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+Project Gutenberg's Following the Color Line, by Ray Stannard Baker
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Following the Color Line
+       an account of Negro citizenship in the American democracy
+
+Author: Ray Stannard Baker
+
+Release Date: January 4, 2011 [EBook #34847]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK FOLLOWING THE COLOR LINE ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Suzanne Shell and the Online Distributed
+Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was
+produced from images generously made available by The
+Internet Archive/Canadian Libraries.)
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+FOLLOWING THE COLOR LINE
+
+
+
+
+BY THE SAME AUTHOR
+
+  OUR NEW PROSPERITY
+  SEEN IN GERMANY
+  BOYS' BOOK OF INVENTIONS
+  SECOND BOYS' BOOK OF INVENTIONS
+
+  AND MANY STORIES
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration: AN OLD BLACK "MAMMY" WITH WHITE CHILD]
+
+
+
+
+  Following the Color Line
+
+  AN ACCOUNT OF NEGRO CITIZENSHIP
+  IN THE AMERICAN DEMOCRACY
+
+
+  By RAY STANNARD BAKER
+
+
+  _ILLUSTRATED_
+
+
+  New York
+  Doubleday, Page & Company
+  1908
+
+
+
+
+  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED, INCLUDING THAT OF TRANSLATION
+  INTO FOREIGN LANGUAGES, INCLUDING THE SCANDINAVIAN
+
+  COPYRIGHT, 1904, 1905, BY THE S. S. McCLURE COMPANY
+
+  COPYRIGHT, 1907, 1908, BY THE PHILLIPS PUBLISHING COMPANY
+
+  COPYRIGHT, 1908, BY DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY
+
+  PUBLISHED, OCTOBER, 1908
+
+
+
+
+"I AM OBLIGED TO CONFESS THAT I DO NOT REGARD THE ABOLITION OF SLAVERY AS
+A MEANS OF PUTTING OFF THE STRUGGLE BETWEEN THE TWO RACES IN THE SOUTHERN
+STATES."
+
+--_De Tocqueville, "Democracy in America"_ (1835)
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE
+
+
+My purpose in writing this book has been to make a clear statement of the
+exact present conditions and relationships of the Negro in American life.
+I am not vain enough to imagine that I have seen all the truth, nor that I
+have always placed the proper emphasis upon the facts that I here present.
+Every investigator necessarily has his personal equation or point of view.
+The best he can do is to set down the truth as he sees it, without bating
+a jot or adding a tittle, and this I have done.
+
+I have endeavoured to see every problem, not as a Northerner, nor as a
+Southerner, but as an American. And I have looked at the Negro, not merely
+as a menial, as he is commonly regarded in the South, nor as a curiosity,
+as he is often seen in the North, but as a plain human being, animated
+with his own hopes, depressed by his own fears, meeting his own problems
+with failure or success.
+
+I have accepted no statement of fact, however generally made, until I was
+fully persuaded from my own personal investigation that what I heard was
+really a fact and not a rumour.
+
+Wherever I have ventured upon conclusions, I claim for them neither
+infallibility nor originality. They are offered frankly as my own latest
+and clearest thoughts upon the various subjects discussed. If any man can
+give me better evidence for the error of my conclusions than I have for
+the truth of them I am prepared to go with him, and gladly, as far as he
+can prove his way. And I have offered my conclusions, not in a spirit of
+controversy, nor in behalf of any party or section of the country, but in
+the hope that, by inspiring a broader outlook, they may lead, finally, to
+other conclusions more nearly approximating the truth than mine.
+
+While these chapters were being published in the _American Magazine_ (one
+chapter, that on lynching, in _McClure's Magazine_) I received many
+hundreds of letters from all parts of the country. I acknowledge them
+gratefully. Many of them contained friendly criticisms, suggestions, and
+corrections, which I have profited by in the revision of the chapters for
+book publication. Especially have the letters from the South, describing
+local conditions and expressing local points of view, been valuable to me.
+I wish here, also, to thank the many men and women, South and North, white
+and coloured, who have given me personal assistance in my inquiries.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+  CHAPTER                                               PAGE
+
+  PREFACE                                                vii
+
+
+  PART I
+
+  THE NEGRO IN THE SOUTH
+
+     I. A Race Riot and After                              3
+
+    II. Following the Colour Line in the South: A
+        Superficial View of Conditions                    26
+
+   III. The Southern City Negro                           45
+
+    IV. In the Black Belt: The Negro Farmer               66
+
+     V. Race Relationships in the Country Districts       87
+
+
+  PART II
+
+  THE NEGRO IN THE NORTH
+
+    VI. Following the Colour Line in the North           109
+
+   VII. The Negroes' Struggle for Survival in Northern
+        Cities                                           130
+
+
+  PART III
+
+  THE NEGRO IN THE NATION
+
+  VIII. The Mulatto: The Problem of Race Mixture         151
+
+    IX. Lynching, South and North                        175
+
+     X. An Ostracised Race in Ferment: The Conflict of
+        Negro Parties and Negro Leaders over Methods
+        of Dealing with Their Own Problem                216
+
+    XI. The Negro in Politics                            233
+
+   XII. The Black Man's Silent Power                     252
+
+  XIII. The New Southern Statesmanship                   271
+
+   XIV. What to Do About the Negro--A Few Conclusions    292
+
+  Index                                                  311
+
+
+
+
+ILLUSTRATIONS
+
+
+  An Old Black "Mammy" with White Child      _Frontispiece_
+
+                                                 FACING PAGE
+
+  Fac-similes of Certain Atlanta Newspapers of
+  September 22, 1906                                       7
+
+  James H. Wallace                                        10
+
+  R. R. Wright                                            10
+
+  H. O. Tanner                                            10
+
+  Rev. H. H. Proctor                                      10
+
+  Dr. W. F. Penn                                          10
+
+  George W. Cable                                         10
+
+  Showing how the Colour Line Was Drawn by the Saloons
+  at Atlanta, Georgia                                     35
+
+  Interior of a Negro Working-man's Home, Atlanta,
+  Georgia                                                 46
+
+  Interior of a Negro Home of the Poorest Sort in
+  Indianapolis                                            46
+
+  Map Showing the Black Belt                              66
+
+  Where White Mill Hands Live in Atlanta, Georgia         71
+
+  Where some of the Poorer Negroes Live in Atlanta,
+  Georgia                                                 71
+
+  A "Poor White" Family                                   74
+
+  A Model Negro School                                    74
+
+  Old and New Cabins for Negro Tenants on the Brown
+  Plantation                                              85
+
+  Cane Syrup Kettle                                       92
+
+  Chain-gang Workers on the Roads                         92
+
+  A Type of the Country Chain-gang Negro                  99
+
+  A Negro Cabin with Evidences of Abundance              110
+
+  Off for the Cotton Fields                              110
+
+  Ward in a Negro Hospital at Philadelphia               135
+
+  Studio of a Negro Sculptress                           135
+
+  A Negro Magazine Editor's Office in Philadelphia       138
+
+  A "Broom Squad" of Negro Boys                          138
+
+  A Type of Negro Girl Typesetter in Atlanta             164
+
+  Mulatto Girl Student                                   164
+
+  Miss Cecelia Johnson                                   164
+
+  Mrs. Booker T. Washington                              173
+
+  Mrs. Robert H. Terrell                                 173
+
+  Negroes Lynched by Being Burned Alive at Statesboro,
+  Georgia                                                179
+
+  Negroes of the Criminal Type                           179
+
+  Court House and Bank in the Public Square at
+  Huntsville, Alabama                                    190
+
+  Charles W. Chesnutt                                    215
+
+  Dr. Booker T. Washington                               218
+
+  Dr. W. E. B. DuBois                                    225
+
+  Colonel James Lewis                                    240
+
+  W. T. Vernon                                           240
+
+  Ralph W. Tyler                                         240
+
+  J. Pope Brown                                          252
+
+  James K. Vardaman                                      252
+
+  Senator Jeff Davis                                     252
+
+  Governor Hoke Smith                                    252
+
+  Senator B. R. Tillman                                  252
+
+  Ex-Governor W. J. Northen                              252
+
+  James H. Dillard                                       275
+
+  Edwin A. Alderman                                      275
+
+  A. M. Soule                                            275
+
+  D. F. Houston                                          275
+
+  George Foster Peabody                                  275
+
+  P. P. Claxton                                          275
+
+  S. C. Mitchell                                         286
+
+  Judge Emory Speer                                      286
+
+  Edgar Gardner Murphy                                   286
+
+  Dr. H. B. Frissell                                     286
+
+  R. C. Ogden                                            286
+
+  J. Y. Joyner                                           286
+
+
+
+
+_PART ONE_
+
+THE NEGRO IN THE SOUTH
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+A RACE RIOT, AND AFTER
+
+
+Upon the ocean, of antagonism between the white and Negro races in this
+country, there arises occasionally a wave, stormy in its appearance, but
+soon subsiding into quietude. Such a wave was the Atlanta riot. Its
+ominous size, greater by far than the ordinary race disturbances which
+express themselves in lynchings, alarmed the entire country and awakened
+in the South a new sense of the dangers which threatened it. A description
+of that spectacular though superficial disturbance, the disaster incident
+to its fury, and the remarkable efforts at reconstruction will lead the
+way naturally--as human nature is best interpreted in moments of
+passion--to a clearer understanding, in future chapters, of the deep and
+complex race feeling which exists in this country.
+
+On the twenty-second day of September, 1906, Atlanta had become a
+veritable social tinder-box. For months the relation of the races had been
+growing more strained. The entire South had been sharply annoyed by a
+shortage of labour accompanied by high wages and, paradoxically, by an
+increasing number of idle Negroes. In Atlanta the lower class--the
+"worthless Negro"--had been increasing in numbers: it showed itself too
+evidently among the swarming saloons, dives, and "clubs" which a
+complaisant city administration allowed to exist in the very heart of the
+city. Crime had increased to an alarming extent; an insufficient and
+ineffective police force seemed unable to cope with it. With a population
+of 115,000 Atlanta had over 17,000 arrests in 1905; in 1906 the number
+increased to 21,602. Atlanta had many more arrests than New Orleans with
+nearly three times the population and twice as many Negroes; and almost
+four times as many as Milwaukee, Wisconsin, a city nearly three times as
+large. Race feeling had been sharpened through a long and bitter
+political campaign, Negro disfranchisement being one of the chief issues
+under discussion. An inflammatory play called "The Clansman," though
+forbidden by public sentiment in many Southern cities, had been given in
+Atlanta and other places with the effect of increasing the prejudice of
+both races. Certain newspapers in Atlanta, taking advantage of popular
+feeling, kept the race issue constantly agitated, emphasising Negro crimes
+with startling headlines. One newspaper even recommended the formation of
+organisations of citizens in imitation of the Ku Klux movement of
+reconstruction days. In the clamour of this growing agitation, the voice
+of the right-minded white people and industrious, self-respecting Negroes
+was almost unheard. A few ministers of both races saw the impending storm
+and sounded a warning--to no effect; and within the week before the riot
+the citizens, the city administration and the courts all woke up together.
+There were calls for mass-meetings, the police began to investigate the
+conditions of the low saloons and dives, the country constabulary was
+increased in numbers, the grand jury was called to meet in special session
+on Monday the 24th.
+
+
+_Prosperity and Lawlessness_
+
+But the awakening of moral sentiment in the city, unfortunately, came too
+late. Crime, made more lurid by agitation, had so kindled the fires of
+hatred that they could not be extinguished by ordinary methods. The best
+people of Atlanta were like the citizens of prosperous Northern cities,
+too busy with money-making to pay attention to public affairs. For Atlanta
+is growing rapidly. Its bank clearings jumped from ninety millions in 1900
+to two hundred and twenty-two millions in 1906, its streets are well paved
+and well lighted, its street-car service is good, its sky-scrapers are
+comparable with the best in the North. In other words, it was
+progressive--few cities I know of more so--but it had forgotten its public
+duties.
+
+Within a few months before the riot there had been a number of crimes of
+worthless Negroes against white women. Leading Negroes, while not one of
+them with whom I talked wished to protect any Negro who was really
+guilty, asserted that the number of these crimes had been greatly
+exaggerated and that in special instances the details had been
+over-emphasised because the criminal was black; that they had been used to
+further inflame race hatred. I had a personal investigation made of every
+crime against a white woman committed in the few months before and after
+the riot. Three, charged to white men, attracted comparatively little
+attention in the newspapers, although one, the offence of a white man
+named Turnadge, was shocking in its details. Of twelve such charges
+against Negroes in the six months preceding the riot two were cases of
+rape, horrible in their details, three were aggravated attempts at rape,
+three may have been attempts, three were pure cases of fright on the part
+of the white woman, and in one the white woman, first asserting that a
+Negro had assaulted her, finally confessed attempted suicide.
+
+The facts of two of these cases I will narrate--and without excuse for the
+horror of the details. If we are to understand the true conditions in the
+South, these things _must_ be told.
+
+
+_Story of One Negro's Crime_
+
+One of the cases was that of Mrs. Knowles Etheleen Kimmel, twenty-five
+years old, wife of a farmer living near Atlanta. A mile beyond the end of
+the street-car line stands a small green bungalow-like house in a lonely
+spot near the edge of the pine woods. The Kimmels who lived there were not
+Southerners by birth but of Pennsylvania Dutch stock. They had been in the
+South four or five years, renting their lonesome farm, raising cotton and
+corn and hopefully getting a little ahead. On the day before the riot a
+strange rough-looking Negro called at the back door of the Kimmel home. He
+wore a soldier's cast-off khaki uniform. He asked a foolish question and
+went away. Mrs. Kimmel was worried and told her husband. He, too, was
+worried--the fear of this crime is everywhere present in the South--and
+when he went away in the afternoon he asked his nearest neighbour to look
+out for the strange Negro. When he came back a few hours later, he found
+fifty white men in his yard. He knew what had happened without being told:
+his wife was under medical attendance in the house. She had been able to
+give a clear description of the Negro: bloodhounds were brought, but the
+pursuing white men had so obliterated the criminal's tracks that he could
+not be traced. Through information given by a Negro a suspect was arrested
+and nearly lynched before he could be brought to Mrs. Kimmel for
+identification; when she saw him she said: "He is not the man." The real
+criminal was never apprehended.
+
+One day, weeks afterward, I found the husband working alone in his field;
+his wife, to whom the surroundings had become unbearable, had gone away to
+visit friends. He told me the story hesitatingly. His prospects, he said,
+were ruined: his neighbours had been sympathetic but he could not continue
+to live there with the feeling that they all knew. He was preparing to
+give up his home and lose himself where people did not know his story. I
+asked him if he favoured lynching, and his answer surprised me.
+
+"I've thought about that," he said. "You see, I'm a Christian man, or I
+try to be. My wife is a Christian woman. We've talked about it. What good
+would it do? We should make criminals of ourselves, shouldn't we? No, let
+the law take its course. When I came here, I tried to help the Negroes as
+much as I could. But many of them won't work even when the wages are high:
+they won't come when they agree to and when they get a few dollars ahead
+they go down to the saloons in Atlanta. Everyone is troubled about getting
+labour and everyone is afraid of prowling idle Negroes. Now, the thing has
+come to me, and it's just about ruined my life."
+
+When I came away the poor lonesome fellow followed me half-way up the
+hill, asking: "Now, what would you do?"
+
+One more case. One of the prominent florists in Atlanta is W. C. Lawrence.
+He is an Englishman, whose home is in the outskirts of the city. On the
+morning of August 20th his daughter Mabel, fourteen years old, and his
+sister Ethel, twenty-five years old, a trained nurse who had recently come
+from England, went out into the nearby woods to pick ferns. Being in broad
+daylight and within sight of houses, they had no fear. Returning along an
+old Confederate breastworks, they were met by a brutal-looking Negro with
+a club in one hand and a stone in the other. He first knocked the little
+girl down, then her aunt. When the child "came to" she found herself
+partially bound with a rope. "Honey," said the Negro, "I want you to come
+with me." With remarkable presence of mind the child said: "I can't, my
+leg is broken," and she let it swing limp from the knee. Deceived, the
+Negro went back to bind the aunt. Mabel, instantly untying the rope,
+jumped up and ran for help. When he saw the child escaping the Negro ran
+off.
+
+
+[Illustration: FAC-SIMILES OF CERTAIN ATLANTA NEWSPAPERS OF SEPTEMBER 22,
+1906
+
+Showing the sensational news headings]
+
+
+"When I got there," said Mr. Lawrence, "my sister was lying against the
+bank, face down. The back of her head had been beaten bloody. The bridge
+of her nose was cut open, one eye had been gouged out of its socket. My
+daughter had three bad cuts on her head--thank God, nothing worse to
+either. But my sister, who was just beginning her life, will be totally
+blind in one eye, probably in both. Her life is ruined."
+
+About a month later, through the information of a Negro, the criminal was
+caught, identified by the Misses Lawrence, and sent to the penitentiary
+for forty years (two cases), the limit of punishment for attempted
+criminal assault.
+
+In both of these cases arrests were made on the information of Negroes.
+
+
+_Terror of Both White and Coloured People_
+
+The effect of a few such crimes as these may be more easily imagined than
+described. They produced a feeling of alarm which no one who has not lived
+in such a community can in any wise appreciate. I was astonished in
+travelling in the South to discover how widely prevalent this dread has
+become. Many white women in Atlanta dare not leave their homes alone after
+dark; many white men carry arms to protect themselves and their families.
+And even these precautions do not always prevent attacks.
+
+But this is not the whole story. Everywhere I went in Atlanta I heard of
+the fear of the white people, but not much was said of the terror which
+the Negroes also felt. And yet every Negro I met voiced in some way that
+fear. It is difficult here in the North for us to understand what such a
+condition means: a whole community namelessly afraid!
+
+The better-class Negroes have two sources of fear: one of the criminals of
+their own race--such attacks are rarely given much space in the
+newspapers--and the other the fear of the white people. My very first
+impression of what this fear of the Negroes might be came, curiously
+enough, not from Negroes but from a fine white woman on whom I called
+shortly after going South. She told this story:
+
+"I had a really terrible experience one evening a few days ago. I was
+walking along ---- Street when I saw a rather good-looking young Negro
+come out of a hallway to the sidewalk. He was in a great hurry, and, in
+turning suddenly, as a person sometimes will do, he accidentally brushed
+my shoulder with his arm. He had not seen me before. When he turned and
+found it was a white woman he had touched, such a look of abject terror
+and fear came into his face as I hope never again to see on a human
+countenance. He knew what it meant if I was frightened, called for help,
+and accused him of insulting or attacking me. He stood still a moment,
+then turned and ran down the street, dodging into the first alley he came
+to. It shows, doesn't it, how little it might take to bring punishment
+upon an innocent man!"
+
+The next view I got was through the eyes of one of the able Negroes of the
+South, Bishop Gaines of the African Methodist Episcopal Church. He is now
+an old man, but of imposing presence. Of wide attainments, he has
+travelled in Europe, he owns much property, and rents houses to white
+tenants. He told me of services he had held some time before in south
+Georgia. Approaching the church one day through the trees, he suddenly
+encountered a white woman carrying water from a spring. She dropped her
+pail instantly, screamed, and ran up the path toward her house.
+
+"If I had been some Negroes," said Bishop Gaines, "I should have turned
+and fled in terror; the alarm would have been given, and it is not
+unlikely that I should have had a posse of white men with bloodhounds on
+my trail. If I had been caught what would my life have been worth? The
+woman would have identified me--and what could I have said? But I did not
+run. I stepped out in the path, held up one hand and said:
+
+"'Don't worry, madam, I am Bishop Gaines, and I am holding services here
+in this church.' So she stopped running and I apologised for having
+startled her."
+
+The Negro knows he has little chance to explain, if by accident or
+ignorance he insults a white woman or offends a white man. An educated
+Negro, one of the ablest of his race, telling me of how a friend of his
+who by merest chance had provoked a number of half-drunken white men, had
+been set upon and frightfully beaten, remarked: "It might have been me!"
+
+Now, I am telling these things just as they look to the Negro; it is quite
+as important, as a problem in human nature, to know how the Negro feels
+and what he says, as it is to know how the white man feels.
+
+
+_How the Newspapers Fomented the Riot_
+
+On the afternoon of the riot the newspapers in flaming headlines
+chronicled four assaults by Negroes on white women. I had a personal
+investigation made of each of those cases. Two of them may have been
+attempts at assaults, but two palpably were nothing more than fright on
+the part of both the white woman and the Negro. As an instance, in one
+case an elderly woman, Mrs. Martha Holcombe, going to close her blinds in
+the evening, saw a Negro on the sidewalk. In a terrible fright she
+screamed. The news was telephoned to the police station, but before the
+officials could respond, Mrs. Holcombe telephoned them not to come out.
+And yet this was one of the "assaults" chronicled in letters five inches
+high in a newspaper extra.
+
+And finally on this hot Saturday half-holiday, when the country people had
+come in by hundreds, when everyone was out of doors, when the streets were
+crowded, when the saloons had been filled since early morning with white
+men and Negroes, both drinking--certain newspapers in Atlanta began to
+print extras with big headings announcing new assaults on white women by
+Negroes. The Atlanta News published five such extras, and newsboys cried
+them through the city:
+
+"Third assault."
+
+"Fourth assault."
+
+The whole city, already deeply agitated, was thrown into a veritable
+state of panic. The news in the extras was taken as truthful; for the city
+was not in a mood then for cool investigation. Calls began to come in from
+every direction for police protection. A loafing Negro in a backyard, who
+in ordinary times would not have been noticed, became an object of real
+terror. The police force, too small at best, was thus distracted and
+separated.
+
+In Atlanta the proportion of men who go armed continually is very large;
+the pawnshops of Decatur and Peters Streets, with windows like arsenals,
+furnish the low class of Negroes and whites with cheap revolvers and
+knives. Every possible element was here, then, for a murderous outbreak.
+The good citizens, white and black, were far away in their homes; the bad
+men had been drinking in the dives permitted to exist by the respectable
+people of Atlanta; and here they were gathered, by night, in the heart of
+the city.
+
+
+_The Mob Gathers_
+
+And, finally, a trivial incident fired the tinder. Fear and vengeance
+generated it: it was marked at first by a sort of rough, half-drunken
+horseplay, but when once blood was shed, the brute, which is none too well
+controlled in the best city, came out and gorged itself. Once permit the
+shackles of law and order to be cast off, and men, white or black,
+Christian or pagan, revert to primordial savagery. There is no such thing
+as an orderly mob.
+
+Crime had been committed by Negroes, but this mob made no attempt to find
+the criminals: it expressed its blind, unreasoning, uncontrolled race
+hatred by attacking every man, woman, or boy it saw who had a black face.
+A lame boot-black, an inoffensive, industrious Negro boy, at that moment
+actually at work shining a man's shoes, was dragged out and cuffed, kicked
+and beaten to death in the street. Another young Negro was chased and
+stabbed to death with jack-knives in the most unspeakably horrible manner.
+The mob entered barber shops where respectable Negro men were at work
+shaving white customers, pulled them away from their chairs and beat them.
+Cars were stopped and inoffensive Negroes were thrown through the windows
+or dragged out and beaten. They did not stop with killing and maiming;
+they broke into hardware stores and armed themselves, they demolished not
+only Negro barber shops and restaurants, but they robbed stores kept by
+white men.
+
+
+[Illustration: JAMES H. WALLACE
+
+"The asphalt workers are nearly all coloured. In New York ... the chosen
+representative who sits with the Central Federated Union of the city is
+James H. Wallace, a coloured man."]
+
+[Illustration: R. R. WRIGHT
+
+Organiser of the Negro State Fair in Georgia. Of full-blooded African
+descent, his grandmother, who reared him, being an African Negro of the
+Mandingo tribe.]
+
+[Illustration: H. O. TANNER
+
+One of whose pictures hangs in the Luxembourg; winner N. W. Harris prize
+for the best American painting at Chicago.]
+
+[Illustration: REV. H. H. PROCTOR
+
+Pastor of the First Congregational Church (coloured), to which belong many
+of the best coloured families of Atlanta.]
+
+[Illustration: DR. W. F. PENN
+
+This prosperous Negro physician's home in Atlanta was visited by the mob.]
+
+[Illustration: GEORGE W. CABLE
+
+Chairman of the coloured probation officers of the Juvenile Court,
+Indianapolis.
+
+Photograph by Sexton & Maxwell]
+
+
+Of course the Mayor came out, and the police force and the fire
+department, and finally the Governor ordered out the militia--to apply
+that pound of cure which should have been an ounce of prevention.
+
+It is highly significant of Southern conditions--which the North does not
+understand--that the first instinct of thousands of Negroes in Atlanta,
+when the riot broke out, was not to run away from the white people but to
+run to them. The white man who takes the most radical position in
+opposition to the Negro race will often be found loaning money to
+individual Negroes, feeding them and their families from his kitchen, or
+defending "his Negroes" in court or elsewhere. All of the more prominent
+white citizens of Atlanta, during the riot, protected and fed many
+coloured families who ran to them in their terror. Even Hoke Smith,
+Governor-elect of Georgia, who is more distrusted by the Negroes as a race
+probably than any other white man in Georgia, protected many Negroes in
+his house during the disturbance. In many cases white friends armed
+Negroes and told them to protect themselves. One widow I know of who had a
+single black servant, placed a shot-gun in his hands and told him to fire
+on any mob that tried to get him. She trusted him absolutely. Southern
+people possess a real liking, wholly unknown in the North, for individual
+Negroes whom they know.
+
+So much for Saturday night. Sunday was quiescent but nervous--the
+atmosphere full of the electricity of apprehension. Monday night, after a
+day of alarm and of prowling crowds of men, which might at any moment
+develop into mobs, the riot broke forth again--in a suburb of Atlanta
+called Brownsville.
+
+
+_Story of the Mob's Work in a Southern Negro Town_
+
+When I went out to Brownsville, knowing of its bloody part in the riot, I
+expected to find a typical Negro slum. I looked for squalour, ignorance,
+vice. And I was surprised to find a large settlement of Negroes
+practically every one of whom owned his own home, some of the houses being
+as attractive without and as well furnished within as the ordinary homes
+of middle-class white people. Near at hand, surrounded by beautiful
+grounds, were two Negro colleges--Clark University and Gammon Theological
+Seminary. The post-office was kept by a Negro. There were several stores
+owned by Negroes. The school-house, though supplied with teachers by the
+county, was built wholly with money personally contributed by the Negroes
+of the neighbourhood, in order that there might be adequate educational
+facilities for their children. They had three churches and not a saloon.
+The residents were all of the industrious, property-owning sort, bearing
+the best reputation among white people who knew them.
+
+Think, then, of the situation in Brownsville during the riot in Atlanta.
+All sorts of exaggerated rumours came from the city. _The Negroes of
+Atlanta were being slaughtered wholesale._ A condition of panic fear
+developed. Many of the people of the little town sought refuge in Gammon
+Theological Seminary, where, packed together, they sat up all one night
+praying. President Bowen did not have his clothes off for days, expecting
+the mob every moment. He telephoned for police protection on Sunday, but
+none was provided. Terror also existed among the families which remained
+in Brownsville; most of the men were armed, and they had decided, should
+the mob appear, to make a stand in defence of their homes.
+
+At last, on Monday evening, just at dark, a squad of the county police,
+led by Officer Poole, marched into the settlement at Brownsville. Here,
+although there had been not the slightest sign of disturbance, they began
+arresting Negroes for being armed. Several armed white citizens, who were
+not officers, joined them.
+
+Finally, looking up a little street they saw dimly in the next block a
+group of Negro men. Part of the officers were left with the prisoners and
+part went up the street. As they approached the group of Negroes, the
+officers began firing: the Negroes responded. Officer Heard was shot dead;
+another officer was wounded, and several Negroes were killed or injured.
+
+The police went back to town with their prisoners. On the way two of the
+Negroes in their charge were shot. A white man's wife, who saw the
+outrage, being with child, dropped dead of fright.
+
+The Negroes (all of this is now a matter of court record) declared that
+they were expecting the mob; that the police--not mounted as usual, not
+armed as usual, and accompanied by citizens--looked to them in the
+darkness like a mob. In their fright the firing began.
+
+The wildest reports, of course, were circulated. One sent broadcast was
+that five hundred students of Clark University, all armed, had decoyed the
+police in order to shoot them down. As a matter of fact, the university
+did not open its fall session until October 3d, over a week later--and on
+this night there were just two students on the grounds. The next morning
+the police and the troops appeared and arrested a very large proportion of
+the male inhabitants of the town. Police officers accompanied by white
+citizens, entered one Negro home, where lay a man named Lewis, badly
+wounded the night before. He was in bed; they opened his shirt, placed
+their revolvers at his breast, and in cold blood shot him through the body
+several times in the presence of his relatives. They left him for dead,
+but he has since recovered.
+
+President Bowen, of Gammon Theological Seminary, one of the able Negroes
+in Atlanta, who had nothing whatever to do with the riot, was beaten over
+the head by one of the police with his rifle-butt. The Negroes were all
+disarmed, and about sixty of them were finally taken to Atlanta and locked
+up charged with the murder of Officer Heard.
+
+In the Brownsville riot four Negroes were killed. One was a decent,
+industrious, though loud-talking, citizen named Fambro, who kept a small
+grocery store and owned two houses besides, which he rented. He had a
+comfortable home, a wife and one child. Another was an inoffensive Negro
+named Wilder, seventy years old, a pensioner as a soldier of the Civil
+War, who was well spoken of by all who knew him. He was found--not shot,
+but murdered by a knife-cut in the abdomen--lying in a woodshed back of
+Fambro's store. McGruder, a brick mason, who earned $4 a day at his trade,
+and who had laid aside enough to earn his own home, was killed while under
+arrest by the police; and Robinson, an industrious Negro carpenter, was
+shot to death on his way to work Tuesday morning after the riot.
+
+
+_Results of the Riot_
+
+And after the riot in Brownsville, what? Here was a self-respecting
+community of hard-working Negroes, disturbing no one, getting an honest
+living. How did the riot affect them? Well, it demoralised them, set them
+back for years. Not only were four men killed and several wounded, but
+sixty of their citizens were in jail. Nearly every family had to go to the
+lawyers, who would not take their cases without money in hand. Hence the
+little homes had to be sold or mortgaged, or money borrowed in some other
+way to defend those arrested, doctors' bills were to be paid, the
+undertaker must be settled with. A riot is not over when the shooting
+stops! And when the cases finally came up in court and all the evidence
+was brought out every Negro went free; but two of the county policemen who
+had taken part in the shooting, were punished. George Muse, one of the
+foremost merchants of Atlanta, who was foreman of the jury which tried the
+Brownsville Negroes, said:
+
+"We think the Negroes were gathered just as white people were in other
+parts of the town, for the purpose of defending their homes. We were
+shocked by the conduct which the evidence showed some of the county police
+had been guilty of."
+
+After the riot was over many Negro families, terrified and feeling
+themselves unprotected, sold out for what they could get--I heard a good
+many pitiful stories of such sudden and costly sacrifices--and left the
+country, some going to California, some to Northern cities. The best and
+most enterprising are those who go: the worst remain. Not only did the
+Negroes leave Brownsville, but they left the city itself in considerable
+numbers. Labour was thus still scarcer and wages higher in Atlanta because
+of the riot.
+
+
+_Report of a White Committee on the Riot_
+
+It is significant that not one of the Negroes killed and wounded in the
+riot was of the criminal class. Every one was industrious, respectable
+and law-abiding. A white committee, composed of W. G. Cooper, Secretary of
+the Chamber of Commerce, and George Muse, a prominent merchant, backed by
+the sober citizenship of the town, made an honest investigation and issued
+a brave and truthful report. Here are a few of its conclusions:
+
+     1. Among the victims of the mob there was not a single vagrant.
+
+     2. They were earning wages in useful work up to the time of the riot.
+
+     3. They were supporting themselves and their families or dependent
+     relatives.
+
+     4. Most of the dead left small children and widows, mothers or
+     sisters with practically no means and very small earning capacity.
+
+     5. The wounded lost from one to eight weeks' time, at 50 cents to $4
+     a day each.
+
+     6. About seventy persons were wounded, and among these there was an
+     immense amount of suffering. In some cases it was prolonged and
+     excruciating pain.
+
+     7. Many of the wounded are disfigured, and several are permanently
+     disabled.
+
+     8. Most of them were in humble circumstances, but they were honest,
+     industrious and law-abiding citizens and useful members of society.
+
+     9. These statements are true of both white and coloured.
+
+     10. Of the wounded, ten are white and sixty are coloured. Of the
+     dead, two are white and ten are coloured; two female, and ten male.
+     This includes three killed at Brownsville.
+
+     11. Wild rumours of a larger number killed have no foundation that we
+     can discover. As the city was paying the funeral expenses of victims
+     and relief was given their families, they had every motive to make
+     known their loss. In one case relatives of a man killed in a broil
+     made fruitless efforts to secure relief.
+
+     12. Two persons reported as victims of the riot had no connection
+     with it. One, a Negro man, was killed in a broil over a crap game;
+     and another, a Negro woman, was killed by her paramour. Both
+     homicides occurred at some distance from the scene of the riot.
+
+The men who made this brave report did not mince matters. They called
+murder, murder; and robbery, robbery. Read this:
+
+     13. As twelve persons were killed and seventy were murderously
+     assaulted, and as, by all accounts, a number took part in each
+     assault, it is clear that several hundred murderers or would-be
+     murderers are at large in this community.
+
+At first, after the riot, there was an inclination in some quarters to
+say:
+
+"Well, at any rate, the riot cleared the atmosphere. The Negroes have had
+their lesson. There won't be any more trouble soon."
+
+But read the sober conclusions in the Committee's report. The riot did not
+prevent further crime.
+
+     14. Although less than three months have passed since the riot,
+     events have already demonstrated that the slaughter of the innocent
+     does not deter the criminal class from committing more crimes. Rapes
+     and robbery have been committed in the city during that time.
+
+     15. The slaughter of the innocent does drive away good citizens. From
+     one small neighbourhood twenty-five families have gone. A great many
+     of them were buying homes on the instalment plan.
+
+     16. The crimes of the mob include robbery as well as murder. In a
+     number of cases the property of innocent and unoffending people was
+     taken. Furniture was destroyed, small shops were looted, windows were
+     smashed, trunks were burst open, money was taken from the small
+     hoard, and articles of value were appropriated. In the commission of
+     these crimes the victims, both men and women, were treated with
+     unspeakable brutality.
+
+     17. As a result of four days of lawlessness there are in this glad
+     Christmas-time widows of both races mourning their husbands, and
+     husbands of both races mourning for their wives; there are orphan
+     children of both races who cry out in vain for faces they will see no
+     more; there are grown men of both races disabled for life, and all
+     this sorrow has come to people who are absolutely innocent of any
+     wrong-doing.
+
+In trying to find out exactly the point of view and the feeling of the
+Negroes--which is most important in any honest consideration of
+conditions--I was handed the following letter, written by a young coloured
+man, a former resident in Atlanta now a student in the North. He is
+writing frankly to a friend. It is valuable as showing a _real_ point of
+view--the bitterness, the hopelessness, the distrust.
+
+"... It is possible that you have formed at least a good idea of how we
+feel as the result of the horrible eruption in Georgia. I have not spoken
+to a Caucasian on the subject since then. But, listen: How would you feel,
+if with our history, there came a time when, after speeches and papers and
+teachings you acquired property and were educated, and were a fairly good
+man, it were impossible for you to walk the street (for whose maintenance
+you were taxed) with your sister without being in mortal fear of death if
+you resented any insult offered to her? How would you feel if you saw a
+governor, a mayor, a sheriff, whom you could not oppose at the polls,
+encourage by deed or word or both, a mob of 'best' and worst citizens to
+slaughter your people in the streets and in their own homes and in their
+places of business? Do you think that you could resist the same wrath that
+caused God to slay the Philistines and the Russians to throw bombs? I can
+resist it, but with each new outrage I am less able to resist it. And yet
+if I gave way to my feelings I should become just like other men ... of
+the mob! But I do not ... not quite, and I must hurry through the only
+life I shall live on earth, tortured by these experiences and these
+horrible impulses, with no hope of ever getting away from them. They are
+ever present, like the just God, the devil, and my conscience.
+
+"If there were no such thing as Christianity we should be hopeless."
+
+Besides this effect on the Negroes the riot for a week or more practically
+paralysed the city of Atlanta. Factories were closed, railroad cars were
+left unloaded in the yards, the street-car system was crippled, and there
+was no cab-service (cab-drivers being Negroes), hundreds of servants
+deserted their places, the bank clearings slumped by hundreds of thousands
+of dollars, the state fair, then just opening, was a failure. It was,
+indeed, weeks before confidence was fully restored and the city returned
+to its normal condition.
+
+
+_Who Made Up the Mob?_
+
+One more point I wish to make before taking up the extraordinary
+reconstructive work which followed the riot. I have not spoken of the men
+who made up the mob. We know the dangerous Negro class--after all a very
+small proportion of the entire Negro population. There is a corresponding
+low class of whites quite as illiterate as the Negroes.
+
+The poor white hates the Negro, and the Negro dislikes the poor white. It
+is in these lower strata of society, where the races rub together in
+unclean streets, that the fire is generated. Decatur and Peters streets,
+with their swarming saloons and dives, furnish the point of contact. I
+talked with many people who saw the mobs at different times, and the
+universal testimony was that it was made up largely of boys and young men,
+and of the low criminal and semi-criminal class. The ignorant Negro and
+the uneducated white; there lies the trouble!
+
+This idea that 115,000 people of Atlanta--respectable, law-abiding, good
+citizens, white and black--should be disgraced before the world by a few
+hundred criminals was what aroused the strong, honest citizenship of
+Atlanta to vigorous action.
+
+The riot brought out all that was worst in human nature; the
+reconstruction brought out all that was best and finest.
+
+Almost the first act of the authorities was to close every saloon in the
+city, afterward revoking all the licences--and for two weeks no liquor was
+sold in the city. The police, at first accused of not having done their
+best in dealing with the mob, arrested a good many white rioters, and
+Judge Broyles, to show that the authorities had no sympathy with such
+disturbers of the peace, sent every man brought before him, twenty-four in
+all, to the chain gang for the largest possible sentence, without the
+alternative of a fine. The grand jury met and boldly denounced the mob;
+its report said in part:
+
+"That the sensationalism of the afternoon papers in the presentation of
+the criminal news to the public prior to the riots of Saturday night,
+especially in the case of the Atlanta _News_, deserves our severest
+condemnation."
+
+But the most important and far-reaching effect of the riot was in arousing
+the strong men of the city. It struck at the pride of those men of the
+South, it struck at their sense of law and order, it struck at their
+business interests. On Sunday following the first riot a number of
+prominent men gathered at the Piedmont Hotel, and had a brief discussion;
+but it was not until Tuesday afternoon, when the worst of the news from
+Brownsville had come in, that they gathered in the court-house with the
+serious intent of stopping the riot at all costs. Most of the prominent
+men of Atlanta were present. Sam D. Jones, president of the Chamber of
+Commerce, presided. One of the first speeches was made by Charles T.
+Hopkins, who had been the leading spirit in the meetings on Sunday and
+Monday. He expressed with eloquence the humiliation which Atlanta felt.
+
+"Saturday evening at eight o'clock," he said, "the credit of Atlanta was
+good for any number of millions of dollars in New York or Boston or any
+financial centre; to-day we couldn't borrow fifty cents. The reputation we
+have been building up so arduously for years has been swept away in two
+short hours. Not by men who have made and make Atlanta, not by men who
+represent the character and strength of our city, but by hoodlums,
+understrappers and white criminals. Innocent Negro men have been struck
+down for no crime whatever, while peacefully enjoying the life and liberty
+guaranteed to every American citizen. The Negro race is a child race. We
+are a strong race, their guardians. We have boasted of our superiority and
+we have now sunk to this level--we have shed the blood of our helpless
+wards. Christianity and humanity demand that we treat the Negro fairly. He
+is here, and here to stay. He only knows how to do those things we teach
+him to do; it is our Christian duty to protect him. I for one, and I
+believe I voice the best sentiment of this city, am willing to lay down my
+life rather than to have the scenes of the last few days repeated."
+
+
+_The Plea of a Negro Physician_
+
+In the midst of the meeting a coloured man arose rather doubtfully. He
+was, however, promptly recognized as Dr. W. F. Penn, one of the foremost
+coloured physicians of Atlanta, a graduate of Yale College--a man of much
+influence among his people. He said that he had come to ask the protection
+of the white men of Atlanta. He said that on the day before a mob had come
+to his home; that ten white men, some of whose families he knew and had
+treated professionally, had been sent into his house to look for concealed
+arms; that his little girl had run to them, one after another, and begged
+them not to shoot her father; that his life and the lives of his family
+had afterward been threatened, so that he had had to leave his home; that
+he had been saved from a gathering mob by a white man in an automobile.
+
+"What shall we do?" he asked the meeting--and those who heard his speech
+said that the silence was profound. "We have been disarmed: how shall we
+protect our lives and property? If living a sober, industrious, upright
+life, accumulating property and educating his children as best he knows
+how, is not the standard by which a coloured man can live and be protected
+in the South, what is to become of him? If the kind of life I have lived
+isn't the kind you want, shall I leave and go North?
+
+"When we aspire to be decent and industrious we are told that we are bad
+examples to other coloured men. Tell us what your standards are for
+coloured men. What are the requirements under which we may live and be
+protected? What shall we do?"
+
+When he had finished, Colonel A. J. McBride, a real estate owner and a
+Confederate veteran, arose and said with much feeling that he knew Dr.
+Penn and that he was a good man, and that Atlanta meant to protect such
+men.
+
+"If necessary," said Colonel McBride, "I will go out and sit on his porch
+with a rifle."
+
+Such was the spirit of this remarkable meeting. Mr. Hopkins proposed that
+the white people of the city express their deep regret for the riot and
+show their sympathy for the Negroes who had suffered at the hands of the
+mob by raising a fund of money for their assistance. Then and there $4,423
+was subscribed, to which the city afterward added $1,000.
+
+But this was not all. These men, once thoroughly aroused, began looking to
+the future, to find some new way of preventing the recurrence of such
+disturbances.
+
+A committee of ten, appointed to work with the public officials in
+restoring order and confidence, consisted of some of the foremost citizens
+of Atlanta:
+
+Charles T. Hopkins, Sam D. Jones, President of the Chamber of Commerce; L.
+Z. Rosser, president of the Board of Education; J. W. English, president
+of the Fourth National Bank; Forrest Adair, a leading real estate owner;
+Captain W. D. Ellis, a prominent lawyer; A. B. Steele, a wealthy lumber
+merchant; M. L. Collier, a railroad man; John E. Murphy, capitalist; and
+H. Y. McCord, president of a wholesale grocery house.
+
+One of the first and most unexpected things that this committee did was to
+send for several of the leading Negro citizens of Atlanta: the Rev. H. H.
+Proctor, B. J. Davis, editor of the _Independent_, a Negro journal, the
+Rev. E. P. Johnson, the Rev. E. R. Carter, the Rev. J. A. Rush, and Bishop
+Holsey.
+
+
+_Committees of the Two Races Meet_
+
+This was the first important occasion in the South upon which an attempt
+was made to get the two races together for any serious consideration of
+their differences.
+
+They held a meeting. The white men asked the Negroes, "What shall we do to
+relieve the irritation?" The Negroes said that they thought that coloured
+men were treated with unnecessary roughness on the street-cars and by the
+police. The white members of the committee admitted that this was so and
+promised to take the matter up immediately with the street-car company and
+the police department, which was done. The discussion was harmonious.
+After the meeting Mr. Hopkins said:
+
+"I believe those Negroes understood the situation better than we did. I
+was astonished at their intelligence and diplomacy. They never referred to
+the riot: they were looking to the future. I didn't know that there were
+such Negroes in Atlanta."
+
+Out of this beginning grew the Atlanta Civic League. Knowing that race
+prejudice was strong, Mr. Hopkins sent out 2,000 cards, inviting the most
+prominent men in the city to become members. To his surprise 1,500
+immediately accepted, only two refused, and those anonymously; 500 men not
+formally invited were also taken as members. The league thus had the great
+body of the best citizens of Atlanta behind it. At the same time Mr.
+Proctor and his committee of Negroes had organised a Coloured Co-operative
+Civic League, which secured a membership of 1,500 of the best coloured men
+in the city. A small committee of Negroes met a small committee of the
+white league.
+
+Fear was expressed that there would be another riotous outbreak during the
+Christmas holidays, and the league proceeded with vigour to prevent it.
+New policemen were put on, and the committee worked with Judge Broyles and
+Judge Roan in issuing statements warning the people against lawlessness.
+They secured an agreement among the newspapers not to publish sensational
+news; the sheriff agreed, if necessary, to swear in some of the best men
+in town as extra deputies; they asked that saloons be closed at four
+o'clock on Christmas Eve; and through the Negro committee, they brought
+influence to bear to keep all coloured people off the streets. When two
+county police got drunk at Brownsville and threatened Mrs. Fambro, the
+wife of one of the Negroes killed in the riot, a member of the committee,
+Mr. Seeley, publisher of the _Georgian_, informed the sheriff and sent
+his automobile to Brownsville, where the policemen were arrested and
+afterward discharged from the force. As a result, it was the quietest
+Christmas Atlanta had had in years.
+
+But the most important of all the work done, because of the spectacular
+interest it aroused, was the defence of a Negro charged with an assault
+upon a white woman. It is an extraordinary and dramatic story.
+
+
+_Does a Riot Prevent Further Crime?_
+
+Although many people said that the riot would prevent any more Negro
+crime, several attacks on white women occurred within a few weeks
+afterward. On November 13th Mrs. J. D. Camp, living in the suburbs of
+Atlanta, was attacked in broad daylight in her home and brutally assaulted
+by a Negro, who afterward robbed the house and escaped. Though the crime
+was treated with great moderation by the newspapers, public feeling was
+intense. A Negro was arrested, charged with the crime. Mr. Hopkins and his
+associates believed that the best way to secure justice and prevent
+lynchings was to have a prompt trial. Accordingly, they held a conference
+with Judge Roan, as a result of which three lawyers in the city, Mr.
+Hopkins, L. Z. Rosser, and J. E. McClelland, were appointed to defend the
+accused Negro, serving without pay. A trial-jury, composed of twelve
+citizens, among the most prominent in Atlanta, was called--one of the
+ablest juries ever drawn in Georgia. There was a determination to have
+immediate and complete justice.
+
+The Negro arrested, one Joe Glenn, had been completely identified by Mrs.
+Camp as her assailant. Although having no doubt of his guilt, the
+attorneys went at the case thoroughly. The first thing they did was to
+call in two members of the Negro committee, Mr. Davis and Mr. Carter.
+These men went to the jail and talked with Glenn, and afterward they all
+visited the scene of the crime. They found that Glenn, who was a man fifty
+years old with grandchildren, bore an excellent reputation. He rented a
+small farm about two miles from Mrs. Camp's home and had some property; he
+was sober and industrious. After making a thorough examination and
+getting all the evidence they could, they came back to Atlanta, persuaded,
+in spite of the fact that the Negro had been positively identified by Mrs.
+Camp--which in these cases is usually considered conclusive--that Glenn
+was not guilty. It was a most dramatic trial; at first, when Mrs. Camp was
+placed on the stand she failed to identify Glenn; afterward, reversing
+herself she broke forth into a passionate denunciation of him. But after
+the evidence was all in, the jury retired, and reported two minutes later
+with a verdict "Not guilty." Remarkably enough, just before the trial was
+over the police informed the court that another Negro, named Will Johnson,
+answering Mrs. Camp's description, had been arrested, charged with the
+crime. He was subsequently identified by Mrs. Camp.
+
+Without this energetic defence, an innocent, industrious Negro would
+certainly have been hanged--or if the mob had been ahead of the police, as
+it usually is, he would have been lynched.
+
+But what of Glenn afterward?
+
+When the jury left the box Mr. Hopkins turned to Glenn and said:
+
+"Well, Joe, what do you think of the case?"
+
+He replied: "Boss I 'spec's they will hang me, for that lady said I was
+the man, but they won't hang me, will they, 'fore I sees my wife and
+chilluns again?"
+
+He was kept in the tower that night and the following day for protection
+against a possible lynching. Plans were made by his attorneys to send him
+secretly out of the city to the home of a farmer in Alabama, whom they
+could trust with the story. Glenn's wife was brought to visit the jail and
+Glenn was told of the plans for his safety, and instructed to change his
+name and keep quiet until the feeling of the community could be
+ascertained.
+
+A ticket was purchased by his attorneys, with a new suit of clothes, hat,
+and shoes. He was taken out of jail about midnight under a strong guard,
+and safely placed on the train. From that day to this he has never been
+heard of. He did not go to Alabama. The poor creature, with the instinct
+of a hunted animal, did not dare after all to trust the white men who had
+befriended him. He is a fugitive, away from his family, not daring,
+though innocent, to return to his home.
+
+
+_Other Reconstruction Movements_
+
+Another strong movement also sprung into existence. Its inspiration was
+religious. Ministers wrote a series of letters to the Atlanta
+_Constitution_. Clark Howell, its editor, responded with an editorial
+entitled "Shall We Blaze the Trail?" W. J. Northen, Ex-Governor of
+Georgia, and one of the most highly respected men in the state, took up
+the work, asking himself, as he says:
+
+"What am I to do, who have to pray every night?"
+
+He answered that question by calling a meeting at the Coloured Y. M. C. A.
+building, where some twenty white men met an equal number of Negroes,
+mostly preachers, and held a prayer meeting.
+
+The South still looks to its ministers for leadership--and they really
+lead. The sermons of men like the Rev. John E. White, the Rev. C. B.
+Wilmer, the Rev. W. W. Landrum, who have spoken with power and ability
+against lawlessness and injustice to the Negro, have had a large influence
+in the reconstruction movement.
+
+Ex-Governor Northen travelled through the state of Georgia, made a notable
+series of speeches, urged the establishment of law and order
+organisations, and met support wherever he went. He talked against mob-law
+and lynching in plain language. Here are some of the things he said:
+
+"We shall never settle this until we give absolute justice to the Negro.
+We are not now doing justice to the Negro in Georgia.
+
+"Get into contact with the best Negroes; there are plenty of good Negroes
+in Georgia. What we must do is to get the good white folks to leaven the
+bad white folks and the good Negroes to leaven the bad Negroes."
+
+"There must be no aristocracy of crime: a white fiend is as much to be
+dreaded as a black brute."
+
+These movements did not cover specifically, it will be observed, the
+enormously difficult problems of politics, and the political relationships
+of the races, nor the subject of Negro education, nor the most
+exasperating of all the provocatives--those problems which arise from
+human contact in street cars, railroad trains, and in life generally.
+
+That they had to meet the greatest difficulties in their work is shown by
+such an editorial as the following, published December 12th by the Atlanta
+_Evening News_:
+
+     No law of God or man can hold back the vengeance of our white men
+     upon such a criminal [the Negro who attacks a white woman]. If
+     necessary, we will double and treble and quadruple the law of Moses,
+     and hang off-hand the criminal, or failing to find that a remedy, we
+     will hang two, three, or four of the Negroes nearest to the crime,
+     until the crime is no longer done or feared in all this Southern land
+     that we inhabit and love.
+
+On January 31, 1907, the newspaper which published this editorial went
+into the hands of a receiver--its failure being due largely to the strong
+public sentiment against its course before and during the riot.
+
+After the excitement of the riot and the evil results which followed it
+began to disappear it was natural that the reconstruction movements should
+quiet down. Ex-Governor Northen continued his work for many months and is
+indeed, still continuing it: and there is no doubt that his campaigns have
+had a wide influence. The feeling that the saloons and dives of Atlanta
+were partly responsible for the riot was a powerful factor in the
+anti-saloon campaign which took place in 1907 and resulted in closing
+every saloon in the state of Georgia on January 1, 1908. And the riot and
+the revulsion which followed it will combine to make a recurrence of such
+a disturbance next to impossible.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+FOLLOWING THE COLOUR LINE IN THE SOUTH
+
+
+Before entering upon a discussion of the more serious aspects of the Negro
+question in the South, it may prove illuminating if I set down, briefly,
+some of the more superficial evidences of colour line distinctions in the
+South as they impress the investigator. The present chapter consists of a
+series of sketches from my note-books giving the earliest and freshest
+impressions of my studies in the South.
+
+When I first went South I expected to find people talking about the Negro,
+but I was not at all prepared to find the subject occupying such an
+overshadowing place in Southern affairs. In the North we have nothing at
+all like it; no question which so touches every act of life, in which
+everyone, white or black, is so profoundly interested. In the North we are
+mildly concerned in many things; the South is overwhelmingly concerned in
+this one thing.
+
+And this is not surprising, for the Negro in the South is both the labour
+problem and the servant question; he is pre�minently the political issue,
+and his place, socially, is of daily and hourly discussion. A Negro
+minister I met told me a story of a boy who went as a sort of butler's
+assistant in the home of a prominent family in Atlanta. His people were
+naturally curious about what went on in the white man's house. One day
+they asked him:
+
+"What do they talk about when they're eating?"
+
+The boy thought a moment; then he said:
+
+"Mostly they discusses us culled folks."
+
+
+_What Negroes Talk About_
+
+The same consuming interest exists among the Negroes. A very large part of
+their conversation deals with the race question. I had been at the
+Piedmont Hotel only a day or two when my Negro waiter began to take
+especially good care of me. He flecked off imaginary crumbs and gave me
+unnecessary spoons. Finally, when no one was at hand, he leaned over and
+said:
+
+"I understand you're down here to study the Negro problem."
+
+"Yes," I said, a good deal surprised. "How did you know it?"
+
+"Well, sir," he replied, "we've got ways of knowing things."
+
+He told me that the Negroes had been much disturbed ever since the riot
+and that he knew many of them who wanted to go North. "The South," he
+said, "is getting to be too dangerous for coloured people." His language
+and pronunciation were surprisingly good. I found that he was a college
+student, and that he expected to study for the ministry.
+
+"Do you talk much about these things among yourselves?" I asked.
+
+"We don't talk about much else," he said. "It's sort of life and death
+with us."
+
+Another curious thing happened not long afterward. I was lunching with
+several fine Southern men, and they talked, as usual, with the greatest
+freedom in the full hearing of the Negro waiters. Somehow, I could not
+help watching to see if the Negroes took any notice of what was said. I
+wondered if they were sensitive. Finally, I put the question to one of my
+friends:
+
+"Oh," he said, "we never mind them; they don't care."
+
+One of the waiters instantly spoke up:
+
+"No, don't mind me; I'm only a block of wood."
+
+
+_First Views of the Negroes_
+
+I set out from the hotel on the morning of my arrival to trace the colour
+line as it appears, outwardly, in the life of such a town.
+
+Atlanta is a singularly attractive place, as bright and new as any Western
+city. Sherman left it in ashes at the close of the war; the old buildings
+and narrow streets were swept away and a new city was built, which is now
+growing in a manner not short of astonishing. It has 115,000 to 125,000
+inhabitants, about a third of whom are Negroes, living in more or less
+detached quarters in various parts of the city, and giving an
+individuality to the life interesting enough to the unfamiliar Northerner.
+A great many of them are always on the streets far better dressed and
+better-appearing than I had expected to see--having in mind, perhaps, the
+tattered country specimens of the penny postal cards. Crowds of Negroes
+were at work mending the pavement, for the Italian and Slav have not yet
+appeared in Atlanta, nor indeed to any extent anywhere in the South. I
+stopped to watch a group of them. A good deal of conversation was going
+on, here and there a Negro would laugh with great good humour, and several
+times I heard a snatch of a song: much jollier workers than our grim
+foreigners, but evidently not working so hard. A fire had been built to
+heat some of the tools, and a black circle of Negroes were gathered around
+it like flies around a drop of molasses and they were all talking while
+they warmed their shins--evidently having plenty of leisure.
+
+As I continued down the street, I found that all the drivers of waggons
+and cabs were Negroes; I saw Negro newsboys, Negro porters, Negro barbers,
+and it being a bright day, many of them were in the street--on the sunny
+side.
+
+I commented that evening to some Southern people I met, on the impression,
+almost of jollity, given by the Negro workers I had seen. One of the older
+ladies made what seemed to me a very significant remark.
+
+"They don't sing as they used to," she said. "You should have known the
+old darkeys of the plantation. Every year, it seems to me, they have been
+losing more and more of their care-free good humour. I sometimes feel that
+I don't know them any more. Since the riot they have grown so glum and
+serious that I'm free to say I'm scared of them!"
+
+One of my early errands that morning led me into several of the great new
+office buildings, which bear testimony to the extraordinary progress of
+the city. And here I found one of the first evidences of the colour line
+for which I was looking. In both buildings, I found a separate elevator
+for coloured people. In one building, signs were placed reading:
+
+     FOR WHITES ONLY
+
+In another I copied this sign:
+
+     THIS CAR FOR COLOURED PASSENGERS,
+      FREIGHT, EXPRESS AND PACKAGES
+
+Curiously enough, as giving an interesting point of view, an intelligent
+Negro with whom I was talking a few days later asked me:
+
+"Have you seen the elevator sign in the Century Building?"
+
+I said I had.
+
+"How would you like to be classed with 'freight, express and packages'?"
+
+I found that no Negro ever went into an elevator devoted to white people,
+but that white people often rode in cars set apart for coloured people. In
+some cases the car for Negroes is operated by a white man, and in other
+cases, all the elevators in a building are operated by coloured men. This
+is one of the curious points of industrial contact in the South which
+somewhat surprise the Northern visitor. In the North a white workman will
+often refuse to work with a Negro; in the South, while the social
+prejudice is strong, Negroes and whites work together side by side in many
+kinds of employment.
+
+I had an illustration in point not long afterward. Passing the post
+office, I saw several mail-carriers coming out, some white, some black,
+talking and laughing, with no evidence, at first, of the existence of any
+colour line. Interested to see what the real condition was, I went in and
+made inquiries. A most interesting and significant condition developed. I
+found that the postmaster, who is a wise man, sent Negro carriers up
+Peachtree and other fashionable streets, occupied by wealthy white people,
+while white carriers were assigned to beats in the mill districts and
+other parts of town inhabited by the poorer classes of white people.
+
+"You see," said my informant, "the Peachtree people know how to treat
+Negroes. They really prefer a Negro carrier to a white one; it's natural
+for them to have a Negro doing such service. But if we sent Negro carriers
+down into the mill district they might get their heads knocked off."
+
+Then he made a philosophical observation:
+
+"If we had only the best class of white folks down here and the
+industrious Negroes, there wouldn't be any trouble."
+
+
+_The Jim Crow Car_
+
+One of the points in which I was especially interested was the "Jim Crow"
+regulations, that is, the system of separation of the races in street cars
+and railroad trains. Next to the question of Negro suffrage, I think the
+people of the North have heard more of the Jim Crow legislation than of
+anything else connected with the Negro problem. The street car is an
+excellent place for observing the points of human contact between the
+races, betraying as it does every shade of feeling upon the part of both.
+In almost no other relationship do the races come together, physically, on
+anything like a common footing. In their homes and in ordinary employment,
+they meet as master and servant; but in the street cars they touch as free
+citizens, each paying for the right to ride, the white not in a place of
+command, the Negro without an obligation of servitude. Street-car
+relationships are, therefore, symbolic of the new conditions. A few years
+ago the Negro came and went in the street cars in most cities and sat
+where he pleased, but gradually Jim Crow laws or local regulations were
+passed, forcing him into certain seats at the back of the car.
+
+While I was in Atlanta, the newspapers reported two significant new
+developments in the policy of separation. In Savannah Jim Crow ordinances
+have gone into effect for the first time, causing violent protestations on
+the part of the Negroes and a refusal by many of them to use the cars at
+all. Montgomery, Ala., about the same time, went one step further and
+demanded, not separate seats in the same car, but entirely separate cars
+for whites and blacks. There could be no better visible evidence of the
+increasing separation of the races, and of the determination of the white
+man to make the Negro "keep his place," than the evolution of the Jim Crow
+regulations.
+
+I was curious to see how the system worked out in Atlanta. Over the door
+of each car, I found this sign:
+
+       WHITE PEOPLE WILL SEAT FROM FRONT OF CAR TOWARD
+     THE BACK AND COLORED PEOPLE FROM REAR TOWARD FRONT
+
+Sure enough, I found the white people in front and the Negroes behind. As
+the sign indicates, there is no definite line of division between the
+white seats and the black seats, as in many other Southern cities. This
+very absence of a clear demarcation is significant of many relationships
+in the South. The colour line is drawn, but neither race knows just where
+it is. Indeed, it can hardly be definitely drawn in many relationships,
+because it is constantly changing. This uncertainty is a fertile source of
+friction and bitterness. The very first time I was on a car in Atlanta, I
+saw the conductor--all conductors are white--ask a Negro woman to get up
+and take a seat farther back in order to make a place for a white man. I
+have also seen white men requested to leave the Negro section of the car.
+
+At one time, when I was on a car the conductor shouted: "Heh, you nigger,
+get back there," which the Negro, who had taken a seat too far forward,
+proceeded hastily to do.
+
+No other one point of race contact is so much and so bitterly discussed
+among the Negroes as the Jim Crow car. I don't know how many Negroes
+replied to my question: "What is the chief cause of friction down here?"
+with a complaint of their treatment on street cars and in railroad trains.
+
+
+_Why the Negro Objects to the Jim Crow Car_
+
+Fundamentally, of course they object to any separation which gives them
+inferior accommodations. This point of view--and I am trying to set down
+every point of view, both coloured and white, exactly as I find it, is
+expressed in many ways.
+
+"We pay first-class fare," said one of the leading Negroes in Atlanta,
+"exactly as the white man does, but we don't get first-class service. I
+say it isn't fair."
+
+In answer to this complaint, the white man says: "The Negro is inferior,
+he must be made to keep his place. Give him a chance and he assumes social
+equality, and that will lead to an effort at intermarriage and
+amalgamation of the races. The Anglo-Saxon will never stand for that."
+
+One of the first complaints made by the Negroes after the riot, was of
+rough and unfair treatment on the street cars.
+
+The committee admitted that the Negroes were not always well treated on
+the cars, and promised to improve conditions. Charles T. Hopkins, a leader
+in the Civic League and one of the prominent lawyers of the city, told me
+that he believed the Negroes should be given their definite seats in every
+car; he said that he personally made it a practice to stand up rather than
+to take any one of the four back seats, which he considered as belonging
+to the Negroes. Two other leading men, on a different occasion, told me
+the same thing.
+
+One result of the friction over the Jim Crow regulations is that many
+Negroes ride on the cars as little as possible. One prominent Negro I met
+said he never entered a car, and that he had many friends who pursued the
+same policy; he said that Negro street car excursions, familiar a few
+years ago, had entirely ceased. It is significant of the feeling that one
+of the features of the Atlanta riot was an attack on the street cars in
+which all Negroes were driven out of their seats. One Negro woman was
+pushed through an open window, and, after falling to the pavement, she was
+dragged by the leg across the sidewalk and thrown through a shop window.
+In another case when the mob stopped a car the motorman, instead of
+protecting his passengers, went inside and beat down a Negro with his
+brass control-lever.
+
+
+_Story of an Encounter on a Street Car_
+
+I heard innumerable stories from both white people and Negroes of
+encounters in the street cars. Dr. W. F. Penn, one of the foremost Negro
+physicians of the city, himself partly white, a graduate of Yale College,
+told me of one occasion in which he entered a car and found there Mrs.
+Crogman, wife of the coloured president of Clark University. Mrs. Crogman
+is a mulatto so light of complexion as to be practically undistinguishable
+from white people. Dr. Penn, who knew her well, sat down beside her and
+began talking. A white man who occupied a seat in front with his wife
+turned and said:
+
+"Here, you nigger, get out of that seat. What do you mean by sitting down
+with a white woman?"
+
+Dr. Penn replied somewhat angrily:
+
+"It's come to a pretty pass when a coloured man cannot sit with a woman of
+his own race in his own part of the car."
+
+The white man turned to his wife and said:
+
+"Here, take these bundles. I'm going to thrash that nigger."
+
+In half a minute the car was in an uproar, the two men struggling.
+Fortunately the conductor and motorman were quickly at hand, and Dr. Penn
+slipped off the car.
+
+Conditions on the railroad trains, while not resulting so often in
+personal encounters, are also the cause of constant irritation. When I
+came South, I took particular pains to observe the arrangement on the
+trains. In some cases Negroes are given entire cars at the front of the
+train, at other times they occupy the rear end of a combination coach and
+baggage car, which is used in the North as a smoking compartment. The
+complaint here is that, while the Negro is required to pay first-class
+fare, he is provided with second-class accommodations. Well-to-do Negroes
+who can afford to travel, also complain that they are not permitted to
+engage sleeping-car berths. Booker T. Washington usually takes a
+compartment where he is entirely cut off from the white passengers. Some
+other Negroes do the same thing, although they are often refused even this
+expensive privilege. Railroad officials with whom I talked, and it is
+important to hear what they say, said that it was not only a question of
+public opinion--which was absolutely opposed to any intermingling of the
+races in the cars--but that Negro travel in most places was small compared
+with white travel, that the ordinary Negro was unclean and careless, and
+that it was impractical to furnish them the same accommodations, even
+though it did come hard on a few educated Negroes. They said that when
+there was a delegation of Negroes, enough to fill an entire sleeping car,
+they could always get accommodations. All of which gives a glimpse of the
+enormous difficulties accompanying the separation of the races in the
+South.
+
+Another interesting point significant of tendencies came early to my
+attention. They had recently finished at Atlanta one of the finest
+railroad stations in this country. The ordinary depot in the South has two
+waiting-rooms of about the same size, one for whites and one for Negroes.
+But when this new station was built the whole front was given up to white
+people, and the Negroes were assigned a side entrance, and a small
+waiting-room. Prominent coloured men regarded it as a new evidence of the
+crowding out of the Negro, the further attempt to give him unequal
+accommodations, to handicap him in his struggle for survival. A delegation
+was sent to the railroad people to protest, but to no purpose. Result:
+further bitterness. There are in the station two lunch-rooms, one for
+whites, one for Negroes.
+
+A leading coloured man said to me:
+
+"No Negro goes to the lunch-room in the station who can help it. We don't
+like the way we have been treated."
+
+
+_A Negro Boycott_
+
+Of course this was an unusually intelligent coloured man, and he spoke for
+his own sort; how far the same feeling of a race consciousness strong
+enough to carry out such a boycott as this--and it is like the boycott of
+a labour union--actuates the masses of ignorant Negroes is a question upon
+which I hope to get more light as I proceed. I have already heard more
+than one coloured leader complain that Negroes do not stand together. And
+a white planter, whom I met in the hotel, said a significant thing along
+this very line:
+
+"If once the Negroes got together and saved their money, they'd soon own
+the country, but they can't do it, and they never will."
+
+After I had begun to trace the colour line I found evidences of it
+everywhere--literally in every department of life. In the theatres,
+Negroes never sit downstairs, but the galleries are black with them. Of
+course, white hotels and restaurants are entirely barred to Negroes, with
+the result that coloured people have their own eating and sleeping places,
+many of them inexpressibly dilapidated and unclean. "Sleepers wanted" is a
+familiar sign in Atlanta, giving notice of places where for a few cents a
+Negro can find a bed or a mattress on the floor, often in a room where
+there are many other sleepers, sometimes both men and women in the same
+room crowded together in a manner both unsanitary and immoral. No good
+public accommodations exist for the educated or well-to-do Negro in
+Atlanta, although other cities are developing good Negro hotels. Indeed
+one cannot long remain in the South without being impressed with extreme
+difficulties which beset the exceptional coloured man.
+
+
+[Illustration: COMPANION PICTURES
+
+Showing how the colour line was drawn by the saloons at Atlanta, Georgia.
+Many of the saloons for Negroes were kept by foreigners, usually Jews.]
+
+
+In slavery time many Negroes attended white churches and Negro children
+were often taught by white women. Now, a Negro is never (or very rarely)
+seen in a white man's church. Once since I have been in the South, I saw a
+very old Negro woman, some much-loved mammy, perhaps--sitting down in
+front near the pulpit, but that is the only exception to the rule that has
+come to my attention. Negroes are not wanted in white churches.
+Consequently the coloured people have some sixty churches of their own in
+Atlanta. Of course, the schools are separate, and have been ever since the
+Civil War.
+
+In one of the parks of Atlanta I saw this sign:
+
+     NO NEGROES ALLOWED IN THIS PARK
+
+
+_Colour Line in the Public Library_
+
+A story significant of the growing separation of the races is told about
+the public library at Atlanta, which no Negro is permitted to enter.
+Carnegie gave the money for building it, and when the question came up as
+to the support of it by the city, the inevitable colour question arose.
+Leading Negroes asserted that their people should be allowed admittance,
+that they needed such an educational advantage even more than white
+people, and that they were to be taxed their share--even though it was
+small--for buying the books and maintaining the building. They did not win
+their point of course, but Mr. Carnegie proposed a solution of the
+difficulty by offering more money to build a Negro branch library,
+provided the city would give the land and provide for its support. The
+city said to the Negroes:
+
+"You contribute the land and we will support the library."
+
+Influential Negroes at once arranged for buying and contributing a site
+for the library. Then the question of control arose. The Negroes thought
+that inasmuch as they gave the land and the building was to be used
+entirely for coloured people, they should have one or two members on the
+board of control. This the city officials, who had charge of the matter,
+would not hear of; result, the Negroes would not give the land, and the
+branch library has never been built.
+
+Right in this connection: while I was in Atlanta, the Art School, which in
+the past has often used Negro models, decided to draw the colour line
+there, too, and no longer employ them.
+
+Formerly Negroes and white men went to the same saloons, and drank at the
+same bars, as they do now, I am told, in some parts of the South. In a few
+instances, in Atlanta, there were Negro saloon-keepers, and many Negro
+bartenders. The first step toward separation was to divide the bar, the
+upper end for white men, the lower for Negroes. After the riot, by a new
+ordinance no saloon was permitted to serve both white and coloured men.
+
+Consequently, going along Decatur Street, one sees the saloons designated
+by conspicuous signs:[1]
+
+     "WHITES ONLY"      "COLOURED ONLY"
+
+And when the Negro suffers the ordinary consequences of a prolonged visit
+to Decatur Street, and finds himself in the city prison, he is separated
+there, too, from the whites. And afterward in court, if he comes to trial,
+two Bibles are provided; he may take his oath on one; the other is for the
+white man. When he dies he is buried in a separate cemetery.
+
+One curious and enlightening example of the infinite ramifications of the
+colour line was given me by Mr. Logan, secretary of the Atlanta Associated
+Charities, which is supported by voluntary contributions. One day, after
+the riot, a subscriber called Mr. Logan on the telephone and said: "Do you
+help Negroes in your society?"
+
+"Why, yes, occasionally," said Mr. Logan.
+
+"What do you do that for?"
+
+"A Negro gets hungry and cold like anybody else," answered Mr. Logan.
+
+"Well, you can strike my name from your subscription list. I won't give
+any of my money to a society that helps Negroes."
+
+
+_Psychology of the South_
+
+Now, this sounds rather brutal, but behind it lies the peculiar psychology
+of the South. This very man who refused to contribute to the associated
+charities, may have fed several Negroes from his kitchen and had a number
+of Negro pensioners who came to him regularly for help. It was simply
+amazing to me, considering the bitterness of racial feeling, to see how
+lavish many white families are in giving food, clothing, and money to
+individual Negroes whom they know. A Negro cook often supports her whole
+family, including a lazy husband, on what she gets daily from the white
+man's kitchen. In some old families the "basket habit" of the Negroes is
+taken for granted; in the newer ones, it is, significantly, beginning to
+be called stealing, showing that the old order is passing and that the
+Negro is being held more and more strictly to account, not as a dependent
+vassal, but as a moral being, who must rest upon his own responsibility.
+
+And often a Negro of the old sort will literally bulldoze his hereditary
+white protector into the loan of quarters and half dollars, which both
+know will never be paid back.
+
+Mr. Brittain, superintendent of schools in Fulton County, gave me an
+incident in point. A big Negro with whom he was wholly unacquainted came
+to his office one day, and demanded--he did not ask, but demanded--a job.
+
+"What's your name?" asked the superintendent.
+
+"Marion Luther Brittain," was the reply.
+
+"That sounds familiar," said Mr. Brittain--it being, indeed, his own name.
+
+"Yas, sah. Ah'm the son of yo' ol' mammy."
+
+In short, Marion Luther had grown up on the old plantation; it was the
+spirit of the hereditary vassal demanding the protection and support of
+the hereditary baron, and he got it, of course.
+
+The Negro who makes his appeal on the basis of this old relationship
+finds no more indulgent or generous friend than the Southern white man,
+indulgent to the point of excusing thievery and other petty offences, but
+the moment he assumes or demands any other relationship or stands up as an
+independent citizen, the white men--at least some white men--turn upon him
+with the fiercest hostility. The incident of the associated charities may
+now be understood. It was not necessarily cruelty to a cold or hungry
+Negro that inspired the demand of the irate subscriber, but the feeling
+that the associated charities helped Negroes and whites on the same basis,
+as men; that, therefore, it encouraged "social equality," and that,
+therefore, it was to be stopped.
+
+Most of the examples so far given are along the line of social contact,
+where, of course, the repulsion is intense. Negroes and whites can go to
+different schools, churches, and saloons, and sit in different street
+cars, and still live pretty comfortably. But the longer I remain in the
+South, the more clearly I come to understand how wide and deep, in other,
+less easily discernible ways, the chasm between the races is becoming.
+
+
+_The New Racial Consciousness Among Negroes_
+
+One of the natural and inevitable results of the effort of the white man
+to set the Negro off, as a race, by himself, is to awaken in him a new
+consciousness--a sort of racial consciousness. It drives the Negroes
+together for defence and offence. Many able Negroes, some largely of white
+blood, cut off from all opportunity of success in the greater life of the
+white man, become of necessity leaders of their own people. And one of
+their chief efforts consists in urging Negroes to work together and to
+stand together. In this they are only developing the instinct of defence
+against the white man which has always been latent in the race. This
+instinct exhibits itself in the way in which the mass of Negroes sometimes
+refuse to turn over a criminal of their colour to white justice; it is
+like the instinctive clannishness of the Highland Scotch or the peasant
+Irish. I don't know how many Southern people have told me in different
+ways of how extremely difficult it is to get at the real feeling of a
+Negro, to make him tell what goes on in his clubs and churches or in his
+innumerable societies.
+
+A Southern woman told me of a cook who had been in her service for
+nineteen years. The whole family really loved the old servant: her
+mistress made her a confidant, in the way of the old South, in the most
+intimate private and family matters, the daughters told her their love
+affairs; they all petted her and even submitted to many small tyrannies
+upon her part.
+
+"But do you know," said my hostess, "Susie never tells us a thing about
+her life or her friends, and we couldn't, if we tried, make her tell what
+goes on in the society she belongs to."
+
+The Negro has long been defensively secretive. Slavery made him that. In
+the past, the instinct was passive and defensive; but with growing
+education and intelligent leadership it is rapidly becoming conscious,
+self-directive and offensive. And right there, it seems to me, lies the
+great cause of the increased strain in the South.
+
+Let me illustrate. In the People's Tabernacle in Atlanta, where thousands
+of Negroes meet every Sunday, I saw this sign in huge letters:
+
+     FOR PHOTOGRAPHS, GO TO AUBURN PHOTO
+      GALLERY OPERATED BY COLOURED MEN
+
+The old-fashioned Negro preferred to go to the white man for everything;
+he didn't trust his own people; the new Negro, with growing race
+consciousness, and feeling that the white man is against him, urges his
+friends to patronise Negro doctors and dentists, and to trade with Negro
+storekeepers. The extent to which this movement has gone was one of the
+most surprising things that I, as an unfamiliar Northerner, found in
+Atlanta. In other words, the struggle of the races is becoming more and
+more rapidly economic.
+
+
+_Story of a Negro Shoe-store_
+
+One day, walking in Broad Street, I passed a Negro shoe-store. I did not
+know that there was such a thing in the country. I went in to make
+inquiries. It was neat, well kept, and evidently prosperous. I found that
+it was owned by a stock company, organised and controlled wholly by
+Negroes; the manager was a brisk young mulatto named Harper, a graduate of
+Atlanta University. I found him dictating to a Negro girl stenographer.
+There were two reasons, he said, why the store had been opened; one was
+because the promoters thought it a good business opportunity, and the
+other was because many Negroes of the better class felt that they did not
+get fair treatment at white stores. At some places--not all, he said--when
+a Negro woman went to buy a pair of shoes, the clerk would hand them to
+her without offering to help her try them on; and a Negro was always kept
+waiting until all the white people in the store had been served. Since the
+new business was opened, he said, it had attracted much of the Negro
+trade; all the leaders advising their people to patronise him. I was much
+interested to find out how this young man looked upon the race question.
+His first answer struck me forcibly, for it was the universal and typical
+answer of the business man the world over whether white, yellow, or black:
+
+"All I want," he said, "is to be protected and let alone, so that I can
+build up this business."
+
+"What do you mean by protection?" I asked.
+
+"Well, justice between the races. That doesn't mean social equality. We
+have a society of our own, and that is all we want. If he can have justice
+in the courts, and fair protection, we can learn to compete with the white
+stores and get along all right."
+
+Such an enterprise as this indicates the new, economic separation between
+the races.
+
+"Here is business," says the Negro, "which I am going to do."
+
+Considering the fact that only a few years ago, the Negro did no business
+at all, and had no professional men, it is really surprising to a
+Northerner to see what progress he has made. One of the first lines he
+took up was--not unnaturally--the undertaking business. Some of the most
+prosperous Negroes in every Southern city are undertakers, doing work
+exclusively, of course, for coloured people. Other early enterprises,
+growing naturally out of a history of personal service, were barbering
+and tailoring. Atlanta has many small Negro tailor and clothes-cleaning
+shops.
+
+
+_Wealthiest Negro in Atlanta_
+
+The wealthiest Negro in Atlanta, A. F. Herndon, operates the largest
+barber shop in the city; he is the president of a Negro insurance company
+(of which there are four in the city) and he owns and rents some fifty
+dwelling houses. He is said to be worth $80,000, all made, of course,
+since slavery.
+
+Another occupation developing naturally from the industrial training of
+slavery was the business of the building contractor. Several such Negroes,
+notably Alexander Hamilton, do a considerable business in Atlanta, and
+have made money. They are employed by white men, and they hire for their
+jobs both white and Negro workmen.
+
+Small groceries and other stores are of later appearance; I saw at least a
+score of them in various parts of Atlanta. For the most part they are very
+small, many are exceedingly dirty and ill-kept; usually much poorer than
+corresponding places kept by foreigners, indiscriminately called "Dagoes"
+down here, who are in reality mostly Russian Jews and Greeks. But there
+are a few Negro grocery stores in Atlanta which are highly creditable.
+Other business enterprises include restaurants (for Negroes), printing
+establishments, two newspapers, and several drug-stores. In other words,
+the Negro is rapidly building up his own business enterprises, tending to
+make himself independent as a race.
+
+The appearance of Negro drug-stores was the natural result of the
+increasing practice of Negro doctors and dentists. Time was when all
+Negroes preferred to go to white practitioners, but since educated
+coloured doctors became common, they have taken a very large
+part--practically all, I am told--of the practice in Atlanta. Several of
+them have had degrees from Northern universities, two from Yale; and one
+of them, at least, has some little practice among white people. The
+doctors are leaders among their people. Naturally they give prescriptions
+to be filled by druggists of their own race; hence the growth of the drug
+business among Negroes everywhere in the South. The first store to be
+established in Atlanta occupies an old wooden building in Auburn Avenue.
+It is operated by Moses Amos, a mulatto, and enjoys, I understand, a high
+degree of prosperity. I visited it. A post-office occupies one corner of
+the room; and it is a familiar gathering place for coloured men. Moses
+Amos told me his story, and I found it so interesting, and so significant
+of the way in which Negro business men have come up, that I am setting it
+down briefly here.
+
+
+_Rise of a Negro Druggist_
+
+"I never shall forget," he said, "my first day in the drug business. It
+was in 1876. I remember I was with a crowd of boys in Peachtree Street,
+where Dr. Huss, a Southern white man, kept a drug-store. The old doctor
+was sitting out in front smoking his pipe. He called one little Negro
+after another, and finally chose me. He said:
+
+"'I want you to live with me, work in the store, and look after my horse.'
+
+"He sent me to his house and told me to tell his wife to give me some
+breakfast, and I certainly delivered the first message correctly. His
+wife, who was a noble lady, not only fed me, but made me take a bath in a
+sure enough porcelain tub, the first I had ever seen. When I went back to
+the store, I was so regenerated that the doctor had to adjust his
+spectacles before he knew me. He said to me:
+
+"'You can wash bottles, put up castor oil, salts and turpentine, sell
+anything you _know_ and put the money in the drawer.'
+
+"He showed me how to work the keys of the cash drawer. 'I am going to
+trust you,' he said. 'Don't steal from me; if you want anything ask for
+it, and you can have it. And don't lie; I hate a liar. A boy who will lie
+will steal, too.'
+
+"I remained with Dr. Huss thirteen years. He sent me to school and paid my
+tuition out of his own pocket; he trusted me fully, often leaving me in
+charge of his business for weeks at a time. When he died I formed a
+partnership with Dr. Butler, Dr. Slater, and others, and bought the store.
+Our business grew and prospered, so that within a few years we had a stock
+worth $3,000, and cash of $800. That made us ambitious. We bought land,
+built a new store, and went into debt to do it. We didn't know much about
+business--that's the Negro's chief trouble--and we lost trade by changing
+our location, so that in spite of all we could do, we failed and lost
+everything, though we finally paid our creditors every cent. After many
+trials we started again in 1896 in our present store; to-day we are doing
+a good business; we can get all the credit we want from wholesale houses,
+we employ six clerks, and pay good interest on the capital invested."
+
+
+_Greatest Difficulties Met by Negro Business Men_
+
+I asked him what was the greatest difficulty he had to meet. He said it
+was the credit system; the fact that many Negroes have not learned
+financial responsibility. Once, he said, he nearly stopped business on
+this account.
+
+"I remember," he said, "the last time we got into trouble. We needed $400
+to pay our bills. I picked out some of our best customers and gave them a
+heart-to-heart talk and told them what trouble we were in. They all
+promised to pay; but on the day set for payment, out of $1,680 which they
+owed us we collected just $8.25. After that experience we came down to a
+cash basis. We trust no one, and since then we have been doing well."
+
+He said he thought the best opportunity for Negro development was in the
+South where he had his whole race behind him. He said he had once been
+tempted to go North looking for an opening.
+
+"How did you make out?" I asked.
+
+"Well, I'll tell you," he said, "when I got there I wanted a shave; I
+walked the streets two hours visiting barber shops, and they all turned me
+away with some excuse. I finally had to buy a razor and shave myself! That
+was just a sample. I came home disgusted and decided to fight it out down
+here where I understood conditions."
+
+Of course only a comparatively few Negroes are able to get ahead in
+business. They must depend almost exclusively on the trade of their own
+race, and they must meet the highly organised competition of white men.
+But it is certainly significant that even a few are able to make progress
+along these unfamiliar lines. Many Southern men I met had little or no
+idea of the remarkable extent of this advancement among the better class
+of Negroes. Here is a strange thing. I don't know how many Southern men
+have prefaced their talks with me with words something like this:
+
+"You can't expect to know the Negro after a short visit. You must live
+down here like we do. Now, I know the Negroes like a book. I was brought
+up with them. I know what they'll do and what they won't do. I have had
+Negroes in my house all my life."
+
+But curiously enough I found that these men rarely knew anything about the
+better class of Negroes--those who were in business, or in independent
+occupations, those who owned their own homes. They _did_ come into contact
+with the servant Negro, the field hand, the common labourer, who make up,
+of course, the great mass of the race. On the other hand, the best class
+of Negroes did not know the higher class of white people, and based their
+suspicion and hatred upon the acts of the poorer sort of whites with whom
+they naturally came into contact. The best elements of the two races are
+as far apart as though they lived in different continents; and that is one
+of the chief causes of the growing danger of the Southern situation. It is
+a striking fact that one of the first--almost instinctive--efforts at
+reconstruction after the Atlanta riot was to bring the best elements of
+both races together, so that they might, by becoming acquainted and
+gaining confidence in each other, allay suspicion and bring influence to
+bear upon the lawless elements of both white people and coloured.
+
+Many Southerners look back wistfully to the faithful, simple, ignorant,
+obedient, cheerful, old plantation Negro and deplore his disappearance.
+They want the New South, but the old Negro. That Negro is disappearing
+forever along with the old feudalism and the old-time exclusively
+agricultural life.
+
+A new Negro is not less inevitable than a new white man and a new South.
+And the new Negro, as my clever friend says, doesn't laugh as much as the
+old one. It is grim business he is in, this being free, this new, fierce
+struggle in the open competitive field for the daily loaf. Many go down to
+vagrancy and crime in that struggle; a few will rise. The more rapid the
+progress (with the trained white man setting the pace), the more frightful
+the mortality.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+THE SOUTHERN CITY NEGRO
+
+
+After my arrival in Atlanta, and when I had begun to understand some of
+the more superficial ramifications of the colour line (as I related in the
+last chapter,) I asked several Southern men whose acquaintance I had made
+where I could best see the poorer or criminal class of Negroes. So much
+has been said of the danger arising from this element of Southern
+population and it plays such a part in every discussion of the race
+question that I was anxious to learn all I could about it.
+
+"Go down any morning to Judge Broyles's court," they said to me, "and
+you'll see the lowest of the low."
+
+So I went down--the first of many visits I made to police and justice
+courts. I chose a Monday morning that I might see to the best advantage
+the accumulation of the arrests of Saturday and Sunday.
+
+The police station stands in Decatur Street, in the midst of the very
+worst section of the city, surrounded by low saloons, dives, and
+pawn-shops. The court occupies a great room upstairs, and it was crowded
+that morning to its capacity. Besides the police, lawyers, court officers,
+and white witnesses, at least one hundred and fifty spectators filled the
+seats behind the rail, nearly all of them Negroes. The ordinary Negro
+loves nothing better than to sit and watch the proceedings of a court.
+Judge Broyles kindly invited me to a seat on the platform at his side
+where I could look into the faces of the prisoners and hear all that was
+said.
+
+
+_In a Southern Police Court_
+
+It was a profoundly interesting and significant spectacle. In the first
+place the very number of cases was staggering. The docket that morning
+carried over one hundred names--men, women, and children, white and
+black; the court worked hard, but it was nearly two o'clock in the
+afternoon before the room was cleared. Atlanta, as I showed in a former
+chapter, has the largest number of arrests, considering the population, of
+any important city in the United States. I found that 13,511 of the total
+of 21,702 persons arrested in 1906 were Negroes, or 62 per cent., whereas
+the coloured population of the city is only 40 per cent. of the total.[2]
+
+A very large proportion of the arrests that Monday morning were Negroes,
+with a surprising proportion of women and of mere children. In 1906 3,194
+Negro women were arrested in Atlanta. It was altogether a pitiful and
+disheartening exhibition, a spectacle of sodden ignorance, reckless vice,
+dissipation. Most of the cases, ravelled out, led back to the saloon.
+
+"Where's your home?" the judge would ask, and in a number of cases the
+answer was:
+
+"Ah come here fum de country."
+
+Over and over again it was the story of the country Negro, or the Negro
+who had been working on the railroad, in the cotton fields or in the
+sawmills, who had entered upon the more complex life of the city. Most of
+the country districts of the South prohibit the sale of liquor; and
+Negroes, especially, have comparatively little temptation of this nature,
+nor are they subjected to the many other glittering pitfalls of city life.
+But of late years the opportunities of the city have attracted the black
+people, just as they have the whites, in large numbers. Atlanta had many
+saloons and other places of vice; and the results are to be seen in Judge
+Broyles's court any morning. And not only Negroes, but the "poor whites"
+who have come in from the mountains and the small farms to work in the
+mills: they, too, suffer fully as much as the Negroes.
+
+
+_Negro Cocaine Victims_
+
+Not a few of the cases both black and white showed evidences of cocaine or
+morphine poisoning--the blear eyes, the unsteady nerves.
+
+
+
+[Illustration: INTERIOR OF A NEGRO WORKINGMAN'S HOME, ATLANTA, GEORGIA]
+
+[Illustration: INTERIOR OF A NEGRO HOME OF THE POOREST SORT IN
+INDIANAPOLIS]
+
+
+"What's the trouble here?" asked the judge.
+
+"Coke," said the officer.
+
+"Ten-seventy-five," said the judge, naming the amount of the fine.
+
+They buy the "coke" in the form of a powder and snuff it up the nose; a
+certain patent catarrh medicine which is nearly all cocaine is sometimes
+used; ten cents will purchase enough to make a man wholly irresponsible
+for his acts, and capable of any crime. The cocaine habit, which seems to
+be spreading, for there are always druggists who will break the law, has
+been a curse to the Negro and has resulted, directly, as the police told
+me, in much crime. I was told of two cases in particular, of offences
+against women, in which the Negro was a victim of the drug habit.
+
+So society, in pursuit of wealth, South and North, preys upon the ignorant
+and weak--and then wonders why crime is prevalent!
+
+One has only to visit police courts in the South to see in how many
+curious ways the contact of the races generates fire.
+
+"What's the trouble here?" inquires the judge.
+
+The white complainant--a boy--says:
+
+"This nigger insulted me!" and he tells the epithet the Negro applied.
+
+"Did you call him that?"
+
+"No sah, I never called him no such name."
+
+"Three-seventy-five--you mustn't insult white people."
+
+And here is the report of the case of a six-year-old Negro boy from the
+_Georgian_:
+
+     Because Robert Lee Buster, a six-year-old Negro boy, insulted Maggie
+     McDermott, a little girl, who lives at 507 Simpson Street, Wednesday
+     afternoon, he was given a whipping in the police station Thursday
+     morning that will make him remember to be good.
+
+     The case was heard in the juvenile court before Judge Broyles. It was
+     shown that the little Negro had made an insulting remark to the
+     little girl.
+
+
+_Story of a Negro Arrest_
+
+The very suspicion and fear that exist give rise to many difficulties. One
+illuminating case came up that morning. A strapping Negro man was brought
+before the judge. He showed no marks of dissipation and was respectably
+dressed. Confronting him were two plain-clothes policemen, one with his
+neck wrapped up, one with a bandage around his arm. Both said they had
+been stabbed by the Negro with a jack-knife. The Negro said he was a hotel
+porter and he had the white manager of the hotel in court to testify to
+his good character, sobriety, and industry. It seems that he was going
+home from work at nine o'clock in the evening, and it was dark. He said he
+was afraid and had been afraid since the riot. At the same time the two
+policemen were looking for a burglar. They saw the Negro porter and
+ordered him to stop. Not being in uniform the Negro said he thought the
+officers were "jes' plain white men" who were going to attack him. When he
+started to run the officers tried to arrest him, and he drew his
+jack-knife and began to fight. And here he was in court! The judge said:
+
+"You mustn't attack officers," and bound him over to trial in the higher
+court.
+
+
+_A White Man and a Negro Woman_
+
+Another case shows one of the strange relationships which grow out of
+Southern conditions. An old white man, much agitated and very pale, was
+brought before the judge. With him came a much younger, comely appearing
+woman. Both were well dressed and looked respectable--so much so, indeed,
+that there was a stir of interest and curiosity among the spectators. Why
+had they been arrested? As they stood in front of the judge's desk, the
+old man hung his head, but the woman looked up with such an expression,
+tearless and tragic, as I hope I shall not have to see again.
+
+"What's the charge?" asked the judge.
+
+"Adultery," said the officer.
+
+The woman winced, the old man did not look up.
+
+The judge glanced from one to the other in surprise.
+
+"Why don't you get married?" he asked.
+
+"The woman," said the officer, "is a nigger."
+
+She was as white as I am, probably an octoroon; I could not have
+distinguished her from a white person, and she deceived even the
+experienced eye of the judge.
+
+"Is that so?" asked the judge.
+
+The man continued to hang his head, the woman looked up; neither said a
+word. It then came out that they had lived together as man and wife for
+many years and that they had children nearly grown. One of the girls--and
+a very bright, ambitious girl--as I learned later, was a student in
+Atlanta University, a Negro college, where she was supported by her
+father, who made good wages as a telegraph operator. Some neighbour had
+complained and the man and woman were arrested.
+
+"Is this all true?" asked the judge.
+
+Neither said a word.
+
+"You can't marry under the Georgia law," said the judge; "I'll have to
+bind you over for trial in the county court."
+
+They were led back to the prisoners' rooms. A few minutes later the
+bailiff came out quickly and said to the judge:
+
+"The old man has fallen in a faint."
+
+Not long afterward they half led, half carried him out across the court
+room.
+
+One thing impressed me especially, not only in this court but in all
+others I have visited: a Negro brought in for drunkenness, for example,
+was punished much more severely than a white man arrested for the same
+offence. The injustice which the weak everywhere suffer--North and
+South--is in the South visited upon the Negro. The white man sometimes
+escaped with a reprimand, he was sometimes fined three dollars and costs,
+but the Negro, especially if he had no white man to intercede for him, was
+usually punished with a ten or fifteen dollar fine, which often meant that
+he must go to the chain-gang. One of the chief causes of complaint by the
+Negroes of Atlanta has been of the rough treatment of the police and of
+unjust arrests. After the riot, when the Civic League, composed of the
+foremost white citizens of Atlanta, was organised, one of the first
+subjects that came up was that of justice to the Negro. Mr. Hopkins, the
+leader of the League, said to me: "We complain that the Negroes will not
+help to bring the criminals of their race to justice. One reason for that
+is that the Negro has too little confidence in our courts. We must give
+him that, above all things."
+
+In accordance with this plan, the Civic League, heartily supported by
+Judge Broyles, employed a young lawyer, Mr. Underwood, to appear
+regularly in court and look after the interests of Negroes.
+
+
+_Convicts Making a Profit for Georgia_
+
+One reason for the very large number of arrests--in Georgia
+particularly--lies in the fact that the state and the counties make a
+profit out of their prison system. No attempt is ever made to reform a
+criminal, either white or coloured. Convicts are hired out to private
+contractors or worked on the public roads. Last year the net profit to
+Georgia from its chain-gangs, to which the prison commission refers with
+pride, reached the great sum of $354,853.55.
+
+Of course a very large proportion of the prisoners are Negroes. The demand
+for convicts by rich sawmill operators, owners of brick-yards, large
+farmers, and others is far in advance of the supply. The natural tendency
+is to convict as many men as possible--it furnishes steady, cheap labour
+to the contractors and a profit to the state. Undoubtedly this explains in
+some degree the very large number of criminals, especially Negroes, in
+Georgia. One of the leading political forces in Atlanta is a very
+prominent banker who is a dominant member of the city police board. He is
+also the owner of extensive brick-yards near Atlanta, where many convicts
+are employed. Some of the large fortunes in Atlanta have come chiefly from
+the labour of chain-gangs of convicts leased from the state.
+
+
+_Fate of the Black Boy_
+
+As I have already suggested, one of the things that impressed me strongly
+in visiting Judge Broyles's court--and others like it--was the astonishing
+number of children, especially Negroes, arrested. Some of them were very
+young and often exceedingly bright-looking. From the records I find that
+in 1906 1 boy six years old, 7 of seven years, 33 of eight years, 69 of
+nine years, 107 of ten years, 142 of eleven years, and 219 of twelve years
+were arrested and brought into court--in other words, 578 boys and girls,
+mostly Negroes, under twelve years of age!
+
+"I should think," I said to a police officer, "you would have trouble in
+taking care of all these children in your reformatories."
+
+"Reformatories!" he said, "there aren't any."
+
+"What do you do with them?"
+
+"Well, if they're bad we put 'em in the stockade or the chain-gang,
+otherwise they're turned loose."
+
+I found, however, that a new state juvenile reformatory was just being
+opened at Milledgeville--which may accommodate a few Negro boys. An
+attempt is also being made in Atlanta to get hold of some of the children
+through a new probation system. I talked with the excellent officer, Mr.
+Gloer, who works in conjunction with Judge Broyles. He reaches a good many
+white boys, but very few Negroes. Of 1,011 boys and girls under sixteen,
+arrested in 1905, 819 were black, but of those given the advantage of the
+probation system, 50 were white and only 7 coloured. In other words, out
+of 819 arrests of Negro children only 7 enjoyed the benefit of the
+probation system.
+
+Mr. Gloer has endeavoured to secure a coloured assistant who would help
+look after the swarming Negro children who are becoming criminals. The
+city refused to appropriate money for that purpose, but some of the
+leading coloured citizens agreed to contribute one dollar a month each,
+and a Negro woman was employed to help with the coloured children brought
+into court. Excellent work was done, but owing to the feeling after the
+riot the Negro assistant discontinued her work.
+
+
+_Care of Negro Orphans_
+
+With many hundreds of Negro orphans, waifs, and foundlings, the state or
+city does very little to help them. If it were not for the fact that the
+Negroes, something like the Jews, are wonderfully helpful to one another,
+adopting orphan children with the greatest willingness, there would be
+much suffering. Several orphanages in the state are conducted by the
+coloured people themselves, either through their churches or by private
+subscription. In Atlanta the Carrie Steele orphanage, which is managed by
+Negroes, has received an appropriation yearly from the city, and has taken
+children sent by the city charities department. After the riot the
+appropriation was suddenly cut off without explanation, but through the
+activities of the new Civic League, it was, I understand, restored.
+
+Without proper reformatories or asylums, with small advantage of the
+probation system, hundreds of Negro children are on the streets of Atlanta
+every day--shooting craps, stealing, learning to drink. A few, shut up in
+the stockade, or in chain-gangs, without any attempt to reform them or
+teach them, take lessons in crime from older offenders and come out worse
+than they went in. They spread abroad the lawlessness they learn and
+finally commit some frightful crime and get back into the chain-gang for
+life--where they make a profit for the state!
+
+Every child, white or coloured, is getting an education somewhere. If that
+education is not in schools, or at home, or, in cases of incorrigibility,
+in proper reformatories, then it is on the streets or in chain-gangs.
+
+
+_Why Negro Children Are Not in School_
+
+My curiosity, aroused by the very large number of young prisoners, led me
+next to inquire why these children were not in school. I visited a number
+of schools and I talked with L. M. Landrum, the assistant superintendent.
+Compulsory education is not enforced anywhere in the South, so that
+children may run the streets unless their parents insist upon sending them
+to school. I found more than this, however, that Atlanta did not begin to
+have enough school facilities for the children who wanted to go. Like many
+rapidly growing cities, both South and North, it has been difficult to
+keep up with the demand. Just as in the North the tenement classes are
+often neglected, so in the South the lowest class--which is the Negro--is
+neglected. Several new schools have been built for white children, but
+there has been no new school for coloured children in fifteen or twenty
+years (though one Negro private school has been taken over within the last
+few years by the city). So crowded are the coloured schools that they have
+two sessions a day, one squad of children coming in the forenoon, another
+in the afternoon. The coloured teachers, therefore, do double work, for
+which they receive about two-thirds as much salary as the white teachers.
+
+Though many Southern cities have instituted industrial training in the
+public schools, Atlanta so far has done nothing. The president of the
+board of education in his last published report (1903) calls attention to
+this fact, and says also:
+
+     While on the subject of Negro schools, permit me to call your
+     attention to their overcrowded condition. In every Negro school many
+     teachers teach two sets of pupils, each set for one-half of a school
+     day.
+
+     The last bond election was carried by a majority of only thirty-three
+     votes. To my personal knowledge more than thirty-three Negroes voted
+     for the bonds on the solemn assurance that by the passage of the
+     bonds the Negro children would receive more school accommodations.
+
+The eagerness of the coloured people for a chance to send their children
+to school is something astonishing and pathetic. They will submit to all
+sorts of inconveniences in order that their children may get an education.
+One day I visited the mill neighbourhood of Atlanta to see how the poorer
+classes of white people lived. I found one very comfortable home occupied
+by a family of mill employees. They hired a Negro woman to cook for them,
+and while they sent their children to the mill to work, the cook sent her
+children to school!
+
+
+_How Negroes Educate Themselves_
+
+Here is a curious and significant thing I found in Atlanta. Because there
+is not enough room for Negro children in public schools, the coloured
+people maintain many private schools. The largest of these, called Morris
+Brown College, has nearly 1,000 pupils. Some of them are boarders from the
+country, but the greater proportion are day pupils from seven years old up
+who come in from the neighbourhood. This "college," in reality a grammar
+school, is managed and largely supported by tuition and contributions from
+Negroes, though some subscriptions are obtained in the North. Besides this
+"college" there are many small private schools conducted by Negro women
+and supported wholly by the tuition paid--the Negroes thus voluntarily
+taxing themselves heavily for their educational opportunities. One
+afternoon in Atlanta I passed a small, rather dilapidated home. Just as I
+reached the gate I heard a great cackling of voices and much laughter.
+Coloured children began to pour out of the house. "What's this?" I said,
+and I turned in to see. I found a Negro woman, the teacher, standing in
+the doorway. She had just dismissed her pupils for recess. She was holding
+school in two little rooms where some fifty children must have been
+crowded to suffocation. Everything was very primitive and
+inconvenient--but it was a school! She collected, she told me, a dollar a
+month tuition for each child. Mollie McCue's school, perhaps the best
+known private school for Negroes in the city, has 250 pupils.
+
+Many children also find educational opportunities in the Negro colleges of
+the city--Clark University, Atlanta University and Spellman Seminary,
+which are supported partly by the Negroes themselves but mostly by
+Northern philanthropy.
+
+Mr. Landrum gave me a copy of the last statistical report of the school
+board (1903), from which these facts appear:
+
+               School     No. of             With   Without
+             Population  Schools  Teachers  Seats    Seats
+
+  White        14,465      20       200     10,052   4,413
+  Coloured      8,118       5        49      2,445   5,673
+
+Even with a double daily session for coloured pupils nearly half of the
+Negro children in Atlanta, even in 1903, were barred from the public
+schools from lack of facilities, and the number has increased largely in
+the last four years. Some of these are accommodated in the private schools
+and colleges which I have mentioned, but there still remain hundreds, even
+thousands, who are getting no schooling of any kind, but who are
+nevertheless being educated--on the streets, and for criminal lives.
+
+
+_White Instruction for Black Children_
+
+I made a good many inquiries to find out what was being done outside of
+the public schools by the white people toward training the Negro either
+morally, industrially or intellectually--and I was astonished to find that
+it was next to nothing. The Negro is, of course, not welcome at the white
+churches or Sunday schools, and the sentiment is so strong against
+teaching the Negro that it is a brave Southern man or woman, indeed, who
+dares attempt anything of the sort. I did find, however, that the Central
+Presbyterian Church of Atlanta conducted a Negro Sunday School. Of this
+Dr. Theron H. Rice, the pastor, said:
+
+"The Sunday School conducted in Atlanta by my church is the outcome of the
+effort of some of the most earnest and thoughtful of our people to give
+careful religious training to the Negroes of this generation and thus to
+conserve the influence begun with the fathers and mothers and the
+grandfathers and grandmothers of these coloured children when they were
+taught personally by their devoted Christian masters and mistresses. The
+work is small in point of the number reached, but it has been productive
+of sturdy character and law-abiding citizenship."
+
+A white man or woman, and especially a Northern white man or woman, in
+Atlanta who teaches Negroes is rigorously ostracised by white society. I
+visited one of the Negro colleges where there are a number of white
+teachers from the North. We had quite a talk. When I came to leave one of
+the teachers said to me:
+
+"You don't know how good it seems to talk with some one from the outside
+world. We work here year in and year out without a white visitor, except
+those who have some necessary business with the institution."
+
+Explaining the attitude toward these Northern teachers (and we must
+understand just how the Southern people feel in this matter), a prominent
+clergyman said that a lady who made a social call upon a teacher in that
+institution would not feel secure against having to meet Negroes socially
+and that when the call was returned a similar embarrassing situation might
+be created.
+
+
+_Apologising for Helping Negroes_
+
+Just in this connection: I found a very remarkable and significant letter
+published in the Orangeburg, S. C., _News_, signed by a well-to-do white
+citizen who thus apologises for a kind act to a Negro school:
+
+     I had left my place of business here on a business trip a few miles
+     below, on returning I came by the above-mentioned school (the Prince
+     Institute, coloured), and was held up by the teacher and begged to
+     make a few remarks to the children. Very reluctantly I did so, not
+     thinking that publicity would be given to it or that I was doing
+     anything that would offend anyone. I wish to say here and now that I
+     am heartily sorry for what I did, and I hope after this humble
+     confession and expression of regret that all whom I have offended
+     will forgive me.
+
+The sentiment indicated by this letter, while widely prevalent, is by no
+means universal. I have seen Southern white men address Negro schools and
+Negro gatherings many times since I have been down here. Some of the
+foremost men in the South have accepted Booker T. Washington's invitations
+to speak at Tuskegee. And concerning the very letter that I reproduce
+above, the _Charlotte Observer_, a strong Southern newspaper, which copied
+it, said:
+
+     A man would better be dead than to thus abase himself. This man did
+     right to address the pupils of a coloured school, but has spoiled all
+     by apologising for it. Few people have conceived that race prejudice
+     went so far, even in South Carolina, as is here indicated. Logically
+     it is to be assumed that this jelly-fish was about to be put under
+     the ban, and to secure exemption from this, published this abject
+     card. To it was appended a certificate from certain citizens, saying
+     they 'are as anxious to see the coloured race elevated as any people,
+     but by all means let it be done inside the colour line.'... The
+     narrowness and malignity betrayed in this Orangeburg incident is
+     exceedingly unworthy, and those guilty of it should be ashamed of
+     themselves.
+
+The Rev. H. S. Bradley, for a long time one of the leading clergymen of
+Atlanta, now of St. Louis, said in a sermon published in the Atlanta
+_Constitution_:
+
+     ... We have not been wholly lacking in our effort to help. There are
+     a few schools and churches supported by Southern whites for the
+     Negroes. Here and there a man like George Williams Walker, of the
+     aristocracy of South Carolina, and a woman like Miss Belle H.
+     Bennett, of the blue blood of Kentucky, goes as teacher to the Negro
+     youth, and seeks in a Christly spirit of fraternity to bring them to
+     a higher plane of civil and moral manhood, but the number like them
+     can almost be counted on fingers of both hands.
+
+     Our Southern churches have spent probably a hundred times as much
+     money since the Civil War in an effort to evangelise the people of
+     China, Japan, India, South America, Africa, Mexico, and Cuba, as they
+     have spent to give the Gospel to the Negroes at our doors. It is
+     often true that opportunity is overlooked because it lies at our
+     feet.
+
+
+_Concerning the Vagrant Negro_
+
+Before I get away from observations of the low-class Negro, I must speak
+of the subject of vagrancy. Many white men have told me with impatience of
+the great number of idle or partly idle Negroes--idle while every industry
+and most of the farming districts of Georgia are crying for more labour.
+And from my observation in Atlanta, I should say that there were good many
+idle or partly idle Negroes--even after the riot, which served, I
+understand, to drive many of them away. Five days before the riot of last
+September, a committee of the city council visited some forty saloons one
+afternoon, and by actual count found 2,455 Negroes (and 152 white men)
+drinking at the bars or lounging around the doorways. In some of these
+saloons--conducted by white men and permitted to exist by the city
+authorities--pictures of nude white women were displayed as an added
+attraction. Has this anything to do with Negro crimes against white women?
+After the riot these conditions in Atlanta were much improved and in
+January, 1908, all the saloons were closed.
+
+Increased Negro idleness is the result, in large measure, of the
+marvellous and rapid changes in Southern conditions. The South has been
+and is to-day dependent on a single labour supply--the Negro. Now Negroes,
+though recruited by a high birth rate, have not been increasing in any
+degree as rapidly as the demand for labour incident to the development of
+every sort of industry, railroads, lumbering, mines, to say nothing of the
+increased farm area and the added requirements of growing cities. With
+this enormous increased demand for labour the Negro supply has,
+relatively, been decreasing. Many have gone North and West, many have
+bought farms of their own, thousands, by education, have became
+professional men, teachers, preachers, and even merchants and
+bankers--always draining away the best and most industrious men of the
+race and reducing by so much the available supply of common labour. In
+short, those Negroes who were capable have been going the same way as the
+unskilled Irishman and German in the North--upward through the door of
+education--but, unlike the North, there have been no other labourers
+coming in to take their places.
+
+What has been the result? Naturally a fierce contest between agriculture
+and industry for the limited and dwindling supply of the only labour they
+had.
+
+
+_Negro Monopoly on Labour_
+
+So they bid against one another--it was as though the Negro had a monopoly
+on labour--and within the last few years day wages for Negro workers have
+jumped from fifty or sixty cents to $1.25 and $1.50, often more--a pure
+matter of competition. A similar advance has affected all sorts of servant
+labour--cooks, waiters, maids, porters.
+
+High wages, scarcity of labour, and the consequent loss of opportunity for
+taking advantage of the prevailing prosperity would, in any community,
+South or North, whether the labour was white or black, produce a spirit of
+impatience and annoyance on the part of the employing class. I found it
+evident enough last summer in Kansas where the farmers were unable to get
+workers to save their crops; and the servant problem is not more
+provoking, certainly, in the South than in the North and West. Indeed, it
+is the labour problem more than any other one cause, that has held the
+South back and is holding it back to-day.
+
+But the South has an added cause of annoyance. Higher wages, instead of
+producing more and better labour, as they would naturally be expected to
+do, have actually served to reduce the supply. This may, at first, seem
+paradoxical: but it is easily explainable and it lies deep down beneath
+many of the perplexities which surround the race problem.
+
+Most Negroes, as I have said, were (and still are, of course)
+farm-dwellers, and farm-dwellers in the hitherto wasteful Southern way.
+Their living is easy to get and very simple. In that warm climate they
+need few clothes; a shack for a home. Their living standards are low; they
+have not learned to save; there has not been time since slavery for them
+to attain the sense of responsibility which would encourage them to get
+ahead. And moreover they have been and are to-day largely under the
+discipline of white land owners.
+
+What was the effect, then, of a rapid advance in wages? The poorer class
+of Negroes, naturally indolent and happy-go-lucky, found that they could
+make as much money in two or three days as they had formerly earned in a
+whole week. It was enough to live on as well as they had ever lived: why,
+then, work more than two days a week? It was the logic of a child, but it
+was the logic used. Everywhere I went in the South I heard the same story:
+high wages coupled with the difficulty of getting anything like continuous
+work from this class of coloured men.
+
+On the other hand the better and more industrious Negroes, who would work
+continuously--and there are unnumbered thousands of them, as faithful as
+any workers--occasionally saved their surplus, bought little farms or
+businesses of their own and began to live on a better scale. One of the
+first things they did after getting their footing was to take their wives
+and daughters out of the white man's kitchen, and to send their children
+from the cotton fields (where the white man needed them) to the
+school-house where the tendency (exactly as with white children) was to
+educate them away from farm employment. With the development of ambition
+and a higher standard of living, the Negro follows the steps of the rising
+Irishman or Italian: he has a better home, he wants his wife to take care
+of it, and he insists upon the education of his children.
+
+In this way higher wages have tended to cut down the already limited
+supply of labour, producing annoyance, placing greater obstacles in the
+way of that material development of which the Southerner is so justly
+proud. And this, not at all unnaturally, has given rise on the one hand to
+complaints against the lazy Negro who will work only two days in the week
+that he may loaf the other five; and on the other hand it has found
+expression in blind and bitter hostility to the education which enables
+the better sort of Negro to rise above the unskilled employment and the
+domestic service of which the South is so keenly in need. It is human
+nature to blame men, not conditions. Here is unlimited work to do: here is
+the Negro who has been for centuries and is to-day depended upon to do it;
+it is not done. The natural result is to throw the blame wholly upon the
+Negro, and not upon the deep economic conditions and tendencies which have
+actually caused the scarcity of labour.
+
+
+_Immigrants to Take the Negroes' Places_
+
+But within the last year or two thinking men in the South have begun to
+see this particular root of the difficulty and a great new movement
+looking to the encouragement of immigration from foreign countries has
+been started. In November, 1906, the first shipload of immigrants ever
+brought from Europe directly to a South Carolina port were landed at
+Charleston with great ceremony and rejoicing. If a steady stream of
+immigrants can be secured and if they can be employed on satisfactory
+terms with the Negro it will go far toward relieving race tension in the
+South.
+
+Of course idleness leads to crime, and one of the present efforts in the
+South is toward a more rigid enforcement of laws against vagrancy. In this
+the white people have the sympathy of the leading Negroes. I was struck
+with one passage in the discussion at the last Workers' Conference at
+Tuskegee. William E. Holmes, president of a coloured college at Macon,
+Georgia, was speaking. Some one interrupted him:
+
+"I would like to ask if you think the Negro is any more disposed to become
+a loafer or vagrant than any other people under the same conditions?"
+
+"Well," said Mr. Holmes, taking a deep breath, "we cannot afford to do
+what other races do. We haven't a single, solitary man or woman among us
+we can afford to support as an idler. It may be that other races have made
+so much progress that they can afford to support loafers. But we are not
+yet in that condition. Some of us have the impression that the world owes
+us a living. That is a misfortune. I must confess that I have become
+convinced that at the present time we furnish a larger number of loafers
+than any other race of people on this continent."
+
+These frank remarks did not meet with the entire approval of the members
+of the conference, but the discussion seemed to indicate that there was a
+great deal more of truth in them than the leaders and teachers of the
+Negro are disposed to admit.
+
+
+_The Worthless Negro_
+
+I tried to see as much as I could of this "worthless Negro," who is about
+the lowest stratum of humanity, it seems to me, of any in our American
+life. He is usually densely ignorant, often a wanderer, working to-day
+with a railroad gang, to-morrow on some city works, the next day picking
+cotton. He has lost his white friends--his "white folks," as he calls
+them--and he has not attained the training or self-direction to stand
+alone. He works only when he is hungry, and he is as much a criminal as he
+dares to be. Many such Negroes are supported by their wives or by women
+with whom they live--for morality and the home virtues among this class
+are unknown. A woman who works as a cook in a white family will often take
+enough from the kitchen to feed a worthless vagabond of a man and keep him
+in idleness--or worse. A Negro song exactly expresses this state of
+beatitude:
+
+  "I doan has to work so ha'd
+  I's got a gal in a white man's ya'd;
+  Ebery night 'bout half pas' eight
+  I goes 'round to the white man's gate:
+  She brings me butter and she brings me la'd--
+  I doan has to work so ha'd!"
+
+This worthless Negro, without training or education, grown up from the
+neglected children I have already spoken of, evident in his idleness
+around saloons and depots--this Negro provokes the just wrath of the
+people, and gives a bad name to the entire Negro race. In numbers he is,
+of course, small, compared with the 8,000,000 Negroes in the South, who
+perform the enormous bulk of hard manual labour upon which rests Southern
+prosperity.
+
+
+_How the Working Negro Lives_
+
+Above this low stratum of criminal or semi-criminal Negroes is a middle
+class, comprising the great body of the race--the workers. They are
+crowded into straggling settlements like Darktown and Jackson Row, a few
+owning their homes, but the majority renting precariously, earning good
+wages, harmless for the most part, but often falling into petty crime.
+Poverty here, however, lacks the tragic note that it strikes in the
+crowded sections of Northern cities. The temperament of the Negro is
+irrepressibly cheerful, he overflows from his small home and sings and
+laughs in his streets; no matter how ragged or forlorn he may be good
+humour sits upon his countenance, and his squalour is not unpicturesque. A
+banjo, a mullet supper from time to time, an exciting revival, give him
+real joys. Most of the families of this middle class, some of whom are
+deserted wives with children, have their "white folks" for whom they do
+washing, cooking, gardening, or other service, and all have church
+connections, so that they have a real place in the social fabric and a
+certain code of self-respect.
+
+I tried to see all I could of this phase of life. I visited many of the
+poorer Negro homes and I was often received in squalid rooms with a
+dignity of politeness which would have done credit to a society woman. For
+the Negro, naturally, is a sort of Frenchman. And if I can sum up the many
+visits I made in a single conclusion I should say, I think, that I was
+chiefly impressed by the tragic punishment meted out to ignorance and
+weakness by our complex society. I would find a home of one or two rooms
+meanly furnished, but having in one corner a glittering cottage organ, or
+on the mantel shelf a glorified gilt clock; crayon portraits,
+inexpressibly crude and ugly, but framed gorgeously, are not uncommon--the
+first uncertain, primitive (not unpitiful) reachings out after some of the
+graces of a broader life. Many of these things are bought from agents and
+the prices paid are extortionate. Often a Negro family will pay monthly
+for a year or so on some showy clock or chromo or music-box or decorated
+mirror--paying the value of it a dozen times over, only to have it seized
+when through sickness, or lack of foresight, they fail to meet a single
+note. Installment houses prey upon them, pawnbrokers suck their blood, and
+they are infinitely the victims of patent medicines. It is rare, indeed,
+that I entered a Negro cabin, even the poorest, without seeing one or more
+bottles of some abominable cure-all. The amount yearly expended by Negroes
+for patent medicines, which are glaringly advertised in all Southern
+newspapers, must be enormous--millions of dollars. I had an interesting
+side light on conditions one day while walking in one of the most
+fashionable residence districts of Atlanta. I saw a magnificent gray-stone
+residence standing somewhat back from the street. I said to my companion,
+who was a resident of the city:
+
+"That's a fine home."
+
+"Yes; stop a minute," he said, "I want to tell you about that. The
+anti-kink man lives there."
+
+"Anti-kink?" I asked in surprise.
+
+"Yes; the man who occupies that house is one of the wealthiest men here.
+He made his money by selling to Negroes a preparation to smooth the kinks
+out of their wool. They're simply crazy on that subject."
+
+"Does it work?"
+
+"You haven't seen any straight-haired Negroes, have you?" he asked.
+
+Ignorance carries a big burden and climbs a rocky road!
+
+
+_Old Mammies and Nurses_
+
+The mass of coloured people still maintain, as I have said, a more or less
+intimate connection with white families--frequently a very beautiful and
+sympathetic relationship like that of the old mammies or nurses. To one
+who has heard so much of racial hatred as I have since I have been down
+here, a little incident that I observed the other day comes with a charm
+hardly describable. I saw a carriage stop in front of a home. The expected
+daughter had arrived--a very pretty girl indeed. She stepped out eagerly.
+Her father was halfway down to the gate; but ahead of him was a very old
+Negro woman in the cleanest of clean starched dresses.
+
+"Honey," she said eagerly.
+
+"Mammy!" exclaimed the girl, and the two rushed into each other's arms,
+clasping and kissing--the white girl and the old black woman.
+
+I thought to myself: "There's no Negro problem there: that's just plain
+human love!"
+
+
+_"Master" Superseded by "Boss"_
+
+Often I have heard Negroes refer to "my white folks" and similarly the
+white man still speaks of "my Negroes." The old term of slavery, the use
+of the word "master," has wholly disappeared, and in its place has arisen,
+not without significance, the round term "Boss," or sometimes "Cap," or
+"Cap'n." To this the white man responds with the first name of the Negro,
+"Jim" or "Susie"--or if the Negro is old or especially respected: "Uncle
+Jim" or "Aunt Susan."
+
+To an unfamiliar Northerner one of the very interesting and somewhat
+amusing phases of conditions down here is the panic fear displayed over
+the use of the word "Mr." or "Mrs." No Negro is ever called Mr. or Mrs. by
+a white man; that would indicate social equality. A Southern white man
+told me with humour of his difficulties:
+
+"Now I admire Booker Washington. I regard him as a great man, and yet I
+couldn't call him Mr. Washington. We were all in a quandary until a
+doctor's degree was given him. That saved our lives! we all call him 'Dr.'
+Washington now."
+
+Sure enough! I don't think I have heard him called Mr. Washington since I
+came down here. It is always "Dr." or just "Booker." They are ready to
+call a Negro "Professor" or "Bishop" or "The Reverend"--but not "Mr."
+
+In the same way a Negro may call Miss Mary Smith by the familiar "Miss
+Mary," but if he called her Miss Smith she would be deeply incensed. The
+formal "Miss Smith" would imply social equality.
+
+I digress: but I have wanted to impress these relationships. There are all
+gradations of Negroes between the wholly dependent old family servant and
+the new, educated Negro professional or business man, and,
+correspondingly, every degree of treatment from indulgence to intense
+hostility.
+
+I must tell, in spite of lack of room, one beautiful story I heard at
+Atlanta, which so well illustrates the old relationship. There is in the
+family of Dr. J. S. Todd, a well-known citizen of Atlanta, an old, old
+servant called, affectionately, Uncle Billy. He has been so long in the
+family that in reality he is served as much as he serves. During the riot
+last September he was terrified: he did not dare to go home at night. So
+Miss Louise, the doctor's daughter, took Uncle Billy home through the dark
+streets. When she was returning one of her friends met her and was much
+alarmed that she should venture out in a time of so much danger.
+
+"What are you doing out here this time of night?" he asked.
+
+"Why," she replied, as if it were the most natural answer in the world, "I
+had to take Uncle Billy safely home."
+
+Over against this story I want to reproduce a report from a Kentucky
+newspaper which will show quite the other extreme:
+
+     _Tennessee Farmer Has Negro Bishop and His Wife Ejected from a
+     Sleeping Car_
+
+     Irvine McGraw, a Tennessee farmer, brought Kentucky's Jim Crow law
+     into prominent notice yesterday on an Illinois Central Pullman car.
+     When McGraw entered the car he saw the coloured divine, Rev. Dr. C.
+     H. Phillips, bishop of the coloured Methodist Episcopal Churches in
+     Tennessee, North Carolina, Texas and a portion of Arizona and New
+     Mexico, and his wife preparing to retire for the night. He demanded
+     that the conductor order them out of the car, but the conductor
+     refused.
+
+     After he entered Kentucky he hunted for an officer at every station
+     and finally at Hopkinsville Policeman Bryant Baker agreed to
+     undertake the task of ejecting the Negroes from the car. The train
+     was held nine minutes while they dressed and repaired to the coloured
+     compartment.
+
+I have now described two of the three great classes of Negroes: First, the
+worthless and idle Negro, often a criminal, comparatively small in numbers
+but perniciously evident. Second, the great middle class of Negroes who do
+the manual work of the South. Above these, a third class, few in numbers,
+but most influential in their race, are the progressive, property-owning
+Negroes, who have wholly severed their old intimate ties with the white
+people--and who have been getting further and further away from them.
+
+
+_A White Man's Problem_
+
+It keeps coming to me that this is more a white man's problem than it is a
+Negro problem. The white man as well as the black is being tried by fire.
+The white man is in full control of the South, politically, socially,
+industrially: the Negro, as ex-Governor Northen points out, is his
+helpless ward. What will he do with him? Speaking of the education of the
+Negro, and in direct reference to the conditions in Atlanta which I have
+already described, many men have said to me:
+
+"Think of the large sums that the South has spent and is spending on the
+education of the Negro. The Negro does not begin to pay for his education
+in taxes."
+
+Neither do the swarming Slavs, Italians, and Poles in our Northern cities.
+They pay little in taxes and yet enormous sums are expended in their
+improvement. For their benefit? Of course, but chiefly for ours. It is
+better to educate men in school than to let them so educate themselves as
+to become a menace to society. The present _kind_ of education in the
+South may possibly be wrong; but for the protection of society it is as
+necessary to train every Negro as it is every white man.
+
+When I saw the crowds of young Negroes being made criminal--through lack
+of proper training--I could not help thinking how pitilessly ignorance
+finally revenges itself upon that society which neglects or exploits it.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+IN THE BLACK BELT: THE NEGRO FARMER
+
+
+The cotton picking season was drawing to its close when I left for the
+black belt of Georgia. So many friends in Atlanta had said:
+
+"The city Negro isn't the real Negro. You must go out on the cotton
+plantations in the country; there you'll see the genuine black African in
+all his primitive glory."
+
+It is quite true that the typical Negro is a farmer. The great mass of the
+race in the South dwells in the country. According to the last census, out
+of 8,000,000 Negroes in the Southern states 6,558,173, or 83 per cent.,
+lived on the farms or in rural villages. The crowded city life which I
+have already described represents not the common condition of the masses
+of the Negro race but the newer development which accompanies the growth
+of industrial and urban life. In the city the races are forced more
+violently together, socially and economically, than in the country,
+producing acute crises, but it is in the old agricultural regions where
+the Negro is in such masses, where ideas change slowly, and old
+institutions persist, that the problem really presents the greatest
+difficulties.
+
+There is no better time of year to see the South than November; for then
+it wears the smile of abundance. The country I went through--rolling red
+hills, or black bottoms, pine-clad in places, with pleasant farm openings
+dotted with cabins, often dilapidated but picturesque, and the busy little
+towns--wore somehow an air of brisk comfort. The fields were lively with
+Negro cotton pickers; I saw bursting loads of the new lint drawn by mules
+or oxen, trailing along the country roads; all the gins were puffing
+busily; at each station platform cotton bales by scores or hundreds stood
+ready for shipment and the towns were cheerful with farmers white and
+black, who now had money to spend. The heat of the summer had gone, the
+air bore the tang of a brisk autumn coolness. It was a good time of the
+year--and everybody seemed to feel it. Many Negroes got on or off at every
+station with laughter and snouted good-byes.
+
+
+_What Is the Black Belt?_
+
+[Illustration: THE BLACK BELT
+
+In the region shaded more than half of the inhabitants are Negroes.]
+
+And so, just at evening, after a really interesting journey, I reached
+Hawkinsville, a thriving town of some 3,000 people just south of the
+centre of Georgia. Pulaski County, of which Hawkinsville is the seat, with
+an ambitious new court-house, is a typical county of the black belt. A
+census map which is here reproduced well shows the region of largest
+proportionate Negro population, extending from South Carolina through
+central Georgia and Alabama to Mississippi. More than half the inhabitants
+of all this broad belt, including also the Atlantic coastal counties and
+the lower Mississippi Valley (as shaded on the map), are Negroes, chiefly
+farm Negroes. There the race question, though perhaps not so immediately
+difficult as in cities like Atlanta, is with both white and coloured
+people the imminent problem of daily existence. Several times while in
+the black belt I was amused at the ardent response of people to whom I
+mentioned the fact that I had already seen something of conditions in
+Kentucky, Maryland, and Virginia:
+
+"Why, they haven't any Negro problem. They're _North_."
+
+In Maryland, Kentucky, and Texas the problem is a sharp irritant--as it
+is, for that matter, in Ohio, in Indianapolis, and on the west side of New
+York City--but it is not the life and death question that it is in the
+black belt or in the Yazoo delta.
+
+All the country of Central Georgia has been long settled. Pulaski County
+was laid out in 1808; and yet the population to-day may be considered
+sparse. The entire county has only 8,000 white people, a large proportion
+of whom live in the towns of Hawkinsville and Cochran, and 12,000 Negroes,
+leaving not inconsiderable areas of forest and uncultivated land which
+will some day become immensely valuable.
+
+
+_A Southern Country Gentleman_
+
+At Hawkinsville I met J. Pope Brown, the leading citizen of the county. In
+many ways he is an example of the best type of the new Southerner. In
+every way open to him, and with energy, he is devoting himself to the
+improvement of his community. For five years he was president of the State
+Agricultural Society; he has been a member of the legislature and chairman
+of the Georgia Railroad Commission, and he represents all that is best in
+the new progressive movement in the South.
+
+One of the unpleasant features of the villages in the South are the poor
+hotels. In accounting for this condition I heard a story illustrating the
+attitude of the old South toward public accommodations. A number of years
+ago, before the death of Robert Toombs, who, as a member of Jefferson
+Davis's cabinet was called the "backbone of the confederacy," the spirit
+of progress reached the town where Toombs lived. The thing most needed was
+a new hotel. The business men got together and subscribed money with
+enthusiasm, counting upon Toombs, who was their richest man, for the
+largest subscription. But when they finally went to him, he said:
+
+"What do we want of a hotel? When a gentleman comes to town I will
+entertain him myself; those who are not gentlemen we don't want!"
+
+That was the old spirit of aristocratic individualism; the town did not
+get its hotel.
+
+One of the public enterprises of Mr. Brown at Hawkinsville is a good
+hotel; and what is rarer still, North and South, he has made his hotel
+building really worthy architecturally.
+
+Mr. Brown took me out to his plantation--a drive of some eight miles. In
+common with most of the larger plantation owners, as I found not only in
+Georgia, but in other Southern states which I afterward visited, Mr. Brown
+makes his home in the city. After a while I came to feel a reasonable
+confidence in assuming that almost any prominent merchant, banker, lawyer,
+or politician whom I met in the towns owned a plantation in the country.
+From a great many stories of the fortunes of families that I heard I
+concluded that the movement of white owners from the land to nearby towns
+was increasing every year. High prices for cotton and consequent
+prosperity seem to have accelerated rather than retarded the movement.
+White planters can now afford to live in town where they can have the
+comforts and conveniences, where the servant question is not impossibly
+difficult, and where there are good schools for the children. Another
+potent reason for the movement is the growing fear of the whites, and
+especially the women and children, at living alone on great farms where
+white neighbours are distant. Statistics show that less crime is committed
+in the black belt than in other parts of the South. I found that the fear
+was not absent even among these people.
+
+I have a letter from a white man, P. S. George, of Greenwood, Mississippi,
+which expresses the country white point of view with singular earnestness:
+
+     I live in a country of large plantations; if there are 40,000 people
+     in that country, at least 30,000 are Negroes, and we never have any
+     friction between the races. I have been here as a man for twenty
+     years and I never heard of but one case of attempted assault by a
+     Negro on a white woman. That Negro was taken out and hanged. I said
+     that we never had any trouble with Negroes, but it's because we never
+     take our eyes off the gun. You may wager that I never leave my wife
+     and daughter at home without a man in the house after ten o'clock at
+     night--because I am afraid.
+
+As a result of these various influences a traveller in the black belt sees
+many plantation houses, even those built in recent years, standing vacant
+and forlorn or else occupied by white overseers, who are in many parts of
+the South almost as difficult to keep as the Negro tenants.
+
+Thousands of small white farmers, both owners and renters, of course,
+remain, but when the leading planters leave the country, these men, too,
+grow discontented and get away at the first opportunity. Going to town,
+they find ready employment for the whole family in the cotton mill or in
+other industries where they make more money and live with a degree of
+comfort that they never before imagined possible.
+
+
+_Story of the Mill People_
+
+Many cotton mills, indeed, employ agents whose business it is to go out
+through the country urging the white farmers to come to town and painting
+glowing pictures of the possibilities of life there. I have visited a
+number of mill neighbourhoods and talked with the operatives. I found the
+older men sometimes homesick for free life of the farm. One lanky old
+fellow said rather pathetically:
+
+"When it comes to cotton picking time and I know that they are grinding
+cane and hunting possums, I jest naturally get lonesome for the country."
+
+But nothing would persuade the women and children to go back to the old
+hard life. Hawkinsville has a small cotton mill and just such a community
+of white workers around it. Owing to the scarcity of labour, wages in the
+mills have been going up rapidly all over the South, during the last two
+or three years, furnishing a still more potent attraction for country
+people.
+
+All these various tendencies are uniting to produce some very remarkable
+conditions in the South. A natural segregation of the races is apparently
+taking place. I saw it everywhere I went in the black belt. The white
+people were gravitating toward the towns or into white neighbourhoods and
+leaving the land, even though still owned by white men, more and more to
+the exclusive occupation of Negroes. Many black counties are growing
+blacker while not a few white counties are growing whiter.
+
+
+[Illustration: WHERE WHITE MILL HANDS LIVE IN ATLANTA, GEORGIA]
+
+[Illustration: WHERE SOME OF THE POORER NEGROES LIVE IN ATLANTA, GEORGIA
+
+COMPANION PICTURES
+
+to show that there is comparatively little difference in the material
+comfort of the two classes]
+
+
+Take, for example, Pulaski County, through which I drove that November
+morning with Mr. Brown. In 1870 the coloured and white population were
+almost exactly equal--about 6,000 for each. In 1880 the Negroes had
+increased to 8,225 while the whites showed a loss. By 1890 the towns had
+begun to improve and the white population grew by about 700, but the
+Negroes increased nearly 2,000. And, finally, here are the figures for
+1900: Negroes 11,029; Whites 7,460.
+
+I have not wished to darken our observations with too many statistics, but
+this tendency is so remarkable that I wish to set down for comparison the
+figures of a "white county" in northern Georgia--Polk County--which is
+growing whiter every year.
+
+         Negroes    Whites
+
+  1880    4,147      7,805
+  1890    4,654     10,289
+  1900    4,916     12,940
+
+
+_Driving out Negroes_
+
+One of the most active causes of this movement is downright fear--or race
+repulsion expressing itself in fear. White people dislike and fear to live
+in dense coloured neighbourhoods, while Negroes are often terrorised in
+white neighbourhoods--and not in the South only but in parts of Ohio,
+Indiana, Illinois, as I shall show when I come to treat of Northern race
+conditions. I have accumulated many instances showing how Negroes are
+expelled from white neighbourhoods. There is a significant report from
+Little Rock, Arkansas:
+
+     (_Special to the Georgian._)
+
+     Little Rock, Ark., Jan. 1.--Practically every Negro in Evening Shade,
+     Sharp County, in this state, has left town as the result of threats
+     which have been made against the Negroes. For several years a small
+     colony of Negroes has lived just on the outskirts of the town. A
+     short time ago notices were posted warning the Negroes to leave the
+     town at once. About the same time Joe Brooks, a Negro who lived with
+     his family two miles north of town, was called to his door and fired
+     upon by unknown persons. A load of shot struck the house close by his
+     side and some of the shot entered his arm. Brooks and his family have
+     left the country, and practically every member of the Negro colony
+     has gone. They have abandoned their property or disposed of it for
+     whatever they could get.
+
+From the New Orleans _Times Democrat_ of March 20, 1907, I cut the
+following dispatch showing one method pursued by the whites of Oklahoma:
+
+     BLACKS ORDERED OUT
+
+     Lawton, Okla., March 20.--"Negroes, beware the cappers. We, the Sixty
+     Sons of Waurika, demand the Negroes to leave here at once. We mean
+     Go! Leave in twenty-four hours, or after that your life is
+     uncertain." These were the words on placards which the eighty Negroes
+     of the town of Waurika, forty miles south of Lawton, saw posted
+     conspicuously in a number of public places this morning.
+
+     Dispatches from here to-night stated that the whites are in earnest,
+     and that the Negroes will be killed if they do not leave town.
+
+Not a few students of Southern conditions like John Temple Graves among
+the whites and Bishop Turner among the coloured people have argued that
+actual physical separation of the races (either by deportation of the
+Negroes to Africa or elsewhere, or by giving them certain reservation-like
+parts of the South to live in) is the only solution. But here is, in
+actuality, a natural segregation going forward in certain parts of the
+South, though in a very different way from that recommended by Mr. Graves
+and Bishop Turner; for even in the blackest counties the white people own
+most of the land, occupy the towns, and dominate everywhere politically,
+socially, and industrially.
+
+Mr. Brown's plantation contains about 5,000 acres, of which some 3,500
+acres are in cultivation, a beautiful rolling country, well watered, with
+here and there clumps of pines, and dotted with the small homes of the
+tenantry.
+
+As we drove along the country road we met or passed many Negroes who bowed
+with the greatest deference. Some were walking, but many drove horses or
+mules and rode not infrequently in top buggies, looking most prosperous,
+as indeed, Mr. Brown informed me that they were. He knew them all, and
+sometimes stopped to ask them how they were getting along. The outward
+relationships between the races in the country seem to me to be smoother
+than it is in the city.
+
+Cotton, as in all this country, is almost the exclusive crop. In spite of
+the constant preaching of agricultural reformers, like Mr. Brown himself,
+hardly enough corn is raised to supply the people with food, and I was
+surprised here and elsewhere at seeing so few cattle and hogs. Sheep are
+non-existent. In Hawkinsville, though the country round about raises
+excellent grass, I saw in front of a supply store bales of hay which had
+been shipped in 400 miles--from Tennessee. Enough sugar cane is raised,
+mostly in small patches, to supply syrup for domestic uses. At the time of
+my visit the Negroes were in the cane-fields with their long knives,
+getting in the crop. We saw several little one-horse grinding mills
+pressing the juice from the cane, while near at hand, sheltered by a
+shanty-like roof, was the great simmering syrup kettle, with an expert
+Negro at work stirring and skimming. And always there were Negroes round
+about, all the boys and girls with jolly smeared faces--and the older ones
+peeling and sucking the fresh cane.
+
+It was a great time of year!
+
+How does the landlord--and a lord he is in a very true sense--manage his
+great estate? The same system is in use with slight variations everywhere
+in the cotton country and a description of Mr. Brown's methods, with
+references here and there to what I have seen or heard elsewhere, will
+give an excellent idea of the common procedure.
+
+
+_A Country of Great Plantations_
+
+The black belt is a country of great plantations, some owners having as
+high as 30,000 acres, interspersed with smaller farms owned by the poorer
+white families or Negroes. In one way the conditions are similar to those
+prevailing in Ireland; great landlords and a poor tenantry or peasantry,
+the tenants here being very largely black.
+
+It requires about 100 families, or 600 people, to operate Mr. Brown's
+plantation. Of these, 90 per cent. are coloured and 10 per cent. white. I
+was much interested in what Mr. Brown said about his Negro tenants, which
+varies somewhat from the impression I had in the city of the younger Negro
+generation.
+
+"I would much rather have young Negroes for tenants," he said, "because
+they work better and seem more disposed to take care of their farms. The
+old Negroes ordinarily will shirk--a habit of slavery."
+
+Besides the residence of the overseer and the homes of the tenants there
+is on the plantation a supply store owned by Mr. Brown, a blacksmith shop
+and a Negro church, which is also used as a school-house. This is, I found
+all through the black belt, a common equipment.
+
+Three different methods are pursued by the landlord in getting his land
+cultivated. First, the better class of tenants rent the land for cash, a
+"standing rent" of some $3 an acre, though in many places in Mississippi
+it ranges as high as $6 and $8 an acre. Second, a share-crop rental, in
+which the landlord and the tenant divide the cotton and corn produced.
+Third, the ordinary wage system; that is, the landlord hires workers at so
+much a month and puts in his own crop. All three of these methods are
+usually employed on the larger plantations. Mr. Brown rents 2,500 acres
+for cash, 400 on shares, and farms 600 himself with wage workers.
+
+All the methods of land measurement are very different here from what they
+are in the North. The plantation is irregularly divided up into what are
+called one-mule or one-plough farms--just that amount of land which a
+family can cultivate with one mule--usually about thirty acres. Some
+ambitious tenants will take a two-mule or even a four-mule farm.
+
+
+_The Negro Tenant_
+
+Most of the tenants, especially the Negroes, are very poor, and wholly
+dependent upon the landlord. Many Negro families possess practically
+nothing of their own, save their ragged clothing, and a few dollars' worth
+of household furniture, cooking utensils and a gun. The landlord must
+therefore supply them not only with enough to live on while they are
+making their crop, but with the entire farming outfit. Let us say that a
+Negro comes in November to rent a one-mule farm from the landlord for the
+coming year.
+
+"What have you got?" asks the landlord.
+
+"Noting', boss," he is quite likely to say.
+
+The "boss" furnishes him with a cabin to live in--which goes with the land
+rented--a mule, a plough, possibly a one-horse waggon and a few tools.
+He is often given a few dollars in cash near Christmas time which
+(ordinarily) he immediately spends--wastes. He is then allowed to draw
+upon the plantation supply store a regular amount of corn to feed his
+mule, and meat, bread, and tobacco, and some clothing for his family. The
+cost of the entire outfit and supplies for a year is in the neighbourhood
+of $300, upon which the tenant pays interest at from 10 to 30 per cent.
+from the time of signing the contract in November, although most of the
+supplies are not taken out until the next summer. Besides this interest
+the planter also makes a large profit on all the groceries and other
+necessaries furnished by his supply store. Having made his contract the
+Negro goes to work with his whole family and keeps at it until the next
+fall when the cotton is all picked and ginned. Then he comes in for his
+"settlement"--a great time of year. The settlements were going forward
+while I was in the black belt. The Negro is credited with the amount of
+cotton he brings in and he is charged with all the supplies he has had,
+and interest, together with the rent of his thirty acres of land. If the
+season has been good and he has been industrious, he will often have a
+nice profit in cash, but sometimes he not only does not come out even, but
+closes his year of work actually in deeper debt to the landlord.
+
+
+[Illustration: A "POOR WHITE" FAMILY
+
+"Among them is a spirit of pride and independence which, rightly directed,
+would uplift and make them prosperous, but which, misguided and blind, as
+it sometimes is, keeps them in poverty."]
+
+[Illustration: A MODEL NEGRO SCHOOL
+
+Inspired by Tuskegee; different, indeed, from the ordinary country Negro
+school in the South]
+
+
+Some Negroes, nowadays usually of the poorer sort, work for wages. They
+get from $12 to $15 a month (against $5 to $8 a few years ago) with a
+cabin to live in. They are allowed a garden patch, where they can, if they
+are industrious and their families help, raise enough vegetables to feed
+them comfortably, or part of a bale of cotton, which is their own. But it
+is sadly to be commented upon that few Negro tenants, or whites either, as
+far as I could see, do anything with their gardens save perhaps to raise a
+few collards, peanuts, and peppers--and possibly a few sweet potatoes.
+This is due in part to indolence and lack of ambition, and in part to the
+steady work required by the planter. The wife and children of an
+industrious wage-working Negro nearly always help in the fields, earning
+an additional income from chopping cotton in spring and picking the lint
+in the fall.
+
+This is the system as it is in theory; but the interest for us lies not in
+the plan, but in the actual practice. How does it all work out for good
+or for evil, for landlord and for tenant?
+
+Tenantry in the South is a very different thing from what it is in the
+North. In the North, a man who rents a farm is nearly as free to do as he
+pleases as if he were the owner. But in the South, the present tenant
+system is much nearer the condition that prevailed in slavery times than
+it is to the present Northern tenant system. This grows naturally out of
+slavery; the white man had learned to operate big plantations with
+ignorant help; and the Negro on his part had no training for any other
+system. The white man was the natural master and the Negro the natural
+dependent and a mere Emancipation Proclamation did not at once change the
+_spirit_ of the relationship.
+
+To-day a white overseer resides on every large plantation and he or the
+owner himself looks after and disciplines the tenants. The tenant is in
+debt to him (in some cases reaching a veritable condition of debt slavery
+or peonage) and he _must_ see that the crop is made. Hence he watches the
+work of every Negro (and indeed that of the white tenants as well) sees
+that the land is properly fertilised, and that the dikes (to prevent
+washing) are kept up, that the cotton is properly chopped (thinned) and
+regularly cultivated. Some of the greater landowners employ assistant
+overseers or "riders" who are constantly travelling from farm to farm. On
+one plantation I saw four such riders start out one day, each with a rifle
+on his saddle. And on a South Carolina plantation I had a glimpse of one
+method of discipline. A planter was telling me of his difficulties--how a
+spirit of unruliness sometimes swept abroad through a plantation, inspired
+by some "bigoty nigger."
+
+"Do you know what I do with such cases?" he said. "Come with me, I'll show
+you."
+
+He took me back through his house to the broad porch and reaching up to a
+shelf over the door he took down a hickory waggon spoke, as long as my
+arm.
+
+"When there's trouble," he said, "I just go down with that and lay one or
+two of 'em out. That ends the trouble. We've got to do it; they're like
+children and once in a while they simply have to be punished. It's far
+better for them to take it this way, from a white man who is their
+friend, than to be arrested and taken to court and sent to the
+chain-gang."
+
+
+_Troubles of the Landlord_
+
+Planters told me of all sorts of difficulties they had to meet with their
+tenants. One of them, after he had spent a whole evening telling me of the
+troubles which confronted any man who tried to work Negroes, summed it all
+up with the remark:
+
+"You've just got to make up your mind that you are dealing with children,
+and handle them as firmly and kindly as you know how."
+
+He told me how hard it was to get a Negro tenant even in the busy season
+to work a full week--and it was often only by withholding the weekly food
+allowance that it could be done. Saturday afternoon (or "evening," as they
+say in the South) the Negro goes to town or visits his friends. Often he
+spends all day Sunday driving about the country and his mule comes back so
+worn out that it cannot be used on Monday. There are often furious
+religious revivals which break into the work, to say nothing of "frolics"
+and fish suppers at which the Negroes often remain all night long. Many of
+them are careless with their tools, wasteful of supplies, irresponsible in
+their promises. One planter told me how he had built neat fences around
+the homes of his Negroes, and fixed up their houses to encourage them in
+thrift and give them more comfort, only to have the fences and even parts
+of the houses used for firewood.
+
+Toward fall, if the season has been bad, and the crop of cotton is short,
+so short that a Negro knows that he will not be able to "pay out" and have
+anything left for himself, he will sometimes desert the plantation
+entirely, leaving the cotton unpicked and a large debt to the landlord. If
+he attempts that, however, he must get entirely away, else the planter
+will chase him down and bring him back to his work. Illiterate, without
+discipline or training, with little ambition and much indolence, a large
+proportion of Negro tenants are looked after and driven like children or
+slaves. I say "a large proportion"--but there are thousands of industrious
+Negro landowners and tenants who are rapidly getting ahead--as I shall
+show in my next chapter.
+
+In this connection it is a noteworthy fact that a considerable number of
+the white tenants require almost as much attention as the Negroes, though
+they are, of course, treated in an entirely different way. One planter in
+Alabama said to me:
+
+"Give me Negroes every time. I wouldn't have a low-down white tenant on my
+place. You can get work out of any Negro if you know how to handle him;
+but there are some white men who won't work and can't be driven, because
+they are white."
+
+
+_Race Troubles in the Country_
+
+In short, when slavery was abolished it gave place to a sort of feudal
+tenantry system which continues widely to-day. And it has worked with
+comparative satisfaction, at least to the landlords, until within the last
+few years, when the next step in the usual evolution of human
+society--industrial and urban development--began seriously to disturb the
+feudal equilibrium of the cotton country. It was a curious idea--human
+enough--that men should attempt to legislate slaves immediately into
+freedom. But nature takes her own methods of freeing slaves; they are
+slower than men's ways, but more certain.
+
+The change now going on in the South from the feudal agricultural life to
+sharpened modern conditions has brought difficulties for the planter
+compared with which all others pale into insignificance. I mean the
+scarcity of labour. Industry is competing with agriculture for the limited
+supply of Negro workers. Negroes, responding to exactly the same natural
+laws that control the white farmers, have been moving cityward, entering
+other occupations, migrating west or north--where more money is to be
+made. Agricultural wages have therefore gone up and rents, relatively,
+have gone down, and had the South not been blessed for several years with
+wonderful returns from its monopoly crop, there might have been a more
+serious crisis.
+
+
+_Cry of the South: "More Labour"_
+
+If the South to-day could articulate its chief need, we should hear a
+single great shout:
+
+"More labour!"
+
+Out of this struggle for tenants, servants, and workers has grown the
+chief complications of the Negro problem--and I am not forgetting race
+prejudice, or the crimes against women. Indeed, it has seemed to me that
+the chief difficulty in understanding the Negro problem lies in showing
+how much of the complication in the South is due to economic readjustments
+and how much to instinctive race repulsion or race prejudice.
+
+
+_A Tenant Stealer_
+
+In one town I visited--not Hawkinsville--I was standing talking with some
+gentlemen in the street when I saw a man drive by in a buggy.
+
+"Do you see that man?" they asked me. I nodded.
+
+"Well, he is the greatest tenant-stealer in this country."
+
+I heard a good deal about these "tenant stealers." A whole neighbourhood
+will execrate one planter who, to keep his land cultivated, will lure away
+his neighbours' Negroes. Sometimes he will offer more wages, sometimes he
+will give the tenants better houses to live in, and sometimes he succeeds
+by that sheer force of a masterful personality which easily controls an
+ignorant tenantry.
+
+I found, moreover, that there was not only a struggle between individual
+planters for Negro tenants, but between states and sections. Many of the
+old farms in South Carolina and Alabama have been used so long that they
+require a steady and heavy annual treatment of fertiliser, with the result
+that cotton growing costs more than it does in the rich alluvial lands of
+Mississippi, or the newer regions of Arkansas and Texas. The result is
+that the planters of the West, being able to pay more wages and give the
+tenants better terms, lure away the Negroes of the East. Georgia and other
+states have met this competitive disadvantage in the usual way in which
+such disadvantages, when first felt but not fully understood, are met, by
+counteracting legislation. Georgia has made the most stringent laws to
+keep her Negroes on the land. The Georgian code (Section 601) says:
+
+     Any person who shall solicit or procure emigrants, or shall attempt
+     to do so, without first procuring a licence as required by law, shall
+     be guilty of a misdemeanour.
+
+Ex-Congressman William H. Fleming, one of the ablest statesmen of Georgia,
+said:
+
+"Land and other forms of capital cannot spare the Negro and will not give
+him up until a substitute is found. His labour is worth millions upon
+millions. In Georgia we now make it a crime for anyone to solicit
+emigrants without taking out a licence, and then we make the licence as
+nearly prohibitive as possible. One of the most dangerous occupations for
+any one to follow in this state would be that of an emigrant agent--as
+some have found by experience."
+
+In this connection I have an account published in April, 1907, in an
+Augusta newspaper of just such a case:
+
+     The heaviest fine given in the city court of Richmond County within
+     the last two years was imposed upon E. F. Arnett yesterday morning.
+     He was sentenced to pay a fine of one thousand dollars or serve six
+     months in the county jail.
+
+     Arnett was convicted of violating the state emigration laws regarding
+     the carrying of labour out of the state. He was alleged to have
+     employed thirteen Negroes to work on the Georgia and Atlantic
+     Railroad, which operates in this state and Alabama. The jury on the
+     case returned a verdict of guilty when court convened yesterday,
+     although it had been reported that a mistrial was probable.
+
+
+_"Peg Leg" Williams_
+
+A famous railroad emigration agent called "Peg Leg" Williams, who promoted
+Negro emigration from Georgia to Mississippi and Texas a few years ago,
+was repeatedly prosecuted and finally driven out of business. In a letter
+which he wrote some time ago to the Atlanta _Constitution_ he said:
+
+     I know of several counties not a hundred miles from Atlanta where
+     it's more than a man's life is worth to go in to get Negroes to move
+     to some other state. There are farmers that would not hesitate to
+     shoot their brother were he to come from Mississippi to get "his
+     niggers," as he calls them, even though he had no contract with them.
+     I know personally numbers of Negro men who have moved West and after
+     accumulating a little, return to get a brother, sister, or an old
+     father or mother, and they were compelled to return without them,
+     their lives being imperilled; they had to leave and leave quick.
+
+In view of such a feeling it may be imagined how futile is the talk of the
+deportation of the Negro race. What the Southern planter wants to-day is
+not fewer Negroes but more Negroes--Negroes who will "keep their place."
+
+
+_Laws to Make the Negro Work_
+
+Many other laws have been passed in the Southern states which are designed
+to keep the Negro on the land, and having him there, to make him work.
+The contract law, the abuses of which lead to peonage and debt slavery, is
+an excellent example--which I shall discuss more fully in the next
+chapter. The criminal laws, the chain-gang system, and the hiring of Negro
+convicts to private individuals are all, in one way or another, devices to
+keep the Negro at work on farms, in brick-yards and in mines. The vagrancy
+laws, not unlike those of the North and excellent in their purpose, are
+here sometimes executed with great severity. In Alabama the last
+legislature passed a law under which a Negro arrested for vagrancy must
+prove that he is not a vagrant. In short, the old rule of law that a man
+is innocent until proved guilty is here reversed for the Negro so that the
+burden of proving that he is not guilty of vagrancy rests upon him, not
+upon the state. The last Alabama legislature also passed a stringent game
+law, one argument in its favour being that by preventing the Negro from
+pot-hunting it would force him to work more steadily in the cotton fields.
+
+
+_Race Hatred Versus Economic Necessity_
+
+One of the most significant things I saw in the South--and I saw it
+everywhere--was the way in which the white people were torn between their
+feeling of race prejudice and their downright economic needs. Hating and
+fearing the Negro as a race (though often loving individual Negroes), they
+yet want him to work for them; they can't get along without him. In one
+impulse a community will rise to mob Negroes or to drive them out of the
+country because of Negro crime or Negro vagrancy, or because the Negro is
+becoming educated, acquiring property and "getting out of his place"; and
+in the next impulse laws are passed or other remarkable measures taken to
+keep him at work--because the South can't get along without him. From the
+Atlanta _Georgian_ I cut recently a letter which well illustrates the way
+in which racial hatred clashes with economic necessity.
+
+     TROUBLES OF COUNTRY FOLK
+
+     But aren't there two sides to every question? Here we are out here in
+     the country, right in the midst of hundreds of Negroes, and do you
+     know, sir, that all this talk about lynching and ku-kluxing is
+     frightening the farm hands to such an extent we begin to fear that
+     soon the farmers will sustain a great loss of labour, by their
+     running away? Already it is beginning to have its effect. After night
+     the Negroes are afraid to leave their farm to go anywhere on errands
+     of business. Why, sir, two miles from this town, the Negroes are
+     afraid to come here to trade at night. The country merchants are
+     feeling the force of it very sorely, and if this foolishness isn't
+     stopped their losses in fall trade will be very heavy.
+
+     Even some of the ladies of our community are complaining of this
+     rashness. That it is demoralising the labour in the home department.
+     So in conclusion, in behalf of my community and other country
+     communities, I feel it my duty to raise a warning voice against all
+     such new foolish ku-kluxism.
+
+     Mableton, Ga.
+
+          T. J. LOWE.
+
+While I was in Georgia a case came up which threw a flood of light upon
+the inner complexities of this problem. In the county of Habersham in
+North Georgia the population is largely of the type known as "poor
+white"--the famous mountain folk who were never slave-owners and many of
+whom fought in the Union army during the Civil War. Habersham is one of
+the "white counties" which is growing whiter. It has about 2,000 Negroes
+and 12,000 whites--many of the latter having come in from the North to
+grow peaches and raise sheep. One of the Negroes of Habersham County was
+Frank Grant, described by a white neighbour as "a Negro of good character,
+a property owner, setting an example of thrift and honesty that ought to
+have made his example a benefit to any community."
+
+Grant had saved money from his labour and bought a home. He was such a
+good worker that people were willing sometimes to pay him twice the wages
+of the average labourer, white or black. On the night of December 16,
+1906, the Negro's house was fired into by a party of white men who then
+went to the house of his tenant, Henry Scism, also a Negro, and shot
+promiscuously around Scism's house, and warned him to leave the country in
+one week, threatening him with severe penalties if he did not go. As a
+result Grant had to sell out his little home, won after such hard work,
+and he and his tenant Scism with their families both fled the county.
+
+"In Grant," said his white neighbour, "the county lost a capable
+labourer--in its present situation, a most valuable asset--and a good
+citizen."
+
+Here, then, we have race hatred versus economic necessity. The important
+citizens and employers of Habersham County came to Atlanta and presented
+a petition to Governor Terrell, January 18, 1907, as follows:
+
+     TO HIS EXCELLENCY, J. M. TERRELL,
+     GOVERNOR OF GEORGIA, ATLANTA:
+
+     Whereas, on the night of December 16, 1906, parties unknown came to
+     the quiet home of one Frank Grant, coloured, a citizen of this
+     county, and shot into his residence, and then went to the home of
+     Henry Scism, coloured, a tenant of said Frank Grant, and shot
+     promiscuously around his (the said Scism's) house, and demanded of
+     him to leave the county under severe penalty.
+
+     This has caused the tenant, Henry Scism, to leave, and Frank Grant to
+     sell his little house at a sacrifice and leave. It comes to us that
+     Frank Grant is a quiet, innocent, hard-working citizen. Therefore,
+     we, the undersigned officers and citizens of Habersham County,
+     Georgia, pray you to offer a liberal reward for the arrest and
+     conviction or these unknown parties--say $100 for the first and $50
+     for each succeeding one.
+
+          (Signed) C. W. GRANT,
+              _County School Commissioner_.
+                  J. A. ERWIN CLERK, S. C.,
+                  M. FRANKLIN, Ordinary
+                  J. D. HILL, T. C. H. C.
+
+But, of course, nothing could be done that would keep the Negroes on the
+land under such conditions.
+
+
+_Why Negroes Are Driven Out_
+
+What does it all mean? Listen to the explanation given by a prominent
+white man of Habersham County--not to me--but to the Atlanta _Georgian_,
+where it was published:
+
+"It is not a problem of Negro labour, because there is little of that kind
+there. The white labour will not work for the fruit growers at prices they
+can afford, even when it is a good fruit year. Often they decline to work
+at any price. They have many admirable qualities; among them is a spirit
+of pride and independence, which, rightly directed, would uplift and make
+them prosperous, but which misguided and blind, as it sometimes is, keeps
+them in poverty and puts the region in which they live at great
+disadvantage.
+
+"Landowners and employers, native, and new, are indignant but helpless.
+They are in the power of the shiftless element of the whites, who say, 'I
+will work or not, as I please, and when I please, and at my own price; and
+I will not have Negroes taking my work away from me.' This is not a race
+question, pure and simple; it is an industrial question, a labour issue,
+not confined to one part of the country."
+
+Here, it will be observed, the same complaint is made against the "poor
+white" as against the Negro--that he is shiftless and that he won't work
+even for high wages.
+
+Generally speaking, the race hatred in the South comes chiefly from the
+poorer class of whites who either own land which they work themselves or
+are tenant farmers in competition with Negroes and from politicians who
+seek to win the votes of this class of white men. The larger landowners
+and employers of labour, while they do not love the Negro, want him to
+work and work steadily, and will do almost anything to keep him on the
+land--so long as he is a faithful, obedient, unambitious worker. When he
+becomes prosperous, or educated, or owns land, many white people no longer
+"have any use for him" and turn upon him with hostility, but the best type
+of the Southern white men is not only glad to see the Negro become a
+prosperous and independent farmer but will do much to help him.
+
+
+_Vivid Illustration of Race Feeling_
+
+I have had innumerable illustrations of the extremes to which race feeling
+reaches among a certain class of Southerners. In a letter to the Atlanta
+_Constitution_, November 5, 1906, a writer who signs himself Mark Johnson,
+says:
+
+     The only use we have for the Negro is as a labourer. It is only as
+     such that we need him; it is only as such that we can use him. If the
+     North wants to take him and educate him we will bid him godspeed and
+     contribute to his education if schools are located on the other side
+     of the line.
+
+And here are extracts from a remarkable letter from a Southern white
+working man signing himself Forrest Pope and published in the Atlanta
+_Georgian_, October 22, 1906:
+
+     When the skilled negro appears and begins to elbow the white man in
+     the struggle for existence, don't you know the white man rebels and
+     won't have it so? If you don't it won't take you long to find it out;
+     just go out and ask a few of them, those who tell you the whole
+     truth, and see what you will find out about it.
+
+
+_What Is the Negro's Place?_
+
+     All the genuine Southern people like the Negro as a servant, and so
+     long as he remains the hewer of wood and carrier of water, and
+     remains strictly in what we choose to call his place, everything is
+     all right, but when ambition, prompted by real education, causes
+     the Negro to grow restless and he bestir himself to get out of that
+     servile condition, then there is, or at least there will be, trouble,
+     sure enough trouble, that all the great editors, parsons and
+     philosophers can no more check than they can now state the whole
+     truth and nothing but the truth, about this all-absorbing,
+     far-reaching miserable race question. There are those among Southern
+     editors and other public men who have been shouting into the ears of
+     the North for twenty-five years that education would solve the Negro
+     question; there is not an honest, fearless, thinking man in the South
+     but who knows that to be a bare-faced lie. Take a young Negro of
+     little more than ordinary intelligence, even, get hold of him in
+     time, train him thoroughly as to books, and finish him up with a good
+     industrial education, send him out into the South with ever so good
+     intentions both on the part of his benefactor and himself, send him
+     to take my work away from me and I will kill him.
+
+
+[Illustration: COMPANION PICTURES
+
+Old and new cabins for Negro tenants on the Brown plantation]
+
+
+The writer says in another part of this remarkable letter, giving as it
+does a glimpse of the bare bones of the economic struggle for existence:
+
+     I am, I believe, a typical Southern white workingman of the skilled
+     variety, and I'll tell the whole world, including Drs. Abbott and
+     Eliot, that I don't want any educated property-owning Negro around
+     me. The Negro would be desirable to me for what I could get out of
+     him in the way of labour that I don't want to have to perform myself,
+     and I have no other uses for him.
+
+
+_Who Will Do the Dirty Work?_
+
+One illustration more and I am through. I met at Montgomery, Alabama, a
+lawyer named Gustav Frederick Mertins. We were discussing the "problem,"
+and Mr. Mertins finally made a striking remark, not at all expressing the
+view that I heard from some of the strongest citizens of Montgomery, but
+excellently voicing the position of many Southerners.
+
+"It's a question," he said, "who will do the dirty work. In this country
+the white man won't: the Negro must. There's got to be a mudsill
+somewhere. If you educate the Negroes they won't stay where they belong;
+and you must consider them as a race, because if you let a few rise it
+makes the others discontented."
+
+Mr. Mertins presented me with a copy of his novel called "The Storm
+Signal," in which he further develops the idea (p. 342):
+
+     The Negro is the mudsill of the social and industrial South to-day.
+     Upon his labour in the field, in the forest, and in the mine, the
+     whole structure rests. Slip the mudsill out and the system must be
+     reorganised.... Educate him and he quits the field. Instruct him in
+     the trades and sciences and he enters into active competition with
+     the white man in what are called the higher planes of life. That
+     competition brings on friction, and that friction in the end means
+     the Negroe's undoing.
+
+Is not this mudsill stirring to-day, and is not that the deep reason for
+many of the troubles in the South--and in the North as well, where the
+Negro has appeared in large numbers? The friction of competition has
+arrived, and despite the demand for justice by many of the best class of
+the Southern whites, the struggle is certainly of growing intensity.
+
+And out of this economic struggle of whites and blacks grows an ethical
+struggle far more significant. It is the struggle of the white man with
+himself. How shall he, who is supreme in the South as in the North, treat
+the Negro? That is the _real_ struggle!
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+RACE RELATIONSHIPS IN THE SOUTH
+
+
+I
+
+Generally speaking, the sharpest race prejudice in the South is exhibited
+by the poorer class of white people, whether farmers, artisans, or
+unskilled workers, who come into active competition with the Negroes, or
+from politicians who are seeking the votes of this class of people. It is
+this element which has driven the Negroes out of more than one community
+in the South and it commonly forms the lynching mobs. A similar antagonism
+of the working classes exists in the North wherever the Negro has appeared
+in large numbers--as I shall show when I come to write of the treatment of
+the Northern Negro.
+
+On the other hand, the larger landowners and employers of the South, and
+all professional and business men who hire servants, while they dislike
+and fear the Negro as a race (though often loving and protecting
+individual Negroes), want the black man to work for them. More than that,
+they _must have him_: for he has a practical monopoly on labour in the
+South. White men of the employing class will do almost anything to keep
+the Negro on the land and his wife in the kitchen--so long as they are
+obedient and unambitious workers.
+
+
+_"Good" and "Bad" Landlords_
+
+But I had not been very long in the black belt before I began to see that
+the large planters--the big employers of labour--often pursued very
+different methods in dealing with the Negro. In the feudal middle ages
+there were good and bad barons; so in the South to-day there are "good"
+and "bad" landlords (for lack of a better designation) and every gradation
+between them.
+
+The good landlord, generally speaking, is the one who knows by inheritance
+how a feudal system should be operated. In other words, he is the old
+slave-owner or his descendant, who not only feels the ancient
+responsibility of slavery times, but believes that the good treatment of
+tenants, as a policy, will produce better results than harshness and
+force.
+
+The bad landlord represents the degeneration of the feudal system: he is
+in farming to make all he can out of it this year and next, without
+reference to human life.
+
+I have already told something of J. Pope Brown's plantation near
+Hawkinsville. On the November day, when we drove out through it, I was
+impressed with the fact that nearly all the houses used by the Negro
+tenants were new, and much superior to the old log cabins built either
+before or after the war, some of which I saw still standing, vacant and
+dilapidated, in various parts of the plantation. I asked the reason why he
+had built new houses:
+
+"Well," he answered, "I find I can keep a better class of tenants, if the
+accommodations are good."
+
+
+_Liquor and "the Resulting Trouble"_
+
+Mr. Brown has other methods for keeping the tenantry on his plantation
+satisfied. Every year he gives a barbecue and "frolic" for his Negroes,
+with music and speaking and plenty to eat. A big watermelon patch is also
+a feature of the plantation, and during all the year the tenants are
+looked after, not only to see that the work is properly done, but in more
+intimate and sympathetic ways. On one trip through the plantation we
+stopped in front of a Negro cabin. Inside lay a Negro boy close to death
+from a bullet wound in the head. He had been at a Negro party a few nights
+before where there was liquor. Someone had overturned the lamp: shooting
+began, and the young fellow was taken out for dead. Such accidents or
+crimes are all too familiar in the plantation country. Although Pulaski
+County, Georgia, prohibits the sale or purchase of liquor (most of the
+South, indeed, is prohibition in its sentiment), the Negroes are able from
+time to time to get jugs of liquor--and, as one Southerner put it to me,
+"enjoy the resulting trouble."
+
+The boy's father came out of the field and told us with real eloquence of
+sorrow of the patient's condition.
+
+"Las' night," he said, "we done thought he was a-crossin' de ribbah."
+
+Mr. Brown had already sent the doctor out from the city; he now made
+arrangements to transport the boy to a hospital in Macon where he could be
+properly treated.
+
+
+_Use of Cocaine Among Negroes_
+
+As I have said before, the white landlord who really tries to treat his
+Negroes well, often has a hard time of it. Many of those (not all) he
+deals with are densely ignorant, irresponsible, indolent--and often
+rendered more careless from knowing that the white man must have labour.
+Many of them will not keep up the fences, or take care of their tools, or
+pick the cotton even after it is ready, without steady attention. A
+prominent Mississippi planter gave me an illustration of one of the
+troubles he just then had to meet. An eighteen-year-old Negro left his
+plantation to work in a railroad camp. There he learned to use cocaine,
+and when he came back to the plantation he taught the habit to a dozen of
+the best Negroes there, to their complete ruin. The planter had the entire
+crowd arrested, searched for cocaine and kept in jail until the habit was
+broken. Then he prosecuted the white druggist who sold the cocaine.
+
+Some Southern planters, to prevent the Negroes from leaving, have built
+churches for them, and in one instance I heard of a school-house as well.
+
+Another point of the utmost importance--for it strikes at the selfish
+interest of the landlord--lies in the treatment of the Negro, who, by
+industry or ability, can "get ahead." A good landlord not only places no
+obstacles in the way of such tenants, but takes a real pride in their
+successes. Mr. Brown said:
+
+"If a tenant sees that other Negroes on the same plantation have been able
+to save money and get land of their own, it tends to make them more
+industrious. It pays the planter to treat his tenants well."
+
+
+_Negro with $1,000 in the Bank_
+
+The result is that a number of Mr. Brown's tenants have bought and own
+good farms near the greater plantation. The plantation, indeed, becomes a
+sort of central sun around which revolves like planets the lesser life of
+the Negro landowner. Mr. Brown told me with no little pride of the
+successes of several Negroes. We met one farmer driving to town in a top
+buggy with a Negro school-teacher. His name was Robert Polhill--a good
+type of the self-respecting, vigorous, industrious Negro. Afterward we
+visited his farm. He had an excellent house with four rooms. In front
+there were vines and decorative "chicken-corn"; a fence surrounded the
+place and it was really in good repair. Inside the house everything was
+scrupulously neat, from the clean rag rugs to the huge post beds with
+their gay coverlets. The wife evidently had some Indian blood in her
+veins; she could read and write, but Polhill himself was a full black
+Negro, intelligent, but illiterate. The children, and there were a lot of
+them, are growing up practically without opportunity for education because
+the school held in the Negro church is not only very poor, but it is in
+session only a short time every year. Near the house was a one-horse
+syrup-mill then in operation, grinding cane brought in by neighbouring
+farmers--white as well as black--the whites thus patronising the
+enterprise of their energetic Negro neighbour.
+
+"I first noticed Polhill when he began work on the plantation," said Mr.
+Brown, "because he was the only Negro on the place whom I could depend
+upon to stop hog-cracks in the fences."
+
+His history is the common history of the Negro farmer who "gets ahead."
+Starting as a wages' hand, he worked hard and steadily, saving enough
+finally to buy a mule--the Negro's first purchase; then he rented land,
+and by hard work and close calculating made money steadily. With his first
+$75 he started out to see the world, travelling by railroad to Florida,
+and finally back home again. The "moving about" instinct is strong in all
+Negroes--sometimes to their destruction. Then he bought 100 acres of land
+on credit and having good crops, paid for it in six or seven years. Now he
+has a comfortable home, he is out of debt, and has money in the bank, a
+painted house, a top buggy and a cabinet organ! These are the values of
+his property:
+
+  His farm is worth    $2,000
+  Two mules               300
+  Horse                   150
+  Other equipment         550
+  Money in the bank     1,000
+                       ------
+                       $4,000
+
+
+_Negro Who Owns 1,000 Acres of Land_
+
+All of this shows what a Negro who is industrious, and who comes up on a
+plantation where the landlord is not oppressive, can do. And despite the
+fact that much is heard on the one hand of the lazy and worthless Negro,
+and on the other of the landlord who holds his Negroes in practical
+slavery--it is significant that many Negroes are able to get ahead. In
+Pulaski County there are Negroes who own as high as 1,000 acres of land.
+Ben Gordon is one of them, his brother Charles has 500 acres, John Nelson
+has 400 acres worth $20 an acre, the Miller family has 1,000 acres,
+January Lawson, another of Mr. Brown's former tenants, has 500 acres; Jack
+Daniel 200 acres, Tom Whelan 600 acres. A mulatto merchant in
+Hawkinsville, whose creditable store I visited, also owns his plantation
+in the country and rents it to Negro tenants on the same system employed
+by the white landowners. Indeed, a few Negroes in the South are coming to
+be not inconsiderable landlords, and have many tenants.
+
+Hawkinsville also has a Negro blacksmith, Negro barbers and Negro
+builders--and like the white man, the Negro also develops his own
+financial sharks. One educated coloured man in Hawkinsville is a "note
+shaver"; he "stands for" other Negroes and signs their notes--at a
+frightful commission.
+
+Statistics will give some idea of how the industrious Negro in a black
+belt county like Pulaski has been succeeding.
+
+                     Total Assessed
+          Acres of      Value of
+         Land Owned     Property
+
+  1875     4,490       $ 43,230
+  1880     5,988         60,760
+  1885     6,901         59,022
+  1890    12,294        122,926
+  1895    14,145        144,158
+  1900    13,205        138,800
+
+It is surprising to an unfamiliar visitor to find out that the Negroes in
+the South have acquired so much land. In Georgia alone in 1906 coloured
+people owned 1,400,000 acres and were assessed for over $28,000,000 worth
+of property, practically all of which, of course, has been acquired in the
+forty years since slavery.
+
+Negro farmers in some instances have made a genuine reputation for
+ability. John Roberts, a Richmond County Negro, won first prize over many
+white exhibitors in the fall of 1906 at the Georgia-Carolina fair at
+Augusta for the best bale of cotton raised.
+
+
+_Little Coloured Boy's Famous Speech_
+
+I was at Macon while the first State fair ever held by Negroes in Georgia
+was in progress. In spite of the fact that racial relationships, owing to
+the recent riot at Atlanta, were acute, the fair was largely attended, and
+not only by Negroes, but by many white visitors. The brunt of the work of
+organisation fell upon R. R. Wright, president of the Georgia State
+Industrial College (coloured) of Savannah. President Wright is of
+full-blooded African descent, his grandmother, who reared him, being an
+African Negro of the Mandingo tribe. Just at the close of the war he was a
+boy in a freedman's school at Atlanta. One Sunday General O. O. Howard
+came to address the pupils. When he had finished, he expressed a desire to
+take a message back to the people of the North.
+
+"What shall I tell them for you?" he asked.
+
+A little black boy in front stood up quickly, and said:
+
+"Tell 'em, massa, we is rising."
+
+Upon this incident John Greenleaf Whittier wrote a famous poem: and at the
+Negro fair, crowning the charts which had been prepared to show the
+progress of the Negroes of Georgia, I saw this motto:
+
+     "WE ARE RISING"
+
+The little black boy grew up, was graduated at Atlanta University, studied
+at Harvard, travelled in Europe, served in the Spanish-American War, and
+is now seeking to help his race to get an industrial training in the
+college which he organised in 1891. The attendance at the fair in Macon
+was between 25,000 and 30,000, the Negroes raised $11,000 and spent
+$7,000, and planned for a greater fair the next year. In this enterprise
+they had the sympathy and approval of the best white people. A vivid
+glimpse of what the fair meant is given by the _Daily News_ of Macon--a
+white newspaper:
+
+     The fair shows what progress can be accomplished by the industrious
+     and thrifty Negro, who casts aside the belief that he is a dependent,
+     and sails right in to make a living and a home for himself. Some of
+     the agricultural exhibits of black farmers have never been surpassed
+     in Macon. On the whole, the exposition just simply astounded folks
+     who did not know what the Negro is doing for himself.
+
+     Another significant feature about the fair was the excellent
+     behaviour of the great throngs of coloured people who poured into the
+     city during its progress. There was not an arrest on the fair grounds
+     and very few in the city.
+
+
+[Illustration: CANE SYRUP KETTLE. EXPERT NEGRO STIRRING AND SKIMMING]
+
+[Illustration: CHAIN-GANG WORKERS ON THE ROADS]
+
+
+The better class of Negro farmers, indeed, have shown not only a capacity
+for getting ahead individually, but for organising for self-advancement,
+and even for working with corresponding associations of white farmers. The
+great cotton and tobacco associations of the South, which aim to direct
+the marketing of the product of the farms, have found it not only wise,
+but necessary to enlist the c�operation of Negro farmers. At the annual
+rally of the dark-tobacco growers at Guthrie, Kentucky, last September,
+many Negro planters were in the line of parade with the whites. The
+farmers' conferences held at Hampton, Tuskegee, Calhoun, and at similar
+schools, illustrate in other ways the possibilities of advancement which
+grow out of landownership by the Negroes.
+
+
+_The Penalties of Being Free_
+
+So much for the sunny side of the picture: the broad-gauge landlord and
+the prosperous tenantry. Conditions in the black belt are in one respect
+much as they were in slavery times, or as they would be under any feudal
+system: if the master or lord is "good," the Negro prospers; if he is
+harsh, grasping, unkind, the Negro suffers bitterly. It gets back finally
+to the white man. In assuming supreme rights in the South--political,
+social, and industrial, the white man also assumes heavy duties and
+responsibilities; he cannot have the one without the other: and he takes
+to himself the pain and suffering which goes with power and
+responsibility.
+
+Of course, scarcity of labour and high wages have given the really
+ambitious and industrious Negro his opportunity, and many thousands of
+them are becoming more and more independent of the favour or the ill-will
+of the whites. And therein lies a profound danger, not only to the Negro,
+but to the South. Gradually losing the support and advice of the best type
+of white man, the independent Negro finds himself in competition with the
+poorer type of white man, whose jealousy he must meet. He takes the
+penalties of being really free. Escaping the exactions of a feudal life,
+he finds he must meet the sharper difficulties of a free industrial
+system. And being without the political rights of his poor white
+competitor and wholly without social recognition, discredited by the
+bestial crimes of the lower class of his own race, he has, indeed, a hard
+struggle before him. In many neighbourhoods he is peculiarly at the mercy
+of this lower class white electorate, and the self-seeking politicians
+whose stock in trade consists in playing upon the passions of race-hatred.
+
+
+II
+
+I come now to the reverse of the picture. When the Negro tenant takes up
+land or hires out to the landlord, he ordinarily signs a contract, or if
+he cannot sign (about half the Negro tenants of the black belt are wholly
+illiterate) he makes his mark. He often has no way of knowing certainly
+what is in the contract, though the arrangement is usually clearly
+understood, and he must depend on the landlord to keep both the rent and
+the supply-store accounts. In other words, he is wholly at the planter's
+mercy--a temptation as dangerous for the landlord as the possibilities
+which it presents are for the tenant. It is so easy to make large profits
+by charging immense interest percentages or outrageous prices for supplies
+to tenants who are too ignorant or too weak to protect themselves, that
+the stories of the oppressive landlord in the South are scarcely
+surprising. It is easy, when the tenant brings in his cotton in the fall
+not only to underweigh it, but to credit it at the lowest prices of the
+week; and this dealing of the strong with the weak is not Southern, it is
+human. Such a system has encouraged dishonesty, and wastefulness; it has
+made many landlords cruel and greedy, it has increased the helplessness,
+hopelessness and shiftlessness of the Negro. In many cases it has meant
+downright degeneration, not only to the Negro, but to the white man. These
+are strong words, but no one can travel in the black belt without seeing
+enough to convince him of the terrible consequences growing out of these
+relationships.
+
+
+_The Story of a Negro Tenant_
+
+A case which came to my attention at Montgomery, Alabama, throws a vivid
+light on one method of dealing with the Negro tenant. Some nine miles from
+Montgomery lives a planter named T. L. McCullough. In December, 1903, he
+made a contract with a Negro named Jim Thomas to work for him. According
+to this contract, a copy of which I have, the landlord agreed to furnish
+Jim the Negro with a ration of 14 lbs. of meat and one bushel of meal a
+month, and to pay him besides $96 for an entire year's labour.
+
+On his part Jim agreed to "do good and faithful labour for the said T. L.
+McCullough." "Good and faithful labour" means from sunrise to sunset every
+day but Sunday, and excepting Saturday afternoon.
+
+A payment of five dollars was made to bind the bargain--just before
+Christmas. Jim probably spent it the next day. It is customary to furnish
+a cabin for the worker to live in; no such place was furnished, and Jim
+had to walk three or four miles morning and evening to a house on another
+plantation. He worked faithfully until May 15th. Then he ran away, but
+when he heard that the landlord was after him, threatening punishment, he
+came back and agreed to work twenty days for the ten he had been away. Jim
+stayed some time, but he was not only given no cabin and paid no money,
+but his food ration was cut off! So he ran away again, claiming that he
+could not work unless he had a place to live. The landlord went after him
+and had him arrested, and although the Negro had worked nearly half a
+year, McCullough prosecuted him for fraud because he had got $5 in cash at
+the signing of the contract. In such a case the Alabama law gives the
+landlord every advantage; it says that when a person receives money under
+a contract and stops work, the presumption is that he intended to defraud
+the landowner and that therefore he is criminally punishable. The
+practical effect of the law is to permit imprisonment for debt, for it
+places a burden of proof on the Negro that he can hardly overturn. The law
+is defended on the ground that Negroes will get money any way they can,
+sign any sort of paper for it, and then run off--if there is not a
+stringent law to punish them. But it may be imagined how this law could be
+used, and is used, in the hands of unscrupulous men to keep the Negro in a
+sort of debt-slavery. When the case came up before Judge William H. Thomas
+of Montgomery, the constitutionality of the law was brought into question,
+and the Negro was finally discharged.
+
+Often an unscrupulous landlord will deliberately give a Negro a little
+money before Christmas, knowing that he will promptly waste it in a
+"celebration" thus getting him into debt so that he dare not leave the
+plantation for fear of arrest and criminal prosecution. If he attempts to
+leave he is arrested and taken before a friendly justice of the peace, and
+fined or threatened with imprisonment. If he is not in debt, it sometimes
+happens that the landlord will have him arrested on the charge of stealing
+a bridle or a few potatoes (for it is easy to find something against
+almost any Negro), and he is brought into court. In several cases I know
+of the escaping Negro has even been chased down with bloodhounds. On
+appearing in court the Negro is naturally badly frightened. The white man
+is there and offers as a special favour to take him back and let him work
+out the fine--which sometimes requires six months, often a whole year. In
+this way Negroes are kept in debt--so-called debt-slavery or peonage--year
+after year, they and their whole family. One of the things that I couldn't
+at first understand in some of the courts I visited was the presence of so
+many white men to stand sponsor for Negroes who had committed various
+offences. Often this grows out of the feudal protective instinct which the
+landlord feels for the tenant or servant of whom he is fond; but often it
+is merely the desire of the white man to get another Negro worker. In one
+case in particular, I saw a Negro brought into court charged with stealing
+cotton.
+
+"Does anybody know this Negro?" asked the judge.
+
+Two white men stepped up and both said they did.
+
+The judge fined the Negro $20 and costs, and there was a real contest
+between the two white men as to who should pay it--and get the Negro. They
+argued for some minutes, but finally the judge said to the prisoner:
+
+"Who do you want to work for, George?"
+
+The Negro chose his employer, and agreed to work four months to pay off
+his $20 fine and costs.
+
+Sometimes a man who has a debt against a Negro will sell the claim--which
+is practically selling the Negro--to some farmer who wants more labour.
+
+A case of this sort came up in the winter of 1907 in Rankin County,
+Mississippi--the facts of which are all in testimony. A Negro named Dan
+January was in debt to a white farmer named Levi Carter. Carter agreed to
+sell the Negro and his entire family to another white farmer named
+Patrick. January refused to be sold. According to the testimony Carter and
+some of his companions seized January, bound him hand and foot and beat
+him most brutally, taking turns in doing the whipping until they were
+exhausted and the victim unconscious.
+
+January's children removed him to his home, but the white men returned the
+next day, produced a rope and threatened to hang him unless he consented
+to go to the purchaser of the debt. The case came into court but the white
+men were never punished. January was in Jackson, Miss., when I was there;
+he still showed the awful effects of his beating.
+
+
+_Keeping Negroes Poor_
+
+This system has many bad results. It encourages the Negro in crime. He
+knows that unless he does something pretty bad, he will not be prosecuted
+because the landlord doesn't want to lose the work of a single hand; he
+knows that if he _is_ prosecuted, the white man will, if possible, "pay
+him out." It disorganises justice and confuses the ignorant Negro mind as
+to what is a crime and what is not. A Negro will often do things that he
+would not do if he thought he were really to be punished. He comes to the
+belief that if the white man wants him arrested, he will be arrested, and
+if he protects him, he won't suffer, no matter what he does. Thousands of
+Negroes, ignorant, weak, indolent, to-day work under this system. There
+are even landlords and employers who will trade upon the Negro's worst
+instincts--his love for liquor, for example--in order to keep him at work.
+An instance of this sort came to my attention at Hawkinsville while I was
+there. The white people of the town were making a strong fight for
+prohibition; the women held meetings, and on the day of the election
+marched in the streets singing and speaking. But the largest employer of
+Negro labor in the county had registered several hundred of his Negroes
+and declared his intention of voting them against prohibition. He said
+bluntly: "If my niggers can't get whisky they won't stay with me; you've
+got to keep a nigger poor or he won't work."
+
+This employer actually voted sixty of his Negroes against prohibition, but
+the excitement was so great that he dared vote no more--and prohibition
+carried.
+
+A step further brings the Negro to the chain-gang. If there is no white
+man to pay him out, or if his crime is too serious to be paid out, he goes
+to the chain-gang--and in several states he is then hired out to private
+contractors. The private employer thus gets him sooner or later. Some of
+the largest farms in the South are operated by chain-gang labour. The
+demand for more convicts by white employers is exceedingly strong. In the
+Montgomery _Advertiser_ for April 10, 1907, I find an account of the
+sentencing of fifty-four prisoners in the city court, fifty-two of whom
+were Negroes. The _Advertiser_ says:
+
+     The demand for their labour is probably greater now than it ever has
+     been before. Numerous labour agents of companies employing convict
+     labour reached Montgomery yesterday, and were busily engaged in
+     manoeuvring to secure part or even all of the convicts for their
+     respective companies. The competition for labour of all kinds, it
+     seems, is keener than ever before known.
+
+The natural tendency of this demand, and from the further fact that the
+convict system makes yearly a huge profit for the State, is to convict as
+many Negroes as possible, and to punish the offences charged as severely
+as possible. From the Atlanta _Constitution_ of October 13, 1906, I have
+this clipping:
+
+     SIX MONTHS FOR POTATO THEFT
+
+     COLUMBUS, GA., October 12 (Special)
+
+     In the city court yesterday Charley Carter, a Negro, was sentenced to
+     six months on the chain-gang or to pay a fine of $25 for stealing a
+     potato valued at 5 cents.
+
+Serious crimes are sometimes compromised. In a newspaper dispatch, October
+6, 1906, from Eaton Ga., I find a report of the trial of six Negroes
+charged with assault with the intent to kill. All were found guilty, but
+upon a recommendation of mercy they were sentenced as having committed
+misdemeanours rather than felonies. They could therefore have their fines
+paid, and five were immediately released by farmers who wanted their
+labour. The report says that of thirty-one misdemeanours during the month
+it is expected that "none will reach the chain-gang," since there are
+"three farmers to every convict ready to pay the fine."
+
+
+[Illustration: A TYPE OF THE COUNTRY CHAIN-GANG NEGRO]
+
+
+Still other methods are pursued by certain landlords to keep their tenants
+on the land. In one extreme case a Negro tenant, after years of work,
+decided to leave the planter. He had had a place offered him where he
+could make more money. There was nothing against him; he simply wanted to
+move. But the landlord informed him that no waggon would be permitted to
+cross his (the planter's) land to get his household belongings. The Negro,
+being ignorant, supposed he could thus be prevented from moving, and
+although the friend who was trying to help him assured him that the
+landlord could not prevent his moving, he dared not go. In another
+instance--also extreme--a planter refused to let his tenants raise hogs,
+because he wanted them to buy salt pork at his store. It is, indeed,
+through the plantation store (which corresponds to the company or "truck"
+store of Northern mining regions) that the unscrupulous planter reaps his
+most exorbitant profits. Negroes on some plantations, whether they work
+hard or not, come out at the end of the year with nothing. Part of this is
+due, of course, to their own improvidence; but part, in too many cases, is
+due to exploitation by the landlord.
+
+
+_One Biscuit to Eat and no Place to Sleep_
+
+Booker T. Washington, in a letter to the Montgomery _Advertiser_ on the
+Negro labour problem, tells this story:
+
+     I recall that some years ago a certain white farmer asked me to
+     secure for him a young coloured man to work about the house and to
+     work in the field. The young man was secured, a bargain was entered
+     into to the effect that he was to be paid a certain sum monthly and
+     his board and lodging furnished as well. At the end of the coloured
+     boy's first day on the farm he returned. I asked the reason, and he
+     said that after working all the afternoon he was handed a buttered
+     biscuit for his supper, and no place was provided for him to sleep.
+
+     At night he was told he could find a place to sleep in the fodder
+     loft. This white farmer, whom I know well, is not a cruel man and
+     seeks generally to do the right thing; but in this case he simply
+     overlooked the fact that it would have paid him in dollars and cents
+     to give some thought and attention to the comfort of his helper.
+
+     This case is more or less typical. Had this boy been well cared for,
+     he would have advertised the place that others would have sought work
+     there.
+
+Such methods mean, of course, the lowest possible efficiency of
+labour--ignorant, hopeless, shiftless. The harsh planter naturally opposes
+Negro education in the bitterest terms and prevents it wherever possible;
+for education means the doom of the system by which he thrives.
+
+
+_Negro with Nineteen Children_
+
+Life for the tenants is often not a pleasant thing to contemplate. I spent
+much time driving about on the great plantations and went into many of the
+cabins. Usually they were very poor, of logs or shacks, sometimes only one
+room, sometimes a room and a sort of lean-to. At one side there was a
+fireplace, often two beds opposite, with a few broken chairs or boxes, and
+a table. Sometimes the cabin was set up on posts and had a floor,
+sometimes it was on the ground and had no floor at all. The people are
+usually densely ignorant and superstitious; the preachers they follow are
+often the worst sort of characters, dishonest and immoral; the schools, if
+there are any, are practically worthless. The whole family works from
+sunrise to sunset in the fields. Even children of six and seven years old
+will drop seed or carry water. Dr. W. E. B. DuBois, himself a Negro, who
+has made many valuable and scholarly studies of Negro life, gives this
+vivid glimpse into a home where the Negro and his wife had nineteen
+children. He says:
+
+     This family of twenty-one is a poverty stricken, reckless, dirty set.
+     The children are stupid and repulsive, and fight for their food at
+     the table. They are poorly dressed, sickly and cross. The table
+     dishes stand from one meal to another unwashed, and the house is in
+     perpetual disorder. Now and then the father and mother engage in a
+     hand-to-hand fight.
+
+
+_Never Heard the Name of Roosevelt_
+
+It would be impossible to over-emphasise the ignorance of many Negro
+farmers. It seems almost unbelievable, but after some good-humoured talk
+with a group of old Negroes I tried to find out how much they knew of the
+outside world. I finally asked them if they knew Theodore Roosevelt. They
+looked puzzled, and finally one old fellow scratched his head and said:
+
+"Whah you say dis yere man libes?"
+
+"In Washington," I said; "you've heard of the President of the United
+States?"
+
+"I reckon I dunno," he said.
+
+And yet this old man gave me a first-class religious exhortation; and one
+in the group had heard of Booker T. Washington, whom he described as a
+"pow'ful big nigger."
+
+
+_Why Negroes Go to Cities_
+
+I made inquiries among the Negroes as to why they wanted to leave the
+farms and go to cities. The answer I got from all sorts of sources was
+first, the lack of schooling in the country, and second, the lack of
+protection.
+
+And I heard also many stories of ill-treatment of various sorts, the
+distrust of the tenant of the landlord in keeping his accounts--all of
+which, dimly recognised, tends to make many Negroes escape the country, if
+they can. Indeed, it is growing harder and harder on the great
+plantations, especially where the management is by overseers, to keep a
+sufficient labour supply. In some places the white landlords have begun to
+break up their plantations, selling small farms to ambitious Negroes--a
+significant sign, indeed, of the passing of the feudal system. An instance
+of this is found near Thomaston, Ga., where Dr. C. B. Thomas has long been
+selling land to Negroes, and encouraging them to buy by offering easy
+terms. Near Dayton, Messrs. Price and Allen have broken up their "Lockhart
+Plantation" and are selling it out to Negroes. I found similar instances
+in many places I visited. Commenting on this tendency, the Thomaston
+_Post_ says:
+
+     This is, in part, a solution of the so-called Negro problem, for
+     those of the race who have property interests at stake cannot afford
+     to antagonise their white neighbours or transgress the laws. The
+     ownership of land tends to make them better citizens in every way,
+     more thoughtful of the right of others, and more ambitious for their
+     own advancement.
+
+     At this place a number of neat and comfortable homes, a commodious
+     high school, and a large lodge building, besides a number of
+     churches, testify to the enterprise and thrift the best class of our
+     coloured population.... The tendency towards cutting up the large
+     plantations is beginning to show itself, and when all of them are so
+     divided, there will be no agricultural labour problem, except,
+     perhaps, in the gathering of an especially large crop.
+
+
+III
+
+I have endeavoured thus to give a picture of both sides of conditions in
+the black belt exactly as I saw them. I can now do no better in further
+illumination of the conditions I have described than by looking at them
+through the eyes and experiences of two exceptionally able white men of
+the South, both leaders in their respective walks of life, neither of them
+politicians and both, incidentally, planters.
+
+At Jackson, Miss., I met Major R. W. Millsaps, a leading citizen of the
+state. He comes of a family with the best Southern traditions behind it;
+he was born in Mississippi, graduated before the war at Harvard College,
+and although his father, a slave owner, had opposed secession, the son
+fought four years in the Confederate army, rising to the rank of Major. He
+came out of the war, as he says, "with no earthly possessions but a jacket
+and a pair of pants, with a hole in them." But he was young and energetic;
+he began hauling cotton from Jackson to Natchez when cotton was worth
+almost its weight in gold. He received $10 a bale for doing it and made
+$4,000 in three months. He is now the president of one of the leading
+banks in Mississippi, interested in many important Southern enterprises,
+and the founder of Millsaps College at Jackson: a modest, useful,
+Christian gentleman.
+
+
+_An Experiment in Trusting Negroes_
+
+Near Greenville, Miss., Major Millsaps owns a plantation of 500 acres,
+occupied by 20 tenants, some 75 people in all. It is in one of the richest
+agricultural sections--the Mississippi bottoms--in the United States. Up
+to 1890 he had a white overseer and he was constantly in trouble of one
+kind or another with his tenants. When the price of cotton dropped, he
+decided to dispense with the overseer entirely and try a rather daring
+experiment. In short, he planned to trust the Negroes. He got them
+together and said:
+
+"I am going to try you. I'm going to give you every possible opportunity;
+if you don't make out, I will go back to the overseer system."
+
+In the sixteen years since then no white man has been on that plantation
+except as a visitor. The land was rented direct to the Negroes on terms
+that would give both landlord and tenant a reasonable profit.
+
+"Did it work?" I asked.
+
+"I have never lost one cent," said Major Millsaps, "no Negro has ever
+failed to pay up and you couldn't drive them off the place. When other
+farmers complain of shortage of labour and tenants, I never have had any
+trouble."
+
+Every Negro on the place owns his own mules and waggons and is out of
+debt. Nearly every family has bought or is buying a home in the little
+town of Leland, nearby, some of which are comfortably furnished. They are
+all prosperous and contented.
+
+"How do you do it?" I asked.
+
+"The secret," he said, "is to treat the Negro well and give him a chance.
+I have found that a Negro, like a white man, is most responsive to good
+treatment. Even a dog responds to kindness! The trouble is that most
+planters want to make too much money out of the Negro; they charge him too
+much rent; they make too large profits on the supplies they furnish. I
+know merchants who expect a return of 50 per cent. on supplies alone. The
+best Negroes I have known are those who are educated; Negroes need more
+education of the right kind--not less--and it will repay us well if we
+give it to them. It makes better, not worse, workers."
+
+I asked him about the servant problem.
+
+"We never have any trouble," he said. "I apply the same rule to servants
+as to the farmers. Treat them well, don't talk insultingly of their people
+before them, don't expect them to do too much work. I believe in treating
+a Negro with respect. That doesn't mean to make equals of them. You people
+in the North don't make social equals of your white servants."
+
+
+_Jefferson Davis's Way with Negroes_
+
+Then he told a striking story of Jefferson Davis.
+
+"I got a lesson in the treatment of Negroes when I was a young man
+returning South from Harvard. I stopped in Washington and called on
+Jefferson Davis, then United States Senator from Mississippi. We walked
+down Pennsylvania Avenue. Many Negroes bowed to Mr. Davis and he returned
+the bow. He was a very polite man. I finally said to him that I thought he
+must have a good many friends among the Negroes. He replied:
+
+"'I can't allow any Negro to outdo me in courtesy.'"
+
+
+_Plain Words from a White Man_
+
+A few days later on my way North I met at Clarksdale, Miss., Walter Clark,
+one of the well-known citizens of the state and President of the
+Mississippi Cotton Association. In the interests of his organisation he
+has been speaking in different parts of the state on court-days and at
+fairs. And the burden of his talks has been, not only organisation by the
+farmers, but a more intelligent and progressive treatment of Negro labour.
+Recognising the instability of the ordinary Negro, the crime he commits,
+the great difficulties which the best-intentioned Southern planters have
+to meet, Mr. Clark yet tells his Southern audiences some vigorous truths.
+He said in a recent speech:
+
+"Every dollar I own those Negroes made for me. Our ancestors chased them
+down and brought them here. They are just what we make them. By our own
+greed and extravagance we have spoiled a good many of them. It has been
+popular here--now happily growing less so--to exploit the Negro by high
+store-prices and by encouraging him to get into debt. It has often made
+him hopeless. We have a low element of white people who are largely
+responsible for the Negro's condition. They sell him whiskey and cocaine;
+they corrupt Negro women. A white man who shoots craps with Negroes or who
+consorts with Negro women is worse than the meanest Negro that ever
+lived."
+
+At Coffeeville, where Mr. Clark talked somewhat to this effect, an old man
+who sat in front suddenly jumped up and said: "That's the truth! Bully for
+you; bully for you!"
+
+In his talk with me, Mr. Clark said other significant things:
+
+"Our people have treated the Negroes as helpless children all their days.
+The Negro has not been encouraged to develop even the capacities he has.
+He must be made to use his own brains, not ours; put him on his
+responsibility and he will become more efficient. A Negro came to me not
+long ago complaining that the farmer for whom he worked would not give him
+an itemised account of his charges at the store. I met the planter and
+asked him about it. He said to me:
+
+"'The black nigger! What does he know about it? He can't read it.'
+
+"'But he is entitled to it, isn't he?' I asked him--and the Negro got it.
+
+"The credit system has been the ruin of many Negroes. It keeps them in
+hopeless debt and it encourages the planter to exploit them. That's the
+truth. My plan is to put the Negro on a strict cash basis; give him an
+idea of what money is by letting him use it. Three years ago I started it
+on my plantation. A Negro would come to me and say: 'Boss, I want a pair
+of shoes.' 'All right,' I'd say. 'I'll pay you spot cash every night and
+you can buy your own shoes.' In the same way I made up my mind that we
+must stop paying Negroes' fines when they got into trouble. I know
+planters who expect regularly every Monday to come into court and pay out
+about so many Negroes. It encourages the Negroes to do things they would
+not think of doing if they knew they would be regularly punished. I've
+quit paying fines; my Negroes, if they get into trouble, have got to
+recognise their own responsibility for it and take what follows. That's
+the only way to make men of them.
+
+"What we need in the South is intelligent labour, more efficient labour. I
+believe in the education of the Negro. Industrial training is needed, not
+only for the Negro, but for the whites as well. The white people down here
+have simply got to take the Negro and make a man of him; in the long run
+it will make him more valuable to us."
+
+
+
+
+_PART TWO_
+
+THE NEGRO IN THE NORTH
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+FOLLOWING THE COLOUR LINE IN THE NORTH
+
+
+Having followed the colour line in the South, it is of extraordinary
+interest and significance to learn how the Negro fares in the North. Is he
+treated better or worse? Is Boston a more favourable location for him than
+Atlanta or New Orleans? A comparison of the "Southern attitude" and the
+"Northern attitude" throws a flood of light upon the Negro as a national
+problem in this country.
+
+Most of the perplexing questions in the North pertain to the city, but in
+the South the great problems are still agricultural. In the South the
+masses of Negroes live on the land; they are a part of the cotton, sugar,
+lumber and turpentine industries; but in the North the Negro is
+essentially a problem of the great cities. He has taken his place in the
+babel of the tenements; already he occupies extensive neighbourhoods like
+the San Juan Hill district in New York and Bucktown in Indianapolis, and,
+by virtue of an increasing volume of immigration from the South, he is
+overflowing his boundaries in all directions, expanding more rapidly,
+perhaps, than any other single element of urban population. In every
+important Northern city, a distinct race-problem already exists, which
+must, in a few years, assume serious proportions.
+
+Country districts and the smaller cities in the North for the most part
+have no Negro question. A few Negroes are found in almost all localities,
+but an examination of the statistics of rural counties and of the lesser
+cities shows that the Negro population is diminishing in some localities,
+increasing slightly in others. In distinctly agricultural districts in the
+North the census exhibits an actual falling off of Negro population of 10
+per cent. between 1880 and 1900. Cass County in Michigan, which has a
+famous Negro agricultural colony--one of the few in the North--shows a
+distinct loss in population. From 1,837 inhabitants in 1880 it dropped to
+1,568 in 1900. A few Negro farmers have done well in the North (at
+Wilberforce, Ohio, I met two or three who had fine large farms and were
+prosperous), but the rural population is so small as to be negligible.
+
+
+_Negroes of Small Northern Towns_
+
+Most of the Negroes in the smaller towns and cities of the North are of
+the stock which came by way of the underground railroad just before the
+Civil War or during the period of philanthropic enthusiasm which followed
+it. They have come to fit naturally into the life of the communities where
+they live, and no one thinks especially of their colour. There is, indeed,
+no more a problem with the Negro than with the Greek or Italian. In one
+community (Lansing, Mich.) with which I have been long familiar, the
+Negroes are mostly mulattoes and their numbers have remained practically
+stationary for thirty years, while the white population has increased
+rapidly. At present there are only about 500 Negroes in a city of 25,000
+people.
+
+As a whole the coloured people of Lansing are peaceful and industrious, a
+natural part of the wage-working population. Individuals have become
+highly prosperous and are much respected. A few of the younger generation
+are idle and worthless.
+
+So far as comfortable conditions of life are concerned, where there is
+little friction or discrimination and a good opportunity for earning a
+respectable livelihood, I have found no places anywhere which seemed so
+favourable to Negroes as these smaller towns and cities in the North and
+West where the coloured population is not increasing. But the moment there
+is new immigration from the South the conditions cease to be Utopian--as I
+shall show.
+
+The great cities of the North present a wholly different aspect; the
+increases of population there are not short of extraordinary. In 1880
+Chicago had only 6,480 coloured people; at present (1908) it has about
+45,000, an increase of some 600 per cent. The census of 1900 gives the
+Negro population of New York as 60,666. It is now (1908) probably not less
+than 80,000. Between 1890 and 1900 the Negroes of Philadelphia
+increased by 59 per cent., while the Caucasians added only 22 per cent.,
+and the growth since 1900 has been even more rapid, the coloured
+population now exceeding 80,000.
+
+
+[Illustration: A NEGRO CABIN WITH EVIDENCES OF ABUNDANCE]
+
+[Illustration: OFF FOR THE COTTON FIELDS]
+
+
+It is difficult to realise the significance of these masses of coloured
+population. The city of Washington to-day has a greater community of
+Negroes (some 100,000) than were ever before gathered together in one
+community in any part of the world, so far as we know. New York and
+Philadelphia both now probably have as many Negroes as any Southern city
+(except Washington, if that be called a Southern city). Nor must it be
+forgotten that about a ninth of the Negro population of the United States
+is in the North and West. Crowded communities of Negroes in Northern
+latitudes have never before existed anywhere. Northern city conditions
+therefore present unique and interesting problems.
+
+I went first to Indianapolis because I had heard so much of the political
+power of the Negroes there; afterward I visited Cincinnati, Philadelphia,
+New York, Boston, Chicago and several smaller cities and country
+neighbourhoods. In every large city both white and coloured people told me
+that race feeling and discrimination were rapidly increasing: that new and
+more difficult problems were constantly arising.
+
+Generally speaking, the more Negroes the sharper the expression of
+prejudice.
+
+While the Negroes were an inconsequential part of the population, they
+passed unnoticed, but with increasing numbers (especially of the lower
+sort of Negroes and black Negroes), accompanied by competition for the
+work of the city and active political power, they are inevitably kindling
+the fires of race-feeling. Prejudice has been incited also by echoes of
+the constant agitation in the South, the hatred-breeding speeches of
+Tillman and Vardaman, the incendiary and cruel books and plays of Dixon,
+and by the increased immigration of Southern white people with their
+strong Southern point of view.
+
+
+_Pathetic Expectations of the Negro_
+
+One finds something unspeakably pathetic in the spectacle of these untold
+thousands of Negroes who are coming North. To many of them, oppressed
+within the limitations set up by the South, it is indeed the promised
+land. I shall never forget the wistful eagerness of a Negro I met in
+Mississippi. He told me he was planning to move to Indianapolis. I asked
+him why he wanted to leave the South.
+
+"They're Jim Crowin' us down here too much," he said; "there's no chance
+for a coloured man who has any self-respect."
+
+"But," I said, "do you know that you will be better off when you get to
+Indianapolis?"
+
+"I hear they don't make no difference up there between white folks and
+coloured, and that a hard-working man can get two dollars a day. Is that
+all so?"
+
+"Yes, that's pretty nearly so," I said--but as I looked at the fairly
+comfortable home he lived in, among his own people, I felt somehow that he
+would not find the promised land all that he anticipated.
+
+And after that I visited Indianapolis and other cities and saw hundreds of
+just such eager Negroes after they had reached the promised land. Two
+classes of coloured people came North: the worthless, ignorant,
+semi-criminal sort who find in the intermittent, high-paid day labour in
+the North, accompanied by the glittering excitements of city life, just
+the conditions they love best. Two or three years ago the Governor of
+Arkansas, Jeff Davis, pardoned a Negro criminal on condition that he would
+go to Boston and stay there! The other class is composed of
+self-respecting, hard-working people who are really seeking better
+conditions of life, a better chance for their children.
+
+And what do Negroes find when they reach the promised land?
+
+In the first place the poorer sort find in Indianapolis the alley home, in
+New York the deadly tenement. Landowners in Indianapolis have been
+building long rows of cheap one-story frame tenements in back streets and
+alleys. The apartments have two or three rooms each. When new they are
+brightly painted and papered and to many Negroes from the South,
+accustomed to the primitive cabin, they are beautiful indeed.
+
+Even the older buildings are more pretentious if not really better than
+anything they have known in the rural South; and how the city life, nearly
+as free to the coloured man as to the white, stirs their pulses! No
+people, either black or white, are really free until they feel free. And
+to many Negroes the first few weeks in a Northern city give them the first
+glimpses they have ever had of what they consider to be liberty.
+
+A striking illustration of this feeling came to my notice at Columbia,
+South Carolina. One of the most respected Negro men there--respected by
+both races--was a prosperous tailor who owned a building on the main
+street of the city. He was well to do, had a family, and his trade came
+from both races. I heard that he was planning to leave the South and I
+went to see him.
+
+"Yes," he said, "I am going away. It's getting to be too dangerous for a
+coloured man down here."
+
+It was just after the Atlanta riot.
+
+"Where are you going?" I asked.
+
+"I think I shall go to Washington," he said.
+
+"Why Washington?"
+
+"Well, you see, I want to be as near the flag as I can."
+
+
+_What the Negro Really Finds in the Promised Land_
+
+But they soon begin to learn things! It is true that the workingman can
+get high wages, and the domestic servant is paid an amount which
+astonishes her, but on the other hand--a fact that somehow never occurs to
+many of these people, or indeed to the foreigners who come flocking to our
+shores--the living cost is higher. For his gaudy tenements the landlord
+extorts exorbitant rentals. Ignorance is ever roundly and mercilessly
+taxed! I saw a double house built for white people just on the edge of a
+Negro neighbourhood and held at a rental of $18 a month, but not being
+able to secure white tenants the landlord rented to Negroes for $25 a
+month.
+
+When he came North the Negro (even though he had lived in cities in the
+South, as many of the immigrants have) never dreamed that it would require
+such an amount of fuel to keep him through the long Northern winter, or
+that his bill for lights, water, and everything else would be so high. And
+in the South many Negro families of the poorer sort are greatly assisted
+by baskets of food brought from the white man's kitchen and the gift of
+cast-off clothes and shoes, to say nothing of tobacco, and even money--a
+lingering loose survival of the relationships of slavery. But in the
+North the Negro finds himself in an intense industrial atmosphere where
+relationships are more strictly impersonal and businesslike. What he gets
+he must pay for. Charity exists on a large scale, as I shall show later,
+but it is the sharp, inquiring, organised charity of the North.
+
+In short, coming North to find a place where he will be treated more like
+a man and less like a serf, the Negro discovers that he must meet the
+competitive struggle to which men of the working class are subjected in
+the highly developed industrial system of the North.
+
+
+_Sufferings of the Northern Negro_
+
+In the South the great mass of Negroes have lived with their doors open,
+fireplaces have kept their homes ventilated, they could leave the matter
+of sanitation to fresh air and sunshine. And the Negro's very lack of
+training for such an environment as that of the North causes him untold
+suffering. To save fuel, and because he loves to be warm and sociable, he
+and his family and friends crowd into one close room, which is kept at
+fever temperature, not by a healthful fireplace, but by a tight stove.
+This, with the lack of proper sanitary conveniences, often becomes a
+hotbed of disease. Even in mild weather I have been in Negro houses in the
+North where the air was almost unendurably warm and impure.
+
+I know of nothing more tragic than the condition of the swarming newer
+Negro populations of Northern cities--the more tragic because the Negro is
+so cheerful and patient about it all. I looked into the statistics closely
+in several of them, and in no instance does the birth-rate keep pace with
+the death-rate. Even allowing for the fact that birth statistics are not
+very accurately kept in most cities it is probable that if it were not for
+the immigration constantly rolling upward from the South the Negro
+population in Northern cities would show a falling off. Consumption and
+the diseases of vice ravage their numbers. One of the ablest Negro
+physicians I have met, Dr. S. A. Furniss, who has practised among his
+people in Indianapolis for many years, has made a careful study of
+conditions. In a paper read before a medical association Dr. Furniss
+says:
+
+"The reports of the Indianapolis Board of Health show that for no month in
+the last ten years has the birth-rate among Negroes equalled the
+death-rate."
+
+Here are the statistics from 1901 to 1905:
+
+         Deaths    Births
+
+  1901    332       279
+  1902    329       280
+  1903    448       283
+  1904    399       327
+  1905    443       384
+
+
+_"Race Suicide" Among Negroes_
+
+From inquiries that I have made everywhere in the North there would seem,
+indeed, to be a tendency to "race suicide" among Negroes as among the old
+American white stock. Especially is this true among the better class
+Negroes. The ignorant Negro in Southern agricultural districts is
+exceedingly prolific, but his Northern city brother has comparatively few
+children. I have saved the record from personal inquiry of perhaps two
+hundred Northern Negro families of the better class. Many have no children
+at all, many have one or two, and the largest family I found (in Boston)
+was seven children. I found one Negro family in the South with twenty-one
+children! Industrialism, of course, is not favourable to a large
+birth-rate. All Northern cities show a notable surplus, according to the
+statistics, of Negro women over Negro men. Many of these are house
+servants and, like the large class of roving single men who do day labour
+on the streets and railroads, they are without family ties and have no
+children.
+
+Dr. Furniss finds that the deaths of Negroes from tuberculosis constitute
+over half the total deaths from that cause in the city of Indianapolis,
+whereas, in proportion to Negro population, they should constitute only
+one-eighth.
+
+His observations upon these startling facts are of great interest:
+
+"I believe the reason for these conditions is plain. First of all it is
+due to Negroes leaving the country and crowding into the larger cities,
+especially in the North, where they live in a climate totally different
+from that with which they have been familiar. They occupy unsanitary
+homes; they are frequently compelled to labour with insufficient food and
+clothing and without proper rest. Of necessity they follow the hardest
+and most exposed occupations in order to make a livelihood. I regret to
+say that intemperance and immorality play a part in making these figures
+what they are. They easily fall victim to the unusual vices of the city.
+
+"Another reason for increased mortality is improper medical attention. Not
+only among the ignorant but among the intelligent we find too much trust
+put in patent medicines; the belief, latent it is true in many cases, but
+still existing among the ignorant, in the hoodoo militates against the
+close following of the doctor's orders.
+
+"What shall we do about it?" asks Dr. Furniss. "We must urge those around
+us to more personal cleanliness, insist on a pure home life, and less
+dissipation and intemperance: to have fewer picnics and save more money
+for a rainy day. Tell the young people in the South not to come to
+Northern cities, but to go to the smaller towns of the West, where they
+can have a fair chance. Unless something is done to change existing
+conditions, to stop this movement to our Northern cities, to provide
+proper habitations and surroundings for those who are already here, it
+will be only a question of time until the problem of the American Negro
+will reach a solution not at all desirable from our point of view."
+
+Of course a doctor always sees the pathological side of life and his view
+is likely to be pessimistic. I saw much of the tragedy of the slum Negroes
+in the cities of the North, and yet many Negroes have been able to
+survive, many have learned how to live in towns and are making a success
+of their lives--as I shall show more particularly in the next chapter. It
+must not be forgotten that Negro families in Boston and Philadelphia
+(mostly mulattoes, it is true) as well as in Charleston, Savannah, and New
+Orleans, have lived and thrived under city conditions for many
+generations. Not a few Negroes in Indianapolis whose homes I visited are
+housed better than the average of white families.
+
+
+_Sickness Among Northern Negroes_
+
+Not only is the death-rate high in the North, but the Negro is hampered by
+sickness to a much greater degree than white people. Hospital records in
+Philadelphia show an excess of Negro patients over whites, according to
+population, of 125 per cent. About 5,000 Negroes passed through the
+hospitals of Philadelphia last year, averaging a confinement of three
+weeks each. Mr. Warner, in _American Charities_, makes sickness the chief
+cause of poverty among coloured people in New York, Boston, New Haven, and
+Baltimore. The percentage of sickness was twice or more as high as that of
+Germans, Irish, or white Americans.
+
+Such are the pains of readjustment which the Negroes are having to bear in
+the North.
+
+A question arises whether they can ever become a large factor of the
+population in Northern latitudes. They are certainly not holding their own
+in the country or in the smaller cities, and in the large cities they are
+increasing at present, not by the birth-rate, but by constant immigration.
+
+Hostile physical conditions of life in the North are not the only
+difficulties that the Negro has to meet. He thought he left prejudice
+behind in the South, but he finds it also showing its teeth here in the
+North. And, as in the South, a wide difference is apparent between the
+attitude of the best class of white men and the lower class.
+
+
+_How Northerners Regard the Negro_
+
+One of the first things that struck me when I began studying race
+conditions in the North was the position of the better class of white
+people with regard to the Negro. In the South every white man and woman
+has a vigorous and vital opinion on the race question. You have only to
+apply the match, the explosion is sure to follow. It is not so in the
+North. A few of the older people still preserve something of the war-time
+sentiment for the Negro; but the people one ordinarily meets don't know
+anything about the Negro, don't discuss him, and don't care about him. In
+Indianapolis, and indeed in other cities, the only white people I could
+find who were much interested in the Negroes were a few politicians,
+mostly of the lower sort, the charity workers and the police. But that, of
+course, is equally true of the Russian Jews or the Italians. One of the
+first white men with whom I talked (at Indianapolis) said to me with some
+impatience:
+
+"There are too many Negroes up here; they hurt the city."
+
+Another told me of the increasing presence of Negroes in the parks, on the
+streets, and in the street cars. He said:
+
+"I suppose sooner or later we shall have to adopt some of the restrictions
+of the South."
+
+He said it without heat, but as a sort of tentative conclusion, he hadn't
+fully made up his mind.
+
+
+_Race Prejudice in Boston_
+
+In Boston, of all places, I expected to find much of the old sentiment. It
+does exist among some of the older men and women, but I was surprised at
+the general attitude which I encountered. It was one of hesitation and
+withdrawal. Summed up, I think the feeling of the better class of people
+in Boston (and elsewhere in Northern cities) might be thus stated:
+
+We have helped the Negro to liberty; we have helped to educate him; we
+have encouraged him to stand on his own feet. Now let's see what he can do
+for himself. After all, he must survive or perish by his own efforts.
+
+In short, they have "cast the bantling on the rocks."
+
+Though they still preserve the form of encouraging the Negro, the spirit
+seems to have fled. Not long ago the Negroes of Boston organised a concert
+at which Theodore Drury, a coloured musician of really notable
+accomplishments, was to appear. Aristocratic white people were appealed to
+and bought a considerable number of tickets; but on the evening of the
+concert the large block of seats purchased by white people was
+conspicuously vacant. Northern white people would seem to be more
+interested in the distant Southern Negro than in the Negro at their doors.
+
+Before I take up the cruder and more violent expressions of prejudice on
+the part of the lower class of white men in the North I want to show the
+beginnings of cold-shouldering as it exists in varying degrees in Northern
+cities, and especially in Boston, the old centre of abolitionism.
+
+Superficially, at least, the Negro in Boston still enjoys the widest
+freedom; but after one gets down to real conditions he finds much
+complaint and alarm on the part of Negroes over growing restrictions.
+
+Boston exercises no discrimination on the street cars, on railroads, or in
+theatres or other places of public gathering. The schools are absolutely
+free. A coloured woman, Miss Maria Baldwin, is the principal of the
+Agassiz school, of Cambridge, attended by 600 white children. I heard her
+spoken of in the highest terms by the white people. Eight Negro teachers,
+chosen through the ordinary channels of competitive examination, teach in
+the public schools. There are Negro policemen, Negro firemen, Negro
+officeholders--fully as many of them as the proportion of Negro population
+in Boston would warrant. A Negro has served as commander of a white post
+of the Grand Army.
+
+
+_Prosperous Negroes in Boston_
+
+Several prosperous Negro business men have won a large white patronage.
+One of the chief merchant-tailoring stores of Boston, with a location on
+Washington Street which rents for $10,000 a year, is owned by J. H. Lewis.
+He has been in business many years. He employs both white and Negro
+workmen and clerks and he has some of the best white trade in Boston. Not
+long ago he went to North Carolina and bought the old plantation where his
+father was a slave, and he even talks of going there to spend his old age.
+Another Negro, Gilbert H. Harris, conducts the largest wig-making
+establishment in New England. I visited his place. He employs coloured
+girls and his trade is exclusively white. Another Negro has a school of
+pharmacy in which all the students are white; another, George Hamm, has a
+prosperous news and stationery store. A dentist, Dr. Grant, who has a
+reputation in his profession for a cement which he invented, was formerly
+in the faculty of the Harvard dentistry school and now enjoys a good
+practice among white people. The real estate dealer who has the most
+extensive business in Cambridge, T. H. Raymond, is a Negro. He employs
+white clerks and his business is chiefly with white people. Two or three
+Negro lawyers, Butler Wilson in particular, have many white clients. Dr.
+Courtney, a coloured physician from the Harvard Medical School, was for a
+time house physician of the Boston Lying-in-Hospital, in which the
+patients were practically all white, and has now a practice which includes
+both white and coloured patients. Dr. Courtney has also served on the
+School Board of Boston, an important elective office. The Negro poet,
+William Stanley Braithwaite, whose father took a degree at Oxford
+(England), is a member of the Authors' Club of Boston. His poems have
+appeared in various magazines, he has written a volume of poems, a
+standard anthology of Elizabethan verse, and he is about to publish a
+critical study of the works of William Dean Howells. Several of these men
+meet white people socially more or less.
+
+I give these examples to show the place occupied by the better and older
+class of Boston Negroes. Most of those I have mentioned are mulattoes,
+some very light. It shows what intelligent Negroes can do for themselves
+in a community where there has been little or no prejudice against them.
+
+But with crowding new immigration, and incited by all the other causes I
+have mentioned, these conditions are rapidly changing.
+
+A few years ago no hotel or restaurant in Boston refused Negro guests; now
+several hotels, restaurants, and especially confectionery stores, will not
+serve Negroes, even the best of them. The discrimination is not made
+openly, but a Negro who goes to such places is informed that there are no
+accommodations, or he is overlooked and otherwise slighted, so that he
+does not come again. A strong prejudice exists against renting flats and
+houses in many white neighbourhoods to coloured people. The Negro in
+Boston, as in other cities, is building up "quarters," which he occupies
+to the increasing exclusion of other classes of people. The great Negro
+centre is now in the South End, a locality once occupied by some of the
+most aristocratic families of Boston. And yet, as elsewhere, they struggle
+for the right to live where they please. A case in point is that of Mrs.
+Mattie A. McAdoo, an educated coloured woman, almost white, who has
+travelled abroad, and is a woman of refinement. She had a flat in an
+apartment house among white friends. One of the renters, a Southern woman,
+finding out that Mrs. McAdoo had coloured blood, objected. The landlord
+refused to cancel Mrs. McAdoo's lease and the white woman left, but the
+next year Mrs. McAdoo found that she could not re-rent her apartment. The
+landlord in this instance was the son of an abolitionist. He said to her:
+
+"You know I have no prejudice against coloured people. I will rent you an
+apartment in the building where I myself live if you want it, but I can't
+let you into my other buildings, because the tenants object."
+
+An attempt was even made a year or so ago by white women to force Miss
+Baldwin, the coloured school principal to whom I have referred, and who is
+almost one of the institutions of Boston, to leave Franklin House, where
+she was living. No one incident, perhaps, awakened Boston to the existence
+of race prejudice more sharply than this.
+
+
+_Churches Draw the Colour Line_
+
+One would think that the last harbour of prejudice would be the churches,
+and yet I found strange things in Boston. There are, and have been for a
+long time, numerous coloured churches in Boston, but many Negroes,
+especially those of the old families, have belonged to the white churches.
+In the last two years increased Negro attendance, especially at the
+Episcopal churches, has become a serious problem. A quarter of the
+congregation of the Church of the Ascension is coloured and the vicar has
+had to refuse any further coloured attendance at the Sunday School. St.
+Peter's and St. Philip's Churches in Cambridge have also been confronted
+with the colour problem.
+
+A proposition is now afoot to establish a Negro mission which shall
+gradually grow into a separate coloured Episcopal Church, a movement which
+causes much bitterness among the coloured people. I shall not soon forget
+the expression of hopelessness in the face of a prominent white church
+leader as he exclaimed:
+
+"What _shall_ we do with these Negroes! I for one would like to have them
+stay. I believe it is in accordance with the doctrine of Christ, but the
+proportion is growing so large that white people are drifting away from
+us. Strangers avoid us. Our organisation is expensive to keep up and the
+Negroes are able to contribute very little in proportion to their
+numbers. Think about it yourself: What shall we do? If we allow the
+Negroes to attend freely it means that eventually all the white people
+will leave and we shall have a Negro church whether we want it or not."
+
+In no other city are there any considerable number of Negroes who attend
+white churches--except a few Catholic churches. At New Orleans, I have
+seen white and coloured people worshipping together at the cathedrals.
+White ministers sometimes have spasms of conscience that they are not
+doing all they should for the Negro.
+
+Let me tell two significant incidents from Philadelphia. The worst Negro
+slum in that city is completely surrounded by business houses and the
+homes of wealthy white people. Within a few blocks of it stand several of
+the most aristocratic churches of Philadelphia. Miss Bartholomew conducts
+a neighbourhood settlement in the very centre of this social bog. Twice
+during the many years she has been there white ministers have ventured
+down from their churches. One of them said he had been troubled by the
+growing masses of ignorant coloured people.
+
+"Can't I do something to help?"
+
+Miss Bartholomew was greatly pleased and cheered.
+
+"Of course you can," she said heartily. "We're trying to keep some of the
+Negro children off the streets. There is plenty of opportunity for helping
+with our boys' and girls' clubs and classes."
+
+"Oh, I didn't mean that," said the minister; "I thought, in cases of death
+in their families, we might offer to read the burial service."
+
+And he went away and did not see the humour of it!
+
+Another minister made a similar proposition: he wanted to establish a
+Sunday School for coloured people. He asked Miss Bartholomew anxiously
+where he could hold it.
+
+"Why not in your church in the afternoon?"
+
+"Why, we couldn't do that!" he exclaimed; "we should have to air all the
+cushions afterward!"
+
+But to return to Boston. A proposition was recently made to organise for
+coloured people a separate Y. M. C. A., but the white members voted
+against any such discrimination. Yet a coloured man said to me
+hopelessly:
+
+"It's only delayed. Next time we shall be put off with a separate
+institution."
+
+
+_Colour Line at Harvard_
+
+Even at Harvard where the Negro has always enjoyed exceptional
+opportunities, conditions are undergoing a marked change. A few years ago
+a large class of white students voluntarily chose a brilliant Negro
+student, R. C. Bruce, as valedictorian. But last year a Negro baseball
+player was the cause of so much discussion and embarrassment to the
+athletic association that there will probably never be another coloured
+boy on the university teams. The line has already been drawn, indeed, in
+the medical department. Although a coloured doctor only a few years ago
+was house physician at the Boston Lying-in-Hospital, coloured students are
+no longer admitted to that institution. One of them, Dr. Welker (an Iowa
+coloured man), cannot secure his degree because he hasn't had six
+obstetrical cases, and he can't get the six cases because he isn't
+admitted with his white classmates to the Lying-in-Hospital. It is a
+curious fact that not only the white patients but some Negro patients
+object to the coloured doctors. In a recent address which has awakened
+much sharp comment among Boston Negroes, President Eliot of Harvard
+indicated his sympathy with the general policy of separate education in
+the South by remarking that if Negro students were in the majority at
+Harvard, or formed a large proportion of the total number, some separation
+of the races might follow.
+
+And this feeling is growing, notwithstanding the fact that no Negro
+student has ever disgraced Harvard and that no students are more orderly
+or law-abiding than the Negroes. On the other hand, Negro students have
+frequently made distinguished records for scholarship: last year one of
+them, Alain Leroy Locke, who took the course in three years, won the first
+of the three Bowdoin prizes (the most important bestowed at Harvard) for a
+literary essay, and passed for his degree with a _magna cum laude_. Since
+then he has been accepted, after a brilliant competitive examination, for
+the Rhodes scholarship from the state of Pennsylvania.
+
+Such feeling as that which is developing in the North comes hard, indeed,
+upon the intelligent, educated, ambitious Negro--especially if he happens
+to have, as a large proportion of these Negroes do have, no little white
+blood. Many coloured people in Boston are so white that they cannot be
+told from white people, yet they are classed as Negroes.
+
+Accompanying this change of attitude, this hesitation and withdrawal of
+the better class of white men, one finds crude sporadic outbreaks on the
+part of the rougher element of white men--who have merely a different way
+of expressing themselves.
+
+
+_White Gangs Attack Negroes_
+
+In Indianapolis the Negro comes in contact with the "bungaloo gangs,"
+crowds of rough and lawless white boys who set upon Negroes and beat them
+frightfully, often wholly without provocation. Although no law prevents
+Negroes from entering any park in Indianapolis, they are practically
+excluded from at least one of them by the danger of being assaulted by
+these gangs.
+
+The street cars are free in all Northern cities, but the Negro
+nevertheless sometimes finds it dangerous to ride with white people.
+Professor R. R. Wright, Jr., himself a Negro, and an acute observer of
+Negro conditions, tells this personal experience:
+
+"I came out on the car from the University of Pennsylvania one evening in
+May about eight o'clock. Just as the car turned off Twenty-seventh to
+Lombard Street, a crowd of about one hundred little white boys from six to
+about fourteen years of age attacked it. The car was crowded, but there
+were only about a dozen Negroes on it, about half of them women. The mob
+of boys got control of the car by pulling off the trolley. They threw
+stones into the car, and finally some of them boarded the car and began to
+beat the Negroes with sticks, shouting as they did so, 'Kill the nigger!'
+'Lynch 'em!' 'Hit that nigger!' etc. This all happened in Philadelphia.
+Doubtless these urchins had been reading in the daily papers the cry 'Kill
+the Negro!' and they were trying to carry out the injunction."
+
+While I was in Indianapolis a clash of enough importance to be reported in
+the newspapers occurred between the races on a street car; and in New
+York, in the San Juan Hill district, one Sunday evening I saw an incident
+which illustrates the almost instinctive race antagonism which exists in
+Northern cities. The street was crowded. Several Negro boys were playing
+on the pavement. Stones were thrown. Instantly several white boys sided
+together and began to advance on the Negroes. In less time than it takes
+to tell it thirty or forty white boys and young men were chasing the
+Negroes down the street. At the next corner the Negroes were joined by
+dozens of their own race. Stones and sticks began to fly everywhere, and
+if it hadn't been for the prompt action of two policemen there would have
+been a riot similar to those which have occurred not once but many times
+in New York City during the past two years. Of course these instances are
+exceptional, but none the less significant.
+
+
+_Bumptiousness as a Cause of Hatred_
+
+Some of the disturbances grow out of a characteristic of a certain sort of
+Negro, the expression of which seems to stir the deepest animosity in the
+city white boy. And that is the bumptiousness, the airiness, of the
+half-ignorant young Negro, who, feeling that he has rights, wants to be
+occupied constantly in using them. He mistakes liberty for licence.
+Although few in numbers among thousands of quiet coloured people, he makes
+a large showing. In the South they call him the "smart Negro," and an
+almost irresistible instinct exists among white boys of a certain class to
+take him down. I remember walking in Indianapolis with an educated
+Northern white man. We met a young Negro immaculately dressed; his
+hat-band was blue and white; his shoes were patent leather with white
+tops; he wore a flowered waistcoat, and his tread as he walked was
+something to see.
+
+"Do you know," said my companion, "I never see that young fellow without
+wanting to step up and knock his head off. I know something about him. He
+is absolutely worthless: he does no work, but lives on the wages of a
+hard-working coloured woman and spends all he can get on his clothes. I
+know the instinct is childish, but I am just telling you how I feel. I'm
+not sure it is racial prejudice; I presume I should feel much the same way
+toward a Frenchman if he did the same thing. And somehow I can't help
+believing that a good thrashing would improve that boy's character."
+
+I'm telling this incident just as it happened, to throw a side-light on
+one of the manifestations of the growing prejudice. One more illustration:
+Miss Eaton conducts a social settlement for Negroes in Boston. One day a
+teacher said to one of the little Negro boys in her class:
+
+"Please pick up my handkerchief."
+
+The boy did not stir; she again requested him to pick up the handkerchief;
+then she asked him why he refused.
+
+"The days of slavery are over," he said.
+
+Now, this spirit is not common, but it exists, and it injures the Negro
+people out of all proportion to its real seriousness.
+
+In certain towns in Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, on the borders of the old
+South, the feeling has reached a stage still more acute. At Springfield,
+O., two race riots have occurred, in the first of which a Negro was
+lynched and in the second many Negroes were driven out of town and a row
+of coloured tenements was burned. There are counties and towns where no
+Negro is permitted to stop over night. At Syracuse, O., Lawrenceburg,
+Ellwood, and Salem, Ind., for example, Negroes have not been permitted to
+live for years. If a Negro appears he is warned of conditions, and if he
+does not leave immediately, he is visited by a crowd of boys and men and
+forced to leave. A farmer who lives within a few miles of Indianapolis
+told me of a meeting, held only a short time ago by thirty-five farmers in
+his neighbourhood, in which an agreement was passed to hire no Negroes,
+nor to permit Negroes to live anywhere in the region.
+
+
+_Story of a Northern Race Riot_
+
+I stopped at Greensburg, Ind., on my way East and found there a remarkable
+illustration showing just how feeling arises in the North. Greensburg is a
+comfortable, well-to-do, conservative, church-going old town in eastern
+Indiana. Many of the residents are retired farmers. The population of
+7,000 is mostly of pure American stock, largely of Northern origin. And
+yet last April this quiet old town was shaken by a race riot. I made
+careful inquiries as to conditions there and I was amazed to discover how
+closely this small disturbance paralleled the greater riot at Atlanta
+which I have already written about. Negroes had lived in Greensburg for
+many years, a group of self-respecting, decent, prosperous men and women.
+They were known to and highly regarded by their white neighbours. One of
+them, named Brooks, owned a barber shop and was janitor for the
+Presbyterian Church and for one of the banks. Another, George W. Edwards,
+whom I met, has been for years an employee in the Garland Mills.
+
+"There isn't a better citizen in town than Edwards," a white lawyer told
+me; and I heard the same thing from other white men.
+
+Another Negro, George Guess, is an engineer in the electric light plant.
+Of the local Negro boys, Robert Lewis, the first coloured graduate of the
+local schools, is now teaching engineering at Hampton Institute. Oscar
+Langston, another Negro boy, is a dentist in Indianapolis. These and other
+Negroes live in good homes, support a church and have a respectable
+society of their own. I found just such a body of good coloured people in
+Atlanta.
+
+Well, progress brought an electric railroad to Greensburg. To work on this
+and on improvements made by the railroad hundreds of labourers were
+required. And they were Negroes of the ignorant, wandering, unlooked-after
+sort so common in similar occupations in the South. When the work was
+finished a considerable number of them remained in Greensburg. Now
+Greensburg, like other American cities, was governed by a mayor who was a
+"good fellow," and who depended on two influences to elect him: party
+loyalty and the saloon vote. He allowed a Negro dive to exist in one part
+of the town, where the idle and worthless Negroes congregated, where a
+murder was committed about a year before the riot. Exactly like Decatur
+Street in Atlanta! A rotten spot always causes trouble sooner or later.
+Good citizens protested and objected--to no purpose. They even organised a
+Good Citizenship League, the purpose of which was to secure a better
+enforcement of law. But the saloon interests were strong and wanted to
+sell whiskey and beer to the Negroes, and the city authorities were
+complaisant.
+
+"Who cares," one of them asked, "about a few worthless Negroes?"
+
+But in a democracy people _must_ care for one another.
+
+
+_A Negro Crime in the North_
+
+One day last April a Negro labourer who had been working for Mrs. Sefton,
+a highly respected widow who lived alone, appeared in the house in broad
+daylight and criminally assaulted her. His name was John Green, a Kentucky
+Negro; he was not only ignorant, but half-witted; he had already committed
+a burglary and had not been punished. He was easily caught, convicted, and
+sentenced. But the town was angry. On April 30th a crowd of men and boys
+gathered, beat two or three Negroes, and drove many out of town. They
+never thought of mobbing the city officials who had allowed the Negro
+dives to exist. And, as in Atlanta, the decent Negroes suffered with the
+criminals: a crowd broke windows in the home of George Edwards, and
+threatened other respectable coloured men. As in Atlanta, the better white
+people were horrified and scandalised; but, as in Atlanta, the white men
+who made up the mob went unpunished (though Atlanta did mildly discipline
+a few rioters). As in Atlanta, the newspaper reports that were sent out
+made no distinction between the different sorts of Negroes. The entire
+Negro population of Greensburg was blamed for the crime of a single
+ignorant and neglected man. I have several different newspaper reports of
+the affair from outside papers, and nearly all indicate in the headlines
+that all the Negroes in Greensburg were concerned in the riot and were
+driven out of town, which was not, of course, true. As a matter of fact
+the respectable Negroes are still living in Greensburg on friendly terms
+with the white people.
+
+
+_Human Nature North and South_
+
+In fact, the more I see of conditions North and South, the more I see that
+human nature north of Mason and Dixon's line is not different from human
+nature south of the line.
+
+Different degrees of prejudice, it is true, are apparent in the two
+sections. In the South the social and political prejudice the natural
+result of the memories of slavery and reconstruction, of the greater mass
+of Negro population and of the backward economic development, is stronger.
+In the North, on the other hand, comparatively little social and political
+prejudice is apparent; but the Negro has a hard fight to get anything but
+the most subservient place in the economic machine.
+
+Over and over again, while I was in the South, I heard remarks like this:
+
+"Down here we make the Negro keep his place socially, but in the North you
+won't let him work."
+
+This leads me to one of the most important phases of race-relationship in
+the North--that is, the economic struggle of the Negro, suddenly thrown,
+as he has been, into the swift-moving, competitive conditions of Northern
+cities. Does he, or can he, survive? Do the masses of Negroes now coming
+North realise their ambitions? Is it true that the North will not let the
+Negro work?
+
+These questions must, perforce, be discussed in another chapter.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+THE NEGROES' STRUGGLE FOR SURVIVAL IN NORTHERN CITIES
+
+
+One of the questions I asked of Negroes whom I met both North and South
+was this:
+
+"What is your chief cause of complaint?"
+
+In the South the first answer nearly always referred to the Jim Crow cars
+or the Jim Crow railroad stations; after that, the complaint was of
+political disfranchisement, the difficulty of getting justice in the
+courts, the lack of good school facilities, and in some localities, of the
+danger of actual physical violence.
+
+But in the North the first answer invariably referred to working
+conditions.
+
+"The Negro isn't given a fair opportunity to get employment. He is
+discriminated against because he is coloured."
+
+Professor Kelly Miller, one of the acutest of Negro writers, has said:
+
+"The Negro (in the North) is compelled to loiter around the edges of
+industry."
+
+Southern white men are fond of meeting Northern criticism of Southern
+treatment of the Negro with the response:
+
+"But the North closes the doors of industrial opportunity to the Negro."
+
+And yet, in spite of this complaint of conditions in the North, one who
+looks Southward can almost see the army of Negroes gathering from out of
+the cities, villages and farms, bringing nothing with them but a buoyant
+hope in a distant freedom, but tramping always Northward. And they come
+not alone from the old South, but from the West Indies, where the coloured
+population looks wistfully toward the heralded opportunities of America. A
+few are even coming from South Africa and South America. In New York,
+Boston, and Philadelphia, thousands of such foreign Negroes know nothing
+of America traditions; some of them do not even speak the English
+language.
+
+And why do they come if their difficulties are so great? Is it true that
+there is no chance for them in industry? Are they better or worse off in
+the North than in the South?
+
+In the first place, in most of the smaller Northern cities where the Negro
+population is not increasing rapidly, discrimination is hardly noticeable.
+Negroes enter the trades, find places in the shops, or even follow
+competitive business callings and still maintain friendly relationships
+with the white people.
+
+But the small towns are not typical of the new race conditions in the
+North; the situation in the greater centres of population where Negro
+immigration is increasing largely, is decidedly different.
+
+As I travelled in the North, I heard many stories of the difficulties
+which the coloured man had to meet in getting employment. Of course, as a
+Negro said to me, "there are always places for the coloured man at the
+bottom." He can always get work at unskilled manual labour, or personal or
+domestic service--in other words, at menial employment. He has had that in
+plenty in the South. But what he seeks as he becomes educated is an
+opportunity for better grades of employment. He wants to rise.
+
+It is not, then, his complaint that he cannot get work in the North, but
+that he is limited in his opportunities to rise, to get positions which
+his capabilities (if it were not for his colour) would entitle him to. He
+is looking for a place where he will be judged at his worth as a man, not
+as a Negro: this he came to the North to find, and he meets difficulties
+of which he had not dreamed in the South.
+
+At Indianapolis I found a great discussion going on over what to do with
+the large number of idle young coloured people, some of whom had been
+through the public schools, but who could not, apparently, find any work
+to do. As an able coloured man said to me: "What shall we do? Here are our
+young people educated in the schools, capable of doing good work in many
+occupations where skill and intelligence are required--and yet with few
+opportunities opening for them. They don't want to dig ditches or become
+porters or valets any more than intelligent white boys: they are human.
+The result is that some of them drop back into idle discouragement--or
+worse."
+
+In New York I had a talk with William L. Bulkley, the coloured principal
+of Public School No. 80, attended chiefly by coloured children, who told
+me of the great difficulties and discouragements which confronted the
+Negro boy who wanted to earn his living. He relates this story:
+
+"I received a communication the other day from an electric company stating
+that they could use some bright, clean, industrious boys in their
+business, starting them at so much a week and aiding them to learn the
+business. I suspected that they did not comprehend coloured boys under the
+generic term 'boys,' but thought to try. So I wrote asking if they would
+give employment to a coloured boy who could answer to the qualifications
+stated. The next mail brought the expected reply that no coloured boy,
+however promising, was wanted. I heaved a sigh and went on.
+
+"The saddest thing that faces me in my work is the small opportunity for a
+coloured boy or girl to find proper employment. A boy comes to my office
+and asks for his working papers. He may be well up in the school, possibly
+with graduation only a few months off. I question him somewhat as follows:
+'Well, my boy, you want to go to work, do you? What are you going to do?'
+'I am going to be a door-boy, sir.' 'Well, you will get $2.50 or $3 a
+week, but after a while that will not be enough; what then?' After a
+moment's pause he will reply: 'I should like to be an office boy.' 'Well,
+what next?' A moment's silence, and, 'I should try to get a position as
+bell-boy.' 'Well, then, what next?' A rather contemplative mood, and then,
+'I should like to climb to the position of head bell-boy.' He has now
+arrived at the top; further than this he sees no hope. He must face the
+bald fact that he must enter business as a boy and wind up as a boy."
+
+And yet in spite of these difficulties, Negroes come North every year in
+increasing numbers, they find living expensive, they suffer an unusual
+amount of sickness and death, they meet more prejudice than they expected
+to meet, and yet they keep coming. Much as Negroes complain of the
+hardship of Northern conditions, and though they are sometimes pitifully
+homesick for the old life in the South, I have yet to find one who wanted
+to go back--unless he had accumulated enough money to buy land.
+
+"Why do they come?" I asked a Negro minister in Philadelphia.
+
+"Well, they're treated more like men up here in the North," he said,
+"that's the secret of it. There's prejudice here, too, but the colour line
+isn't drawn in their faces at every turn as it is in the South. It all
+gets back to a question of manhood."
+
+In the North prejudice is more purely economic than it is in the South--an
+incident of industrial competition.
+
+In the South the Negro still has the field of manual labour largely to
+himself, he is unsharpened by competition; but when he reaches the
+Northern city, he not only finds the work different and more highly
+organised and specialised, but he finds that he must meet the fierce
+competition of half a dozen eager, struggling, ambitious groups of
+foreigners, who are willing and able to work long hours at low pay in
+order to get a foothold. He has to meet often for the first time the
+Italian, the Russian Jew, the Slav, to say nothing of the white American
+labourer. He finds the pace set by competitive industry immensely harder
+than in most parts of the South. No life in the world, perhaps, requires
+as much in brain and muscle of all classes of men as that of the vast
+Northern cities in the United States. I have talked with many coloured
+workmen and I am convinced that not a few of them fail, not because of
+their colour, nor because they are lazy (Negroes in the North are of the
+most part hard workers--they _must_ be, else they starve or freeze), but
+for simple lack of speed and skill; they haven't learned to keep the pace
+set by the white man.
+
+A contractor in New York who employs large numbers of men, said to me:
+
+"It isn't colour so much as plain efficiency. I haven't any sentiment in
+the matter at all. It's business. As a general rule the ordinary coloured
+man can't do as much work nor do it as well as the ordinary white man. The
+result, is, I don't take coloured men when I can get white men. Yet I have
+several coloured men who have been with me for years, and I wouldn't part
+with them for any white man I know. In the same way I would rather employ
+Italians than Russian Jews: they're stronger workers."
+
+Not unnaturally the Negro charges these competitive difficulties which he
+has to meet in the North (as he has been accustomed to do in the South) to
+the white man; he calls it colour prejudice, when as a matter of fact, it
+is often only the cold businesslike requirement of an industrial life
+which demands tremendous efficiency, which in many lines of activity has
+little more feeling than a machine, that is willing to use Italians, or
+Japanese, or Chinese, or Negroes, or Hindus, or any other people on the
+face of the earth. On the other hand, no doubt exists that many labour
+unions, especially in the skilled trades, are hostile to Negroes, even
+though they may have no rules against their admission. I heard the
+experiences of an expert Negro locomotive engineer named Burns who had a
+run out of Indianapolis to the South. Though he was much in favour with
+the company, and indeed with many trainmen who knew him personally, the
+general feeling was so strong that by soaping the tracks, injuring his
+engine, and in other ways making his work difficult and dangerous, he was
+finally forced to abandon his run. If there were space I could give many
+accounts of strikes against the employment of Negroes. The feeling among
+union labour men has undoubtedly been growing more intense in the last few
+years owing to the common use of Negroes as strike breakers. With a few
+thousand Negroes the employers broke the great stockyards strike in
+Chicago in 1904, and the teamsters' strike in the following year. Colour
+prejudice is used like any other weapon for strengthening the monopoly of
+the labour union. I know several unions which are practically monopolistic
+corporations into which any outsider, white, yellow, or black, penetrates
+with the greatest difficulty. Such closely organised unions keep the
+Negroes out in the South exactly as they do in the North. A Negro
+tile-setter, steam-fitter or plumber can no more get into a union in
+Atlanta than in New York. Of course these unions, like any other closely
+organised group of men, employ every weapon to further their cause. They
+use prejudice as a competitive fighting weapon, they seize upon the colour
+of the Negro, or the pig-tail and curious habits of the Chinaman, or
+the low-living standard of the Hindu, to fight competition and protect
+them in their labour monopoly.
+
+
+[Illustration: WARD IN A NEGRO HOSPITAL AT PHILADELPHIA]
+
+[Illustration: STUDIO OF A NEGRO SCULPTRESS]
+
+
+And yet, although I expected to find the Negro wholly ostracised by union
+labour, I discovered that where the Negro becomes numerous or skilful
+enough, he, like the Italian or the Russian Jew, begins to force his way
+into the unions. The very first Negro carpenter I chanced to meet in the
+North (from whom I had expected a complaint of discrimination) said to me:
+
+"I'm all right. I'm a member of the union and get union wages."
+
+And I found after inquiry that there are a few Negroes in most of the
+unions of skilled workers, carpenters, masons, iron-workers, even in the
+exclusive typographical union and in the railroad organisations--a few
+here and there, mostly mulattoes. They have got in just as the Italians
+get in, not because they are wanted, or because they are liked, but
+because by being prepared, skilled, and energetic, the unions have had to
+take them in as a matter of self-protection. In the South the Negro is
+more readily accepted as a carpenter, blacksmith, or bricklayer than in
+the North not because he is more highly regarded but because (unlike the
+North) the South has almost no other labour supply.
+
+In several great industries North and South, indeed, the Negro is as much
+a part of labour unionism as the white man. Thousands of Negroes are
+members of the United Mine-Workers, John Mitchell's great organisation,
+and they stand on an exact industrial equality with the whites. Other
+thousands are in the cigar-makers' union, where, by virtue of economic
+pressure, they have forced recognition.
+
+Indeed, in the North, in spite of the complaint of discrimination, I found
+Negroes working and making a good living in all sorts of industries--union
+or no union. A considerable number of Negro firemen have good positions in
+New York, a contracting Negro plumber in Indianapolis who uses coloured
+help has been able to maintain himself, not only against white
+competition, but against the opposition of organised white labour. I know
+of Negro paper-hangers and painters, not union men, but making a living at
+their trade and gradually getting hold. A good many Negro printers,
+pressmen, and the like are now found in Negro offices (over 200
+newspapers and magazines are published by Negroes in this country) who
+are getting their training. I know of several girls (all mulattoes) who
+occupy responsible positions in offices in New York and Chicago. Not a few
+coloured nurses, seamstresses and milliners have found places in the life
+of the North which they seem capable of holding. It is not easy for them
+to make progress: each coloured man who takes a step ahead must prove, for
+his race, that a coloured man can after all, do his special work as well
+as a white man. The presumption is always against him.
+
+Here is a little newspaper account of a successful skilled pattern maker
+in Chicago:
+
+     A few days ago a large box containing twenty-one large and small
+     patterns was shipped to the Jamestown Exhibition by the McGuire Car
+     Company of Paris, Illinois, one of the largest car companies in the
+     West. Before the box was shipped scores of newspaper men, engineers
+     and business men were permitted to inspect what is said to be the
+     most complete and most valuable exhibit of the kind ever sent to an
+     exhibition in this country. The contents of this precious box is
+     entirely the work of a coloured man named George A. Harrison. Mr.
+     Harrison is one of the highest salaried men on the pay-roll of the
+     company. He makes all the patterns for all of the steel, brass, and
+     iron castings for every kind of car made by this company. He
+     graduated at the head of his class of sixty members in a pattern
+     making establishment in Chicago.
+
+Cases of this sort are exceptional among the vast masses of untrained
+Negro population in the cities, and yet it shows what can be done--and the
+very possibility of such advancement encourages Negroes to come North.
+
+
+_Trades Which Negroes Dominate_
+
+So much for the higher branches of industry. In some of the less skilled
+occupations, on the other hand, the Negro is not only getting hold, but
+actually becoming dominant.
+
+The asphalt workers are nearly all coloured. In New York they have a
+strong union and although part of the membership is white (chiefly
+Italian), the chosen representative who sits with the Central Federated
+Union of the city is James H. Wallace, a coloured man.
+
+In Indianapolis I found that the hod-carriers' industry was almost wholly
+in the hands of Negroes who have a strong union, with a large strike fund
+put aside. So successful have they been that they now propose erecting a
+building of their own as a club house. Although there are white men in the
+union the officers are all coloured. Not long ago some of the coloured
+members began to "rush" a white man at his work. It was reported to the
+union and hotly discussed. The coloured members finally decided that there
+should be no discrimination against white men, and fined one of the Negro
+offenders for his conduct. He couldn't pay and had to leave town.
+
+Where the Negro workman gets a foothold in the North, he often does very
+well indeed. R. R. Wright, Jr., calls attention to conditions in the
+Midvale Steel Company, which is one of the largest, if not the largest
+employer of Negro labour in Philadelphia. Charles J. Harrah, the president
+of this company, said before the United States Industrial Commission in
+1900:
+
+"We have fully 800 or 1,000 coloured men. The balance are Americans, Irish
+and Germans. The coloured labour we have is excellent.... They are lusty
+fellows; we have some with shoulders twice as broad as mine, and with
+chests twice as deep as mine. The men come up here ignorant and untutored.
+We teach them the benefit of discipline. We teach the coloured man the
+benefit of thrift, and coax him to open a bank account; and he generally
+does it, and in a short time has money in it, and nothing can stop him
+from adding money to that bank account. We have no coloured men who
+drink."
+
+Asked as to the friction between the white and black workmen, Mr. Harrah
+replied:
+
+"Not a bit of it. They work cheek by jowl with Irish, and when the
+Irishman has a festivity at home he has coloured men invited. We did it
+with trepidation. We introduced one man at first to sweep up the yard, and
+we noticed the Irish and Germans looked at him askance. Then we put in
+another. Then we put them in the boiler-room, and then we got them in the
+open hearth and in the forge, and gradually we got them everywhere. They
+are intelligent and docile, and when they come in as labourers, unskilled,
+they gradually become skilled, and in the course of time we will make
+excellent foremen out of them."
+
+Mr. Harrah added that there was absolutely no difference in wages of
+Negroes and whites in the same grade of work.
+
+I have pointed out especially in my last article how and where prejudice
+was growing in Northern cities, as it certainly is. On the other hand,
+where one gets down under the surface there are to be found many
+counteracting influences--those quiet constructive forces, which, not
+being sensational or threatening, attract too little attention. Northern
+people are able to help Negroes where Southern people are deterred by the
+intensity of social prejudice: for in most places in the South the
+teaching of Negroes still means social ostracism.
+
+
+_Help for Negroes in the North_
+
+Settlement work, in one form or another, has been instituted in most
+Northern cities, centres of enlightenment and hope. I have visited a
+number of these settlements and have seen their work. They are doing much,
+especially in giving a moral tone to a slum community: they help to keep
+the children off the streets by means of clubs and classes; they open the
+avenues of sympathy between the busy upper world and the struggling lower
+world. Such is the work of Miss Bartholomew, Miss Hancock, Miss Wharton in
+Philadelphia, Miss Eaton in Boston, Mrs. Celia Parker Woolley in Chicago,
+Miss Ovington in New York. Miss Hancock, a busy, hopeful Quaker woman, has
+a "broom squad" of Negro boys which makes a regular business of sweeping
+several of the streets in the very worst slum district in Philadelphia; it
+gives them employment and it teaches them civic responsibility and pride.
+
+But perhaps I can give the best idea of these movements by telling of the
+different forms of work in a single city--Indianapolis. In the first
+place, the Flanner Guild, projected by Mr. Flanner, a white man, is
+maintained largely by white contributions, but it is controlled wholly by
+coloured people. Millinery classes were opened for girls (of which there
+are now many practising graduates, eight of whom are giving lessons in
+Indianapolis and in other cities), and there are clubs and social
+gatherings of all sorts: it has been, indeed, a helpful social centre of
+influence.
+
+
+[Illustration: A NEGRO MAGAZINE EDITOR'S OFFICE IN PHILADELPHIA]
+
+[Illustration: A "BROOM SQUAD" OF NEGRO BOYS
+
+Which makes a regular business of sweeping several of the streets in the
+very worst slum district in Philadelphia; it gives them employment and it
+teaches them civic responsibility and pride. Miss Hancock at the right.]
+
+
+
+In the South, as I have shown, Negroes receive much off-hand individual
+charity--food from the kitchen, gifts of old clothes and money; but it is
+largely personal and unorganised. In the North there is comparatively
+little indiscriminate giving, but an effort to reach and help Negro
+families by making them help themselves. One of the difficulties of the
+Negro is improvidence; but once given a start on the road to money saving,
+it is often astonishing to see him try to live up to cash in the bank. The
+Charity Organisation Society of Indianapolis has long maintained a dime
+savings and loan association which employs six women collectors, one
+coloured, who visit hundreds of homes every week. These form indeed a
+corps of friendly visitors, the work of collecting the savings furnishing
+them an opportunity of getting into the homes and so winning the
+confidence of the people that they can help them in many ways. Last year
+over 6,000 depositors were registered in the association, two-thirds of
+whom were Negroes, and over $25,000 was on deposit. Not less than
+twenty-five cents a week is accepted, but many Negroes save much more. As
+soon as they get into the habit of saving they usually transfer their
+accounts to the savings bank--and once with a bank book, they are on the
+road to genuine improvement.
+
+Another work of great value which Mr. Grout of the Charity Organisation
+Society has organised is vacant lot cultivation. By securing the use of
+vacant land in and around the city many Negro families have been
+encouraged to make gardens, thus furnishing healthful and self-respecting
+occupation for the old or very young members of many Negro families, who
+otherwise might become public charges. The plots are ploughed and seeds
+are provided: the Negroes do their own work and take the crop. The work is
+supported by voluntary contributions from white people. A number of Negro
+women have raised enough vegetables not only to supply themselves but have
+had some to sell.
+
+Negro children are closely looked after in Indianapolis. Compulsory
+education applies equally to both races. Every family thus comes also
+under the more or less active attention of the school authorities. An
+officer, Miss Sarah Colton Smith, is employed exclusively to visit and
+keep watch of the Negro children. Her work also is largely that of the
+friendly visitor, helping the various overworked mothers with
+suggestions, taking an interest in Negro organisations. For example, the
+Coloured Woman's Club, working with Miss Smith, has organised a day
+nursery which cares for some of the very young children of working Negro
+women, thereby allowing the older ones to go to school. Indianapolis
+(which has one of the most progressive and intelligent school systems,
+wholly non-political, in the country) is also thoroughly alive to the
+necessity of industrial education--for both races. Significantly enough,
+the Negro schools were first fitted with industrial departments, so that
+for a time the cost of education per capita in Indianapolis was higher for
+coloured children than for white. When I expressed my surprise at this
+unusual condition I was told:
+
+"Of course, the immediate need of the Negro was greater."
+
+Night schools are also held in the public school buildings from November
+to April--two schools for Negroes especially, where coloured people of all
+ages are at liberty to attend. It is a remarkable sight: Negroes fifty and
+sixty years old mingle there with mere children. The girls are taught
+sewing and cooking, the men carpentry--besides the ordinary branches. One
+old man from the South was found crying with joy over his ability to write
+his name. For the very young children, Negro equally with white, there is
+Mrs. Eliza Blaker's Kindergarten. For the aged coloured women a home is
+now supported principally by the coloured people themselves.
+
+
+_The Morals of Negro Women_
+
+I saw a good deal of these various lines of activity and talked with the
+people who come close in touch with the struggling masses of the Negro
+poor. I wish I had room to tell some of the stories I heard: the black
+masses of poverty, disease, hopeless ignorance, and yet everywhere shot
+through with hopeful tendencies and individual uplift and success. In
+Indianapolis, as in other Northern cities, I heard much to the credit of
+the Negro women.
+
+"If the Negro is saved here in the North," Miss Smith told me, "it will be
+due to the women."
+
+They gave me many illustrations showing how hard the Negro women
+worked--taking in washing or going out every day to work, raising their
+families, keeping the home, sometimes supporting worthless husbands.
+
+"A Negro woman of the lower class," one visitor said to me, "rarely
+expects her husband to support her. She takes the whole burden herself."
+
+And the women, so the loan association visitors told me, are the chief
+savers: they are the ones who get and keep the bank accounts. I have heard
+a great deal South and North about the immorality of Negro women. Much
+immorality no doubt exists, but no honest observer can go into any of the
+crowded coloured communities of Northern cities and study the life without
+coming away with a new respect for the Negro women.
+
+Another hopeful work in Indianapolis is the juvenile court. A boy who
+commits a crime is not immediately cast off to become a more desperate
+criminal and ultimately to take his revenge upon the society which
+neglected him. He comes into a specially organised court, where he meets
+not violence, but friendliness and encouragement. Mrs. Helen W. Rogers is
+at the head of the probation work in Indianapolis, and she has under her
+supervision a large corps of voluntary probation officers, thirty of whom
+are coloured men and women--the best in town. These coloured probation
+officers have an organisation of which George W. Cable, who is the foreman
+of the distributing department of the Indianapolis post-office, is the
+chairman. A Negro boy charged with an offence is turned over to one of
+these leading Negro men or women, required to report regularly, and helped
+until he gets on his feet again. Thus far the system has worked with great
+success. Boys whose offences are too serious for probation are sent, not
+to a jail or chain-gang, where they become habitual criminals, but to a
+reform school, where they are taught regular habits of work.
+
+
+_Why the Negro Often Fails_
+
+As I continued my inquiries I found that the leading coloured men in most
+cities, though they might be ever so discouraged over the condition of the
+ignorant, reckless masses of their people, were awakening to the fact
+that the Negro's difficulty in the North was not all racial, not all due
+to mere colour prejudice, but also in large measure to lack of training,
+lack of aggressiveness and efficiency, lack of organisation. In New York a
+"Committee for Improving the Industrial Condition of Negroes" has been
+formed. It is composed of both white and coloured men, and the secretary
+is S. R. Scottron, an able coloured man. The object of the committee is to
+study the condition of the Negroes in New York City, find out the causes
+of idleness, and try to help the Negro to better employment.
+
+This committee has experienced difficulty not so much in finding openings
+for Negroes, as in getting reliable Negroes to fill them. Boys and girls,
+though educated in the public schools, come out without knowing how to do
+anything that will earn them a living. Although the advantages of Cooper
+Institute and other industrial training schools are open to Negroes, they
+have been little used, either from lack of knowledge of the opportunity,
+or because the Negroes preferred the regular literary courses of the
+schools. So many unskilled and untrained Negroes, both old and young, have
+discouraged many employers from trying any sort of Negro help. I shall not
+forget the significant remark of a white employer I met in Indianapolis: a
+broad-gauge man, known for his philanthropies.
+
+"I've tried Negro help over and over again, hoping to help out the
+condition of Negro idleness we have here. I have had two or three good
+Negro workers, but so many of them have been wholly undisciplined,
+irresponsible, and sometimes actually dishonest, that I've given up
+trying. When I hear that an applicant is coloured, I don't employ him."
+
+Upon this very point Professor Bulkley said to me:
+
+"The great need of the young coloured people is practical training in
+industry. A Negro boy can't expect to get hold in a trade unless he has
+had training."
+
+R. R. Wright, Jr., who has made a study of conditions in Philadelphia,
+says:
+
+"It is in the skilled trades that the Negroes are at the greatest
+disadvantage. Negroes have been largely shut out of mechanical trades
+partly because of indifference and occasional active hostility of labour
+unions, partly because it has been difficult to overcome the traditional
+notion that a 'Negro's place' is in domestic service, but chiefly because
+there have been practically no opportunities for Negroes to learn trades.
+Those Negroes who know skilled trades and follow them are principally men
+from the South, who learned their trades there. The poorest of them fall
+into domestic service; the best have found places at their trades. For the
+Negro boy who is born in this city it is difficult to acquire a trade, and
+here, I say, the system has been weakest."
+
+With the idea of giving more practical training School No. 80 in New York,
+of which Professor Bulkley is principal, is now opened in the evenings for
+industrial instruction. Last year 1,300 coloured people, young and old,
+were registered. In short, there is a recognition in the North as in the
+South of the need of training the Negro to work. And not only the Negro,
+but the white boy and girl as well--as Germany and other European
+countries have learned.
+
+
+_The Road from Slavery to Freedom_
+
+At Indianapolis I found an organisation of Negro women, called the Woman's
+Improvement Club. The president, Mrs. Lillian T. Fox, told me what the
+club was doing to solve the problem of the coloured girl and boy who could
+not get work. She found that, after all, white prejudice was not so much a
+bugaboo as she had imagined. The newspapers gave publicity to the work;
+the Commercial Club, the foremost business men's organisation of the city,
+offered to lend its assistance; several white employers agreed to try
+coloured help, and one, the Van Camp Packing Company, one of the great
+concerns of its kind in the country, even fitted up a new plant to be
+operated wholly by coloured people. Last fall, after the season's work was
+over, one of the officers of the company told me that the Negro plant had
+been a great success, that the girls had done their work faithfully and
+with great intelligence.
+
+Just recently a meeting of coloured carpenters was held in New York to
+organise for self-help, and they found that, by bringing pressure to bear,
+the Brotherhood of Carpenters was perfectly willing to accept them as
+members of the union, on exactly the same basis as any other carpenters.
+
+In short, the Negro is beginning to awaken to the fact that if he is to
+survive and succeed in Northern cities, it must be by his own skill,
+energy, and organisation. For, like any individual or any race, striving
+for a place in industry or in modern commercial life, the Negro must, in
+order to succeed, not only equal his competitor, but become more
+efficient. A Negro contractor said to me:
+
+"Yes, I can get any amount of work, but they expect me to do it a little
+better and a little cheaper than my white competitors." Then he added:
+
+"And I can do it, too!"
+
+Those are the only terms on which success can be won.
+
+For so long a time the Negro has been driven or forced to work, as in the
+South, that he learns only slowly, in an intense, impersonal, competitive
+life like that of the North, where work is at a premium, that he himself,
+not the white man, must do the driving. It is the lesson that raises any
+man from slavery into freedom.
+
+
+_Pullman Porters_
+
+So much for industry. The Negro in the North has also been going into
+business and into other and varied employment. The very difficulty of
+getting hold in the trades and in salaried employment has driven many
+coloured people into small business enterprises: grocery stores, tailor
+shops, real estate or renting agencies. If they are being driven out by
+white men as waiters and barbers, they enjoy, on the other hand, growing
+opportunities as railroad and Pullman porters and waiters--places which
+are often highly profitable, and lead, if the Negro saves his money, to
+better openings. A Negro banker whom I met in the South told me that he
+got his start as a Pullman porter. He had a good run, and by being active
+and accommodating, often made from $150 to $200 a month from his wages and
+tips.
+
+But the same change is going on in the North that I found everywhere in
+the South. I mean a growing race consciousness among Negroes--the building
+up of a more or less independent Negro community life within the greater
+white civilisation. Every force seems to be working in that direction.
+
+
+_Business Among Boston and Philadelphia Negroes_
+
+As I have showed many Negroes in Boston (and indeed in other cities) have
+made a success in business enterprises which are patronised by white
+people--or rather by both races. Coloured doctors and lawyers in Boston
+have more or less white practice. Of course, coloured men who can succeed
+without reference to their colour and do business with both races, wish to
+continue to do so--but the tendency in the North, as in the South, is all
+against such development and toward Negro enterprises for the Negro
+population. Even in Boston numerous enterprises are conducted by Negroes
+for Negroes. I visited several small but prosperous grocery stores. A
+Negro named Basil F. Hutchins has built up a thriving undertaking and
+livery establishment for Negro trade. Charles W. Alexander has a
+print-shop with coloured workmen and publishes _Alexander's Magazine_. A
+new hotel called the Astor House, conducted by Negroes for Negroes, has
+250 rooms with telephone service in each room, a large restaurant and many
+of the other attractions of a good hotel. But in this growth the North is
+far behind the South. Scores of Negro banks are to be found in the South,
+not one in the North. Cities like Richmond, Va., Jackson, Miss.,
+Nashville, Tenn., have a really remarkable development of Negro business
+enterprises.
+
+Perhaps I can convey a clearer idea of the great variety of employment of
+Negroes in Northern cities by outlining the condition in a single city,
+Philadelphia--information for which I am indebted to R. R. Wright, Jr. The
+census of 1900 shows that out of 28,940 Negro males (boys and men), 21,128
+were at work, and out of 33,673 girls and women, 14,095 were wage-earners.
+Here are some of the more numerous occupations of Negro men:
+
+  Common labourers                 7,690
+  Servants and waiters             4,378
+  Teamsters and hackmen            1,957
+  Porters and helpers in stores      921
+  Barbers and hairdressers           444
+  Messengers and errand boys         346
+  Brick and stone masons             308
+
+Most of these are, of course, low-class occupations--the hard wage-work of
+the city in which the men often sink below the poverty line. On the other
+hand the census gives these figures:
+
+  Negro professional men (415) and women (170)
+  including doctors, clergymen, dentists, teachers,
+  electricians, architects, artists, musicians,
+  lawyers, journalists, civil engineers, actors,
+  literary and scientific persons, etc.                585
+
+  Retail merchants, men (297), women (22).             319
+
+  Hotel keepers                                         13
+
+One Negro runs a men's furnishing store; another, a drug store; others,
+groceries, meats, etc. The beneficial society has grown to a regular
+insurance company, the renting agent has become a real estate dealer.
+Within the past twelve months Negroes have incorporated two realty
+companies, one land investment company, four building and loan
+associations, one manufacturing company, one insurance company, besides a
+number of other smaller concerns.
+
+The civil service has proved of advantage to the Negro of Philadelphia, as
+of every other large Northern city. In the post-office there are about 150
+clerks, carriers and other employees, on the police force about 70
+patrolmen, and 40 school-teachers and about 200 persons in other municipal
+offices.
+
+
+_Wherein Lies Success for Negroes_
+
+I have thus endeavoured to present the conditions of the Negro in the
+North and show his relationship with white people. I have tried to exhibit
+every factor, good or bad, which plays a part in racial conditions. Many
+sinister influences exist: the large increase of ignorant and unskilled
+Negroes from the South; the growing prejudice in the North, both social
+and industrial, against the Negro; the high death-rate and low birth-rate
+among the Negro population, which is due to poverty, ignorance, crime, and
+an unfriendly climate. On the other hand, many encouraging and hopeful
+tendencies are perceptible. Individual Negroes are forcing recognition in
+nearly all branches of human activity, entering business life and the
+professions. A new racial consciousness is growing up leading to
+organisations for self-help; and while white prejudice is increasing, so
+is white helpfulness as manifested in social settlements, industrial
+schools, and other useful philanthropies.
+
+All these forces and counter forces--economic, social, religious,
+political--are at work. We can all see them plainly, but we cannot judge
+of their respective strength. It is a tremendous struggle that is going
+on--the struggle of a backward race for survival within the swift-moving
+civilisation of an advanced race. No one can look upon it without the most
+profound fascination for its interests as a human spectacle, nor without
+the deepest sympathy for the efforts of 10,000,000 human beings to
+surmount the obstacles which beset them on every hand.
+
+And what a struggle it is! As I look out upon it and see this dark horde
+of men and women coming up, coming up, a few white men here and there
+cheering them on, a few bitterly holding them back, I feel that Port
+Arthur and the battles of Manchuria, bloody as they were, are not to be
+compared with such a conflict as this, for this is the silent, dogged,
+sanguinary, modern struggle in which the combatants never rest upon their
+arms. But the object is much the same: the effort of a backward race for a
+foothold upon this earth, for civilised respect and an opportunity to
+expand. And the Negro is not fighting Russians, but Americans, Germans,
+Irish, English, Italians, Jews, Slavs--all those mingling white races
+(each, indeed, engaged in the same sort of a struggle) which make up the
+nation we call America.
+
+The more I see of the conflict the more I seem to see that victory or
+defeat lies with the Negro himself. As a wise Negro put it to me:
+
+"Forty years ago the white man emancipated us: but we are only just now
+discovering that we must emancipate ourselves."
+
+Whether the Negro can survive the conflict, how it will all come out, no
+man knows. For this is the making of life itself.
+
+
+
+
+_PART THREE_
+
+THE NEGRO IN THE NATION
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+THE MULATTO: THE PROBLEM OF RACE MIXTURE
+
+
+I had not been long engaged in the study of the race problem when I found
+myself face to face with a curious and seemingly absurd question:
+
+"What is a Negro?"
+
+I saw plenty of men and women who were unquestionably Negroes, Negroes in
+every physical characteristic, black of countenance with thick lips and
+kinky hair, but I also met men and women as white as I am, whose assertion
+that they were really Negroes I accepted in defiance of the evidence of my
+own senses. I have seen blue-eyed Negroes and golden-haired Negroes; one
+Negro girl I met had an abundance of soft straight red hair. I have seen
+Negroes I could not easily distinguish from the Jewish or French types; I
+once talked with a man I took at first to be a Chinaman but who told me he
+was a Negro. And I have met several people, passing everywhere for white,
+who, I knew, had Negro blood.
+
+Nothing, indeed, is more difficult to define than this curious physical
+colour line in the individual human being. Legislatures have repeatedly
+attempted to define where black leaves off and white begins, especially in
+connection with laws prohibiting marriage between the races. Some of the
+statutes define a Negro as a "person with one-eighth or more of Negro
+blood." Southern people, who take pride in their ability to distinguish
+the drop of dark blood in the white face, are themselves frequently
+deceived. Several times I have heard police judges in the South ask
+concerning a man brought before them:
+
+"Is this man coloured or white?"
+
+Just recently a case has arisen at Norfolk, Va., in which a Mrs. Rosa
+Stone sued the Norfolk & Western Railroad Company for being compelled by
+the white conductor, who thought her a Negro, to ride in a "Jim Crow" car.
+Having been forced into the Negro compartment, it remained for a real
+coloured woman, who knew her personally, to draw the line against her.
+This coloured woman is reported as saying:
+
+"Lor, Miss Rosa, this ain't no place for you; you b'long in the cars back
+yonder."
+
+It appears that Mrs. Stone was tanned.
+
+
+_Curious Story of a White Man Who Was Expelled as a Negro_
+
+Here is a story well illustrating the difficulties sometimes encountered
+by Southerners in deciding who is white and who is coloured. On March 6,
+1907, the Atlanta _Georgian_ published this account of how a man who, it
+was said, was a Negro passing for a white man, was expelled by a crowd of
+white men from the town of Albany, Ga.:
+
+     Peter Zeigler, a Negro, was last night escorted out of town by a
+     crowd of white men. Zeigler had been here for a month and palmed
+     himself off as a white man. He has been boarding with one of the best
+     white families in the city and has been associating with some of
+     Albany's best people. A visiting lady recognised him as being a Negro
+     who formerly lived in her city, and her assertion was investigated
+     and found to be correct. Last night he was carried to Forester's
+     Station, a few miles north of here, and ordered to board an outgoing
+     train.
+
+     Zeigler has a fair education and polished manners, and his colour was
+     such that he could easily pass for a white man where he was not
+     known.
+
+Immediately after suffering the indignity of being expelled from Albany,
+Mr. Zeigler communicated with his friends and relatives, a delegation of
+whom came from Charleston, Orangeburg, and Summerville, S. C. and proved
+to the satisfaction of everyone that Mr. Zeigler was, in reality, a white
+man connected with several old families of South Carolina. Of this return
+of Mr. Zeigler the Albany _Herald_ says:
+
+     The _Herald_ yesterday contained the account of the return to Albany
+     of Peter B. Zeigler, the young man who was forced to leave Albany
+     between suns on the night of March 4th. The young man upon his return
+     was accompanied by a party composed of relatives and influential
+     friends from his native state of South Carolina.
+
+Nothing surely could throw a more vivid light on colour line confusions in
+the South than this story.
+
+Another extraordinary case is that of Mrs. Elsie Massey, decided in Tipton
+County, Tenn., after years of litigation, in which one side tried to prove
+that Mrs. Massey was a Negro, the daughter of a cotton planter named "Ed"
+Barrow, and a quadroon slave, and the other side tried to prove that she
+was of pure Caucasian blood. On June 13, 1907, a jury of white men finally
+declared that Mrs. Massey was white and that she and her children might
+inherit $250,000 worth of property. Such instances as these, a few among
+almost innumerable cases, will indicate how difficult it often is to
+decide who is and who is not a Negro--the definition of Negro here being
+that used in the South, a person having any Negro blood, no matter how
+little.
+
+
+_How Many Mulattoes There Are_
+
+Few people realise how large a proportion of the so-called Negro race in
+this country is not really Negro at all, but mulatto or mixed blood,
+either half white, or quadroon, or octoroon, or some other combination. In
+the last census (1900) the government gave up the attempt in
+discouragement of trying to enumerate the mulattoes at all, and counted
+all persons as Negroes who were so classed in the communities where they
+resided. The census of 1870 showed that one-eighth (roughly) of the Negro
+population was mulatto, that of 1890 showed that the proportion had
+increased to more than one-seventh. But these statistics are confessedly
+inaccurate: the census report itself says:
+
+"These figures are of little value. Indeed, as an indication of the extent
+to which the races have mingled, they are misleading."
+
+From my own observation, and from talking and corresponding with many men
+who have had superior opportunities for investigation, I think it safe to
+say that between one-fourth and one-third of the Negroes in this country
+at the present time have a _visible_ admixture of white blood. At least
+the proportion is greater than the census figures of 1870 and 1890 would
+indicate. It is probable that 3,000,000 persons out of the 10,000,000
+population are visibly mulattoes. It will be seen, then, how very
+important a matter it is, in any careful survey of the race problem, to
+consider the influence of the mixed blood. In the North, indeed, the race
+problem may almost be called a mulatto problem rather than a Negro
+problem, for in not a few places the mixed bloods are in excess of the
+darker types.
+
+Many mulattoes have a mixed ancestry reaching back to the beginning of
+civilisation in North America; for the Negro slave appeared practically as
+soon as the white colonist. Many Negroes mixed (and are still mixing in
+Oklahoma) with the Indians, and one is to-day often astonished to see
+distinct Indian types among them. I shall never forget a woman I saw in
+Georgia--as perfect of line as any Greek statue--erect, lithe, strong,
+with sleek straight hair, the high cheekbones of the Indian, but the lips
+of the Negro. She was plainly an Indian type--but had no memory of
+anything but Negro ancestry. A strain of Arab blood from Africa runs in
+the veins of many Negroes, in others flows the blood of the Portuguese
+slave-traders or of the early Spanish adventurers or of the French who
+settled in New Orleans, to say nothing of every sort of American white
+blood. In my classification I have estimated 3,000,000 persons who are
+"visibly" mulattoes: the actual number who have some strain of
+blood--Arab, Portuguese, Spanish, French, Indian--other than Negro, must
+be considerably larger.
+
+It is a curious problem, this of colour. Several times, in different parts
+of the country, I have been told by both white and coloured observers that
+Negroes, even without the admixture of white blood, were gradually growing
+lighter--the effect of a cold climate, clothing and other causes. A
+tendency toward such a change, an adaptation to new environment, is
+certainly in accord with the best scientific beliefs, but whether a mere
+century or two in America has really operated to whiten the blackness of
+thousands of years of jungle life, must be left for the careful scientist
+to decide. It is certain that the darkest American Negro is far superior
+to the native African Negro.
+
+
+_Story of a Real African Woman_
+
+At Montgomery, Ala., Mr. Craik took me to see a real African woman, one of
+the very few left who were captured in Africa and brought to this country
+as slaves. She came in the _Wanderer_, long after the slave trade was
+forbidden by law, and was secretly landed at Mobile about 1858. She is a
+stocky, vigorous old woman. She speaks very little English, and I could
+not understand even that little. She asserts, I am told, that she is the
+daughter of a king in Africa, and she tells yet of the hardships and
+alarms of the ocean voyage. Her daughter is married to a
+respectable-looking Negro farmer. Mr. Craik succeeded, in spite of her
+superstitious terrors, in getting her to submit to having a picture taken.
+
+And yet all these strange-blooded people are classed roughly together as
+Negroes. I remember sitting once on the platform at a great meeting at the
+People's Tabernacle in Atlanta. An audience of some 1,200 coloured people
+was present. A prominent white man gave a brief address in which he urged
+the Negroes present to accept with humility the limitations imposed upon
+them by their heredity, that they were Negroes and that therefore they
+should accept with grace the place of inferiority. Now as I looked out
+over that audience, which included the best class of coloured people in
+Atlanta, I could not help asking myself:
+
+"What is this blood he is appealing to, anyway?"
+
+For I saw comparatively few men and women who could really be called
+Negroes at all. Some were so light as to be indistinguishable from
+Caucasians. A bishop of the African Methodist Episcopal Church who sat
+near me on the platform was a nephew of Robert Toombs, one of the great
+men of the South, a leader of the Confederacy. Another man present was a
+grandson of a famous senator of South Carolina. Several others that I knew
+of were half-brothers or sisters or cousins of more or less well-known
+white men. And I could not hear this appeal to heredity without thinking
+of the not at all humble Southern blood which flowed in the veins of some
+of these men and women. How futile such advice really was, and how little
+it got into the hearts of the audience, was forcibly impressed on me
+afterward by the remark of a mulatto I met.
+
+"They've given us their blood, whether we wanted it or not," he said, "and
+now they ask us not to respond to the same ambitions and hopes that they
+have. They have given us fighting blood and expect us not to struggle."
+
+
+_Attitude of the Mixed Blood Toward the Black Negroes_
+
+In the cities of the South no inconsiderable communities of mulattoes have
+long existed, many of them highly prosperous. Even before the war
+thousands of "free persons of colour" resided in Charleston, Richmond, and
+New Orleans. In places like Charleston they had (and still have to some
+extent) an exclusive society of their own which looked down on the black
+Negro with a prejudice equal to that of the white man. The census of 1860
+shows a population of 3,441 "free persons of colour" in Charleston alone,
+of whom 2,554 were mulattoes. In New Orleans in the same year lived 9,084
+free Negroes, of whom 7,357 were mulattoes; and they were so far distant
+in sympathy from the slave population that they even tendered their
+support to the Confederacy at the beginning of the war.
+
+But with the Emancipation Proclamation the aristocratic "free person of
+colour" who had formed a sort of third class as between the white above
+and the black below, lost his unique position: the line was drawn against
+him. When I went South I expected to find a good deal of aloofness between
+the mulatto and the black man. It does exist, but really less to-day in
+the South than in Boston! The very first mulatto, a preacher in Atlanta,
+with whom I raised the question, surprised me by denying that the mulatto
+was in any degree potentially superior to the real Negro: that if the
+black man were given the same advantages and environment as the mulatto,
+he would do as well, that the prominence of the mulatto is the result of
+the superior advantages he has long enjoyed, being the house servant in
+slavery times, with opportunities for education and discipline that the
+black man never possessed. This was his argument, and to support it he
+gave me a long list of black Negroes who had achieved success or
+leadership. I found Booker T. Washington and Professor Du Bois (themselves
+both mulattoes) arguing along the same lines. In other words, the
+prejudice of white people has forced all coloured people, light or dark,
+together, and has awakened in many ostracised men and women who are nearly
+white a spirit which expresses itself in the passionate defence of
+everything that is Negro.
+
+And yet, with what pathos! What is this race? The spirit and the ideals
+are not Negro: for the people are not Negro, even the darkest of them, in
+the sense that the inhabitants of the jungles of Africa are Negroes. The
+blackest of black American Negroes is far ahead of his naked cousin in
+Africa. But neither are they white!
+
+One evening last summer I attended a performance at Philadelphia of a
+Negro play called the "Shoo-Fly Regiment." It was written, both words and
+music, by two clever mulattoes, Cole and Johnson; and it was wholly
+presented by Negroes. The audience was large, mostly composed of coloured
+people, and the laughter was unstinted. The point that impressed me was
+this, that the writers had chosen a distinct Negro subject. The play dealt
+with two questions of much interest among coloured people: the matter of
+industrial education, and the Negro soldier. That, it seemed to me, was
+significant: it was an effort to appeal to the class consciousness of the
+Negro.
+
+And yet as I sat and watched the play I could not help being impressed
+with the essential tragedy of the so-called Negro people. The players of
+the company were of every colour, from the black African type to the
+mulatto with fair hair and blue eyes. In spite of this valiant effort to
+emphasise certain racial interests, one who saw the play could not help
+asking:
+
+"What, after all, is this Negro race? What is the Negro spirit? Is it in
+this black African or in this white American with the drop of dark blood?"
+
+In a recent address a coloured minister of San Francisco, J. Hugh Kelley,
+said:
+
+"My father's father was a Black Hawk Indian, seven feet tall. My father's
+mother was an Irishwoman. My mother's father was an American white man.
+Her mother was a full-blooded African woman. What am I?"
+
+
+_Pathetic Desire of Negroes to Be Like White Men_
+
+Even among those Negroes who are most emphatic in defence of the race
+there is, deep down, the pathetic desire to be like the dominant white
+man. It is not unreasonable, nor unnatural, for all outward opportunity of
+development lies open to the white man. To be coloured is to be
+handicapped in the race for those things in life which men call desirable.
+I remember discussing the race question one evening with a group of
+intelligent coloured men. They had made a strong case for the Negro
+spirit, and the need of the race to stand for itself, but one of them said
+in a passing remark (what the investigator overhears is often of greater
+significance than what he hears), speaking of a mulatto friend of his:
+
+"His hair is _better_ than mine."
+
+He meant _straighter_, more like that of the white man.
+
+The same evening, another Negro, referring to a light-complexioned
+coloured man, said:
+
+"Thank God, he is passing now for white."
+
+At Philadelphia a dark Negro made this comment on one of the coloured
+churches where mulattoes are in the ascendancy:
+
+"You can't have a good time when you go there unless you have straight
+hair."
+
+This remark indicated not only the ideal held by the speaker, but showed
+the line drawn by the light-coloured man against his darker brother.
+
+In the same way it is almost a universal desire of Negroes to "marry
+whiter;" that is, a dark man will, if possible, marry a mulatto woman, the
+lighter the better. The ideal is whiteness: for whiteness stands for
+opportunity, power, progress.
+
+Give a coloured man or woman white blood, educate him until he has
+glimpses of the greater possibilities of life and then lock him forever
+within the bars of colour, and you have all the elements of tragedy. Dr.
+DuBois in his remarkable book, "The Souls of Black Folk," has expressed
+more vividly than any other writer the essential significance of this
+tragedy. I read the book before I went South and I thought it certainly
+overdrawn, the expression of a highly cultivated and exceptional Mulatto,
+but after meeting many Negroes I have been surprised to find how truly it
+voices a wide experience.
+
+
+_Experience of a Highly Educated Mulatto_
+
+DuBois tells in this book how he first came to realise that he was really
+a Negro. He was a boy in school near his home in Massachusetts.
+
+"Something," he writes, "put it into the boys' and girls' heads to buy
+gorgeous visiting cards--ten cents a package--and exchange. The exchange
+was merry, till one girl, a tall newcomer, refused my card--refused it
+peremptorily, with a glance. Then it dawned upon me with a certain
+suddenness that I was different from the others; or like, mayhap, in heart
+and life and longing, but shut out from their world by a vast veil. I had
+thereafter no desire to tear down that veil, to creep through; I held all
+beyond it in common contempt, and lived above it in a region of blue sky
+and great wandering shadows. That sky was bluest when I could beat my
+mates at examination time, or beat them at a foot-race, or even beat their
+stringy heads. Alas, with the years all this fine contempt began to fade;
+for the worlds I longed for, and all their dazzling opportunities, were
+theirs not mine.... With other black boys the strife was not so fiercely
+sunny; their youth shrunk into tasteless sycophancy or into silent hatred
+of the pale world about them and mocking distrust of everything white; or
+wasted itself in a bitter cry, Why did God make me an outcast and a
+stranger in mine own house? The shades of the prison-house closed round
+about us all: walls strait and stubborn to the whitest, but relentlessly
+narrow, tall and unscalable to sons of night who must plod darkly on in
+resignation, or beat unavailing palms against the stone, or steadily,
+half-hopelessly, watch the streak of blue above."
+
+If space permitted I could tell many stories illustrative of the daily
+tragedy which many mulattoes are meeting in this country, struggles that
+are none the less tragic for being inarticulate. Here is a letter which I
+received not long ago from a mulatto professor in a Western Negro college:
+
+"I wonder how you will treat that point to which you have thus far only
+referred in your studies, 'Where does the colour line really begin?' What
+is to become of that large class of which I am a part, that class which is
+neither white nor black and yet both? There are millions of us who have
+the blood of both races, and, if heredity means anything, who have the
+traditions, feelings, and passions of both. Yet we are black in name, in
+law, in station, in everything save face and figure, despite the
+overwhelming white blood. And why? Certainly not because we have to be.
+America is a big country: it is easy to get lost, even in a neighbouring
+state. Some of us do, and the process has been going on so long in certain
+large cities of the North until we cease to think about it. But the
+majority of us stay and live and work out our destiny among the people
+into whom we were born, living ofttimes side by side with our white
+brothers and sisters. When I go back to Atlanta after an absence of two
+years, I can, if I wish, go back in a Pullman, go out of the main entrance
+of the station, get my dinner at the Piedmont Hotel, and when I am tired
+of being Mr. Hyde, I can stroll down Auburn Avenue with my friends in the
+full glory of Dr. Jekyll. As a matter of fact I shall doubtless avail
+myself of the privilege of a sleeper, sneak out the side entrance, get on
+the last seat of the car, despite the conductor's remonstrance, go on to
+my friends at once and be myself all the time I am there. I wouldn't be a
+white man if I had to. I want to be black. I want to love those who love
+me. I want to help those who need my help. And I know hundreds just like
+me: I know others who are not.
+
+"I wonder if you can decide: 'Where does the colour line really--end?'"
+
+
+_A Negro Who Lived First as a White Man, Then as a Negro_
+
+When I was in Philadelphia I met an intelligent Negro named A. L. Manley,
+who is at present the janitor of a large apartment house. He has been
+connected with the good-government movement in Philadelphia, being the
+leader of a club of coloured men who have supported the reform party. When
+I first met him I should not have known him for a Negro, he is so white.
+His white grandfather was a famous governor of North Carolina--Charles
+Manley. He was educated at Wilmington, N. C., and at Hampton Institute.
+For a time he published a Negro newspaper at Wilmington, but during the
+race riot in that city a number of years ago he was driven out and his
+property was destroyed, his office being burned to the ground. After a
+year or two in Washington he came to Philadelphia, where he endeavoured to
+get work at his trade as a painter and decorator, but the moment he
+informed employers that he was a coloured man they refused to hire
+him--usually excusing themselves on the ground that union labour would
+refuse to work with him.
+
+"So I tried being white," he said: "that is, I did not reveal the fact
+that I had coloured blood, and I immediately got work in some of the best
+shops in Philadelphia. I joined the union and had no trouble at all."
+
+But during all this time he had to live, as he says, "the life of a
+sneak." He had to sneak out of his home in the morning and return to it
+only after nightfall, lest someone discover that his family (he has a wife
+and two children) was coloured.
+
+"The thing finally became unbearable," he said; "no decent man could stand
+it. I preferred to be a Negro and hold up my head rather than to be a
+sneak."
+
+So he dropped his trade and became a janitor. In other words, he stepped
+back, as so many Negroes in the North are forced to do, into a form of
+domestic service, although in his case the position is one of
+responsibility and good pay.
+
+Such stories of the problem of the mulatto are innumerable; and yet I do
+not wish to imply that the life is all shadow, for it isn't. The Negro
+blood, wherever it is, supplies an element of light-heartedness which will
+not be wholly crushed. It is this element, indeed, that accounts in no
+small degree for the survival of the Negro in this country. Where the
+Indian perished for want of adaptability, the Negro has survived by sheer
+elasticity of temperament: it is perhaps the highest natural gift of the
+Negro race. One hears much of the unfavourable traits of the Negro, but
+certainly, judging from any point of view, the power of adaptability
+displayed by the Negro in a wholly foreign environment, under the harshest
+conditions, and his ability to thrive and increase in numbers, even
+meeting the competition of the dominant race, and to keep on laughing at
+his work, is a power which in any race would be regarded as notable.
+
+
+_Why Some Light Mulattoes do not "Cross over to White"_
+
+I once asked a very light mulatto why he did not "cross the line," as they
+call it (or "go over to white") and quit his people. His answer surprised
+me; it was so distinctly an unexpected point of view.
+
+"Why," he said, "white people don't begin to have the good times that
+Negroes do. They're stiff and cold. They aren't sociable. They don't
+laugh."
+
+Here certainly was a criticism of the white man! And it was corroborated
+by a curious story I heard at Memphis, of a mulatto well known among the
+coloured people of Tennessee. A number of years ago it came to him
+suddenly one day that he was white enough to pass anywhere for white, and
+he acted instantly on the inspiration. He went to Memphis and bought a
+first-class ticket on a Mississippi River boat to Cincinnati. No one
+suspected that he was coloured; he sat at the table with white people and
+even occupied a state-room with a white man. At first he said he could
+hardly restrain his exultation, but after a time, although he said he
+talked and smoked with the white men, he began to be lonesome.
+
+"It grew colder and colder," he said.
+
+In the evening he sat on the upper deck and as he looked over the railing
+he could see, down below, the Negro passengers and deck hands talking and
+laughing. After a time, when it grew darker, they began to sing--the
+inimitable Negro songs.
+
+"That finished me," he said, "I got up and went downstairs and took my
+place among them. I've been a Negro ever since."
+
+An ordinary community of middle or working class white people is often
+singularly barren of any social or intellectual interest: it is often
+sombre, sodden, uninteresting. Not so the Negro community. In several
+cities I have tried to trace out the social life of various cliques,
+especially among the mulattoes, and I have been astonished to find how
+many societies there are, often with high-sounding names, how many church
+affairs must be attended to, how many suppers and picnics are constantly
+under way, how many clubs and secret societies are supported.
+
+Forced upon themselves, every point of contact with the white race becomes
+to the Negro a story of peculiar human interest. The view they get from
+the outside or underneath of white civilisation is not, to say the least,
+altogether our view. Once, in a gathering of mulattoes I heard the
+discussion turn to the stories of those who had "gone over to
+white"--friends or acquaintances of those who were present. Few such cases
+are known to white people, but the Negroes know many of them. It developed
+from this conversation (and afterward I got the same impression many
+times) that there is a sort of conspiracy of silence to protect the Negro
+who "crosses the line" and takes his place as a white man. Such cases even
+awaken glee among them, as though the Negro, thus, in some way, was
+getting even with the dominant white man.
+
+
+_Stories of Negroes Who Have Crossed the Colour Line_
+
+I don't know how many times I have heard mulattoes speak of the French
+novelist Dumas as having Negro blood, and they also claim Robert Browning
+and Alexander Hamilton (how truly I do not know). But the cases which
+interest them most are those in this country; and there must be far more
+of them than white people imagine. I know of scores of them. A well-known
+white actress, whose name, of course, I cannot give, when she goes to
+Boston, secretly visits her coloured relatives. A New York man who holds a
+prominent political appointment under the state government and who has
+become an authority in his line, is a Negro. Not long ago he entered a
+hotel in Baltimore and the Negro porter who ran to take his bag said
+discreetly:
+
+"Hello, Bob."
+
+As boys they had gone to the same Negro school.
+
+"Let me carry your bag," said the porter, "I won't give you away."
+
+In Philadelphia there lives a coloured woman who married a rich white man.
+Of course, no white people know she is coloured, but the Negroes do, and
+do not tell. Occasionally she drives down to a certain store, dismisses
+her carriage and walks on foot to the home of her mother and sisters.
+
+Only a few years ago the newspapers were filled for a day or two with the
+story of a girl who had been at Vassar College, and upon graduation by
+merest accident it was discovered that she was a Negro. A similar case
+arose last year at Chicago University, that of Miss Cecelia Johnson, who
+had been a leader in her class, a member of the Pi Delta Phi Sorority and
+president of Englewood House, an exclusive girls' club. She was the sister
+of a well-known Negro politician of Chicago.
+
+The Chicago _Tribune_, after publishing a story to the effect that Miss
+Johnson had kept her parentage secret apologised for the publicity in
+these words:
+
+     The Tribune makes this reparation spontaneously and as a simple act
+     of justice.
+
+     There is not the slightest mystery about Miss Johnson. Her life has
+     been an open book. She has won distinction at high school, and
+     university, and her career appears to have been free from any blemish
+     that should lessen the love of her intimate friends or the respect in
+     which she is held by her acquaintances.
+
+Some mulattoes I know of, one a prominent Wall Street broker, have
+"crossed the line" by declaring that they are Mexicans, Brazilians,
+Spanish or French; one says he is an Armenian. Under a foreign name they
+are readily accepted among white people where, as Negroes, they would be
+instantly rejected. No one, of course, can estimate the number of men and
+women with Negro blood who have thus "gone over to white"; but it must be
+large.
+
+
+_Does Race Amalgamation Still Continue?_
+
+One of the first questions that always arises concerning the mulatto is
+whether or not the mixture of blood still continues and whether it is
+increasing or decreasing. In other words, is the amalgamation of the races
+still going on and to what extent?
+
+Intermarriage between the races is forbidden by law in all the Southern
+states and also in the following Northern and Western states: Arizona,
+California, Colorado, Delaware, Idaho, Indiana, Missouri, Nebraska,
+Nevada, Oklahoma, Oregon, and Utah. In all other Northern and Western
+states marriage between the races is lawful.
+
+And yet, the marriage laws, so far as they affect the actual problem of
+amalgamation, mean next to nothing at all. No legal marriage existed
+between the races in slavery times and yet there was a widespread mixture
+of blood. Concubinage was a common practice: a mulatto was worth more in
+cash than a black man. The great body of mulattoes now in the country
+trace their origin to such relationships.
+
+And such practice of slavery days no more ceased instantly with a paper
+Emancipation Proclamation than many other customs and habits which had
+grown up out of centuries of slave relationships. It is a slow process,
+working out of slavery, both for white men and black.
+
+I made inquiries widely in every part of the South among both white and
+coloured people and I found a strong and rapidly growing sentiment
+against what the South calls "miscegenation." For years white men in many
+communities, often prominent judges, governors, wealthy planters, made
+little or no secret of the fact that they had a Negro family as well as a
+white family.
+
+
+[Illustration: A TYPE OF NEGRO GIRL
+
+Typesetter in Atlanta. Many Negro girls are entering stenography,
+bookkeeping, dressmaking, millinery and other occupations.]
+
+[Illustration: MULATTO GIRL STUDENT
+
+At Clark University, Atlanta. At the completion of her studies this young
+woman will take up missionary work in Africa.]
+
+[Illustration: MISS CECELIA JOHNSON
+
+A mulatto who could be easily taken for a white person. She was a leader
+in her class in Chicago University.]
+
+
+And the practice is far from dead yet. Every Southern town knows of such
+cases, often many of them: and a large number of mulatto children to-day
+are the sons and daughters of Southern white men, often men of decided
+importance in their communities. In one town I visited I heard a white man
+expressing with great bitterness his feeling against the Negro race,
+arguing that the Negro must be kept down, else it would lead to the
+mongrelisation of the white race. The next morning as chance would have
+it, another white man with whom I was walking pointed out to me a neat
+cottage, the home of the Negro family of the white man who had talked with
+me on the previous evening. And I saw this man's coloured children in the
+yard!
+
+The better class of Southern people know perfectly well of these
+conditions and are beginning to attack them boldly. At a meeting in the
+Court Street Methodist Church in Montgomery, Ala., in 1907, Dr. J. A.
+Rice, the pastor, made this statement, significant in its very
+fearlessness, of changing sentiment:
+
+"I hesitate before I make another statement which is all too true. I
+hesitate, because I fear that in saying it I shall be charged with
+sensationalism. But even at the risk of such a charge I will say, for it
+must be said, that there are in the city of Montgomery, four hundred Negro
+women supported by white men."
+
+The next morning this statement was reported in the Montgomery
+_Advertiser_.
+
+It may be said also, that these 400 cases in a city of 35,000 people do
+not represent a condition of mere vice. Many of the women are comfortably
+provided for and have families of children. Vice is wholly distinct from
+this system of concubinage; for there are in Montgomery thirty-two Negro
+dives operated for white patronage--also the statement of Dr. Rice, quoted
+in the Montgomery _Advertiser_.
+
+The proportion of such cases in some of the less progressive Southern
+towns even to-day, is almost appalling: and at the same time that speakers
+and writers are railing at the mulatto for his disturbing race leadership
+and his restless desire for political and other rights, and while they are
+declaiming against amalgamation and mongrelisation, the mulatto population
+is increasing. Striving to keep the Negro in his place as a Negro, the
+South is making him more and more a white man.
+
+
+_Attempt to Stop Miscegenation_
+
+Among Southern women, not unnaturally, the feeling aroused by these
+practices has been especially bitter. Here is a remarkable plea, published
+in the _Times-Democrat_ on June 21, 1907, signed "A woman."
+
+     Will you kindly publish the following without attaching my signature
+     or divulging it in any way? I have several brothers who are
+     old-maidish enough to have nervous prostration if they should see my
+     name signed to such an unmaidenly, immodest letter, but I do my
+     thinking without any assistance from them, and hope for the sake of
+     peace in my family that they will not recognise me in print.
+
+     I am a resident of a large town in the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta, where
+     miscegenation is common--where, if a man isolates himself from
+     feminine society, the first and only conclusion reached is, "he has a
+     woman of his own" in saddle, of duskier shade. This conclusion is
+     almost without exception true. If some daring woman, not afraid of
+     being dubbed a Carrie Nation, were to canvass the delta counties of
+     Mississippi taking the census, she would find so many cases of
+     miscegenation, and their resultant mongrel families, that she would
+     bow her head in shame for the "flower of Southern chivalry"--gone to
+     seed.
+
+Awakened by a sense of the fearfulness of these conditions, such a strong
+paper as the New Orleans _Times-Democrat_ has been conducting a campaign
+for laws which shall punish the white man who maintains illicit relations
+with Negroes. For years attempts have been made in the legislatures of
+several states (in part successfully) to enact such legislation, but the
+practice has been so firmly entrenched that many of the efforts have
+failed.
+
+On February 15, 1906, the _Times-Democrat_ put the case in stronger
+language than I would dare to do:
+
+     It is a public scandal that there should be no law of this kind
+     (against miscegenation) on the statute book of Louisiana, and that it
+     should be left to mobs to break up the miscegenatious couples. The
+     failure to pass a law of this kind is attributed to white
+     degenerates, men who denounce social equality yet practice it, men
+     who are more dangerous to their own race than the most inflammatory
+     Negro orator and social equality preacher, and who have succeeded by
+     some sort of legislative trickery in pigeon-holing or killing the
+     bills intended to protect Louisiana from a possible danger. Such men
+     should be exposed before the people of the state in their true
+     colours.
+
+It will thus be seen how deep-seated the difficulty is. And yet, as I have
+followed the editorial expression of many Southern newspapers, I have been
+astonished to see how people are beginning to talk out. Here is an
+editorial from the _Star_ of Monroe, La.:
+
+     DESTRUCTIVE CRIME OF MISCEGENATION
+
+     There can be no greater wrong done the people of any community than
+     for public sentiment to permit and tolerate this growing and
+     destructive crime of miscegenation, yet in many towns and cities of
+     Louisiana, especially, there are to-day white men cohabiting with
+     Negro women, who have sweet and lovable families. This is a crime
+     that becomes almost unbearable, and should bring the blush of shame
+     to every man's cheek who dares to flaunt his debased and degrading
+     conceptions of morality in the eyes of self-respecting men and women.
+
+In January, 1907, District Attorney J. H. Currie, in Judge Cochran's court
+at Meridian, Miss., addressed a jury on what he called "the curse of
+miscegenation." In the course of his speech he said:
+
+"The accursed shadow of miscegenation hangs over the South to-day like a
+pall of hell. We talk much of the Negro question and all of its possible
+ramifications and consequences, but, gentlemen, the trouble is not far
+afield. Our own people, our white men with their black concubines, are
+destroying the integrity of the Negro race, raising up a menace to the
+white race, lowering the standard of both races and preparing the way for
+riot, mob, criminal assaults, and, finally, a death struggle for racial
+supremacy. The trouble is at our own door. We have tolerated this crime
+long enough, and if our country is not run by policy rather than by law,
+then it is time to rise up and denounce this sin of the earth."
+
+
+_Anti-Miscegenation League is Formed_
+
+Strong men and women, indeed, in several states have begun to organise
+against the evil. At Francisville, La., in May (1907), a meeting was
+called to organise against what one of the speakers, Mr. Wickliffe, called
+the "yellow peril" of the South. He said that "every man familiar with
+conditions in our midst knows that the enormous increase in persons of
+mixed blood is due to men of the white race openly keeping Negro women as
+concubines." Out of this meeting grew an organisation to help stamp out
+the evil. About the same time, a mass meeting was held in Vicksburg,
+Miss., and an Anti-Miscegenation League was formed.
+
+The hatred and fear of such relationships have grown most rapidly, of
+course, among the better classes of white people. The class of white men
+who consort with Negro women at the present time is of a much lower sort
+than it was five or ten years ago, or than it was in slavery times.
+
+And the Negroes on their part are also awakening to the seriousness of
+this problem. I found in several Negro communities women's clubs and other
+organisations which are trying, feebly enough, but significantly trying,
+to stem the evil from their side. It is a terrible slough to get out of.
+Negro women, and especially the more comely and intelligent of them, are
+surrounded by temptations difficult indeed to meet. It has been and is a
+struggle in Negro communities, especially village communities, to get a
+moral standard established which will make such relationships with white
+men unpopular. In some places to-day, the Negro concubines of white men
+are received in the Negro churches and among the Negroes generally, and
+honoured rather than ostracised. They are often among the most intelligent
+of the Negro women, they often have the best homes and the most money to
+contribute to their churches. They are proud of their light-coloured
+children. And yet, as the Negroes begin to be educated, they develop an
+intense hatred of these conditions: and the utter withdrawal of the best
+sort of Negro families from any white associations is due in part to the
+dread of such temptations. I shall never forget the bitterness in the
+reply of a coloured blacksmith who had a number of good-looking girls. I
+said to him jokingly:
+
+"I suppose you are going to send them to college."
+
+"Why should I?" he asked. "What good will it do? Educate them to live with
+some white man!"
+
+
+_The Tragedy of the Negro Girl_
+
+A friend of mine, Southern by birth, told me a story of an experience he
+had at Nashville, where he went to deliver an address at Fisk University,
+a Negro college. On his way home in the dark, he chanced to walk close
+behind two mulatto girls who had been at the lecture. They were discussing
+it. One of them said:
+
+"Well, it's no use. There is no chance down here for a yellow girl. It's
+either get away from the South--or the usual thing."
+
+In that remark lay a world of bitter knowledge of conditions.
+
+It is remarkable, indeed, that the Negroes should have begun to develop
+moral standards as rapidly as they have. For in the South few people
+_expect_ the coloured girl to be moral: everything is against her
+morality. In the first place, the home life of the great mass of Negroes
+is still primitive. They are crowded together in one or two rooms, they
+get no ideas of privacy, or of decency. The girls are the prey not only of
+white men but of men of their own race. The highest ideal before their
+eyes in many cases is the finely dressed, prosperous concubine of a white
+man. Moreover, in nearly all Southern towns, houses of prostitution are
+relegated to the Negro quarter. At Montgomery, Ala., I saw such places in
+respectable Negro neighbourhoods, against which the Negro people had
+repeatedly and bitterly objected to the city authorities, to no purpose.
+The example of such places of vice on Negro children is exactly what it
+would be on white children. In the same way, although it seems
+unbelievable, Negro schools in several cities have been built in vice
+districts. I saw a fine new brick school for coloured children at
+Louisville placed in one of the very nastiest streets of the city. The
+same conditions surround at least one coloured school which I saw at New
+Orleans.
+
+And yet the South, permitting such training in vice, wonders at Negro
+immorality and is convulsed over the crime of rape. Demanding that the
+Negro be self-restrained, white men set the example in every way from
+concubinage down, of immorality and lack of restraint. They sow the
+whirlwind and look for no crop!
+
+When the coloured girl grows up, she goes to service in a white family,
+where she either sleeps in an outbuilding (the survival of the old system
+of Negro "quarters") or goes home at night. In either event the mistress
+rarely pays the slightest attention to her conduct in this particular. I
+talked with a woman, a fine type of the old gentlefolk, who expressed
+with frankness a common conviction in the South.
+
+"We don't consider," she said, "that the Negroes have any morals. Up North
+where I was visiting this summer I was amazed to find women with coloured
+servants looking after them, trying to keep them in at night and prevent
+mischief. We never do that; we know it isn't any use."
+
+It may be imagined how difficult it is in such an atmosphere for Negroes
+to build up moral standards, or to live decently. If there ever was a
+human tragedy in this world it is the tragedy of the Negro girl.
+
+
+_Relations Between White Men and Negro Women_
+
+Illicit relationships between the races have not gone on without causing
+many a troubled conscience. Nor has a difference in colour always deadened
+the deeper feelings of the human heart. In spite of laws and colour lines,
+human nature, wherever found, is profoundly alike. In making my inquiries
+among coloured colleges I found to my astonishment that in nearly all of
+them mulatto boys and girls are being educated, and well educated, by
+their white fathers. A number of them are at Atlanta University, Tuskegee,
+Hampton, Fisk--indeed, at all of the colleges. And Wilberforce College,
+next after Lincoln University of Chester County, Pa., the oldest Negro
+institution of learning in the country, founded in 1856, was largely
+supported in slavery times by Southern white men who felt a moral
+obligation to educate their coloured sons and daughters. Large farms
+around Wilberforce (near Xenia) which I have visited were originally
+bought by Southern slave-owners for their mulatto children, where they
+could get away from the South and grow up in a free state. Some of these
+mulatto children, educated in Latin and Greek, with too much money and
+little to do, went straight to the devil, while others conserved their
+property, and it is to-day in the hands of their descendants.
+
+Thus the relations between white men and Negro women even to-day, though
+marriage is forbidden by law, are sometimes remarkable in their expression
+of the deepest emotions of the human heart. I shall never forget the story
+of one such case among many that I heard in the South. I withhold the
+names in this case although the story is widely known among the people in
+that part of Alabama. At ---- lives a planter of prominence who was
+formerly on the staff of the governor of the state. He had no white
+family, but everyone knew that he lived with a mulatto woman and was
+raising a coloured family. When the boys and girls were old enough, he
+sent them to Atlanta University, to Tuskegee, and to Spellman Seminary,
+providing them plentifully with money. He also paid for his wife's
+sister's schooling.
+
+A year or so ago his mulatto "wife" died; and he was heart-broken. He sent
+for his boys to come from college and let it be known that he would have
+something to say at the funeral. Many white and coloured people,
+therefore, attended and followed the body of the Negro woman to the
+cemetery. At the grave, General ---- stepped forward and raised his hand.
+
+"I have just one word to say here to-day. These children who are here have
+always gone by their mother's name. I want to acknowledge them now in
+front of all these people as my children; and henceforth they will bear my
+name. I wish also to say that this woman who lies here was my wife, not by
+law, but in the sight of God. I here acknowledge her. This is a duty I
+have to do not only to this woman but to God. When I leave my property I
+shall leave it to those children, and shall see that they get it."
+
+
+_Intermarriage of the Races in the North_
+
+So much for Southern conditions. How is it in the North where
+intermarriage is not forbidden by law?
+
+In 1903, during a heated political campaign in Mississippi, United States
+Senator Money repeatedly made the assertion that in Massachusetts in the
+previous year, because there were no laws to separate the Negro and
+prevent intermarriage, 2,000 white women had married Negro men. I heard
+echoes of Senator Money's statistics in several places in the South.
+
+I have made a careful investigation of the facts in several northern
+cities, and I have been surprised to discover how little intermarriage
+there really is.
+
+If intermarriage in the North were increasing largely, Boston, being the
+city where the least race prejudice exists and where the proportion of
+mulattoes is largest, would show it most plainly. As a matter of fact, in
+the year 1902, when according to Senator Money, 2,000 white women married
+coloured men, there were in Boston, which contains the great bulk of the
+Negro population of Massachusetts, just twenty-nine inter-racial
+marriages.
+
+Although the Negro population of Boston has been steadily increasing, the
+number of marriages between the races, which remained about stationary
+from 1875 to 1890, has since 1900 been rapidly decreasing. Here are the
+exact figures as given by the registry department:
+
+  RACIAL INTERMARRIAGES IN BOSTON
+
+           Groom       Groom
+          Coloured     White        Total
+           Bride       Bride        Mixed
+           White      Coloured    Marriages
+
+  1900      32           3           35
+  1901      30           1           31
+  1902      25           4           29
+  1903      27           2           29
+  1904      27           1           28
+  1905      17           2           19
+
+At Boston and in other Northern towns I made inquiries in regard to the
+actual specific instances of intermarriage.
+
+There are two classes of cases, first, what may be called the
+intellectuals; highly educated mulattoes who marry educated white women. I
+have the history of a number of such intermarriages, but there is not
+space here to relate the really interesting life stories which have grown
+out of them. One of the best-known Negro professors in the country has a
+white wife. I saw the home where they live under almost ideal
+surroundings. A mulatto doctor of a Southern town married a white girl who
+was a graduate of Wellesley College; they had trouble in the South and
+have "gone over to white" and are now living in the North. They have two
+children. A Negro business man of Boston has a white wife; they celebrated
+recently the twenty-fifth anniversary of their marriage.
+
+
+[Illustration: MRS. BOOKER T. WASHINGTON
+
+MRS. ROBERT H. TERRELL Photograph by Clinedinst
+
+TWO OF THE LEADING WOMEN OF THE NEGRO RACE]
+
+
+But such cases as these are rare. In the great majority of intermarriages
+the white women belong to the lower walks of life. They are German, Irish,
+or other foreign women, respectable, but ignorant. As far as I can see
+from investigating a number of such cases, the home life is as happy as
+that of other people in the same stratum of life. But the white woman
+who thus marries a Negro is speedily declassed: she is ostracised by the
+white people, and while she finds a certain place among the Negroes, she
+is not even readily accepted as a Negro. In short, she is cut off from
+both races. When I was at Xenia, O., I was told of a case of a white man
+who was arrested for living with a Negro woman. The magistrate compelled
+him to marry the Negro woman as the worst punishment he could invent!
+
+For this reason, although there are no laws in most Northern states
+against mixed marriages, and although the Negro population has been
+increasing, the number of intermarriages is not only not increasing, but
+in many cities, as in Boston, it is decreasing. It is an unpopular
+institution!
+
+No one phase of the race question has aroused more acrimonious discussion
+than that of the Mulatto, especially as to the comparative physical
+strength and intelligence of the black Negro and the mulatto, a subject
+which cannot be here entered into.
+
+
+_Most Leaders of the Negro Race are Mulattoes_
+
+This much I know from my own observation: most of the leading men of the
+race to-day in every line of activity are mulattoes. Both Booker T.
+Washington and Dr. DuBois are mulattoes. Frederick Douglass was a mulatto.
+The foremost literary men, Charles W. Chesnutt and William Stanley
+Braithwaite, are mulattoes; the foremost painter of the race, H. O.
+Tanner, whose pictures have been in the Luxembourg, and who has been an
+honour to American art, is a mulatto. Both Judge Terrell and his wife,
+Mary Church Terrell, who is a member of the School Board of Washington,
+are mulattoes. On the other hand, there are notable exceptions to the
+rule. W. T. Vernon, Register of the United States Treasury, and Professor
+Kelly Miller of Washington, D. C., one of the ablest men of his race, both
+have the appearance of being full-blooded Negroes. Paul Lawrence Dunbar,
+the poet, was an undoubted Negro; so was J. C. Price, a brilliant orator;
+so is M. C. B. Mason, secretary of the Southern Aid Society of the
+Methodist Church.
+
+Full-blooded Negroes often make brilliant school and college records, even
+in comparison with white boys. It is the judgment of Hampton Institute,
+after years of careful observation, that there is no difference in ability
+between light and dark Negroes. I quote from the _Southern Workman_,
+published at Hampton:
+
+     The question as to the comparative intelligence of light and dark
+     Negroes is one that is not easily settled. After long years of
+     observation Hampton's records show that about an equal number of
+     mulattoes and pure blacks have made advancement in their studies and
+     at their work. While it is probable that the lighter students are
+     possessed of a certain quickness which does not belong to the darker,
+     there is a power of endurance among the blacks that does not belong
+     to their lighter brethren.
+
+As to the comparative accomplishment of light and dark Negroes after
+leaving school, the evidence is so confusing that I would not dare to
+enter upon a generalisation: that question must be left to the great
+scientific sociologist who will devote a lifetime to this most interesting
+problem in human life.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+LYNCHINGS, SOUTH AND NORTH
+
+
+Most of the studies for this book were made in 1906, 1907, and 1908, but I
+investigated the subject of lynching, South and North, in the fall of
+1904. Since that time the feeling against mob-vengeance has been gaining
+strength throughout the country and the number of lynchings has been
+steadily decreasing. But the number is still appalling and many recent
+cases, especially in the black belt, have been accompanied by brutal
+excesses. My studies made four years ago are typical of present
+conditions; I have, indeed, confirmed them by a somewhat careful
+examination made last year (1907) of two or three recent cases.
+
+Lynch-law reached its height in the late eighties and early nineties. In
+the sixteen years from 1884 to 1900 the number of persons lynched in the
+United States was 2,516. Of these 2,080 were in the Southern states and
+436 in the North; 1,678 were Negroes and 801 were white men; 2,465 were
+men and 51 were women. I am here using the accepted (indeed the only)
+statistics--those collected by the Chicago _Tribune_. As showing the
+gradual growth of the sentiment against mob-law I can do no better than to
+give the record of lynchings for a number of successive years:
+
+  1891    192
+  1892    235
+  1893    200
+  1894    190
+  1895    171
+  1896    131
+  1897    166
+  1898    127
+  1899    107
+  1900    116
+  1901    135
+  1902     96
+  1903    104
+  1904     87
+  1905     66
+  1906     73
+  1907     56
+
+Before I take up the account of specific cases an analysis of the
+lynchings for the years 1906 and 1907 will help to show in what states mob
+rule is most often invoked and for what offences lynchings are most
+common. Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana and Georgia--the black belt
+states--are thus seen to have the worst records, and the figures here
+given do not include the men killed in the Atlanta riot which would add
+twelve to the Georgia record for 1906:
+
+Following is the comparative number of lynchings for the two years.
+
+  State               1907    1906
+
+  Alabama              13       5
+  Arkansas              3       4
+  Colorado             --       1
+  Florida              --       6
+  Georgia               6       9
+  Indian Territory      2       1
+  Iowa                  1      --
+  Kentucky              1       3
+  Louisiana             8       9
+  Maryland              2       1
+  Mississippi          12      13
+  Missouri             --       3
+  Nebraska              1      --
+  North Carolina       --       5
+  Oklahoma              2      --
+  South Carolina        1       2
+  Tennessee             1       5
+  Texas                 3       6
+                       --      --
+      Totals           56      73
+
+Of those lynched in 1907, 49 were Negro men, three Negro women and four
+white men. By methods:
+
+  Hanging            31
+  Shot to death      17
+  Hanged and shot     3
+  Shot and burned     2
+  Beaten to death     1
+  Kicked to death     1
+
+The offences for which these men and woman were lynched range from
+stealing seventy-five cents and talking with white girls over the
+telephone, to rape and murder. Here is the list:
+
+  For being father of boy who jostled white women     1
+  For being victor over white man in fight            1
+  Attempted murder                                    5
+  Murder of wife                                      1
+  Murder of husband and wife                          1
+  Murder of wife and stepson                          1
+  Murder of mistress                                  1
+  Manslaughter                                       10
+  Accessory to murder                                 1
+  Rape                                                8
+  Attempted rape                                     11
+  Raping own stepdaughter                             1
+  For being wife and son of a raper                   2
+  Protecting fugitive from posse                      1
+  Talking to white girls over telephone               1
+  Expressing sympathy for mob's victim                3
+  Three-dollar debt                                   2
+  Stealing seventy-five cents                         1
+  Insulting white man                                 1
+  Store burglary                                      3
+
+In making my study I visited four towns where lynchings had taken place,
+two in the South, Statesboro in Ga. and Huntsville in Ala.; and two in the
+North, Springfield, O., and Danville, Ill.
+
+
+I.--LYNCHING IN THE SOUTH
+
+Statesboro, Ga., where two Negroes were burned alive under the most
+shocking circumstances, on August 16, 1904, is a thrifty county seat
+located about seventy miles from Savannah.
+
+For a hundred years a settlement has existed there, but it was not until
+the people discovered the wealth of the turpentine forests and of the
+sea-island cotton industry that the town became highly prosperous. Since
+1890 it has doubled in population every five years, having in 1904 some
+2,500 people. Most of the town is newly built. A fine, new court-house
+stands in the city square, and there are new churches, a large, new
+academy, a new water-works system and telephones, electric lights, rural
+free delivery--everywhere the signs of improvement and progress. It is
+distinctly a town of the New South, developed almost exclusively by the
+energy of Southerners and with Southern money. Its population is pure
+American, mostly of old Carolina, Georgia, and Virginia stock. Fully 70
+per cent. of the inhabitants are church members--Baptists, Presbyterians,
+and Methodists--and the town has not had a saloon in twenty-five years and
+rarely has a case of drunkenness. There are no beggars and practically no
+tramps. A poorhouse, built several years ago, had to be sold because no
+one would go to it. The farms are small, for the most part, and owned by
+the farmers themselves; only 8 per cent. of them are mortgaged. There are
+schools for both white and coloured children, though the school year is
+short and education not compulsory.
+
+In short, this is a healthy, temperate, progressive American town--a
+country city, self-respecting, ambitious, with a good future before
+it--the future of the New South.
+
+
+_Character of the Negro Population_
+
+About 40 per cent. of the population of the county consists of Negroes.
+Here as elsewhere there are to be found two very distinct kinds of
+Negroes--as distinct as the classes of white men. The first of these is
+the self-respecting, resident Negro. Sometimes he is a land-owner, more
+often a renter; he is known to the white people, employed by them, and
+trusted by them. In Statesboro, as in most of the South, a large
+proportion of the Negroes are of this better class. On the other hand, one
+finds everywhere many of the so-called "worthless Negroes," perhaps a
+growing class, who float from town to town, doing rough work, having no
+permanent place of abode, not known to the white population generally. The
+turpentine industry has brought many such Negroes to the neighbourhood of
+Statesboro. Living in the forest near the turpentine-stills, and usually
+ignorant and lazy, they and all their kind, both in the country districts
+and in the city, are doubly unfortunate in coming into contact chiefly
+with the poorer class of white people, whom they often meet as industrial
+competitors.
+
+
+_Danger from the Floating Negro_
+
+In all the towns I visited, South as well as North, I found that this
+floating, worthless Negro caused most of the trouble. He prowls the roads
+by day and by night; he steals; he makes it unsafe for women to travel
+alone. Sometimes he has gone to school long enough to enable him to read a
+little and to write his name, enough education to make him hate the hard
+work of the fields and aspire to better things, without giving him the
+determination to earn them. He has little or no regard for the family
+relations or home life, and when he commits a crime or is tired of one
+locality, he sets out, unencumbered, to seek new fields, leaving his wife
+and children without the slightest compunction.
+
+
+[Illustration: PAUL REED
+
+WILL CATO
+
+Negroes lynched by being burned alive at Statesboro, Georgia]
+
+[Illustration: NEGROES OF THE CRIMINAL TYPE
+
+Pictures taken in the Atlanta Jail
+
+Will Johnson, arrested, charged with the Camp assault.
+
+Lucius Frazier, who entered a home in the residence district of Atlanta.]
+
+
+About six miles from the city of Statesboro lived Henry Hodges, a
+well-to-do planter. He had a good farm, he ran three ploughs, as they say
+in the cotton country, and rumour reported that he had money laid by.
+Coming of an old family, he was widely related in Bullock County, and his
+friendliness and kindness had given him and his family a large circle of
+acquaintances. Family ties and friendships, in old-settled communities
+like those in the South, are influences of much greater importance in
+fixing public opinion and deciding political and social questions than
+they are in the new and heterogeneous communities of the North.
+
+The South is still, so far as the white population is concerned, a
+sparsely settled country. The farmers often live far apart; the roads are
+none too good. The Hodges home was in a lonely place, the nearest
+neighbours being Negroes, nearly half a mile distant. No white people
+lived within three-quarters of a mile. Hodges had been brought up among
+Negroes, he employed them, he was kind to them. To one of the Negroes
+suspected of complicity in the subsequent murder, he had loaned his
+shot-gun; another, afterward lynched, called at his home the very night
+before the murder, intending then to rob him, and Hodges gave him a bottle
+of turpentine to cure a "snake-graze."
+
+
+_Story of the Murder_
+
+On the afternoon of July 29, 1904, Mr. Hodges drove to a neighbour's house
+to bring his nine-year-old girl home from school. No Southern white
+farmer, especially in thinly settled regions like Bulloch County, dares
+permit any woman or girl of his family to go out anywhere alone, for fear
+of the criminal Negro.
+
+"You don't know and you can't know," a Georgian said to me, "what it means
+down here to live in constant fear lest your wife or daughter be attacked
+on the road, or even in her home. Many women in the city of Statesboro
+dare not go into their backyards after dark. Every white planter knows
+that there is always danger for his daughters to visit even the nearest
+neighbour, or for his wife to go to church without a man to protect her."
+
+It is absolutely necessary to understand this point of view before one can
+form a true judgment upon conditions in the South.
+
+When Hodges arrived at his home that night, it was already dark. The
+little girl ran to join her mother; the father drove to the barn. Two
+Negroes--perhaps more--met him there and beat his brains out with a stone
+and a buggy brace. Hearing the noise, Mrs. Hodges ran out with a lamp and
+set it on the gate-post. The Negroes crept up--as nearly as can be
+gathered from the contradictory stories and confessions--and murdered her
+there in her doorway with peculiar brutality. Many of the crimes committed
+by Negroes are marked with almost animal-like ferocity. Once aroused to
+murderous rage, the Negro does not stop with mere killing; he bruises and
+batters his victim out of all semblance to humanity. For the moment, under
+stress of passion, he seems to revert wholly to savagery.
+
+The Negroes went into the house and ransacked it for money. The little
+girl, who must have been terror-stricken beyond belief, hid behind a
+trunk; the two younger children, one a child of two years, the other a
+mere baby, lay on the bed. Finding no money, the Negroes returned to their
+homes. Here they evidently began to dread the consequences of their deed,
+for toward midnight they returned to the Hodges home. During all this time
+the little girl had been hiding there in darkness, with the bodies of her
+father and mother in the doorway. When the Negroes appeared, she either
+came out voluntarily, hoping that friends had arrived, or she was dragged
+out.
+
+"Where's the money?" demanded the Negroes.
+
+The child got out all she had, a precious five-cent piece, and offered it
+to them on condition that they would not hurt her. One of them seized her
+and beat her to death.
+
+I make no excuse for telling these details; they _must be told_, else we
+shall not see the depths or the lengths of this problem.
+
+
+_Burning of the Hodges Home_
+
+The Negroes then dragged the bodies of Mr. and Mrs. Hodges into their home
+and set the house afire. As nearly as can be made out from the subsequent
+confessions, the two younger children were burned alive.
+
+When the neighbours reached the scene of the crime, the house was wholly
+consumed, only the great end chimney left standing, and the lamp still
+burning on the gate-post.
+
+Well, these Southerners are warm-hearted, home-loving people. Everybody
+knew and respected the Hodges--their friends in the church, their many
+relatives in the county--and the effect of this frightful crime described
+in all its details, may possibly be imagined by Northern people living
+quietly and peacefully in their homes. When two of the prominent citizens
+of the town told me, weeks afterward, of the death of the little girl,
+they could not keep back their tears.
+
+The murder took place on Friday night; on Saturday the Negroes, Paul Reed
+and Will Cato, were arrested with several other suspects, including two
+Negro preachers. Both Reed and Cato were of the illiterate class; both had
+been turpentine workers, living in the forest, far from contact with white
+people. Cato was a floater from South Carolina. Reed was born in the
+county, but he was a good type of the worthless and densely ignorant
+Negro.
+
+It is a somewhat common impression that a whole town loses itself in a
+passion of anarchy, and is not satisfied until the criminals are killed.
+But in spite of the terrible provocation and the intense feeling, there
+yet existed in Statesboro exactly such a feeling for the sacredness of
+law, such intelligent Americanism, as exists in your town or mine. Not
+within the present generation had a lynching taken place in the town, and
+the people were deeply concerned to preserve the honour and good name of
+their community. In the midst of intense excitement a meeting of good
+citizens, both white and black, was called in the court-house. It was
+presided over by J. A. Brannan, one of the foremost citizens. Speeches
+were made by Mayor Johnstone, by the ministers of the town, and by other
+citizens, including a Negro, all calling for good order and the calm and
+proper enforcement of the law.
+
+
+_Attempts to Prevent the Lynching_
+
+And the regular machinery of justice was put in motion with commendable
+rapidity. Fearing a lynching, the Negroes who had been arrested were sent
+to Savannah and there lodged in jail. A grand jury was immediately called,
+indictments were found, and in two weeks--the shortest possible time under
+the law--the Negroes were brought back from Savannah for trial. To protect
+them, two military companies, one from Statesboro, one from Savannah, were
+called out. The proof of guilt was absolutely conclusive, and, although
+the Negroes were given every advantage to which they were entitled under
+the law, several prominent attorneys having been appointed to defend them,
+they were promptly convicted and sentenced to be hanged.
+
+In the meantime great excitement prevailed. The town was crowded for days
+with farmers who came flocking in from every direction. The crime was
+discussed and magnified; it was common talk that the "niggers of Madison
+County are getting too bigoty"--that they wouldn't "keep their places."
+Fuel was added to the flame by the common report that the murderers of the
+Hodges family were members of a Negro society known as the "Before Day
+Club," and wild stories were told of other murders that had been planned,
+the names of intended victims even being reported.
+
+On the Sunday night before the trial, two Negro women, walking down the
+street are said to have crowded two respectable white girls off the
+sidewalk. A crowd dragged the women from a church where they had gone,
+took them to the outskirts of the town, whipped them both violently, and
+ordered them to leave the county.
+
+"Let the law take its course," urged the good citizen. "The Negroes have
+been sentenced to be hanged, let them be hanged legally; we want no
+disgrace to fall on the town."
+
+
+_How the Lynchers Themselves Defend a Lynching_
+
+But as the trial progressed and the crowd increased, there were louder and
+louder expressions of the belief that hanging was too good for such a
+crime. I heard intelligent citizens argue that a Negro criminal, in order
+to be a hero in the eyes of his people, does not mind being hanged!
+
+Another distinct feeling developed--a feeling that I found in other
+lynching towns: that somehow the courts and the law were not to be
+trusted to punish the criminals properly. Although Reed and Cato were
+sentenced to be hanged, the crowd argued that "the lawyers would get them
+off," that "the case would be appealed, and they would go free."
+
+Members of the mob tried to get Sheriff Kendrick to promise not to remove
+the Negroes to Savannah, fearing that in some way they would be taken
+beyond the reach of justice.
+
+In other words, there existed a deep-seated conviction that justice too
+often miscarried in Bulloch County and that murderers commonly escaped
+punishment through the delays and technicalities of the law.
+
+
+_A Habit of Man-killing_
+
+And there is, unfortunately, a foundation for this belief. In every
+lynching town I visited I made especial inquiry as to the prevalence of
+crime, particularly as to the degree of certainty of punishment for crime.
+In all of them property is safe; laws looking to the protection of goods
+and chattels are executed with a fair degree of precision; for we are a
+business-worshipping people. But I was astounded by the extraordinary
+prevalence in all these lynching counties, North as well as South, of
+crimes of violence, especially homicide, accompanied in every case by a
+poor enforcement of the law. Bulloch County, with barely twenty-five
+thousand inhabitants, had thirty-two homicides in a little more than five
+years before the lynching--an annual average of one to every four thousand
+five hundred people (the average in the entire United States being one to
+nine thousand). Within eight months prior to the Hodges lynching, no fewer
+than ten persons (including the Hodges family) were murdered in Bulloch
+County. In twenty-eight years, notwithstanding the high rate of homicides,
+only three men, all Negroes, have been legally hanged, while four
+men--three Negroes and one white man--have been lynched.
+
+It is well understood that if the murderer has friends or a little money
+to hire lawyers, he can, especially if he happens to be white, nearly
+always escape with a nominal punishment. These facts are widely known and
+generally commented upon. In his subsequent charge to the grand jury,
+Judge Daley said that the mob was due in part to "delays in the execution
+of law and to the people becoming impatient."
+
+I am not telling these things with any idea of excusing or palliating the
+crime of lynching, but with the earnest intent of setting forth all the
+facts, so that we may understand just what the feelings and impulses of a
+lynching town really are, good as well as bad. Unless we diagnose the case
+accurately, we cannot hope to discover effective remedies.
+
+
+_Psychology of the Mob_
+
+In the intense, excited crowd gathered around the court-house on this
+Tuesday, the 16th of August, other influences were also at work,
+influences operating in a greater or less degree in every lynching mob. We
+are accustomed to look upon a mob as an entity, the expression of a single
+concrete feeling; it is not; it is itself torn with dissensions and
+compunctions, swayed by conflicting emotions. Similarly, we look upon a
+militia company as a sort of machine, which, set in operation,
+automatically performs a certain definite service. But it is not. It is
+made up of young men, each with his own intense feelings, prejudices,
+ideals; and it requires unusual discipline to inculcate such a sense of
+duty that the individual soldier will rise superior to the emotions of the
+hour. Most of these young men of Statesboro and Savannah really
+sympathised with the mob; among the crowd the Statesboro men saw their
+relatives and friends. Some of the officers were ambitious men, hoping to
+stand for political office. What would happen if they ordered the troops
+to fire on their neighbours?
+
+And "the nigger deserved hanging," and "why should good white blood be
+shed for nigger brutes?" At a moment of this sort the clear perception of
+solemn abstract principles and great civic duties fades away in tumultuous
+excitement. Yet these soldier boys were not cowards; they have a fighting
+history; their fathers made good soldiers; they themselves would serve
+bravely against a foreign enemy, but when called upon for mob service they
+failed utterly, as they have failed repeatedly, both North and South.
+
+Up to the last moment, although the crowd believed in lynching and wanted
+to lynch, there seemed to be no real and general determination to
+forestall the law. The mob had no centre, no fixed purpose, no real plan
+of action. One determined man, knowing his duty (as I shall show in
+another story), and doing it with common sense, could have prevented
+trouble, but there was no such man. Captain Hitch, of the Savannah
+Company, a vacillating commander, allowed the crowd to pack the
+court-house, to stream in and out among his soldiers; he laid the
+responsibility (afterward) on the sheriff, and the sheriff shouldered it
+back upon him. In nearly all the cases I investigated, I found the same
+attempt to shift responsibility, the same lack of a responsible head. Our
+system too often fails when mob stress is laid upon it--unless it happens
+that some strong man stands out, assumes responsibility, and becomes a
+momentary despot.
+
+
+_How the Soldiers Were Overpowered_
+
+A mob, no matter how deeply inflamed, is always cowardly. This mob was no
+exception. It crowded up, crowded up, testing authority. It joked with the
+soldiers, and when it found that the jokes were appreciated, it took
+further liberties; it jostled the soldiers--good-humouredly. "You don't
+dare fire," it said, and the soldiers made no reply. "Your guns aren't
+loaded," it said, and some soldier confessed that they were not. In tender
+consideration for the feelings of the mob, the officers had ordered the
+men not to load their rifles. The next step was easy enough; the mob
+playfully wrenched away a few of the guns, those behind pushed
+forward--those behind always do push forward, knowing they will not be
+hurt--and in a moment the whole mob was swarming up the stairs, yelling
+and cheering.
+
+In the court-room, sentence had been passed on Reed and Cato, and the
+judge had just congratulated the people on "their splendid regard for the
+law under very trying conditions." Then the mob broke in. A brother of the
+murdered Hodges, a minister from Texas, rose magnificently to the
+occasion. With tears streaming down his face, he begged the mob to let the
+law take its course.
+
+"We don't want religion, we want blood," yelled a voice.
+
+The mob was now thoroughly stirred; it ceased to hesitate; it was
+controlled wholly by its emotions. The leaders plunged down the court-room
+and into the witness chamber, where the Negroes sat with their wives,
+Reed's wife with a young baby. The officers of the law accommodatingly
+indicated the right Negroes, and the mob dragged them out. Hanging was at
+first proposed, and a man even climbed a telegraph-pole just outside the
+court-house, but the mob, growing more ferocious as it gathered volume and
+excitement, yelled its determination:
+
+"Burn them! burn them!"
+
+They rushed up the road, intending to take the Negroes to the scene of the
+crime. But it was midday in August, with a broiling hot sun overhead and a
+dusty road underfoot. A mile from town the mob swerved into a turpentine
+forest, pausing first to let the Negroes kneel and confess. Calmer spirits
+again counselled hanging, but some one began to recite in a high-keyed
+voice the awful details of the crime, dwelling especially on the death of
+the little girl. It worked the mob into a frenzy of ferocity.
+
+"They burned the Hodges and gave them no choice; burn the niggers!"
+
+"Please don't burn me," pleaded Cato. And again: "Hang me or shoot me;
+please don't burn me!"
+
+
+_Burning of the Negroes_
+
+Some one referred the question to the father-in-law of Hodges. He said
+Hodges's mother wished the men burned. That settled it. Men were sent into
+town for kerosene oil and chains, and finally the Negroes were bound to an
+old stump, fagots were heaped around them, and each was drenched with oil.
+Then the crowd stood back accommodatingly, while a photographer, standing
+there in the bright sunshine, took pictures of the chained Negroes.
+Citizens crowded up behind the stump and got their faces into the
+photograph. When the fagots were lighted, the crowd yelled wildly. Cato,
+the less stolid of the two Negroes, partly of white blood, screamed with
+agony; but Reed, black and stolid, bore it like a block of wood. They
+threw knots and sticks at the writhing creatures, but always left room
+for the photographer to take more pictures.
+
+And when it was all over, they began, in common with all mobs, to fight
+for souvenirs. They scrambled for the chains before they were cold, and
+the precious links were divided among the populace. Pieces of the stump
+were hacked off, and finally one young man--it must be told--gathered up a
+few charred remnants of bone, carried them uptown, and actually tried to
+give them to the judge who presided at the trial of the Negroes, to the
+utter disgust of that official.
+
+
+_After Effects of Mob-law_
+
+This is the law of the mob, that it never stops with the thing it sets out
+to do. It is exactly like any other manifestation of uncontrolled human
+passion--given licence it takes more licence, it releases that which is
+ugly, violent, revengeful in the community as in the individual human
+heart. I have heard often of a "quiet mob," an "orderly mob," which "went
+about its business and hanged the nigger," but in all the cases I have
+known about, and I made special inquiries upon this particular point, not
+one single mob stopped when the immediate work was done, unless under
+compulsion. Even good citizens of Statesboro will tell you that "the
+niggers got only what they deserved," and "it was all right if the mob had
+only stopped there." But it did not stop there; it never does.
+
+All the stored-up racial animosity came seething to the surface; all the
+personal grudges and spite. As I have already related, two Negro women
+were whipped on the Sunday night before the lynching. On the day following
+the lynching the father of the women was found seeking legal punishment
+for the men who whipped his daughters, and he himself was taken out and
+frightfully beaten. On the same day two other young Negroes, of the
+especially hated "smart nigger" type, were caught and whipped--one for
+riding a bicycle on the sidewalk, the other, as several citizens told me,
+"on general principles." But this was not the worst. On Wednesday night an
+old Negro man and his son--Negroes of the better class--were sitting in
+their cabin some miles from Statesboro, when they were both shot at
+through the window and badly wounded. Another respectable Negro, named
+McBride, was visited in his home by a white mob, which first whipped his
+wife, who was confined with a baby three days old, and then beat, kicked,
+and shot McBride himself so horribly that he died the next day. The better
+class of citizens, the same men who would, perhaps, condone the burning of
+Reed and Cato, had no sympathy with this sort of thing. Some of them took
+McBride's dying statement, and four white men were arrested and charged
+with the murder; but never punished.
+
+Indeed, the mob led directly to a general increase of crime in Bulloch
+County. As Judge Daley said in his charge to a subsequent grand jury:
+
+"Mob violence begets crime. Crime has been more prevalent since this
+lynching than ever before. In the middle circuit the courts have been so
+badly crowded with murder trials that it has been almost impossible to
+attend to civil business."
+
+Another evil result of the lynching was that it destroyed valuable
+evidence. The prosecutors had hoped to learn from the convicted Reed and
+Cato whether or not they had any companions and thereby bring to justice
+all the other Negroes suspected of complicity in the murder of the Hodges.
+If the Before Day Club ever existed and had a criminal purpose (which is
+doubtful) most of the members who composed it were left at large, awaiting
+the next opportunity to rob and murder.
+
+
+_Mob Justice and the Cotton Crop_
+
+Mob-law has not only represented a moral collapse in this community, but
+it struck, also, at the sensitive pocket of the business interests of the
+county. Frightened by the threatening attitude of the whites, the Negroes
+began to leave the county. It was just at the beginning of the
+cotton-picking season, when labour of every sort was much needed, Negro
+labour especially. It would not do to frighten away all the Negroes. On
+Thursday some of the officials and citizens of Statesboro got together,
+appointed extra marshals, and gave notice that there were to be no more
+whippings, and the mob spirit disappeared--until next time.
+
+But what of the large Negro population of Statesboro during all this
+excitement? The citizens told the "decent Negroes": "We don't want to hurt
+you; we know you; you are all right; go home and you won't be hurt." Go
+home they did, and there was not a Negro to be seen during all the time of
+the lynching. From inquiry among the Negroes themselves, I found that many
+of them had no voice to raise against the burning of Reed and Cato. This
+was the grim, primitive eye-for-an-eye logic that they used, in common
+with many white men:
+
+"Reed and Cato burned the Hodges; they ought to be burned."
+
+Even Cato's wife used this logic.
+
+But all the Negroes were bitter over the indiscriminate whippings which
+followed the lynching. These whippings widened the breach between the
+races, led to deeper suspicion and hatred, fertilised the soil for future
+outbreaks. In the same week that I visited Statesboro, no fewer than three
+cotton-gins in various parts of Bulloch County were mysteriously burned at
+night, and while no one knew the exact origin of the fires, it was openly
+charged that they were caused by revengeful Negroes. None of these
+terrible after-effects would have taken place if the law had been allowed
+to follow its course.
+
+
+_A Fighting Parson_
+
+The overwhelming majority of the people of Bulloch County undoubtedly
+condoned the lynching, even believed in it heartily and completely. And
+yet, as I have said, there was a strong dissenting opposition among the
+really thoughtful, better-class citizens. All the churches of Statesboro
+came out strongly for law and order. The Methodist church, led by a
+fighting parson, the Rev. Whitely Langston, expelled two members who had
+been in the mob--an act so unpopular that the church lost twenty-five
+members of its congregation. Of course, the members of the mob were known,
+but none of them was ever punished. The judge especially charged the grand
+jury to investigate the lynching, and this was its report:
+
+"We deplore the recent lawlessness in our city and community, specially
+referred to by his Honour, Judge A. F. Daley, in his able charge. We have
+investigated the matter in the light of information coming under our
+personal knowledge and obtained by the examination of a number of
+witnesses, but we have been unable to find sufficient evidence to warrant
+indictments. We tender thanks to his Honour, Judge Daley, for his able and
+comprehensive charge."
+
+A feeble attempt was made to discipline the military officers who allowed
+the populace to walk over them and take away their guns. A court-martial
+sat for days in Savannah and finally recommended the dismissal of Captain
+Hitch from the service of the state; but the Governor let him off with
+half the penalty suggested. Two lieutenants were also disciplined.
+
+In the state election which followed the lynching, numerous voters in
+Bulloch County actually scratched the name of Governor Terrell, of
+Georgia, because he ordered the troops to Statesboro, and substituted the
+name of Captain Hitch. Sheriff Kendrick, who failed to protect Reed and
+Cato, was re-elected without opposition.
+
+It was in a tone of deep discouragement that Mayor G. S. Johnstone, of
+Statesboro, said to me:
+
+"If our grand jury won't indict these lynchers, if our petit juries won't
+convict, and if our soldiers won't shoot, what are we coming to?"
+
+
+_Revolution of Opinion in the South on Lynching_
+
+Conditions at Statesboro are, perhaps, typical of those in most Southern
+towns. In most Southern towns a lynching would be conducted much as it was
+in Statesboro; there would be the same objecting but ineffective minority
+of good citizens, the troops would refuse their duty, and the lynchers
+would escape in much the same way. And yet, if we were to stop with the
+account of the Statesboro affair, we should overlook some of the greatest
+influences now affecting the lynching problem in the South. No one who
+visits the South can escape the conviction that, with its intensified
+industrial life, and the marvelous development and enrichment of the whole
+country, other equally momentous, if less tangible, changes are taking
+place. Public opinion is developing along new lines, old, set prejudices
+are breaking up, and there is, among other evident influences, a marked
+revolution in the attitude of the Southern people and the Southern
+newspapers on the lynching question. I turn now to the lynching at
+Huntsville, Ala., which reveals in a striking manner some of the features
+of the new revolt in the South against mob-law.
+
+
+[Illustration: COURT HOUSE AND BANK IN THE PUBLIC SQUARE AT HUNTSVILLE,
+ALABAMA
+
+The Negro, Maples, was lynched by being hung to the elm tree at the corner
+of the court house, near the extreme right of the picture.
+
+Photographed by Collins & Son]
+
+
+_A Negro Crime at Huntsville, Ala._
+
+One evening in September, 1904, a Negro of Huntsville, Ala., asked an old
+peddler named Waldrop for a ride. Waldrop was a kindly old man, well known
+and respected throughout Madison County; he drove into the city two or
+three times a week with vegetables and chickens to sell, and returned with
+the small product of his trade in his pocket.
+
+Waldrop knew the Negro, Maples, and, although Maples was of the worthless
+sort, and even then under indictment for thieving, the peddler made room
+for him in his waggon, and they rode out of the town together. They drove
+into a lonely road. They crossed a little bridge. Tall trees shaded and
+darkened the place. Night was falling. The Negro picked up a stone and
+beat out the brains of the inoffensive old man, robbed him, and left him
+lying there at the roadside, while the horse wandered homeward.
+
+How a murder cries out! The murderer fled in the darkness but it was as if
+he left great footprints. The next day, in Huntsville, the law laid its
+hand on his shoulder.
+
+Now, Huntsville is one of the best cities in Alabama. No other city,
+perhaps, preserves more of the aristocratic habiliments of the older
+South. It was the first capital of the state. Seven governors lie buried
+in its cemetery; its county house, its bank, some of its residences are
+noble examples of the architecture of the ante-bellum South. And while
+preserving these evidences of the wealth and refinement of an older
+civilisation, few cities in the South have responded more vigorously to
+the new impulses of progress and development. Its growth during the last
+few years has been little short of amazing. Northern capital has come in;
+nine cotton-mills have been built, drawing a large increase of population,
+and stimulating the development of the country in every direction. It is
+a fine, orderly, progressive city--intensely American, ambitious,
+self-respecting.
+
+
+_Relation of Lynching to Business Success_
+
+Huntsville has had its share of lynchings in the past. Within twenty years
+seven Negroes and one white man had been the victims of mobs in Madison
+County. The best citizens knew what a lynching meant; they knew how the
+mob began, and what invariably followed its excesses, and they wanted no
+more such horrors. But this revolt was not wholly moral. With awakening
+industrial ambition the people realised that disorder had a tendency to
+frighten away capital, stop immigration, and retard development generally.
+Good business demands good order. This feeling has been expressed in
+various forms and through many channels. It existed in Statesboro, but it
+was by no means as vigorous as in this manufacturing city of Huntsville.
+We find, for instance, Congressman Richardson of Alabama, a citizen of
+Huntsville, saying in a speech on the floor of the House of
+Representatives:
+
+"Why, Mr. Chairman, we have more reason in the South to observe the law
+and do what is right than any other section of this Union."
+
+The Atlanta _Constitution_ presents the same view in vigorous language:
+
+     Aside entirely from the consideration of the evil effects of the mob
+     spirit in breeding general disrespect for the law, and aside from the
+     question of the inevitable brutalising effect of lynching upon those
+     who are spectators--and the effect goes even further--the practical
+     question arises: Can we at the South afford it?
+
+     Is there any use blinding ourselves to the fact, patent to everybody,
+     that it is this sort of thing that has kept hundreds of thousands of
+     desirable immigrants from coming to the Southern states?
+
+
+_Story of a Bold Judge_
+
+When the murderer of the peddler Waldrop was arrested, therefore, the
+thoughtful and progressive people of the city--the kind who are creating
+the New South--took immediate steps to prevent mob disturbance. The city
+was fortunate in having an able, energetic young man as its circuit
+judge--a judge, the son of a judge, who saw his duty clearly, and who was
+not afraid to act, even though it might ruin his immediate political
+future, as, indeed, it did. Rare qualities in these days! The murder was
+committed Tuesday, September 6th, the Negro was arrested Wednesday, Judge
+Speake impanelled a special grand jury without waiting a moment, and that
+very afternoon, within six hours after the Negro's arrest and within
+twenty hours after the crime was committed, the Negro was formally
+indicted. Arrangements were then made to call a special trial jury within
+a week, in the hope that the prospect of immediate punishment would
+prevent the gathering of a mob.
+
+
+_A Record of Homicide as a Cause of Lynching_
+
+But, unfortunately, we find here in Madison County not only a history of
+lynching--a habit, it may be called--but there existed the same disregard
+for the sacredness of human life which is the common characteristic of
+most lynching communities, South or North. I made a careful examination of
+the records of the county. In the five years preceding this lynching, no
+fewer than thirty-three murder and homicide cases were tried in the
+courts, besides eight murderers indicted, but not arrested. This is the
+record of a single county of about forty thousand people. Notwithstanding
+this record of crime, there had not been a legal hanging in the county,
+even of a Negro, for nineteen years. It was a fact--well known to
+everybody in the county--that it was next to impossible to convict a white
+man for killing. Murderers employed good lawyers, they appealed their
+cases, they brought political friendships to bear, and the relationships
+between the old families were so far extended that they reached even into
+the jury room. As a consequence, nearly every white murderer went free.
+Only a short time before the lynching, Fred Stevens a white man, who shot
+a white man in a quarrel over a bucket of water, was let out with a fine
+of $50, costs, and thirty days in jail. This for a _killing_. And the
+attorney for Stevens actually went into court afterward and asked to have
+the costs cut down.
+
+Negroes who committed homicide, though more vigorously punished than white
+murderers, yet frequently escaped with five or ten years in the
+penitentiary--especially if they had money or a few white friends. All
+this had induced a contempt of the courts of justice--a fear that, after
+all, through the delays and technicalities of the law and the compassion
+of the jury, the murderer of Waldrop would not be punished as he deserved.
+This was the substance of the reasoning I heard repeatedly: "That Negro,
+Maples, ought to have been hanged; we were not sure the jury would hang
+him; we hanged him to protect ourselves."
+
+I met an intelligent farmer during a drive through Madison County. Here
+are some of the things he said, and they voiced closely what I heard in
+one form or another from many people in all walks of life:
+
+"Life is cheap in Madison County. If you have a grudge against a man, kill
+him; don't wound him. If you wound him, you'll likely be sent up; if you
+kill him, you can go free. They often punish more severely for carrying
+concealed weapons or even for chicken stealing in Madison County than they
+do for murder."
+
+So strong was the evidence in one murder case in an adjoining circuit that
+Judge Kyle instructed the jury to find the murderer guilty; the jury
+deliberately returned a verdict, "Not guilty." The Alabama system of
+justice is cursed by the professional juror chosen by politicians, and
+often open to political influences. This, with the unlimited right of
+appeal and the great number of peremptory challenges allowed to the
+defence in accepting jurymen, gives such power to the lawyers for the
+defendant that convictions are exceedingly difficult. Oftentimes, also,
+the prosecuting attorney is a young, inexperienced lawyer, ill-paid, who
+is no match for the able attorneys employed by the defendant.
+
+No, it is not all race prejudice that causes lynchings, even in the South.
+One man in every six lynched in this country in 1903--the year before the
+lynching I am describing--was a white man. It is true that a Negro is
+often the victim of mob-law where a white man would not be, but the chief
+cause certainly seems to lie deeper, in the widespread contempt of the
+courts, and the unpunished subversion of the law in this country, both
+South and North. This, indeed, would probably be the sole cause of
+lynching, were it not for the crime of rape, of which I wish to speak
+again a little later.
+
+
+_Composition of the Mob at Huntsville_
+
+Well, a mob began gathering in Huntsville before the grand jury had ceased
+its labours. It was chiefly composed of the workmen from the
+cotton-mills. These are of a peculiar class--pure American stock,
+naturally of high intelligence, but almost wholly illiterate--men from the
+hills, the descendants of the "poor white trash," who never owned slaves,
+and who have always hated the Negroes. The poor whites are and have been
+for a long time in certain lines the industrial competitors of the
+Negroes, and the jealousy thus engendered accounts in no small degree for
+the intensity of the race feeling.
+
+Anticipating trouble, Judge Speake ordered the closing of all the
+saloons--there were then only fifteen to a population of some twenty-one
+thousand--and called out the local military company. But the mob ran over
+the militiamen as though they were not there, broke into the jail, built a
+fire in the hallway, and added sulphur and cayenne pepper. Fearing that
+the jail would be burned and all the prisoners suffocated, the sheriff
+released the Negro, Maples, and he jumped out of a second-story window
+into the mob. They dragged him up the street to the square in the heart of
+the city. Here, on the pleasant lawn, the Daughters of America were
+holding a festival, and the place was brilliant with Japanese lanterns.
+Scattering the women and children, the mob jostled the Negro under the
+glare of an electric light, just in front of the stately old court-house.
+
+Here impassioned addresses were made by several prominent young
+lawyers--J. H. Wallace, Jr., W. B. Bankhead, and Solicitor Pettus--urging
+the observance of law and order. A showing of hands afterward revealed the
+fact that a large proportion of those present favoured a legal
+administration of justice. But it was too late now.
+
+A peculiarly dramatic incident fired the mob anew. The Negro was suddenly
+confronted by the son of the murdered peddler. "Horace," he demanded, "did
+you kill my old dad?"
+
+Quivering with fright, the Negro is said to have confessed the crime. He
+was instantly dragged around the corner, where they hanged him to an
+elm-tree, and while he dangled there in the light of the gala lanterns,
+they shot him full of holes. Then they cut off one of his little fingers
+and parts of his trousers for souvenirs. So he hung until daylight, and
+crowds of people came out to see.
+
+
+_Effort to Punish the Lynchers_
+
+But the forces of law and order here had vigour and energy. Judge Speake,
+communicating with the Governor, had troops sent from Birmingham, and
+then, without shilly-shallying or delaying or endeavouring to shift
+responsibility, he ordered a special grand jury to indict the lynchers the
+very next day and he saw to it that it was composed of the best citizens
+in town. When it met, so deep and solemn was its feeling of responsibility
+that it was opened with prayer, an extraordinary evidence of the awakened
+conscience of the people. More than this, the citizens generally were so
+aroused that they held a mass meeting, and denounced the lynching as a
+"blot upon our civilisation," and declared that "each and every man taking
+part" with the mob was "guilty of murder." Bold words, but no bolder than
+the editorials of the newspapers of the town or of the state. Every force
+of decency and good order was at work. Such strong newspapers as the
+Birmingham _Age-Herald_, the _Ledger_, and the _News_, the Montgomery
+_Advertiser_, the Chattanooga _News_, and, indeed, prominent newspapers
+all over the South united strongly in their condemnation of the lynchers
+and in their support of the efforts to bring the mob to justice.
+
+
+_Southern Newspapers on Lynching_
+
+The Huntsville _Mercury_ spoke of the "deep sense of shame felt by our
+good citizens in being run over by a few lawless spirits."
+
+"There is no justification," said the Birmingham _News_, "for the mob who,
+in punishing one murderer, made many more."
+
+"This lynching," said the Birmingham _Ledger_, "is a disgrace to our
+state. The _Ledger_ doesn't put its ear to the ground to hear from the
+North, nor does it care what Northern papers say. The crime is our own,
+and the disgrace falls on us."
+
+"Where, in fact," said the _Age-Herald_, "does such business lead to? The
+answer is summed up in a word--anarchy!"
+
+It would be well if every community in this country could read the full
+report of Judge Speake's grand jury. It is a work of the sort struck off
+only by men stirred to high things by what they feel to be a great
+crisis; it is of the same metal as the Declaration of Independence. Here
+is a single paragraph:
+
+     Realising that this is a supreme moment in our history; that we must
+     either take a stand for the law to-day or surrender to the mob and to
+     the anarchists for all time; that our actions shall make for good or
+     evil in future generations; forgetting our personal friendships and
+     affiliations, and with malice toward none, but acting only as sworn
+     officers of the state of Alabama, we, the grand jury of Madison
+     County, state of Alabama, find----
+
+Ten members of the mob were indicted--and not for mere rioting or for
+breaking into the jail, but for _murder_. The jury also charged Sheriff
+Rodgers, Mayor Smith, and Chief of Police Overton with wilful neglect and
+incompetence, and advised their impeachment. No one not understanding the
+far-reaching family and political relationships in these old-settled
+Southern communities, and the deep-seated feeling against punishment for
+the crime of lynching, can form any adequate idea of what a sensation was
+caused by the charges of the grand jury against the foremost officials of
+the city. It came like a bolt from a clear sky; it was altogether an
+astonishing procedure, at first not fully credited. When the utter
+seriousness of Judge Speake came to be fully recognised, a good many men
+hurriedly left town. The Birmingham soldiers, led by a captain with
+backbone, arrested a number of those who remained. Judge Speake ordered a
+special trial jury, and appointed an able lawyer to assist Prosecutor
+Pettus in bringing the lynchers to justice. The very next week the trials
+were begun.
+
+
+_Difficulty of Breaking the Lynching Habit_
+
+By this time, however, the usual influences had begun to work; the moral
+revulsion had carried far, and the rebound had come. The energetic judge
+and his solicitors found themselves face to face with the bad old jury
+system, with the deep-seated distrust of the courts, with the rooted habit
+of non-punishment for lynchers. Moreover, it was found that certain wild
+young men, with good family connections, had been mixed up in the mob--and
+all the strong family and political machinery of the country began to
+array itself against conviction. A community has exactly as hard a road to
+travel in breaking a bad habit as an individual. The New South is having
+a struggle to break the habits of the Old South. It was found, also, that
+the great mass of people in the country, as well as the millworkers in the
+city, were still strongly in favour of punishment by lynching. One hundred
+and ten veniremen examined for jurors to try the lynchers were asked this
+question; "If you were satisfied from the evidence beyond a reasonable
+doubt that the defendant took part with or abetted the mob in murdering a
+Negro, would you favour his conviction?" And seventy-six of them answered,
+"No."
+
+In other words, a large majority believed that a white man should not be
+punished for lynching a Negro. And when the juries were finally obtained,
+although the evidence was conclusive, they acquitted the lynchers, one
+after another. Only one man in one jury stood out for conviction--a young
+clerk named S. M. Blair, a pretty good type of the modern hero. He hung
+the jury, and so bitter was the feeling against him among the millworkers
+that they threatened to boycott his employer.
+
+
+_Relation of Lynching to the "Usual Crime"_
+
+This is the reasoning of many of the men chosen as jurors; I heard it over
+and over again, not only in Huntsville but, in substance, everywhere that
+I stopped in the South:
+
+"If we convict these men for lynching the Negro, Maples, we shall
+establish a precedent that will prevent us from lynching for the crime of
+rape."
+
+Every argument on lynching in the South gets back sooner or later to this
+question of rape. Ask any high-class citizen--the very highest--if he
+believes in lynching, and he will tell you roundly, "No." Ask him about
+lynching for rape, and in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred he will
+instantly weaken.
+
+"If my sister or my daughter--look here, if your sister or your
+daughter----"
+
+Lynching, he says, is absolutely necessary to keep down this crime. You
+ask him why the law cannot be depended upon, and he replies:
+
+"It is too great an ordeal for the self-respecting white woman to go into
+court and accuse the Negro ravisher and withstand a public
+cross-examination. It is intolerable. No woman will do it. And, besides,
+the courts are uncertain. Lynching is the only remedy."
+
+Yet the South is deeply stirred over the prevalence of lynching. The mob
+spirit, invoked to punish such a crime as rape, is defended by some people
+in the North as well as in the South; but once invoked, it spreads and
+spreads, until to-day lynching for rape forms only a very small proportion
+of the total number of mob hangings. It spreads until a Negro is lynched
+for chicken stealing, or for mere "obnoxiousness." In the year 1903, out
+of 103 lynchings, only 11 were for rape and 10 for attempted rape, while
+47 were for murder, 15 for complicity in murderous assault, 4 for arson, 5
+for mere "race prejudice," 2 for insults to whites, 1 for making threats,
+5 for unknown offenses, 1 for refusing to give information, and 3 were
+wholly innocent Negroes, lynched because their identity was mistaken. It
+is probable that lynching in the South would immediately be wiped out, if
+it were not for the question of rape. You will hear the problem put by
+thinking Southerners very much in this fashion:
+
+"We must stop mob-law; every month we recognise that fact more clearly.
+But can we stop mob-law unless we go to the heart of the matter and stop
+lynching for rape? Is there not a way of changing our methods of legal
+procedure so that the offender in this crime can be punished without
+subjecting the victim to the horrible publicity of the courts?"
+
+
+_Governor Cunningham--A Real Leader_
+
+But I have wandered from my story. In Acting-Governor Cunningham, the
+people of Alabama had a leader who was not afraid to handle a dangerous
+subject like lynching. He sent a court of inquiry to Huntsville, which
+found the local military company "worthless and inefficient," because it
+had failed to protect the jail. Immediately, upon the receipt of this
+report, the Governor dismissed the Huntsville company from the service,
+every man in it. Quite a contrast from the action at Statesboro! The
+Governor then went a step further: he ordered the impeachment of the
+sheriff. A little later Federal Judge Jones took up the case, charged his
+jury vigorously, and some of the mob rioters were indicted in the federal
+courts.
+
+Governor Cunningham took a bold stand against mob-law everywhere and
+anywhere in the state:
+
+"I am opposed to mob-law," he said, "of whatsoever kind, for any and all
+causes. If lynching is to be justified or extenuated for any crime, be it
+ever so serious, it will lead to the same method of punishment for other
+crimes of a less degree of depravity, and through the operation of the
+process of evolution, will enlarge more and more the field of operation
+for this form of lawlessness."
+
+It means something also when citizens, in support of their institutions
+and out of love of their city, rise above politics. Judge Speake had been
+nominated by the Democrats to succeed himself. A Democratic nomination in
+Alabama means election. After his vigorous campaign against the lynchers,
+he became exceedingly unpopular among the majority of the people. They
+resolved to defeat him. A committee waited on Shelby Pleasants, a
+prominent Republican lawyer, and asked him to run against Judge Speake,
+assuring him a certain election.
+
+"I will not be a mob's candidate," he said. "I indorse every action of
+Judge Speake."
+
+The committee approached several other lawyers, but not one of them would
+run against the judge, and the Republican newspaper of the town came out
+strongly in support of Judge Speake, even publishing his name at the head
+of its editorial columns. Before he could be elected, however, a decision
+of the State Supreme Court, unconnected in any way with the lynching,
+followed like fate, and deprived Madison County of his services. He was
+now a private citizen, and even if he had come up for nomination to any
+political office, he would undoubtedly have been defeated. The New South
+is not yet strong enough to defy the Old South politically.
+
+
+_Influences Tending to Prevent Future Lynchings in the South_
+
+The influences against lynching in the South are constantly growing
+stronger. With most (not all) of the newspapers, the preachers and the
+best citizens united against it, the outlook is full of hope. And rural
+free delivery and country telephones, spreading in every direction, are
+inestimable influences in the quickening of public opinion. Better roads
+are being built, the country is settling up with white people, schools are
+improving and the population generally, after a series of profitable
+cotton crops, is highly prosperous--all influences working toward the
+solution of this problem.
+
+When I went South I shared the impression of many Northerners that the
+South was lawless and did not care--an impression that arises from the
+wide publication of the horrible details of every lynching that occurs,
+and the utter silence regarding those deep, quiet, and yet powerful moral
+and industrial forces which are at the work of rejuvenation beneath the
+surface--an account of which I have given. I came away from the South
+deeply impressed with two things:
+
+That the South is making fully as good progress in overcoming its peculiar
+forms of lawlessness as the North is making in overcoming _its_ peculiar
+forms.
+
+
+II.--LYNCHING IN THE NORTH
+
+Having looked, into two Southern lynching towns, let us now see what a
+Northern lynching is like. The comparison is highly interesting and
+illuminating.
+
+Springfield, O., is one of the most prosperous of the smaller cities of
+the state. It is a beautiful town having, in 1904, some 41,000 people. It
+has fine streets, fine buildings, busy factories, churches, an imposing
+library. Some of the older families have resided there for nearly a
+century. It is the seat of government of one of the most fertile and
+attractive counties in the state: an altogether progressive, enlightened
+city. Of its population in 1904 over 6,000 were Negroes (about
+one-seventh), a considerable proportion of whom are recent settlers. Large
+numbers of Negroes, as I have shown in former chapters, have been
+migrating from the South, and crowding into Northern towns located along
+the Ohio or in those portions of Indiana, Illinois, Ohio, Pennsylvania,
+Kansas, and other states, which border on the Old South. Many of the
+Negroes in Springfield came from Kentucky. We discover in these Northern
+towns exactly as in the South, the two classes of Negroes: the steady,
+resident class, more or less known to the whites, and a restless,
+unstable, ignorant class, coming to one neighbourhood to-day to help build
+a bridge, and going elsewhere to-morrow to dig a canal. For years no such
+thing as race prejudice existed in Springfield; but with the growth of
+Negro population it increased with rapidity. For instance, a druggist in
+Springfield refused to sell soda-water to a Negro college professor, the
+typesetters in a publishing house compelled the discharge of Negro
+workmen, a Negro physician visited the high-school, found the half-dozen
+Negro pupils sitting by themselves and, angrily charging discrimination,
+ordered his child to sit among the white children. This feeling of race
+repulsion was especially noticeable between the working class of white men
+and the Negroes who come more or less into industrial competition with
+them. The use of Negroes for breaking strikes in the coalfields and
+elsewhere has been a fertile source of discord, kindling the fire of race
+prejudice in places where it never before existed.
+
+
+_How the Negroes Sold Their Votes_
+
+In Springfield there were about 1,500 Negro voters, many of whom were
+bought at every election. The Democrats and the Republicans were so evenly
+divided that the city administration was Democratic and the county
+administration Republican. The venal Negro vote went to the highest
+bidder, carried the elections, and, with the whiskey influence, governed
+the town. Springfield, enlightened, educated, progressive, highly
+American, had 145 saloons--or one to every 285 people. Before the
+lynching, nine of these were Negro saloons--some of them indescribably
+vile. A row of houses along the railroad tracks, not three blocks from the
+heart of the city, was known as the Levee. It was a Negro row composed of
+saloons and disorderly houses, where the lowest of the low, Negro men and
+both Negro and white women, made a general rendezvous. Just back of it was
+one of the foremost Catholic churches in town; hardly a block away were
+the post-office, the public library, and the foremost club of the city,
+and within three or four hundred yards were the back doors of some of the
+city's most aristocratic residences. For years, the ineffective good
+citizen had protested against these abominable resorts, but when the
+Republicans wanted to win they needed the votes from these places, and
+when the Democrats wanted to win _they_ needed them. Burnett, the
+Democratic boss, said in a tone of real injury to a gentleman--a
+Democrat--who protested against the protection of the Levee:
+
+"Don't you want the party to win? We've got to have those sixty or eighty
+votes from Hurley"--Hurley being the notorious Negro proprietor of a dive
+called the Honky Tonk.
+
+
+_Corrupt Politics and the Negro Question_
+
+So these vile places remained open, protected by the police, breeding
+crime, and encouraging arrogance, idleness, and vice among the Negroes.
+
+And yet one will hear good citizens of Springfield complaining that the
+Negroes make themselves conspicuous and obnoxious at primaries and
+elections, standing around, waiting, and refusing to vote until they
+receive money in hand.
+
+"To my mind," one of these citizens said to me, "the conspicuousness of
+the Negro at elections is one of the chief causes of race prejudice."
+
+But who is to blame? The Negro who accepts the bribe, or the white
+politician who is eager to give it, or the white business man who,
+desiring special privileges, stands behind the white politician, or the
+ordinary citizen who doesn't care? Talk with these politicians on the one
+hand, and the impractical reformers on the other, and they will tell you
+in all seriousness of the sins of the South in disfranchising the Negro.
+
+"Every Negro in Springfield," I was told, "exercises his right to vote."
+
+If you were to tell these men that the Negroes of Springfield are
+disfranchised as absolutely as they are anywhere in the South, they would
+stare at you in amazement. But a purchased voter is a disfranchised voter.
+The Negroes have no more real voice in the government of Springfield than
+they have in the government of Savannah or New Orleans. In the South the
+Negro has been disfranchised by law or by intimidation: in the North by
+cash. Which is worse?
+
+
+_Story of the Crime that Led to the Lynching_
+
+A few months before the lynching a Negro named Dixon arrived in
+Springfield from Kentucky. He was one of the illiterate, idle, floating
+sort. He had with him a woman not his wife, with whom he quarrelled. He
+was arrested and brought into court.
+
+I am profoundly conscious of the seriousness of any charge which touches
+upon our courts, the last resort of justice, and yet it was a matter of
+common report that "justice was easy" in Clark County, that laws were not
+enforced, that criminals were allowed to escape on suspended sentence. I
+heard this talk everywhere, often coupled with personal accusations
+against the judges, but I could not discover that the judges were more
+remiss than other officials. They were afflicted with no other disease.
+
+Even in a serious sociological study of Clark County by Professor E. S.
+Tood, I find this statement:
+
+     In Springfield, one of the chief faults of the municipal system has
+     been and is the laxity and discrimination in the enforcement of the
+     law. Many of the municipal ordinances have been shelved for years.
+     The saloon closing ordinances are enforced intermittently, as are
+     those concerning gambling.
+
+When the Negro Dixon was brought into court he was convicted and let out
+on suspended sentence. He got drunk immediately and was again arrested,
+this time serving several weeks in jail. The moment he was free he began
+quarrelling with his "wife," in a house directly across the street from
+police headquarters. An officer named Collis tried to make peace and Dixon
+deliberately shot him through the stomach, also wounding the woman.
+
+This was on Sunday. Dixon was immediately placed in the county jail.
+Collis died the next morning.
+
+
+_Human Life Cheap in Clark County_
+
+I have called attention to the fact that the lynching town nearly always
+has a previous bad record of homicide. Disregard for the sacredness of
+human life seems to be in the air of these places. Springfield was no
+exception. Between January 1, 1902, and March 7, 1904, the day of the
+lynching, a little more than two years, no fewer than ten homicides were
+committed in the city of Springfield. White men committed five of these
+crimes and Negroes five. Three of the cases were decided within a short
+time before the lynching and the punishment administered was widely
+criticised. Bishop, a coloured man who had killed a coloured man, was
+fined $200 and sentenced to six months in the workhouse. This was for
+_killing a man_. O'Brien, a white man, who killed a white man, got one
+year in the penitentiary. And only a week before the lynching,
+Schocknessy, a white man who killed a white man, but who had influential
+political friends, went scott-free!
+
+On the morning after the Collis murder, the _Daily Sun_ published a list
+of the recent homicides in Springfield in big type on its first page and
+asked editorially:
+
+"What are you going to do about it?"
+
+It then answered its own question:
+
+"Nothing."
+
+The following morning, after the lynching, the same paper printed in its
+headlines:
+
+     AWFUL REBUKE TO THE COURTS
+
+     _They Have Temporised With the Criminal Classes Until Patience was
+     Exhausted_
+
+I cite these facts to show the underlying conditions in Springfield; a
+soil richly prepared for an outbreak of mob law--with corrupt politics,
+vile saloons, the law paralysed by non-enforcement against vice, a large
+venal Negro vote, lax courts of justice.
+
+
+_Gathering of the Lynching Mob_
+
+Well, on Monday afternoon the mob began to gather. At first it was an
+absurd, ineffectual crowd, made up largely of lawless boys of sixteen to
+twenty--a pronounced feature of every mob--with a wide fringe of more
+respectable citizens, their hands in their pockets and no convictions in
+their souls, looking on curiously, helplessly. They gathered hooting
+around the jail, cowardly, at first, as all mobs are, but growing bolder
+as darkness came on and no move was made to check them. The murder of
+Collis was not a horrible, soul-rending crime like that at Statesboro,
+Ga.; these men in the mob were not personal friends of the murdered man;
+it was a mob from the back rooms of the swarming saloons of Springfield;
+and it included also the sort of idle boys "who hang around cigar stores,"
+as one observer told me. The newspaper reports are fond of describing
+lynching mobs as "made up of the foremost citizens of the town." In few
+cases that I know of, either South or North, except in back country
+neighbourhoods, has a mob been made up of what may be called the best
+citizens; but the best citizens have often stood afar off "decrying the
+mob"--as a Springfield man told me--and letting it go on. A mob is the
+method by which good citizens turn over the law and the government to the
+criminal or irresponsible classes.
+
+And no official in direct authority in Springfield that evening,
+apparently, had so much as an ounce of grit within him. The sheriff came
+out and made a weak speech in which he said he "didn't want to hurt
+anybody." They threw stones at him and broke his windows. The chief of
+police sent eighteen men to the jail but did not go near himself. All of
+these policemen undoubtedly sympathised with the mob in its efforts to get
+at the slayer of their brother officer; at least, they did nothing
+effective to prevent the lynching. An appeal was made to the Mayor to
+order out the engine companies that water might be turned on the mob. He
+said he didn't like to; _the hose might be cut_. The local militia company
+was called to its barracks, but the officer in charge hesitated,
+vacillated, doubted his authority, and objected finally because he had no
+ammunition _except_ Krag-Jorgenson cartridges, which, if fired into a mob,
+would kill too many people! The soldiers did not stir that night from the
+safe and comfortable precincts of their armoury.
+
+A sort of dry rot, a moral paralysis, seems to strike the administrators
+of law in a town like Springfield. What can be expected of officers who
+are not accustomed to enforce the law, or of a people not accustomed to
+obey it--or who make reservations and exceptions when they do enforce it
+or obey it?
+
+
+_Threats to Lynch the Judges_
+
+When the sheriff made his speech to the mob, urging them to let the law
+take its course they jeered him. The law! When, in the past, had the law
+taken its proper course in Clark County? Some one shouted, referring to
+Dixon:
+
+"He'll only get fined for shooting in the city limits."
+
+"He'll get ten days in jail and suspended sentence."
+
+Then there were voices:
+
+"Let's go hang Mower and Miller"--the two judges.
+
+This threat indeed, was frequently repeated both on the night of the
+lynching and on the day following.
+
+So the mob came finally, and cracked the door of the jail with a railroad
+rail. This jail is said to be the strongest in Ohio, and having seen it, I
+can well believe that the report is true. But steel bars have never yet
+kept out a mob; it takes something a good deal stronger: human courage
+backed up by the consciousness of being right.
+
+They murdered the Negro in cold blood in the jail doorway; then they
+dragged him to the principal business street and hung him to a
+telegraph-pole, afterward riddling his lifeless body with revolver shots.
+
+
+_Lesson of a Hanging Negro_
+
+That was the end of that! Mob justice administered! And there the Negro
+hung until daylight the next morning--an unspeakably grizzly, dangling
+horror, advertising the shame of the town. His head was shockingly crooked
+to one side, his ragged clothing, cut for souvenirs, exposed in places his
+bare body: he dripped blood. And, with the crowds of men both here and at
+the morgue where the body was publicly exhibited, came young boys in
+knickerbockers, and little girls and women by scores, horrified but
+curious. They came even with baby carriages! Men made jokes: "A dead
+nigger is a good nigger." And the purblind, dollars-and-cents man, most
+despicable of all, was congratulating the public:
+
+"It'll save the county a lot of money!"
+
+Significant lessons, these, for the young!
+
+But the mob wasn't through with its work. Easy people imagine that, having
+hanged a Negro, the mob goes quietly about its business; but that is never
+the way of the mob. Once released, the spirit of anarchy spreads and
+spreads, not subsiding until it has accomplished its full measure of evil.
+
+
+_Mob Burning of Negro Saloons_
+
+All the following day a rumbling, angry crowd filled the streets of
+Springfield, threatening to burn out the notorious Levee, threatening
+Judges Mower and Miller, threatening the "niggers." The local troops--to
+say nothing of the police force--which might easily have broken up the
+mob, remained sedulously in their armouries, vacillating, doubtful of
+authority, knowing that there were threats to burn and destroy, and making
+not one move toward the protection of the public. One of the captains was
+even permitted to go to a neighbouring city to a dance! At the very same
+time the panic-stricken officials were summoning troops from other towns.
+So night came on, the mob gathered around the notorious dives, some one
+touched a match, and the places of crime suddenly disgorged their foul
+inhabitants. Black and white, they came pouring out and vanished into the
+darkness where they belonged--from whence they did not return. Eight
+buildings went up in smoke, the fire department
+deliberating--intentionally, it is said--until the flames could not be
+controlled. The troops, almost driven out by the county prosecutor,
+McGrew, appeared after the mob had completed its work.
+
+Good work, badly done, a living demonstration of the inevitability of
+law--if not orderly, decent law, then of mob-law.
+
+For days following the troops filled Springfield, costing the state large
+sums of money, costing the county large sums of money. They chiefly
+guarded the public fountain; the mob had gone home--until next time.
+
+
+_Efforts to Punish the Mob_
+
+What happened after that? A perfunctory court-martial, that did absolutely
+nothing. A grand jury of really good citizens that sat for weeks, off and
+on; and like the mountain that was in travail and brought forth a mouse,
+they indicted two boys and two men out of all that mob, not for murder,
+but for "breaking into jail." And, curiously enough, it developed--how do
+such things develop?--that every man on the grand jury was a Republican,
+chosen by Republican county officers, and in their report they severely
+censured the police force (Democratic), and the mayor (Democratic), and
+had not one word of disapproval for the sheriff (Republican). Curiously
+enough, also, the public did not become enthusiastic over the report of
+that grand jury.
+
+But the worst feature of all in this Springfield lynching was the apathy
+of the public. No one really seemed to care. A "nigger" had been hanged:
+what of it? But the law itself had been lynched. What of that? I had just
+come from the South, where I had found the people of several lynching
+towns in a state of deep excitement--moral excitement if you like,
+thinking about this problem, quarrelling about it, expelling men from the
+church, impeaching sheriffs, dishonourably discharging whole militia
+companies. Here in Springfield, I found cold apathy, except for a few fine
+citizens, one of whom, City Solicitor Stewart L. Tatum, promptly offered
+his services to the sheriff and assisted in a vain effort to remove the
+Negro in a closed carriage and afterward at the risk of personal assault
+earnestly attempted to defeat the purposes of the mob. Another of these
+citizens, the Rev. Father Cogan, pleaded with the mob on the second night
+of the rioting at risk to himself; another withdrew from the militia
+company because it had not done its duty. And afterward the city officials
+were stirred by the faintest of faint spasms of righteousness: some of the
+Negro saloons were closed up, but within a month, the most notorious of
+all the dive-keepers, Hurley, the Negro political boss, was permitted to
+open an establishment--through the medium of a brother-in-law!
+
+If there ever was an example of good citizenship lying flat on its back
+with political corruption squatting on its neck, Springfield furnished an
+example of that condition. There was no reconstructive movement, no rising
+and organisation of the better sort of citizens. Negro dives gradually
+reopened, the same corrupt politics continued: and the result was logical
+and inevitable. About two years later, in February, 1906, another race
+riot broke out in Springfield--worse in some ways than the first. On
+February 26th, Martin M. Davis, a white brakeman, was shot in the railroad
+yards near a row of notorious Negro houses, by Edward Dean, a coloured
+man. The Negro was at once removed from the city and a mob which had
+gathered in anticipation of another lynching, when it was cheated of its
+victim, set fire to a number of houses in the Negro settlement. The
+militia was at once called out, but the following night the mob gathered
+as before and visiting the Negro settlement, tried to set fire to other
+buildings.
+
+It is significant that on the very night that this riot occurred the city
+council had under consideration an ordinance prohibiting the use of
+screens or other obstructions to the view of the interior of saloons after
+closing hours on week days or during Sundays. A committee of the council,
+favourable to the saloon interests, had recommended that the ordinance be
+not acted upon by council but referred to the people at a distant
+election, a proposition wholly illegal. While Stewart L. Tatum the city
+solicitor to whom I have already referred, argued to the council the
+illegality of the proposal made by the committee the noise of the mob
+reached the council chamber and the friends of the ordinance seized the
+opportunity to adjourn and delay action that would evidently result in the
+defeat of the ordinance.
+
+Finally, as a result of both these riots, the city was mildly stirred; a
+Civic League was formed by prominent citizens and the _attack on property_
+vigorously deprecated; the passage of the screen ordinance was recommended
+and at the next meeting of the council this ordinance, which had been
+vetoed by the mayor of the previous administration and had excited
+considerable public interest during a period of two years, was passed and
+has proved of great assistance to the police department in controlling the
+low saloons where the riot spirit is bred.
+
+I turn with pleasure from the story of this lynching to another Northern
+town, where I found as satisfying an example of how to deal with a mob as
+this country has known.
+
+In Springfield we had an exhibition of nearly complete supineness and
+apathy before the mob; in Statesboro, Ga., we discovered a decided
+law-and-order element, not strong enough, however, to do much; in
+Huntsville, Ala., we had a tremendous moral awakening. In Danville, Ill.,
+we find an example of law vindicated, magnificently and completely,
+through the heroism of a single man, backed up later by wholesome public
+opinion.
+
+
+_Character of Danville, Ill._
+
+Danville presented many of the characteristics of Springfield, O. It had a
+growing Negro population and there had been an awakening race prejudice
+between the white workingmen and the Negroes, especially in the
+neighbouring coal mines.
+
+As in other places where lynchings have occurred, I found that Vermilion
+County, of which Danville is the seat, had also a heavy record of homicide
+and other crime. They counted there on a homicide every sixty days; at the
+term of court preceding the lynching seven murder trials were on the
+docket; and in all its history the county never had had a legal hanging,
+though it had suffered two lynchings. The criminal record of Vermilion
+County was exceeded at that time only by Cook County (Chicago), and St.
+Clair County (East St. Louis), where the horrible lynching of a Negro
+schoolmaster took place (at Belleville) in the preceding summer.
+
+
+_Story of a Starved Negro_
+
+The crime which caused the rioting was committed by the familiar vagrant
+Negro from the South--in this case a Kentucky Negro named Wilson--a
+miserable, illiterate, half-starved creature who had been following a
+circus. He had begged along the road in Indiana and no one would feed him.
+He came across the line into Illinois, found a farmhouse door open, saw
+food on the table, and darted in to steal it. As he was leaving, the woman
+of the house appeared. In an animal-like panic, the Negro darted for the
+door, knocking the woman down as he escaped. Immediately the cry went up
+that there had been an attempted criminal assault, but the sheriff told me
+that the woman never made any such charge and the Negro bore all the
+evidence of the truthfulness of the assertion that he was starving; he was
+so emaciated with hunger that even after his arrest the sheriff dared not
+allow him a full meal.
+
+
+_Hot Weather and Mobs_
+
+But it was enough to stir up the mob spirit. It was Saturday night, July
+25th, and the usual crowd from all over the county had gathered in the
+town. Among the crowd were many coal miners, who had just been paid off
+and were drinking. As in Springfield, the town had a very large number of
+saloons, ninety-one within a radius of five miles, to a population of
+some 25,000. Most Northern towns are far worse in this respect than the
+average Southern town. It was a hot night; mobs work best in hot weather.
+Statistics, indeed, show that the great majority of lynchings take place
+in the summer, particularly in July and August.
+
+It was known that the sheriff had brought his Negro prisoner to the jail,
+and the crime was widely discussed. The whole city was a sort of human
+tinder-box, ready to flare up at a spark of violence.
+
+Well, the spark came--in a saloon. Metcalf, a Negro, had words with a
+well-known white butcher named Henry Gatterman. Both had been drinking.
+The Negro drew a revolver and shot Gatterman dead. Instantly the city was
+in a furor of excitement. The police appeared and arrested Metcalf, and
+got him finally with great difficulty to the police station, where he was
+locked up. A mob formed instantly. It was led, at first, by a crowd of
+lawless boys from sixteen to eighteen years old. Rapidly gathering
+strength, it rushed into the city hall, and although the mayor, the chief
+of police, and nearly the entire police force were present, they got the
+Negro out and hanged him to a telegraph-pole in the main street of the
+town, afterward shooting his body full of holes.
+
+Intoxicated by their swift success and, mob-like, growing in recklessness
+and bloodthirstiness, they now turned upon the jail determined to lynch
+the Negro Wilson. It was a much uglier mob than any I have hitherto
+described; it was a drunken mob, and it had already tasted blood. It
+swarmed around the jail, yelling, shooting, and breaking the windows with
+stones.
+
+
+_A "Strict" Sheriff_
+
+Sheriff Hardy H. Whitlock of Vermilion County had never been looked upon
+as an especially remarkable man--except, as I was told everywhere, he had
+a record as _a strict sheriff_, as a man who did his best to enforce the
+law in times of peace. He and the state's attorney were so industrious
+that they caught and punished four times as many criminals in proportion
+to population as were convicted in Chicago. The sheriff was a big, solid,
+deliberate man with gray eyes. He was born in Tennessee. His father was an
+itinerant Presbyterian preacher, always poor, doing good for everybody
+but himself, and stern in his conceptions of right and wrong. His mother,
+as the sheriff related, made him obey the law with peach-tree switches.
+His history was the commonest of the common; not much education, had to
+make his living, worked in a livery stable. He was faithful at that,
+temperate, friendly. They elected him constable, an office that he held
+for seven years. He was faithful at that. They elected him sheriff of the
+county. He went at the new task as he had at all his other work, with no
+especial brilliancy, but steadily doing his duty, catching criminals. He
+found a great deal to learn and he learned. The extradition laws of the
+states troubled him when he wanted to bring prisoners home. There was no
+compilation of the laws on the subject. Here was work to be done. Although
+no lawyer, he went at it laboriously and compiled a book of five hundred
+pages, containing all the extradition laws of the country, and had it
+published at his own expense.
+
+
+_Defending a Jail With a Riot-gun_
+
+And when the crisis came that night with the mob howling around his jail,
+Hardy Whitlock had become so accustomed to doing his duty that he didn't
+know how to do anything else. Here was the jail to be protected: he
+intended to protect it. He sent for no troops--there was no time
+anyhow--nor for the police. He had a couple of deputies and his wife.
+Though the mob was breaking the windows of the house and the children were
+there, his wife said:
+
+"Give me a gun, Hardy, and I'll stay by you."
+
+The sheriff went out on the porch, unarmed, in his shirt-sleeves, and made
+them a little speech. They yelled at him, threw stones, fired revolvers.
+They brought a railroad rail to break in the door. He went out among them,
+called them Bill, and Jim, and Dick, and persuaded them to put it down;
+but others took it up willingly.
+
+"Are you going to open the door?" they yelled.
+
+"No!" said the sheriff.
+
+Then he went in and got his riot-gun, well loaded with duck-shot. He was
+one man against two thousand. They began battering on the iron door,
+yelling and shooting. It was not an especially strong door, and it began
+to give at the bottom, and finally bent inward enough to admit a man's
+body. The crucial moment had come: and the sheriff was there to meet it.
+He stuck his riot-gun out of the opening and began firing. The mob fell
+back but came charging forward again, wild with passion. The sheriff fired
+again, seven times in all, and one of his deputies opened with a revolver.
+For a time pandemonium reigned; they attempted the house entrance of the
+jail; the sheriff was there also with his riot-gun; they threatened
+dynamite and fire. They cut down the Negro, Metcalf, brought him in front
+of the jail, piled straw on the body and attempted to burn it. Part of the
+time they were incited to greater violence by a woman who stood in a
+waggon-box across the street. So they raged all night, firing at the jail,
+but not daring to come too near the man with the riot-gun.
+
+"On Sunday," the sheriff told me, "I realised I was up against it. I knew
+the tough element in town had it in for me."
+
+
+_How a Real Sheriff Punished a Mob_
+
+They even threatened him on the street. A large number of men had been
+wounded by the firing, some dangerously, though no one, fortunately, was
+killed. The sheriff stood alone in the town. A lesser man might still have
+failed ignominiously. But Whitlock went about the nearest duty: punishing
+the rioters. He had warrants issued and arrested every man he could find
+who was streaked or speckled with shot--indubitable evidence of his
+presence in the mob at the jail door. Many fled the city, but he got
+twenty or thirty.
+
+Vermilion County also had a prosecuting attorney who knew his duty--J. W.
+Keeslar. Judge Thompson called a grand jury, Attorney Keeslar pushed the
+cases with great vigour, and this was the result: thirteen men and one
+woman (the disorderly woman of the waggon-box) were sent to the
+penitentiary, eight others were heavily fined. At the same time the Negro,
+Wilson, came up for trial, pleaded guilty, and was legally punished by a
+term in the penitentiary.
+
+
+[Illustration: CHARLES W. CHESNUTT
+
+The well-known novelist, author of "The Colonel's Dream," "The House
+Behind the Cedars," "The Conjure Woman," etc. Mr. Chesnutt is a lawyer in
+Cleveland, Ohio.
+
+Photograph by Edmondson]
+
+
+And the people came strongly to the support of their officers. Hardy
+Whitlock became one of the most popular men in the county. Keeslar, coming
+up for re�lection the following fall, with mob-law for the essential
+issue, was returned to his office with an overwhelming majority. The
+sheriff told me that, in his opinion, the success of the officers in
+convicting the lynchers was due largely to a thoroughly awakened public
+opinion, the strong attitude of the newspapers, especially those of
+Chicago, the help of the governor, and the feeling, somehow, that the best
+sentiment of the county was behind them.
+
+
+_Conclusions Regarding Lynching in This Country_
+
+And finally, we may, perhaps venture upon a few general conclusions.
+
+Lynching in this country is peculiarly the white man's burden. The white
+man has taken all the responsibility of government; he really governs in
+the North as well as in the South, in the North disfranchising the Negro
+with cash, in the South by law or by intimidation. All the machinery of
+justice is in his hands. How keen is the need, then, of calmness and
+strict justice in dealing with the Negro! Nothing more surely tends to
+bring the white man down to the lowest level of the criminal Negro than
+yielding to those blind instincts of savagery which find expression in the
+mob. The man who joins a mob, by his very acts, puts himself on a level
+with the Negro criminal: both have given way wholly to brute passion. For,
+if civilisation means anything, it means self-restraint; casting away
+self-restraint the white man becomes as savage as the criminal Negro.
+
+If the white man sets an example of non-obedience to law, of
+non-enforcement of law, and of unequal justice, what can be expected of
+the Negro? A criminal father is a poor preacher of homilies to a wayward
+son. The Negro sees a man, white or black, commit murder and go free, over
+and over again in all these lynching counties. Why should he fear to
+murder? Every passion of the white man is reflected and emphasised in the
+criminal Negro.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+AN OSTRACISED RACE IN FERMENT
+
+THE CONFLICT OF NEGRO PARTIES AND NEGRO LEADERS OVER METHODS OF DEALING
+WITH THEIR OWN PROBLEM
+
+
+One of the things that has interested me most of all in studying Negro
+communities, especially in the North, has been to find them so torn by
+cliques and divided by such wide differences of opinion.
+
+No other element of our population presents a similar condition; the
+Italians, the Jews, the Germans and especially the Chinese and Japanese
+are held together not only by a different language, but by ingrained and
+ancient national habits. They group themselves naturally. But the Negro is
+an American in language and customs; he knows no other traditions and he
+has no other conscious history; a large proportion, indeed, possess
+varying degrees of white American blood (restless blood!) and yet the
+Negro is not accepted as an American. Instead of losing himself gradually
+in the dominant race, as the Germans, Irish, and Italians are doing,
+adding those traits or qualities with which Time fashions and modifies
+this human mosaic called the American nation, the Negro is set apart as a
+peculiar people.
+
+With every Negro, then, an essential question is: "How shall I meet this
+attempt to put me off by myself?"
+
+That question in one form or another--politically, industrially,
+socially--is being met daily, almost hourly, by every Negro in this
+country. It colours his very life.
+
+"You don't know, and you can't know," a Negro said to me, "what it is to
+be a problem, to understand that everyone is watching you and studying
+you, to have your mind constantly on your own actions. It has made us
+think and talk about ourselves more than other people do. It has made us
+self-conscious and sensitive."
+
+It is scarcely surprising, then, that upon such a vital question there
+should be wide differences of opinion among Negroes. As a matter of fact,
+there are almost innumerable points of view and suggested modes of
+conduct, but they all group themselves into two great parties which are
+growing more distinct in outline and purpose every day. Both parties exist
+in every part of the country, but it is in the North that the struggle
+between them is most evident. I have found a sharper feeling and a
+bitterer discussion of race relationships among the Negroes of the North
+than among those of the South. If you want to hear the race question
+discussed with fire and fervour, go to Boston!
+
+For two hundred and fifty years the Negro had no thought, no leadership,
+no parties; then suddenly he was set free, and became, so far as law could
+make him, an integral and indistinguishable part of the American people.
+But it was only in a few places in the North and among comparatively few
+individuals that he ever approximately reached the position of a free
+citizen, that he ever really enjoyed the rights granted to him under the
+law. In the South he was never free politically, socially, and
+industrially, in the sense that the white man is free, and is not so
+to-day.
+
+But in Boston, and in other Northern cities in lesser degree, a group of
+Negroes reached essentially equal citizenship. A few families trace their
+lineage back to the very beginnings of civilisation in this country,
+others were freemen long before the war, a few had revolutionary war
+records of which their descendants are intensely and justly proud. Some of
+the families have far more white blood than black; though the census shows
+that only about 40 per cent. of the Negroes of Boston are mulattoes, the
+real proportion is undoubtedly very much higher.
+
+In abolition times these Negroes were much regarded. Many of them attained
+and kept a certain real position among the whites; they were even accorded
+unusual opportunities and favours. They found such a place as an educated
+Negro might find to-day (or at least as he found a few years ago) in
+Germany. In some instances they became wealthy. At a time when the North
+was passionately concerned in the abolition of slavery the colour of his
+skin sometimes gave the Negro special advantages, even honours.
+
+For years after the war this condition continued; then a stream of
+immigration of Southern Negroes began to appear, at first a mere rivulet,
+but latterly increasing in volume, until to-day all of our Northern cities
+have swarming coloured colonies. Owing to the increase of the Negro
+population and for other causes which I have already mentioned, sentiment
+in the North toward the Negro has been undergoing a swift change.
+
+
+_How Colour Lines Are Drawn_
+
+Now the tragedy of the Negro is the colour of his skin: he is easily
+recognisable. The human tendency is to class people together by outward
+appearances. When the line began to be drawn it was drawn not alone
+against the unworthy Negro, but against the Negro. It was not so much
+drawn by the highly intelligent white man as by the white man. And the
+white man alone has not drawn it, but the Negroes themselves are drawing
+it--and more and more every day. So we draw the line in this country
+against the Chinese, the Japanese, and in some measure against the Jews
+(and they help to draw it). So we speak with disparagement of "dagoes" and
+"square heads." Right or wrong, these lines, in our present state of
+civilisation, are drawn. They are here; they must be noted and dealt with.
+
+What was the result? The Northern Negro who has been enjoying the free
+life of Boston and Philadelphia has protested passionately against the
+drawing of a colour line: he wishes to be looked upon, and not at all
+unnaturally, for he possesses human ambitions and desires, solely for his
+worth as a man, not as a Negro.
+
+In Philadelphia I heard of the old Philadelphia Negroes, in Indianapolis
+of the old Indianapolis families, in Boston a sharp distinction was drawn
+between the "Boston Negroes" and the recent Southern importation. Even in
+Chicago, where there is nothing old, I found the same spirit.
+
+In short, it is the protest against separation, against being deprived of
+the advantages and opportunities of a free life. In the South the most
+intelligent and best educated Negroes are, generally speaking, the leaders
+of their race, but in Northern cities some of the ablest Negroes will have
+nothing to do with the masses of their own people or with racial
+movements; they hold themselves aloof, asserting that there is no
+colour line, and if there is, there should not be. Their associations and
+their business are largely with white people and they cling passionately
+to the fuller life.
+
+
+[Illustration: DR. BOOKER T. WASHINGTON
+
+Photograph by Dimock]
+
+
+"When I am sick," one of them said to me, "I don't go to a Negro doctor,
+but to a doctor. Colour has nothing to do with it."
+
+In the South the same general setting apart of Negroes as Negroes is going
+on, of course, on an immeasurably wider scale. By disfranchisement they
+are being separated politically, the Jim Crow laws set them apart socially
+and physically, the hostility of white labour in some callings pushes them
+aside in the industrial activities. But the South presents no such
+striking contrasts as the North, because no Southern Negroes were ever
+really accorded a high degree of citizenship.
+
+
+_Two Great Negro Parties_
+
+Now, the Negroes of the country are meeting the growing discrimination
+against them in two ways, out of which have grown the two great parties to
+which I have referred. One party has sprung, naturally, from the thought
+of the Northern Negro and is a product of the freedom which the Northern
+Negro has enjoyed; although, of course, it finds many followers in the
+South.
+
+The other is the natural product of the far different conditions in the
+South, where the Negro cannot speak his mind, where he has never realised
+any large degree of free citizenship. Both are led by able men, and both
+are backed by newspapers and magazines. It has come, indeed, to the point
+where most Negroes of any intelligence at all have taken their place on
+one side or the other.
+
+The second-named party, which may best, perhaps, be considered first, is
+made up of the great mass of the coloured people both South and North; its
+undisputed leader is Booker T. Washington.
+
+
+_The Rise of Booker T. Washington_
+
+Nothing has been more remarkable in the recent history of the Negro than
+Washington's rise to influence as a leader, and the spread of his ideals
+of education and progress. It is noteworthy that he was born in the South,
+a slave, that he knew intimately the common struggling life of his people
+and the attitude of the white race toward them. He worked his way to
+education in Southern schools and was graduated at Hampton--a story which
+he tells best himself in his book, "Up From Slavery." He was and is
+Southern in feeling and point of view. When he began to think how he could
+best help his people the same question came to him that comes to every
+Negro:
+
+"What shall we do about this discrimination and separation?"
+
+And his was the type of character which answered, "Make the best of it;
+overcome it with self-development."
+
+The very essence of his doctrine is this:
+
+"Get yourself right, and the world will be all right."
+
+His whole work and his life have said to the white man:
+
+"You've set us apart. You don't want us. All right; we'll be apart. We can
+succeed as Negroes."
+
+It is the doctrine of the opportunist and optimist: peculiarly, indeed,
+the doctrine of the man of the soil, who has come up fighting, dealing
+with the world, not as he would like to have it, but as it overtakes him.
+Many great leaders have been like that: Lincoln was one. They have the
+simplicity and patience of the soil, and the immense courage and faith. To
+prevent being crushed by circumstances they develop humour; they laugh off
+their troubles. Washington has all of these qualities of the common life:
+he possesses in high degree what some one has called "great commonness."
+And finally he has a simple faith in humanity, and in the just purposes of
+the Creator of humanity.
+
+Being a hopeful opportunist Washington takes the Negro as he finds him,
+often ignorant, weak, timid, surrounded by hostile forces, and tells him
+to go to work at anything, anywhere, but go to work, learn how to work
+better, save money, have a better home, raise a better family.
+
+
+_What Washington Teaches the Negro_
+
+The central idea of his doctrine, indeed, is work. He teaches that if the
+Negro wins by real worth a strong economic position in the country, other
+rights and privileges will come to him naturally. He should get his
+rights, not by gift of the white man, but by earning them himself.
+
+"I noticed," he says, "when I first went to Tuskegee to start the Tuskegee
+Normal and Industrial Institute, that some of the white people about there
+looked rather doubtfully at me. I thought I could get their influence by
+telling them how much algebra and history and science and all those things
+I had in my head, but they treated me about the same as they did before.
+They didn't seem to care about the algebra, history, and science that were
+in my head only. Those people never even began to have confidence in me
+until we commenced to build a large three-story brick building; and then
+another and another, until now we have eighty-six buildings which have
+been erected largely by the labour of our students, and to-day we have the
+respect and confidence of all the white people in that section.
+
+"There is an unmistakable influence that comes over a white man when he
+sees a black man living in a two-story brick house that has been paid
+for."
+
+In another place he has given his ideas of what education should be:
+
+"How I wish that, from the most cultured and highly endowed university in
+the great North to the humblest log cabin schoolhouse in Alabama, we could
+burn, as it were, into the hearts and heads of all that usefulness, that
+service to our brother is the supreme end of education."
+
+It is, indeed, to the teaching of service in the highest sense that
+Washington's life has been devoted. While he urges every Negro to reach as
+high a place as he can, he believes that the great masses of the Negroes
+are best fitted to-day for manual labour; his doctrine is that they should
+be taught to do that labour better: that when the foundations have been
+laid in sound industry and in business enterprise, the higher callings and
+honours will come of themselves.
+
+His emphasis is rather upon duties than upon rights. He does not advise
+the Negro to surrender a single right: on the other hand, he urges his
+people to use fully every right they have or can get--for example, to vote
+wherever possible, and vote thoughtfully. But he believes that some of the
+rights given the Negro have been lost because the Negro had neither the
+wisdom nor the strength to use them properly.
+
+
+_Washington's Influence on His People_
+
+I have not said much thus far in these articles about Booker T.
+Washington, but as I have been travelling over this country, South and
+North, studying Negro communities, I have found the mark of him everywhere
+in happier human lives. Wherever I found a prosperous Negro enterprise, a
+thriving business place, a good home, there I was almost sure to find
+Booker T. Washington's picture over the fireplace or a little framed motto
+expressing his gospel of work and service. I have heard bitter things said
+about Mr. Washington by both coloured people and white. I have waited and
+investigated many of these stories, and I am telling here what I have seen
+and known of his influence among thousands of common, struggling human
+beings. Many highly educated Negroes, especially, in the North, dislike
+him and oppose him, but he has brought new hope and given new courage to
+the masses of his race. He has given them a working plan of life. And is
+there a higher test of usefulness? Measured by any standard, white or
+black, Washington must be regarded to-day as one of the great men of this
+country: and in the future he will be so honoured.
+
+
+_Dr. Du Bois and the Negro_
+
+The party led by Washington is made up of the masses of the common people;
+the radical party, on the other hand, represents what may be called the
+intellectuals. The leading exponent of its point of view is unquestionably
+Professor W. E. B. Du Bois of Atlanta University--though, like all
+minority parties, it is torn with dissension and discontent. Dr. Du Bois
+was born in Massachusetts of a family that had no history of Southern
+slavery. He has a large intermixture of white blood. Broadly educated at
+Harvard and in the universities of Germany, he is to-day one of the able
+sociologists of this country. His economic studies of the Negro made for
+the United States Government and for the Atlanta University conference
+(which he organised) are works of sound scholarship and furnish the
+student with the best single source of accurate information regarding the
+Negro at present obtainable in this country. And no book gives a deeper
+insight into the inner life of the Negro, his struggles and his
+aspirations, than "The Souls of Black Folk."
+
+Dr. Du Bois has the temperament of the scholar and idealist--critical,
+sensitive, unhumorous, impatient, often covering its deep feeling with
+sarcasm and cynicism. When the question came to him:
+
+"What shall the Negro do about discrimination?" his answer was the exact
+reverse of Washington's: it was the voice of Massachusetts:
+
+"Do not submit! agitate, object, fight."
+
+Where Washington reaches the hearts of his people, Du Bois appeals to
+their heads. Du Bois is not a leader of men, as Washington is: he is
+rather a promulgator of ideas. While Washington is building a great
+educational institution and organising the practical activities of the
+race, Du Bois is the lonely critic holding up distant ideals. Where
+Washington cultivates friendly human relationships with the white people
+among whom the lot of the Negro is cast, Du Bois, sensitive to rebuffs,
+draws more and more away from white people.
+
+
+_A Negro Declaration of Independence_
+
+Several years ago Du Bois organised the Niagara movement for the purpose
+of protesting against the drawing of the colour line. It is important, not
+so much for the extent of its membership, which is small, but because it
+represents, genuinely, a more or less prevalent point of view among many
+coloured people.
+
+Its declaration of principles says:
+
+     We refuse to allow the impression to remain that the Negro-American
+     assents to inferiority, is submissive under oppression and apologetic
+     before insults. Through helplessness we may submit, but the voice of
+     protest of ten million Americans must never cease to assail the ears
+     of their fellows, so long as America is unjust.
+
+     Any discrimination based simply on race or colour is barbarous, we
+     care not how hallowed it be by custom, expediency, or prejudice.
+     Differences made on account of ignorance, immorality, or disease are
+     legitimate methods of fighting evil, and against them we have no word
+     of protest, but discriminations based simply and solely on physical
+     peculiarities, place of birth, colour of skin, are relics of that
+     unreasoning human savagery of which the world is, and ought to be,
+     thoroughly ashamed.
+
+The object of the movement is to protest against disfranchisement and Jim
+Crow laws and to demand equal rights of education, equal civil rights,
+equal economic opportunities, and justice in the courts. Taking the ballot
+from the Negro they declare to be only a step to economic slavery; that it
+leaves the Negro defenceless before his competitor--that the
+disfranchisement laws in the South are being followed by all manner of
+other discriminations which interfere with the progress of the Negro.
+
+"Persistent manly agitation is the way to liberty," says the declaration,
+"and toward this goal the Niagara movement has started."
+
+The annual meeting of the movement was held last August in Boston, the
+chief gathering being in Faneuil Hall. Every reference in the speeches to
+Garrison, Phillips, and Sumner was cheered to the echo. "It seemed," said
+one newspaper report, "like a revival of the old spirit of
+abolitionism--with the white man left out."
+
+Several organisations in the country, like the New England Suffrage
+League, the Equal Rights League of Georgia, and others, take much the same
+position as the Niagara movement.
+
+The party led by Dr. Du Bois is, in short, a party of protest which
+endeavours to prevent Negro separation and discrimination against Negroes
+by agitation and political influence.
+
+
+_Two Negro Parties Compared_
+
+These two points of view, of course, are not peculiar to Negroes; they
+divide all human thought. The opportunist and optimist on the one hand
+does his great work with the world as he finds it: he is resourceful,
+constructive, familiar. On the other hand, the idealist, the agitator, who
+is also a pessimist, performs the function of the critic, he sees the
+world as it should be and cries out to have it instantly changed.
+
+Thus with these two great Negro parties. Each is working for essentially
+the same end--better conditions of life for the Negro--each contains brave
+and honest men, and each is sure, humanly enough, that the other side is
+not only wrong, but venally wrong, whereas both parties are needed and
+both perform a useful function.
+
+
+[Illustration: DR. W. E. B. DU BOIS of Atlanta University
+
+Photograph by Purdy]
+
+
+The chief, and at present almost the only, newspaper exponent of the
+radical Negro point of view is the Boston _Guardian_, published by William
+Monroe Trotter. Mr. Trotter is a mulatto who was graduated a few years ago
+with high honours from Harvard. His wife, who is active with him in his
+work, has so little Negro blood that she would ordinarily pass for white.
+Mr. Trotter's father fought in the Civil War and rose to be a lieutenant
+in Colonel Hallowell's Massachusetts regiment. He was one of the leaders
+of the Negro soldiers who refused to accept $8 a month as servants when
+white soldiers received $13. He argued that if a Negro soldier stood up
+and stopped a bullet, he was as valuable to the country as the white
+soldier. Though his family suffered, he served without pay rather than
+accept the money. It was the uncompromising spirit of Garrison and
+Phillips.
+
+
+_A Negro Newspaper of Agitation_
+
+The _Guardian_ is as violent and bitter in some of its denunciations as
+the most reactionary white paper in the South. It would have the North
+take up arms again and punish the South for its position on the Negro
+question! It breathes the spirit of prejudice. Reading it sometimes, I am
+reminded of Senator Tillman's speeches. It answers the white publicity
+given in the South to black crime against white women by long accounts of
+similar crimes of white men. One of its chief points of conflict is the
+position of President Roosevelt regarding the Brownsville riot and the
+discharge of Negro soldiers; the attack on Roosevelt is unceasing, and in
+this viewpoint, at least, it is supported undoubtedly by no small
+proportion of the Negroes of the country. Another leading activity is its
+fight on Booker T. Washington and his work. Denouncing Washington as a
+"notorious and incorrigible Jim Crowist," it says that he "dares to assert
+that the best way to get rights is not to oppose their being taken away,
+but to get money." Two or three years ago, when Mr. Washington went to
+Boston to address a coloured audience in Zion Church, Mr. Trotter and his
+friends scattered cayenne pepper on the rostrum and created a disturbance
+which broke up the meeting. Mr. Trotter went to jail for the offence. From
+the _Guardian_ of September 2d I cut part of the leading editorial which
+will show its attitude:
+
+     PROPHET OF SLAVERY AND TRAITOR TO RACE
+
+     As another mark of the treacherous character of Booker Washington in
+     matters concerning the race, come his discordant notes in support of
+     Secretary Taft for President of the United States in spite of the
+     fact that every Negro organisation of any note devoted to the cause
+     of equal rights and justice have condemned President Roosevelt for
+     his unpardonable treatment of the soldiers of the 25th Infantry, U.
+     S. A., and Secretary Taft for his duplicity, and declared their
+     determination to seek the defeat of either if nominated for the
+     office of President of these United States, or anyone named by them
+     for said office. Booker Washington, ever concerned for his own
+     selfish ambitions, indifferent to the cries of the race so long as he
+     wins the approval of white men who do not believe in the Negro,
+     defies the absolutely unanimous call of all factions of the race for
+     Foraker. Leader of the self-seekers, he has persistently, but thank
+     heaven unsuccessfully, sought to entangle the whole race in the
+     meshes of subordination. Knowing the race could only be saved by
+     fighting cowardice, we have just as persistently resisted every
+     attempt he has made to plant his white flag on the domains of equal
+     manhood rights and our efforts have been rewarded by the universal
+     denunciation of his doctrines of submission and his utter elimination
+     as a possible leader of his race.
+
+Generally speaking, the radical party has fought every movement of any
+sort that tends to draw a colour line.
+
+
+_Boston Hotel for Coloured People_
+
+One of the enterprises of Boston which interested me deeply was a Negro
+hotel, the Astor House, which is operated by Negroes for Negro guests. It
+has 200 rooms, with a telephone in each room, a restaurant, and other
+accommodations. It struck me that it was a good example of Negro self-help
+that Negroes should be proud of. But upon mentioning it to a coloured man
+I met I found that he was violently opposed to it.
+
+"Why hotels for coloured men?" he asked. "I believe in hotels for men. The
+coloured man must not draw the line himself if he doesn't want the white
+man to do it. He must demand and insist constantly upon his rights as an
+American citizen."
+
+I found in Boston and in other Northern cities many Negroes who took this
+position. A white woman, who sought to establish a help and rescue mission
+for coloured girls similar to those conducted for the Jews, Italians, and
+other nationalities in other cities, was violently opposed, on the ground
+that it set up a precedent for discrimination. In the same way separate
+settlement work (though there is a separate settlement for Jews in Boston)
+and the proposed separate Y. M. C. A. have met with strong protests.
+Everything that tends to set the Negro off as a Negro, whether the white
+man does it or the Negro does it, is bitterly opposed by this party of
+coloured people.
+
+They fought the Jamestown Exposition because it had a Negro Building,
+which they called the "Jim Crow Annex," and they fought the National
+Christian Endeavour Convention because the leaders could not assure Negro
+delegates exactly equal facilities in the hotels and restaurants. Of
+course the denunciation of the white South is continuous and bitter. It is
+noteworthy, however, that even the leaders of the movement not only
+recognise and conduct separate newspapers and ask Negroes to support them,
+but that they urge Negroes to stand together politically.
+
+
+_Boston Negroes Seen by a New York Negro Newspaper_
+
+But the large proportion of coloured newspapers in the country, the
+strongest and ablest of which is perhaps the New York _Age_, are
+supporters of Washington and his ideals. The Boston correspondent of the
+_Age_ said recently:
+
+     It is unfortunate in Boston that we have a hall which we can get free
+     of charge: we refer to Faneuil Hall. They work Faneuil Hall for all
+     it is worth. Scarcely a month ever passes by that does not see a
+     crowd of Afro-Americans in Faneuil Hall throwing up their hats,
+     yelling and going into hysterics over some subject usually relating
+     to somebody a thousand miles away, never in relation to conditions
+     right at home. The better element of Negroes and the majority of our
+     white friends in this city have become disgusted over the policy that
+     is being pursued and has been pursued for several months in Boston.
+     Your correspondent can give you no better evidence of the disgust
+     than to state that a few days ago there was one of these hysterical
+     meetings held in Faneuil Hall and our people yelled and cried and
+     agitated for two hours and more. The next day not one of the leading
+     papers, such as the _Herald_ and the _Transcript_, had a single line
+     concerning this meeting. A few years ago had a meeting been held in
+     Faneuil Hall under the leadership of safe and conservative
+     Afro-Americans, both of these newspapers and papers of similar
+     character would have devoted from two to three columns to a
+     discussion of it. Now, in Boston, they let such meetings completely
+     alone.
+
+     If there ever was a place where the Negro seems to have more freedom
+     than he seems to know what to do with, it is in this city.
+
+In spite of the agitation against drawing the colour line by the radical
+party, however, the separation is still going on. And it is not merely
+the demand of the white man that the Negro step aside by himself, for the
+Negro himself is drawing the colour line, and drawing it with as much
+enthusiasm as the white man. A genuine race-spirit or race-consciousness
+is developing. Negroes are meeting prejudice with self-development.
+
+It is a significant thing to find that many Negroes who a few years ago
+called themselves "Afro-Americans," or "Coloured Americans," and who
+winced at the name Negro, now use Negro as the race name with pride. While
+in Indianapolis I went to a Negro church to hear a speech by W. T. Vernon,
+one of the leading coloured men of the country, who was appointed Register
+of the United States Treasury by President Roosevelt. On the walls of the
+church hung the pictures of coloured men who had accomplished something
+for their race, and the essence of the speaker's address was an appeal to
+racial pride and the demand that the race stand up for itself, encourage
+Negro business and patronise Negro industry. All of which, surely, is
+significant.
+
+
+_How Negroes Themselves Draw the Colour Line_
+
+The pressure for separation among the Negroes themselves is growing
+rapidly stronger. Where there are mixed schools in the North there is
+often pressure by Negroes for separate schools. The Philadelphia
+_Courant_, a Negro newspaper, in objecting to this new feeling, says:
+
+     Public sentiment, so far as the white people are concerned, does not
+     object to the mixed school system in vogue in our city half as much
+     as the Afro-American people seem to be doing themselves. We find them
+     the chief objectors.
+
+One reason why the South to-day has a better development of Negro
+enterprise, one reason why Booker T. Washington believes that the South is
+a better place for the Negro than the North, and advises him to remain
+there, is this more advanced racial spirit. Prejudice there, being
+sharper, has forced the Negro back upon his own resources.
+
+Dr. Frissell of Hampton is always talking to his students of the
+"advantages of disadvantages."
+
+I was much struck with the remark of a Negro business man I met in
+Indianapolis:
+
+"The trouble here is," he said, "that there is not enough prejudice
+against us."
+
+"How is that?" I inquired.
+
+"Well, you see we are still clinging too much to the skirts of the white
+man. When you hate us more it will drive us together and make us support
+coloured enterprises."
+
+When in Chicago I heard of an interesting illustration of this idea. With
+the increasing number of Negro students prejudice has increased in the
+Chicago medical schools, until recently some of them have, by agreement,
+been closed to coloured graduate students. Concerning this condition, the
+Chicago _Conservator_, a Negro newspaper, says: "The cause of this
+extraordinary announcement is that the Southern students object to the
+presence of Negroes in the classes. Now it is up to the Negro doctors of
+the country to meet this insult by establishing a post-graduate school of
+their own. They can do it if they have the manhood, self-respect, and
+push. Let Doctors Hall, Williams, Boyd and others get busy."
+
+To this the New York _Age_ adds:
+
+"Yes; let us have a school of that sort of our own."
+
+And this is no idle suggestion. Few people have any conception of the
+growing progress of Negroes in the medical profession. In August, 1907,
+the Coloured National Medical Association held its ninth annual session at
+Baltimore. Over three hundred delegates and members were in attendance
+from thirty different states. Graduates were there not only from Harvard,
+Yale, and other white colleges, but from coloured medical schools like
+Meharry and Howard University. Negro hospitals have been opened and are
+well supported in several cities.
+
+
+_National Negro Business League_
+
+All over the country the Negro is organised in business leagues and these
+leagues have formed a National Business League which met last August in
+Topeka, Kansas. I can do no better in interpreting the spirit of this
+work, which is indeed the practical spirit of the Southern party, than in
+quoting briefly from the address of Booker T. Washington, who is the
+president of the league:
+
+     Despite much talk, the Negro is not discouraged, but is going
+     forward. The race owns to-day an acreage equal to the combined
+     acreage of Holland and Belgium. The Negro owns more land, more
+     houses, more stores, more banks, than has ever been true in his
+     history. We are learning that no race can occupy a soil unless it
+     gets as much out of it as any other race gets out of it. Soil,
+     sunshine, rain, and the laws of trade have no regard for race or
+     colour. We are learning that we must be builders if we would succeed.
+     As we learn this lesson we shall find help at the South and at the
+     North. We must not be content to be tolerated in communities, we must
+     make ourselves needed. The law that governs the universe knows no
+     race or colour. The force of nature will respond as readily to the
+     hand of the Chinaman, the Italian, or the Negro as to any other race.
+     Man may discriminate, but nature and the laws that control the
+     affairs of men will not and cannot. Nature does not hide her wealth
+     from a black hand.
+
+All along the line one finds this spirit of hopeful progress. A vivid
+picture of conditions, showing frankly both the weakness and strength of
+the Negro, is given by a coloured correspondent of the Indianapolis
+_Freeman_. He begins by telling of the organisation at Carbondale, Ill.,
+of a joint stock company composed of thirty-nine coloured men to operate a
+dry goods store. The correspondent writes:
+
+     The question is, "Will the coloured people support this enterprise
+     with their patronage?" It is a general cry all over the country that
+     coloured people pass by the doors of our merchants and trade with any
+     other concerns--Jews, Dagoes, Polacks, and what not. This is a very
+     unfortunate fact which stands before us as a living shame. The very
+     people who preach "race union, race support, race enterprise," are
+     often the first to pass our own mercantile establishments by. The
+     only places where coloured men can prosper in business are where our
+     people are driven out of other people's places of business and
+     actually forced to patronise our own. A certain cigar manufacturer in
+     St. Louis, a first-class business man, putting out the very best
+     classes of cigars, said, a few days ago, that some of the hardest
+     work he ever did was to get a few of our own dealers to handle his
+     goods. If but one-third of the stores and stands that sell cigars and
+     tobacco in St. Louis alone would buy their goods of him he could in a
+     few more years employ one or two dozen more men and women in his
+     factory. A dry goods company in the same city is suffering from the
+     same trouble. Our people will condescend to look in, but more often
+     their purchases are made at a neighbouring Jew store. There are also
+     in that neighbourhood several first-class, up-to-date, clean and
+     tasty-looking coloured restaurants: but twice as many Negroes take
+     their meals at the cheap-John, filthy, fourth-class chop counters run
+     by other people near by. But, after all, my people are doing better
+     in these matters than they did some time past. It was a most pleasant
+     surprise to learn, the other day, that the coloured undertakers in
+     St. Louis do every dollar's worth of business for our people in that
+     line. This information was given by a reliable white undertaker and
+     substantiated by the coloured undertakers. The white man was asked
+     what he thought of it. He said he thought it was a remarkable
+     illustration of the loyalty of the Negro to his own people and that
+     they should be commended for it. And then there are two sides to
+     every question. It is too often true that our people run their
+     business on a low order--noisy, uncleanly, questionable, dive-like
+     concerns--therefore do not deserve the patronage of decent people.
+     Too many of our men do not know anything about business. They don't
+     believe in investing their money in advertising their business in
+     good first-class periodicals. We must not expect everybody to know
+     where we are or what we have to sell unless we advertise. Many of our
+     nickels would find their way to the cash drawer of a coloured man if
+     we just knew where to find the store, restaurant or hotel.
+
+
+_Remarkable Development of Negroes_
+
+It is not short of astonishing, indeed, to discover how far the Negro has
+been able to develop in the forty-odd years since slavery a distinct race
+spirit and position. It is pretty well known that he has been going into
+business, that he is acquiring much land, that he has many professional
+men, that he worships in his own churches and has many schools which he
+conducts--but in other lines of activity he is also getting a foothold.
+Just as an illustration: I was surprised at finding so many Negro theatres
+in the country--theatres not only owned or operated by Negroes, but
+presenting plays written and acted by Negroes. I saw a fine new Negro
+theatre in New Orleans; I visited a smaller coloured theatre in Jackson,
+Miss., and in Chicago the Pekin Theatre is an enterprise wholly conducted
+by Negroes. Williams and Walker, Negro comedians, have long amused large
+audiences, both white and coloured. Their latest production, "Bandanna
+Land," written and produced wholly by Negroes, is not only funny, but
+clean.
+
+Many other illustrations could be given to show how the Negro is
+developing in one way or another--but especially along racial lines. The
+extensive organisation of Negro lodges of Elks and Masons and other secret
+orders, many of them with clubhouses, might be mentioned. Attention might
+be called to the almost innumerable insurance societies and companies
+maintained by Negroes, the largest of which, the True Reformers, of
+Richmond, has over 50,000 members, and to the growth of Negro newspapers
+and magazines (there are now over two hundred in the country), but enough
+has been said, perhaps, to make the point that there has been a real
+development of a Negro spirit and self-consciousness. Of course these
+signal successes loom large among the ten million of the country and yet
+they show the possibilities: there is this hopeful side of Negro
+conditions in this country as well as the dark and evil aspects of which
+we hear all too much.
+
+Out of this ferment of racial self-consciousness and readjustment has
+grown, as I have shown, the two great Negro parties. Between them and
+within them lie the destinies of the race in this country, and to no small
+extent also the destiny of the dominant white race. It is, therefore, of
+the highest importance for white men to understand the real tendencies of
+thought and organisation among these ten million Americans. For here is
+vigour and ability, and whatever may be the white man's attitude toward
+the Negro, the contempt of mere ignorance of what the Negro is doing is
+not only short-sighted but positively foolish. Only by a complete
+understanding can the white man who has assumed the entire responsibility
+of government in this country meet the crises, like that of the Atlanta
+riot, which are constantly arising between the races.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+THE NEGRO IN POLITICS
+
+
+The discussion of the Negro in politics will of necessity deal chiefly
+with conditions in the South; for it is there, and there only, that the
+Negro is, at the present time, a great political problem. Negroes in the
+North are indeed beginning to play a conscious part in politics; but they
+are only one element among many. They take their place with the "Irish
+vote," the "German vote," the "Polish vote," the "labour vote," each of
+which must be courted or placated by the politicians. I have looked into
+Negro political conditions in several cities, notably Indianapolis and
+Philadelphia, and I cannot see that they are in any marked way different
+from the condition of any other class of our population which through
+ignorance, or fear, or ambition, votes more or less _en masse_. Many
+Negroes do not vote at all; some are as conscientious and incorruptible as
+any white citizen; but a large proportion, ignorant and short-sighted, are
+disfranchised by the use of money in one form or another at every
+election. One of the broadest observers in Indianapolis said to me:
+
+"The Negro voters are no worse and no better than our foreign voting
+population."
+
+Mayor Tom Johnson, himself Southern by birth, writes me regarding the
+Negro vote of Cleveland:
+
+"I do not believe there is any larger percentage of unintelligent or
+dishonest votes among the coloured voters than among the white voters in
+the same walks of life."
+
+
+_Negro a National Problem_
+
+I wish here to emphasise again the fact that the Negro is not a sectional
+but a _national_ problem. Anything that affects the South favourably or
+unfavourably reacts upon the whole country. And the same latent race
+feeling exists in the North that exists in the South (for it is human,
+not Southern). The North, indeed, as I have shown in previous chapters,
+confronted with a large influx of Negroes, is coming more and more to
+understand and sympathise with the heart-breaking problems which beset the
+South. Nothing short of the patient co�peration of the entire country,
+North and South, white and black, will ever solve the race question.
+
+In this country, as elsewhere, political thought divides itself into two
+opposing forces, two great parties or points of view.
+
+Whatever their momentary names have been, whether Federalist, Democratic,
+Whig, Republican, Populist, or Socialist, one of these parties has been an
+Aristocratic or conservative party, the other a democratic or progressive
+party. The political struggle in this country (and the world over) has
+been between the aristocratic idea that a few men (or one man) should
+control the country and supervise the division of labour and the products
+of labour and the democratic idea that more people should have a hand in
+it.
+
+The abolition of slavery in the South was an incident in this struggle.
+Slavery was not abolished because the North agitated, or because John
+Brown raided or Mrs. Stowe wrote a book, or for any other sentimental or
+superficial reason, but because it was undemocratic.
+
+
+_What Slavery Did_
+
+This is what slavery did: It enabled a comparatively few men (only about
+one in ten of the white men of the South was a slave-owner or
+slave-renter) to control eleven states of the Union, to monopolise
+learning, to hold all the political offices, to own most of the good land
+and nearly all of the wealth. Not only did it keep the Negro in slavery,
+but nine-tenths of the white people (the so-called "poor whites," whom
+even the Negroes despised) were hardly more than peasants or serfs. It was
+in many ways a charming aristocracy, but it was doomed from the beginning.
+If there had been no North, slavery in the South would have disappeared
+just as inevitably. It was the restless yeast of democracy, spreading
+abroad upon the earth (in Europe as well as America) that killed slavery
+and liberated both Negro and poor white men.
+
+Revolutions such as the Civil War change names: they do not at once change
+human relationships. Mankind is reconstructed not by proclamations or
+legislation or military occupation, but by time, growth, education,
+religion, thought.
+
+When the South got on its feet again after Reconstruction and took account
+of itself, what did it find? It found 4,000,000 ignorant Negroes changed
+in name from "slave" to "freeman," but not changed in nature. It found the
+poor whites still poor whites; and the aristocrats, although they had lost
+both property and position, were still aristocrats. For values, after all,
+are not outward, but inward: not material, but spiritual. It was as
+impossible for the Negro at that time to be less than a slave as it was
+for the aristocrat to be less than an aristocrat. And this is what so many
+legal-minded men will not or cannot see.
+
+What happened?
+
+Exactly what might have been predicted. Southern society had been turned
+wrong side up by force, and it righted itself again by force. The Ku Klux
+Klan, the Patrollers, the Bloody Shirt movement, were the agencies
+(violent and cruel indeed, but inevitable) which readjusted the
+relationships, put the aristocrats on top, the poor whites in the middle,
+and the Negroes at the bottom. In short, society instinctively reverted to
+its old human relationships. I once saw a man shot through the body in a
+street riot. Mortally wounded, he stumbled and rolled over in the dust,
+but sprung up again as though uninjured and ran a hundred yards before he
+finally fell dead. Thus the Old South, though mortally wounded, sprung up
+and ran again.
+
+
+_The Struggle in South Carolina_
+
+The political reactions after Reconstruction varied, of course, in the
+different states, being most violent in states like South Carolina, where
+the old aristocratic r�gime was most firmly entrenched, and least violent
+in North Carolina, which has always been the most democratic of Southern
+states.
+
+In South Carolina then, for example, the aristocrats in 1875 returned to
+political supremacy.
+
+General Wade Hampton, who represented all that was highest in the old
+r�gime, became governor of the state. A similar tendency developed, of
+course, in the other Southern states, and a notable group of statesmen
+(and they _were_ statesmen) appeared in politics--Hill and Gordon of
+Georgia, Lamar and George of Mississippi, Butler of South Carolina, Morgan
+of Alabama, all aristocrats of the old school.
+
+Apparently the ancient order was restored; apparently the wounded man ran
+as well as ever. But the Old South, after all, had received its mortal
+wound. There _had_ been a revolution; society _had_ been overturned. The
+institution on which it had reared its ancient splendour was gone: for the
+aristocrat no longer enjoyed the special privilege, the enormous economic
+advantage of _owning_ his labourers. He was reduced to an economic
+equality with other white men, and even with the Negro, either of whom
+could _hire_ labour as easily and cheaply as he could. And the baronial
+plantation which had been the mark of his grandeur before the war was now
+the millstone of his doom.
+
+Special privilege, always the bulwark of aristocracy, being thus removed,
+the germ of democracy began to work among the poor whites. The
+disappearance of competitive slave labour made them unexpectedly
+prosperous; it secured a more equable division of wealth. With prosperity
+came more book-reading, more schooling, a greater _feeling_ of
+independence. And this feeling animated the poor white with a new sense of
+freedom and power.
+
+Enter now, when the time was fully ripe for a leader, the rude man of the
+people.
+
+How often he appears in the pages of history, the sure product of
+revolutions, bursting upward like some devastating force, not at all
+silken-handed or subtle-minded, but crude, virile, direct, truthful.
+
+
+_Tillman, the Prophet_
+
+So Tillman came in South Carolina. I can see him as he rode to the
+farmers' fairs and court days in the middle eighties, a sallow-faced,
+shaggy-haired man with one gleaming, restless, angry eye. He had been long
+preparing in silence for his task--struggling upward in the
+poverty-stricken days of the war and through the Reconstruction, without
+schooling, or chance of schooling, but endowed with a virile-mindedness
+which fed eagerly upon certain fermentative books of an inherited library.
+Lying on his back in the evening on the porch of his farmhouse, he read
+Carlyle's "French Revolution" and Gibbon's "Rome." He had in him, indeed,
+the veritable spirit of the revolutionist: in the days of the Patrollers,
+he, too, had ridden and hunted Negroes. He had seen the aristocracy come
+again into power; he had heard the whisperings of discontent among the
+poor whites. And at fairs and on court days in the eighties I hear him
+screaming his speeches of defiance, raucous, immoderate, denouncing all
+gentlemen, denouncing government by gentlemen, demanding that government
+be restored to the "plain people!" On one of the transparencies of those
+days he himself had printed the words (strange reminder of the Commune!):
+
+"Awake! arise! or be forever fallen."
+
+He spoke not only to the farmers, but he flung defiance at the aristocrats
+in the heart of the aristocracy. At Charleston, one of the proudest of
+Southern cities, he said:
+
+"Men of Charleston, I have always heard that you were the most
+self-idolatrous people that ever lived; but I want to say to you that the
+sun does not rise in the Cooper and set in the Ashley. It shines all over
+the state.... If the tales that have been told me or the reports which
+have come to me are one-tenth true, you are the most arrant set of cowards
+God ever made."
+
+And everywhere he went he closed his speeches with this appeal:
+
+"Organise, organise, organise. With organisation you will become free once
+more. Without it, you will remain slaves."
+
+Once, upon an historic occasion on the floor of the United States Senate,
+Tillman paused in the heat of a debate to explain (not to excuse) his
+fiery utterances.
+
+"I am a rude man," he said, "and don't care."
+
+That is Tillman. They tried to keep him and his followers out of the
+political conventions; but he would not be kept out, nor kept down. Years
+later he himself expressed the spirit of revolt in the United States
+Senate. Zach McGhee tells how he had been making one of his fierce
+attacks, an ebullition in general against things as they are. A senator
+arose to snuff him out in the genial senatorial way.
+
+"I would like to ask, Mr. President, what is before the Senate?"
+
+"_I_ am before the Senate," screamed Tillman.
+
+In 1890 Tillman was elected governor of South Carolina: the poor white, at
+last, was in power.
+
+The same change was going on all over the South. In Mississippi the rise
+of the people (no longer poor) was represented by Vardaman, in Arkansas by
+Jeff Davis, and Georgia and Alabama have experienced the same overturn in
+a more complicated form. It has become a matter of pride to many of the
+new leaders of the "plain people" that they do not belong to the "old
+families" or to the "aristocracy." Governor Comer told me that he was a
+"doodle-blower"--a name applied to the poor white dwellers on the sand
+hills of Alabama. Governor Swanson of Virginia is proud of the fact that
+he is the first governor of the state wholly educated in the public
+schools and colleges. Call these men demagogues if you will, and some of
+them certainly are open to the charge of appealing to the prejudices and
+passions of the people, they yet represent a genuine movement for a more
+democratic government in the South.
+
+The old aristocrats gibe at the new leaders even to the point of bitter
+hatred (in South Carolina at least one murder has grown out of the
+hostility of the factions); they see (how acutely!) the blunders of
+untrained administrators, their pride in their states is rubbed blood-raw
+by the unblushing crudities of the Tillmans, the Vardamans, the Jeff
+Davises. Go South and talk with any of these men of the ancient order and
+you will come away feeling that conditions in the South are without hope.
+
+
+_"High Men" of the Old South_
+
+And those old aristocrats had their virtues. One loves to hear the names
+still applied at Richmond, Montgomery, Macon, and Charleston to the men of
+the old type, by other men of the old type. How often I have heard the
+terms a "high man," an "incorruptible man." Beautiful names! For there was
+a personal honour, a personal devotion to public duties among many of
+these ante-bellum slave-owners that made them indeed "high men."
+
+When they were in power their reign was usually skilful and honest: the
+reign of a beneficent oligarchy. But it was selfish: it reigned for
+itself--with nine-tenths of the people serfs or slaves. Its luxuries, its
+culture, its gentleness, like that of all aristocracies, was enjoyed at
+the fearful cost of poverty, ignorance, and slavery of millions of human
+beings. It had no sympathy, therefore it perished from off the earth.
+
+The new men of the Tillman type made glaring, even violent mistakes, but
+for the most part honest mistakes; they saw clearly what they wanted: they
+wanted more power in the hands of the people, more democracy, and they
+went crudely at the work of getting it. In spite of the bitterness against
+Vardaman among some of the best people of Mississippi I heard no one
+accuse him of corruption in any department of his administration. On the
+whole, they said he had directed the business of the state with judgment.
+And Tillman, in spite of the dire predictions of the aristocrats, did not
+ruin the state. Quite to the contrary, he performed a notable service in
+extending popular education, establishing an agricultural college,
+regulating the liquor traffic (even though the system he established has
+since degenerated). Never before, indeed, has South Carolina, and the
+South generally, been more prosperous than it has since these men went
+into power, never has wealth increased so rapidly, never has education
+been so general nor the percentage of illiteracy so low. The "highest
+citizen" may not be so high (if it can be called high) in luxury and
+culture as he was before the war, but the average citizen is decidedly
+higher.
+
+Having thus acquired a proper historical perspective, we may now consider
+the part which the Negro has played in the politics of the South. Where
+does _he_ come in?
+
+
+_Where the Negro Comes In_
+
+Though it may seem a sweeping generalisation, it is none the less
+literally true that up to the present time the Negro's real influence in
+politics in the South has been almost negligible. He has been an _issue_,
+but not an _actor_ in politics. In the ante-bellum slavery agitation no
+Negroes appeared; they were an inert lump of humanity possessing no power
+of inner direction; the leaders on both sides were white men. The Negroes
+did not even follow poor old John Brown. And since the war, as I have
+shown, the struggle has been between the aristocrats and the poor whites.
+They have talked _about_ the Negro, but they have not let _him_ talk. Even
+in Reconstruction times, and I am not forgetting exceptional Negroes like
+Bruce, Revels, Pinchback, and others, the Negro was in politics by virtue
+of the power of the North. As a class, the Negroes were not self-directed
+but used by Northern carpetbaggers and political Southerners who took most
+of the offices and nearly all of the stealings.
+
+In short, the Negro in times past has never been in politics in the South
+in any positive sense. And that is not in the least surprising. Coming out
+of slavery, the Negro had no power of intelligent self-direction,
+practically no leaders who knew anything. He was still a slave in
+everything except name, and slaves have never yet ruled, or helped rule.
+
+The XV Amendment to the Constitution could not really enfranchise the
+Negro slaves. Men must enfranchise themselves.
+
+And this political equality by decree, not by growth and development,
+caused many of the woes of Reconstruction.
+
+Two distinct impulses mark the effort of the South to disfranchise the
+Negro. The first was the blind revolt of Reconstruction times, in which
+force and fraud were frankly and openly applied. The effort to eliminate
+the Negro brought the white people together in one dominant party and the
+"Solid South" was born. For years this method sufficed; but in the
+meantime the Negro was getting a little education, acquiring
+self-consciousness, and developing leaders of more or less ability. It
+became necessary, therefore, both because the Negro was becoming more
+restive, less easily controlled by force, and because the awakening white
+man disliked and feared the basis of fraud on which his elections rested,
+to establish legal sanction for disfranchisement, to define the political
+status of the Negro by law.
+
+Now, the truth is that the mass of Southerners have _never believed that
+the Negro has or should have any political rights_. The South as a whole
+does not now approve and never has approved of the voting Negro. A few
+Negroes vote everywhere, "but not enough," as a Southerner said to me, "to
+do any hurt."
+
+The South, then, has been placed in the position of _providing by law for
+something that it did not really believe in_.
+
+
+[Illustration: COLONEL JAMES LEWIS United States Receiver at New Orleans]
+
+[Illustration: W. T. VERNON Register of the United States Treasury
+
+Photograph by G. V. Buck]
+
+[Illustration: RALPH W. TYLER An auditor of the Government at Washington]
+
+
+
+It was prophesied that when the Negro was disfranchised by law and
+"eliminated from politics" the South would immediately stop discussing the
+Negro question and divide politically along new lines. But this has not
+happened. Though disfranchisement laws have been in force in Mississippi
+for years there is less division in the white party of that state than
+ever before.
+
+Why is this so? Because the Negro, through gradual education and the
+acquisition of property, is becoming more and more a real as well as a
+potential factor in politics. For he is just beginning to be _really_
+free. And the South has not yet decided how to deal with a Negro who owns
+property and is self-respecting and intelligent and who demands rights.
+The South is suspicious of this new Negro: it dreads him; and the
+politicians in power are quick to play upon this sentiment in order that
+the South may remain solid and the present political leadership remain
+undisturbed.
+
+For the South, however much it may talk of the ignorant masses of Negroes,
+does not really fear them; it wants to keep them, and keep them ignorant.
+It loves the ignorant, submissive old Negroes, the "mammies" and "uncles";
+it wants Negroes who, as one Southerner put it to me, "will do the dirty
+work and not fuss about it." It wants Negroes who are really inferior and
+who _feel_ inferior. The Negro that the South fears and dislikes is the
+educated, property-owning Negro who is beginning to demand rights, to take
+his place among men as a citizen. This is not an unsupported statement of
+mine, but has been expressed over and over again by speakers and writers
+in every part of the South. I have before me a letter from Charles P.
+Lane, editor of the Huntsville (Alabama) _Daily Tribune_, written to
+Governor Comer. It was published in the Atlanta _Constitution_. The writer
+is arguing that the Negro disfranchisement laws in Alabama are too
+lenient, that they permit too many Negroes to vote. He says:
+
+     We thought then (in 1901, when the new Alabama Constitution
+     disfranchising the Negro was under discussion), as we do now, that
+     the menace to peace, the danger to society and white supremacy was
+     not in the illiterate Negro, but in the upper branches of Negro
+     society, the educated, the man who, after ascertaining his political
+     rights, forced the way to assert them.
+
+He continues:
+
+     We, the Southern people, entertain no prejudice toward the ignorant
+     per se inoffensive Negro. It is because we know him and for him we
+     entertain a compassion. But our blood boils when the educated Negro
+     asserts himself politically. We regard each assertion as an
+     unfriendly encroachment upon our native superior rights, and a
+     dare-devil menace to our control of the affairs of the state.
+
+     In this are we not speaking the truth? Does not every Southern
+     Caucasian "to the manor born" bear witness to this version? Hence we
+     present that the way to dampen racial prejudice, avert the impending
+     horrors, is to emasculate the Negro politically by repealing the XV
+     Amendment of the Constitution of the United States.
+
+I use this statement of Mr. Lane's not because it represents the broadest
+and freest thought in the South, for it does not, but because it
+undoubtedly states frankly and clearly the point of view of the _majority_
+of Southern people. It is the point of view which, talked all over Georgia
+last year, helped to elect Hoke Smith governor of the state, as it has
+elected other governors. Hoke Smith's argument was essentially this:
+
+
+_Hoke Smith's Views_
+
+The uneducated Negro is a good Negro; "he is contented to occupy the
+natural status of his race, the position of inferiority." The educated and
+intelligent Negro, who wants to vote, is a disturbing and threatening
+influence. We don't want him down here; let him go North.
+
+This feeling regarding the educated Negro, who, as Mr. Lane says,
+"ascertains his rights and forces his way to assert them," is the basic
+fact in Southern politics. It is what keeps the white people welded
+together in a single party; it is what sternly checks revolts and
+discourages independence.
+
+Keeping this fact in mind, let us look more intimately into Southern
+conditions.
+
+Following ordinary usage I have spoken of the Solid South. As a matter of
+fact the South is not solid, nor is there a single party. The very
+existence of one strong party presupposes another, potentially as strong.
+In the South to-day there are, as inevitably as human nature, two parties
+and two political points of view. And one is aristocratic and the other is
+democratic.
+
+It is noteworthy in the pages of history that parties which were once
+democratic become in time aristocratic. We are accustomed for example, to
+look back upon Magna Charta as a mighty instrument of democracy; which it
+was; but it was not democracy according to our understanding of the word.
+It merely substituted a baronial oligarchy for the divine-right rule of
+one man, King John. It did not touch the downtrodden slaves, serfs and
+peasants of England. And yet that struggle of the barons was of profound
+moment in history, for it started the spirit of democracy on its way
+downward, it was the seed from which sprung English constitutionalism,
+which finally flowered in the American republic.
+
+Tillman, as I have shown, wrung democracy from the old slave-owning
+oligarchy. He conquered: he established a democracy in South Carolina
+which included poor whites as well as aristocrats. But Tillman in his
+fiery pleas for the rights of men no more considered the Negro than the
+old barons considered the serfs of their day in the struggle against King
+John. It was and is incomprehensible to him that the Negro "has any rights
+which the white man is bound to respect."
+
+In short we have in the South the familiar and ancient division of social
+forces, but instead of two white parties, we now see a white aristocratic
+party, which seeks to control the government, monopolise learning, and
+supervise the division of labour and the products of labour, struggling
+with a democratic party consisting of a few white and many coloured
+people, which clamours for a part in the government. That, in plain words,
+is the true situation in the South to-day.
+
+
+_Has the Spirit of Democracy Crossed the Colour Line?_
+
+For democracy is like this: once its ferment begins to work in a nation it
+does not stop until it reaches and animates the uttermost man. Though
+Tillman's hatred and contempt of the Negro who has aspirations is without
+bounds, the spirit which he voiced in his wild campaigns does not stop at
+the colour line. Movements are so much greater than men, often going so
+much further than men intend. A prophet who stands out for truth as
+Tillman did cannot, having uttered it, thereafter limit it nor recall it.
+As I have been travelling about the country, how often I have heard the
+same animating whisper from the Negroes that Tillman heard in older days
+among the poor whites:
+
+"We are free; we are free."
+
+Yes, Tillman and Vardaman are right; education, newspapers, books,
+commercial prosperity, are working in the Negro too; he, too, has the
+world-old disease of restlessness, ambition, hope. And many a Negro leader
+and many a Negro organisation--and that is what is causing the turmoil in
+the South, the fear of the white aristocracy--are voicing the equivalent
+of Tillman's bold words:
+
+"Awake! arise! or be forever fallen."
+
+Now we may talk all we like about the situation, we may say that the Negro
+is wrong in entertaining such ambitions, that his hopes can never be
+gratified, that he is doomed forever to menial and inferior
+occupations--the plain fact remains (as Tillman himself testifies), that
+the democratic spirit _has_ crossed the colour line irrespective of laws
+and conventions, that the Negro is restless with the ambition to rise, to
+enjoy all that is best, finest, most complete in this world. How humanly
+the ancient struggle between aristocracy seeking to maintain its
+"superiority" and democracy fighting for "equality" is repeating itself!
+And this struggle in the South is complicated, deeply and variously, by
+the fact that the lower people are black and of a different race. They
+wear on their faces the badge of their position.
+
+What is being done about it?
+
+As every student of history is well aware, no aristocracy ever lets go
+until it is compelled to. How bitterly King John fought his barons; how
+bitterly the South Carolina gentlemen fought the rude Tillman! Having
+control of the government, the newspapers, the political parties, the
+schools, an aristocracy surrounds and fortifies itself with every possible
+safeguard. It maintains itself at any cost. And that is both human and
+natural; that is what is happening in the South to-day. Exactly the same
+conflict occurred before the war when the old slave-owning aristocracy
+(which everyone now acknowledges to have been wrong) was defending itself
+and the institution upon which its existence depended. The old
+slave-owning aristocrats believed that they were made of finer clay than
+the "poor whites," that their rule was peculiarly beneficent, that if
+anything should happen to depose them the country would go to ruin and
+destruction. It was the old, old conviction, common to kings and
+oligarchies, that they were possessed of a divine right, a special and
+perpetual franchise from God.
+
+
+_The White South Defends Itself_
+
+The present white aristocratic party in the South is defending itself
+exactly after the manner of all aristocracies.
+
+In the first place, having control of the government it has entrenched
+itself with laws. The moment, for example, that the Negro began to develop
+any real intelligence and leadership, the disfranchisement process was
+instituted. Laws were so worded that every possible white man be admitted
+to the franchise and every possible Negro (regardless of his intelligence)
+be excluded. These laws now exist in nearly all the Southern states.
+Although the XV Amendment to the Federal Constitution declares that the
+right to vote shall not be "denied or abridged ... on account of race or
+colour or previous condition of servitude," the South, in defence of its
+white aristocracy, has practically nullified this amendment. Governor Hoke
+Smith of Georgia, for example, said (June 9, 1906):
+
+     Legislation can be passed which will ... not interfere with the right
+     of any white man to vote, and get rid of 95 per cent. of the Negro
+     voters.
+
+Not only do the enacted laws disfranchise all possible Negroes, but many
+other Negroes who have enough property or education to qualify, are
+further disfranchised by the dishonest administration of those laws. For
+the machinery of government, being wholly in white hands, the registers
+and judges of election have power to keep out any Negro, however fit he
+may be. I know personally of many instances in which educated and
+well-to-do Negroes have been refused the right to register where ignorant
+white men were readily admitted.
+
+The law, after all, in this matter, plays very little figure. The white
+majority has determined to control the government utterly and to give the
+Negro, whether educated or not, no political influence. That is the plain
+truth of the matter. Listen to Hoke Smith in his campaign pledge of last
+year:
+
+"I favour, and if elected will urge with all my power, the elimination of
+the Negro from politics."
+
+Let us also quote the plain-speaking Vardaman in his address of April,
+1907, at Poplarville, Miss.:
+
+     How is the white man going to control the government? The way we do
+     it is to pass laws to fit the white man and make the other people
+     (Negroes) come to them.... If it is necessary every Negro in the
+     state will be lynched; it will be done to maintain white
+     supremacy.... The XV Amendment ought to be wiped out. We all agree on
+     that. Then why don't we do it?
+
+It may be argued that this violent expression does not represent the best
+sentiment of the South. It does not; and yet Vardaman, Tillman, Jeff
+Davis, Hoke Smith, and others of the type are _elected_, the _majority_ in
+their states support them. And I am talking here of politics, which deals
+with majorities. In a following chapter I shall hope to deal with the
+reconstructive and progressive minority in the South as it expresses
+itself especially in the more democratic border states like North
+Carolina.
+
+Thus the spirit of democracy has really escaped among the coloured people
+and it is running abroad like a prairie fire. Tillman, the prophet, sees
+it:
+
+"Every man," he says, "who can look before his nose can see that with
+Negroes constantly going to school, the increasing number of people who
+can read and write among the coloured race ... will in time encroach upon
+our white men."
+
+
+_Demand Repeal of XV Amendment_
+
+In order, then, to prevent the Negro getting into politics, the Tillmans,
+Vardamans, and others declare that the South must strike at the foundation
+of his political liberty: the XV Amendment must be repealed. In short, the
+moment the Negro meets one test of citizenship, these political leaders
+advance a more difficult one: now proposing to take away entirely every
+hope of ultimate citizenship. In the recent campaign for the United States
+senatorship in Mississippi, Vardaman and John Sharp Williams were quite in
+accord on this point, though they disagreed on methods of accomplishing
+the purpose. When the political liberty of the Negro has thus been finally
+removed, the South, say these men, will again have two parties, and will
+be able to take the place it should occupy in the counsels of the nation.
+
+Take the next point in the logic of the political leaders. It is a fact
+of common knowledge in history that aristocracies cannot long survive when
+free education is permitted among all classes of people. Education is more
+potent against oligarchies and aristocracies than dynamite bombs. Every
+aristocracy that has survived has had to monopolise learning more or less
+completely--else it went to the wall. It is not surprising that there
+should have been no effective public-school system in the South before the
+war where the poor whites could get an education, or that the teaching of
+Negroes was in many states a crime punishable by law. Education enables
+the Negro, as Mr. Lane says, to "ascertain his rights and force his way to
+assert them." Therefore to prevent his ascertaining his rights he must not
+be educated. The undivided supremacy of the white party, it is clearly
+discerned, is bound up with Negro ignorance. Therefore we have seen and
+are now seeing in certain parts of the South continuous agitation against
+the education of Negroes. That is one reason for the feeling in the South
+against "Northern philanthropy" which is contributing money to support
+Negro schools and colleges.
+
+"What the North is sending South is not money," says Vardaman, "but
+dynamite; this education is ruining our Negroes. They're demanding
+equality."
+
+
+_A Southern View of Negro Education_
+
+When I was in Montgomery, Ala., a letter was published in one of the
+newspapers from Alexander Troy, a well-known lawyer. It did not express
+the view of the most thoughtful men of that city, but I am convinced that
+it represented with directness and force the belief of a large proportion
+of the white people of Alabama. The letter says:
+
+     All the millions which have been spent by the state since the war in
+     Negro education ... have been worse than wasted. Should anyone ask
+     "Has not Booker Washington's school been of benefit to the Negro?"
+     the so-called philanthropists of the North would say "yes," but a
+     hundred thousand white people of Alabama would say "no."... Ask any
+     gentleman from the country what he thinks of the matter, and a very
+     large majority of them will tell you that they never saw a Negro
+     benefited by education, but hundreds ruined. He ceases to be a hewer
+     of wood and a drawer of water....
+
+     Exclude the air and a man will die, keep away the moisture and the
+     flower will wither. Stop the appropriations for Negro education, by
+     amendment to the Constitution if necessary, and the school-house in
+     which it is taught will decay. Not only that, but the Negro will
+     take the place the Creator intended he should take in the economy of
+     the world--a dutiful, faithful, and law-abiding servant.
+
+These are Mr. Troy's words and they found reflection in the discussions of
+the Alabama legislature then in session. A compulsory education bill had
+been introduced; the problem was to pass a law that would apply to white
+people, not to Negroes. In this connection I heard a significant
+discussion in the state senate. I use the report of it, for accuracy, as
+given the next morning in the _Advertiser_:
+
+     Senator Thomas said ... he would oppose any bills that would compel
+     Negroes to educate their children, for it had come to his knowledge
+     that Negroes would give the clothing off their backs to send their
+     children to school, while too often the white man, secure in his
+     supremacy, would be indifferent to his duty.
+
+     At this point Senator Lusk arose excitedly to his feet and said:
+
+     "Does the Senator from Barbour mean to say that the Negro race is
+     more ambitious and has more aspirations than the white race?"
+
+     "The question of the gentleman ... is an insult to the senate of
+     Alabama," replied Senator Thomas deliberately. "It is an insult to
+     the great Caucasian race, the father of all the arts and sciences, to
+     compare it to that black and kinky race which lived in a state of
+     black and ignorant savagery until the white race seized it and lifted
+     it to its present position."
+
+The result of this feeling against Negro education has shown itself in an
+actual reduction of Negro schooling in many localities, especially in
+Louisiana, and little recent progress anywhere else, compared with the
+rapid educational development among the whites, except through the work of
+the Negroes themselves, or by Northern initiative.
+
+In cutting off an $8,000 appropriation for Alcorn College (coloured)
+Governor Vardaman, as a member of the board of trustees, said:
+
+"I am not anxious even to see the Negro turned into a skilled mechanic.
+God Almighty intended him to till the soil under the direction of the
+white man and that is what we are going to teach him down there at Alcorn
+College."
+
+Without arguing the rights or wrongs or necessities of their position, I
+have thus endeavoured to set down the purposes of the present political
+leadership in the South.
+
+
+_Economic Cause for White Supremacy_
+
+Now the chief object of any aristocracy, the reason why it wishes to
+monopolise government and learning, is because it wishes to supervise the
+division of labour and the products of labour. That is the bottom fact.
+
+In slavery times, of course, the white man supervised labour absolutely
+and took _all_ the profits. In some cases to-day, by a system of peonage,
+he still controls the labourer and takes all the profits. But as the Negro
+has grown in education and property he not only wishes to supervise his
+own labour, but demands a larger share in the returns of labour. He is no
+longer willing to be an abject "hewer of wood and a drawer of water" as he
+was in slavery times; he has an ambition to own his own farm, do his own
+business, employ his own professional men, and so on. He will not "keep
+his place" as a servant. And that is the basis of all the trouble.
+
+Many of the utterances of white political leaders resolve themselves into
+a statement of this position.
+
+At the American Bankers' Association last fall Governor Swanson of
+Virginia said:
+
+"At last the offices, the business houses, and the financial institutions
+are all in the hands of intelligent Anglo-Saxons, and with God's help and
+our own good right hand we will hold him (the Negro) where he is."
+
+In other words, the white man will by force hold all political, business
+and financial positions; he will be boss, and the Negro must do the menial
+work; he must be a servant.
+
+Hoke Smith says in his speech (the italics are mine):
+
+"Those Negroes who are contented to occupy the natural status of their
+race, the position of inferiority, _all competition being eliminated
+between the whites and the blacks_, will be treated with greater
+kindness."
+
+In other words, if the Negro will be contented to keep himself inferior
+and not compete with the white man, everything will be all right. And
+thus, curiously enough, while Hoke Smith in his campaign was thundering
+against railroad corporations for destroying competition, while he was
+glorifying the principle of "free and unrestricted trade," he was
+advocating the formation of a monopoly of all white men by the elimination
+of the competition of all coloured men.
+
+Indeed, we find sporadic attempts to pass laws to compel the Negro to
+engage only in certain sorts of menial work. In Texas not long ago a bill
+was introduced in the legislature "to confine coloured labour to the farm
+whenever it was found in city and town communities to be competing with
+white labour." In the last session of the Arkansas legislature Senator
+McKnight introduced a bill providing that Negroes be forbidden "from
+waiting on white persons in hotels, restaurants, or becoming barbers, or
+porters on trains, and to prevent any white man from working for any
+Negro."
+
+In a number of towns respectable, educated, and prosperous Negro doctors,
+grocers, and others have been forcibly driven out. I visited Monroe, La.,
+where two Negro doctors had been forced to leave town because they were
+taking the practice of white physicians. In the same town a Negro grocer
+was burned out, because he was encroaching on the trade of white grocers.
+
+Neither of the laws above referred to, of course, was passed; and the
+instances of violence I have given are sporadic and unusual. For the South
+has not followed the dominant political leaders to the extremes of their
+logic. Human nature never, finally, goes to extremes: it is forever
+compromising, never wholly logical. While perhaps a large proportion of
+Southerners would agree perfectly with Hoke Smith or Tillman in his
+_theory_ of a complete supremacy of all white men in all respects, as a
+matter of fact nearly every white Southerner is encouraging some practical
+exception which quite overturns the theory. Tens of thousands of white
+Southerners swear by Booker T. Washington, and though doubtful about Negro
+education, the South is expending millions of dollars every year on
+coloured schools. Vardaman, declaiming violently against Negro colleges,
+has actually, in specific instances, given them help and encouragement. I
+told how he had cut off an $8,000 appropriation from Alcorn College
+because he did not believe in Negro education: but he turned around and
+gave Alcorn College $14,000 for a new lighting system, _because he had
+come in personal contact with the Negro president of Alcorn College, and
+liked him_.
+
+And though the politicians may talk about complete Negro disfranchisement,
+the Negro has nowhere been completely disfranchised: a few Negroes vote in
+every part of the South.
+
+I once heard a Southerner argue for an hour against the participation of
+the Negro in politics, and then ten minutes later tell me with pride of a
+certain Negro banker in his city whom we both knew.
+
+"Dr. ----'s all right," he said. "He's a sensible Negro. I went with him
+myself when he registered. He ought to vote."
+
+So personal relationships, the solving touch of human nature, play havoc
+with political theories and generalities. Mankind develops not by rules
+but by exceptions to rules. While the white aristocracy has indeed
+succeeded in controlling local government in the South almost completely,
+it has not been able to dominate the federal political organisations,
+which include many Negroes. And though often opposing education for the
+Negro, the aristocracy has not, after all, monopolised education; and the
+Negro, in spite of Jim Crow laws and occasional violence, has actually
+been pushing ahead, getting a foothold in landownership, entering the
+professions, even competing in some lines of business with white men. So
+democracy, though black, is encroaching in the world-old way on
+aristocracy; how far Negroes can go toward real democratic citizenship in
+the various lines--industrial, political, social--no man knows. We can see
+the fight; we do not know how the spoils of war will finally be divided.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+THE BLACK MAN'S SILENT POWER
+
+HOW THE DOMINANCE OF THE IDEA OF THE NEGRO STIFLES FREEDOM OF THOUGHT AND
+SPEECH IN SOUTHERN POLITICS
+
+
+At present the point of view of a large proportion of Southern white
+people on the Negro question is adequately expressed by such men as
+Tillman, Jeff Davis, and Hoke Smith. They are the political leaders. Their
+policies are, in general, the policies adopted; they are the men elected
+to office. Even in the border states, where the coloured population is not
+so dense as in the black belt, the attitude of the politicians is much the
+same as it is in the black belt. So far as the Negro question is
+concerned, Governor Swanson of Virginia stands on practically the same
+platform as Tillman and Hoke Smith--though he has not found it necessary
+to express his views as vigorously. And the position of the black-belt
+states in regard to the disfranchisement of the Negro and the extension of
+"Jim Crow" laws is being accepted by the border state of Maryland and the
+Western state of Oklahoma.
+
+But there also exists, and particularly in Virginia, North Carolina,
+Tennessee, and Georgia, a vigorous minority point of view, which I have
+referred to in a former chapter as the "broadest and freest thought of the
+South." Although it has not yet attained political position, it is a party
+of ideas, force, convictions, with a definite constructive programme. To
+this constructive point of view I have been able, thus far, to refer only
+incidentally.
+
+In the present chapter I wish to consider some of the effects upon
+Southern life of the domination of the Negro as a political issue, and the
+result of the continued supremacy of leaders like Tillman.
+
+
+
+[Illustration: J. POPE BROWN of Pulaski County, Georgia]
+
+[Illustration: EX-GOVERNOR JAMES K. VARDAMAN of Mississippi]
+
+[Illustration: SENATOR JEFF DAVIS of Arkansas
+
+Photograph by Harris-Ewing]
+
+[Illustration: GOVERNOR HOKE SMITH of Georgia
+
+Copyright, 1906, by Hallen Studios]
+
+[Illustration: SENATOR B. R. TILLMAN of South Carolina
+
+Photograph by F. B. Johnston]
+
+[Illustration: EX-GOVERNOR W. J. NORTHEN of Georgia]
+
+
+In the next chapter, under the title "The New Southern Statesmanship," I
+shall outline the programme and recount the activities of the new Southern
+leaders.
+
+
+_The Most Sinister Form of Negro Domination_
+
+Travelling in the South one hears much of the "threat of Negro
+domination," by which is generally meant political control by Negro voters
+or the election of Negro officeholders. But there already exists a far
+more real and sinister form of Negro domination. For the Negro still
+dominates the _thought_ of the South. For over eighty years, until quite
+recently, few great or serious issues have occupied the attention of the
+South save those growing out of slavery and the Negro problem. Though the
+very existence of our nation is due largely to the courage, wisdom, and
+political genius of Southern statesmanship--to Washington, Jefferson,
+Marshall, Patrick Henry, and their compatriots--the South, since the
+enunciation of the Monroe doctrine in 1823, has played practically no
+constructive part in national affairs. As Professor Mitchell of Richmond
+well points out, the great, vitalising influences which swept over the
+entire civilised world during the first half of the nineteenth century,
+the liberalising, nationalising, industrialising influences, left the
+South untouched. For it was chained in common slavery with the Negro.
+Instead of expanding with the new thought, it clung to slavery in
+opposition to the liberal tendency of the age, it insisted upon states'
+rights in opposition to nationality, it contented itself with agriculture
+alone, instead of embracing the rising industrialism. "It was an
+instance," as Professor Mitchell says, "of arrested development."
+
+Dr. John E. White of Atlanta has ably expressed the ethical result upon a
+people of confining their thought to a single selfish interest:
+
+"As long as we struggled for that which was good for everybody
+everywhere," he says, "we moved with Providence and the South led the van.
+There were great human concerns in the building up of the Republic. The
+whole world was interested in it. It was a work ennobling to a people--the
+inspiration of a great national usefulness. The disaster began when the
+South began to think only for and of itself--began to have only one
+problem."
+
+Thus the South, owing to the presence of the Negro, dropped behind in the
+progress of the world. And while the new and vitalising world influences
+are now spreading abroad throughout the South, manifesting themselves in
+factories, mines, mills, better schools, and more railroads, the old, ugly
+Negro problem still shackles political thought and cripples freedom of
+action. In other words, the South is being rapidly industrialised, but not
+so rapidly liberalised and nationalised, though these developments are
+certainly following.
+
+
+_Exploiting Negro Prejudice_
+
+The cause of this dominance of thought by the Negro lies chiefly with a
+certain group of politicians whose interest it is to maintain their party
+control and to keep the South solid. And they do this by harping
+perpetually on the Negro problem. I observed, wherever I went in the South
+and found busy and prosperous industries, that the Negro problem was
+little discussed. One manufacturer in New Orleans said to me, when I asked
+him about the Negro question:
+
+"Why, I'm so busy I never think about it."
+
+And that is the attitude of the progressive, constructive Southerner: he
+is impatient with the talk about the Negro and the Negro problem. He wants
+to forget it.
+
+But there remains a body of men in the South who, not prosperous in other
+industries, still make the Negro a sort of industry: they live by
+exploiting Negro prejudice. They prevent the expression of new ideas and
+force a great people to confine its political genius to a worn-out issue.
+
+
+_Roosevelt Democrats Down South_
+
+Talking with all classes of white men in the South, I was amazed to
+discover how many of them had ceased to be Democrats (in the party sense)
+at all, and were followers in their beliefs of Roosevelt and the
+Republican party. Many of them told me that they wished they could break
+away and express themselves openly and freely, but they did not dare. A
+considerable number have ventured to vote the Republican ticket in
+national elections (especially on the free-silver issue), but few indeed
+have had the courage to declare their independence in state or local
+affairs. For the instant a rift appears in the harmony of the white party
+(and that is a better name for it than Democratic) the leaders talk Negro,
+and the would-be independents are driven back into the fold. Over and over
+again leaders with new issues have endeavoured to get a hearing. A number
+of years ago the Populist movement spread widely throughout the South. Tom
+Watson of Georgia, Kolb of Alabama, Butler of North Carolina, led revolts
+against the old Democratic party. By fusion with the Republicans the
+Populists carried North Carolina. But the old political leaders
+immediately raised the Negro issue, declared that the Populists were
+encouraging the Negro vote, and defeated the insurgents, driving most of
+their leaders into political obscurity. Now, I am not arguing that
+Populism was an ideal movement, nor that its leaders were ideal men; I am
+merely trying to show the cost of independence in the South. A number of
+years ago Emory Speer, of Georgia, now Federal Judge, ran for Congress on
+an independent ticket. His platform was "The Union and the Constitution, a
+free ballot and a fair count." The inevitable Negro issue was raised
+against him, it was insisted that there must be no division among white
+people lest the Negro secure the balance of political power, and Speer was
+finally defeated. He became a Republican and has since had no influence in
+state politics.
+
+Upon this point an able Southern writer, Professor Edwin Mims of Trinity
+College, N. C., has said:
+
+"The independents in the South have to face the same state of affairs that
+the independents of the North did in the '80's--all the better traditions
+connected with one party, and most of the respectable people belonging to
+the same party. Just as George William Curtis and his followers were
+accused of being Democrats in disguise and of being traitors to the 'grand
+old party' that had saved the Union and freed the slaves, and deserters to
+a party of Copperheads, so the Southern independent is said to be a
+Republican in disguise, and is told of the awful crimes of the
+Reconstruction era. When all other arguments have failed, there is the
+inevitable appeal to the threatened domination of an inferior race which
+is not now even a remote possibility."
+
+As a result of this domination of a worn-out issue, political contests in
+the South have ordinarily concerned themselves not with stimulating public
+questions, but with the personal qualifications of the candidates. The
+South has not dared to face real problems lest the white party be split
+and the Negro voter somehow slip into influence. A campaign was fought
+last year in Mississippi. Of course the candidates all belonged to the
+white party; all therefore subscribed to identically the same
+platform--which had been prepared by the party leaders--so that the only
+issue was the personality of the candidates. Let me quote from the
+Mississippi correspondent of the New Orleans _Times-Democrat_, April 29,
+1907:
+
+     The only "issue" ... is the personality of the candidate himself. The
+     voter may take the speeches of each candidate and analyse them from
+     start to finish, and he will fail to find where there is any
+     difference of opinion between the candidates on any of the live
+     questions of the day which are likely to affect Mississippi. He must,
+     therefore, turn from the speeches to the candidate himself for an
+     "issue" and must take his choice of the several candidates as men,
+     and decide which of them will do most good to the state and be the
+     safest man to entrust with the helm.
+
+
+_Negro Holds Democratic Party Together_
+
+I am speaking here, of course, of the Negro as a dominant issue, the
+essential element which holds the Democratic party together and without
+which other policies could not be carried or candidates elected. Vigorous
+divisions on other issues have taken place locally within the lines of the
+Democratic party, especially during the last two or three years. The
+railroad and trust questions have been prominently before the people in
+most of the Southern states. During his long campaign for governor Hoke
+Smith talked railroads and railroad influence in politics constantly, but
+in order to be elected he raised the Negro question and talked it
+vigorously, especially in all of his country addresses. It is also highly
+significant that the South should have taken so strong a lead in the
+prohibition movement, although even this question has been more or less
+connected with the Negro problem, the argument being that the South must
+forbid the liquor traffic because of its influence on the Negro. No states
+in the Union, indeed, have been more radical in dealing with the trust
+question than Texas and Arkansas; and Alabama, Georgia, and North Carolina
+have been the scenes of some of the hottest fights in the country on the
+railroad question. All this goes to show that, once freed from the incubus
+of the Negro on Southern thought, the South would instantly become a great
+factor in national questions. And being almost exclusively American in its
+population, with few rich men and ideals of life not yet so subservient to
+the dollar as those of the North, it would become a powerful factor in the
+progressive and constructive movements of the country. The influence of a
+single bold man like Tillman in the Senate has been notable. In the future
+the country has much to look for from the idealism of Southern
+statesmanship.
+
+
+_Stifling Free Speech_
+
+But the unfortunate result of the dominance of the single idea of the
+Negro upon politics has been to benumb the South intellectually; to stifle
+free thought and free speech. Let a man advance a new issue and if the
+party leaders do not favour it they have only to cry out "Negro," twisting
+the issue so as to emphasise its Negro side (and every question in the
+South has a Negro side), and the independent thinker is crushed. I once
+talked with the editor of a newspaper in the South who said to me, "such
+and such is my belief."
+
+"But," I said, "you take just the opposite position in your paper."
+
+"Yes--but I can't talk out; it would kill my business."
+
+This timorousness has touched not only politics, but has reached the
+schools and the churches--and still shackles the freest speech. George W.
+Cable, the novelist, was practically forced to leave the South because he
+advocated the "continual and diligent elevation of that lower man which
+human society is constantly precipitating," because he advocated justice
+for the Negro.
+
+Professor Andrew Slade was compelled to resign from Emory College in
+Georgia because he published an article in the _Atlantic Monthly_ taking a
+point of view not supported by the majority in Southern sentiment!
+Professor John Spencer Bassett was saved from a forced resignation from
+Trinity College in North Carolina for a similar offence after a lively
+fight in the Board of Trustees which left Trinity with the reputation of
+being one of the freest institutions in the South.
+
+The situation in the South has made people afraid of the truth. Political
+oratory, particularly, often gets away entirely from the wholesome and
+regenerative world of actual facts. I quoted in the last chapter from a
+speech of Governor Swanson of Virginia, in which he said: "The business
+houses and financial institutions are in the hands of intelligent
+Anglo-Saxons, and with God's help and our own good right hand we will hold
+him (the Negro) where he is."
+
+
+_Negro's Progress in Richmond_
+
+What a curious thing oratory is! Right in Governor Swanson's own city of
+Richmond there are four banks owned and operated by Negroes; one of the
+Negro bankers sat in the convention to which Governor Swanson was at that
+moment speaking. There is a Negro insurance company, "The True Reformers,"
+in which I saw eighty Negro clerks and stenographers at work. It has a
+surplus of $300,000, with a business in thirty states. Negroes also own
+and operate in Richmond four clothing stores, five drug stores, many
+grocery stores (some very small, of course), two hotels, four livery
+stables, five printing establishments, eight fraternal insurance
+companies, seven meat markets, fifty eating-places, and many other sorts
+of business enterprises, small, of course, but growing rapidly. In
+Richmond also, there are ten Negro lawyers, fifteen physicians, three
+dentists, two photographers, eighty-five school teachers, forty-six Negro
+churches.
+
+
+_Southerners Who See the Danger_
+
+When I make the assertion regarding "free speech" and the fear of truth in
+the South, I am making no statement which has not been far more forcibly
+put by thoughtful and fearless Southerners who see and dread this sinister
+tendency.
+
+The late Chancellor Hill, of the University of Georgia, spoke of the
+"deadly paralysis of intellect caused by the enforced uniformity of
+thought within the lines of one party." He said:
+
+"Before the war the South was in opposition to the rest of civilisation
+on the question of slavery. It defended itself: its thinking, its
+political science, even its religion was not directed toward a search for
+truth, but it was concentrated on the defence of a civil and political
+order of things. These conditions made impossible a vigorous intellectual
+life."
+
+William Preston Few, dean of Trinity College, North Carolina, writes
+(_South Atlantic Quarterly_, January, 1905):
+
+"This prevalent lack of first hand thinking and of courage to speak out
+has brought about an unfortunate scarcity of intellectual honesty."
+
+An excellent illustration of this condition grew out of the statement of
+Dr. Edwin A. Alderman, president of the University of Virginia, at a
+dinner a year or so ago, in which he compared the recent political
+leadership of the South somewhat unfavourably with the statesmanship of
+the Old South. Upon hearing of this remark Senator Bailey of Texas angrily
+resigned from the alumni committee of the University. Chancellor Hill
+said, concerning the incident:
+
+"The question whether Dr. Alderman was right or wrong becomes
+insignificant beside the larger question whether Senator Bailey was right
+or wrong in his method of dealing with a difference of opinion. And this
+leads to the question: Have we freedom of opinion in the South? Must every
+man who thinks above a whisper do so at the peril of his reputation and
+his influence, or at the deadlier risk of having an injury inflicted upon
+the institution which he represents?"
+
+In giving so much space to the words and position of Vardaman, Tillman,
+Hoke Smith, and others, I have not yet sufficiently emphasised the work
+and influence of the thoughtful and constructive men of the South. But it
+must be borne in mind that I am writing of politics, of majorities: and
+politicians of the Tillman type are still the political forces in the
+South. They are in control: they are elected. Yet there is the growing
+class of new statesmen whose work I shall recount in the next chapter.
+
+
+_Whites Disfranchised as Well as Blacks_
+
+But the limitation of intellectual freedom has not been the only result of
+the political dominance of the Negro issue. It is curious to observe that
+when one class of men in any society is forced downward politically,
+another is forced up: for so mankind keeps its balances and averages. A
+significant phase of the movement in the South to eliminate the Negro is
+the sure return to government by a white aristocracy. For disfranchisement
+of the Negro has also served to disfranchise a very large proportion of
+the white people as well. In every Southern state where Negro
+disfranchisement has been forced, the white vote also has been steadily
+dwindling. To-day in Alabama not half the white males of voting age are
+qualified voters. In Mississippi the proportion is still lower.
+
+In the last Presidential election the state of Mississippi was carried by
+Parker with a total vote of only 58,383, out of a total of 349,177
+citizens (both white and coloured) of voting age. Only one-third of the
+white men voted. It has been found, indeed, in several counties in
+Mississippi, that while the number of white eligibles has been decreasing,
+the number of Negroes on the registration lists has been increasing. In
+the city of Jackson, Miss., last year, 1,200 voters were registered out of
+a population of 32,000 people.
+
+To show the dwindling process, take the single country of Tallapoosa in
+Alabama. The last census shows 4,203 whites and 2,036 blacks of voting
+age, 6,259 in all. After the adoption of the new constitution
+disfranchising the Negro in 1901, the total registration was 4,008. Last
+fall, although the important question of prohibition had arisen and an
+especial effort was made to get voters out, an investigation showed there
+were only 1,700 qualified voters in the country.
+
+This astonishing condition is due primarily to the fact that there is no
+vital party division on new issues in the South; but it is also due to the
+franchise tests, which, having been made severe to keep the Negro out,
+operate also to disfranchise hundreds of thousands of poor and ignorant
+white men. I spent much time talking with white workingmen, both in the
+cities and in the country. I asked them why so many workingmen and farmers
+did not vote. Here is one comprehensive reply of a labour leader:
+
+"What's the use? We have to pay two dollars a year poll-tax, and pay it
+nearly a year before election. And why vote? There are no real issues at
+stake. An election is merely a personal quarrel in the clique of men who
+control the Democratic party. Why should we pay two dollars a year and go
+to the bother of satisfying the personal ambition of some man we are not
+interested in?"
+
+
+_A White Oligarchy_
+
+So the white vote is dwindling; the political power is being gathered into
+the hands of fewer and fewer men. And there is actually springing up a
+large class of non-voting white men not unlike the powerless "poor whites"
+of ante-bellum times. The white politicians, indeed, in some places do not
+encourage the poorer white men to qualify, for the fewer voters, the more
+certain their control.
+
+Of course the chief fights in Mississippi and elsewhere are not at the
+elections, but in the Democratic (white) primaries; but this fact only
+accentuates the point I wish to make: the limitation of political
+independence of action. Such conditions are deeply concerning the
+thoughtful men of the South; but while they think, few dare to brave
+political extinction by speaking out. One would think that the Republican
+party, which ostensibly stands for the opposition in the South, would cry
+out about conditions. But it does not. The fact is, the Republican party,
+as now constituted in the South, is even a more restricted white oligarchy
+than the Democratic party. In nearly all parts of the South, indeed, it is
+a close corporation which controls or seeks to control all the federal
+offices. Speak out? Of course not. It, too, is attempting to eliminate the
+Negro (in some places it calls itself "lily white"), and it works not
+inharmoniously with the Democratic politicians. For the Republican machine
+in the South really has no quarrel with the Democratic machine; it takes
+the federal offices which the Democrats cannot get, and the Democrats take
+local offices which the Republicans know they cannot get.
+
+
+_The South a Weapon in National Conventions_
+
+The Republican Presidents at Washington have, unfortunately, played into
+the hands of the Southern office-holding machine. Why? Partly because
+Republicans are few in the South and partly because a solid Republican
+delegation from the South, easily handled and controlled and favouring
+the administration, is a powerful weapon in national conventions. McKinley
+played almost absolutely into the hands of this Southern Republican
+machine, and Hanna operated it. Indeed, McKinley's nomination was probably
+due to the skill with which Hanna marshaled this solid phalanx of Southern
+delegates. Roosevelt has made a number of first-class appointments outside
+of the machine, even appointing a few Democrats of the high type of Judge
+Jones of Alabama.
+
+Over and over in this book I have spoken of the Negro as a national, not a
+Southern issue; and in politics this is peculiarly true. Though having few
+Republicans, the South, through its office-holding Republican delegations,
+has largely influenced the choice of more than one Republican president.
+The "Solid South" is as useful to the Republican party as to the
+Democratic party. Why the certainty expressed by Republican politicians of
+the nomination of Taft? Because the national organisation felt sure it
+could control the Southern delegations. It counted on the "Solid South."
+
+Thus in a very real sense the government of this entire nation turns upon
+the despised black man--whether he votes or not!
+
+
+_The Negro's Political Power in the North_
+
+In another way the Southern attitude toward the Negro affects the nation.
+Owing to disfranchisement and "Jim Crow" laws, thousands of Negroes have
+moved northward and settled in the great cities, until to-day Negro
+voters, though they may not (as has been claimed) hold the balance of
+power, yet wield a great influence in the politics of at least four
+states--Indiana, Ohio, New Jersey, and Rhode Island--and are also
+considerable factors in the political destiny of Illinois, Pennsylvania,
+New York, and Delaware. The potential influence of the Negro voter in the
+North is excellently illustrated in the recent campaign for the Republican
+nomination to the Presidency, especially in the fight in Ohio between
+Foraker and Taft and in the eagerness displayed by Taft to placate the
+Negro vote.
+
+In still another way the Negro affects the entire nation. Through its
+attitude of exclusion the South exercises an influence on national
+legislation out of all proportion to its voting population. Though nearly
+all Negroes are disfranchised, as well as a large number of white voters,
+all these disfranchised voters are counted in the allotment of Congressmen
+to Southern states.
+
+Out of this has grown a curious condition. In 1904 Alabama, Arkansas,
+Georgia, and Mississippi, which have thirty-five members in Congress, cast
+413,516 votes, while Massachusetts alone, with only fourteen Congressmen,
+cast 445,098 votes.
+
+Here, for example, is the record of South Carolina:
+
+  Total population of voting age, both white and coloured (1900)   283,325
+  Total white voting population                                    130,375
+  Total actual vote in 1902 for Congressmen                         32,185
+  Total Democratic vote which elected seven Congressmen             29,343
+
+Thus in South Carolina in 1902 an average of about 4,600 voters voted at
+the election for each Congressman (in 1904, a Presidential year, the
+average was about 8,100) while in New York State over 40,000 votes are
+cast in each Congressional district and in Pennsylvania about 38,000.
+
+Now, I am not here criticising this condition; I am merely endeavouring to
+set down the facts as I find them. My purpose is to illustrate the
+profound and far-reaching effects of the Negro issue upon the nation. And
+is it not curious, when all is said, to observe how this rejected black
+man, whom the South has attempted to eliminate utterly from politics, has
+been for years changing and warping the entire government of this nation
+in the most fundamental ways! Did he not cause a civil war, the results of
+which still curse the country? And though excluded in large measure from
+the polls, does he not in reality cast his mighty vote for Presidents,
+Congressmen, Governors?
+
+Often, looking out across the South, it appears to the observer that the
+Negro has a more far-reaching and real influence on our national life for
+being excluded from the polls than he would have if he were frankly and
+justly admitted to the franchise on the same basis as white men.
+
+All the real thinkers and statesmen of the South have looked and longed
+for the hour when the South, free of this dominance of an ugly issue,
+should again take its great place in national affairs. In 1875, at the
+close of Reconstruction, Senator Lamar of Mississippi predicted in a
+speech at Jackson that the South, having eliminated the Negro from
+politics, would now divide on new economic issues and become politically
+healthy. But that has not happened; less division on real issues probably
+exists in Mississippi to-day than in 1875. Why? Is it not possible that
+the manner of the elimination of the Negro from politics is wrong? Has it
+occurred to leaders and statesmen that Negroes who are qualified can be
+eliminated _into_ politics; that the present method in reality makes the
+Negro a more dangerous political factor than he would be if he were
+allowed to vote regularly and quietly?
+
+
+_Southerners Who Are Speaking Out_
+
+In spite of the domination of both parties in the South by narrowing
+groups of leaders there are not wanting men to fight for a new alignment.
+On the Republican side one of these men is Joseph C. Manning, of Alexander
+City, Ala., who publishes a paper called the _Southern American_. He has
+shown how white men are being disfranchised as well as Negroes, how the
+South is controlled by a "Bourbon oligarchy" in the Democratic party and a
+"federal-for-revenue" Republican party--as he calls them. His paper
+appears every week with his denunciations in big letters, urging the
+Republican party to reform and become a party of truth and progress.
+
+He says:
+
+     THE RALLYING CRY
+
+     The great body of the people of the white South, the masses of the
+     white people of Alabama, are to-day suppressed by the strategy of a
+     political autocracy dominating under the guise and pretence of a
+     democracy.
+
+     Why not throw off the yoke and get in the fight?
+
+     Rise up above this petty delegate getting, patronage manipulating,
+     state chairman squabbling, until this small politics shall become
+     lost in the great and the supreme issue.
+
+     Stop this "lily-white" nonsense. Quit being sidetracked by this
+     Bourbon wail of Negro. Recognise this vital force of the immovable
+     truth that an injustice to one American citizen will react upon all.
+     You can't have one law for the white man and another for the Negro in
+     our form of government. You know that those who have the most talked
+     of suppressing blacks have really suppressed you, white Republicans,
+     and the most of the Southern whites.
+
+     The outcry of Negro and social equality and the like is the very
+     essence of political moonshine.
+
+A number of men inside the Democratic party are not afraid to speak out.
+Ex-Congressman Fleming of Georgia said in a notable address at Athens,
+Ga.:
+
+"Those whose stock in trade is 'hating the nigger' may easily gain some
+temporary advantage for themselves in our white primaries, where it
+requires no courage, either physical or moral, to strike those who have no
+power to strike back--not even with a paper ballot. But these men will
+achieve nothing permanent for the good of the state or of the nation by
+stirring up race passion and prejudice. Injustice and persecution will not
+solve any of the problems of the ages. God did not so ordain his universe.
+
+"Justly proud of our race, we refuse to amalgamate with the Negro, but the
+Negro is an American citizen, and is protected as such by guarantees of
+the Constitution that are as irrepealable almost as the Bill of Rights
+itself. Nor, if such a thing as repealing these guarantees were possible,
+would it be wise for the South. Suppose we admit the oft-reiterated
+proposition that no two races so distinct as the Caucasian and the Negro
+can live together on terms of perfect equality; yet it is equally true
+that without some access to the ballot, present or prospective, some
+participation in the government, no inferior race in an elective republic
+could long protect itself against reduction to slavery in many of its
+substantial forms--and God knows the South wants no more of that curse."
+
+Men of the type of Mr. Fleming are far in the minority in the South; they
+are so few as yet as to count, politically speaking, for little or
+nothing. But the fact that they are there, that they are not afraid to
+speak out, even though it ruins them politically, is significant and
+hopeful.
+
+
+_Ante-bellum Aggression_
+
+Now it is this way with a party having only one issue: when attacked, it
+can only become more and more violent and vociferous upon that issue. And
+this is what we discover in the South: an increasing bitterness of leaders
+like Tillman and Vardaman, for they know that their own existence and that
+of the party which they represent depends upon keeping the Negro issue
+prominent. The very fact that they are violent is significant: it shows
+that they recognise powerful and growing new elements in the South, which,
+though not yet apparent politically, are getting hold of the people.
+
+In other words, the present group of autocratic leaders is seeking at any
+length to defend itself. And its work is not only defensive, it is also
+offensive. It must be. The institution of slavery might have lasted many
+years longer if the Southern leaders had been content with the slave
+territory they already held. But they were not so content. They tried to
+extend slavery to the new territories of the Union, and it was this
+aggression that was the chief immediate cause of the Civil War. It was the
+struggle over Missouri and Kansas, and the policy of the country regarding
+the new West, whether it should be admitted slave or free, which
+precipitated hostilities.
+
+"Continual aggression," John Hay once said, "is the necessity of a false
+position." The ante-bellum Southern leaders saw that they must either
+extend their institution or else face its ultimate extinction.
+
+At the present time we have a repetition of the ante-bellum aggression. As
+it happened then, we have speakers like Tillman and others coming North
+urging the validity of the Southern treatment of the Negro. Writers like
+Thomas Dixon rekindle old fires of hatred. At the same moment that Tillman
+is abusing the North for its interest in Southern education, he himself is
+speaking from Northern platforms to make sentiment for the Southern
+position. So we have the extension of disfranchisement and "Jim Crow" laws
+to the new Western state of Oklahoma and the agitation for
+disfranchisement in Maryland. So we have the advancing demand by
+Southerners in Congress for the repeal of the XV Amendment. And just
+recently Congressman Heflin of Alabama has introduced a bill seeking to
+provide for "Jim Crow" distinctions upon the street-cars of Washington.
+How all this recalls the efforts of the ante-bellum Southern Congressmen
+to force the United States Government to take the Southern position on the
+slavery question!
+
+
+_Fighting to Put the Negro Down_
+
+I have recently read some of the voluminous discussions upon the subject
+of slavery which took place before the Civil War, and I have been
+astonished to find the arguments of the Southern political leaders of
+to-day almost identical in substance (though changed somewhat in form)
+with the reasoning of the old slave-owning class. One hears the same
+arguments regarding the physiological and ethnological inferiority of all
+coloured men to all white men: the argument that "one drop of Negro blood
+makes a Negro," and even that the Negro is not a human being at all, but a
+beast.
+
+I have before me a book recently published by a Bible house (of all
+places!) in St. Louis and widely circulated in the South. It is entitled
+"Is the Negro a Beast?" and it goes on to prove by Biblical quotation that
+he has no soul! Being a beast, it becomes a small matter to kill him.
+
+One also hears the argument now, as in slavery times, of the divine right
+of the white man to rule the Negro. "God intended the white man to rule,"
+says Vardaman, "and the Negro to be a humble servant." And finally there
+is the frank argument of physical force; that the white man, being strong,
+will and must rule the Negro.
+
+Hoke Smith to-day is supporting much the same position that Robert Toombs
+held before the war. Of course Hoke Smith has receded from the belief in
+the chattel slavery of the Negro for which Toombs contended; but in many
+other respects he evidently believes that the Negro should be reduced (as
+Ex-Congressman Fleming of Georgia says in the quotation given above) "to
+slavery in many of its substantial forms." In order to validate its
+position and keep its place (and make the Negro keep his) the white
+aristocracy has been forced to defend the doctrine of all monarchies and
+aristocracies--the inequality of men in all respects. Hoke Smith states
+the fundamental assumption thus plainly in his address (June 9, 1906):
+
+"I believe the wise course is to plant ourselves squarely upon the
+proposition in Georgia that the Negro is in no respect the equal of the
+white man, and that he cannot in the future in this state occupy a
+position of equality."
+
+
+_Both the South and the North Undemocratic_
+
+Thus I have attempted to present the political situation in the South and
+the reasoning which underlies it. It possesses a large significance for
+the entire country.
+
+Here is the fact: the war and the emancipation proclamation did not make
+the South completely democratic; it merely cut away one bulwark of
+aristocracy--slavery. The South is still dominated by the aristocratic
+idea, and more or less frankly so. The South has admitted only grudgingly,
+and not yet fully, the "poor white" man to democratic political
+fellowship. There are, as I have shown, hundreds of thousands of
+disfranchised white Americans in the South. Moreover many white leaders
+look askance on the new Italian immigrants, though they, too, are white
+men. The extreme point of view in regard to the foreigner was expressed in
+a speech by the Hon. Jeff Truly, candidate for governor of Mississippi, at
+Magnolia in that state on March 18, 1907:
+
+"I am opposed to any inferior race. The Italian immigration scheme does
+not settle the labour question; Italians are a threat and a danger to our
+racial, industrial, and commercial supremacy. Mississippi needs no such
+immigration. Leave your lands to your own children. As governor of the
+state, I promise that not one dollar of the state shall be spent for the
+immigration of any such."
+
+As for the Negro, of course, the South has never believed in a democracy
+which really includes him.
+
+But neither does the North. When we get right down to it, the controlling
+white men in the North do not believe in an inclusive democracy much more
+than the South. I have talked with many Northerners who go South, and it
+is astonishing to see how quickly most of them adopt the Southern point of
+view. For it is the doctrine which many of them, down in their hearts,
+really believe.
+
+In reality the North also has an aristocratic government, an oligarchy
+based upon wealth and property, which dominates politics and governs the
+country more or less completely. Roosevelt has been fighting some of the
+more boisterous aspects of the rule of this oligarchy--and has showed the
+country how powerful it is!
+
+
+_The Underman Fighting All Over the World_
+
+It is curious, indeed, when one's attention is awakened to the facts, how
+strong the parallel is between the South and the North. I mean here a
+parallel not in laws or even in customs, but in spirit, in the living
+reality which lies down deep under institutions, which is, after all, the
+only thing that really counts.
+
+The cause of all the trouble in the North is similar to what it is in the
+South: the underman will not keep his place. He is restless, ambitious, he
+wants civil, political, and industrial equality. Thus we see the growth of
+labour organisations, and the spread of populists and socialists, who
+demand new rights and a greater share in the products of labour. They will
+not, as Hoke Smith says of the Negroes, "content themselves with the place
+of inferiority." The essential feature of the history of the last five
+years in this country, and it will go down in history as the beginning of
+great things, has been the vague, crudely powerful effort of the underman
+(half his strength wasted because he is blind) to limit in some degree the
+power of this moneyed aristocracy. Such is the meaning of the demand for
+trust and railroad legislation, such the significance of the insurance
+investigation, such the effort to curb the power of men like Rockefeller,
+Harriman, Morgan.
+
+So the North, in spirit, also disfranchises its lower class. It does it by
+the purchase at elections in one form or another of its "poor whites" and
+its Negroes. What else is the meaning of Tammany Hall and the boss and
+machine system in other cities? Tammany Hall is our method of
+disfranchisement: it is our cunning machine for nullifying the fourteenth
+and fifteenth amendments. While the South is disfranchising by
+legislation, the North is doing it by cash.
+
+
+_The Question We Are Coming To_
+
+I have spoken of the lack of free speech in the South; but that is not
+peculiar to the South. Though there is undoubtedly a far greater
+intellectual freedom to-day in the North than in the South, yet the North
+has disciplined more than one professor for his utterances on the trust or
+railroad questions. South or North, it is dangerous to attack the
+entrenched privilege of those in control.
+
+We criticise the frankness of Vardaman in advocating different standards
+of justice for white men and Negroes, but do we not have the same custom
+in the North? How extremely difficult it is sometimes to get a rich
+criminal into jail in the North!
+
+In short, we are coming again face to face in this country with the same
+tremendous (even revolutionary) question which presents itself in every
+crisis of the world's history:
+
+"What is democracy? What does democracy include? Does democracy really
+include Negroes as well as white men? Does it include Russian Jews,
+Italians, Japanese? Does it include Rockefeller and the Slavonian
+street-sweeper? And Tillman and the Negro farmhand?"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+THE NEW SOUTHERN STATESMANSHIP
+
+"Democracy is the progress of all through all, under the leadership of
+the best and the wisest."--_Mazzini._
+
+
+In former chapters I have had much to tell that was unpleasant and perhaps
+discouraging; but it had to be told, for it is there, and must be honestly
+met and reckoned with.
+
+But the chief pleasure of the present task has been the opportunity it has
+given me to meet the working idealists of the South, and to see the
+courageous and unselfish way in which they are meeting the obstacles which
+confront them. If any man would brighten his faith in human nature, if he
+would attain a deeper and truer grasp upon the best things of life, let
+him attend one of the educational rallies of Virginia, North Carolina,
+Tennessee, Georgia, or Texas, and hear the talks of Dr. S. C. Mitchell,
+President Alderman, J. Y. Joyner, P. P. Claxton, Chancellor Barrow,
+President Houston, and others; or let him spend a few days at Hampton with
+Dr. Frissell, or at Tuskegee with Dr. Washington, or at Calhoun with Miss
+Thorne. Coming away from a meeting one night at Tuskegee after there had
+been speaking in the chapel by both white and coloured men, I could not
+help saying to myself:
+
+"The Negro problem is not unsolvable; it is being solved, here and now, as
+fast as any human problem can be solved."
+
+Men may be found straining their vision to see some distant and complex
+solution to the question (have we not heard talk of deportation,
+extermination, amalgamation, segregation, and the like?) when the real
+solution is under their very eyes, going forward naturally and simply.
+
+It is this quiet, constructive movement among the white people in the
+South which I wish to consider here.
+
+In a former chapter I showed how the Negroes of the country are divided
+into two parties or points of view, the greater led by Booker T.
+Washington, the lesser by W. E. B. DuBois. Washington's party is the party
+of the opportunist and optimist, which deals with the world as it is: it
+is a constructive, practical, cheerful party. It emphasises duties rather
+than rights. Dr. DuBois's party, on the other hand, represents the
+critical point of view. It is idealistic and pessimistic: a party of
+agitation, emphasising rights rather than duties.
+
+But these two points of view are by no means peculiar to Negroes: they
+divide all human thought; and the action and reaction between them is the
+mode of human progress.
+
+
+_Division of White Leadership in the South_
+
+White leadership in the South, then, is divided along similar lines with
+Negro leadership--a party of rights and a party of duties. But with this
+wide difference: among the Negroes as I showed, the party of agitation and
+criticism led by DuBois is far inferior both numerically and in influence
+to the party of opportunity and duties led by Washington. For the Negroes
+have been forced to concede the futility of trying to progress by
+political action and legislation, by rights specified but not earned.
+Washington's preaching has been:
+
+"Stop thinking about your rights and get down to work. Get yourself right
+and the world will be all right."
+
+But among the white people of the South the party of agitation and the
+emphasis of rights rather than duties is still far in the ascendency. Led
+by such men as Tillman, Vardaman, Jeff Davis, Hoke Smith, and others, it
+controls, for the present, the policies of the entire South. It has much
+to say of the rights of the white man, very little about his duties. It
+is, indeed, doing for the whites by agitation and legislation (often a
+kind of force) exactly what Dr. DuBois would like to do for the Negro, if
+he could.
+
+"Agitate, object, fight," say both Tillman and DuBois.
+
+"Work," says Washington.
+
+Now, the same logic of circumstances which produced Booker T. Washington
+and his significant movement among the Negroes has produced a group of new
+and highly able white leaders. These new leaders saw that agitation
+(while most necessary in its place) would not, after all, build up the
+South; they saw that although the sort of leader typified by Tillman and
+Vardaman was passing laws and winning elections, he was not, after all,
+getting anywhere; that race feeling was growing more bitter, often to the
+injury of Southern prosperty; that progress is not built upon stump
+speeches. The answer to all this was plain enough.
+
+"Let us stop talking, forget the race problem, and get to work. It does
+not matter where we take hold, but let us go to work."
+
+And the doctrine of work in the South has become a great propaganda,
+almost, indeed, a passion. It has found expression in a remarkable growth
+of industrial activities, cotton-mills, coal-mines, iron and steel
+industries; in new methods of farming; in spreading railroads. But more
+than all else, perhaps, it has developed a new enthusiasm for education,
+not only for education of the old classical sort, but for industrial and
+agricultural education--the training of workers. All this, indeed,
+represents the rebound from years of agitation in which the Negro has been
+"cussed and discussed," as one Southerner put it to me, beyond the limit
+of endurance. Wherever I went in the South among the new industrial and
+educational leaders I found an active distaste for the discussion of the
+Negro problem. These men were too busy with fine new enterprises to be
+bothered with ancient and unprofitable issues.
+
+
+_New Prescriptions for Solving the Negro Problem_
+
+When I asked Professor Dillard of New Orleans how he thought the Negro
+question should be treated, he replied:
+
+"With silence."
+
+"My prescription," says President Alderman in his address on "Southern
+Idealism," "is 'silence and slow time,' faith in the South, and wise
+training for both white and black."
+
+Edgar Gardner Murphy of Alabama, himself one of the new leaders, has thus
+outlined the position of the rising Southern leadership:
+
+"The South is growing weary of extremists and of sensational
+problem-solvers.... Our coming leadership will have a sense of proportion
+which will involve a steady refusal to be stampeded by antique nightmares
+and ethnological melodrama. It will possess an increasing passion for
+getting hold of the real things in a real world. And it will ... deal with
+one task at a time. It will subordinate paper schemes of distant
+amelioration to duties that will help right now."
+
+Emphasis here is laid upon "real things in a real world" and "duties that
+will help right now"; and that is the voice everywhere of the new
+statesmanship.
+
+But let us be clear upon one point at the start. The platforms of these
+parties are matters of emphasis. One emphasises rights; the other
+emphasises duties. I have no doubt that Booker T. Washington believes as
+firmly in the rights of the Negro as any leader of his race; he has merely
+ceased to emphasise these rights by agitation until his people have gained
+more education and more property, until by honest achievement they are
+prepared to exercise their rights with intelligence.
+
+In the same way, the views of many of the new Southern white leaders of
+whom I shall speak in this article have not radically changed, so far as
+the Negro is concerned; some of them, I have found, do not differ from
+Tillman upon essential points; but, like Washington, they have decided not
+to emphasise controversial matters, and go to work and develop the South,
+and the people of the South, for the good of the whole country. If the
+test has to come in the long run between white men and coloured men, as it
+will have to come and is coming all the time, they want it to be an honest
+test of efficiency. The fittest here, too, will survive (there is no
+escaping the great law!), but these new thinkers wish the test of fitness
+to be, not mere physical force, not mere brute power, whether expressed in
+lynching or politics, but the higher test of real capacity. They have
+supreme confidence that the white man is superior on his merits in any
+contest; and Washington, on his side, is willing to (indeed, he must) take
+up the gauntlet thus thrown down.
+
+
+[Illustration: JAMES H. DILLARD of New Orleans, President Jeanes Fund
+Board.
+
+Photograph by Hitchler]
+
+[Illustration: EDWIN A. ALDERMAN President of the University of Virginia.
+
+Photograph by Pach Bros.]
+
+[Illustration: A. M. SOULE President Georgia State College of
+Agriculture.]
+
+[Illustration: D. F. HOUSTON President of the University of Texas.
+
+Photograph by The Elliotts]
+
+[Illustration: GEORGE FOSTER PEABODY of New York, member of the Southern
+Education and Jeanes Fund Boards.
+
+Photograph by Pach Bros.]
+
+[Illustration: P. P. CLAXTON of the University of Tennessee, leader of the
+educational campaign in Tennessee.
+
+Photograph by Knafft & Bro.]
+
+
+The condition in the South may be likened to a battle in which the
+contestants, weary of profitless and wordy warfare, are turning homeward
+to gather up new ammunition. Each side is passionately getting
+education, acquiring land, developing wealth and industry, preparing for
+the struggles of the future. And it is a fine and wholesome tendency. In a
+large sense, indeed, this movement typifies the progressive thought of the
+entire country for it means a sincere attempt to change the plane of
+battle (for battle there must be) from one of crude, primitive force,
+whether physical, political, or, indeed, industrial, to one of
+intellectual efficiency or usefulness to society.
+
+And these working idealists of both races understand one another better
+than most people think. Dr. Mitchell and President Alderman understand
+Booker T. Washington, and he understands them. This is not saying that
+they agree. But agreement upon every abstract principle is not necessary
+where both parties are hard at work at practical, definite, and immediate
+tasks.
+
+
+_Self-Criticism in the South_
+
+The new Southern statesmanship began (as all new movements begin) with
+self-criticism. Henry W. Grady, a real statesman, by criticising the old
+order of things, announced the beginning of the "New South"--an active,
+working, hopeful South.
+
+He saw the faults of the old exclusive agricultural life and the danger of
+low-class, uneducated labour, and he urged industrial development and a
+better school system. R. H. Edmonds of Baltimore, through the
+_Manufacturers' Record_, and many other able business leaders have done
+much to bring about the new industrial order: the day of new railroads,
+cotton-mills, and coal-mines; the day of cities.
+
+But it is in the educational field that the development of the new
+statesmanship has been most remarkable. Although it was unfortunate in one
+way that so much of the political leadership of the South should have
+fallen to men of the type of Vardaman, Jeff Davis, and Heflin, it is
+highly fortunate in another way. For it has driven the broadest and ablest
+minds in the South to seek expression in other lines of activity, in
+industry and in the church, but particularly in educational leadership. It
+is not without profound significance that the great American, General
+Lee, turned his attention and gave his highest energies after Appomattox,
+not to politics, but to education. The South to-day has a group of
+schoolmen who are leaders of extraordinary force and courage. The ministry
+has also attained an influence in the South which it does not possess in
+most parts of the North. The influence of Bishop Galloway of Mississippi,
+Dr. John E. White and Dr. C. B. Wilmer of Atlanta, and many others has
+been notable.
+
+For many years after the war the South was passive with exhaustion. Young
+men, who were not afraid, had to grow up to the task of reconstruction.
+And no one who has not traced the history of the South since the war can
+form any conception of the magnitude of that task. It was essentially the
+building of a new civilisation. The leaders were compelled not only to
+face abject poverty, but they have had to deal constantly with the problem
+of a labouring class just released from slavery. At every turn, in
+politics, in industry, in education, they were confronted with the Negro
+and the problem of what to do with him. Where one school-house would do in
+the North, they were compelled to build two school-houses, one for white
+children, one for black. It took from twenty-five to forty years of hard
+work after the war before the valuation of wealth in the South had again
+reached the figures of 1860. The valuations in the year 1890 for several
+of the states were less than in 1860. South Carolina in 1900--forty years
+after the beginning of the war--had only just caught up with the record of
+1860. Since 1890, however, the increase everywhere has been swift and
+sure.
+
+
+_Courage and Vision of New Leaders_
+
+Well, it required courage and vision in the earlier days to go before a
+poverty-stricken people, who had not yet enough means for living
+comfortably, and to demand of them that they build up and support two
+systems of education in the South. And yet that was exactly the task of
+the educational pioneers. Statesmanship, as I have said, begins with
+self-criticism. While the mere politician is flattering his followers and
+confirming them in their errors, the true statesman is criticising them
+and spurring them to new beliefs and stronger activities. While the
+politician is pleading rights, the statesman also dares to emphasise
+duties. While the politicians in the South (not all, but many of them)
+have been harping on race prejudice and getting themselves elected to
+office by reviving ancient hatred, these new statesmen have been facing
+courageously forward, telling the people boldly of the conditions of
+illiteracy which surround them, and demanding that schools be built and
+every child, white and black, be educated. In many cases they have had to
+overcome a settled prejudice against education, especially education of
+Negroes; and after that was overcome they have had to build up a sense of
+social responsibility for universal education before they could count on
+getting the money they needed for their work.
+
+After the war the North, in one form or another, poured much money into
+the South for teaching the Negroes; lesser sums, like those coming from
+the Peabody fund, were contributed toward white schools. But in the long
+run there can be no real education which is not self-education; outside
+influences may help (or indeed hurt), but until a state--like a man--is
+inspired with a desire for education and a willingness to make sacrifices
+to get it, the people will not become enlightened.
+
+In the middle eighties the fire of this inspiration began to blaze up in
+many parts of the South. Various combustible elements were present: a
+sense of the appalling condition of illiteracy existing in the South; a
+pride and independence of character which was hurt by the gifts of money
+from the North; a feeling that the Negroes in some instances were getting
+better educational opportunities than the white children; and, finally,
+the splendid idealism of young men who saw clearly that the only sure
+foundation for democracy is universal education.
+
+
+_Inspiration of Democracy in North Carolina_
+
+Not unnaturally the movement found its earliest expression in North
+Carolina, which has been the most instinctively democratic of Southern
+states. From the beginning of the country North Carolina, with its
+population of Scotch-Presbyterians and Quakers, has been inspired with a
+peculiar spirit of independence. When I was in Charlotte I went to see the
+monument which commemorates the Mecklenburg Declaration of Independence:
+the work of a group of stout-hearted citizens who decided, before the
+country at large was ready for it, to declare their independence of
+British rule. North Carolina was among the last of the Southern states to
+secede from the Union, and its treatment of its Negroes all along has been
+singularly liberal. For example, in several Southern states little or no
+provision is made for the Negro defective classes, but at Raleigh I
+visited a large asylum for Negro deaf, dumb, and blind which is conducted
+according to the most improved methods. And to-day North Carolina is freer
+politically, the state is nearer a new and healthy party alignment, than
+any other Southern state except Tennessee and possibly Kentucky.
+
+Such a soil was fertile for new ideas and new movements. In 1885 two young
+men, Charles D. McIver and Edwin A. Alderman, now president of the
+University of Virginia, began a series of educational campaigns under the
+supervision of the state. They spoke in every county, rousing the people
+to build better school-houses and to send legislators to Raleigh who
+should be more liberal in educational appropriations. In many cases their
+rallies were comparable with the most enthusiastic political
+meetings--only no one was asking to be elected to office, and the only
+object was public service. As Alderman has said:
+
+"It was an effort to move the centre of gravity from the court-house to
+the school-house."
+
+And it really moved; the state took fire and has been afire ever since.
+Governor Aycock made the educational movement a part of his campaign;
+Governor Glenn has been hardly less enthusiastic; and the development of
+the school system has been little short of amazing. When I was in Raleigh
+last spring J. Y. Joyner, State Superintendent of Schools, who was also
+one of the pioneer campaigners, told me that a new school-house was being
+built for every day in the year, and new school libraries established at
+the same rate. Between 1900 and 1906 the total amount of money expended
+for schools in North Carolina more than doubled, and while the school
+population in the same years had increased only 6 per cent., the daily
+attendance had increased 28 per cent.
+
+
+_North Carolina Compared with Massachusetts_
+
+To give a graphic idea of the progress in education, I can do no better
+than to show the increase in public expenditures since 1872:
+
+  1872 Total school expenditures    $   42,856
+  1880 Total school expenditures       349,831
+  1890 Total school expenditures       787,145
+  1900 Total school expenditures     1,091,610
+  1906 Total school expenditures     2,291,053
+
+I have looked into the statistics and I find that North Carolina spends
+more per hundred dollars of taxable property for school purposes than
+Massachusetts, which is perhaps the leading American state in educational
+expenditures. In 1906 North Carolina raised $.40 on every one hundred
+dollars, while Massachusetts raised $.387. But this does not mean, of
+course, that North Carolina has reached the standard of Massachusetts; it
+only shows how the people, though not rich, have been willing to tax
+themselves. And they have only just begun; the rate of illiteracy of the
+state, as in all the South, is still excessive among both white and
+coloured people. According to the last census, North Carolina has more
+illiterate white people than any other state in the Union, a condition
+due, of course, to its large population of mountaineers. While the
+progress already made is notable the leaders still have a stupendous task
+before them. At the present time, although taxing itself more per hundred
+dollars' worth of property than Massachusetts, North Carolina pays only
+$2.63 each year for the education of each child, whereas Massachusetts
+expends $24.89--nearly ten times as much.
+
+I do not wish to over-emphasise the work in North Carolina; I am merely
+using conditions there as a convenient illustration of what is going on in
+greater or less degree all over the South. One of the group of early
+enthusiasts in North Carolina was P. P. Claxton, who is now in charge of
+the educational campaign in Tennessee. With President Dabney, formerly of
+the University of Tennessee and State Superintendent Mynders, Mr. Claxton
+has conducted a state-wide campaign for education. Every available
+occasion has been utilised: picnics, court-days, Decoration Days: and
+often the audiences have been larger and more enthusiastic than political
+rallies. Indeed, the meetings have been carried on much like a political
+campaign. At one time over one hundred speakers were in the field. Every
+county in the state was stumped, and in two years it was estimated that
+over half of the entire population of the state actually attended the
+meetings. Labour unions and women's clubs were stirred to activity,
+resolutions were passed, politicians were called upon to declare
+themselves, and teachers' organisations were formed. The result was most
+notable. In 1902 the state expended $1,800,000 for educational purposes;
+in 1908--six years later--the total will exceed $4,000,000.
+
+A similar campaign has been going on in Virginia, under the auspices of
+the Co�perative Educational Association, in which the leaders have been
+Dr. S. C. Mitchell, Professor Bruce Payne, President Alderman, and others.
+In this work Ex-Governor Montague has also been a force for good, both
+while he was governor and since, and Governor Swanson at present is
+actively interested. Local leagues were formed in every part of the state
+to the number of 324. Negroes have also organised along the same line and
+now have ten local associations in five counties.
+
+
+_How the South Is Taxing Itself_
+
+One of the most striking features of the movement has been the development
+of the system of local taxation for school purposes--which is a long step
+in the direction of democracy. In the past the people have looked more or
+less to some outside source for help--to state or national funds, or the
+private gifts of philanthropists, or they have depended upon private
+schools--but now they are voting to take the burden themselves. In other
+words, with the building up of a popular school system, supported by local
+taxation, education in the South is becoming, for the first time,
+democratic. It would be difficult to overestimate the importance of this
+movement in stimulating the local pride and self-reliance of the people,
+or in inspiring each community with educational enthusiasm.
+
+Another development of profound influence has been going on in the South.
+As I have already pointed out, the so-called "Northern philanthropist" has
+long been interested in Southern education, especially Negro education.
+For years his activities awakened, and indeed still awaken, a good deal of
+hostility in some parts of the South. Many Southerners have felt that the
+Northerners, however good their intentions, did not understand Southern
+conditions, and that some of the money was expended in a way that did not
+help the cause of progress in the South.
+
+
+_South and North Work Together_
+
+But both the Northerners (whatever their mistakes in method may have been)
+and the new Southern leaders were intensely and sincerely interested in
+the same thing: namely, better education and better conditions in the
+South. It was natural that these two groups of earnest and reasonable men
+should finally come together in a spirit of co�peration; and this is,
+indeed, what has happened. Out of a series of quiet conferences held in
+the South grew what has been called the "Ogden movement" and the Southern
+Education Board. This organisation was made up of three different classes
+of men: first, a group of the Southern leaders of whom I have
+spoken--Mitchell, Alderman, Dabney, Curry, Houston, Hill, McIver, Claxton,
+Edgar Gardner Murphy, Sydney J. Bowie, and Henry E. Fries; second,
+Southern men who, living in the North, were yet deeply interested in the
+progress of the South--men like Walter H. Page, George Foster Peabody, and
+Frank R. Chambers; and, finally, the Northerners--Robert C. Ogden, who was
+president of the board, William H. Baldwin, H. H. Hanna, Dr. Wallace
+Buttrick, Albert Shaw, and Dr. G. S. Dickerman.
+
+One of the inspirers of the movement, also a member of the board, was Dr.
+H. B. Frissell, who followed General Armstrong as principal of Hampton
+Institute.
+
+Each year conferences have been held in the South, a feature of which has
+been the "Ogden Special"--a special train from the North bringing Northern
+citizens to Southern institutions and encouraging a more intimate
+acquaintanceship on both sides. No one influence has been more potent
+than this in developing a spirit of nationalisation in the Southern
+educational movement.
+
+So far in this chapter I have had very little to say about the Negro, and
+especially Negro education. It is important to know the view of the new
+leadership on this question. I have shown in previous articles that the
+majority view in the South was more or less hostile to the education of
+the Negro, or, at least, to his education beyond the bare rudiments.
+
+The new leaders have recognised this feeling, and while without exception
+they believe that the Negro must be educated and most of them have said so
+openly, the general policy has been to emphasise white education and unite
+the people on that.
+
+"In education," one of the leaders said to me, "it doesn't matter much
+where we begin. If we can arouse the spirit of the school, the people are
+going to see that it is as important to the state to have a trained Negro
+as it is to have a trained white man."
+
+One of the troubles in the South, one of the reasons for the prejudice
+against education, and particularly Negro education, has arisen from the
+fact that what has been called education was not really education at all.
+In the first place many of the schools have been so poor and the teachers
+so inefficient that the "education" acquired was next to worthless. There
+was not enough of it, nor was it of a kind to give the Negro any real hold
+upon life, and it often hurt him far more than it helped. Much of the
+prejudice in the South against Negro education is unquestionably due to
+the wretched school system, which in many places has not really educated
+anybody. But, deeper than all this, the old conception in the South of a
+school was for a long time the old aristocratic conception--what some one
+has called "useless culture"--of educating a class of men, not to work,
+but to despise work. That idea of education has wrought much evil,
+especially among the Negroes. It has taught both white and coloured men,
+not the doctrine of service, which is necessary to democracy, but it has
+given them a desire for artificial superiority, which is the
+characteristic of aristocracies. It has made the Negro "uppish" and
+"bumptious"; it has caused some white men to argue their superiority when
+they had no basis of accomplishment or usefulness to make them really
+superior.
+
+
+_The Inspiration of Hampton Institute_
+
+But when the idea of education began to be democratic, when men began to
+think more of their duties than of their rights, a wholly new sort of
+school appeared; and it appeared first among the Negroes. The country has
+not yet begun to realise the debt of gratitude which it owes to the
+promoters of Hampton Institute--to the genius of General Armstrong, its
+founder and to the organising ability of Dr. H. B. Frissell who followed
+him. These men will be more highly honoured a hundred years from now than
+they are to-day, for Americans will then appreciate more fully their
+service to the democracy.
+
+The "Hampton idea" is the teaching of work--of service, of humility, of
+duties to God and to man. It is in the highest sense the democratic idea
+in education. And it has come, as most great movements have come, from the
+needs and the struggles of those who are downtrodden and outcast. And how
+wonderfully the idea has spread! Out of Hampton sprung Tuskegee and
+Calhoun and Kowaliga and scores of other Negro schools, until to-day
+nearly all Negro institutions for higher training in the South have
+industrial or agricultural departments.
+
+The best Southern white people were and are friendly to schools of this
+new type. They thought at first that Hampton and Tuskegee were going to
+train servants in the old personal sense of servants who become only
+cooks, butlers, and farmers, and many still have that aristocratic
+conception of service. But the "Hampton idea" of servants is a much
+greater one, for it is the democratic idea of training men who will serve
+their own people and thereby serve the country. Men who graduate from
+Hampton and Tuskegee become leaders of their race. They buy and cultivate
+land, they set up business establishments--in short, they become producers
+and state-builders in the largest sense.
+
+
+_New World Idea of Education_
+
+The idea of Hampton is the new world idea of education, and white people
+in the South (and in the North as well) are now applying it everywhere in
+their educational movements. Agricultural and industrial schools for white
+boys and girls are spreading throughout the South: schools to teach work,
+just as Hampton teaches it. Only last year the state of Georgia provided
+for eleven new agricultural schools in various parts of the state, and
+there is already talk in the South, as in the North, of agricultural
+training in high schools. These men, white and black, who are educated for
+democratic service will in time become masters of the state.
+
+The new leaders, then, of whom I have spoken, do not oppose Negro
+education: they favour it and will go forward steadily with the task of
+bring it about. So far, the Negro public schools have felt little of the
+new impulse; in some states and localities, as I have shown in other
+chapters, the Negro schools have actually retrograded, where the white
+schools have been improving rapidly. But that is the continuing influence
+of the old leadership; the new men have not yet come fully into their own.
+
+I could quote indefinitely from the real statesmen of the South regarding
+Negro education, but I have too little space. Senator Lamar of Mississippi
+once said:
+
+"The problem of race, in a large part, is a problem of illiteracy. Most of
+the evils which have grown up out of the problem have arisen from a
+condition of ignorance, prejudice and superstition. Remove these and the
+simpler elements of the question will come into play.... I will go with
+those who will go furthest in this matter."
+
+No higher note has been struck in educational ideals than in the
+Declaration of Principles adopted last winter (1907) at the meeting of the
+Southern Educational Association at Lexington, Ky., an exclusively
+Southern gathering of white men and women. Their resolutions, which for
+lack of space cannot be here printed in full, should be read by every man
+and woman in the country who is interested in the future of democratic
+institutions. I copy here only a few of the declarations:
+
+     1. All children, regardless of race, creed, sex, or the social
+     station or economic condition of their parents, have equal right to,
+     and should have equal opportunity for, such education as will develop
+     to the fullest possible degree all that is best in their individual
+     natures, and fit them for the duties of life and citizenship in the
+     age and community in which they live.
+
+     2. To secure this right and provide this opportunity to all children
+     is the first and highest duty of the modern democratic state, and the
+     highest economic wisdom of an industrial age and community. Without
+     universal education of the best and highest type, there can be no
+     real democracy, either political or social; nor can agriculture,
+     manufactures, or commerce ever attain their highest development.
+
+     3. Education in all grades and in all legitimate directions, being
+     for the public good, the public should bear the burden of it. The
+     most just taxes levied by the state, or with the authority of the
+     state, by any smaller political division, are those levied for the
+     support of education. No expenditures can possibly produce greater
+     returns and none should be more liberal.
+
+
+_The New South on Negro Education_
+
+Concerning Negro education, I am publishing the resolutions in full,
+because they voice the present thought of the best leadership in the
+South:
+
+     1. We endorse the accepted policy of the states of the South in
+     providing educational facilities for the youth of the Negro race,
+     believing that whatever the ultimate solution of this grievous
+     problem may be, education must be an important factor in that
+     solution.
+
+     2. We believe that the education of the Negro in the elementary
+     branches of education should be made thorough, and should include
+     specific instruction in hygiene and home sanitation, for the better
+     protection of both races.
+
+     3. We believe that in the secondary education of Negro youth emphasis
+     should be placed upon agriculture and the industrial occupations,
+     including nurse training, domestic science, and home economics.
+
+     4. We believe that for practical, economical and psychological
+     reasons Negro teachers should be provided for Negro schools.
+
+     5. We advise instruction in normal schools and normal institutions by
+     white teachers, whenever possible, and closer supervision of courses
+     of study and methods of teaching in Negro normal schools by the State
+     Department of Education.
+
+     6. We recommend that in urban and rural Negro schools there should be
+     closer and more thorough supervision, not only by city and county
+     superintendents, but also by directors of music, drawing, manual
+     training, and other special topics.
+
+     7. We urge upon school authorities everywhere the importance of
+     adequate buildings, comfortable seating, and sanitary accommodations
+     for Negro youth.
+
+     8. We deplore the isolation of many Negro schools, established
+     through motives of philanthropy, from the life and the sympathies of
+     the communities in which they are located. We recommend the
+     supervision of all such schools by the state, and urge that their
+     work and their methods be adjusted to the civilisation in which they
+     exist, in order that the maximum good of the race and of the
+     community may be thereby attained.
+
+     9. On account of economic and psychological differences in the two
+     races, we believe that there should be a difference in courses of
+     study and methods of teaching, and that there should be such an
+     adjustment of school curricula as shall meet the evident needs of
+     Negro youth.
+
+     10. We insist upon such an equitable distribution of the school funds
+     that all the youth of the Negro race shall have at least an
+     opportunity to receive the elementary education provided by the
+     state, and in the administration of state laws, and in the execution
+     of this educational policy, we urge patience, toleration, and
+     justice.
+
+     (Signed) G. R. GLENN, P. P. CLAXTON, J. H. PHILLIPS, C. B. GIBSON,
+     R. N. ROARK, J. H. VAN SICKLE,
+
+     _Committee_.
+
+In this connection also let me call attention to the reports of J. Y.
+Joyner, Superintendent of Education, and Charles L. Coon of North
+Carolina, for a broad view of Negro education.
+
+I have already shown how the South and the North came together in
+educational relationships in the Southern Education Board. I have pointed
+it out as a tendency toward nationalisation in educational interests. But
+the Southern Education Board, while it contained both Northern and
+Southern white men, was primarily interested in white education and
+contained no Negro members. At the time the board was organised, an active
+interest in the Negro would have defeated, in part at least, its declared
+purpose.
+
+
+[Illustration: S. C. MITCHELL of Richmond College; President of the
+Co�perative Education Association of Virginia.]
+
+[Illustration: JUDGE EMORY SPEER of Georgia. After two terms in Congress
+he was appointed to the Federal bench.
+
+Photograph by Curtiss Studio]
+
+[Illustration: EDGAR GARDNER MURPHY of Alabama, member Southern Education
+Board; author "Problems of the Present South."
+
+Photograph by Sol. Young]
+
+[Illustration: DR. H. B. FRISSELL Principal Hampton Institute and member
+of Southern Education and Jeanes Fund Boards.
+
+Photograph by Rockwood]
+
+[Illustration: R. C. OGDEN of New York, President of the Southern
+Education Board.
+
+Copyright, 1907, by Pach Bros.]
+
+[Illustration: J. Y. JOYNER Superintendent of Public Instruction of North
+Carolina.
+
+Photograph by Wharton & Tyree]
+
+
+_The South, the North, and the Negro at Last Work Together_
+
+Since that time another highly significant movement has arisen. In 1907
+Miss Jeanes, a wealthy Quakeress of Philadelphia, gave $1,000,000 for the
+encouragement of Negro primary education. She placed it in the hands of
+Dr. H. B. Frissell of Hampton and Dr. Booker T. Washington of Tuskegee. In
+the organisation of the board for the control of this fund and its work, a
+further step forward in nationalisation and, indeed, in the direction of
+democracy, was made. It marks a new development in the co�peration of all
+the forces for good in the solution of this difficult national problem.
+The membership of the board includes not only Southern and Northern white
+men, but also several leading Negroes. The president and general director
+is a Southern white man, coming of an old family, James H. Dillard, dean
+of Tulane University of New Orleans. It will be of interest to publish
+here a full list of the members, because they represent, in more ways
+than one, the new leadership not only in the South, but in the nation:
+
+Southern white men:
+
+  James H. Dillard, President.
+  David C. Barrow, chancellor University of Georgia.
+  Belton Gilreath, manufacturer and mine-owner, Alabama.
+  Dr. S. C. Mitchell, of Richmond College, Richmond, Va.
+
+Northern white men:
+
+  Robert C. Ogden, of New York.
+  Andrew Carnegie, of New York.
+  Talcott Williams, of Philadelphia.
+  George McAneny, president of the City Club of New York.
+  William H. Taft, of Ohio.
+
+To these must be added:
+
+     Dr. H. B. Frissell, of Hampton Institute, a Northerner, whose work
+     and residence has long been in the South.
+
+     George Foster Peabody, treasurer, a Georgian, trustee of the
+     University of Georgia, who resides in the North.
+
+     Walter H. Page, the editor of the _World's Work_, a North Carolinian
+     who has long lived in the North.
+
+Negro membership:
+
+  Booker T. Washington.
+  Bishop Abraham Grant, of Kan.
+  R. R. Moton, of Hampton Institute, secretary of the board.
+  J. C. Napier, a banker of Nashville, Tenn.
+  R. D. Smith, a farmer of Paris, Tex.
+
+In a true sense the Southern Education Board and the Jeanes Fund Board
+represent organisations of working idealists. Such co�peration as this,
+between reasonable, broad-minded, and unselfish men of the entire country,
+is, at the present moment, the real solution of our problems. It is the
+solution of the Negro problem--all the solution there ever will be. For
+there is no finality in human endeavour: there is only activity; and when
+that activity is informed with the truth and inspired with faith and
+courage, it is not otherwise than success, for it is the best that human
+nature at any given time can do.
+
+In making this statement, I do not, of course wish to infer that
+conditions are as good as can be expected, and that nothing remains to be
+done. As a matter of fact, the struggle is just beginning; as I have shown
+in previous chapters, all the forces of entrenched prejudice and ignorance
+are against the movement, the political leaders who still dominate the
+South are as hostile as they dare to be. The task is, indeed, too big for
+the South alone, or the North alone, or the white man alone: it will
+require all the strength and courage the nation possesses.
+
+
+_Universities Feel the New Impulse_
+
+Besides the campaign for better common schools, the educational revival
+has also renewed and revivified all the higher institutions of learning in
+the South. The state universities, especially, have been making
+extraordinary progress. I shall not soon forget my visit to the University
+of Georgia, at Athens, nor the impression I received while there of strong
+men at work, not merely erecting buildings of mortar and brick, but
+establishing a new sort of university system, which shall unify and direct
+to one common end all of the educational activities of the state:
+beginning with the common school and reaching upward to the university
+itself; including the agricultural and industrial schools, and even the
+Negro college of agriculture. The University of Georgia is one of the
+oldest state colleges in America, and the ambition of its leaders is to
+make it one of the greatest. Mr. Hodgson drove me around the campus, which
+has recently been extended until it contains nearly 1,000 acres. He showed
+me where the new buildings are to be, the drives and the bridges. Much of
+it is yet a vision of the future, but it is the sort of vision that comes
+true. I spent a day with President Soule of the Agricultural College, on
+his special educational train, which covered a considerable part of the
+state of Georgia, stopping at scores of towns where the speakers appeared
+before great audiences of farmers and made practical addresses on cotton
+and corn and cattle-raising, and on education generally. And everywhere
+the practical work of these public educators was greeted with enthusiasm.
+
+I heard from Professor Stewart of his work in organising rural high
+schools, in encouraging local taxation, and in bringing the work of the
+public schools into closer correlation with that of the university.
+
+Seeing the educational work of states like Georgia, North Carolina,
+Virginia, and others, one cannot but feel that the time is coming shortly
+when the North will be going South for new ideas and new inspiration in
+education.
+
+In a brief review like this, I have been able, of course, to give only the
+barest outline of a very great work, and I have mentioned only a few among
+hundreds of leaders; the work I have described is only illustrative of
+what is going on in greater or less degree everywhere in the South.
+
+Many important developments have come from these campaigns for education.
+The actual building of new school-houses and the expenditure of more money
+for the struggle with illiteracy is only one of many results. For the
+crusade for education, supplemented by the new industrial impulse in the
+South, has awakened a new spirit of self-help. The success with which the
+public was aroused in the educational campaign has inspired leaders in all
+lines of activity with new courage and faith. It is a spirit of
+youthfulness which is not afraid to attempt anything.
+
+Much printers' ink has been expended in trying to account for the spread
+of the anti-saloon movement throughout the South. But there is nothing
+strange about it: it is, indeed, only another manifestation of the new
+Southern spirit, the desire to get things right in the South. And this
+movement will further stir men's minds, develop self-criticism, and reveal
+to the people their power of concerted action whether the politicians are
+with them or not. It is, indeed, significant that the women of the South,
+perhaps for the first time, have become a powerful influence in public
+affairs. Their organisations have helped, in some instances led, in both
+the educational and the anti-saloon movement. No leaders in the Virginia
+educational movement have been more useful than Mrs. L. R. Dashiell and
+Mrs. B. B. Munford of Richmond.
+
+Practically all the progress of the South, both industrial and
+educational, has been made by non-political movements and non-political
+leaders--often in opposition to the political leaders. Indeed, nearly
+every one of the hopeful movements of the South has had to capture some
+entrenched stronghold of the old political captains. In several states,
+for example, the school systems a few years ago were crippled by political
+domination and nepotism. Superintendents, principals, and teachers were
+frequently appointed not for their ability, but because they were good
+members of the party or because they were related to politicians.
+
+
+_New Statesmen Against Old Politicians_
+
+In Alabama I found prominent men attacking the fee system of payment of
+lesser magistrates. The evil in this system lies in the encouragement it
+gives to trivial litigation and the arrest of citizens for petty offences.
+Let me give a single example. A Negro had another Negro arrested for
+"'sault and battery." Both appeared in court. The accused Negro was tried,
+and finally sent to the chain-gang. The justice suggested to the convicted
+man that if he wanted satisfaction he should turn around and have his
+accuser arrested; which he did, promptly accusing him of "'busive
+language." Another trial was held; and in the end both Negroes found
+themselves side by side in the chain-gang; the magistrate, the constable,
+the sheriff, had all drawn liberal fees, and the private contractor who
+hired the chain-gang, and who also "stood in" with the politicians, had
+obtained another cheap labourer for his work. It is a vicious circle,
+which has enabled the politicians and their backers to profit at every
+turn from the weakness and evil of both Negro and low-class white man.
+
+In attacking the fee system and the old, evil chain-gang system as the new
+leaders are doing in many parts of the South, in closing the saloons
+(always a bulwark of low politics), in building up a new school system
+free from selfish control, the new leaders are striking squarely at the
+roots of the old political aristocracy, undermining it and cutting it
+away. It is sure to fall; and in its place the South will rear a splendid
+new leadership of constructive ability and unselfish patriotism. There
+will be a division on matters of vital concern, and a turning from ancient
+and worn-out issues to new interests and activities. When that time comes
+the whole nation will again profit by the genius of Southern statesmanship
+and we shall again have Southern Presidents.
+
+Already the old type of politician sees the handwriting of fate. He knows
+not which way to turn. At one moment he harps more fiercely and bitterly
+than ever before on the issue which has maintained him so long in power,
+the Negro; and at the next moment he seizes frantically on some one of the
+new issues--education, prohibition, anti-railroad--hoping thereby to
+maintain himself and his old party control. But he cannot do it; every
+force in the South is already making for new things, for more democracy,
+for more nationalisation.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV
+
+WHAT TO DO ABOUT THE NEGRO--A FEW CONCLUSIONS
+
+
+The deeper one delves into the problem of race, the humbler he becomes
+concerning his own views. Studying a black man, he discovers that he must
+study human nature. The best he can do, then, is to present his latest and
+clearest thought, knowing that newer light and deeper knowledge may modify
+his conclusions. It is out of such expressions of individual thought (no
+one man has or can have all the truth) and the kindly discussion which
+follows it (and why shouldn't it be kindly?) that arises finally that
+power of social action which we call public opinion. Together--not
+otherwise--we may approach the truth.
+
+The world to-day is just beginning to meet new phases of the problem of
+race difference. Improved transportation and communication are yearly
+making the earth smaller. As Americans we are being brought every year
+into closer contact with black and yellow people. We are already disturbed
+not only by a Negro race problem, but on our Pacific coast and in Hawaii
+we have a Japanese and Chinese problem. In the Philippine Islands we have
+a tangle of race problems in comparison with which our Southern situation
+seems simple. Other nations are facing complexities equally various and
+difficult. England's problems in both South Africa and India are largely
+racial. The great issue in Australia, where Chinese labour has become a
+political question, is expressed in the campaign slogan: "A white
+Australia."
+
+
+_What Is the Race Problem?_
+
+Essentially, then, what is the race problem?
+
+The race problem is the problem of living with human beings who are not
+like us, whether they are, in our estimation, our "superiors" or
+"inferiors," whether they have kinky hair or pigtails, whether they are
+slant-eyed, hook-nosed, or thick-lipped. In its essence it is the same
+problem, magnified, which besets every neighbourhood, even every family.
+
+In our own country we have 10,000,000 Negroes distributed among 75,000,000
+white people. They did not come here to invade us, or because they wanted
+to come. We brought them by force, and at a fearful and cruel sacrifice of
+life. We brought them, not to do them good, but selfishly, that they might
+be compelled to do the hard work and let us live lazily, eat richly, sleep
+softly. We treated them as beasts of burden. I say "we," for the North
+owned slaves, too, at first, and emancipated them (by selling them to the
+South) because it did not pay to keep them. Nor was the anti-slavery
+sentiment peculiar to the North; voices were raised against the
+institution of slavery by many Southern statesmen from Jefferson down--men
+who knew by familiar observation of the evil of slavery, especially for
+the white man.
+
+
+_Differences Between Southern and Northern Attitudes Toward the Race
+Problem_
+
+But differences are apparent in the outlook of the South and North which
+must be pointed out before we can arrive at any general conclusions. By
+understanding the reasons for race feeling we shall be the better able to
+judge of the remedies proposed.
+
+In the first place, the South is still clouded with bitter memories of the
+war, and especially of the Reconstruction period. The North cannot
+understand how deep and real this feeling is, how it has been warped into
+the souls of even the third generation. The North, victorious, forgot; but
+the South, broken and defeated, remembered. Until I had been a good while
+in the South and talked with many people I had no idea what a social
+cataclysm like the Civil War really meant to those who are defeated, how
+long it echoes in the hearts of men and women. The Negro has indeed
+suffered--suffered on his way upward; but the white man, with his higher
+cultivation, his keener sensibilities, his memories of a departed glory,
+has suffered far more. I have tried, as I have listened to the stories of
+struggle which only the South knows, to put myself in the place of these
+Anglo-Saxon men and women, and I think I can understand a little at least
+of what it must have meant to meet defeat, loss of relatives and friends,
+grinding poverty, the chaos of reconstruction--and after all that to have,
+always at elbow-touch, the unconscious cause of all their trouble, the
+millions of inert, largely helpless Negroes who, imbued with a sharp sense
+of their rights, are attaining only slowly a corresponding appreciation of
+their duties and responsibilities.
+
+The ruin of the war left the South poor, and it has provided itself slowly
+with educational advantages. It is a long step behind the North in the
+average of education among white people not less than coloured. But more
+than all else, perhaps, the South is in the throes of vast economic
+changes. It is in the transition stage between the old wasteful,
+semi-feudal civilisation and the sharp new city and industrial life. It is
+suffering the common pains of readjustment; and, being hurt, it is not
+wholly conscious of the real reason.
+
+For example, many of the troubles between the races attributed to the
+perversity of the Negro are often only the common difficulties which arise
+out of the relationship of employer and employee. In other words,
+difficulties in the South are often attributed to the race problem which
+in the North we know as the labour problem. For the South even yet has not
+fully established itself on the wage system. Payment of Negroes in the
+country is still often a matter of old clothes, baskets from the white
+man's kitchen or store, with occasionally a little money, which is often
+looked upon as an indulgence rather than a right. No race ever yet has
+sprung directly from slavery into the freedom of a full-fledged wage
+system, no matter what the laws were. It is not insignificant of progress
+that the "basket habit" is coming to be looked upon as thievery, organised
+charity in the cities is taking the place of indiscriminate personal
+gifts, wages are more regularly paid and measure more accurately the value
+of the service rendered.
+
+But the relationships between the races still smack in no small degree,
+especially in matters of social contact (which are always the last to
+change), of the old feudal character; they are personal and sentimental.
+They express themselves in the personal liking for the old "mammies," in
+the personal contempt for the "smart Negro."
+
+A large part of the South still believes that the Negro was created to
+serve the white man, and for no other purpose. This is especially the
+belief in the conservative country districts.
+
+"If these Negroes become doctors and merchants or buy their own farms," a
+Southern woman said to me as a clinching argument against Negro education,
+"what shall we do for servants?"
+
+Another reason for the feeling in the South against the Negro is that the
+South has never had any other labouring class of people (to speak of) with
+which to compare the Negro. All the employers have been white; most of the
+workers have been black. The North, on the other hand, has had a constant
+procession of ignorant working people of various sorts. The North is
+familiar with the progress of alien people, wherein the workingman of
+to-day becomes the employer of to-morrow--which has not happened in the
+South.
+
+
+_Confusion of Labour and Race Problems_
+
+An illustration of the confusion between the race problem and the labour
+problem is presented in certain Southern neighbourhoods by the influx of
+European immigrants. Because the Italian does the work of the Negro, a
+tendency exists to treat him like a Negro. In Louisiana on the sugar
+plantations Italian white women sometimes work under Negro foremen and no
+objection is made. A movement is actually under way in Mississippi to keep
+the children of Italian immigrants out of the white schools. In not a few
+instances white workmen have been held in peonage like Negroes; several
+such cases are now pending in the courts. Here is a dispatch showing how
+new Italian immigrants were treated in one part of Mississippi--only the
+Italians, unlike the Negroes, have an active government behind them:
+
+     MOBILE, ALA., October 3.--The Italian Government has taken notice of
+     the situation at Sumrall, Miss., where the native whites are
+     endeavouring to keep Italian children out of the schools and where a
+     leader of the Italians was taken to the woods and whipped.
+
+     The Italian Consul at New Orleans, Count G. Morroni, reached Mobile
+     this afternoon and began an investigation of the situation. He to-day
+     heard the story of Frank Seaglioni, the leader of the Italian colony
+     at Sumrall, who was a few days ago decoyed from his home at night
+     with a bogus message from New Orleans and unmercifully whipped by a
+     mob of white men.
+
+A decided tendency also exists to charge up to the Negro, because he is a
+Negro, all the crimes which are commonly committed by any ignorant,
+neglected, poverty-stricken people. Only last summer we had in New York
+what the newspaper reporters called a "crime wave." The crime in that case
+was what is designated in the South as the "usual crime" (offences against
+women) for which Negroes are lynched. But in New York not a Negro was
+implicated.
+
+I was struck while in Philadelphia by a presentment of a grand jury in
+Judge Kinsey's court upon the subject of a "crime wave" which read thus:
+
+     In closing our duties as jurymen, we wish to call to the attention of
+     this court the large proportion of cases presented to us for action
+     wherein the offences were charged to either persons of foreign birth
+     or those of the coloured race, and we feel that some measures should
+     be taken to the end that our city should be relieved of both the
+     burden of the undesirable alien and the irresponsible coloured
+     person.
+
+Here, it will be seen, the "undesirable alien" and "irresponsible coloured
+person" are classed together, although it is significant of the greater
+prejudice against the coloured man that the newspaper report of the action
+of the grand jury should be headed "Negro Crime Abnormal," without
+referring to the alien at all. When I inquired at the prosecutor's office
+about the presentiment, I was told:
+
+"Oh, the dagoes are just as bad as the Negroes."
+
+And both are bad, not because they are Negroes or Italians, but because
+they are ignorant, neglected, poverty-stricken.
+
+Thus in the dust and confusion of the vast readjustments now going on in
+the South, the discomfort of which both races feel but neither quite
+understands, we have the white man blindly blaming the Negro and the Negro
+blindly hating the white. When they both understand that many of the
+troubles they are having are only the common gall-spots of the new
+industrial harness there will be a better living together.
+
+I do not wish to imply, of course, that an industrial age or the wage
+system furnishes an ideal condition for race relationships; for in the
+North the Negro's struggle for survival in the competitive field is
+accompanied, as I have shown elsewhere, by the severest suffering. The
+condition of Negroes in Indianapolis, New York, and Philadelphia is in
+some ways worse than it is anywhere in the South. But, say what we will,
+the wage system is one step upward from the old feudalism. The Negro is
+treated less like a slave and more like a man in the North. It is for this
+reason that Negroes, no matter what their difficulties of making a living
+in the North, rarely wish to go back to the South. And as the South
+develops industrially it will approximate more nearly to Northern
+conditions. In Southern cities to-day, because of industrial development,
+the Negro is treated more like a man than he is in the country; and this
+is one reason why Negroes crowd into the cities and can rarely be
+persuaded to go back into the country--unless they can own their own land.
+
+But the South is rapidly shaking off the remnants of the old feudalism.
+Development of mines and forests, the extension of manufacturing, the
+introduction of European immigrants, the inflow of white Northerners,
+better schools, more railroads and telephones, are all helping to bring
+the South up to the economic standard of the North. There will be a
+further break-up of baronial tenant farming, the plantation store will
+disappear, the ruinous credit system will be abolished, and there will be
+a widespread appearance of independent farm-owners, both white and black.
+This will all tend to remove the personal and sentimental attitude of the
+old Southern life; the Negro will of necessity be judged more and more as
+a man, not as a slave or dependent. In short, the country, South and
+North, will become economically more homogeneous.
+
+But even when the South reaches the industrial development of the North
+the Negro problem will not be solved; it is certainly not solved in New
+York or Philadelphia, where industrial development has reached its highest
+form. The prejudice in those cities, as I have shown, has been growing
+more intense as Negro population increased. What, then, will happen?
+
+
+_Two Elements in Every Race Problem_
+
+Two elements appear in every race problem: the first, race prejudice--the
+repulsion of the unlike; second, economic or competitive jealousy. Both
+operate, for example, in the case of the Irishman or Italian, but with the
+Negro and Chinaman race prejudice is greater because the difference is
+greater. The difficulty of the Negro in this country is the colour of his
+skin, the symbol of his difference. In China the difficulty of the white
+trader is his whiteness, his difference. Race lines, in short, are drawn
+by white men, not because the other race is inferior (the Japanese and
+Chinese are in many ways our superiors), nor because of criminality
+(certain classes of foreigners are more criminal in our large cities than
+the Negroes), nor because of laziness, but because of discernible physical
+differences--black skin, almond eyes, pigtails, hook noses, a peculiar
+bodily odour, or small stature. That dislike of a different people is more
+or less instinctive in all men.
+
+A tendency has existed on the part of Northern students who have no
+first-hand knowledge of the masses of Negroes to underestimate the force
+of race repulsion; on the other hand, the Southern student who is
+confronted with the Negroes themselves is likely to overestimate racial
+repulsion and underestimate economic competition as a cause of the
+difficulty. The profoundest question, indeed, is to decide how much of the
+so-called problem is due to race repulsion and how much to economic
+competition.
+
+This leads us to the most sinister phase of the race problem. As I have
+shown, we have the two elements of conflict: instinctive race repulsion
+and competitive jealousy. What is easier for the race in power, the white
+race in this country (the yellow race in Asia) than to play upon race
+instinct in order to serve selfish ends? How shrewdly the labour union,
+whether in San Francisco or Atlanta, seizes upon that race hatred to keep
+the black or yellow man out of the union and thereby control all the work
+for its members! Race prejudice played upon becomes a tool in clinching
+the power of the labour monopoly.
+
+How the politician in the South excites race hatred in order that he may
+be elected to office! Vardaman governed because he could make men hate one
+another more bitterly than his opponent. The Rev. Thomas Dixon has
+appealed in his books and plays to the same passion.
+
+In several places in this country Negroes have been driven out by
+mobs--not because they were criminal, or because they were bad citizens,
+but because they were going into the grocery and drug business, they were
+becoming doctors, dentists, and the like, and taking away the trade of
+their white competitors. So the stores and restaurants of highly
+efficient Japanese were wrecked in San Francisco.
+
+What is easier or cruder to use as a weapon for crushing a rival than the
+instinctive dislike of man for man? And that usage is not peculiar to the
+white man. In Africa the black man wastes no time with the
+different-looking white man; he kills him, if he dares, on the spot. And
+how ably the Chinaman has employed the instinctive hatred of his
+countrymen for "foreign devils" in order to fight American trade and
+traders! We hate the Chinaman and drive him out, and he hates us and
+drives us out.
+
+
+_Chief Danger of Race Prejudice_
+
+And this is one of the dangers of the race problem in this country--the
+fostering of such an instinct to make money or to get political office.
+Such a basis of personal prosperty is all the more dangerous because the
+white man is in undisputed power in this country; the Negro has no great
+navy behind him; he is like a child in the house of a harsh parent. All
+that stands between him and destruction is the ethical sense of the white
+man. Will the white man's sense of justice and virtue be robust enough to
+cause him to withhold the hand of unlimited power? Will he see, as Booker
+T. Washington says, that if he keeps the Negro in the gutter he must stay
+there with him? The white man and his civilisation, not alone the Negro,
+will rise or fall by that ethical test.
+
+The Negro, on his part, as I have shown repeatedly in former chapters,
+employs the same methods as the white man, for Negro nature is not
+different from human nature. He argues: "The white man hates you; hate
+him. Trade with Negro storekeepers; employ Negro doctors; don't go to
+white dentists and lawyers."
+
+Out of this condition proceed two tendencies. The first is the natural
+result of mutual fear and suspicion, and that is, a rapid flying apart of
+the races. All through my former chapters I have been showing how the
+Negroes are being segregated. So are the Chinese segregated, and the
+blacks in South Africa, and certain classes in India. Parts of the South
+are growing blacker. Negroes crowd into "coloured quarters" in the
+cities. More and more they are becoming a people wholly apart--separate in
+their churches, separate in their schools, separate in cars, conveyances,
+hotels, restaurants, with separate professional men. In short, we discover
+tendencies in this country toward the development of a caste system.
+
+Now, one of the most striking facts in our recent history is the progress
+of the former slave. And this finds its world parallel in the progress of
+people whom the vainglorious Anglo-Saxon once despised: the Japanese,
+Chinese, and East Indians. In forty years the Negro has advanced a
+distance that would have been surprising in almost any race. In the bare
+accomplishments--area of land owned, crops raised, professional men
+supported, business enterprises conducted, books and poetry written, music
+composed, pictures painted--the slaves of forty years ago have made the
+most astonishing progress. This leads to the second tendency, which
+proceeds slowly out of the growing conviction that hatred and suspicion
+and fear as motives in either national or individual progress will not
+work; that there must be some other way for different people to work side
+by side in peace and justice. And thus we discover a tendency toward a
+friendly living together under the new relationship, in which the Negro is
+not a slave or a dependent, but a man and a citizen. Booker T. Washington
+preaches the gospel of this new life. And gradually as race prejudice
+becomes inconvenient, threatens financial adversity, ruffles the smooth
+current of comfortable daily existence, the impulse grows to set it aside.
+Men don't keep on fighting when it is no longer profitable to fight.
+
+And thus, side by side, these two impulses exist--the one pointing toward
+the development of a hard caste system which would ultimately petrify our
+civilisation as it has petrified that of India; and the other looking to a
+reasonable, kindly, and honourable working together of the races.
+
+
+_What Are the Remedies for the Evil Conditions?_
+
+So much for conditions; what of remedies?
+
+I have heard the most extraordinary remedies proposed. Serious men
+actually talk of the deportation of the entire Negro population to
+Africa, not stopping to inquire whether we have any right to deport them,
+or calculating the economic revolution and bankruptcy which the
+deportation of the entire labouring class would cause in the South,
+without stopping to think that even if we could find a spot in the world
+for 10,000,000 Negroes, and they all wanted to go, that all the ships
+flying the American flag, if constantly employed, could probably not
+transport the natural increase of the Negro population, let alone the
+10,000,000 present inhabitants. I have heard talk of segregation in
+reservations, like the Indians--segregation out of existence! I have even
+heard unspeakable talk of the wholesale extinction of the race by
+preventing the breeding of children! All quack remedies and based upon
+hatred, not upon justice.
+
+There is no sudden or cut-and-dried solution of the Negro problem, or of
+any other problem. Men are forever demanding formul� which will enable
+them to progress without effort. They seek to do quickly by medication
+what can only be accomplished by deliberate hygiene. A problem that has
+been growing for two hundred and fifty years in America, and for thousands
+of years before that in Africa, warping the very lives of the people
+concerned, changing their currents of thought as well as their conduct,
+cannot be solved in forty years. Why expect it?
+
+And yet there are definite things that can be done which, while working no
+immediate miracles, will set our faces to the light and keep us trudging
+toward the true goal.
+
+Down at the bottom--it will seem trite, but it is eternally true--the
+cause of the race "problem" and most other social problems is simply lack
+of understanding and sympathy between man and man. And the remedy is
+equally simple--a gradual substitution of understanding and sympathy for
+blind repulsion and hatred.
+
+Consider, for example, the Atlanta riot. Increasing misunderstanding and
+hatred caused a dreadful explosion and bloodshed. What happened? Instantly
+the wisest white men in Atlanta invited the wisest coloured men to meet
+them. They got together: general explanations followed. They found that
+there had been error on both sides; they found that there were reasonable
+human beings on both sides. One of the leading white men said: "I did not
+know there were any such broad-minded Negroes in the South." In other
+words, they tried to understand and sympathise with one another. Over and
+over again men will be found hating Negroes, or Chinamen, or "dagoes," and
+yet liking some individual Negro, or Chinaman, or "dago." When they get
+acquainted they see that the Negro or Chinaman is a human being like
+themselves, full of faults, but not devoid of good qualities.
+
+As a fundamental proposition, then, it will be found that the solution of
+the Negro problem lies in treating the Negro more and more as a human
+being like ourselves. Treating the Negro as a human being, we must judge
+him, not by his colour, or by any other outward symbol, but upon his worth
+as a man. Nothing that fails of that full honesty and fairness of judgment
+in the smallest particular will suffice. We disgrace and injure ourselves
+more than we do the Negro when we are not willing to admit virtue or
+learning or power in another human being because his face happens to be
+yellow or black.
+
+Of the soundness of this fundamental standard of judgment there can be no
+doubt; the difficulty lies in applying it practically to society as it is
+to-day. In the suggestions which I offer here I am trying to do two
+things: to outline the present programme, and to keep open a clear view to
+the future goal.
+
+
+_Shall the Negro Vote?_
+
+Let us approach, then, without fear the first of the three groups of
+problems--political, industrial, and social--which confront us.
+
+Shall the Negro vote?
+
+Thousands of Negroes in this country are fully as well equipped, fully as
+patriotic, as the average white citizen. Moreover, they are as much
+concerned in the real welfare of the country. The principle that our
+forefathers fought for, "taxation only with representation," is as true
+to-day as it ever was.
+
+On the other hand, the vast majority of Negroes (and many foreigners and
+"poor whites") are still densely ignorant, and have little or no
+appreciation of the duties of citizenship. It seems right that they should
+be required to wait before being allowed to vote until they are prepared.
+A wise parent hedges his son about with restrictions; he does not
+authorise his signature at the bank or allow him to run a locomotive; and
+until he is twenty-one years old he is disfranchised and has no part in
+the government. But the parent restricts his son because it seems the
+wisest course for him, for the family, and for the state that he should
+grow to manhood before he is burdened with grave responsibilities. So the
+state limits suffrage; and rightly limits it, so long as it accompanies
+that limitation with a determined policy of education. But the suffrage
+law is so executed in the South to-day as to keep many capable Negroes
+from the exercise of their rights, to prevent recognition of honest merit,
+and it is executed unjustly as between white men and coloured. It is no
+condonement of the Southern position to say that the North also
+disfranchises a large part of the Negro vote by bribery, which it does; it
+is only saying that the North is also wrong.
+
+As for the agitation for the repeal of the Fifteenth Amendment to the
+Federal Constitution, which gives the right of suffrage to the coloured
+man, it must be met by every lover of justice and democracy with a face of
+adamant. If there were only one Negro in the country capable of
+citizenship, the way for him must, at least, be kept open. No doubt full
+suffrage was given to the mass of Negroes before they were prepared for
+it, while yet they were slaves in everything except bodily shackles, and
+the result during the Reconstruction period was disastrous. But the
+principle of a free franchise--fortunately, as I believe, for this
+country--has been forever established. If the white man is not willing to
+meet the Negro in any contest whatsoever without plugging the dice, then
+he is not the superior but the inferior of the Negro.
+
+
+_What Shall Be the Industrial Relation of the Races?_
+
+So much for the political relationships of the races. How about the
+industrial relationships?
+
+The same test of inherent worth must here also apply, and the question
+will not be settled until it does apply. A carpenter must be asked, not
+"What colour are you?" but "How cunningly and efficiently can you build a
+house?" Of all absurdities, the judgment of the skill of a surgeon by the
+kink of his hair will certainly one day be looked upon as the most absurd.
+The same observation applies broadly to the attempt to confine a whole
+people, regardless of their capabilities, to menial occupations because
+they are dark-coloured. No, the place of the Negro is the place he can
+fill most efficiently and the longer we attempt to draw artificial lines
+the longer we shall delay the solution of the race problem. On the other
+hand, the Negro must not clamour for places he cannot yet fill.
+
+"The trouble with the Negro," says Booker T. Washington, "is that he is
+all the time trying to get recognition, whereas what he should do is to
+get something to recognise."
+
+Negroes as a class are to-day far inferior in education, intelligence, and
+efficiency to the white people as a class. Here and there an able Negro
+will develop superior abilities; but the mass of Negroes for years to come
+must find their activities mostly in physical and more or less menial
+labour. Like any race, they must first prove themselves in these simple
+lines of work before they can expect larger opportunities.
+
+There must always be men like Dr. DuBois who agitate for rights; their
+service is an important one, but at the present time it would seem that
+the thing most needed was the teaching of such men as Dr. Washington,
+emphasising duties and responsibilities, urging the Negro to prepare
+himself for his rights.
+
+
+_Social Contact_
+
+We come now, having considered the political and industrial relationships
+of the races, to the most difficult and perplexing of all the phases of
+the Negro question--that of social contact. Political and industrial
+relationships are more or less outward, but social contact turns upon the
+delicate and deep questions of home life, personal inclinations, and of
+privileges rather than rights. It is always in the relationships of oldest
+developments, like those that cling around the home, that human nature is
+slowest to change. Indeed, much of the complexity of the Negro problem
+has arisen from a confusion in people's minds between rights and
+privileges.
+
+Everyone recalls the excitement caused--it became almost a national
+issue--when President Roosevelt invited Booker T. Washington to luncheon
+at the White House. Well, that feeling is deep in the South, as deep
+almost as human nature. Many Northern people who go South to live come to
+share it; indeed, it is the gravest question in ethics to decide at what
+point natural instincts should be curbed.
+
+Social contact is a privilege, not a right; it is not a subject for
+legislation or for any other sort of force. "Social questions," as Colonel
+Watterson of Kentucky says, "create their own laws and settle themselves.
+They cannot be forced." All such relationships will work themselves out
+gradually, naturally, quietly, in the long course of the years: and the
+less they are talked about the better.
+
+
+_Jim Crow Laws_
+
+As for the Jim Crow laws in the South, many of them, at least, are at
+present necessary to avoid the danger of clashes between the ignorant of
+both race. They are the inevitable scaffolding of progress. As a matter of
+fact, the Negro has profited in one way by such laws. For the white man
+has thus driven the Negroes together, forced ability to find its outlet in
+racial leadership, and by his severity produced a spirit of self-reliance
+which would not otherwise have existed. Dr. Frissell of Hampton is always
+talking to his students of the "advantages of disadvantages."
+
+As for laws against the intermarriage of the races, they do not prevent
+what they are designed to prevent: the mixing of white and coloured blood.
+In many parts of the South, despite the existence of such laws,
+miscegenation, though decreasing rapidly, still continues. On the other
+hand, in the North, where Negroes and whites may marry, there is actually
+very little marriage and practically no concubinage. The solution of this
+question, too, lies far more in education than in law. As a matter of
+fact, the more education both races receive, the less the amalgamation. In
+the South, as in the North, the present tendency of the educated and
+prosperous Negroes is to build up a society of their own, entirely apart
+from and independent of white people. As I have shown in a former chapter,
+a white woman in the North who marries a Negro is declassed--ostracised by
+both races. The danger of amalgamation lies with ignorant and vicious
+people, black or white, not with educated and sensitive people.
+
+As in the case of the Jim Crow laws, separate schools in the South are
+necessary, and in one way I believe them to be of great advantage to the
+Negroes themselves. In Northern cities like Indianapolis and New York,
+where there are no separation laws of any kind, separate schools have
+appeared, naturally and quietly, in districts where the Negro population
+is dense. That the pupils in each should be treated with exact justice in
+the matter of expenditures by the state is axiomatic. And the Negro boy
+should have the same unbounded opportunity for any sort of education he is
+capable of using as the white boy; nothing less will suffice.
+
+One influence at present growing rapidly will have its profound effect on
+the separation laws. Though a tendency exists toward local segregation of
+Negroes to which I have already referred, there is also a counter-tendency
+toward a scattering of Negroes throughout the entire country. The white
+population in the South, now 20,000,000 against 9,000,000 Negroes, is
+increasing much more rapidly than the Negro population. The death-rate of
+Negroes is exceedingly high; and the sharper the conditions of competition
+with white workers, the greater will probably be the limitation of
+increase of the more inefficient Negro population.
+
+As for the predictions of "amalgamation," "a mongrel people," "black
+domination," and other bogies of prophecy, we must not, as I see it, give
+them any weight whatsoever. We cannot regulate our short lives by the fear
+of something far in the future which will probably never happen at all.
+All we can do is to be right at this moment and let the future take care
+of itself; it will anyway. There is no other sane method of procedure.
+Much as we may desire it, the future arrangement of this universe is not
+in our hands. As to the matter of "superiority" or "inferiority," it is
+not a subject of argument at all; nor can we keep or attain "superiority"
+by laws or colour lines, or in any other way, except by being superior.
+If we are right, absolutely right, in the eternal principles, we can rest
+in peace that the matter of our superiority will take care of itself.
+
+
+_The Real Solution of the Negro Problem_
+
+I remember asking a wise Southern man I met what, in his opinion, was the
+chief factor in the solution of the Negro problem.
+
+"Time," he said, "and patience."
+
+But time must be occupied with discipline and education--more and more
+education, not less education, education that will teach first of all the
+dignity of service not only for Negroes but for white men. The white man,
+South and North, needs it quite as much as the coloured man. And this is
+exactly the programme of the new Southern statesmanship of which I spoke
+in a former chapter. These wise Southerners have resolved to forget the
+discouragements and complexities of the Negro problem, forget even their
+disagreements, and go to work on present problems: the development of
+education and industry.
+
+Whether we like it or not the whole nation (indeed, the whole world) is
+tied by unbreakable bonds to its Negroes, its Chinamen, its slum-dwellers,
+its thieves, its murderers, its prostitutes. We cannot elevate ourselves
+by driving them back either with hatred or violence or neglect; but only
+by bringing them forward: by service.
+
+For good comes to men, not as they work alone, but as they work together
+with that sympathy and understanding which is the only true Democracy. The
+Great Teacher never preached the flat equality of men, social or
+otherwise. He gave mankind a working principle by means of which, being so
+different, some white, some black, some yellow, some old, some young, some
+men, some women, some accomplished, some stupid--mankind could, after all,
+live together in harmony and develop itself to the utmost possibility. And
+that principle was the Golden Rule. It is the least sentimental, the most
+profoundly practical teaching known to men.
+
+
+
+
+INDEX
+
+
+
+
+INDEX
+
+
+  A
+
+  Alcorn College, 248.
+
+  Alderman, President Edwin A., 259, 271, 273, 278.
+
+  Amalgamation of Races, 153, 164, 171.
+
+  Amos, Moses, 42.
+
+  Atlanta, colour line in, 27.
+    riot, 3.
+
+  Atlanta University, 40, 49, 54, 92, 170.
+
+
+  B
+
+  Barrow, Chancellor D. C., 271, 287.
+
+  Bassett, Professor John Spencer, 257.
+
+  Black Belt, 67.
+
+  Boston, race prejudice in, 118.
+    prosperous Negroes in, 119.
+
+  Bowie, Sydney J., 281.
+
+  Boycott by Negroes, 34.
+
+  Bradley, Rev. H. S., quoted, 56.
+
+  Brittain, M. L., quoted, 37.
+
+  Brown, J. Pope, 68.
+
+  Broyles, Judge, 18, 45.
+
+  Bulkley, William L., quoted, 131, 142.
+
+  "Bumptiousness," 125.
+
+  Buttrick, Dr. Wallace, 281.
+
+
+  C
+
+  Cable, George W., 141.
+
+  Cable, George W., the novelist, 257.
+
+  Carnegie, Andrew, 35, 287.
+
+  Chain-gang, 50, 96, 98, 290.
+
+  Chambers, Frank R., 281.
+
+  Charities, attitude toward Negroes, 35, 114, 138.
+
+  Churches, Negro, 89, 168.
+
+  Civil Service, Negroes in, 146.
+
+  "Clansman, The," 4.
+
+  Clark University, 12.
+
+  Clark, Walter, President Mississippi Cotton Association, quoted, 104.
+
+  Claxton, P. P., 271, 279.
+
+  Cocaine, use of by Negroes, 46, 89, 104.
+
+  Colour line, drawn by Negroes, 226.
+
+  Concubinage, a case of, 48.
+
+  Convicts, Negro, make profits for Georgia, 50.
+
+  Cooper, W. G., report on Atlanta riot, 15.
+
+  Cotton mill workers, 53, 70.
+
+  Courts and the Negro, 45, 96, 141, 185, 205.
+
+  Credit system, influence on Negro, 105.
+
+  Crime against women, 5, 128, 296.
+    as incentive to riot, 3, 4, 46, 183, 193, 204.
+    condoned to keep Negro on farms, 98.
+    juvenile, 51, 141.
+
+  "Crossing the Line," 161.
+
+  Cunningham, Acting Governor, 199.
+
+  Currie, J. H., District Attorney, quoted, 167.
+
+
+  D
+
+  Danville, Ill., lynching, 212.
+
+  Davis, Jefferson, way with Negroes, 103, 275.
+
+  Davis, Senator Jeff, 112, 238, 252.
+
+  Death rate among Negroes, 115.
+
+  Dickerman, Dr. G. S., 281.
+
+  Dillard, Professor James H., 273, 286.
+
+  Dixon, Rev. Thomas, 111, 266, 298.
+
+  DuBois, Dr. W. E. B., 100, 156, 158, 173, 222, 272, 304.
+
+
+  E
+
+  Edmonds, R. H., 275.
+
+  Education, 65, 139.
+    Booker T. Washington on, 221.
+    in South, 271, 273.
+    Negro, 282.
+    "New South" on Negro, 285.
+
+
+  F
+
+  Farmer, Negro, 6, 100.
+    in the North, 109, 170.
+    organization among, 93.
+
+  Fear of Negroes, 8.
+    prevalence of, in the South, 7.
+
+  Few, Dean William Preston, 259.
+
+  Fifteenth Amendment, 245, 246.
+
+  Fisk University, 170.
+
+  Fleming, Ex-Congressman William H., 264.
+
+  Fraternal Orders, 231.
+
+  "Free Persons of Colour" 156.
+
+  Free Speech, 257.
+
+  Fries, Henry E., 281.
+
+  Frissell, Dr. H. B., of Hampton, 228, 271, 281, 286.
+
+  Furniss, Dr. S. A., quoted, 114.
+
+
+  G
+
+  Gaines, Bishop, J. W., 8.
+
+  Galloway, Bishop C. B., 276.
+
+  Gammon Theological Seminary, 12, 13.
+
+  George, P. S., letter, 69.
+
+  Gilreath, Belton, 287.
+
+  Grady, Henry W., 275.
+
+  Grant, Bishop Abram, 287.
+
+  Graves, John Temple, 72.
+
+
+  H
+
+  Hampton Institute, 170, 283.
+
+  Hampton, General Wade, 235.
+
+  Hanna, H. H., 281.
+
+  Harrah, Charles J., President Midvale Steel Company, quoted, 137.
+
+  Harvard University, colour line at, 123.
+
+  Hill, Walter B., Chancellor, 258.
+
+  Hopkins, Charles T., 18, 32, 49.
+
+  Houston, President D. F., 271.
+
+  Howell, Clark, Editor Atlanta _Constitution_, 24.
+
+  Huntsville, Alabama, lynching, 191.
+
+
+  I
+
+  Immigrants in the South, 28, 268, 295.
+    take Negroes' places, 59.
+
+  Intermarriage of races, 164, 171, 305.
+
+
+  J
+
+  Jeanes Fund, 286.
+
+  "Jim Crow," laws, 30, 112, 130, 151, 219, 224, 251, 252, 262, 266, 305.
+
+  Johnson, Mayor Tom, 233.
+
+  Joyner, J. Y., 271, 278, 286.
+
+
+  K
+
+  Ku Klux Klan, 4, 235.
+
+
+  L
+
+  Labour problems in North, 130.
+    in South, 57, 78, 83, 249, 294.
+
+  Labour unions, attitude toward Negroes, 135, 143, 160.
+
+  Lamar, Senator J. Q., 263, 284.
+
+  Landrum, Rev. W. W., 24.
+
+  Lane, Charles P., letter, 241.
+
+  Lawlessness, as incentive to riot, 4, 183, 193, 204.
+
+  Leaders of Negro race, 216.
+
+  Legislation against Negroes, 249.
+
+  Lynching, 175.
+
+
+  M
+
+  McAneny, George, 287.
+
+  McIver, Charles D., 278.
+
+  Manley, Charles quoted, 160.
+
+  Manning, Joseph C., 264.
+
+  Medicines, patent and the Negro, 62, 116.
+
+  Mertins, George Frederick, quoted, 85.
+
+  Miller, Professor Kelley, quoted, 130.
+
+  Millsaps, Major R. W., 102.
+
+  Mims, Professor Edwin, 255.
+
+  Miscegenation, 165, 305.
+
+  Mitchell, Professor S. C., 253, 271, 280, 281.
+
+  Mob, psychology of, 10, 184.
+
+  Mob, rule results of, 13.
+
+  Money, United States Senator, H. D., 171.
+
+  Moton, R. R., 287.
+
+  Mulattoes, 149.
+    leaders of the race, 173.
+
+  Murphy, Edgar Gardner, 273.
+
+
+  N
+
+  Napier, J. C., 287.
+
+  Negroes, boycott by, 34.
+    domination of, 252.
+    driven out, 71.
+    in Government service, 29.
+    in Northern cities, 113.
+    in street cars, 30.
+    labour unions, 135.
+    land ownership among, 91.
+    private schools, 53.
+    racial consciousness among, 38.
+    what they talk about, 26.
+    why they go to cities, 101.
+    with white blood, 149.
+    worthless, 60. (_See_ Vagrants)
+
+  Negro business enterprises, 39.
+    business league, 229.
+    dramatic efforts, 157, 231.
+    in Boston, 119, 145.
+    story of Negro druggist, 42.
+    story of successful farmer, 90.
+
+  Newspapers, influence of sensational, 9, 25.
+    Negro, 225.
+
+  Niagara Movement, 223.
+
+  Northen, Ex-Governor W. J., 24, 25, 65.
+
+
+  O
+
+  "Ogden Movement," 281.
+
+  Ogden, Robert C., 281, 287.
+
+  Organised Labour and the Negro, 135.
+
+  Orphans, Negro, 51.
+
+
+  P
+
+  Page, Walter H., 281, 287.
+
+  Parties among Negroes, 216.
+
+  Peabody, George Foster, 281, 287.
+
+  Penn, Dr. W. F., 19, 33.
+
+  Peonage, 96.
+
+  Politics, Negro in, 98, 160, 233, 252, 262.
+    and lynching, 203, 224.
+
+  Populism in South, 255.
+
+  Porters, Pullman, 144.
+
+  Prejudice, race, in North, 111, 117, 125, 133, 138.
+    in churches, 121.
+    Negro, 226.
+
+  Prejudice, race, and economic necessity, 81.
+    cases of, 55, 82.
+    superficial manifestations, 26, 296.
+
+  Prohibition movement, 256.
+
+  Psychology of the South, 37;
+    mob, 184.
+
+
+  R
+
+  Race, world problems of, 292.
+
+  Rape, investigation of cases, 5.
+    trial of Negro for, 22.
+    a northern case, 128.
+
+  Reconstruction, 235.
+
+  Rice, Dr. J. A., quoted, 165.
+
+  Rice, Rev. Theron H., quoted, 54.
+
+  Richardson, Congressman William, quoted, 192.
+
+  Riot, Atlanta, 3.
+
+  Riots, effect on crime, 22;
+    in Northern cities, 124, 126;
+    Wilmington, 160;
+    lynching riot at Danville, 211;
+    at Huntsville, Ala., 191;
+    at Springfield, O., 201;
+    at Statesboro, Ga., 186.
+
+
+  S
+
+  Saloons, 10, 18, 21, 25, 36, 46, 49, 88, 98, 104, 127, 207, 266,
+        289, 290.
+
+  Schools, appropriations for, 248.
+    in Atlanta, 53.
+    in bad neighbourhoods, 169.
+    in North, 132, 139.
+    industrial, 140, 143.
+    North Carolina, 279.
+    private for Negroes, 53.
+    retrogression of Negro, 284.
+    separate, 306.
+    why Negroes are not in, 52.
+
+  Secret Societies among Negroes, 231.
+
+  Segregation of races, 300;
+    natural going on, 70.
+
+  Settlement work among Negroes, 122, 126, 138.
+
+  Shaw, Albert, 281.
+
+  Sickness among Negroes, 116.
+
+  Slade, Professor Andrew, 257.
+
+  Slavery, evils of, 234.
+
+  Smith, Governor Hoke, 11, 242, 245, 249, 250, 252, 256, 267.
+
+  Smith, R. D., 287.
+
+  Social contact of races, 304.
+
+  Solution of race problems, 300.
+
+  Soule, President A. M., 288.
+
+  "Souls of Black Folk, The," 158.
+
+  South Carolina, political struggles in, 235.
+
+  Southern Education Board, 281, 286.
+
+  Speake, Judge Paul, 195.
+
+  Speer, Judge Emory, 255.
+
+  Springfield, O., lynching, 191.
+    and riot, 201.
+
+  Statesboro, Ga., lynching, 177.
+
+  Stewart, Professor J. B., 288.
+
+  Strikes and Negroes, 134.
+
+  Swanson, Governor Claude A., 249, 252, 258, 280.
+
+
+  T
+
+  Taft, William H., 287.
+
+  Tatum, Stewart L., 209.
+
+  Tenant System, 74, 87, 100.
+
+  Thomas, Judge William H., 96.
+
+  Tillman, Senator B. R., 111, 236, 246, 250, 252, 259, 265.
+
+  Trades, Negroes in, 135, 145.
+
+  Trinity College, 258.
+
+  Troy, Alexander, letter, 247.
+
+  Tuberculosis among Negroes, 114.
+
+  Tuskegee, 60, 170, 221, 283.
+
+
+  U
+
+  University of Georgia, 288.
+
+
+  V
+
+  Vagrants among Negroes, 57, 60, 81, 178, 211.
+
+  Vardaman, Governor J. K., 111, 238, 246, 265, 267, 275, 298.
+
+  Vernon, W. T., Register of Treasury, 228.
+
+  Vice among Negroes, 165, 169.
+
+  Vote, shall the Negro? 202.
+
+
+  W
+
+  Washington, Booker T., 33, 56, 64, 99, 156, 173, 219, 250, 271, 274,
+        286, 299, 300, 304.
+
+  Watterson, Henry, 305.
+
+  Weather and mobs, 211.
+
+  White, Rev. John E., 24, 253, 276.
+
+  Whitlock, Hardy H., sheriff, 212.
+
+  Wilberforce College, 170.
+
+  Williams, "Pegleg," 80.
+
+  Williams, Talcott, 287.
+
+  Wilmer, Rev. C. B., 24, 276.
+
+  Women, Negro, arrested in Atlanta, 46.
+    clubs, 143, 168.
+    morals of, 140, 169.
+
+  Wright, President R. R., 92.
+
+  Wright, Professor R. R., Jr., quoted, 124, 137, 142, 145.
+
+
+
+
+Footnotes:
+
+[1] Since these notes were made, in 1907, the prohibition movement has
+abolished all the saloons in Georgia.
+
+[2] Since the closing of the saloons on January 1, 1908, the number of
+arrests has largely decreased, but the observations here made still apply
+to a large number of Southern cities.
+
+
+
+
+Transcriber's Notes:
+
+Passages in italics are indicated by _italics_.
+
+Punctuation has been corrected without note.
+
+The following misprints have been addressed:
+  "he" corrected to "be" (page 5)
+  "Thelogical" corrected to "Theological" (page 13)
+  "take" corrected to "takes" (page 33)
+  "Childern" corrected to "Children" (page 52)
+  "on" corrected to "no" (page 57)
+  "o-morrow" corrected to "to-morrow" (page 60)
+  "negroes" corrected to "Negroes" (page 67)
+  "whould" corrected to "would" (page 85)
+  "wont" corrected to "won't" (page 98)
+  missing "and" added (page 188)
+  "typsetters" corrected to "typesetters" (page 202)
+  "be" corrected to "he" (page 204)
+  "weeks" corrected to "week" (page 210)
+  "anothern" corrected to "another" (page 210)
+  "hightly" corrected to "highly" (page 275)
+  "declaractions" corrected to "declarations" (page 284)
+  "familar" corrected to "familiar" (page 295)
+  "is" corrected to "it" (page 300)
+  "Govenor" corrected to "Governor" (Index)
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's Following the Color Line, by Ray Stannard Baker
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+      The Project Gutenberg eBook of Following the Color Line, by Ray Stannard Baker.
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+<pre>
+
+Project Gutenberg's Following the Color Line, by Ray Stannard Baker
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Following the Color Line
+       an account of Negro citizenship in the American democracy
+
+Author: Ray Stannard Baker
+
+Release Date: January 4, 2011 [EBook #34847]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK FOLLOWING THE COLOR LINE ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Suzanne Shell and the Online Distributed
+Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was
+produced from images generously made available by The
+Internet Archive/Canadian Libraries.)
+
+
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/cover.jpg" alt="" /></div>
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<h1>FOLLOWING THE COLOR LINE</h1>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<table class="tbord" border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="5" summary="table">
+<tr><td align="center">BY THE SAME AUTHOR</td></tr>
+<tr><td><br />OUR NEW PROSPERITY</td></tr>
+<tr><td>SEEN IN GERMANY</td></tr>
+<tr><td>BOYS&#8217; BOOK OF INVENTIONS</td></tr>
+<tr><td>SECOND BOYS&#8217; BOOK OF INVENTIONS</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="center">AND MANY STORIES</td></tr></table>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p><a name="frontis" id="frontis"></a></p>
+<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/gs01.jpg" alt="" /></div>
+<p class="center">AN OLD BLACK &#8220;MAMMY&#8221; WITH WHITE CHILD</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/title.jpg" alt="Following the Color Line An Account of Negro Citizenship in the American Democracy By Ray Stannard Bakerd" /></div>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><small>ALL RIGHTS RESERVED, INCLUDING THAT OF TRANSLATION<br />
+INTO FOREIGN LANGUAGES, INCLUDING THE SCANDINAVIAN</small></p>
+<p class="center"><small>COPYRIGHT, 1904, 1905, BY THE S. S. McCLURE COMPANY</small></p>
+<p class="center"><small>COPYRIGHT, 1907, 1908, BY THE PHILLIPS PUBLISHING COMPANY</small></p>
+<p class="center"><small>COPYRIGHT, 1908, BY DOUBLEDAY, PAGE &amp; COMPANY</small></p>
+<p class="center"><small>PUBLISHED, OCTOBER, 1908</small></p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr style="width: 50%;" />
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<div class="note">
+<p>&#8220;I AM OBLIGED TO CONFESS THAT I DO NOT REGARD THE ABOLITION OF SLAVERY AS
+A MEANS OF PUTTING OFF THE STRUGGLE BETWEEN THE TWO RACES IN THE SOUTHERN
+STATES.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p class="right">&mdash;<i>De Tocqueville, &#8220;Democracy in America&#8221;</i> (1835)</p></div>
+
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr style="width: 50%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_vii" id="Page_vii">[Pg vii]</a></span></p>
+<h2>PREFACE</h2>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p>My purpose in writing this book has been to make a clear statement of the
+exact present conditions and relationships of the Negro in American life.
+I am not vain enough to imagine that I have seen all the truth, nor that I
+have always placed the proper emphasis upon the facts that I here present.
+Every investigator necessarily has his personal equation or point of view.
+The best he can do is to set down the truth as he sees it, without bating
+a jot or adding a tittle, and this I have done.</p>
+
+<p>I have endeavoured to see every problem, not as a Northerner, nor as a
+Southerner, but as an American. And I have looked at the Negro, not merely
+as a menial, as he is commonly regarded in the South, nor as a curiosity,
+as he is often seen in the North, but as a plain human being, animated
+with his own hopes, depressed by his own fears, meeting his own problems
+with failure or success.</p>
+
+<p>I have accepted no statement of fact, however generally made, until I was
+fully persuaded from my own personal investigation that what I heard was
+really a fact and not a rumour.</p>
+
+<p>Wherever I have ventured upon conclusions, I claim for them neither
+infallibility nor originality. They are offered frankly as my own latest
+and clearest thoughts upon the various subjects discussed. If any man can
+give me better evidence for the error of my conclusions than I have for
+the truth of them I am prepared to go with him, and gladly, as far as he
+can prove his way. And I have offered my conclusions, not in a spirit of
+controversy, nor in behalf of any party or section of the country, but in
+the hope that, by inspiring a broader outlook, they may lead, finally, to
+other conclusions more nearly approximating the truth than mine.</p>
+
+<p>While these chapters were being published in the <i>American Magazine</i> (one
+chapter, that on lynching, in <i>McClure&#8217;s Magazine</i>) I received many
+hundreds of letters from all parts<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_viii" id="Page_viii">[Pg viii]</a></span> of the country. I acknowledge them
+gratefully. Many of them contained friendly criticisms, suggestions, and
+corrections, which I have profited by in the revision of the chapters for
+book publication. Especially have the letters from the South, describing
+local conditions and expressing local points of view, been valuable to me.
+I wish here, also, to thank the many men and women, South and North, white
+and coloured, who have given me personal assistance in my inquiries.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr style="width: 50%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_ix" id="Page_ix">[Pg ix]</a></span></p>
+<h2>CONTENTS</h2>
+
+<table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="5" summary="table">
+<tr><td colspan="2"><small>CHAPTER</small></td><td align="right"><small>PAGE</small></td></tr>
+<tr><td>&nbsp;</td></tr>
+<tr><td>&nbsp;</td><td><span class="smcap">Preface</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_vii">vii</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>&nbsp;</td></tr>
+<tr><td colspan="2" align="center"><a href="#PART_ONE">PART I</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td colspan="2" align="center">THE NEGRO IN THE SOUTH</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right"><a href="#CHAPTER_I">I.</a></td><td>A Race Riot and After</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_3">3</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right"><a href="#CHAPTER_II">II.</a></td><td>Following the Colour Line in the South: A Superficial View of Conditions</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_26">26</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right"><a href="#CHAPTER_III">III.</a></td><td>The Southern City Negro</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_45">45</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right"><a href="#CHAPTER_IV">IV.</a></td><td>In the Black Belt: The Negro Farmer</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_66">66</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right"><a href="#CHAPTER_V">V.</a></td><td>Race Relationships in the Country Districts</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_87">87</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>&nbsp;</td></tr>
+<tr><td colspan="2" align="center"><a href="#PART_TWO">PART II</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td colspan="2" align="center">THE NEGRO IN THE NORTH</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right"><a href="#CHAPTER_VI">VI.</a></td><td>Following the Colour Line in the North</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_109">109</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right"><a href="#CHAPTER_VII">VII.</a></td><td>The Negroes&#8217; Struggle for Survival in Northern Cities</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_130">130</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>&nbsp;</td></tr>
+<tr><td colspan="2" align="center"><a href="#PART_THREE">PART III</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td colspan="2" align="center">THE NEGRO IN THE NATION</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right"><a href="#CHAPTER_VIII">VIII.</a></td><td>The Mulatto: The Problem of Race Mixture</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_151">151</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right"><a href="#CHAPTER_IX">IX.</a></td><td>Lynching, South and North</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_175">175</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td valign="top" align="right"><a href="#CHAPTER_X">X.</a></td><td>An Ostracised Race in Ferment: The Conflict of Negro Parties and<br />Negro Leaders over Methods of Dealing with Their Own Problem</td><td valign="bottom" align="right"><a href="#Page_216">216</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right"><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_x" id="Page_x">[Pg x]</a></span><a href="#CHAPTER_XI">XI.</a></td><td>The Negro in Politics</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_233">233</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right"><a href="#CHAPTER_XII">XII.</a></td><td>The Black Man&#8217;s Silent Power</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_252">252</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right"><a href="#CHAPTER_XIII">XIII.</a></td><td>The New Southern Statesmanship</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_271">271</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right"><a href="#CHAPTER_XIV">XIV.</a></td><td>What to Do About the Negro&mdash;A Few Conclusions</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_292">292</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>&nbsp;</td></tr>
+<tr><td>&nbsp;</td><td>Index</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_311">311</a></td></tr></table>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr style="width: 50%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_xi" id="Page_xi">[Pg xi]</a></span></p>
+<h2>ILLUSTRATIONS</h2>
+
+<table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="5" summary="table">
+<tr><td>An Old Black &#8220;Mammy&#8221; with White Child</td><td align="right"><a href="#frontis"><i>Frontispiece</i></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right"><small>FACING PAGE</small></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Fac-similes of Certain Atlanta Newspapers of September 22, 1906</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_7">7</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>James H. Wallace</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_11">10</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>R. R. Wright</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_11">10</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>H. O. Tanner</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_11">10</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Rev. H. H. Proctor</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_11">10</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Dr. W. F. Penn</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_11">10</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>George W. Cable</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_11">10</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Showing how the Colour Line Was Drawn by the Saloons at Atlanta, Georgia</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_35">35</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Interior of a Negro Working-man&#8217;s Home, Atlanta, Georgia</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_46">46</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Interior of a Negro Home of the Poorest Sort in Indianapolis</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_46">46</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Map Showing the Black Belt</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_67">66</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Where White Mill Hands Live in Atlanta, Georgia</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_70">71</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Where some of the Poorer Negroes Live in Atlanta, Georgia</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_70">71</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>A &#8220;Poor White&#8221; Family</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_75">74</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>A Model Negro School</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_75">74</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Old and New Cabins for Negro Tenants on the Brown Plantation</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_85">85</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Cane Syrup Kettle</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_93">92</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Chain-gang Workers on the Roads</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_93">92</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>A Type of the Country Chain-gang Negro</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_99">99</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>A Negro Cabin with Evidences of Abundance</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_111">110</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Off for the Cotton Fields</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_111">110</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Ward in a Negro Hospital at Philadelphia</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_135">135</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Studio of a Negro Sculptress</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_135">135</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_xii" id="Page_xii">[Pg xii]</a></span>A Negro Magazine Editor&#8217;s Office in Philadelphia</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_138">138</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>A &#8220;Broom Squad&#8221; of Negro Boys</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_138">138</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>A Type of Negro Girl Typesetter in Atlanta</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_165">164</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Mulatto Girl Student</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_165">164</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Miss Cecelia Johnson</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_165">164</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Mrs. Booker T. Washington</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_172">173</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Mrs. Robert H. Terrell</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_172">173</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Negroes Lynched by Being Burned Alive at Statesboro, Georgia</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_179">179</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Negroes of the Criminal Type</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_179">179</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Court House and Bank in the Public Square at Huntsville, Alabama</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_191">190</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Charles W. Chesnutt</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_214">215</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Dr. Booker T. Washington</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_219">218</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Dr. W. E. B. DuBois</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_224">225</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Colonel James Lewis</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_240">240</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>W. T. Vernon</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_240">240</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Ralph W. Tyler</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_240">240</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>J. Pope Brown</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_252">252</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>James K. Vardaman</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_252">252</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Senator Jeff Davis</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_252">252</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Governor Hoke Smith</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_252">252</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Senator B. R. Tillman</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_252">252</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Ex-Governor W. J. Northen</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_252">252</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>James H. Dillard</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_274">275</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Edwin A. Alderman</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_274">275</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>A. M. Soule</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_274">275</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>D. F. Houston</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_274">275</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>George Foster Peabody</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_274">275</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>P. P. Claxton</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_274">275</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>S. C. Mitchell</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_286">286</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Judge Emory Speer</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_286">286</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Edgar Gardner Murphy</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_286">286</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Dr. H. B. Frissell</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_286">286</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>R. C. Ogden</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_286">286</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>J. Y. Joyner</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_286">286</a></td></tr></table>
+
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr style="width: 50%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_1" id="Page_1">[Pg 1]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="PART_ONE" id="PART_ONE"></a><i>PART ONE</i></h2>
+<h2>THE NEGRO IN THE SOUTH</h2>
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_2" id="Page_2">[Pg 2]</a></span></p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_3" id="Page_3">[Pg 3]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_I" id="CHAPTER_I"></a>CHAPTER I</h2>
+<h3>A RACE RIOT, AND AFTER</h3>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="dropcap"><span class="caps">Upon</span> the ocean, of antagonism between the white and Negro races in this
+country, there arises occasionally a wave, stormy in its appearance, but
+soon subsiding into quietude. Such a wave was the Atlanta riot. Its
+ominous size, greater by far than the ordinary race disturbances which
+express themselves in lynchings, alarmed the entire country and awakened
+in the South a new sense of the dangers which threatened it. A description
+of that spectacular though superficial disturbance, the disaster incident
+to its fury, and the remarkable efforts at reconstruction will lead the
+way naturally&mdash;as human nature is best interpreted in moments of
+passion&mdash;to a clearer understanding, in future chapters, of the deep and
+complex race feeling which exists in this country.</p>
+
+<p>On the twenty-second day of September, 1906, Atlanta had become a
+veritable social tinder-box. For months the relation of the races had been
+growing more strained. The entire South had been sharply annoyed by a
+shortage of labour accompanied by high wages and, paradoxically, by an
+increasing number of idle Negroes. In Atlanta the lower class&mdash;the
+&#8220;worthless Negro&#8221;&mdash;had been increasing in numbers: it showed itself too
+evidently among the swarming saloons, dives, and &#8220;clubs&#8221; which a
+complaisant city administration allowed to exist in the very heart of the
+city. Crime had increased to an alarming extent; an insufficient and
+ineffective police force seemed unable to cope with it. With a population
+of 115,000 Atlanta had over 17,000 arrests in 1905; in 1906 the number
+increased to 21,602. Atlanta had many more arrests than New Orleans with
+nearly three times the population and twice as many Negroes; and almost
+four times as many as Milwaukee, Wisconsin, a city nearly three times as
+large. Race feeling had been sharpened through<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_4" id="Page_4">[Pg 4]</a></span> a long and bitter
+political campaign, Negro disfranchisement being one of the chief issues
+under discussion. An inflammatory play called &#8220;The Clansman,&#8221; though
+forbidden by public sentiment in many Southern cities, had been given in
+Atlanta and other places with the effect of increasing the prejudice of
+both races. Certain newspapers in Atlanta, taking advantage of popular
+feeling, kept the race issue constantly agitated, emphasising Negro crimes
+with startling headlines. One newspaper even recommended the formation of
+organisations of citizens in imitation of the Ku Klux movement of
+reconstruction days. In the clamour of this growing agitation, the voice
+of the right-minded white people and industrious, self-respecting Negroes
+was almost unheard. A few ministers of both races saw the impending storm
+and sounded a warning&mdash;to no effect; and within the week before the riot
+the citizens, the city administration and the courts all woke up together.
+There were calls for mass-meetings, the police began to investigate the
+conditions of the low saloons and dives, the country constabulary was
+increased in numbers, the grand jury was called to meet in special session
+on Monday the 24th.</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><i>Prosperity and Lawlessness</i></p>
+
+<p>But the awakening of moral sentiment in the city, unfortunately, came too
+late. Crime, made more lurid by agitation, had so kindled the fires of
+hatred that they could not be extinguished by ordinary methods. The best
+people of Atlanta were like the citizens of prosperous Northern cities,
+too busy with money-making to pay attention to public affairs. For Atlanta
+is growing rapidly. Its bank clearings jumped from ninety millions in 1900
+to two hundred and twenty-two millions in 1906, its streets are well paved
+and well lighted, its street-car service is good, its sky-scrapers are
+comparable with the best in the North. In other words, it was
+progressive&mdash;few cities I know of more so&mdash;but it had forgotten its public
+duties.</p>
+
+<p>Within a few months before the riot there had been a number of crimes of
+worthless Negroes against white women. Leading Negroes, while not one of
+them with whom I talked wished<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_5" id="Page_5">[Pg 5]</a></span> to protect any Negro who was really
+guilty, asserted that the number of these crimes had been greatly
+exaggerated and that in special instances the details had been
+over-emphasised because the criminal was black; that they had been used to
+further inflame race hatred. I had a personal investigation made of every
+crime against a white woman committed in the few months before and after
+the riot. Three, charged to white men, attracted comparatively little
+attention in the newspapers, although one, the offence of a white man
+named Turnadge, was shocking in its details. Of twelve such charges
+against Negroes in the six months preceding the riot two were cases of
+rape, horrible in their details, three were aggravated attempts at rape,
+three may have been attempts, three were pure cases of fright on the part
+of the white woman, and in one the white woman, first asserting that a
+Negro had assaulted her, finally confessed attempted suicide.</p>
+
+<p>The facts of two of these cases I will narrate&mdash;and without excuse for the
+horror of the details. If we are to understand the true conditions in the
+South, these things <i>must</i> <ins class="correction" title="original: he">be</ins> told.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><i>Story of One Negro&#8217;s Crime</i></p>
+
+<p>One of the cases was that of Mrs. Knowles Etheleen Kimmel, twenty-five
+years old, wife of a farmer living near Atlanta. A mile beyond the end of
+the street-car line stands a small green bungalow-like house in a lonely
+spot near the edge of the pine woods. The Kimmels who lived there were not
+Southerners by birth but of Pennsylvania Dutch stock. They had been in the
+South four or five years, renting their lonesome farm, raising cotton and
+corn and hopefully getting a little ahead. On the day before the riot a
+strange rough-looking Negro called at the back door of the Kimmel home. He
+wore a soldier&#8217;s cast-off khaki uniform. He asked a foolish question and
+went away. Mrs. Kimmel was worried and told her husband. He, too, was
+worried&mdash;the fear of this crime is everywhere present in the South&mdash;and
+when he went away in the afternoon he asked his nearest neighbour to look
+out for the strange Negro. When he came back a few hours later, he found
+fifty white men in his yard. He knew what had happened without being told:
+his wife was under medical attendance<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_6" id="Page_6">[Pg 6]</a></span> in the house. She had been able to
+give a clear description of the Negro: bloodhounds were brought, but the
+pursuing white men had so obliterated the criminal&#8217;s tracks that he could
+not be traced. Through information given by a Negro a suspect was arrested
+and nearly lynched before he could be brought to Mrs. Kimmel for
+identification; when she saw him she said: &#8220;He is not the man.&#8221; The real
+criminal was never apprehended.</p>
+
+<p>One day, weeks afterward, I found the husband working alone in his field;
+his wife, to whom the surroundings had become unbearable, had gone away to
+visit friends. He told me the story hesitatingly. His prospects, he said,
+were ruined: his neighbours had been sympathetic but he could not continue
+to live there with the feeling that they all knew. He was preparing to
+give up his home and lose himself where people did not know his story. I
+asked him if he favoured lynching, and his answer surprised me.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I&#8217;ve thought about that,&#8221; he said. &#8220;You see, I&#8217;m a Christian man, or I
+try to be. My wife is a Christian woman. We&#8217;ve talked about it. What good
+would it do? We should make criminals of ourselves, shouldn&#8217;t we? No, let
+the law take its course. When I came here, I tried to help the Negroes as
+much as I could. But many of them won&#8217;t work even when the wages are high:
+they won&#8217;t come when they agree to and when they get a few dollars ahead
+they go down to the saloons in Atlanta. Everyone is troubled about getting
+labour and everyone is afraid of prowling idle Negroes. Now, the thing has
+come to me, and it&#8217;s just about ruined my life.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>When I came away the poor lonesome fellow followed me half-way up the
+hill, asking: &#8220;Now, what would you do?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>One more case. One of the prominent florists in Atlanta is W. C. Lawrence.
+He is an Englishman, whose home is in the outskirts of the city. On the
+morning of August 20th his daughter Mabel, fourteen years old, and his
+sister Ethel, twenty-five years old, a trained nurse who had recently come
+from England, went out into the nearby woods to pick ferns. Being in broad
+daylight and within sight of houses, they had no fear. Returning along an
+old Confederate breastworks, they were met by a brutal-looking Negro with
+a club in one hand and a stone in the other. He first knocked the little
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_7" id="Page_7">[Pg 7]</a></span>girl down, then her aunt. When the child &#8220;came to&#8221; she found herself
+partially bound with a rope. &#8220;Honey,&#8221; said the Negro, &#8220;I want you to come
+with me.&#8221; With remarkable presence of mind the child said: &#8220;I can&#8217;t, my
+leg is broken,&#8221; and she let it swing limp from the knee. Deceived, the
+Negro went back to bind the aunt. Mabel, instantly untying the rope,
+jumped up and ran for help. When he saw the child escaping the Negro ran
+off.</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/gs02.jpg" alt="" /></div>
+<p class="center">FAC-SIMILES OF CERTAIN ATLANTA NEWSPAPERS OF SEPTEMBER 22, 1906<br />Showing the sensational news headings</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;When I got there,&#8221; said Mr. Lawrence, &#8220;my sister was lying against the
+bank, face down. The back of her head had been beaten bloody. The bridge
+of her nose was cut open, one eye had been gouged out of its socket. My
+daughter had three bad cuts on her head&mdash;thank God, nothing worse to
+either. But my sister, who was just beginning her life, will be totally
+blind in one eye, probably in both. Her life is ruined.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>About a month later, through the information of a Negro, the criminal was
+caught, identified by the Misses Lawrence, and sent to the penitentiary
+for forty years (two cases), the limit of punishment for attempted
+criminal assault.</p>
+
+<p>In both of these cases arrests were made on the information of Negroes.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><i>Terror of Both White and Coloured People</i></p>
+
+<p>The effect of a few such crimes as these may be more easily imagined than
+described. They produced a feeling of alarm which no one who has not lived
+in such a community can in any wise appreciate. I was astonished in
+travelling in the South to discover how widely prevalent this dread has
+become. Many white women in Atlanta dare not leave their homes alone after
+dark; many white men carry arms to protect themselves and their families.
+And even these precautions do not always prevent attacks.</p>
+
+<p>But this is not the whole story. Everywhere I went in Atlanta I heard of
+the fear of the white people, but not much was said of the terror which
+the Negroes also felt. And yet every Negro I met voiced in some way that
+fear. It is difficult here in the North for us to understand what such a
+condition means: a whole community namelessly afraid!</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_8" id="Page_8">[Pg 8]</a></span>The better-class Negroes have two sources of fear: one of the criminals of
+their own race&mdash;such attacks are rarely given much space in the
+newspapers&mdash;and the other the fear of the white people. My very first
+impression of what this fear of the Negroes might be came, curiously
+enough, not from Negroes but from a fine white woman on whom I called
+shortly after going South. She told this story:</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I had a really terrible experience one evening a few days ago. I was
+walking along &mdash;&mdash; Street when I saw a rather good-looking young Negro
+come out of a hallway to the sidewalk. He was in a great hurry, and, in
+turning suddenly, as a person sometimes will do, he accidentally brushed
+my shoulder with his arm. He had not seen me before. When he turned and
+found it was a white woman he had touched, such a look of abject terror
+and fear came into his face as I hope never again to see on a human
+countenance. He knew what it meant if I was frightened, called for help,
+and accused him of insulting or attacking me. He stood still a moment,
+then turned and ran down the street, dodging into the first alley he came
+to. It shows, doesn&#8217;t it, how little it might take to bring punishment
+upon an innocent man!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The next view I got was through the eyes of one of the able Negroes of the
+South, Bishop Gaines of the African Methodist Episcopal Church. He is now
+an old man, but of imposing presence. Of wide attainments, he has
+travelled in Europe, he owns much property, and rents houses to white
+tenants. He told me of services he had held some time before in south
+Georgia. Approaching the church one day through the trees, he suddenly
+encountered a white woman carrying water from a spring. She dropped her
+pail instantly, screamed, and ran up the path toward her house.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;If I had been some Negroes,&#8221; said Bishop Gaines, &#8220;I should have turned
+and fled in terror; the alarm would have been given, and it is not
+unlikely that I should have had a posse of white men with bloodhounds on
+my trail. If I had been caught what would my life have been worth? The
+woman would have identified me&mdash;and what could I have said? But I did not
+run. I stepped out in the path, held up one hand and said:</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;&#8216;Don&#8217;t worry, madam, I am Bishop Gaines, and I am<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_9" id="Page_9">[Pg 9]</a></span> holding services here
+in this church.&#8217; So she stopped running and I apologised for having
+startled her.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The Negro knows he has little chance to explain, if by accident or
+ignorance he insults a white woman or offends a white man. An educated
+Negro, one of the ablest of his race, telling me of how a friend of his
+who by merest chance had provoked a number of half-drunken white men, had
+been set upon and frightfully beaten, remarked: &#8220;It might have been me!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Now, I am telling these things just as they look to the Negro; it is quite
+as important, as a problem in human nature, to know how the Negro feels
+and what he says, as it is to know how the white man feels.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><i>How the Newspapers Fomented the Riot</i></p>
+
+<p>On the afternoon of the riot the newspapers in flaming headlines
+chronicled four assaults by Negroes on white women. I had a personal
+investigation made of each of those cases. Two of them may have been
+attempts at assaults, but two palpably were nothing more than fright on
+the part of both the white woman and the Negro. As an instance, in one
+case an elderly woman, Mrs. Martha Holcombe, going to close her blinds in
+the evening, saw a Negro on the sidewalk. In a terrible fright she
+screamed. The news was telephoned to the police station, but before the
+officials could respond, Mrs. Holcombe telephoned them not to come out.
+And yet this was one of the &#8220;assaults&#8221; chronicled in letters five inches
+high in a newspaper extra.</p>
+
+<p>And finally on this hot Saturday half-holiday, when the country people had
+come in by hundreds, when everyone was out of doors, when the streets were
+crowded, when the saloons had been filled since early morning with white
+men and Negroes, both drinking&mdash;certain newspapers in Atlanta began to
+print extras with big headings announcing new assaults on white women by
+Negroes. The Atlanta News published five such extras, and newsboys cried
+them through the city:</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Third assault.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Fourth assault.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The whole city, already deeply agitated, was thrown into a<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_10" id="Page_10">[Pg 10]</a></span> veritable
+state of panic. The news in the extras was taken as truthful; for the city
+was not in a mood then for cool investigation. Calls began to come in from
+every direction for police protection. A loafing Negro in a backyard, who
+in ordinary times would not have been noticed, became an object of real
+terror. The police force, too small at best, was thus distracted and
+separated.</p>
+
+<p>In Atlanta the proportion of men who go armed continually is very large;
+the pawnshops of Decatur and Peters Streets, with windows like arsenals,
+furnish the low class of Negroes and whites with cheap revolvers and
+knives. Every possible element was here, then, for a murderous outbreak.
+The good citizens, white and black, were far away in their homes; the bad
+men had been drinking in the dives permitted to exist by the respectable
+people of Atlanta; and here they were gathered, by night, in the heart of
+the city.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><i>The Mob Gathers</i></p>
+
+<p>And, finally, a trivial incident fired the tinder. Fear and vengeance
+generated it: it was marked at first by a sort of rough, half-drunken
+horseplay, but when once blood was shed, the brute, which is none too well
+controlled in the best city, came out and gorged itself. Once permit the
+shackles of law and order to be cast off, and men, white or black,
+Christian or pagan, revert to primordial savagery. There is no such thing
+as an orderly mob.</p>
+
+<p>Crime had been committed by Negroes, but this mob made no attempt to find
+the criminals: it expressed its blind, unreasoning, uncontrolled race
+hatred by attacking every man, woman, or boy it saw who had a black face.
+A lame boot-black, an inoffensive, industrious Negro boy, at that moment
+actually at work shining a man&#8217;s shoes, was dragged out and cuffed, kicked
+and beaten to death in the street. Another young Negro was chased and
+stabbed to death with jack-knives in the most unspeakably horrible manner.
+The mob entered barber shops where respectable Negro men were at work
+shaving white customers, pulled them away from their chairs and beat them.
+Cars were stopped and inoffensive Negroes were thrown through the windows
+or dragged out and <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_11" id="Page_11">[Pg 11]</a></span>beaten. They did not stop with killing and maiming;
+they broke into hardware stores and armed themselves, they demolished not
+only Negro barber shops and restaurants, but they robbed stores kept by
+white men.</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<table width="50%" border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="5" summary="table">
+<tr><td colspan="2"><img src="images/gs03_top.jpg" alt="" /></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="center">JAMES H. WALLACE</td><td align="center">R. R. WRIGHT</td></tr>
+<tr><td>&#8220;The asphalt workers are nearly all coloured. In New York ... the chosen
+representative who sits with the Central Federated Union of the city is James H. Wallace, a coloured man.&#8221;</td>
+<td>Organiser of the Negro State Fair in Georgia. Of full-blooded African descent, his grandmother, who reared him, being an African Negro of the Mandingo tribe.</td></tr>
+<tr><td>&nbsp;</td></tr>
+<tr><td colspan="2"><img src="images/gs03_mid.jpg" alt="" /></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="center">H. O. TANNER</td><td align="center">REV. H. H. PROCTOR</td></tr>
+<tr><td>One of whose pictures hangs in the Luxembourg; winner N. W. Harris prize for the best American painting at Chicago.</td>
+<td>Pastor of the First Congregational Church (coloured), to which belong many of the best coloured families of Atlanta.</td></tr>
+<tr><td>&nbsp;</td></tr>
+<tr><td colspan="2"><img src="images/gs03_bot.jpg" alt="" /></td></tr>
+<tr><td colspan="2" align="right"><small>Photograph by Sexton &amp; Maxwell</small></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="center">DR. W. F. PENN</td><td align="center">GEORGE W. CABLE</td></tr>
+<tr><td>This prosperous Negro physician&#8217;s home in Atlanta was visited by the mob.</td>
+<td>Chairman of the coloured probation officers of the Juvenile Court, Indianapolis.</td></tr></table>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>Of course the Mayor came out, and the police force and the fire
+department, and finally the Governor ordered out the militia&mdash;to apply
+that pound of cure which should have been an ounce of prevention.</p>
+
+<p>It is highly significant of Southern conditions&mdash;which the North does not
+understand&mdash;that the first instinct of thousands of Negroes in Atlanta,
+when the riot broke out, was not to run away from the white people but to
+run to them. The white man who takes the most radical position in
+opposition to the Negro race will often be found loaning money to
+individual Negroes, feeding them and their families from his kitchen, or
+defending &#8220;his Negroes&#8221; in court or elsewhere. All of the more prominent
+white citizens of Atlanta, during the riot, protected and fed many
+coloured families who ran to them in their terror. Even Hoke Smith,
+Governor-elect of Georgia, who is more distrusted by the Negroes as a race
+probably than any other white man in Georgia, protected many Negroes in
+his house during the disturbance. In many cases white friends armed
+Negroes and told them to protect themselves. One widow I know of who had a
+single black servant, placed a shot-gun in his hands and told him to fire
+on any mob that tried to get him. She trusted him absolutely. Southern
+people possess a real liking, wholly unknown in the North, for individual
+Negroes whom they know.</p>
+
+<p>So much for Saturday night. Sunday was quiescent but nervous&mdash;the
+atmosphere full of the electricity of apprehension. Monday night, after a
+day of alarm and of prowling crowds of men, which might at any moment
+develop into mobs, the riot broke forth again&mdash;in a suburb of Atlanta
+called Brownsville.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><i>Story of the Mob&#8217;s Work in a Southern Negro Town</i></p>
+
+<p>When I went out to Brownsville, knowing of its bloody part in the riot, I
+expected to find a typical Negro slum. I looked for squalour, ignorance,
+vice. And I was surprised to<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_12" id="Page_12">[Pg 12]</a></span> find a large settlement of Negroes
+practically every one of whom owned his own home, some of the houses being
+as attractive without and as well furnished within as the ordinary homes
+of middle-class white people. Near at hand, surrounded by beautiful
+grounds, were two Negro colleges&mdash;Clark University and Gammon Theological
+Seminary. The post-office was kept by a Negro. There were several stores
+owned by Negroes. The school-house, though supplied with teachers by the
+county, was built wholly with money personally contributed by the Negroes
+of the neighbourhood, in order that there might be adequate educational
+facilities for their children. They had three churches and not a saloon.
+The residents were all of the industrious, property-owning sort, bearing
+the best reputation among white people who knew them.</p>
+
+<p>Think, then, of the situation in Brownsville during the riot in Atlanta.
+All sorts of exaggerated rumours came from the city. <i>The Negroes of
+Atlanta were being slaughtered wholesale.</i> A condition of panic fear
+developed. Many of the people of the little town sought refuge in Gammon
+Theological Seminary, where, packed together, they sat up all one night
+praying. President Bowen did not have his clothes off for days, expecting
+the mob every moment. He telephoned for police protection on Sunday, but
+none was provided. Terror also existed among the families which remained
+in Brownsville; most of the men were armed, and they had decided, should
+the mob appear, to make a stand in defence of their homes.</p>
+
+<p>At last, on Monday evening, just at dark, a squad of the county police,
+led by Officer Poole, marched into the settlement at Brownsville. Here,
+although there had been not the slightest sign of disturbance, they began
+arresting Negroes for being armed. Several armed white citizens, who were
+not officers, joined them.</p>
+
+<p>Finally, looking up a little street they saw dimly in the next block a
+group of Negro men. Part of the officers were left with the prisoners and
+part went up the street. As they approached the group of Negroes, the
+officers began firing: the Negroes responded. Officer Heard was shot dead;
+another officer was wounded, and several Negroes were killed or injured.</p>
+
+<p>The police went back to town with their prisoners. On<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_13" id="Page_13">[Pg 13]</a></span> the way two of the
+Negroes in their charge were shot. A white man&#8217;s wife, who saw the
+outrage, being with child, dropped dead of fright.</p>
+
+<p>The Negroes (all of this is now a matter of court record) declared that
+they were expecting the mob; that the police&mdash;not mounted as usual, not
+armed as usual, and accompanied by citizens&mdash;looked to them in the
+darkness like a mob. In their fright the firing began.</p>
+
+<p>The wildest reports, of course, were circulated. One sent broadcast was
+that five hundred students of Clark University, all armed, had decoyed the
+police in order to shoot them down. As a matter of fact, the university
+did not open its fall session until October 3d, over a week later&mdash;and on
+this night there were just two students on the grounds. The next morning
+the police and the troops appeared and arrested a very large proportion of
+the male inhabitants of the town. Police officers accompanied by white
+citizens, entered one Negro home, where lay a man named Lewis, badly
+wounded the night before. He was in bed; they opened his shirt, placed
+their revolvers at his breast, and in cold blood shot him through the body
+several times in the presence of his relatives. They left him for dead,
+but he has since recovered.</p>
+
+<p>President Bowen, of Gammon <ins class="correction" title="original: Thelogical">Theological</ins> Seminary, one of the able Negroes
+in Atlanta, who had nothing whatever to do with the riot, was beaten over
+the head by one of the police with his rifle-butt. The Negroes were all
+disarmed, and about sixty of them were finally taken to Atlanta and locked
+up charged with the murder of Officer Heard.</p>
+
+<p>In the Brownsville riot four Negroes were killed. One was a decent,
+industrious, though loud-talking, citizen named Fambro, who kept a small
+grocery store and owned two houses besides, which he rented. He had a
+comfortable home, a wife and one child. Another was an inoffensive Negro
+named Wilder, seventy years old, a pensioner as a soldier of the Civil
+War, who was well spoken of by all who knew him. He was found&mdash;not shot,
+but murdered by a knife-cut in the abdomen&mdash;lying in a woodshed back of
+Fambro&#8217;s store. McGruder, a brick mason, who earned $4 a day at his trade,
+and who had laid aside enough to earn his own home, was killed while under
+arrest by the police; and Robinson, an industrious Negro<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_14" id="Page_14">[Pg 14]</a></span> carpenter, was
+shot to death on his way to work Tuesday morning after the riot.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><i>Results of the Riot</i></p>
+
+<p>And after the riot in Brownsville, what? Here was a self-respecting
+community of hard-working Negroes, disturbing no one, getting an honest
+living. How did the riot affect them? Well, it demoralised them, set them
+back for years. Not only were four men killed and several wounded, but
+sixty of their citizens were in jail. Nearly every family had to go to the
+lawyers, who would not take their cases without money in hand. Hence the
+little homes had to be sold or mortgaged, or money borrowed in some other
+way to defend those arrested, doctors&#8217; bills were to be paid, the
+undertaker must be settled with. A riot is not over when the shooting
+stops! And when the cases finally came up in court and all the evidence
+was brought out every Negro went free; but two of the county policemen who
+had taken part in the shooting, were punished. George Muse, one of the
+foremost merchants of Atlanta, who was foreman of the jury which tried the
+Brownsville Negroes, said:</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;We think the Negroes were gathered just as white people were in other
+parts of the town, for the purpose of defending their homes. We were
+shocked by the conduct which the evidence showed some of the county police
+had been guilty of.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>After the riot was over many Negro families, terrified and feeling
+themselves unprotected, sold out for what they could get&mdash;I heard a good
+many pitiful stories of such sudden and costly sacrifices&mdash;and left the
+country, some going to California, some to Northern cities. The best and
+most enterprising are those who go: the worst remain. Not only did the
+Negroes leave Brownsville, but they left the city itself in considerable
+numbers. Labour was thus still scarcer and wages higher in Atlanta because
+of the riot.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><i>Report of a White Committee on the Riot</i></p>
+
+<p>It is significant that not one of the Negroes killed and wounded in the
+riot was of the criminal class. Every one was<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_15" id="Page_15">[Pg 15]</a></span> industrious, respectable
+and law-abiding. A white committee, composed of W. G. Cooper, Secretary of
+the Chamber of Commerce, and George Muse, a prominent merchant, backed by
+the sober citizenship of the town, made an honest investigation and issued
+a brave and truthful report. Here are a few of its conclusions:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>1. Among the victims of the mob there was not a single vagrant.</p>
+
+<p>2. They were earning wages in useful work up to the time of the riot.</p>
+
+<p>3. They were supporting themselves and their families or dependent
+relatives.</p>
+
+<p>4. Most of the dead left small children and widows, mothers or
+sisters with practically no means and very small earning capacity.</p>
+
+<p>5. The wounded lost from one to eight weeks&#8217; time, at 50 cents to $4
+a day each.</p>
+
+<p>6. About seventy persons were wounded, and among these there was an
+immense amount of suffering. In some cases it was prolonged and
+excruciating pain.</p>
+
+<p>7. Many of the wounded are disfigured, and several are permanently
+disabled.</p>
+
+<p>8. Most of them were in humble circumstances, but they were honest,
+industrious and law-abiding citizens and useful members of society.</p>
+
+<p>9. These statements are true of both white and coloured.</p>
+
+<p>10. Of the wounded, ten are white and sixty are coloured. Of the
+dead, two are white and ten are coloured; two female, and ten male.
+This includes three killed at Brownsville.</p>
+
+<p>11. Wild rumours of a larger number killed have no foundation that we
+can discover. As the city was paying the funeral expenses of victims
+and relief was given their families, they had every motive to make
+known their loss. In one case relatives of a man killed in a broil
+made fruitless efforts to secure relief.</p>
+
+<p>12. Two persons reported as victims of the riot had no connection
+with it. One, a Negro man, was killed in a broil over a crap game;
+and another, a Negro woman, was killed by her paramour. Both
+homicides occurred at some distance from the scene of the riot.</p></div>
+
+<p>The men who made this brave report did not mince matters. They called
+murder, murder; and robbery, robbery. Read this:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>13. As twelve persons were killed and seventy were murderously
+assaulted, and as, by all accounts, a number took part in each
+assault, it is clear that several hundred murderers or would-be
+murderers are at large in this community.</p></div>
+
+<p>At first, after the riot, there was an inclination in some quarters to
+say:</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Well, at any rate, the riot cleared the atmosphere. The Negroes have had
+their lesson. There won&#8217;t be any more trouble soon.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_16" id="Page_16">[Pg 16]</a></span>But read the sober conclusions in the Committee&#8217;s report. The riot did not
+prevent further crime.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>14. Although less than three months have passed since the riot,
+events have already demonstrated that the slaughter of the innocent
+does not deter the criminal class from committing more crimes. Rapes
+and robbery have been committed in the city during that time.</p>
+
+<p>15. The slaughter of the innocent does drive away good citizens. From
+one small neighbourhood twenty-five families have gone. A great many
+of them were buying homes on the instalment plan.</p>
+
+<p>16. The crimes of the mob include robbery as well as murder. In a
+number of cases the property of innocent and unoffending people was
+taken. Furniture was destroyed, small shops were looted, windows were
+smashed, trunks were burst open, money was taken from the small
+hoard, and articles of value were appropriated. In the commission of
+these crimes the victims, both men and women, were treated with
+unspeakable brutality.</p>
+
+<p>17. As a result of four days of lawlessness there are in this glad
+Christmas-time widows of both races mourning their husbands, and
+husbands of both races mourning for their wives; there are orphan
+children of both races who cry out in vain for faces they will see no
+more; there are grown men of both races disabled for life, and all
+this sorrow has come to people who are absolutely innocent of any
+wrong-doing.</p></div>
+
+<p>In trying to find out exactly the point of view and the feeling of the
+Negroes&mdash;which is most important in any honest consideration of
+conditions&mdash;I was handed the following letter, written by a young coloured
+man, a former resident in Atlanta now a student in the North. He is
+writing frankly to a friend. It is valuable as showing a <i>real</i> point of
+view&mdash;the bitterness, the hopelessness, the distrust.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;... It is possible that you have formed at least a good idea of how we
+feel as the result of the horrible eruption in Georgia. I have not spoken
+to a Caucasian on the subject since then. But, listen: How would you feel,
+if with our history, there came a time when, after speeches and papers and
+teachings you acquired property and were educated, and were a fairly good
+man, it were impossible for you to walk the street (for whose maintenance
+you were taxed) with your sister without being in mortal fear of death if
+you resented any insult offered to her? How would you feel if you saw a
+governor, a mayor, a sheriff, whom you could not oppose at the polls,
+encourage by deed or word or both, a mob of &#8216;best&#8217; and worst citizens to
+slaughter your people in the streets and in their own homes and in their
+places of business? Do you think that you could resist the same wrath that
+caused God<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_17" id="Page_17">[Pg 17]</a></span> to slay the Philistines and the Russians to throw bombs? I can
+resist it, but with each new outrage I am less able to resist it. And yet
+if I gave way to my feelings I should become just like other men ... of
+the mob! But I do not ... not quite, and I must hurry through the only
+life I shall live on earth, tortured by these experiences and these
+horrible impulses, with no hope of ever getting away from them. They are
+ever present, like the just God, the devil, and my conscience.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;If there were no such thing as Christianity we should be hopeless.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Besides this effect on the Negroes the riot for a week or more practically
+paralysed the city of Atlanta. Factories were closed, railroad cars were
+left unloaded in the yards, the street-car system was crippled, and there
+was no cab-service (cab-drivers being Negroes), hundreds of servants
+deserted their places, the bank clearings slumped by hundreds of thousands
+of dollars, the state fair, then just opening, was a failure. It was,
+indeed, weeks before confidence was fully restored and the city returned
+to its normal condition.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><i>Who Made Up the Mob?</i></p>
+
+<p>One more point I wish to make before taking up the extraordinary
+reconstructive work which followed the riot. I have not spoken of the men
+who made up the mob. We know the dangerous Negro class&mdash;after all a very
+small proportion of the entire Negro population. There is a corresponding
+low class of whites quite as illiterate as the Negroes.</p>
+
+<p>The poor white hates the Negro, and the Negro dislikes the poor white. It
+is in these lower strata of society, where the races rub together in
+unclean streets, that the fire is generated. Decatur and Peters streets,
+with their swarming saloons and dives, furnish the point of contact. I
+talked with many people who saw the mobs at different times, and the
+universal testimony was that it was made up largely of boys and young men,
+and of the low criminal and semi-criminal class. The ignorant Negro and
+the uneducated white; there lies the trouble!</p>
+
+<p>This idea that 115,000 people of Atlanta&mdash;respectable, law-abiding, good
+citizens, white and black&mdash;should be disgraced before the world by a few
+hundred criminals was<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_18" id="Page_18">[Pg 18]</a></span> what aroused the strong, honest citizenship of
+Atlanta to vigorous action.</p>
+
+<p>The riot brought out all that was worst in human nature; the
+reconstruction brought out all that was best and finest.</p>
+
+<p>Almost the first act of the authorities was to close every saloon in the
+city, afterward revoking all the licences&mdash;and for two weeks no liquor was
+sold in the city. The police, at first accused of not having done their
+best in dealing with the mob, arrested a good many white rioters, and
+Judge Broyles, to show that the authorities had no sympathy with such
+disturbers of the peace, sent every man brought before him, twenty-four in
+all, to the chain gang for the largest possible sentence, without the
+alternative of a fine. The grand jury met and boldly denounced the mob;
+its report said in part:</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;That the sensationalism of the afternoon papers in the presentation of
+the criminal news to the public prior to the riots of Saturday night,
+especially in the case of the Atlanta <i>News</i>, deserves our severest
+condemnation.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>But the most important and far-reaching effect of the riot was in arousing
+the strong men of the city. It struck at the pride of those men of the
+South, it struck at their sense of law and order, it struck at their
+business interests. On Sunday following the first riot a number of
+prominent men gathered at the Piedmont Hotel, and had a brief discussion;
+but it was not until Tuesday afternoon, when the worst of the news from
+Brownsville had come in, that they gathered in the court-house with the
+serious intent of stopping the riot at all costs. Most of the prominent
+men of Atlanta were present. Sam D. Jones, president of the Chamber of
+Commerce, presided. One of the first speeches was made by Charles T.
+Hopkins, who had been the leading spirit in the meetings on Sunday and
+Monday. He expressed with eloquence the humiliation which Atlanta felt.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Saturday evening at eight o&#8217;clock,&#8221; he said, &#8220;the credit of Atlanta was
+good for any number of millions of dollars in New York or Boston or any
+financial centre; to-day we couldn&#8217;t borrow fifty cents. The reputation we
+have been building up so arduously for years has been swept away in two
+short hours. Not by men who have made and make Atlanta, not by men who
+represent the character and strength<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_19" id="Page_19">[Pg 19]</a></span> of our city, but by hoodlums,
+understrappers and white criminals. Innocent Negro men have been struck
+down for no crime whatever, while peacefully enjoying the life and liberty
+guaranteed to every American citizen. The Negro race is a child race. We
+are a strong race, their guardians. We have boasted of our superiority and
+we have now sunk to this level&mdash;we have shed the blood of our helpless
+wards. Christianity and humanity demand that we treat the Negro fairly. He
+is here, and here to stay. He only knows how to do those things we teach
+him to do; it is our Christian duty to protect him. I for one, and I
+believe I voice the best sentiment of this city, am willing to lay down my
+life rather than to have the scenes of the last few days repeated.&#8221;</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><i>The Plea of a Negro Physician</i></p>
+
+<p>In the midst of the meeting a coloured man arose rather doubtfully. He
+was, however, promptly recognized as Dr. W. F. Penn, one of the foremost
+coloured physicians of Atlanta, a graduate of Yale College&mdash;a man of much
+influence among his people. He said that he had come to ask the protection
+of the white men of Atlanta. He said that on the day before a mob had come
+to his home; that ten white men, some of whose families he knew and had
+treated professionally, had been sent into his house to look for concealed
+arms; that his little girl had run to them, one after another, and begged
+them not to shoot her father; that his life and the lives of his family
+had afterward been threatened, so that he had had to leave his home; that
+he had been saved from a gathering mob by a white man in an automobile.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;What shall we do?&#8221; he asked the meeting&mdash;and those who heard his speech
+said that the silence was profound. &#8220;We have been disarmed: how shall we
+protect our lives and property? If living a sober, industrious, upright
+life, accumulating property and educating his children as best he knows
+how, is not the standard by which a coloured man can live and be protected
+in the South, what is to become of him? If the kind of life I have lived
+isn&#8217;t the kind you want, shall I leave and go North?</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;When we aspire to be decent and industrious we are told<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_20" id="Page_20">[Pg 20]</a></span> that we are bad
+examples to other coloured men. Tell us what your standards are for
+coloured men. What are the requirements under which we may live and be
+protected? What shall we do?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>When he had finished, Colonel A. J. McBride, a real estate owner and a
+Confederate veteran, arose and said with much feeling that he knew Dr.
+Penn and that he was a good man, and that Atlanta meant to protect such
+men.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;If necessary,&#8221; said Colonel McBride, &#8220;I will go out and sit on his porch
+with a rifle.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Such was the spirit of this remarkable meeting. Mr. Hopkins proposed that
+the white people of the city express their deep regret for the riot and
+show their sympathy for the Negroes who had suffered at the hands of the
+mob by raising a fund of money for their assistance. Then and there $4,423
+was subscribed, to which the city afterward added $1,000.</p>
+
+<p>But this was not all. These men, once thoroughly aroused, began looking to
+the future, to find some new way of preventing the recurrence of such
+disturbances.</p>
+
+<p>A committee of ten, appointed to work with the public officials in
+restoring order and confidence, consisted of some of the foremost citizens
+of Atlanta:</p>
+
+<p>Charles T. Hopkins, Sam D. Jones, President of the Chamber of Commerce; L.
+Z. Rosser, president of the Board of Education; J. W. English, president
+of the Fourth National Bank; Forrest Adair, a leading real estate owner;
+Captain W. D. Ellis, a prominent lawyer; A. B. Steele, a wealthy lumber
+merchant; M. L. Collier, a railroad man; John E. Murphy, capitalist; and
+H. Y. McCord, president of a wholesale grocery house.</p>
+
+<p>One of the first and most unexpected things that this committee did was to
+send for several of the leading Negro citizens of Atlanta: the Rev. H. H.
+Proctor, B. J. Davis, editor of the <i>Independent</i>, a Negro journal, the
+Rev. E. P. Johnson, the Rev. E. R. Carter, the Rev. J. A. Rush, and Bishop
+Holsey.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><i>Committees of the Two Races Meet</i></p>
+
+<p>This was the first important occasion in the South upon which an attempt
+was made to get the two races together for any serious consideration of
+their differences.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_21" id="Page_21">[Pg 21]</a></span>They held a meeting. The white men asked the Negroes, &#8220;What shall we do to
+relieve the irritation?&#8221; The Negroes said that they thought that coloured
+men were treated with unnecessary roughness on the street-cars and by the
+police. The white members of the committee admitted that this was so and
+promised to take the matter up immediately with the street-car company and
+the police department, which was done. The discussion was harmonious.
+After the meeting Mr. Hopkins said:</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I believe those Negroes understood the situation better than we did. I
+was astonished at their intelligence and diplomacy. They never referred to
+the riot: they were looking to the future. I didn&#8217;t know that there were
+such Negroes in Atlanta.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Out of this beginning grew the Atlanta Civic League. Knowing that race
+prejudice was strong, Mr. Hopkins sent out 2,000 cards, inviting the most
+prominent men in the city to become members. To his surprise 1,500
+immediately accepted, only two refused, and those anonymously; 500 men not
+formally invited were also taken as members. The league thus had the great
+body of the best citizens of Atlanta behind it. At the same time Mr.
+Proctor and his committee of Negroes had organised a Coloured Co-operative
+Civic League, which secured a membership of 1,500 of the best coloured men
+in the city. A small committee of Negroes met a small committee of the
+white league.</p>
+
+<p>Fear was expressed that there would be another riotous outbreak during the
+Christmas holidays, and the league proceeded with vigour to prevent it.
+New policemen were put on, and the committee worked with Judge Broyles and
+Judge Roan in issuing statements warning the people against lawlessness.
+They secured an agreement among the newspapers not to publish sensational
+news; the sheriff agreed, if necessary, to swear in some of the best men
+in town as extra deputies; they asked that saloons be closed at four
+o&#8217;clock on Christmas Eve; and through the Negro committee, they brought
+influence to bear to keep all coloured people off the streets. When two
+county police got drunk at Brownsville and threatened Mrs. Fambro, the
+wife of one of the Negroes killed in the riot, a member of the committee,
+Mr. Seeley,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_22" id="Page_22">[Pg 22]</a></span> publisher of the <i>Georgian</i>, informed the sheriff and sent
+his automobile to Brownsville, where the policemen were arrested and
+afterward discharged from the force. As a result, it was the quietest
+Christmas Atlanta had had in years.</p>
+
+<p>But the most important of all the work done, because of the spectacular
+interest it aroused, was the defence of a Negro charged with an assault
+upon a white woman. It is an extraordinary and dramatic story.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><i>Does a Riot Prevent Further Crime?</i></p>
+
+<p>Although many people said that the riot would prevent any more Negro
+crime, several attacks on white women occurred within a few weeks
+afterward. On November 13th Mrs. J. D. Camp, living in the suburbs of
+Atlanta, was attacked in broad daylight in her home and brutally assaulted
+by a Negro, who afterward robbed the house and escaped. Though the crime
+was treated with great moderation by the newspapers, public feeling was
+intense. A Negro was arrested, charged with the crime. Mr. Hopkins and his
+associates believed that the best way to secure justice and prevent
+lynchings was to have a prompt trial. Accordingly, they held a conference
+with Judge Roan, as a result of which three lawyers in the city, Mr.
+Hopkins, L. Z. Rosser, and J. E. McClelland, were appointed to defend the
+accused Negro, serving without pay. A trial-jury, composed of twelve
+citizens, among the most prominent in Atlanta, was called&mdash;one of the
+ablest juries ever drawn in Georgia. There was a determination to have
+immediate and complete justice.</p>
+
+<p>The Negro arrested, one Joe Glenn, had been completely identified by Mrs.
+Camp as her assailant. Although having no doubt of his guilt, the
+attorneys went at the case thoroughly. The first thing they did was to
+call in two members of the Negro committee, Mr. Davis and Mr. Carter.
+These men went to the jail and talked with Glenn, and afterward they all
+visited the scene of the crime. They found that Glenn, who was a man fifty
+years old with grandchildren, bore an excellent reputation. He rented a
+small farm about two miles from Mrs. Camp&#8217;s home and had some property; he
+was sober and industrious. After making a thorough examination<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_23" id="Page_23">[Pg 23]</a></span> and
+getting all the evidence they could, they came back to Atlanta, persuaded,
+in spite of the fact that the Negro had been positively identified by Mrs.
+Camp&mdash;which in these cases is usually considered conclusive&mdash;that Glenn
+was not guilty. It was a most dramatic trial; at first, when Mrs. Camp was
+placed on the stand she failed to identify Glenn; afterward, reversing
+herself she broke forth into a passionate denunciation of him. But after
+the evidence was all in, the jury retired, and reported two minutes later
+with a verdict &#8220;Not guilty.&#8221; Remarkably enough, just before the trial was
+over the police informed the court that another Negro, named Will Johnson,
+answering Mrs. Camp&#8217;s description, had been arrested, charged with the
+crime. He was subsequently identified by Mrs. Camp.</p>
+
+<p>Without this energetic defence, an innocent, industrious Negro would
+certainly have been hanged&mdash;or if the mob had been ahead of the police, as
+it usually is, he would have been lynched.</p>
+
+<p>But what of Glenn afterward?</p>
+
+<p>When the jury left the box Mr. Hopkins turned to Glenn and said:</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Well, Joe, what do you think of the case?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>He replied: &#8220;Boss I &#8217;spec&#8217;s they will hang me, for that lady said I was
+the man, but they won&#8217;t hang me, will they, &#8217;fore I sees my wife and
+chilluns again?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>He was kept in the tower that night and the following day for protection
+against a possible lynching. Plans were made by his attorneys to send him
+secretly out of the city to the home of a farmer in Alabama, whom they
+could trust with the story. Glenn&#8217;s wife was brought to visit the jail and
+Glenn was told of the plans for his safety, and instructed to change his
+name and keep quiet until the feeling of the community could be
+ascertained.</p>
+
+<p>A ticket was purchased by his attorneys, with a new suit of clothes, hat,
+and shoes. He was taken out of jail about midnight under a strong guard,
+and safely placed on the train. From that day to this he has never been
+heard of. He did not go to Alabama. The poor creature, with the instinct
+of a hunted animal, did not dare after all to trust the white men who had
+befriended him. He is a fugitive, away<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_24" id="Page_24">[Pg 24]</a></span> from his family, not daring,
+though innocent, to return to his home.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><i>Other Reconstruction Movements</i></p>
+
+<p>Another strong movement also sprung into existence. Its inspiration was
+religious. Ministers wrote a series of letters to the Atlanta
+<i>Constitution</i>. Clark Howell, its editor, responded with an editorial
+entitled &#8220;Shall We Blaze the Trail?&#8221; W. J. Northen, Ex-Governor of
+Georgia, and one of the most highly respected men in the state, took up
+the work, asking himself, as he says:</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;What am I to do, who have to pray every night?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>He answered that question by calling a meeting at the Coloured Y. M. C. A.
+building, where some twenty white men met an equal number of Negroes,
+mostly preachers, and held a prayer meeting.</p>
+
+<p>The South still looks to its ministers for leadership&mdash;and they really
+lead. The sermons of men like the Rev. John E. White, the Rev. C. B.
+Wilmer, the Rev. W. W. Landrum, who have spoken with power and ability
+against lawlessness and injustice to the Negro, have had a large influence
+in the reconstruction movement.</p>
+
+<p>Ex-Governor Northen travelled through the state of Georgia, made a notable
+series of speeches, urged the establishment of law and order
+organisations, and met support wherever he went. He talked against mob-law
+and lynching in plain language. Here are some of the things he said:</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;We shall never settle this until we give absolute justice to the Negro.
+We are not now doing justice to the Negro in Georgia.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Get into contact with the best Negroes; there are plenty of good Negroes
+in Georgia. What we must do is to get the good white folks to leaven the
+bad white folks and the good Negroes to leaven the bad Negroes.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;There must be no aristocracy of crime: a white fiend is as much to be
+dreaded as a black brute.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>These movements did not cover specifically, it will be observed, the
+enormously difficult problems of politics, and the political relationships
+of the races, nor the subject of Negro<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_25" id="Page_25">[Pg 25]</a></span> education, nor the most
+exasperating of all the provocatives&mdash;those problems which arise from
+human contact in street cars, railroad trains, and in life generally.</p>
+
+<p>That they had to meet the greatest difficulties in their work is shown by
+such an editorial as the following, published December 12th by the Atlanta
+<i>Evening News</i>:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>No law of God or man can hold back the vengeance of our white men
+upon such a criminal [the Negro who attacks a white woman]. If
+necessary, we will double and treble and quadruple the law of Moses,
+and hang off-hand the criminal, or failing to find that a remedy, we
+will hang two, three, or four of the Negroes nearest to the crime,
+until the crime is no longer done or feared in all this Southern land
+that we inhabit and love.</p></div>
+
+<p>On January 31, 1907, the newspaper which published this editorial went
+into the hands of a receiver&mdash;its failure being due largely to the strong
+public sentiment against its course before and during the riot.</p>
+
+<p>After the excitement of the riot and the evil results which followed it
+began to disappear it was natural that the reconstruction movements should
+quiet down. Ex-Governor Northen continued his work for many months and is
+indeed, still continuing it: and there is no doubt that his campaigns have
+had a wide influence. The feeling that the saloons and dives of Atlanta
+were partly responsible for the riot was a powerful factor in the
+anti-saloon campaign which took place in 1907 and resulted in closing
+every saloon in the state of Georgia on January 1, 1908. And the riot and
+the revulsion which followed it will combine to make a recurrence of such
+a disturbance next to impossible.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr style="width: 50%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_26" id="Page_26">[Pg 26]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_II" id="CHAPTER_II"></a>CHAPTER II</h2>
+<h3>FOLLOWING THE COLOUR LINE IN THE SOUTH</h3>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="dropcap"><span class="caps">Before</span> entering upon a discussion of the more serious aspects of the Negro
+question in the South, it may prove illuminating if I set down, briefly,
+some of the more superficial evidences of colour line distinctions in the
+South as they impress the investigator. The present chapter consists of a
+series of sketches from my note-books giving the earliest and freshest
+impressions of my studies in the South.</p>
+
+<p>When I first went South I expected to find people talking about the Negro,
+but I was not at all prepared to find the subject occupying such an
+overshadowing place in Southern affairs. In the North we have nothing at
+all like it; no question which so touches every act of life, in which
+everyone, white or black, is so profoundly interested. In the North we are
+mildly concerned in many things; the South is overwhelmingly concerned in
+this one thing.</p>
+
+<p>And this is not surprising, for the Negro in the South is both the labour
+problem and the servant question; he is pre&euml;minently the political issue,
+and his place, socially, is of daily and hourly discussion. A Negro
+minister I met told me a story of a boy who went as a sort of butler&#8217;s
+assistant in the home of a prominent family in Atlanta. His people were
+naturally curious about what went on in the white man&#8217;s house. One day
+they asked him:</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;What do they talk about when they&#8217;re eating?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The boy thought a moment; then he said:</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Mostly they discusses us culled folks.&#8221;</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><i>What Negroes Talk About</i></p>
+
+<p>The same consuming interest exists among the Negroes. A very large part of
+their conversation deals with the race<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_27" id="Page_27">[Pg 27]</a></span> question. I had been at the
+Piedmont Hotel only a day or two when my Negro waiter began to take
+especially good care of me. He flecked off imaginary crumbs and gave me
+unnecessary spoons. Finally, when no one was at hand, he leaned over and
+said:</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I understand you&#8217;re down here to study the Negro problem.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Yes,&#8221; I said, a good deal surprised. &#8220;How did you know it?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Well, sir,&#8221; he replied, &#8220;we&#8217;ve got ways of knowing things.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>He told me that the Negroes had been much disturbed ever since the riot
+and that he knew many of them who wanted to go North. &#8220;The South,&#8221; he
+said, &#8220;is getting to be too dangerous for coloured people.&#8221; His language
+and pronunciation were surprisingly good. I found that he was a college
+student, and that he expected to study for the ministry.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Do you talk much about these things among yourselves?&#8221; I asked.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;We don&#8217;t talk about much else,&#8221; he said. &#8220;It&#8217;s sort of life and death with us.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Another curious thing happened not long afterward. I was lunching with
+several fine Southern men, and they talked, as usual, with the greatest
+freedom in the full hearing of the Negro waiters. Somehow, I could not
+help watching to see if the Negroes took any notice of what was said. I
+wondered if they were sensitive. Finally, I put the question to one of my
+friends:</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Oh,&#8221; he said, &#8220;we never mind them; they don&#8217;t care.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>One of the waiters instantly spoke up:</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;No, don&#8217;t mind me; I&#8217;m only a block of wood.&#8221;</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><i>First Views of the Negroes</i></p>
+
+<p>I set out from the hotel on the morning of my arrival to trace the colour
+line as it appears, outwardly, in the life of such a town.</p>
+
+<p>Atlanta is a singularly attractive place, as bright and new as any Western
+city. Sherman left it in ashes at the close of the war; the old buildings
+and narrow streets were swept away<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_28" id="Page_28">[Pg 28]</a></span> and a new city was built, which is now
+growing in a manner not short of astonishing. It has 115,000 to 125,000
+inhabitants, about a third of whom are Negroes, living in more or less
+detached quarters in various parts of the city, and giving an
+individuality to the life interesting enough to the unfamiliar Northerner.
+A great many of them are always on the streets far better dressed and
+better-appearing than I had expected to see&mdash;having in mind, perhaps, the
+tattered country specimens of the penny postal cards. Crowds of Negroes
+were at work mending the pavement, for the Italian and Slav have not yet
+appeared in Atlanta, nor indeed to any extent anywhere in the South. I
+stopped to watch a group of them. A good deal of conversation was going
+on, here and there a Negro would laugh with great good humour, and several
+times I heard a snatch of a song: much jollier workers than our grim
+foreigners, but evidently not working so hard. A fire had been built to
+heat some of the tools, and a black circle of Negroes were gathered around
+it like flies around a drop of molasses and they were all talking while
+they warmed their shins&mdash;evidently having plenty of leisure.</p>
+
+<p>As I continued down the street, I found that all the drivers of waggons
+and cabs were Negroes; I saw Negro newsboys, Negro porters, Negro barbers,
+and it being a bright day, many of them were in the street&mdash;on the sunny
+side.</p>
+
+<p>I commented that evening to some Southern people I met, on the impression,
+almost of jollity, given by the Negro workers I had seen. One of the older
+ladies made what seemed to me a very significant remark.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;They don&#8217;t sing as they used to,&#8221; she said. &#8220;You should have known the
+old darkeys of the plantation. Every year, it seems to me, they have been
+losing more and more of their care-free good humour. I sometimes feel that
+I don&#8217;t know them any more. Since the riot they have grown so glum and
+serious that I&#8217;m free to say I&#8217;m scared of them!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>One of my early errands that morning led me into several of the great new
+office buildings, which bear testimony to the extraordinary progress of
+the city. And here I found one of the first evidences of the colour line
+for which I was looking. In both buildings, I found a separate elevator<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_29" id="Page_29">[Pg 29]</a></span>
+for coloured people. In one building, signs were placed reading:</p>
+
+<div class="textbox"><p class="center">FOR WHITES ONLY</p></div>
+
+<p>In another I copied this sign:</p>
+
+<div class="textbox2"><p class="center">THIS CAR FOR COLOURED PASSENGERS,<br />FREIGHT, EXPRESS AND PACKAGES</p></div>
+
+<p>Curiously enough, as giving an interesting point of view, an intelligent
+Negro with whom I was talking a few days later asked me:</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Have you seen the elevator sign in the Century Building?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>I said I had.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;How would you like to be classed with &#8216;freight, express and packages&#8217;?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>I found that no Negro ever went into an elevator devoted to white people,
+but that white people often rode in cars set apart for coloured people. In
+some cases the car for Negroes is operated by a white man, and in other
+cases, all the elevators in a building are operated by coloured men. This
+is one of the curious points of industrial contact in the South which
+somewhat surprise the Northern visitor. In the North a white workman will
+often refuse to work with a Negro; in the South, while the social
+prejudice is strong, Negroes and whites work together side by side in many
+kinds of employment.</p>
+
+<p>I had an illustration in point not long afterward. Passing the post
+office, I saw several mail-carriers coming out, some white, some black,
+talking and laughing, with no evidence, at first, of the existence of any
+colour line. Interested to see what the real condition was, I went in and
+made inquiries. A most interesting and significant condition developed. I
+found that the postmaster, who is a wise man, sent Negro carriers up
+Peachtree and other fashionable streets, occupied by wealthy white people,
+while white carriers were assigned to beats in the mill districts and
+other parts of town inhabited by the poorer classes of white people.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;You see,&#8221; said my informant, &#8220;the Peachtree people<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_30" id="Page_30">[Pg 30]</a></span> know how to treat
+Negroes. They really prefer a Negro carrier to a white one; it&#8217;s natural
+for them to have a Negro doing such service. But if we sent Negro carriers
+down into the mill district they might get their heads knocked off.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Then he made a philosophical observation:</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;If we had only the best class of white folks down here and the
+industrious Negroes, there wouldn&#8217;t be any trouble.&#8221;</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><i>The Jim Crow Car</i></p>
+
+<p>One of the points in which I was especially interested was the &#8220;Jim Crow&#8221;
+regulations, that is, the system of separation of the races in street cars
+and railroad trains. Next to the question of Negro suffrage, I think the
+people of the North have heard more of the Jim Crow legislation than of
+anything else connected with the Negro problem. The street car is an
+excellent place for observing the points of human contact between the
+races, betraying as it does every shade of feeling upon the part of both.
+In almost no other relationship do the races come together, physically, on
+anything like a common footing. In their homes and in ordinary employment,
+they meet as master and servant; but in the street cars they touch as free
+citizens, each paying for the right to ride, the white not in a place of
+command, the Negro without an obligation of servitude. Street-car
+relationships are, therefore, symbolic of the new conditions. A few years
+ago the Negro came and went in the street cars in most cities and sat
+where he pleased, but gradually Jim Crow laws or local regulations were
+passed, forcing him into certain seats at the back of the car.</p>
+
+<p>While I was in Atlanta, the newspapers reported two significant new
+developments in the policy of separation. In Savannah Jim Crow ordinances
+have gone into effect for the first time, causing violent protestations on
+the part of the Negroes and a refusal by many of them to use the cars at
+all. Montgomery, Ala., about the same time, went one step further and
+demanded, not separate seats in the same car, but entirely separate cars
+for whites and blacks. There could be no better visible evidence of the
+increasing separation of the races, and of the determination of the white
+man to make the Negro &#8220;keep his place,&#8221; than the evolution of the Jim Crow
+regulations.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_31" id="Page_31">[Pg 31]</a></span>I was curious to see how the system worked out in Atlanta. Over the door
+of each car, I found this sign:</p>
+
+<div class="textbox3"><p class="center">WHITE PEOPLE WILL SEAT FROM FRONT OF CAR TOWARD<br />
+THE BACK AND COLORED PEOPLE FROM REAR TOWARD FRONT</p></div>
+
+<p>Sure enough, I found the white people in front and the Negroes behind. As
+the sign indicates, there is no definite line of division between the
+white seats and the black seats, as in many other Southern cities. This
+very absence of a clear demarcation is significant of many relationships
+in the South. The colour line is drawn, but neither race knows just where
+it is. Indeed, it can hardly be definitely drawn in many relationships,
+because it is constantly changing. This uncertainty is a fertile source of
+friction and bitterness. The very first time I was on a car in Atlanta, I
+saw the conductor&mdash;all conductors are white&mdash;ask a Negro woman to get up
+and take a seat farther back in order to make a place for a white man. I
+have also seen white men requested to leave the Negro section of the car.</p>
+
+<p>At one time, when I was on a car the conductor shouted: &#8220;Heh, you nigger,
+get back there,&#8221; which the Negro, who had taken a seat too far forward,
+proceeded hastily to do.</p>
+
+<p>No other one point of race contact is so much and so bitterly discussed
+among the Negroes as the Jim Crow car. I don&#8217;t know how many Negroes
+replied to my question: &#8220;What is the chief cause of friction down here?&#8221;
+with a complaint of their treatment on street cars and in railroad trains.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><i>Why the Negro Objects to the Jim Crow Car</i></p>
+
+<p>Fundamentally, of course they object to any separation which gives them
+inferior accommodations. This point of view&mdash;and I am trying to set down
+every point of view, both coloured and white, exactly as I find it, is
+expressed in many ways.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;We pay first-class fare,&#8221; said one of the leading Negroes in Atlanta,
+&#8220;exactly as the white man does, but we don&#8217;t get first-class service. I
+say it isn&#8217;t fair.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>In answer to this complaint, the white man says: &#8220;The<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_32" id="Page_32">[Pg 32]</a></span> Negro is inferior,
+he must be made to keep his place. Give him a chance and he assumes social
+equality, and that will lead to an effort at intermarriage and
+amalgamation of the races. The Anglo-Saxon will never stand for that.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>One of the first complaints made by the Negroes after the riot, was of
+rough and unfair treatment on the street cars.</p>
+
+<p>The committee admitted that the Negroes were not always well treated on
+the cars, and promised to improve conditions. Charles T. Hopkins, a leader
+in the Civic League and one of the prominent lawyers of the city, told me
+that he believed the Negroes should be given their definite seats in every
+car; he said that he personally made it a practice to stand up rather than
+to take any one of the four back seats, which he considered as belonging
+to the Negroes. Two other leading men, on a different occasion, told me
+the same thing.</p>
+
+<p>One result of the friction over the Jim Crow regulations is that many
+Negroes ride on the cars as little as possible. One prominent Negro I met
+said he never entered a car, and that he had many friends who pursued the
+same policy; he said that Negro street car excursions, familiar a few
+years ago, had entirely ceased. It is significant of the feeling that one
+of the features of the Atlanta riot was an attack on the street cars in
+which all Negroes were driven out of their seats. One Negro woman was
+pushed through an open window, and, after falling to the pavement, she was
+dragged by the leg across the sidewalk and thrown through a shop window.
+In another case when the mob stopped a car the motorman, instead of
+protecting his passengers, went inside and beat down a Negro with his
+brass control-lever.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><i>Story of an Encounter on a Street Car</i></p>
+
+<p>I heard innumerable stories from both white people and Negroes of
+encounters in the street cars. Dr. W. F. Penn, one of the foremost Negro
+physicians of the city, himself partly white, a graduate of Yale College,
+told me of one occasion in which he entered a car and found there Mrs.
+Crogman, wife of the coloured president of Clark University. Mrs. Crogman
+is a mulatto so light of complexion as to be practically undistinguishable
+from white people. Dr. Penn, who knew her<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_33" id="Page_33">[Pg 33]</a></span> well, sat down beside her and
+began talking. A white man who occupied a seat in front with his wife
+turned and said:</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Here, you nigger, get out of that seat. What do you mean by sitting down
+with a white woman?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Dr. Penn replied somewhat angrily:</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;It&#8217;s come to a pretty pass when a coloured man cannot sit with a woman of
+his own race in his own part of the car.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The white man turned to his wife and said:</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Here, take these bundles. I&#8217;m going to thrash that nigger.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>In half a minute the car was in an uproar, the two men struggling.
+Fortunately the conductor and motorman were quickly at hand, and Dr. Penn
+slipped off the car.</p>
+
+<p>Conditions on the railroad trains, while not resulting so often in
+personal encounters, are also the cause of constant irritation. When I
+came South, I took particular pains to observe the arrangement on the
+trains. In some cases Negroes are given entire cars at the front of the
+train, at other times they occupy the rear end of a combination coach and
+baggage car, which is used in the North as a smoking compartment. The
+complaint here is that, while the Negro is required to pay first-class
+fare, he is provided with second-class accommodations. Well-to-do Negroes
+who can afford to travel, also complain that they are not permitted to
+engage sleeping-car berths. Booker T. Washington usually <ins class="correction" title="original: take">takes</ins> a
+compartment where he is entirely cut off from the white passengers. Some
+other Negroes do the same thing, although they are often refused even this
+expensive privilege. Railroad officials with whom I talked, and it is
+important to hear what they say, said that it was not only a question of
+public opinion&mdash;which was absolutely opposed to any intermingling of the
+races in the cars&mdash;but that Negro travel in most places was small compared
+with white travel, that the ordinary Negro was unclean and careless, and
+that it was impractical to furnish them the same accommodations, even
+though it did come hard on a few educated Negroes. They said that when
+there was a delegation of Negroes, enough to fill an entire sleeping car,
+they could always get accommodations. All of which gives a glimpse of the
+enormous difficulties accompanying the separation of the races in the
+South.</p>
+
+<p>Another interesting point significant of tendencies came<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_34" id="Page_34">[Pg 34]</a></span> early to my
+attention. They had recently finished at Atlanta one of the finest
+railroad stations in this country. The ordinary depot in the South has two
+waiting-rooms of about the same size, one for whites and one for Negroes.
+But when this new station was built the whole front was given up to white
+people, and the Negroes were assigned a side entrance, and a small
+waiting-room. Prominent coloured men regarded it as a new evidence of the
+crowding out of the Negro, the further attempt to give him unequal
+accommodations, to handicap him in his struggle for survival. A delegation
+was sent to the railroad people to protest, but to no purpose. Result:
+further bitterness. There are in the station two lunch-rooms, one for
+whites, one for Negroes.</p>
+
+<p>A leading coloured man said to me:</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;No Negro goes to the lunch-room in the station who can help it. We don&#8217;t
+like the way we have been treated.&#8221;</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><i>A Negro Boycott</i></p>
+
+<p>Of course this was an unusually intelligent coloured man, and he spoke for
+his own sort; how far the same feeling of a race consciousness strong
+enough to carry out such a boycott as this&mdash;and it is like the boycott of
+a labour union&mdash;actuates the masses of ignorant Negroes is a question upon
+which I hope to get more light as I proceed. I have already heard more
+than one coloured leader complain that Negroes do not stand together. And
+a white planter, whom I met in the hotel, said a significant thing along
+this very line:</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;If once the Negroes got together and saved their money, they&#8217;d soon own
+the country, but they can&#8217;t do it, and they never will.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>After I had begun to trace the colour line I found evidences of it
+everywhere&mdash;literally in every department of life. In the theatres,
+Negroes never sit downstairs, but the galleries are black with them. Of
+course, white hotels and restaurants are entirely barred to Negroes, with
+the result that coloured people have their own eating and sleeping places,
+many of them inexpressibly dilapidated and unclean. &#8220;Sleepers wanted&#8221; is a
+familiar sign in Atlanta, giving notice of places where for a few cents a
+Negro can find a bed or a mattress <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_35" id="Page_35">[Pg 35]</a></span>on the floor, often in a room where
+there are many other sleepers, sometimes both men and women in the same
+room crowded together in a manner both unsanitary and immoral. No good
+public accommodations exist for the educated or well-to-do Negro in
+Atlanta, although other cities are developing good Negro hotels. Indeed
+one cannot long remain in the South without being impressed with extreme
+difficulties which beset the exceptional coloured man.</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/gs04_top.jpg" alt="" /></div>
+<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/gs04_bot.jpg" alt="" /></div>
+<p class="center">COMPANION PICTURES</p>
+<p class="center">Showing how the colour line was drawn by the saloons at Atlanta, Georgia.<br />
+Many of the saloons for Negroes were kept by foreigners, usually Jews.</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>In slavery time many Negroes attended white churches and Negro children
+were often taught by white women. Now, a Negro is never (or very rarely)
+seen in a white man&#8217;s church. Once since I have been in the South, I saw a
+very old Negro woman, some much-loved mammy, perhaps&mdash;sitting down in
+front near the pulpit, but that is the only exception to the rule that has
+come to my attention. Negroes are not wanted in white churches.
+Consequently the coloured people have some sixty churches of their own in
+Atlanta. Of course, the schools are separate, and have been ever since the
+Civil War.</p>
+
+<p>In one of the parks of Atlanta I saw this sign:</p>
+
+<div class="textbox2"><p class="center">NO NEGROES ALLOWED IN THIS PARK</p></div>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><i>Colour Line in the Public Library</i></p>
+
+<p>A story significant of the growing separation of the races is told about
+the public library at Atlanta, which no Negro is permitted to enter.
+Carnegie gave the money for building it, and when the question came up as
+to the support of it by the city, the inevitable colour question arose.
+Leading Negroes asserted that their people should be allowed admittance,
+that they needed such an educational advantage even more than white
+people, and that they were to be taxed their share&mdash;even though it was
+small&mdash;for buying the books and maintaining the building. They did not win
+their point of course, but Mr. Carnegie proposed a solution of the
+difficulty by offering more money to build a Negro branch library,
+provided the city would give the land and provide for its support. The
+city said to the Negroes:</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;You contribute the land and we will support the library.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_36" id="Page_36">[Pg 36]</a></span>Influential Negroes at once arranged for buying and contributing a site
+for the library. Then the question of control arose. The Negroes thought
+that inasmuch as they gave the land and the building was to be used
+entirely for coloured people, they should have one or two members on the
+board of control. This the city officials, who had charge of the matter,
+would not hear of; result, the Negroes would not give the land, and the
+branch library has never been built.</p>
+
+<p>Right in this connection: while I was in Atlanta, the Art School, which in
+the past has often used Negro models, decided to draw the colour line
+there, too, and no longer employ them.</p>
+
+<p>Formerly Negroes and white men went to the same saloons, and drank at the
+same bars, as they do now, I am told, in some parts of the South. In a few
+instances, in Atlanta, there were Negro saloon-keepers, and many Negro
+bartenders. The first step toward separation was to divide the bar, the
+upper end for white men, the lower for Negroes. After the riot, by a new
+ordinance no saloon was permitted to serve both white and coloured men.</p>
+
+<p>Consequently, going along Decatur Street, one sees the saloons designated
+by conspicuous signs:<small><a name="f1.1" id="f1.1" href="#f1">[1]</a></small></p>
+
+<table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="5" summary="table">
+<tr><td align="center" class="tbord2">&#8220;WHITES ONLY&#8221;</td><td><span class="spacer">&nbsp;</span></td><td align="center" class="tbord2">&#8220;COLOURED ONLY&#8221;</td></tr></table>
+
+<p>And when the Negro suffers the ordinary consequences of a prolonged visit
+to Decatur Street, and finds himself in the city prison, he is separated
+there, too, from the whites. And afterward in court, if he comes to trial,
+two Bibles are provided; he may take his oath on one; the other is for the
+white man. When he dies he is buried in a separate cemetery.</p>
+
+<p>One curious and enlightening example of the infinite ramifications of the
+colour line was given me by Mr. Logan, secretary of the Atlanta Associated
+Charities, which is supported by voluntary contributions. One day, after
+the riot, a subscriber called Mr. Logan on the telephone and said: &#8220;Do you
+help Negroes in your society?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Why, yes, occasionally,&#8221; said Mr. Logan.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;What do you do that for?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_37" id="Page_37">[Pg 37]</a></span>&#8220;A Negro gets hungry and cold like anybody else,&#8221; answered Mr. Logan.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Well, you can strike my name from your subscription list. I won&#8217;t give
+any of my money to a society that helps Negroes.&#8221;</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><i>Psychology of the South</i></p>
+
+<p>Now, this sounds rather brutal, but behind it lies the peculiar psychology
+of the South. This very man who refused to contribute to the associated
+charities, may have fed several Negroes from his kitchen and had a number
+of Negro pensioners who came to him regularly for help. It was simply
+amazing to me, considering the bitterness of racial feeling, to see how
+lavish many white families are in giving food, clothing, and money to
+individual Negroes whom they know. A Negro cook often supports her whole
+family, including a lazy husband, on what she gets daily from the white
+man&#8217;s kitchen. In some old families the &#8220;basket habit&#8221; of the Negroes is
+taken for granted; in the newer ones, it is, significantly, beginning to
+be called stealing, showing that the old order is passing and that the
+Negro is being held more and more strictly to account, not as a dependent
+vassal, but as a moral being, who must rest upon his own responsibility.</p>
+
+<p>And often a Negro of the old sort will literally bulldoze his hereditary
+white protector into the loan of quarters and half dollars, which both
+know will never be paid back.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Brittain, superintendent of schools in Fulton County, gave me an
+incident in point. A big Negro with whom he was wholly unacquainted came
+to his office one day, and demanded&mdash;he did not ask, but demanded&mdash;a job.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;What&#8217;s your name?&#8221; asked the superintendent.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Marion Luther Brittain,&#8221; was the reply.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;That sounds familiar,&#8221; said Mr. Brittain&mdash;it being, indeed, his own name.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Yas, sah. Ah&#8217;m the son of yo&#8217; ol&#8217; mammy.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>In short, Marion Luther had grown up on the old plantation; it was the
+spirit of the hereditary vassal demanding the protection and support of
+the hereditary baron, and he got it, of course.</p>
+
+<p>The Negro who makes his appeal on the basis of this old<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_38" id="Page_38">[Pg 38]</a></span> relationship
+finds no more indulgent or generous friend than the Southern white man,
+indulgent to the point of excusing thievery and other petty offences, but
+the moment he assumes or demands any other relationship or stands up as an
+independent citizen, the white men&mdash;at least some white men&mdash;turn upon him
+with the fiercest hostility. The incident of the associated charities may
+now be understood. It was not necessarily cruelty to a cold or hungry
+Negro that inspired the demand of the irate subscriber, but the feeling
+that the associated charities helped Negroes and whites on the same basis,
+as men; that, therefore, it encouraged &#8220;social equality,&#8221; and that,
+therefore, it was to be stopped.</p>
+
+<p>Most of the examples so far given are along the line of social contact,
+where, of course, the repulsion is intense. Negroes and whites can go to
+different schools, churches, and saloons, and sit in different street
+cars, and still live pretty comfortably. But the longer I remain in the
+South, the more clearly I come to understand how wide and deep, in other,
+less easily discernible ways, the chasm between the races is becoming.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><i>The New Racial Consciousness Among Negroes</i></p>
+
+<p>One of the natural and inevitable results of the effort of the white man
+to set the Negro off, as a race, by himself, is to awaken in him a new
+consciousness&mdash;a sort of racial consciousness. It drives the Negroes
+together for defence and offence. Many able Negroes, some largely of white
+blood, cut off from all opportunity of success in the greater life of the
+white man, become of necessity leaders of their own people. And one of
+their chief efforts consists in urging Negroes to work together and to
+stand together. In this they are only developing the instinct of defence
+against the white man which has always been latent in the race. This
+instinct exhibits itself in the way in which the mass of Negroes sometimes
+refuse to turn over a criminal of their colour to white justice; it is
+like the instinctive clannishness of the Highland Scotch or the peasant
+Irish. I don&#8217;t know how many Southern people have told me in different
+ways of how extremely difficult it is to get at the real feeling of a
+Negro, to make<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_39" id="Page_39">[Pg 39]</a></span> him tell what goes on in his clubs and churches or in his
+innumerable societies.</p>
+
+<p>A Southern woman told me of a cook who had been in her service for
+nineteen years. The whole family really loved the old servant: her
+mistress made her a confidant, in the way of the old South, in the most
+intimate private and family matters, the daughters told her their love
+affairs; they all petted her and even submitted to many small tyrannies
+upon her part.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;But do you know,&#8221; said my hostess, &#8220;Susie never tells us a thing about
+her life or her friends, and we couldn&#8217;t, if we tried, make her tell what
+goes on in the society she belongs to.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The Negro has long been defensively secretive. Slavery made him that. In
+the past, the instinct was passive and defensive; but with growing
+education and intelligent leadership it is rapidly becoming conscious,
+self-directive and offensive. And right there, it seems to me, lies the
+great cause of the increased strain in the South.</p>
+
+<p>Let me illustrate. In the People&#8217;s Tabernacle in Atlanta, where thousands
+of Negroes meet every Sunday, I saw this sign in huge letters:</p>
+
+<div class="textbox4"><p class="center">FOR PHOTOGRAPHS, GO TO AUBURN PHOTO<br />GALLERY OPERATED BY COLOURED MEN</p></div>
+
+<p>The old-fashioned Negro preferred to go to the white man for everything;
+he didn&#8217;t trust his own people; the new Negro, with growing race
+consciousness, and feeling that the white man is against him, urges his
+friends to patronise Negro doctors and dentists, and to trade with Negro
+storekeepers. The extent to which this movement has gone was one of the
+most surprising things that I, as an unfamiliar Northerner, found in
+Atlanta. In other words, the struggle of the races is becoming more and
+more rapidly economic.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><i>Story of a Negro Shoe-store</i></p>
+
+<p>One day, walking in Broad Street, I passed a Negro shoe-store. I did not
+know that there was such a thing in the country. I went in to make
+inquiries. It was neat, well kept,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_40" id="Page_40">[Pg 40]</a></span> and evidently prosperous. I found that
+it was owned by a stock company, organised and controlled wholly by
+Negroes; the manager was a brisk young mulatto named Harper, a graduate of
+Atlanta University. I found him dictating to a Negro girl stenographer.
+There were two reasons, he said, why the store had been opened; one was
+because the promoters thought it a good business opportunity, and the
+other was because many Negroes of the better class felt that they did not
+get fair treatment at white stores. At some places&mdash;not all, he said&mdash;when
+a Negro woman went to buy a pair of shoes, the clerk would hand them to
+her without offering to help her try them on; and a Negro was always kept
+waiting until all the white people in the store had been served. Since the
+new business was opened, he said, it had attracted much of the Negro
+trade; all the leaders advising their people to patronise him. I was much
+interested to find out how this young man looked upon the race question.
+His first answer struck me forcibly, for it was the universal and typical
+answer of the business man the world over whether white, yellow, or black:</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;All I want,&#8221; he said, &#8220;is to be protected and let alone, so that I can
+build up this business.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;What do you mean by protection?&#8221; I asked.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Well, justice between the races. That doesn&#8217;t mean social equality. We
+have a society of our own, and that is all we want. If he can have justice
+in the courts, and fair protection, we can learn to compete with the white
+stores and get along all right.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Such an enterprise as this indicates the new, economic separation between
+the races.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Here is business,&#8221; says the Negro, &#8220;which I am going to do.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Considering the fact that only a few years ago, the Negro did no business
+at all, and had no professional men, it is really surprising to a
+Northerner to see what progress he has made. One of the first lines he
+took up was&mdash;not unnaturally&mdash;the undertaking business. Some of the most
+prosperous Negroes in every Southern city are undertakers, doing work
+exclusively, of course, for coloured people. Other early enterprises,
+growing naturally out of a history of personal service, were barbering<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_41" id="Page_41">[Pg 41]</a></span>
+and tailoring. Atlanta has many small Negro tailor and clothes-cleaning shops.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><i>Wealthiest Negro in Atlanta</i></p>
+
+<p>The wealthiest Negro in Atlanta, A. F. Herndon, operates the largest
+barber shop in the city; he is the president of a Negro insurance company
+(of which there are four in the city) and he owns and rents some fifty
+dwelling houses. He is said to be worth $80,000, all made, of course,
+since slavery.</p>
+
+<p>Another occupation developing naturally from the industrial training of
+slavery was the business of the building contractor. Several such Negroes,
+notably Alexander Hamilton, do a considerable business in Atlanta, and
+have made money. They are employed by white men, and they hire for their
+jobs both white and Negro workmen.</p>
+
+<p>Small groceries and other stores are of later appearance; I saw at least a
+score of them in various parts of Atlanta. For the most part they are very
+small, many are exceedingly dirty and ill-kept; usually much poorer than
+corresponding places kept by foreigners, indiscriminately called &#8220;Dagoes&#8221;
+down here, who are in reality mostly Russian Jews and Greeks. But there
+are a few Negro grocery stores in Atlanta which are highly creditable.
+Other business enterprises include restaurants (for Negroes), printing
+establishments, two newspapers, and several drug-stores. In other words,
+the Negro is rapidly building up his own business enterprises, tending to
+make himself independent as a race.</p>
+
+<p>The appearance of Negro drug-stores was the natural result of the
+increasing practice of Negro doctors and dentists. Time was when all
+Negroes preferred to go to white practitioners, but since educated
+coloured doctors became common, they have taken a very large
+part&mdash;practically all, I am told&mdash;of the practice in Atlanta. Several of
+them have had degrees from Northern universities, two from Yale; and one
+of them, at least, has some little practice among white people. The
+doctors are leaders among their people. Naturally they give prescriptions
+to be filled by druggists of their own race; hence the growth of the drug
+business among Negroes everywhere in the South. The first store to be
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_42" id="Page_42">[Pg 42]</a></span>established in Atlanta occupies an old wooden building in Auburn Avenue.
+It is operated by Moses Amos, a mulatto, and enjoys, I understand, a high
+degree of prosperity. I visited it. A post-office occupies one corner of
+the room; and it is a familiar gathering place for coloured men. Moses
+Amos told me his story, and I found it so interesting, and so significant
+of the way in which Negro business men have come up, that I am setting it
+down briefly here.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><i>Rise of a Negro Druggist</i></p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I never shall forget,&#8221; he said, &#8220;my first day in the drug business. It
+was in 1876. I remember I was with a crowd of boys in Peachtree Street,
+where Dr. Huss, a Southern white man, kept a drug-store. The old doctor
+was sitting out in front smoking his pipe. He called one little Negro
+after another, and finally chose me. He said:</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;&#8216;I want you to live with me, work in the store, and look after my horse.&#8217;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;He sent me to his house and told me to tell his wife to give me some
+breakfast, and I certainly delivered the first message correctly. His
+wife, who was a noble lady, not only fed me, but made me take a bath in a
+sure enough porcelain tub, the first I had ever seen. When I went back to
+the store, I was so regenerated that the doctor had to adjust his
+spectacles before he knew me. He said to me:</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;&#8216;You can wash bottles, put up castor oil, salts and turpentine, sell
+anything you <i>know</i> and put the money in the drawer.&#8217;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;He showed me how to work the keys of the cash drawer. &#8216;I am going to
+trust you,&#8217; he said. &#8216;Don&#8217;t steal from me; if you want anything ask for
+it, and you can have it. And don&#8217;t lie; I hate a liar. A boy who will lie
+will steal, too.&#8217;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I remained with Dr. Huss thirteen years. He sent me to school and paid my
+tuition out of his own pocket; he trusted me fully, often leaving me in
+charge of his business for weeks at a time. When he died I formed a
+partnership with Dr. Butler, Dr. Slater, and others, and bought the store.
+Our business grew and prospered, so that within a few years we had a stock
+worth $3,000, and cash of $800. That made us ambitious. We bought land,
+built a new store, and went<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_43" id="Page_43">[Pg 43]</a></span> into debt to do it. We didn&#8217;t know much about
+business&mdash;that&#8217;s the Negro&#8217;s chief trouble&mdash;and we lost trade by changing
+our location, so that in spite of all we could do, we failed and lost
+everything, though we finally paid our creditors every cent. After many
+trials we started again in 1896 in our present store; to-day we are doing
+a good business; we can get all the credit we want from wholesale houses,
+we employ six clerks, and pay good interest on the capital invested.&#8221;</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><i>Greatest Difficulties Met by Negro Business Men</i></p>
+
+<p>I asked him what was the greatest difficulty he had to meet. He said it
+was the credit system; the fact that many Negroes have not learned
+financial responsibility. Once, he said, he nearly stopped business on
+this account.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I remember,&#8221; he said, &#8220;the last time we got into trouble. We needed $400
+to pay our bills. I picked out some of our best customers and gave them a
+heart-to-heart talk and told them what trouble we were in. They all
+promised to pay; but on the day set for payment, out of $1,680 which they
+owed us we collected just $8.25. After that experience we came down to a
+cash basis. We trust no one, and since then we have been doing well.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>He said he thought the best opportunity for Negro development was in the
+South where he had his whole race behind him. He said he had once been
+tempted to go North looking for an opening.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;How did you make out?&#8221; I asked.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Well, I&#8217;ll tell you,&#8221; he said, &#8220;when I got there I wanted a shave; I
+walked the streets two hours visiting barber shops, and they all turned me
+away with some excuse. I finally had to buy a razor and shave myself! That
+was just a sample. I came home disgusted and decided to fight it out down
+here where I understood conditions.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Of course only a comparatively few Negroes are able to get ahead in
+business. They must depend almost exclusively on the trade of their own
+race, and they must meet the highly organised competition of white men.
+But it is certainly significant that even a few are able to make progress
+along these unfamiliar lines. Many Southern men I met had little<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_44" id="Page_44">[Pg 44]</a></span> or no
+idea of the remarkable extent of this advancement among the better class
+of Negroes. Here is a strange thing. I don&#8217;t know how many Southern men
+have prefaced their talks with me with words something like this:</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;You can&#8217;t expect to know the Negro after a short visit. You must live
+down here like we do. Now, I know the Negroes like a book. I was brought
+up with them. I know what they&#8217;ll do and what they won&#8217;t do. I have had
+Negroes in my house all my life.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>But curiously enough I found that these men rarely knew anything about the
+better class of Negroes&mdash;those who were in business, or in independent
+occupations, those who owned their own homes. They <i>did</i> come into contact
+with the servant Negro, the field hand, the common labourer, who make up,
+of course, the great mass of the race. On the other hand, the best class
+of Negroes did not know the higher class of white people, and based their
+suspicion and hatred upon the acts of the poorer sort of whites with whom
+they naturally came into contact. The best elements of the two races are
+as far apart as though they lived in different continents; and that is one
+of the chief causes of the growing danger of the Southern situation. It is
+a striking fact that one of the first&mdash;almost instinctive&mdash;efforts at
+reconstruction after the Atlanta riot was to bring the best elements of
+both races together, so that they might, by becoming acquainted and
+gaining confidence in each other, allay suspicion and bring influence to
+bear upon the lawless elements of both white people and coloured.</p>
+
+<p>Many Southerners look back wistfully to the faithful, simple, ignorant,
+obedient, cheerful, old plantation Negro and deplore his disappearance.
+They want the New South, but the old Negro. That Negro is disappearing
+forever along with the old feudalism and the old-time exclusively
+agricultural life.</p>
+
+<p>A new Negro is not less inevitable than a new white man and a new South.
+And the new Negro, as my clever friend says, doesn&#8217;t laugh as much as the
+old one. It is grim business he is in, this being free, this new, fierce
+struggle in the open competitive field for the daily loaf. Many go down to
+vagrancy and crime in that struggle; a few will rise. The more rapid the
+progress (with the trained white man setting the pace), the more frightful the mortality.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr style="width: 50%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_45" id="Page_45">[Pg 45]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_III" id="CHAPTER_III"></a>CHAPTER III</h2>
+<h3>THE SOUTHERN CITY NEGRO</h3>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="dropcap"><span class="caps">After</span> my arrival in Atlanta, and when I had begun to understand some of
+the more superficial ramifications of the colour line (as I related in the
+last chapter,) I asked several Southern men whose acquaintance I had made
+where I could best see the poorer or criminal class of Negroes. So much
+has been said of the danger arising from this element of Southern
+population and it plays such a part in every discussion of the race
+question that I was anxious to learn all I could about it.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Go down any morning to Judge Broyles&#8217;s court,&#8221; they said to me, &#8220;and
+you&#8217;ll see the lowest of the low.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>So I went down&mdash;the first of many visits I made to police and justice
+courts. I chose a Monday morning that I might see to the best advantage
+the accumulation of the arrests of Saturday and Sunday.</p>
+
+<p>The police station stands in Decatur Street, in the midst of the very
+worst section of the city, surrounded by low saloons, dives, and
+pawn-shops. The court occupies a great room upstairs, and it was crowded
+that morning to its capacity. Besides the police, lawyers, court officers,
+and white witnesses, at least one hundred and fifty spectators filled the
+seats behind the rail, nearly all of them Negroes. The ordinary Negro
+loves nothing better than to sit and watch the proceedings of a court.
+Judge Broyles kindly invited me to a seat on the platform at his side
+where I could look into the faces of the prisoners and hear all that was
+said.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><i>In a Southern Police Court</i></p>
+
+<p>It was a profoundly interesting and significant spectacle. In the first
+place the very number of cases was staggering. The docket that morning
+carried over one hundred names&mdash;men,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_46" id="Page_46">[Pg 46]</a></span> women, and children, white and
+black; the court worked hard, but it was nearly two o&#8217;clock in the
+afternoon before the room was cleared. Atlanta, as I showed in a former
+chapter, has the largest number of arrests, considering the population, of
+any important city in the United States. I found that 13,511 of the total
+of 21,702 persons arrested in 1906 were Negroes, or 62 per cent., whereas
+the coloured population of the city is only 40 per cent. of the total.<small><a name="f2.1" id="f2.1" href="#f2">[2]</a></small></p>
+
+<p>A very large proportion of the arrests that Monday morning were Negroes,
+with a surprising proportion of women and of mere children. In 1906 3,194
+Negro women were arrested in Atlanta. It was altogether a pitiful and
+disheartening exhibition, a spectacle of sodden ignorance, reckless vice,
+dissipation. Most of the cases, ravelled out, led back to the saloon.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Where&#8217;s your home?&#8221; the judge would ask, and in a number of cases the
+answer was:</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Ah come here fum de country.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Over and over again it was the story of the country Negro, or the Negro
+who had been working on the railroad, in the cotton fields or in the
+sawmills, who had entered upon the more complex life of the city. Most of
+the country districts of the South prohibit the sale of liquor; and
+Negroes, especially, have comparatively little temptation of this nature,
+nor are they subjected to the many other glittering pitfalls of city life.
+But of late years the opportunities of the city have attracted the black
+people, just as they have the whites, in large numbers. Atlanta had many
+saloons and other places of vice; and the results are to be seen in Judge
+Broyles&#8217;s court any morning. And not only Negroes, but the &#8220;poor whites&#8221;
+who have come in from the mountains and the small farms to work in the
+mills: they, too, suffer fully as much as the Negroes.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><i>Negro Cocaine Victims</i></p>
+
+<p>Not a few of the cases both black and white showed evidences of cocaine or
+morphine poisoning&mdash;the blear eyes, the unsteady nerves.</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/gs05_top.jpg" alt="" /></div>
+<p class="center">INTERIOR OF A NEGRO WORKINGMAN&#8217;S HOME, ATLANTA, GEORGIA</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/gs05_bot.jpg" alt="" /></div>
+<p class="center">INTERIOR OF A NEGRO HOME OF THE POOREST SORT IN INDIANAPOLIS</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_47" id="Page_47">[Pg 47]</a></span>&#8220;What&#8217;s the trouble here?&#8221; asked the judge.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Coke,&#8221; said the officer.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Ten-seventy-five,&#8221; said the judge, naming the amount of the fine.</p>
+
+<p>They buy the &#8220;coke&#8221; in the form of a powder and snuff it up the nose; a
+certain patent catarrh medicine which is nearly all cocaine is sometimes
+used; ten cents will purchase enough to make a man wholly irresponsible
+for his acts, and capable of any crime. The cocaine habit, which seems to
+be spreading, for there are always druggists who will break the law, has
+been a curse to the Negro and has resulted, directly, as the police told
+me, in much crime. I was told of two cases in particular, of offences
+against women, in which the Negro was a victim of the drug habit.</p>
+
+<p>So society, in pursuit of wealth, South and North, preys upon the ignorant
+and weak&mdash;and then wonders why crime is prevalent!</p>
+
+<p>One has only to visit police courts in the South to see in how many
+curious ways the contact of the races generates fire.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;What&#8217;s the trouble here?&#8221; inquires the judge.</p>
+
+<p>The white complainant&mdash;a boy&mdash;says:</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;This nigger insulted me!&#8221; and he tells the epithet the Negro applied.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Did you call him that?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;No sah, I never called him no such name.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Three-seventy-five&mdash;you mustn&#8217;t insult white people.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>And here is the report of the case of a six-year-old Negro boy from the <i>Georgian</i>:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Because Robert Lee Buster, a six-year-old Negro boy, insulted Maggie
+McDermott, a little girl, who lives at 507 Simpson Street, Wednesday
+afternoon, he was given a whipping in the police station Thursday
+morning that will make him remember to be good.</p>
+
+<p>The case was heard in the juvenile court before Judge Broyles. It was
+shown that the little Negro had made an insulting remark to the
+little girl.</p></div>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><i>Story of a Negro Arrest</i></p>
+
+<p>The very suspicion and fear that exist give rise to many difficulties. One
+illuminating case came up that morning. A strapping Negro man was brought
+before the judge. He showed no marks of dissipation and was respectably
+dressed.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_48" id="Page_48">[Pg 48]</a></span> Confronting him were two plain-clothes policemen, one with his
+neck wrapped up, one with a bandage around his arm. Both said they had
+been stabbed by the Negro with a jack-knife. The Negro said he was a hotel
+porter and he had the white manager of the hotel in court to testify to
+his good character, sobriety, and industry. It seems that he was going
+home from work at nine o&#8217;clock in the evening, and it was dark. He said he
+was afraid and had been afraid since the riot. At the same time the two
+policemen were looking for a burglar. They saw the Negro porter and
+ordered him to stop. Not being in uniform the Negro said he thought the
+officers were &#8220;jes&#8217; plain white men&#8221; who were going to attack him. When he
+started to run the officers tried to arrest him, and he drew his
+jack-knife and began to fight. And here he was in court! The judge said:</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;You mustn&#8217;t attack officers,&#8221; and bound him over to trial in the higher
+court.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><i>A White Man and a Negro Woman</i></p>
+
+<p>Another case shows one of the strange relationships which grow out of
+Southern conditions. An old white man, much agitated and very pale, was
+brought before the judge. With him came a much younger, comely appearing
+woman. Both were well dressed and looked respectable&mdash;so much so, indeed,
+that there was a stir of interest and curiosity among the spectators. Why
+had they been arrested? As they stood in front of the judge&#8217;s desk, the
+old man hung his head, but the woman looked up with such an expression,
+tearless and tragic, as I hope I shall not have to see again.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;What&#8217;s the charge?&#8221; asked the judge.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Adultery,&#8221; said the officer.</p>
+
+<p>The woman winced, the old man did not look up.</p>
+
+<p>The judge glanced from one to the other in surprise.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Why don&#8217;t you get married?&#8221; he asked.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;The woman,&#8221; said the officer, &#8220;is a nigger.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>She was as white as I am, probably an octoroon; I could not have
+distinguished her from a white person, and she deceived even the
+experienced eye of the judge.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Is that so?&#8221; asked the judge.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_49" id="Page_49">[Pg 49]</a></span>The man continued to hang his head, the woman looked up; neither said a
+word. It then came out that they had lived together as man and wife for
+many years and that they had children nearly grown. One of the girls&mdash;and
+a very bright, ambitious girl&mdash;as I learned later, was a student in
+Atlanta University, a Negro college, where she was supported by her
+father, who made good wages as a telegraph operator. Some neighbour had
+complained and the man and woman were arrested.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Is this all true?&#8221; asked the judge.</p>
+
+<p>Neither said a word.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;You can&#8217;t marry under the Georgia law,&#8221; said the judge; &#8220;I&#8217;ll have to
+bind you over for trial in the county court.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>They were led back to the prisoners&#8217; rooms. A few minutes later the
+bailiff came out quickly and said to the judge:</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;The old man has fallen in a faint.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Not long afterward they half led, half carried him out across the court
+room.</p>
+
+<p>One thing impressed me especially, not only in this court but in all
+others I have visited: a Negro brought in for drunkenness, for example,
+was punished much more severely than a white man arrested for the same
+offence. The injustice which the weak everywhere suffer&mdash;North and
+South&mdash;is in the South visited upon the Negro. The white man sometimes
+escaped with a reprimand, he was sometimes fined three dollars and costs,
+but the Negro, especially if he had no white man to intercede for him, was
+usually punished with a ten or fifteen dollar fine, which often meant that
+he must go to the chain-gang. One of the chief causes of complaint by the
+Negroes of Atlanta has been of the rough treatment of the police and of
+unjust arrests. After the riot, when the Civic League, composed of the
+foremost white citizens of Atlanta, was organised, one of the first
+subjects that came up was that of justice to the Negro. Mr. Hopkins, the
+leader of the League, said to me: &#8220;We complain that the Negroes will not
+help to bring the criminals of their race to justice. One reason for that
+is that the Negro has too little confidence in our courts. We must give
+him that, above all things.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>In accordance with this plan, the Civic League, heartily supported by
+Judge Broyles, employed a young lawyer, Mr.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_50" id="Page_50">[Pg 50]</a></span> Underwood, to appear
+regularly in court and look after the interests of Negroes.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><i>Convicts Making a Profit for Georgia</i></p>
+
+<p>One reason for the very large number of arrests&mdash;in Georgia
+particularly&mdash;lies in the fact that the state and the counties make a
+profit out of their prison system. No attempt is ever made to reform a
+criminal, either white or coloured. Convicts are hired out to private
+contractors or worked on the public roads. Last year the net profit to
+Georgia from its chain-gangs, to which the prison commission refers with
+pride, reached the great sum of $354,853.55.</p>
+
+<p>Of course a very large proportion of the prisoners are Negroes. The demand
+for convicts by rich sawmill operators, owners of brick-yards, large
+farmers, and others is far in advance of the supply. The natural tendency
+is to convict as many men as possible&mdash;it furnishes steady, cheap labour
+to the contractors and a profit to the state. Undoubtedly this explains in
+some degree the very large number of criminals, especially Negroes, in
+Georgia. One of the leading political forces in Atlanta is a very
+prominent banker who is a dominant member of the city police board. He is
+also the owner of extensive brick-yards near Atlanta, where many convicts
+are employed. Some of the large fortunes in Atlanta have come chiefly from
+the labour of chain-gangs of convicts leased from the state.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><i>Fate of the Black Boy</i></p>
+
+<p>As I have already suggested, one of the things that impressed me strongly
+in visiting Judge Broyles&#8217;s court&mdash;and others like it&mdash;was the astonishing
+number of children, especially Negroes, arrested. Some of them were very
+young and often exceedingly bright-looking. From the records I find that
+in 1906 1 boy six years old, 7 of seven years, 33 of eight years, 69 of
+nine years, 107 of ten years, 142 of eleven years, and 219 of twelve years
+were arrested and brought into court&mdash;in other words, 578 boys and girls,
+mostly Negroes, under twelve years of age!</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_51" id="Page_51">[Pg 51]</a></span>&#8220;I should think,&#8221; I said to a police officer, &#8220;you would have trouble in
+taking care of all these children in your reformatories.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Reformatories!&#8221; he said, &#8220;there aren&#8217;t any.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;What do you do with them?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Well, if they&#8217;re bad we put &#8217;em in the stockade or the chain-gang,
+otherwise they&#8217;re turned loose.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>I found, however, that a new state juvenile reformatory was just being
+opened at Milledgeville&mdash;which may accommodate a few Negro boys. An
+attempt is also being made in Atlanta to get hold of some of the children
+through a new probation system. I talked with the excellent officer, Mr.
+Gloer, who works in conjunction with Judge Broyles. He reaches a good many
+white boys, but very few Negroes. Of 1,011 boys and girls under sixteen,
+arrested in 1905, 819 were black, but of those given the advantage of the
+probation system, 50 were white and only 7 coloured. In other words, out
+of 819 arrests of Negro children only 7 enjoyed the benefit of the
+probation system.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Gloer has endeavoured to secure a coloured assistant who would help
+look after the swarming Negro children who are becoming criminals. The
+city refused to appropriate money for that purpose, but some of the
+leading coloured citizens agreed to contribute one dollar a month each,
+and a Negro woman was employed to help with the coloured children brought
+into court. Excellent work was done, but owing to the feeling after the
+riot the Negro assistant discontinued her work.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><i>Care of Negro Orphans</i></p>
+
+<p>With many hundreds of Negro orphans, waifs, and foundlings, the state or
+city does very little to help them. If it were not for the fact that the
+Negroes, something like the Jews, are wonderfully helpful to one another,
+adopting orphan children with the greatest willingness, there would be
+much suffering. Several orphanages in the state are conducted by the
+coloured people themselves, either through their churches or by private
+subscription. In Atlanta the Carrie Steele orphanage, which is managed by
+Negroes, has received an appropriation yearly from the city, and has taken
+children sent by the city charities<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_52" id="Page_52">[Pg 52]</a></span> department. After the riot the
+appropriation was suddenly cut off without explanation, but through the
+activities of the new Civic League, it was, I understand, restored.</p>
+
+<p>Without proper reformatories or asylums, with small advantage of the
+probation system, hundreds of Negro children are on the streets of Atlanta
+every day&mdash;shooting craps, stealing, learning to drink. A few, shut up in
+the stockade, or in chain-gangs, without any attempt to reform them or
+teach them, take lessons in crime from older offenders and come out worse
+than they went in. They spread abroad the lawlessness they learn and
+finally commit some frightful crime and get back into the chain-gang for
+life&mdash;where they make a profit for the state!</p>
+
+<p>Every child, white or coloured, is getting an education somewhere. If that
+education is not in schools, or at home, or, in cases of incorrigibility,
+in proper reformatories, then it is on the streets or in chain-gangs.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><i>Why Negro <ins class="correction" title="original: Childern">Children</ins> Are Not in School</i></p>
+
+<p>My curiosity, aroused by the very large number of young prisoners, led me
+next to inquire why these children were not in school. I visited a number
+of schools and I talked with L. M. Landrum, the assistant superintendent.
+Compulsory education is not enforced anywhere in the South, so that
+children may run the streets unless their parents insist upon sending them
+to school. I found more than this, however, that Atlanta did not begin to
+have enough school facilities for the children who wanted to go. Like many
+rapidly growing cities, both South and North, it has been difficult to
+keep up with the demand. Just as in the North the tenement classes are
+often neglected, so in the South the lowest class&mdash;which is the Negro&mdash;is
+neglected. Several new schools have been built for white children, but
+there has been no new school for coloured children in fifteen or twenty
+years (though one Negro private school has been taken over within the last
+few years by the city). So crowded are the coloured schools that they have
+two sessions a day, one squad of children coming in the forenoon, another
+in the afternoon. The coloured teachers, therefore, do double work, for
+which they receive about two-thirds as much salary as the white teachers.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_53" id="Page_53">[Pg 53]</a></span>Though many Southern cities have instituted industrial training in the
+public schools, Atlanta so far has done nothing. The president of the
+board of education in his last published report (1903) calls attention to
+this fact, and says also:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>While on the subject of Negro schools, permit me to call your
+attention to their overcrowded condition. In every Negro school many
+teachers teach two sets of pupils, each set for one-half of a school
+day.</p>
+
+<p>The last bond election was carried by a majority of only thirty-three
+votes. To my personal knowledge more than thirty-three Negroes voted
+for the bonds on the solemn assurance that by the passage of the
+bonds the Negro children would receive more school accommodations.</p></div>
+
+<p>The eagerness of the coloured people for a chance to send their children
+to school is something astonishing and pathetic. They will submit to all
+sorts of inconveniences in order that their children may get an education.
+One day I visited the mill neighbourhood of Atlanta to see how the poorer
+classes of white people lived. I found one very comfortable home occupied
+by a family of mill employees. They hired a Negro woman to cook for them,
+and while they sent their children to the mill to work, the cook sent her
+children to school!</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><i>How Negroes Educate Themselves</i></p>
+
+<p>Here is a curious and significant thing I found in Atlanta. Because there
+is not enough room for Negro children in public schools, the coloured
+people maintain many private schools. The largest of these, called Morris
+Brown College, has nearly 1,000 pupils. Some of them are boarders from the
+country, but the greater proportion are day pupils from seven years old up
+who come in from the neighbourhood. This &#8220;college,&#8221; in reality a grammar
+school, is managed and largely supported by tuition and contributions from
+Negroes, though some subscriptions are obtained in the North. Besides this
+&#8220;college&#8221; there are many small private schools conducted by Negro women
+and supported wholly by the tuition paid&mdash;the Negroes thus voluntarily
+taxing themselves heavily for their educational opportunities. One
+afternoon in Atlanta I passed a small, rather dilapidated home. Just as I
+reached the gate I heard a great cackling of voices and much laughter.
+Coloured children began to pour out of the house. &#8220;What&#8217;s this?&#8221; I said,
+and I<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_54" id="Page_54">[Pg 54]</a></span> turned in to see. I found a Negro woman, the teacher, standing in
+the doorway. She had just dismissed her pupils for recess. She was holding
+school in two little rooms where some fifty children must have been
+crowded to suffocation. Everything was very primitive and
+inconvenient&mdash;but it was a school! She collected, she told me, a dollar a
+month tuition for each child. Mollie McCue&#8217;s school, perhaps the best
+known private school for Negroes in the city, has 250 pupils.</p>
+
+<p>Many children also find educational opportunities in the Negro colleges of
+the city&mdash;Clark University, Atlanta University and Spellman Seminary,
+which are supported partly by the Negroes themselves but mostly by
+Northern philanthropy.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Landrum gave me a copy of the last statistical report of the school
+board (1903), from which these facts appear:</p>
+
+<table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="5" summary="table">
+<tr><td>&nbsp;</td><td><span class="spacer">&nbsp;</span></td>
+    <td align="center">School<br />Population</td><td><span class="spacer">&nbsp;</span></td>
+    <td align="center">No. of<br />Schools</td><td><span class="spacer">&nbsp;</span></td>
+    <td align="center">Teachers</td><td><span class="spacer">&nbsp;</span></td>
+    <td align="center">With<br />Seats</td><td><span class="spacer">&nbsp;</span></td>
+    <td align="center">Without<br />Seats</td><td><span class="spacer">&nbsp;</span></td></tr>
+<tr><td>White</td><td>&nbsp;</td>
+    <td align="center">14,465</td><td>&nbsp;</td>
+    <td align="center">20</td><td>&nbsp;</td>
+    <td align="center">200</td><td>&nbsp;</td>
+    <td align="center">10,052</td><td>&nbsp;</td>
+    <td align="center">4,413</td><td>&nbsp;</td></tr>
+<tr><td>Coloured</td><td>&nbsp;</td>
+    <td align="center"><span style="margin-left: .5em;">8,118</span></td><td>&nbsp;</td>
+    <td align="center"><span style="margin-left: .5em;">5</span></td><td>&nbsp;</td>
+    <td align="center"><span style="margin-left: .5em;">49</span></td><td>&nbsp;</td>
+    <td align="center"><span style="margin-left: .5em;">2,445</span></td><td>&nbsp;</td>
+    <td align="center">5,673</td><td>&nbsp;</td></tr></table>
+
+<p>Even with a double daily session for coloured pupils nearly half of the
+Negro children in Atlanta, even in 1903, were barred from the public
+schools from lack of facilities, and the number has increased largely in
+the last four years. Some of these are accommodated in the private schools
+and colleges which I have mentioned, but there still remain hundreds, even
+thousands, who are getting no schooling of any kind, but who are
+nevertheless being educated&mdash;on the streets, and for criminal lives.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><i>White Instruction for Black Children</i></p>
+
+<p>I made a good many inquiries to find out what was being done outside of
+the public schools by the white people toward training the Negro either
+morally, industrially or intellectually&mdash;and I was astonished to find that
+it was next to nothing. The Negro is, of course, not welcome at the white
+churches or Sunday schools, and the sentiment is so strong against
+teaching the Negro that it is a brave Southern man or woman, indeed, who
+dares attempt anything of the sort. I did find, however, that the Central
+Presbyterian Church of Atlanta conducted a Negro Sunday School. Of this
+Dr. Theron H. Rice, the pastor, said:</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_55" id="Page_55">[Pg 55]</a></span>&#8220;The Sunday School conducted in Atlanta by my church is the outcome of the
+effort of some of the most earnest and thoughtful of our people to give
+careful religious training to the Negroes of this generation and thus to
+conserve the influence begun with the fathers and mothers and the
+grandfathers and grandmothers of these coloured children when they were
+taught personally by their devoted Christian masters and mistresses. The
+work is small in point of the number reached, but it has been productive
+of sturdy character and law-abiding citizenship.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>A white man or woman, and especially a Northern white man or woman, in
+Atlanta who teaches Negroes is rigorously ostracised by white society. I
+visited one of the Negro colleges where there are a number of white
+teachers from the North. We had quite a talk. When I came to leave one of
+the teachers said to me:</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;You don&#8217;t know how good it seems to talk with some one from the outside
+world. We work here year in and year out without a white visitor, except
+those who have some necessary business with the institution.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Explaining the attitude toward these Northern teachers (and we must
+understand just how the Southern people feel in this matter), a prominent
+clergyman said that a lady who made a social call upon a teacher in that
+institution would not feel secure against having to meet Negroes socially
+and that when the call was returned a similar embarrassing situation might
+be created.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><i>Apologising for Helping Negroes</i></p>
+
+<p>Just in this connection: I found a very remarkable and significant letter
+published in the Orangeburg, S. C., <i>News</i>, signed by a well-to-do white
+citizen who thus apologises for a kind act to a Negro school:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>I had left my place of business here on a business trip a few miles
+below, on returning I came by the above-mentioned school (the Prince
+Institute, coloured), and was held up by the teacher and begged to
+make a few remarks to the children. Very reluctantly I did so, not
+thinking that publicity would be given to it or that I was doing
+anything that would offend anyone. I wish to say here and now that I
+am heartily sorry for what I did, and I hope after this humble
+confession and expression of regret that all whom I have offended
+will forgive me.</p></div>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_56" id="Page_56">[Pg 56]</a></span>The sentiment indicated by this letter, while widely prevalent, is by no
+means universal. I have seen Southern white men address Negro schools and
+Negro gatherings many times since I have been down here. Some of the
+foremost men in the South have accepted Booker T. Washington&#8217;s invitations
+to speak at Tuskegee. And concerning the very letter that I reproduce
+above, the <i>Charlotte Observer</i>, a strong Southern newspaper, which copied
+it, said:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>A man would better be dead than to thus abase himself. This man did
+right to address the pupils of a coloured school, but has spoiled all
+by apologising for it. Few people have conceived that race prejudice
+went so far, even in South Carolina, as is here indicated. Logically
+it is to be assumed that this jelly-fish was about to be put under
+the ban, and to secure exemption from this, published this abject
+card. To it was appended a certificate from certain citizens, saying
+they &#8216;are as anxious to see the coloured race elevated as any people,
+but by all means let it be done inside the colour line.&#8217;... The
+narrowness and malignity betrayed in this Orangeburg incident is
+exceedingly unworthy, and those guilty of it should be ashamed of
+themselves.</p></div>
+
+<p>The Rev. H. S. Bradley, for a long time one of the leading clergymen of
+Atlanta, now of St. Louis, said in a sermon published in the Atlanta
+<i>Constitution</i>:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>... We have not been wholly lacking in our effort to help. There are
+a few schools and churches supported by Southern whites for the
+Negroes. Here and there a man like George Williams Walker, of the
+aristocracy of South Carolina, and a woman like Miss Belle H.
+Bennett, of the blue blood of Kentucky, goes as teacher to the Negro
+youth, and seeks in a Christly spirit of fraternity to bring them to
+a higher plane of civil and moral manhood, but the number like them
+can almost be counted on fingers of both hands.</p>
+
+<p>Our Southern churches have spent probably a hundred times as much
+money since the Civil War in an effort to evangelise the people of
+China, Japan, India, South America, Africa, Mexico, and Cuba, as they
+have spent to give the Gospel to the Negroes at our doors. It is
+often true that opportunity is overlooked because it lies at our
+feet.</p></div>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><i>Concerning the Vagrant Negro</i></p>
+
+<p>Before I get away from observations of the low-class Negro, I must speak
+of the subject of vagrancy. Many white men have told me with impatience of
+the great number of idle or partly idle Negroes&mdash;idle while every industry
+and most of the farming districts of Georgia are crying for more labour.
+And from my observation in Atlanta, I should say that there were good many
+idle or partly idle Negroes&mdash;even after the riot,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_57" id="Page_57">[Pg 57]</a></span> which served, I
+understand, to drive many of them away. Five days before the riot of last
+September, a committee of the city council visited some forty saloons one
+afternoon, and by actual count found 2,455 Negroes (and 152 white men)
+drinking at the bars or lounging around the doorways. In some of these
+saloons&mdash;conducted by white men and permitted to exist by the city
+authorities&mdash;pictures of nude white women were displayed as an added
+attraction. Has this anything to do with Negro crimes against white women?
+After the riot these conditions in Atlanta were much improved and in
+January, 1908, all the saloons were closed.</p>
+
+<p>Increased Negro idleness is the result, in large measure, of the
+marvellous and rapid changes in Southern conditions. The South has been
+and is to-day dependent on a single labour supply&mdash;the Negro. Now Negroes,
+though recruited by a high birth rate, have not been increasing in any
+degree as rapidly as the demand for labour incident to the development of
+every sort of industry, railroads, lumbering, mines, to say nothing of the
+increased farm area and the added requirements of growing cities. With
+this enormous increased demand for labour the Negro supply has,
+relatively, been decreasing. Many have gone North and West, many have
+bought farms of their own, thousands, by education, have became
+professional men, teachers, preachers, and even merchants and
+bankers&mdash;always draining away the best and most industrious men of the
+race and reducing by so much the available supply of common labour. In
+short, those Negroes who were capable have been going the same way as the
+unskilled Irishman and German in the North&mdash;upward through the door of
+education&mdash;but, unlike the North, there have been <ins class="correction" title="original: on">no</ins> other labourers
+coming in to take their places.</p>
+
+<p>What has been the result? Naturally a fierce contest between agriculture
+and industry for the limited and dwindling supply of the only labour they
+had.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><i>Negro Monopoly on Labour</i></p>
+
+<p>So they bid against one another&mdash;it was as though the Negro had a monopoly
+on labour&mdash;and within the last few years day wages for Negro workers have
+jumped from fifty or sixty cents<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_58" id="Page_58">[Pg 58]</a></span> to $1.25 and $1.50, often more&mdash;a pure
+matter of competition. A similar advance has affected all sorts of servant
+labour&mdash;cooks, waiters, maids, porters.</p>
+
+<p>High wages, scarcity of labour, and the consequent loss of opportunity for
+taking advantage of the prevailing prosperity would, in any community,
+South or North, whether the labour was white or black, produce a spirit of
+impatience and annoyance on the part of the employing class. I found it
+evident enough last summer in Kansas where the farmers were unable to get
+workers to save their crops; and the servant problem is not more
+provoking, certainly, in the South than in the North and West. Indeed, it
+is the labour problem more than any other one cause, that has held the
+South back and is holding it back to-day.</p>
+
+<p>But the South has an added cause of annoyance. Higher wages, instead of
+producing more and better labour, as they would naturally be expected to
+do, have actually served to reduce the supply. This may, at first, seem
+paradoxical: but it is easily explainable and it lies deep down beneath
+many of the perplexities which surround the race problem.</p>
+
+<p>Most Negroes, as I have said, were (and still are, of course)
+farm-dwellers, and farm-dwellers in the hitherto wasteful Southern way.
+Their living is easy to get and very simple. In that warm climate they
+need few clothes; a shack for a home. Their living standards are low; they
+have not learned to save; there has not been time since slavery for them
+to attain the sense of responsibility which would encourage them to get
+ahead. And moreover they have been and are to-day largely under the
+discipline of white land owners.</p>
+
+<p>What was the effect, then, of a rapid advance in wages? The poorer class
+of Negroes, naturally indolent and happy-go-lucky, found that they could
+make as much money in two or three days as they had formerly earned in a
+whole week. It was enough to live on as well as they had ever lived: why,
+then, work more than two days a week? It was the logic of a child, but it
+was the logic used. Everywhere I went in the South I heard the same story:
+high wages coupled with the difficulty of getting anything like continuous
+work from this class of coloured men.</p>
+
+<p>On the other hand the better and more industrious Negroes, who would work
+continuously&mdash;and there are unnumbered<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_59" id="Page_59">[Pg 59]</a></span> thousands of them, as faithful as
+any workers&mdash;occasionally saved their surplus, bought little farms or
+businesses of their own and began to live on a better scale. One of the
+first things they did after getting their footing was to take their wives
+and daughters out of the white man&#8217;s kitchen, and to send their children
+from the cotton fields (where the white man needed them) to the
+school-house where the tendency (exactly as with white children) was to
+educate them away from farm employment. With the development of ambition
+and a higher standard of living, the Negro follows the steps of the rising
+Irishman or Italian: he has a better home, he wants his wife to take care
+of it, and he insists upon the education of his children.</p>
+
+<p>In this way higher wages have tended to cut down the already limited
+supply of labour, producing annoyance, placing greater obstacles in the
+way of that material development of which the Southerner is so justly
+proud. And this, not at all unnaturally, has given rise on the one hand to
+complaints against the lazy Negro who will work only two days in the week
+that he may loaf the other five; and on the other hand it has found
+expression in blind and bitter hostility to the education which enables
+the better sort of Negro to rise above the unskilled employment and the
+domestic service of which the South is so keenly in need. It is human
+nature to blame men, not conditions. Here is unlimited work to do: here is
+the Negro who has been for centuries and is to-day depended upon to do it;
+it is not done. The natural result is to throw the blame wholly upon the
+Negro, and not upon the deep economic conditions and tendencies which have
+actually caused the scarcity of labour.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><i>Immigrants to Take the Negroes&#8217; Places</i></p>
+
+<p>But within the last year or two thinking men in the South have begun to
+see this particular root of the difficulty and a great new movement
+looking to the encouragement of immigration from foreign countries has
+been started. In November, 1906, the first shipload of immigrants ever
+brought from Europe directly to a South Carolina port were landed at
+Charleston with great ceremony and rejoicing. If a steady stream of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_60" id="Page_60">[Pg 60]</a></span>
+immigrants can be secured and if they can be employed on satisfactory
+terms with the Negro it will go far toward relieving race tension in the
+South.</p>
+
+<p>Of course idleness leads to crime, and one of the present efforts in the
+South is toward a more rigid enforcement of laws against vagrancy. In this
+the white people have the sympathy of the leading Negroes. I was struck
+with one passage in the discussion at the last Workers&#8217; Conference at
+Tuskegee. William E. Holmes, president of a coloured college at Macon,
+Georgia, was speaking. Some one interrupted him:</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I would like to ask if you think the Negro is any more disposed to become
+a loafer or vagrant than any other people under the same conditions?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Well,&#8221; said Mr. Holmes, taking a deep breath, &#8220;we cannot afford to do
+what other races do. We haven&#8217;t a single, solitary man or woman among us
+we can afford to support as an idler. It may be that other races have made
+so much progress that they can afford to support loafers. But we are not
+yet in that condition. Some of us have the impression that the world owes
+us a living. That is a misfortune. I must confess that I have become
+convinced that at the present time we furnish a larger number of loafers
+than any other race of people on this continent.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>These frank remarks did not meet with the entire approval of the members
+of the conference, but the discussion seemed to indicate that there was a
+great deal more of truth in them than the leaders and teachers of the
+Negro are disposed to admit.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><i>The Worthless Negro</i></p>
+
+<p>I tried to see as much as I could of this &#8220;worthless Negro,&#8221; who is about
+the lowest stratum of humanity, it seems to me, of any in our American
+life. He is usually densely ignorant, often a wanderer, working to-day
+with a railroad gang, <ins class="correction" title="original: o-morrow">to-morrow</ins> on some city works, the next day picking
+cotton. He has lost his white friends&mdash;his &#8220;white folks,&#8221; as he calls
+them&mdash;and he has not attained the training or self-direction to stand
+alone. He works only when he is hungry, and he is as much a criminal as he
+dares to be. Many such Negroes are supported by their wives or by women
+with whom they live&mdash;for morality and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_61" id="Page_61">[Pg 61]</a></span> the home virtues among this class
+are unknown. A woman who works as a cook in a white family will often take
+enough from the kitchen to feed a worthless vagabond of a man and keep him
+in idleness&mdash;or worse. A Negro song exactly expresses this state of
+beatitude:</p>
+
+<p class="poem">&#8220;I doan has to work so ha&#8217;d<br />
+I&#8217;s got a gal in a white man&#8217;s ya&#8217;d;<br />
+Ebery night &#8217;bout half pas&#8217; eight<br />
+I goes &#8217;round to the white man&#8217;s gate:<br />
+She brings me butter and she brings me la&#8217;d&mdash;<br />
+I doan has to work so ha&#8217;d!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>This worthless Negro, without training or education, grown up from the
+neglected children I have already spoken of, evident in his idleness
+around saloons and depots&mdash;this Negro provokes the just wrath of the
+people, and gives a bad name to the entire Negro race. In numbers he is,
+of course, small, compared with the 8,000,000 Negroes in the South, who
+perform the enormous bulk of hard manual labour upon which rests Southern
+prosperity.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><i>How the Working Negro Lives</i></p>
+
+<p>Above this low stratum of criminal or semi-criminal Negroes is a middle
+class, comprising the great body of the race&mdash;the workers. They are
+crowded into straggling settlements like Darktown and Jackson Row, a few
+owning their homes, but the majority renting precariously, earning good
+wages, harmless for the most part, but often falling into petty crime.
+Poverty here, however, lacks the tragic note that it strikes in the
+crowded sections of Northern cities. The temperament of the Negro is
+irrepressibly cheerful, he overflows from his small home and sings and
+laughs in his streets; no matter how ragged or forlorn he may be good
+humour sits upon his countenance, and his squalour is not unpicturesque. A
+banjo, a mullet supper from time to time, an exciting revival, give him
+real joys. Most of the families of this middle class, some of whom are
+deserted wives with children, have their &#8220;white folks&#8221; for whom they do
+washing, cooking, gardening, or other service, and all have church
+connections, so that they have a real place in the social fabric and a
+certain code of self-respect.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_62" id="Page_62">[Pg 62]</a></span>I tried to see all I could of this phase of life. I visited many of the
+poorer Negro homes and I was often received in squalid rooms with a
+dignity of politeness which would have done credit to a society woman. For
+the Negro, naturally, is a sort of Frenchman. And if I can sum up the many
+visits I made in a single conclusion I should say, I think, that I was
+chiefly impressed by the tragic punishment meted out to ignorance and
+weakness by our complex society. I would find a home of one or two rooms
+meanly furnished, but having in one corner a glittering cottage organ, or
+on the mantel shelf a glorified gilt clock; crayon portraits,
+inexpressibly crude and ugly, but framed gorgeously, are not uncommon&mdash;the
+first uncertain, primitive (not unpitiful) reachings out after some of the
+graces of a broader life. Many of these things are bought from agents and
+the prices paid are extortionate. Often a Negro family will pay monthly
+for a year or so on some showy clock or chromo or music-box or decorated
+mirror&mdash;paying the value of it a dozen times over, only to have it seized
+when through sickness, or lack of foresight, they fail to meet a single
+note. Installment houses prey upon them, pawnbrokers suck their blood, and
+they are infinitely the victims of patent medicines. It is rare, indeed,
+that I entered a Negro cabin, even the poorest, without seeing one or more
+bottles of some abominable cure-all. The amount yearly expended by Negroes
+for patent medicines, which are glaringly advertised in all Southern
+newspapers, must be enormous&mdash;millions of dollars. I had an interesting
+side light on conditions one day while walking in one of the most
+fashionable residence districts of Atlanta. I saw a magnificent gray-stone
+residence standing somewhat back from the street. I said to my companion,
+who was a resident of the city:</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;That&#8217;s a fine home.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Yes; stop a minute,&#8221; he said, &#8220;I want to tell you about that. The
+anti-kink man lives there.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Anti-kink?&#8221; I asked in surprise.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Yes; the man who occupies that house is one of the wealthiest men here.
+He made his money by selling to Negroes a preparation to smooth the kinks
+out of their wool. They&#8217;re simply crazy on that subject.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Does it work?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_63" id="Page_63">[Pg 63]</a></span>&#8220;You haven&#8217;t seen any straight-haired Negroes, have you?&#8221; he asked.</p>
+
+<p>Ignorance carries a big burden and climbs a rocky road!</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><i>Old Mammies and Nurses</i></p>
+
+<p>The mass of coloured people still maintain, as I have said, a more or less
+intimate connection with white families&mdash;frequently a very beautiful and
+sympathetic relationship like that of the old mammies or nurses. To one
+who has heard so much of racial hatred as I have since I have been down
+here, a little incident that I observed the other day comes with a charm
+hardly describable. I saw a carriage stop in front of a home. The expected
+daughter had arrived&mdash;a very pretty girl indeed. She stepped out eagerly.
+Her father was halfway down to the gate; but ahead of him was a very old
+Negro woman in the cleanest of clean starched dresses.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Honey,&#8221; she said eagerly.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Mammy!&#8221; exclaimed the girl, and the two rushed into each other&#8217;s arms,
+clasping and kissing&mdash;the white girl and the old black woman.</p>
+
+<p>I thought to myself: &#8220;There&#8217;s no Negro problem there: that&#8217;s just plain
+human love!&#8221;</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><i>&#8220;Master&#8221; Superseded by &#8220;Boss&#8221;</i></p>
+
+<p>Often I have heard Negroes refer to &#8220;my white folks&#8221; and similarly the
+white man still speaks of &#8220;my Negroes.&#8221; The old term of slavery, the use
+of the word &#8220;master,&#8221; has wholly disappeared, and in its place has arisen,
+not without significance, the round term &#8220;Boss,&#8221; or sometimes &#8220;Cap,&#8221; or
+&#8220;Cap&#8217;n.&#8221; To this the white man responds with the first name of the Negro,
+&#8220;Jim&#8221; or &#8220;Susie&#8221;&mdash;or if the Negro is old or especially respected: &#8220;Uncle
+Jim&#8221; or &#8220;Aunt Susan.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>To an unfamiliar Northerner one of the very interesting and somewhat
+amusing phases of conditions down here is the panic fear displayed over
+the use of the word &#8220;Mr.&#8221; or &#8220;Mrs.&#8221; No Negro is ever called Mr. or Mrs. by
+a white man; that would indicate social equality. A Southern white man
+told me with humour of his difficulties:</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_64" id="Page_64">[Pg 64]</a></span>&#8220;Now I admire Booker Washington. I regard him as a great man, and yet I
+couldn&#8217;t call him Mr. Washington. We were all in a quandary until a
+doctor&#8217;s degree was given him. That saved our lives! we all call him &#8216;Dr.&#8217;
+Washington now.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Sure enough! I don&#8217;t think I have heard him called Mr. Washington since I
+came down here. It is always &#8220;Dr.&#8221; or just &#8220;Booker.&#8221; They are ready to
+call a Negro &#8220;Professor&#8221; or &#8220;Bishop&#8221; or &#8220;The Reverend&#8221;&mdash;but not &#8220;Mr.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>In the same way a Negro may call Miss Mary Smith by the familiar &#8220;Miss
+Mary,&#8221; but if he called her Miss Smith she would be deeply incensed. The
+formal &#8220;Miss Smith&#8221; would imply social equality.</p>
+
+<p>I digress: but I have wanted to impress these relationships. There are all
+gradations of Negroes between the wholly dependent old family servant and
+the new, educated Negro professional or business man, and,
+correspondingly, every degree of treatment from indulgence to intense
+hostility.</p>
+
+<p>I must tell, in spite of lack of room, one beautiful story I heard at
+Atlanta, which so well illustrates the old relationship. There is in the
+family of Dr. J. S. Todd, a well-known citizen of Atlanta, an old, old
+servant called, affectionately, Uncle Billy. He has been so long in the
+family that in reality he is served as much as he serves. During the riot
+last September he was terrified: he did not dare to go home at night. So
+Miss Louise, the doctor&#8217;s daughter, took Uncle Billy home through the dark
+streets. When she was returning one of her friends met her and was much
+alarmed that she should venture out in a time of so much danger.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;What are you doing out here this time of night?&#8221; he asked.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Why,&#8221; she replied, as if it were the most natural answer in the world, &#8220;I
+had to take Uncle Billy safely home.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Over against this story I want to reproduce a report from a Kentucky
+newspaper which will show quite the other extreme:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><i>Tennessee Farmer Has Negro Bishop and His Wife Ejected from a
+Sleeping Car</i></p>
+
+<p>Irvine McGraw, a Tennessee farmer, brought Kentucky&#8217;s Jim Crow law
+into prominent notice yesterday on an Illinois Central Pullman car.
+When McGraw entered the car he saw the coloured divine, Rev. Dr. C.
+H. Phillips, bishop of the coloured Methodist Episcopal Churches in
+Tennessee, North Carolina, Texas and a portion of Arizona and New
+Mexico, and his wife <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_65" id="Page_65">[Pg 65]</a></span>preparing to retire for the night. He demanded
+that the conductor order them out of the car, but the conductor
+refused.</p>
+
+<p>After he entered Kentucky he hunted for an officer at every station
+and finally at Hopkinsville Policeman Bryant Baker agreed to
+undertake the task of ejecting the Negroes from the car. The train
+was held nine minutes while they dressed and repaired to the coloured
+compartment.</p></div>
+
+<p>I have now described two of the three great classes of Negroes: First, the
+worthless and idle Negro, often a criminal, comparatively small in numbers
+but perniciously evident. Second, the great middle class of Negroes who do
+the manual work of the South. Above these, a third class, few in numbers,
+but most influential in their race, are the progressive, property-owning
+Negroes, who have wholly severed their old intimate ties with the white
+people&mdash;and who have been getting further and further away from them.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><i>A White Man&#8217;s Problem</i></p>
+
+<p>It keeps coming to me that this is more a white man&#8217;s problem than it is a
+Negro problem. The white man as well as the black is being tried by fire.
+The white man is in full control of the South, politically, socially,
+industrially: the Negro, as ex-Governor Northen points out, is his
+helpless ward. What will he do with him? Speaking of the education of the
+Negro, and in direct reference to the conditions in Atlanta which I have
+already described, many men have said to me:</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Think of the large sums that the South has spent and is spending on the
+education of the Negro. The Negro does not begin to pay for his education
+in taxes.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Neither do the swarming Slavs, Italians, and Poles in our Northern cities.
+They pay little in taxes and yet enormous sums are expended in their
+improvement. For their benefit? Of course, but chiefly for ours. It is
+better to educate men in school than to let them so educate themselves as
+to become a menace to society. The present <i>kind</i> of education in the
+South may possibly be wrong; but for the protection of society it is as
+necessary to train every Negro as it is every white man.</p>
+
+<p>When I saw the crowds of young Negroes being made criminal&mdash;through lack
+of proper training&mdash;I could not help thinking how pitilessly ignorance
+finally revenges itself upon that society which neglects or exploits it.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr style="width: 50%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_66" id="Page_66">[Pg 66]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_IV" id="CHAPTER_IV"></a>CHAPTER IV</h2>
+<h3>IN THE BLACK BELT: THE NEGRO FARMER</h3>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="dropcap"><span class="caps">The</span> cotton picking season was drawing to its close when I left for the
+black belt of Georgia. So many friends in Atlanta had said:</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;The city Negro isn&#8217;t the real Negro. You must go out on the cotton
+plantations in the country; there you&#8217;ll see the genuine black African in
+all his primitive glory.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>It is quite true that the typical Negro is a farmer. The great mass of the
+race in the South dwells in the country. According to the last census, out
+of 8,000,000 Negroes in the Southern states 6,558,173, or 83 per cent.,
+lived on the farms or in rural villages. The crowded city life which I
+have already described represents not the common condition of the masses
+of the Negro race but the newer development which accompanies the growth
+of industrial and urban life. In the city the races are forced more
+violently together, socially and economically, than in the country,
+producing acute crises, but it is in the old agricultural regions where
+the Negro is in such masses, where ideas change slowly, and old
+institutions persist, that the problem really presents the greatest
+difficulties.</p>
+
+<p>There is no better time of year to see the South than November; for then
+it wears the smile of abundance. The country I went through&mdash;rolling red
+hills, or black bottoms, pine-clad in places, with pleasant farm openings
+dotted with cabins, often dilapidated but picturesque, and the busy little
+towns&mdash;wore somehow an air of brisk comfort. The fields were lively with
+Negro cotton pickers; I saw bursting loads of the new lint drawn by mules
+or oxen, trailing along the country roads; all the gins were puffing
+busily; at each station platform cotton bales by scores or hundreds stood
+ready for shipment and the towns were cheerful with farmers white and
+black, who now had money to spend. The heat of the summer had<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_67" id="Page_67">[Pg 67]</a></span> gone, the
+air bore the tang of a brisk autumn coolness. It was a good time of the
+year&mdash;and everybody seemed to feel it. Many Negroes got on or off at every
+station with laughter and snouted good-byes.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><i>What Is the Black Belt?</i></p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/gs06.png" alt="" /></div>
+<p class="center">THE BLACK BELT<br />
+In the region shaded more than half of the inhabitants are <ins class="correction" title="original: negroes">Negroes</ins>.</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>And so, just at evening, after a really interesting journey, I reached
+Hawkinsville, a thriving town of some 3,000 people just south of the
+centre of Georgia. Pulaski County, of which Hawkinsville is the seat, with
+an ambitious new court-house, is a typical county of the black belt. A
+census map which is here reproduced well shows the region of largest
+proportionate Negro population, extending from South Carolina through
+central Georgia and Alabama to Mississippi. More than half the inhabitants
+of all this broad belt, including also the Atlantic coastal counties and
+the lower Mississippi Valley (as shaded on the map), are Negroes, chiefly
+farm Negroes. There the race question, though perhaps not so immediately
+difficult as in cities like Atlanta, is with both white and coloured
+people the imminent problem of daily existence. Several times while<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_68" id="Page_68">[Pg 68]</a></span> in
+the black belt I was amused at the ardent response of people to whom I
+mentioned the fact that I had already seen something of conditions in
+Kentucky, Maryland, and Virginia:</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Why, they haven&#8217;t any Negro problem. They&#8217;re <i>North</i>.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>In Maryland, Kentucky, and Texas the problem is a sharp irritant&mdash;as it
+is, for that matter, in Ohio, in Indianapolis, and on the west side of New
+York City&mdash;but it is not the life and death question that it is in the
+black belt or in the Yazoo delta.</p>
+
+<p>All the country of Central Georgia has been long settled. Pulaski County
+was laid out in 1808; and yet the population to-day may be considered
+sparse. The entire county has only 8,000 white people, a large proportion
+of whom live in the towns of Hawkinsville and Cochran, and 12,000 Negroes,
+leaving not inconsiderable areas of forest and uncultivated land which
+will some day become immensely valuable.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><i>A Southern Country Gentleman</i></p>
+
+<p>At Hawkinsville I met J. Pope Brown, the leading citizen of the county. In
+many ways he is an example of the best type of the new Southerner. In
+every way open to him, and with energy, he is devoting himself to the
+improvement of his community. For five years he was president of the State
+Agricultural Society; he has been a member of the legislature and chairman
+of the Georgia Railroad Commission, and he represents all that is best in
+the new progressive movement in the South.</p>
+
+<p>One of the unpleasant features of the villages in the South are the poor
+hotels. In accounting for this condition I heard a story illustrating the
+attitude of the old South toward public accommodations. A number of years
+ago, before the death of Robert Toombs, who, as a member of Jefferson
+Davis&#8217;s cabinet was called the &#8220;backbone of the confederacy,&#8221; the spirit
+of progress reached the town where Toombs lived. The thing most needed was
+a new hotel. The business men got together and subscribed money with
+enthusiasm, counting upon Toombs, who was their richest man, for the
+largest subscription. But when they finally went to him, he said:</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;What do we want of a hotel? When a gentleman comes<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_69" id="Page_69">[Pg 69]</a></span> to town I will
+entertain him myself; those who are not gentlemen we don&#8217;t want!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>That was the old spirit of aristocratic individualism; the town did not
+get its hotel.</p>
+
+<p>One of the public enterprises of Mr. Brown at Hawkinsville is a good
+hotel; and what is rarer still, North and South, he has made his hotel
+building really worthy architecturally.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Brown took me out to his plantation&mdash;a drive of some eight miles. In
+common with most of the larger plantation owners, as I found not only in
+Georgia, but in other Southern states which I afterward visited, Mr. Brown
+makes his home in the city. After a while I came to feel a reasonable
+confidence in assuming that almost any prominent merchant, banker, lawyer,
+or politician whom I met in the towns owned a plantation in the country.
+From a great many stories of the fortunes of families that I heard I
+concluded that the movement of white owners from the land to nearby towns
+was increasing every year. High prices for cotton and consequent
+prosperity seem to have accelerated rather than retarded the movement.
+White planters can now afford to live in town where they can have the
+comforts and conveniences, where the servant question is not impossibly
+difficult, and where there are good schools for the children. Another
+potent reason for the movement is the growing fear of the whites, and
+especially the women and children, at living alone on great farms where
+white neighbours are distant. Statistics show that less crime is committed
+in the black belt than in other parts of the South. I found that the fear
+was not absent even among these people.</p>
+
+<p>I have a letter from a white man, P. S. George, of Greenwood, Mississippi,
+which expresses the country white point of view with singular earnestness:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>I live in a country of large plantations; if there are 40,000 people
+in that country, at least 30,000 are Negroes, and we never have any
+friction between the races. I have been here as a man for twenty
+years and I never heard of but one case of attempted assault by a
+Negro on a white woman. That Negro was taken out and hanged. I said
+that we never had any trouble with Negroes, but it&#8217;s because we never
+take our eyes off the gun. You may wager that I never leave my wife
+and daughter at home without a man in the house after ten o&#8217;clock at
+night&mdash;because I am afraid.</p></div>
+
+<p>As a result of these various influences a traveller in the black belt sees
+many plantation houses, even those built in recent<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_70" id="Page_70">[Pg 70]</a></span> years, standing vacant
+and forlorn or else occupied by white overseers, who are in many parts of
+the South almost as difficult to keep as the Negro tenants.</p>
+
+<p>Thousands of small white farmers, both owners and renters, of course,
+remain, but when the leading planters leave the country, these men, too,
+grow discontented and get away at the first opportunity. Going to town,
+they find ready employment for the whole family in the cotton mill or in
+other industries where they make more money and live with a degree of
+comfort that they never before imagined possible.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><i>Story of the Mill People</i></p>
+
+<p>Many cotton mills, indeed, employ agents whose business it is to go out
+through the country urging the white farmers to come to town and painting
+glowing pictures of the possibilities of life there. I have visited a
+number of mill neighbourhoods and talked with the operatives. I found the
+older men sometimes homesick for free life of the farm. One lanky old
+fellow said rather pathetically:</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;When it comes to cotton picking time and I know that they are grinding
+cane and hunting possums, I jest naturally get lonesome for the country.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>But nothing would persuade the women and children to go back to the old
+hard life. Hawkinsville has a small cotton mill and just such a community
+of white workers around it. Owing to the scarcity of labour, wages in the
+mills have been going up rapidly all over the South, during the last two
+or three years, furnishing a still more potent attraction for country
+people.</p>
+
+<p>All these various tendencies are uniting to produce some very remarkable
+conditions in the South. A natural segregation of the races is apparently
+taking place. I saw it everywhere I went in the black belt. The white
+people were gravitating toward the towns or into white neighbourhoods and
+leaving the land, even though still owned by white men, more and more to
+the exclusive occupation of Negroes. Many black counties are growing
+blacker while not a few white counties are growing whiter.</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/gs07_top.jpg" alt="" /></div>
+<p class="center">WHERE WHITE MILL HANDS LIVE IN ATLANTA, GEORGIA</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/gs07_bot.jpg" alt="" /></div>
+<p class="center">WHERE SOME OF THE POORER NEGROES LIVE IN ATLANTA, GEORGIA</p>
+<p class="center">COMPANION PICTURES<br />
+to show that there is comparatively little difference in the material
+comfort of the two classes</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>Take, for example, Pulaski County, through which I drove<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_71" id="Page_71">[Pg 71]</a></span> that November
+morning with Mr. Brown. In 1870 the coloured and white population were
+almost exactly equal&mdash;about 6,000 for each. In 1880 the Negroes had
+increased to 8,225 while the whites showed a loss. By 1890 the towns had
+begun to improve and the white population grew by about 700, but the
+Negroes increased nearly 2,000. And, finally, here are the figures for
+1900: Negroes 11,029; Whites 7,460.</p>
+
+<p>I have not wished to darken our observations with too many statistics, but
+this tendency is so remarkable that I wish to set down for comparison the
+figures of a &#8220;white county&#8221; in northern Georgia&mdash;Polk County&mdash;which is
+growing whiter every year.</p>
+
+<table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="5" summary="table">
+<tr><td>&nbsp;</td><td><span class="spacer">&nbsp;</span></td>
+    <td align="center">Negroes</td><td><span class="spacer">&nbsp;</span></td>
+    <td align="center">Whites</td></tr>
+<tr><td>1880</td><td>&nbsp;</td>
+    <td align="center">4,147</td><td>&nbsp;</td>
+    <td align="center"><span style="margin-left: .5em;">7,805</span></td><td>&nbsp;</td></tr>
+<tr><td>1890</td><td>&nbsp;</td>
+    <td align="center">4,654</td><td>&nbsp;</td>
+    <td align="center">10,289</td><td>&nbsp;</td></tr>
+<tr><td>1900</td><td>&nbsp;</td>
+    <td align="center">4,916</td><td>&nbsp;</td>
+    <td align="center">12,940</td><td>&nbsp;</td></tr></table>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><i>Driving out Negroes</i></p>
+
+<p>One of the most active causes of this movement is downright fear&mdash;or race
+repulsion expressing itself in fear. White people dislike and fear to live
+in dense coloured neighbourhoods, while Negroes are often terrorised in
+white neighbourhoods&mdash;and not in the South only but in parts of Ohio,
+Indiana, Illinois, as I shall show when I come to treat of Northern race
+conditions. I have accumulated many instances showing how Negroes are
+expelled from white neighbourhoods. There is a significant report from
+Little Rock, Arkansas:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p class="center">(<i>Special to the Georgian.</i>)</p>
+
+<p>Little Rock, Ark., Jan. 1.&mdash;Practically every Negro in Evening Shade,
+Sharp County, in this state, has left town as the result of threats
+which have been made against the Negroes. For several years a small
+colony of Negroes has lived just on the outskirts of the town. A
+short time ago notices were posted warning the Negroes to leave the
+town at once. About the same time Joe Brooks, a Negro who lived with
+his family two miles north of town, was called to his door and fired
+upon by unknown persons. A load of shot struck the house close by his
+side and some of the shot entered his arm. Brooks and his family have
+left the country, and practically every member of the Negro colony
+has gone. They have abandoned their property or disposed of it for
+whatever they could get.</p></div>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_72" id="Page_72">[Pg 72]</a></span>From the New Orleans <i>Times Democrat</i> of March 20, 1907, I cut the
+following dispatch showing one method pursued by the whites of Oklahoma:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p class="center">BLACKS ORDERED OUT</p>
+
+<p>Lawton, Okla., March 20.&mdash;&#8220;Negroes, beware the cappers. We, the Sixty
+Sons of Waurika, demand the Negroes to leave here at once. We mean
+Go! Leave in twenty-four hours, or after that your life is
+uncertain.&#8221; These were the words on placards which the eighty Negroes
+of the town of Waurika, forty miles south of Lawton, saw posted
+conspicuously in a number of public places this morning.</p>
+
+<p>Dispatches from here to-night stated that the whites are in earnest,
+and that the Negroes will be killed if they do not leave town.</p></div>
+
+<p>Not a few students of Southern conditions like John Temple Graves among
+the whites and Bishop Turner among the coloured people have argued that
+actual physical separation of the races (either by deportation of the
+Negroes to Africa or elsewhere, or by giving them certain reservation-like
+parts of the South to live in) is the only solution. But here is, in
+actuality, a natural segregation going forward in certain parts of the
+South, though in a very different way from that recommended by Mr. Graves
+and Bishop Turner; for even in the blackest counties the white people own
+most of the land, occupy the towns, and dominate everywhere politically,
+socially, and industrially.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Brown&#8217;s plantation contains about 5,000 acres, of which some 3,500
+acres are in cultivation, a beautiful rolling country, well watered, with
+here and there clumps of pines, and dotted with the small homes of the
+tenantry.</p>
+
+<p>As we drove along the country road we met or passed many Negroes who bowed
+with the greatest deference. Some were walking, but many drove horses or
+mules and rode not infrequently in top buggies, looking most prosperous,
+as indeed, Mr. Brown informed me that they were. He knew them all, and
+sometimes stopped to ask them how they were getting along. The outward
+relationships between the races in the country seem to me to be smoother
+than it is in the city.</p>
+
+<p>Cotton, as in all this country, is almost the exclusive crop. In spite of
+the constant preaching of agricultural reformers, like Mr. Brown himself,
+hardly enough corn is raised to supply<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_73" id="Page_73">[Pg 73]</a></span> the people with food, and I was
+surprised here and elsewhere at seeing so few cattle and hogs. Sheep are
+non-existent. In Hawkinsville, though the country round about raises
+excellent grass, I saw in front of a supply store bales of hay which had
+been shipped in 400 miles&mdash;from Tennessee. Enough sugar cane is raised,
+mostly in small patches, to supply syrup for domestic uses. At the time of
+my visit the Negroes were in the cane-fields with their long knives,
+getting in the crop. We saw several little one-horse grinding mills
+pressing the juice from the cane, while near at hand, sheltered by a
+shanty-like roof, was the great simmering syrup kettle, with an expert
+Negro at work stirring and skimming. And always there were Negroes round
+about, all the boys and girls with jolly smeared faces&mdash;and the older ones
+peeling and sucking the fresh cane.</p>
+
+<p>It was a great time of year!</p>
+
+<p>How does the landlord&mdash;and a lord he is in a very true sense&mdash;manage his
+great estate? The same system is in use with slight variations everywhere
+in the cotton country and a description of Mr. Brown&#8217;s methods, with
+references here and there to what I have seen or heard elsewhere, will
+give an excellent idea of the common procedure.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><i>A Country of Great Plantations</i></p>
+
+<p>The black belt is a country of great plantations, some owners having as
+high as 30,000 acres, interspersed with smaller farms owned by the poorer
+white families or Negroes. In one way the conditions are similar to those
+prevailing in Ireland; great landlords and a poor tenantry or peasantry,
+the tenants here being very largely black.</p>
+
+<p>It requires about 100 families, or 600 people, to operate Mr. Brown&#8217;s
+plantation. Of these, 90 per cent. are coloured and 10 per cent. white. I
+was much interested in what Mr. Brown said about his Negro tenants, which
+varies somewhat from the impression I had in the city of the younger Negro
+generation.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I would much rather have young Negroes for tenants,&#8221; he said, &#8220;because
+they work better and seem more disposed to take care of their farms. The
+old Negroes ordinarily will shirk&mdash;a habit of slavery.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_74" id="Page_74">[Pg 74]</a></span>Besides the residence of the overseer and the homes of the tenants there
+is on the plantation a supply store owned by Mr. Brown, a blacksmith shop
+and a Negro church, which is also used as a school-house. This is, I found
+all through the black belt, a common equipment.</p>
+
+<p>Three different methods are pursued by the landlord in getting his land
+cultivated. First, the better class of tenants rent the land for cash, a
+&#8220;standing rent&#8221; of some $3 an acre, though in many places in Mississippi
+it ranges as high as $6 and $8 an acre. Second, a share-crop rental, in
+which the landlord and the tenant divide the cotton and corn produced.
+Third, the ordinary wage system; that is, the landlord hires workers at so
+much a month and puts in his own crop. All three of these methods are
+usually employed on the larger plantations. Mr. Brown rents 2,500 acres
+for cash, 400 on shares, and farms 600 himself with wage workers.</p>
+
+<p>All the methods of land measurement are very different here from what they
+are in the North. The plantation is irregularly divided up into what are
+called one-mule or one-plough farms&mdash;just that amount of land which a
+family can cultivate with one mule&mdash;usually about thirty acres. Some
+ambitious tenants will take a two-mule or even a four-mule farm.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><i>The Negro Tenant</i></p>
+
+<p>Most of the tenants, especially the Negroes, are very poor, and wholly
+dependent upon the landlord. Many Negro families possess practically
+nothing of their own, save their ragged clothing, and a few dollars&#8217; worth
+of household furniture, cooking utensils and a gun. The landlord must
+therefore supply them not only with enough to live on while they are
+making their crop, but with the entire farming outfit. Let us say that a
+Negro comes in November to rent a one-mule farm from the landlord for the
+coming year.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;What have you got?&#8221; asks the landlord.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Noting&#8217;, boss,&#8221; he is quite likely to say.</p>
+
+<p>The &#8220;boss&#8221; furnishes him with a cabin to live in&mdash;which goes with the land
+rented&mdash;a mule, a plough, possibly a <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_75" id="Page_75">[Pg 75]</a></span>one-horse waggon and a few tools.
+He is often given a few dollars in cash near Christmas time which
+(ordinarily) he immediately spends&mdash;wastes. He is then allowed to draw
+upon the plantation supply store a regular amount of corn to feed his
+mule, and meat, bread, and tobacco, and some clothing for his family. The
+cost of the entire outfit and supplies for a year is in the neighbourhood
+of $300, upon which the tenant pays interest at from 10 to 30 per cent.
+from the time of signing the contract in November, although most of the
+supplies are not taken out until the next summer. Besides this interest
+the planter also makes a large profit on all the groceries and other
+necessaries furnished by his supply store. Having made his contract the
+Negro goes to work with his whole family and keeps at it until the next
+fall when the cotton is all picked and ginned. Then he comes in for his
+&#8220;settlement&#8221;&mdash;a great time of year. The settlements were going forward
+while I was in the black belt. The Negro is credited with the amount of
+cotton he brings in and he is charged with all the supplies he has had,
+and interest, together with the rent of his thirty acres of land. If the
+season has been good and he has been industrious, he will often have a
+nice profit in cash, but sometimes he not only does not come out even, but
+closes his year of work actually in deeper debt to the landlord.</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/gs08_top.jpg" alt="" /></div>
+<p class="center">A &#8220;POOR WHITE&#8221; FAMILY<br />
+&#8220;Among them is a spirit of pride and independence which, rightly directed,
+would uplift and make them prosperous, but which, misguided and blind, as
+it sometimes is, keeps them in poverty.&#8221;</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/gs08_bot.jpg" alt="" /></div>
+<p class="center">A MODEL NEGRO SCHOOL<br />
+Inspired by Tuskegee; different, indeed, from the ordinary country Negro school in the South</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>Some Negroes, nowadays usually of the poorer sort, work for wages. They
+get from $12 to $15 a month (against $5 to $8 a few years ago) with a
+cabin to live in. They are allowed a garden patch, where they can, if they
+are industrious and their families help, raise enough vegetables to feed
+them comfortably, or part of a bale of cotton, which is their own. But it
+is sadly to be commented upon that few Negro tenants, or whites either, as
+far as I could see, do anything with their gardens save perhaps to raise a
+few collards, peanuts, and peppers&mdash;and possibly a few sweet potatoes.
+This is due in part to indolence and lack of ambition, and in part to the
+steady work required by the planter. The wife and children of an
+industrious wage-working Negro nearly always help in the fields, earning
+an additional income from chopping cotton in spring and picking the lint
+in the fall.</p>
+
+<p>This is the system as it is in theory; but the interest for us lies not in
+the plan, but in the actual practice.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_76" id="Page_76">[Pg 76]</a></span> How does it all work out for good
+or for evil, for landlord and for tenant?</p>
+
+<p>Tenantry in the South is a very different thing from what it is in the
+North. In the North, a man who rents a farm is nearly as free to do as he
+pleases as if he were the owner. But in the South, the present tenant
+system is much nearer the condition that prevailed in slavery times than
+it is to the present Northern tenant system. This grows naturally out of
+slavery; the white man had learned to operate big plantations with
+ignorant help; and the Negro on his part had no training for any other
+system. The white man was the natural master and the Negro the natural
+dependent and a mere Emancipation Proclamation did not at once change the
+<i>spirit</i> of the relationship.</p>
+
+<p>To-day a white overseer resides on every large plantation and he or the
+owner himself looks after and disciplines the tenants. The tenant is in
+debt to him (in some cases reaching a veritable condition of debt slavery
+or peonage) and he <i>must</i> see that the crop is made. Hence he watches the
+work of every Negro (and indeed that of the white tenants as well) sees
+that the land is properly fertilised, and that the dikes (to prevent
+washing) are kept up, that the cotton is properly chopped (thinned) and
+regularly cultivated. Some of the greater landowners employ assistant
+overseers or &#8220;riders&#8221; who are constantly travelling from farm to farm. On
+one plantation I saw four such riders start out one day, each with a rifle
+on his saddle. And on a South Carolina plantation I had a glimpse of one
+method of discipline. A planter was telling me of his difficulties&mdash;how a
+spirit of unruliness sometimes swept abroad through a plantation, inspired
+by some &#8220;bigoty nigger.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Do you know what I do with such cases?&#8221; he said. &#8220;Come with me, I&#8217;ll show
+you.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>He took me back through his house to the broad porch and reaching up to a
+shelf over the door he took down a hickory waggon spoke, as long as my
+arm.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;When there&#8217;s trouble,&#8221; he said, &#8220;I just go down with that and lay one or
+two of &#8217;em out. That ends the trouble. We&#8217;ve got to do it; they&#8217;re like
+children and once in a while they simply have to be punished. It&#8217;s far
+better for them to take<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_77" id="Page_77">[Pg 77]</a></span> it this way, from a white man who is their
+friend, than to be arrested and taken to court and sent to the
+chain-gang.&#8221;</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><i>Troubles of the Landlord</i></p>
+
+<p>Planters told me of all sorts of difficulties they had to meet with their
+tenants. One of them, after he had spent a whole evening telling me of the
+troubles which confronted any man who tried to work Negroes, summed it all
+up with the remark:</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;You&#8217;ve just got to make up your mind that you are dealing with children,
+and handle them as firmly and kindly as you know how.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>He told me how hard it was to get a Negro tenant even in the busy season
+to work a full week&mdash;and it was often only by withholding the weekly food
+allowance that it could be done. Saturday afternoon (or &#8220;evening,&#8221; as they
+say in the South) the Negro goes to town or visits his friends. Often he
+spends all day Sunday driving about the country and his mule comes back so
+worn out that it cannot be used on Monday. There are often furious
+religious revivals which break into the work, to say nothing of &#8220;frolics&#8221;
+and fish suppers at which the Negroes often remain all night long. Many of
+them are careless with their tools, wasteful of supplies, irresponsible in
+their promises. One planter told me how he had built neat fences around
+the homes of his Negroes, and fixed up their houses to encourage them in
+thrift and give them more comfort, only to have the fences and even parts
+of the houses used for firewood.</p>
+
+<p>Toward fall, if the season has been bad, and the crop of cotton is short,
+so short that a Negro knows that he will not be able to &#8220;pay out&#8221; and have
+anything left for himself, he will sometimes desert the plantation
+entirely, leaving the cotton unpicked and a large debt to the landlord. If
+he attempts that, however, he must get entirely away, else the planter
+will chase him down and bring him back to his work. Illiterate, without
+discipline or training, with little ambition and much indolence, a large
+proportion of Negro tenants are looked after and driven like children or
+slaves. I say &#8220;a large proportion&#8221;&mdash;but there are thousands of industrious
+Negro landowners and tenants who are rapidly getting ahead&mdash;as I shall
+show in my next chapter.</p>
+
+<p>In this connection it is a noteworthy fact that a considerable<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_78" id="Page_78">[Pg 78]</a></span> number of
+the white tenants require almost as much attention as the Negroes, though
+they are, of course, treated in an entirely different way. One planter in
+Alabama said to me:</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Give me Negroes every time. I wouldn&#8217;t have a low-down white tenant on my
+place. You can get work out of any Negro if you know how to handle him;
+but there are some white men who won&#8217;t work and can&#8217;t be driven, because
+they are white.&#8221;</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><i>Race Troubles in the Country</i></p>
+
+<p>In short, when slavery was abolished it gave place to a sort of feudal
+tenantry system which continues widely to-day. And it has worked with
+comparative satisfaction, at least to the landlords, until within the last
+few years, when the next step in the usual evolution of human
+society&mdash;industrial and urban development&mdash;began seriously to disturb the
+feudal equilibrium of the cotton country. It was a curious idea&mdash;human
+enough&mdash;that men should attempt to legislate slaves immediately into
+freedom. But nature takes her own methods of freeing slaves; they are
+slower than men&#8217;s ways, but more certain.</p>
+
+<p>The change now going on in the South from the feudal agricultural life to
+sharpened modern conditions has brought difficulties for the planter
+compared with which all others pale into insignificance. I mean the
+scarcity of labour. Industry is competing with agriculture for the limited
+supply of Negro workers. Negroes, responding to exactly the same natural
+laws that control the white farmers, have been moving cityward, entering
+other occupations, migrating west or north&mdash;where more money is to be
+made. Agricultural wages have therefore gone up and rents, relatively,
+have gone down, and had the South not been blessed for several years with
+wonderful returns from its monopoly crop, there might have been a more
+serious crisis.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><i>Cry of the South: &#8220;More Labour&#8221;</i></p>
+
+<p>If the South to-day could articulate its chief need, we should hear a
+single great shout:</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;More labour!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Out of this struggle for tenants, servants, and workers has grown the
+chief complications of the Negro <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_79" id="Page_79">[Pg 79]</a></span>problem&mdash;and I am not forgetting race
+prejudice, or the crimes against women. Indeed, it has seemed to me that
+the chief difficulty in understanding the Negro problem lies in showing
+how much of the complication in the South is due to economic readjustments
+and how much to instinctive race repulsion or race prejudice.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><i>A Tenant Stealer</i></p>
+
+<p>In one town I visited&mdash;not Hawkinsville&mdash;I was standing talking with some
+gentlemen in the street when I saw a man drive by in a buggy.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Do you see that man?&#8221; they asked me. I nodded.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Well, he is the greatest tenant-stealer in this country.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>I heard a good deal about these &#8220;tenant stealers.&#8221; A whole neighbourhood
+will execrate one planter who, to keep his land cultivated, will lure away
+his neighbours&#8217; Negroes. Sometimes he will offer more wages, sometimes he
+will give the tenants better houses to live in, and sometimes he succeeds
+by that sheer force of a masterful personality which easily controls an
+ignorant tenantry.</p>
+
+<p>I found, moreover, that there was not only a struggle between individual
+planters for Negro tenants, but between states and sections. Many of the
+old farms in South Carolina and Alabama have been used so long that they
+require a steady and heavy annual treatment of fertiliser, with the result
+that cotton growing costs more than it does in the rich alluvial lands of
+Mississippi, or the newer regions of Arkansas and Texas. The result is
+that the planters of the West, being able to pay more wages and give the
+tenants better terms, lure away the Negroes of the East. Georgia and other
+states have met this competitive disadvantage in the usual way in which
+such disadvantages, when first felt but not fully understood, are met, by
+counteracting legislation. Georgia has made the most stringent laws to
+keep her Negroes on the land. The Georgian code (Section 601) says:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Any person who shall solicit or procure emigrants, or shall attempt
+to do so, without first procuring a licence as required by law, shall
+be guilty of a misdemeanour.</p></div>
+
+<p>Ex-Congressman William H. Fleming, one of the ablest statesmen of Georgia, said:</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_80" id="Page_80">[Pg 80]</a></span>&#8220;Land and other forms of capital cannot spare the Negro and will not give
+him up until a substitute is found. His labour is worth millions upon
+millions. In Georgia we now make it a crime for anyone to solicit
+emigrants without taking out a licence, and then we make the licence as
+nearly prohibitive as possible. One of the most dangerous occupations for
+any one to follow in this state would be that of an emigrant agent&mdash;as
+some have found by experience.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>In this connection I have an account published in April, 1907, in an
+Augusta newspaper of just such a case:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>The heaviest fine given in the city court of Richmond County within
+the last two years was imposed upon E. F. Arnett yesterday morning.
+He was sentenced to pay a fine of one thousand dollars or serve six
+months in the county jail.</p>
+
+<p>Arnett was convicted of violating the state emigration laws regarding
+the carrying of labour out of the state. He was alleged to have
+employed thirteen Negroes to work on the Georgia and Atlantic
+Railroad, which operates in this state and Alabama. The jury on the
+case returned a verdict of guilty when court convened yesterday,
+although it had been reported that a mistrial was probable.</p></div>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><i>&#8220;Peg Leg&#8221; Williams</i></p>
+
+<p>A famous railroad emigration agent called &#8220;Peg Leg&#8221; Williams, who promoted
+Negro emigration from Georgia to Mississippi and Texas a few years ago,
+was repeatedly prosecuted and finally driven out of business. In a letter
+which he wrote some time ago to the Atlanta <i>Constitution</i> he said:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>I know of several counties not a hundred miles from Atlanta where
+it&#8217;s more than a man&#8217;s life is worth to go in to get Negroes to move
+to some other state. There are farmers that would not hesitate to
+shoot their brother were he to come from Mississippi to get &#8220;his
+niggers,&#8221; as he calls them, even though he had no contract with them.
+I know personally numbers of Negro men who have moved West and after
+accumulating a little, return to get a brother, sister, or an old
+father or mother, and they were compelled to return without them,
+their lives being imperilled; they had to leave and leave quick.</p></div>
+
+<p>In view of such a feeling it may be imagined how futile is the talk of the
+deportation of the Negro race. What the Southern planter wants to-day is
+not fewer Negroes but more Negroes&mdash;Negroes who will &#8220;keep their place.&#8221;</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><i>Laws to Make the Negro Work</i></p>
+
+<p>Many other laws have been passed in the Southern states which are designed
+to keep the Negro on the land, and having<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_81" id="Page_81">[Pg 81]</a></span> him there, to make him work.
+The contract law, the abuses of which lead to peonage and debt slavery, is
+an excellent example&mdash;which I shall discuss more fully in the next
+chapter. The criminal laws, the chain-gang system, and the hiring of Negro
+convicts to private individuals are all, in one way or another, devices to
+keep the Negro at work on farms, in brick-yards and in mines. The vagrancy
+laws, not unlike those of the North and excellent in their purpose, are
+here sometimes executed with great severity. In Alabama the last
+legislature passed a law under which a Negro arrested for vagrancy must
+prove that he is not a vagrant. In short, the old rule of law that a man
+is innocent until proved guilty is here reversed for the Negro so that the
+burden of proving that he is not guilty of vagrancy rests upon him, not
+upon the state. The last Alabama legislature also passed a stringent game
+law, one argument in its favour being that by preventing the Negro from
+pot-hunting it would force him to work more steadily in the cotton fields.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><i>Race Hatred Versus Economic Necessity</i></p>
+
+<p>One of the most significant things I saw in the South&mdash;and I saw it
+everywhere&mdash;was the way in which the white people were torn between their
+feeling of race prejudice and their downright economic needs. Hating and
+fearing the Negro as a race (though often loving individual Negroes), they
+yet want him to work for them; they can&#8217;t get along without him. In one
+impulse a community will rise to mob Negroes or to drive them out of the
+country because of Negro crime or Negro vagrancy, or because the Negro is
+becoming educated, acquiring property and &#8220;getting out of his place&#8221;; and
+in the next impulse laws are passed or other remarkable measures taken to
+keep him at work&mdash;because the South can&#8217;t get along without him. From the
+Atlanta <i>Georgian</i> I cut recently a letter which well illustrates the way
+in which racial hatred clashes with economic necessity.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p class="center">TROUBLES OF COUNTRY FOLK</p>
+
+<p>But aren&#8217;t there two sides to every question? Here we are out here in
+the country, right in the midst of hundreds of Negroes, and do you
+know, sir, that all this talk about lynching and ku-kluxing is
+frightening the farm hands to such<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_82" id="Page_82">[Pg 82]</a></span> an extent we begin to fear that
+soon the farmers will sustain a great loss of labour, by their
+running away? Already it is beginning to have its effect. After night
+the Negroes are afraid to leave their farm to go anywhere on errands
+of business. Why, sir, two miles from this town, the Negroes are
+afraid to come here to trade at night. The country merchants are
+feeling the force of it very sorely, and if this foolishness isn&#8217;t
+stopped their losses in fall trade will be very heavy.</p>
+
+<p>Even some of the ladies of our community are complaining of this
+rashness. That it is demoralising the labour in the home department.
+So in conclusion, in behalf of my community and other country
+communities, I feel it my duty to raise a warning voice against all
+such new foolish ku-kluxism.</p>
+
+<p class="right"><span class="smcap">T. J. Lowe.</span></p>
+
+<p>Mableton, Ga.</p></div>
+
+<p>While I was in Georgia a case came up which threw a flood of light upon
+the inner complexities of this problem. In the county of Habersham in
+North Georgia the population is largely of the type known as &#8220;poor
+white&#8221;&mdash;the famous mountain folk who were never slave-owners and many of
+whom fought in the Union army during the Civil War. Habersham is one of
+the &#8220;white counties&#8221; which is growing whiter. It has about 2,000 Negroes
+and 12,000 whites&mdash;many of the latter having come in from the North to
+grow peaches and raise sheep. One of the Negroes of Habersham County was
+Frank Grant, described by a white neighbour as &#8220;a Negro of good character,
+a property owner, setting an example of thrift and honesty that ought to
+have made his example a benefit to any community.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Grant had saved money from his labour and bought a home. He was such a
+good worker that people were willing sometimes to pay him twice the wages
+of the average labourer, white or black. On the night of December 16,
+1906, the Negro&#8217;s house was fired into by a party of white men who then
+went to the house of his tenant, Henry Scism, also a Negro, and shot
+promiscuously around Scism&#8217;s house, and warned him to leave the country in
+one week, threatening him with severe penalties if he did not go. As a
+result Grant had to sell out his little home, won after such hard work,
+and he and his tenant Scism with their families both fled the county.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;In Grant,&#8221; said his white neighbour, &#8220;the county lost a capable
+labourer&mdash;in its present situation, a most valuable asset&mdash;and a good
+citizen.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Here, then, we have race hatred versus economic necessity. The important
+citizens and employers of Habersham County<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_83" id="Page_83">[Pg 83]</a></span> came to Atlanta and presented
+a petition to Governor Terrell, January 18, 1907, as follows:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+<p><span class="smcap">To His Excellency, J. M. Terrell,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;"><span class="smcap">Governor of Georgia, Atlanta:</span></span></p>
+
+<p>Whereas, on the night of December 16, 1906, parties unknown came to
+the quiet home of one Frank Grant, coloured, a citizen of this
+county, and shot into his residence, and then went to the home of
+Henry Scism, coloured, a tenant of said Frank Grant, and shot
+promiscuously around his (the said Scism&#8217;s) house, and demanded of
+him to leave the county under severe penalty.</p>
+
+<p>This has caused the tenant, Henry Scism, to leave, and Frank Grant to
+sell his little house at a sacrifice and leave. It comes to us that
+Frank Grant is a quiet, innocent, hard-working citizen. Therefore,
+we, the undersigned officers and citizens of Habersham County,
+Georgia, pray you to offer a liberal reward for the arrest and
+conviction or these unknown parties&mdash;say $100 for the first and $50
+for each succeeding one.</p>
+
+<p><span style="margin-left: 4em;">(Signed) <span class="smcap">C. W. Grant</span>,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 8em;"><i>County School Commissioner</i>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 12em;"><span class="smcap">J. A. Erwin Clerk</span>, S. C.,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 12em;"><span class="smcap">M. Franklin</span>, Ordinary</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 12em;"><span class="smcap">J. D. Hill</span>, T. C. H. C.</span></p></div>
+
+<p>But, of course, nothing could be done that would keep the Negroes on the
+land under such conditions.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><i>Why Negroes Are Driven Out</i></p>
+
+<p>What does it all mean? Listen to the explanation given by a prominent
+white man of Habersham County&mdash;not to me&mdash;but to the Atlanta <i>Georgian</i>,
+where it was published:</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;It is not a problem of Negro labour, because there is little of that kind
+there. The white labour will not work for the fruit growers at prices they
+can afford, even when it is a good fruit year. Often they decline to work
+at any price. They have many admirable qualities; among them is a spirit
+of pride and independence, which, rightly directed, would uplift and make
+them prosperous, but which misguided and blind, as it sometimes is, keeps
+them in poverty and puts the region in which they live at great
+disadvantage.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Landowners and employers, native, and new, are indignant but helpless.
+They are in the power of the shiftless element of the whites, who say, &#8216;I
+will work or not, as I please, and when I please, and at my own price; and
+I will not have Negroes taking my work away from me.&#8217; This is not a race
+question, pure and simple; it is an industrial question, a labour issue,
+not confined to one part of the country.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_84" id="Page_84">[Pg 84]</a></span>Here, it will be observed, the same complaint is made against the &#8220;poor
+white&#8221; as against the Negro&mdash;that he is shiftless and that he won&#8217;t work
+even for high wages.</p>
+
+<p>Generally speaking, the race hatred in the South comes chiefly from the
+poorer class of whites who either own land which they work themselves or
+are tenant farmers in competition with Negroes and from politicians who
+seek to win the votes of this class of white men. The larger landowners
+and employers of labour, while they do not love the Negro, want him to
+work and work steadily, and will do almost anything to keep him on the
+land&mdash;so long as he is a faithful, obedient, unambitious worker. When he
+becomes prosperous, or educated, or owns land, many white people no longer
+&#8220;have any use for him&#8221; and turn upon him with hostility, but the best type
+of the Southern white men is not only glad to see the Negro become a
+prosperous and independent farmer but will do much to help him.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><i>Vivid Illustration of Race Feeling</i></p>
+
+<p>I have had innumerable illustrations of the extremes to which race feeling
+reaches among a certain class of Southerners. In a letter to the Atlanta
+<i>Constitution</i>, November 5, 1906, a writer who signs himself Mark Johnson,
+says:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>The only use we have for the Negro is as a labourer. It is only as
+such that we need him; it is only as such that we can use him. If the
+North wants to take him and educate him we will bid him godspeed and
+contribute to his education if schools are located on the other side
+of the line.</p></div>
+
+<p>And here are extracts from a remarkable letter from a Southern white
+working man signing himself Forrest Pope and published in the Atlanta
+<i>Georgian</i>, October 22, 1906:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>When the skilled negro appears and begins to elbow the white man in
+the struggle for existence, don&#8217;t you know the white man rebels and
+won&#8217;t have it so? If you don&#8217;t it won&#8217;t take you long to find it out;
+just go out and ask a few of them, those who tell you the whole
+truth, and see what you will find out about it.</p></div>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><i>What Is the Negro&#8217;s Place?</i></p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>All the genuine Southern people like the Negro as a servant, and so
+long as he remains the hewer of wood and carrier of water, and
+remains strictly in what we choose to call his place, everything is
+all right, but when ambition, <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_85" id="Page_85">[Pg 85]</a></span>prompted by real education, causes
+the Negro to grow restless and he bestir himself to get out of that
+servile condition, then there is, or at least there will be, trouble,
+sure enough trouble, that all the great editors, parsons and
+philosophers can no more check than they can now state the whole
+truth and nothing but the truth, about this all-absorbing,
+far-reaching miserable race question. There are those among Southern
+editors and other public men who have been shouting into the ears of
+the North for twenty-five years that education <ins class="correction" title="original: whould">would</ins> solve the Negro
+question; there is not an honest, fearless, thinking man in the South
+but who knows that to be a bare-faced lie. Take a young Negro of
+little more than ordinary intelligence, even, get hold of him in
+time, train him thoroughly as to books, and finish him up with a good
+industrial education, send him out into the South with ever so good
+intentions both on the part of his benefactor and himself, send him
+to take my work away from me and I will kill him.</p></div>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/gs09_top.jpg" alt="" /></div>
+<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/gs09_bot.jpg" alt="" /></div>
+<p class="center">COMPANION PICTURES<br />
+Old and new cabins for Negro tenants on the Brown plantation</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>The writer says in another part of this remarkable letter, giving as it
+does a glimpse of the bare bones of the economic struggle for existence:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>I am, I believe, a typical Southern white workingman of the skilled
+variety, and I&#8217;ll tell the whole world, including Drs. Abbott and
+Eliot, that I don&#8217;t want any educated property-owning Negro around
+me. The Negro would be desirable to me for what I could get out of
+him in the way of labour that I don&#8217;t want to have to perform myself,
+and I have no other uses for him.</p></div>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><i>Who Will Do the Dirty Work?</i></p>
+
+<p>One illustration more and I am through. I met at Montgomery, Alabama, a
+lawyer named Gustav Frederick Mertins. We were discussing the &#8220;problem,&#8221;
+and Mr. Mertins finally made a striking remark, not at all expressing the
+view that I heard from some of the strongest citizens of Montgomery, but
+excellently voicing the position of many Southerners.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;It&#8217;s a question,&#8221; he said, &#8220;who will do the dirty work. In this country
+the white man won&#8217;t: the Negro must. There&#8217;s got to be a mudsill
+somewhere. If you educate the Negroes they won&#8217;t stay where they belong;
+and you must consider them as a race, because if you let a few rise it
+makes the others discontented.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Mertins presented me with a copy of his novel called &#8220;The Storm
+Signal,&#8221; in which he further develops the idea (p. 342):</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>The Negro is the mudsill of the social and industrial South to-day.
+Upon his labour in the field, in the forest, and in the mine, the
+whole structure rests. Slip the mudsill out and the system must be
+reorganised.... Educate him and he quits the field. Instruct him in
+the trades and sciences<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_86" id="Page_86">[Pg 86]</a></span> and he enters into active competition with
+the white man in what are called the higher planes of life. That
+competition brings on friction, and that friction in the end means
+the Negroe&#8217;s undoing.</p></div>
+
+<p>Is not this mudsill stirring to-day, and is not that the deep reason for
+many of the troubles in the South&mdash;and in the North as well, where the
+Negro has appeared in large numbers? The friction of competition has
+arrived, and despite the demand for justice by many of the best class of
+the Southern whites, the struggle is certainly of growing intensity.</p>
+
+<p>And out of this economic struggle of whites and blacks grows an ethical
+struggle far more significant. It is the struggle of the white man with
+himself. How shall he, who is supreme in the South as in the North, treat
+the Negro? That is the <i>real</i> struggle!</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr style="width: 50%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_87" id="Page_87">[Pg 87]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_V" id="CHAPTER_V"></a>CHAPTER V</h2>
+<h3>RACE RELATIONSHIPS IN THE SOUTH</h3>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center">I</p>
+
+<p class="dropcap"><span class="caps">Generally</span> speaking, the sharpest race prejudice in the South is exhibited
+by the poorer class of white people, whether farmers, artisans, or
+unskilled workers, who come into active competition with the Negroes, or
+from politicians who are seeking the votes of this class of people. It is
+this element which has driven the Negroes out of more than one community
+in the South and it commonly forms the lynching mobs. A similar antagonism
+of the working classes exists in the North wherever the Negro has appeared
+in large numbers&mdash;as I shall show when I come to write of the treatment of
+the Northern Negro.</p>
+
+<p>On the other hand, the larger landowners and employers of the South, and
+all professional and business men who hire servants, while they dislike
+and fear the Negro as a race (though often loving and protecting
+individual Negroes), want the black man to work for them. More than that,
+they <i>must have him</i>: for he has a practical monopoly on labour in the
+South. White men of the employing class will do almost anything to keep
+the Negro on the land and his wife in the kitchen&mdash;so long as they are
+obedient and unambitious workers.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><i>&#8220;Good&#8221; and &#8220;Bad&#8221; Landlords</i></p>
+
+<p>But I had not been very long in the black belt before I began to see that
+the large planters&mdash;the big employers of labour&mdash;often pursued very
+different methods in dealing with the Negro. In the feudal middle ages
+there were good and bad barons; so in the South to-day there are &#8220;good&#8221;
+and &#8220;bad&#8221; landlords (for lack of a better designation) and every gradation
+between them.</p>
+
+<p>The good landlord, generally speaking, is the one who knows by inheritance
+how a feudal system should be operated. In other words, he is the old
+slave-owner or his descendant, who not only feels the ancient
+responsibility of slavery times, but believes<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_88" id="Page_88">[Pg 88]</a></span> that the good treatment of
+tenants, as a policy, will produce better results than harshness and
+force.</p>
+
+<p>The bad landlord represents the degeneration of the feudal system: he is
+in farming to make all he can out of it this year and next, without
+reference to human life.</p>
+
+<p>I have already told something of J. Pope Brown&#8217;s plantation near
+Hawkinsville. On the November day, when we drove out through it, I was
+impressed with the fact that nearly all the houses used by the Negro
+tenants were new, and much superior to the old log cabins built either
+before or after the war, some of which I saw still standing, vacant and
+dilapidated, in various parts of the plantation. I asked the reason why he
+had built new houses:</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Well,&#8221; he answered, &#8220;I find I can keep a better class of tenants, if the
+accommodations are good.&#8221;</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><i>Liquor and &#8220;the Resulting Trouble&#8221;</i></p>
+
+<p>Mr. Brown has other methods for keeping the tenantry on his plantation
+satisfied. Every year he gives a barbecue and &#8220;frolic&#8221; for his Negroes,
+with music and speaking and plenty to eat. A big watermelon patch is also
+a feature of the plantation, and during all the year the tenants are
+looked after, not only to see that the work is properly done, but in more
+intimate and sympathetic ways. On one trip through the plantation we
+stopped in front of a Negro cabin. Inside lay a Negro boy close to death
+from a bullet wound in the head. He had been at a Negro party a few nights
+before where there was liquor. Someone had overturned the lamp: shooting
+began, and the young fellow was taken out for dead. Such accidents or
+crimes are all too familiar in the plantation country. Although Pulaski
+County, Georgia, prohibits the sale or purchase of liquor (most of the
+South, indeed, is prohibition in its sentiment), the Negroes are able from
+time to time to get jugs of liquor&mdash;and, as one Southerner put it to me,
+&#8220;enjoy the resulting trouble.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The boy&#8217;s father came out of the field and told us with real eloquence of
+sorrow of the patient&#8217;s condition.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Las&#8217; night,&#8221; he said, &#8220;we done thought he was a-crossin&#8217; de ribbah.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_89" id="Page_89">[Pg 89]</a></span>Mr. Brown had already sent the doctor out from the city; he now made
+arrangements to transport the boy to a hospital in Macon where he could be
+properly treated.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><i>Use of Cocaine Among Negroes</i></p>
+
+<p>As I have said before, the white landlord who really tries to treat his
+Negroes well, often has a hard time of it. Many of those (not all) he
+deals with are densely ignorant, irresponsible, indolent&mdash;and often
+rendered more careless from knowing that the white man must have labour.
+Many of them will not keep up the fences, or take care of their tools, or
+pick the cotton even after it is ready, without steady attention. A
+prominent Mississippi planter gave me an illustration of one of the
+troubles he just then had to meet. An eighteen-year-old Negro left his
+plantation to work in a railroad camp. There he learned to use cocaine,
+and when he came back to the plantation he taught the habit to a dozen of
+the best Negroes there, to their complete ruin. The planter had the entire
+crowd arrested, searched for cocaine and kept in jail until the habit was
+broken. Then he prosecuted the white druggist who sold the cocaine.</p>
+
+<p>Some Southern planters, to prevent the Negroes from leaving, have built
+churches for them, and in one instance I heard of a school-house as well.</p>
+
+<p>Another point of the utmost importance&mdash;for it strikes at the selfish
+interest of the landlord&mdash;lies in the treatment of the Negro, who, by
+industry or ability, can &#8220;get ahead.&#8221; A good landlord not only places no
+obstacles in the way of such tenants, but takes a real pride in their
+successes. Mr. Brown said:</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;If a tenant sees that other Negroes on the same plantation have been able
+to save money and get land of their own, it tends to make them more
+industrious. It pays the planter to treat his tenants well.&#8221;</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><i>Negro with $1,000 in the Bank</i></p>
+
+<p>The result is that a number of Mr. Brown&#8217;s tenants have bought and own
+good farms near the greater plantation. The plantation, indeed, becomes a
+sort of central sun around which revolves like planets the lesser life of
+the Negro landowner.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_90" id="Page_90">[Pg 90]</a></span> Mr. Brown told me with no little pride of the
+successes of several Negroes. We met one farmer driving to town in a top
+buggy with a Negro school-teacher. His name was Robert Polhill&mdash;a good
+type of the self-respecting, vigorous, industrious Negro. Afterward we
+visited his farm. He had an excellent house with four rooms. In front
+there were vines and decorative &#8220;chicken-corn&#8221;; a fence surrounded the
+place and it was really in good repair. Inside the house everything was
+scrupulously neat, from the clean rag rugs to the huge post beds with
+their gay coverlets. The wife evidently had some Indian blood in her
+veins; she could read and write, but Polhill himself was a full black
+Negro, intelligent, but illiterate. The children, and there were a lot of
+them, are growing up practically without opportunity for education because
+the school held in the Negro church is not only very poor, but it is in
+session only a short time every year. Near the house was a one-horse
+syrup-mill then in operation, grinding cane brought in by neighbouring
+farmers&mdash;white as well as black&mdash;the whites thus patronising the
+enterprise of their energetic Negro neighbour.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I first noticed Polhill when he began work on the plantation,&#8221; said Mr.
+Brown, &#8220;because he was the only Negro on the place whom I could depend
+upon to stop hog-cracks in the fences.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>His history is the common history of the Negro farmer who &#8220;gets ahead.&#8221;
+Starting as a wages&#8217; hand, he worked hard and steadily, saving enough
+finally to buy a mule&mdash;the Negro&#8217;s first purchase; then he rented land,
+and by hard work and close calculating made money steadily. With his first
+$75 he started out to see the world, travelling by railroad to Florida,
+and finally back home again. The &#8220;moving about&#8221; instinct is strong in all
+Negroes&mdash;sometimes to their destruction. Then he bought 100 acres of land
+on credit and having good crops, paid for it in six or seven years. Now he
+has a comfortable home, he is out of debt, and has money in the bank, a
+painted house, a top buggy and a cabinet organ! These are the values of
+his property:</p>
+
+<table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="5" summary="table">
+<tr><td>His farm is worth</td><td><span class="spacer">&nbsp;</span></td><td align="right">$2,000</td></tr>
+<tr><td>Two mules</td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">300</td></tr>
+<tr><td>Horse</td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">150</td></tr>
+<tr><td>Other equipment</td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">550</td></tr>
+<tr><td>Money in the bank</td><td>&nbsp;</td><td class="bb" align="right">1,000</td></tr>
+<tr><td>&nbsp;</td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">$4,000</td></tr></table>
+
+<p>&nbsp;<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_91" id="Page_91">[Pg 91]</a></span></p>
+<p class="center"><i>Negro Who Owns 1,000 Acres of Land</i></p>
+
+<p>All of this shows what a Negro who is industrious, and who comes up on a
+plantation where the landlord is not oppressive, can do. And despite the
+fact that much is heard on the one hand of the lazy and worthless Negro,
+and on the other of the landlord who holds his Negroes in practical
+slavery&mdash;it is significant that many Negroes are able to get ahead. In
+Pulaski County there are Negroes who own as high as 1,000 acres of land.
+Ben Gordon is one of them, his brother Charles has 500 acres, John Nelson
+has 400 acres worth $20 an acre, the Miller family has 1,000 acres,
+January Lawson, another of Mr. Brown&#8217;s former tenants, has 500 acres; Jack
+Daniel 200 acres, Tom Whelan 600 acres. A mulatto merchant in
+Hawkinsville, whose creditable store I visited, also owns his plantation
+in the country and rents it to Negro tenants on the same system employed
+by the white landowners. Indeed, a few Negroes in the South are coming to
+be not inconsiderable landlords, and have many tenants.</p>
+
+<p>Hawkinsville also has a Negro blacksmith, Negro barbers and Negro
+builders&mdash;and like the white man, the Negro also develops his own
+financial sharks. One educated coloured man in Hawkinsville is a &#8220;note
+shaver&#8221;; he &#8220;stands for&#8221; other Negroes and signs their notes&mdash;at a
+frightful commission.</p>
+
+<p>Statistics will give some idea of how the industrious Negro in a black
+belt county like Pulaski has been succeeding.</p>
+
+<table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="5" summary="table">
+<tr><td>&nbsp;</td><td><span class="spacer">&nbsp;</span></td>
+    <td align="center">Acres of<br />Land Owned</td><td><span class="spacer">&nbsp;</span></td>
+    <td align="center">Total Assessed<br />Value of<br />Property</td></tr>
+<tr><td>1875</td><td>&nbsp;</td>
+    <td align="center"><span style="margin-left: .5em;">4,490</span></td><td>&nbsp;</td>
+    <td align="center">$43,230</td></tr>
+<tr><td>1880</td><td>&nbsp;</td>
+    <td align="center"><span style="margin-left: .5em;">5,988</span></td><td>&nbsp;</td>
+    <td align="center"><span style="margin-left: .5em;">60,760</span></td></tr>
+<tr><td>1885</td><td>&nbsp;</td>
+    <td align="center"><span style="margin-left: .5em;">6,901</span></td><td>&nbsp;</td>
+    <td align="center"><span style="margin-left: .5em;">59,022</span></td></tr>
+<tr><td>1890</td><td>&nbsp;</td>
+    <td align="center">12,294</td><td>&nbsp;</td>
+    <td align="center">122,926</td></tr>
+<tr><td>1895</td><td>&nbsp;</td>
+    <td align="center">14,145</td><td>&nbsp;</td>
+    <td align="center">144,158</td></tr>
+<tr><td>1900</td><td>&nbsp;</td>
+    <td align="center">13,205</td><td>&nbsp;</td>
+    <td align="center">138,800</td></tr></table>
+
+<p>It is surprising to an unfamiliar visitor to find out that the Negroes in
+the South have acquired so much land. In Georgia alone in 1906 coloured
+people owned 1,400,000 acres and were assessed for over $28,000,000 worth
+of property, practically all of which, of course, has been acquired in the
+forty years since slavery.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_92" id="Page_92">[Pg 92]</a></span>Negro farmers in some instances have made a genuine reputation for
+ability. John Roberts, a Richmond County Negro, won first prize over many
+white exhibitors in the fall of 1906 at the Georgia-Carolina fair at
+Augusta for the best bale of cotton raised.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><i>Little Coloured Boy&#8217;s Famous Speech</i></p>
+
+<p>I was at Macon while the first State fair ever held by Negroes in Georgia
+was in progress. In spite of the fact that racial relationships, owing to
+the recent riot at Atlanta, were acute, the fair was largely attended, and
+not only by Negroes, but by many white visitors. The brunt of the work of
+organisation fell upon R. R. Wright, president of the Georgia State
+Industrial College (coloured) of Savannah. President Wright is of
+full-blooded African descent, his grandmother, who reared him, being an
+African Negro of the Mandingo tribe. Just at the close of the war he was a
+boy in a freedman&#8217;s school at Atlanta. One Sunday General O. O. Howard
+came to address the pupils. When he had finished, he expressed a desire to
+take a message back to the people of the North.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;What shall I tell them for you?&#8221; he asked.</p>
+
+<p>A little black boy in front stood up quickly, and said:</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Tell &#8217;em, massa, we is rising.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Upon this incident John Greenleaf Whittier wrote a famous poem: and at the
+Negro fair, crowning the charts which had been prepared to show the
+progress of the Negroes of Georgia, I saw this motto:</p>
+
+<div class="textbox"><p class="center">&#8220;WE ARE RISING&#8221;</p></div>
+
+<p>The little black boy grew up, was graduated at Atlanta University, studied
+at Harvard, travelled in Europe, served in the Spanish-American War, and
+is now seeking to help his race to get an industrial training in the
+college which he organised in 1891. The attendance at the fair in Macon
+was between 25,000 and 30,000, the Negroes raised $11,000 and spent
+$7,000, and planned for a greater fair the next year. In this enterprise
+they had the sympathy and approval of the best white people. A vivid
+glimpse of what<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_93" id="Page_93">[Pg 93]</a></span> the fair meant is given by the <i>Daily News</i> of Macon&mdash;a
+white newspaper:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>The fair shows what progress can be accomplished by the industrious
+and thrifty Negro, who casts aside the belief that he is a dependent,
+and sails right in to make a living and a home for himself. Some of
+the agricultural exhibits of black farmers have never been surpassed
+in Macon. On the whole, the exposition just simply astounded folks
+who did not know what the Negro is doing for himself.</p>
+
+<p>Another significant feature about the fair was the excellent
+behaviour of the great throngs of coloured people who poured into the
+city during its progress. There was not an arrest on the fair grounds
+and very few in the city.</p></div>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/gs10_top.jpg" alt="" /></div>
+<p class="center">CANE SYRUP KETTLE. EXPERT NEGRO STIRRING AND SKIMMING</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/gs10_bot.jpg" alt="" /></div>
+<p class="center">CHAIN-GANG WORKERS ON THE ROADS</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>The better class of Negro farmers, indeed, have shown not only a capacity
+for getting ahead individually, but for organising for self-advancement,
+and even for working with corresponding associations of white farmers. The
+great cotton and tobacco associations of the South, which aim to direct
+the marketing of the product of the farms, have found it not only wise,
+but necessary to enlist the c&ouml;operation of Negro farmers. At the annual
+rally of the dark-tobacco growers at Guthrie, Kentucky, last September,
+many Negro planters were in the line of parade with the whites. The
+farmers&#8217; conferences held at Hampton, Tuskegee, Calhoun, and at similar
+schools, illustrate in other ways the possibilities of advancement which
+grow out of landownership by the Negroes.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><i>The Penalties of Being Free</i></p>
+
+<p>So much for the sunny side of the picture: the broad-gauge landlord and
+the prosperous tenantry. Conditions in the black belt are in one respect
+much as they were in slavery times, or as they would be under any feudal
+system: if the master or lord is &#8220;good,&#8221; the Negro prospers; if he is
+harsh, grasping, unkind, the Negro suffers bitterly. It gets back finally
+to the white man. In assuming supreme rights in the South&mdash;political,
+social, and industrial, the white man also assumes heavy duties and
+responsibilities; he cannot have the one without the other: and he takes
+to himself the pain and suffering which goes with power and
+responsibility.</p>
+
+<p>Of course, scarcity of labour and high wages have given the really
+ambitious and industrious Negro his opportunity, and many thousands of
+them are becoming more and more independent<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_94" id="Page_94">[Pg 94]</a></span> of the favour or the ill-will
+of the whites. And therein lies a profound danger, not only to the Negro,
+but to the South. Gradually losing the support and advice of the best type
+of white man, the independent Negro finds himself in competition with the
+poorer type of white man, whose jealousy he must meet. He takes the
+penalties of being really free. Escaping the exactions of a feudal life,
+he finds he must meet the sharper difficulties of a free industrial
+system. And being without the political rights of his poor white
+competitor and wholly without social recognition, discredited by the
+bestial crimes of the lower class of his own race, he has, indeed, a hard
+struggle before him. In many neighbourhoods he is peculiarly at the mercy
+of this lower class white electorate, and the self-seeking politicians
+whose stock in trade consists in playing upon the passions of race-hatred.</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center">II</p>
+
+<p>I come now to the reverse of the picture. When the Negro tenant takes up
+land or hires out to the landlord, he ordinarily signs a contract, or if
+he cannot sign (about half the Negro tenants of the black belt are wholly
+illiterate) he makes his mark. He often has no way of knowing certainly
+what is in the contract, though the arrangement is usually clearly
+understood, and he must depend on the landlord to keep both the rent and
+the supply-store accounts. In other words, he is wholly at the planter&#8217;s
+mercy&mdash;a temptation as dangerous for the landlord as the possibilities
+which it presents are for the tenant. It is so easy to make large profits
+by charging immense interest percentages or outrageous prices for supplies
+to tenants who are too ignorant or too weak to protect themselves, that
+the stories of the oppressive landlord in the South are scarcely
+surprising. It is easy, when the tenant brings in his cotton in the fall
+not only to underweigh it, but to credit it at the lowest prices of the
+week; and this dealing of the strong with the weak is not Southern, it is
+human. Such a system has encouraged dishonesty, and wastefulness; it has
+made many landlords cruel and greedy, it has increased the helplessness,
+hopelessness and shiftlessness of the Negro. In many cases it has meant
+downright degeneration, not only to the Negro, but to the white man. These
+are strong words, but no one can travel in the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_95" id="Page_95">[Pg 95]</a></span> black belt without seeing
+enough to convince him of the terrible consequences growing out of these
+relationships.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><i>The Story of a Negro Tenant</i></p>
+
+<p>A case which came to my attention at Montgomery, Alabama, throws a vivid
+light on one method of dealing with the Negro tenant. Some nine miles from
+Montgomery lives a planter named T. L. McCullough. In December, 1903, he
+made a contract with a Negro named Jim Thomas to work for him. According
+to this contract, a copy of which I have, the landlord agreed to furnish
+Jim the Negro with a ration of 14 lbs. of meat and one bushel of meal a
+month, and to pay him besides $96 for an entire year&#8217;s labour.</p>
+
+<p>On his part Jim agreed to &#8220;do good and faithful labour for the said T. L.
+McCullough.&#8221; &#8220;Good and faithful labour&#8221; means from sunrise to sunset every
+day but Sunday, and excepting Saturday afternoon.</p>
+
+<p>A payment of five dollars was made to bind the bargain&mdash;just before
+Christmas. Jim probably spent it the next day. It is customary to furnish
+a cabin for the worker to live in; no such place was furnished, and Jim
+had to walk three or four miles morning and evening to a house on another
+plantation. He worked faithfully until May 15th. Then he ran away, but
+when he heard that the landlord was after him, threatening punishment, he
+came back and agreed to work twenty days for the ten he had been away. Jim
+stayed some time, but he was not only given no cabin and paid no money,
+but his food ration was cut off! So he ran away again, claiming that he
+could not work unless he had a place to live. The landlord went after him
+and had him arrested, and although the Negro had worked nearly half a
+year, McCullough prosecuted him for fraud because he had got $5 in cash at
+the signing of the contract. In such a case the Alabama law gives the
+landlord every advantage; it says that when a person receives money under
+a contract and stops work, the presumption is that he intended to defraud
+the landowner and that therefore he is criminally punishable. The
+practical effect of the law is to permit imprisonment for debt, for it
+places a burden of proof on the Negro that he can hardly overturn. The law
+is defended<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_96" id="Page_96">[Pg 96]</a></span> on the ground that Negroes will get money any way they can,
+sign any sort of paper for it, and then run off&mdash;if there is not a
+stringent law to punish them. But it may be imagined how this law could be
+used, and is used, in the hands of unscrupulous men to keep the Negro in a
+sort of debt-slavery. When the case came up before Judge William H. Thomas
+of Montgomery, the constitutionality of the law was brought into question,
+and the Negro was finally discharged.</p>
+
+<p>Often an unscrupulous landlord will deliberately give a Negro a little
+money before Christmas, knowing that he will promptly waste it in a
+&#8220;celebration&#8221; thus getting him into debt so that he dare not leave the
+plantation for fear of arrest and criminal prosecution. If he attempts to
+leave he is arrested and taken before a friendly justice of the peace, and
+fined or threatened with imprisonment. If he is not in debt, it sometimes
+happens that the landlord will have him arrested on the charge of stealing
+a bridle or a few potatoes (for it is easy to find something against
+almost any Negro), and he is brought into court. In several cases I know
+of the escaping Negro has even been chased down with bloodhounds. On
+appearing in court the Negro is naturally badly frightened. The white man
+is there and offers as a special favour to take him back and let him work
+out the fine&mdash;which sometimes requires six months, often a whole year. In
+this way Negroes are kept in debt&mdash;so-called debt-slavery or peonage&mdash;year
+after year, they and their whole family. One of the things that I couldn&#8217;t
+at first understand in some of the courts I visited was the presence of so
+many white men to stand sponsor for Negroes who had committed various
+offences. Often this grows out of the feudal protective instinct which the
+landlord feels for the tenant or servant of whom he is fond; but often it
+is merely the desire of the white man to get another Negro worker. In one
+case in particular, I saw a Negro brought into court charged with stealing
+cotton.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Does anybody know this Negro?&#8221; asked the judge.</p>
+
+<p>Two white men stepped up and both said they did.</p>
+
+<p>The judge fined the Negro $20 and costs, and there was a real contest
+between the two white men as to who should pay it&mdash;and get the Negro. They
+argued for some minutes, but finally the judge said to the prisoner:</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_97" id="Page_97">[Pg 97]</a></span>&#8220;Who do you want to work for, George?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The Negro chose his employer, and agreed to work four months to pay off
+his $20 fine and costs.</p>
+
+<p>Sometimes a man who has a debt against a Negro will sell the claim&mdash;which
+is practically selling the Negro&mdash;to some farmer who wants more labour.</p>
+
+<p>A case of this sort came up in the winter of 1907 in Rankin County,
+Mississippi&mdash;the facts of which are all in testimony. A Negro named Dan
+January was in debt to a white farmer named Levi Carter. Carter agreed to
+sell the Negro and his entire family to another white farmer named
+Patrick. January refused to be sold. According to the testimony Carter and
+some of his companions seized January, bound him hand and foot and beat
+him most brutally, taking turns in doing the whipping until they were
+exhausted and the victim unconscious.</p>
+
+<p>January&#8217;s children removed him to his home, but the white men returned the
+next day, produced a rope and threatened to hang him unless he consented
+to go to the purchaser of the debt. The case came into court but the white
+men were never punished. January was in Jackson, Miss., when I was there;
+he still showed the awful effects of his beating.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><i>Keeping Negroes Poor</i></p>
+
+<p>This system has many bad results. It encourages the Negro in crime. He
+knows that unless he does something pretty bad, he will not be prosecuted
+because the landlord doesn&#8217;t want to lose the work of a single hand; he
+knows that if he <i>is</i> prosecuted, the white man will, if possible, &#8220;pay
+him out.&#8221; It disorganises justice and confuses the ignorant Negro mind as
+to what is a crime and what is not. A Negro will often do things that he
+would not do if he thought he were really to be punished. He comes to the
+belief that if the white man wants him arrested, he will be arrested, and
+if he protects him, he won&#8217;t suffer, no matter what he does. Thousands of
+Negroes, ignorant, weak, indolent, to-day work under this system. There
+are even landlords and employers who will trade upon the Negro&#8217;s worst
+instincts&mdash;his love for liquor, for example&mdash;in order to keep him at work.
+An instance of this sort came to my attention<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_98" id="Page_98">[Pg 98]</a></span> at Hawkinsville while I was
+there. The white people of the town were making a strong fight for
+prohibition; the women held meetings, and on the day of the election
+marched in the streets singing and speaking. But the largest employer of
+Negro labor in the county had registered several hundred of his Negroes
+and declared his intention of voting them against prohibition. He said
+bluntly: &#8220;If my niggers can&#8217;t get whisky they <ins class="correction" title="original: wont">won&#8217;t</ins> stay with me; you&#8217;ve
+got to keep a nigger poor or he won&#8217;t work.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>This employer actually voted sixty of his Negroes against prohibition, but
+the excitement was so great that he dared vote no more&mdash;and prohibition
+carried.</p>
+
+<p>A step further brings the Negro to the chain-gang. If there is no white
+man to pay him out, or if his crime is too serious to be paid out, he goes
+to the chain-gang&mdash;and in several states he is then hired out to private
+contractors. The private employer thus gets him sooner or later. Some of
+the largest farms in the South are operated by chain-gang labour. The
+demand for more convicts by white employers is exceedingly strong. In the
+Montgomery <i>Advertiser</i> for April 10, 1907, I find an account of the
+sentencing of fifty-four prisoners in the city court, fifty-two of whom
+were Negroes. The <i>Advertiser</i> says:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>The demand for their labour is probably greater now than it ever has
+been before. Numerous labour agents of companies employing convict
+labour reached Montgomery yesterday, and were busily engaged in
+man&oelig;uvring to secure part or even all of the convicts for their
+respective companies. The competition for labour of all kinds, it
+seems, is keener than ever before known.</p></div>
+
+<p>The natural tendency of this demand, and from the further fact that the
+convict system makes yearly a huge profit for the State, is to convict as
+many Negroes as possible, and to punish the offences charged as severely
+as possible. From the Atlanta <i>Constitution</i> of October 13, 1906, I have
+this clipping:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p class="center">SIX MONTHS FOR POTATO THEFT</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Columbus, Ga.</span>, October 12 (Special)</p>
+
+<p>In the city court yesterday Charley Carter, a Negro, was sentenced to
+six months on the chain-gang or to pay a fine of $25 for stealing a
+potato valued at 5 cents.</p></div>
+
+<p>Serious crimes are sometimes compromised. In a newspaper dispatch, October
+6, 1906, from Eaton Ga., I find a <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_99" id="Page_99">[Pg 99]</a></span>report of the trial of six Negroes
+charged with assault with the intent to kill. All were found guilty, but
+upon a recommendation of mercy they were sentenced as having committed
+misdemeanours rather than felonies. They could therefore have their fines
+paid, and five were immediately released by farmers who wanted their
+labour. The report says that of thirty-one misdemeanours during the month
+it is expected that &#8220;none will reach the chain-gang,&#8221; since there are
+&#8220;three farmers to every convict ready to pay the fine.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/gs11.jpg" alt="" /></div>
+<p class="center">A TYPE OF THE COUNTRY CHAIN-GANG NEGRO</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>Still other methods are pursued by certain landlords to keep their tenants
+on the land. In one extreme case a Negro tenant, after years of work,
+decided to leave the planter. He had had a place offered him where he
+could make more money. There was nothing against him; he simply wanted to
+move. But the landlord informed him that no waggon would be permitted to
+cross his (the planter&#8217;s) land to get his household belongings. The Negro,
+being ignorant, supposed he could thus be prevented from moving, and
+although the friend who was trying to help him assured him that the
+landlord could not prevent his moving, he dared not go. In another
+instance&mdash;also extreme&mdash;a planter refused to let his tenants raise hogs,
+because he wanted them to buy salt pork at his store. It is, indeed,
+through the plantation store (which corresponds to the company or &#8220;truck&#8221;
+store of Northern mining regions) that the unscrupulous planter reaps his
+most exorbitant profits. Negroes on some plantations, whether they work
+hard or not, come out at the end of the year with nothing. Part of this is
+due, of course, to their own improvidence; but part, in too many cases, is
+due to exploitation by the landlord.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><i>One Biscuit to Eat and no Place to Sleep</i></p>
+
+<p>Booker T. Washington, in a letter to the Montgomery <i>Advertiser</i> on the
+Negro labour problem, tells this story:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>I recall that some years ago a certain white farmer asked me to
+secure for him a young coloured man to work about the house and to
+work in the field. The young man was secured, a bargain was entered
+into to the effect that he was to be paid a certain sum monthly and
+his board and lodging furnished as well. At the end of the coloured
+boy&#8217;s first day on the farm he returned. I asked the reason, and he
+said that after working all the afternoon he was handed a buttered
+biscuit for his supper, and no place was provided for him to sleep.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_100" id="Page_100">[Pg 100]</a></span>At night he was told he could find a place to sleep in the fodder
+loft. This white farmer, whom I know well, is not a cruel man and
+seeks generally to do the right thing; but in this case he simply
+overlooked the fact that it would have paid him in dollars and cents
+to give some thought and attention to the comfort of his helper.</p>
+
+<p>This case is more or less typical. Had this boy been well cared for,
+he would have advertised the place that others would have sought work
+there.</p></div>
+
+<p>Such methods mean, of course, the lowest possible efficiency of
+labour&mdash;ignorant, hopeless, shiftless. The harsh planter naturally opposes
+Negro education in the bitterest terms and prevents it wherever possible;
+for education means the doom of the system by which he thrives.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><i>Negro with Nineteen Children</i></p>
+
+<p>Life for the tenants is often not a pleasant thing to contemplate. I spent
+much time driving about on the great plantations and went into many of the
+cabins. Usually they were very poor, of logs or shacks, sometimes only one
+room, sometimes a room and a sort of lean-to. At one side there was a
+fireplace, often two beds opposite, with a few broken chairs or boxes, and
+a table. Sometimes the cabin was set up on posts and had a floor,
+sometimes it was on the ground and had no floor at all. The people are
+usually densely ignorant and superstitious; the preachers they follow are
+often the worst sort of characters, dishonest and immoral; the schools, if
+there are any, are practically worthless. The whole family works from
+sunrise to sunset in the fields. Even children of six and seven years old
+will drop seed or carry water. Dr. W. E. B. DuBois, himself a Negro, who
+has made many valuable and scholarly studies of Negro life, gives this
+vivid glimpse into a home where the Negro and his wife had nineteen
+children. He says:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>This family of twenty-one is a poverty stricken, reckless, dirty set.
+The children are stupid and repulsive, and fight for their food at
+the table. They are poorly dressed, sickly and cross. The table
+dishes stand from one meal to another unwashed, and the house is in
+perpetual disorder. Now and then the father and mother engage in a
+hand-to-hand fight.</p></div>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><i>Never Heard the Name of Roosevelt</i></p>
+
+<p>It would be impossible to over-emphasise the ignorance of many Negro
+farmers. It seems almost unbelievable, but after<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_101" id="Page_101">[Pg 101]</a></span> some good-humoured talk
+with a group of old Negroes I tried to find out how much they knew of the
+outside world. I finally asked them if they knew Theodore Roosevelt. They
+looked puzzled, and finally one old fellow scratched his head and said:</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Whah you say dis yere man libes?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;In Washington,&#8221; I said; &#8220;you&#8217;ve heard of the President of the United
+States?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I reckon I dunno,&#8221; he said.</p>
+
+<p>And yet this old man gave me a first-class religious exhortation; and one
+in the group had heard of Booker T. Washington, whom he described as a
+&#8220;pow&#8217;ful big nigger.&#8221;</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><i>Why Negroes Go to Cities</i></p>
+
+<p>I made inquiries among the Negroes as to why they wanted to leave the
+farms and go to cities. The answer I got from all sorts of sources was
+first, the lack of schooling in the country, and second, the lack of
+protection.</p>
+
+<p>And I heard also many stories of ill-treatment of various sorts, the
+distrust of the tenant of the landlord in keeping his accounts&mdash;all of
+which, dimly recognised, tends to make many Negroes escape the country, if
+they can. Indeed, it is growing harder and harder on the great
+plantations, especially where the management is by overseers, to keep a
+sufficient labour supply. In some places the white landlords have begun to
+break up their plantations, selling small farms to ambitious Negroes&mdash;a
+significant sign, indeed, of the passing of the feudal system. An instance
+of this is found near Thomaston, Ga., where Dr. C. B. Thomas has long been
+selling land to Negroes, and encouraging them to buy by offering easy
+terms. Near Dayton, Messrs. Price and Allen have broken up their &#8220;Lockhart
+Plantation&#8221; and are selling it out to Negroes. I found similar instances
+in many places I visited. Commenting on this tendency, the Thomaston
+<i>Post</i> says:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>This is, in part, a solution of the so-called Negro problem, for
+those of the race who have property interests at stake cannot afford
+to antagonise their white neighbours or transgress the laws. The
+ownership of land tends to make them better citizens in every way,
+more thoughtful of the right of others, and more ambitious for their
+own advancement.</p>
+
+<p>At this place a number of neat and comfortable homes, a commodious
+high<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_102" id="Page_102">[Pg 102]</a></span> school, and a large lodge building, besides a number of
+churches, testify to the enterprise and thrift the best class of our
+coloured population.... The tendency towards cutting up the large
+plantations is beginning to show itself, and when all of them are so
+divided, there will be no agricultural labour problem, except,
+perhaps, in the gathering of an especially large crop.</p></div>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center">III</p>
+
+<p>I have endeavoured thus to give a picture of both sides of conditions in
+the black belt exactly as I saw them. I can now do no better in further
+illumination of the conditions I have described than by looking at them
+through the eyes and experiences of two exceptionally able white men of
+the South, both leaders in their respective walks of life, neither of them
+politicians and both, incidentally, planters.</p>
+
+<p>At Jackson, Miss., I met Major R. W. Millsaps, a leading citizen of the
+state. He comes of a family with the best Southern traditions behind it;
+he was born in Mississippi, graduated before the war at Harvard College,
+and although his father, a slave owner, had opposed secession, the son
+fought four years in the Confederate army, rising to the rank of Major. He
+came out of the war, as he says, &#8220;with no earthly possessions but a jacket
+and a pair of pants, with a hole in them.&#8221; But he was young and energetic;
+he began hauling cotton from Jackson to Natchez when cotton was worth
+almost its weight in gold. He received $10 a bale for doing it and made
+$4,000 in three months. He is now the president of one of the leading
+banks in Mississippi, interested in many important Southern enterprises,
+and the founder of Millsaps College at Jackson: a modest, useful,
+Christian gentleman.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><i>An Experiment in Trusting Negroes</i></p>
+
+<p>Near Greenville, Miss., Major Millsaps owns a plantation of 500 acres,
+occupied by 20 tenants, some 75 people in all. It is in one of the richest
+agricultural sections&mdash;the Mississippi bottoms&mdash;in the United States. Up
+to 1890 he had a white overseer and he was constantly in trouble of one
+kind or another with his tenants. When the price of cotton dropped, he
+decided to dispense with the overseer entirely and try a rather daring
+experiment. In short, he planned to trust the Negroes. He got them
+together and said:</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_103" id="Page_103">[Pg 103]</a></span>&#8220;I am going to try you. I&#8217;m going to give you every possible opportunity;
+if you don&#8217;t make out, I will go back to the overseer system.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>In the sixteen years since then no white man has been on that plantation
+except as a visitor. The land was rented direct to the Negroes on terms
+that would give both landlord and tenant a reasonable profit.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Did it work?&#8221; I asked.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I have never lost one cent,&#8221; said Major Millsaps, &#8220;no Negro has ever
+failed to pay up and you couldn&#8217;t drive them off the place. When other
+farmers complain of shortage of labour and tenants, I never have had any
+trouble.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Every Negro on the place owns his own mules and waggons and is out of
+debt. Nearly every family has bought or is buying a home in the little
+town of Leland, nearby, some of which are comfortably furnished. They are
+all prosperous and contented.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;How do you do it?&#8221; I asked.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;The secret,&#8221; he said, &#8220;is to treat the Negro well and give him a chance.
+I have found that a Negro, like a white man, is most responsive to good
+treatment. Even a dog responds to kindness! The trouble is that most
+planters want to make too much money out of the Negro; they charge him too
+much rent; they make too large profits on the supplies they furnish. I
+know merchants who expect a return of 50 per cent. on supplies alone. The
+best Negroes I have known are those who are educated; Negroes need more
+education of the right kind&mdash;not less&mdash;and it will repay us well if we
+give it to them. It makes better, not worse, workers.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>I asked him about the servant problem.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;We never have any trouble,&#8221; he said. &#8220;I apply the same rule to servants
+as to the farmers. Treat them well, don&#8217;t talk insultingly of their people
+before them, don&#8217;t expect them to do too much work. I believe in treating
+a Negro with respect. That doesn&#8217;t mean to make equals of them. You people
+in the North don&#8217;t make social equals of your white servants.&#8221;</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><i>Jefferson Davis&#8217;s Way with Negroes</i></p>
+
+<p>Then he told a striking story of Jefferson Davis.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I got a lesson in the treatment of Negroes when I was a<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_104" id="Page_104">[Pg 104]</a></span> young man
+returning South from Harvard. I stopped in Washington and called on
+Jefferson Davis, then United States Senator from Mississippi. We walked
+down Pennsylvania Avenue. Many Negroes bowed to Mr. Davis and he returned
+the bow. He was a very polite man. I finally said to him that I thought he
+must have a good many friends among the Negroes. He replied:</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;&#8216;I can&#8217;t allow any Negro to outdo me in courtesy.&#8217;&#8221;</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><i>Plain Words from a White Man</i></p>
+
+<p>A few days later on my way North I met at Clarksdale, Miss., Walter Clark,
+one of the well-known citizens of the state and President of the
+Mississippi Cotton Association. In the interests of his organisation he
+has been speaking in different parts of the state on court-days and at
+fairs. And the burden of his talks has been, not only organisation by the
+farmers, but a more intelligent and progressive treatment of Negro labour.
+Recognising the instability of the ordinary Negro, the crime he commits,
+the great difficulties which the best-intentioned Southern planters have
+to meet, Mr. Clark yet tells his Southern audiences some vigorous truths.
+He said in a recent speech:</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Every dollar I own those Negroes made for me. Our ancestors chased them
+down and brought them here. They are just what we make them. By our own
+greed and extravagance we have spoiled a good many of them. It has been
+popular here&mdash;now happily growing less so&mdash;to exploit the Negro by high
+store-prices and by encouraging him to get into debt. It has often made
+him hopeless. We have a low element of white people who are largely
+responsible for the Negro&#8217;s condition. They sell him whiskey and cocaine;
+they corrupt Negro women. A white man who shoots craps with Negroes or who
+consorts with Negro women is worse than the meanest Negro that ever
+lived.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>At Coffeeville, where Mr. Clark talked somewhat to this effect, an old man
+who sat in front suddenly jumped up and said: &#8220;That&#8217;s the truth! Bully for
+you; bully for you!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>In his talk with me, Mr. Clark said other significant things:</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Our people have treated the Negroes as helpless children all their days.
+The Negro has not been encouraged to <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_105" id="Page_105">[Pg 105]</a></span>develop even the capacities he has.
+He must be made to use his own brains, not ours; put him on his
+responsibility and he will become more efficient. A Negro came to me not
+long ago complaining that the farmer for whom he worked would not give him
+an itemised account of his charges at the store. I met the planter and
+asked him about it. He said to me:</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;&#8216;The black nigger! What does he know about it? He can&#8217;t read it.&#8217;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;&#8216;But he is entitled to it, isn&#8217;t he?&#8217; I asked him&mdash;and the Negro got it.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;The credit system has been the ruin of many Negroes. It keeps them in
+hopeless debt and it encourages the planter to exploit them. That&#8217;s the
+truth. My plan is to put the Negro on a strict cash basis; give him an
+idea of what money is by letting him use it. Three years ago I started it
+on my plantation. A Negro would come to me and say: &#8216;Boss, I want a pair
+of shoes.&#8217; &#8216;All right,&#8217; I&#8217;d say. &#8216;I&#8217;ll pay you spot cash every night and
+you can buy your own shoes.&#8217; In the same way I made up my mind that we
+must stop paying Negroes&#8217; fines when they got into trouble. I know
+planters who expect regularly every Monday to come into court and pay out
+about so many Negroes. It encourages the Negroes to do things they would
+not think of doing if they knew they would be regularly punished. I&#8217;ve
+quit paying fines; my Negroes, if they get into trouble, have got to
+recognise their own responsibility for it and take what follows. That&#8217;s
+the only way to make men of them.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;What we need in the South is intelligent labour, more efficient labour. I
+believe in the education of the Negro. Industrial training is needed, not
+only for the Negro, but for the whites as well. The white people down here
+have simply got to take the Negro and make a man of him; in the long run
+it will make him more valuable to us.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_106" id="Page_106">[Pg 106]</a></span></p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr style="width: 50%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_107" id="Page_107">[Pg 107]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="PART_TWO" id="PART_TWO"></a><i>PART TWO</i></h2>
+<h2>THE NEGRO IN THE NORTH</h2>
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_108" id="Page_108">[Pg 108]</a></span></p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_109" id="Page_109">[Pg 109]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_VI" id="CHAPTER_VI"></a>CHAPTER VI</h2>
+<h3>FOLLOWING THE COLOUR LINE IN THE NORTH</h3>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="dropcap"><span class="caps">Having</span> followed the colour line in the South, it is of extraordinary
+interest and significance to learn how the Negro fares in the North. Is he
+treated better or worse? Is Boston a more favourable location for him than
+Atlanta or New Orleans? A comparison of the &#8220;Southern attitude&#8221; and the
+&#8220;Northern attitude&#8221; throws a flood of light upon the Negro as a national
+problem in this country.</p>
+
+<p>Most of the perplexing questions in the North pertain to the city, but in
+the South the great problems are still agricultural. In the South the
+masses of Negroes live on the land; they are a part of the cotton, sugar,
+lumber and turpentine industries; but in the North the Negro is
+essentially a problem of the great cities. He has taken his place in the
+babel of the tenements; already he occupies extensive neighbourhoods like
+the San Juan Hill district in New York and Bucktown in Indianapolis, and,
+by virtue of an increasing volume of immigration from the South, he is
+overflowing his boundaries in all directions, expanding more rapidly,
+perhaps, than any other single element of urban population. In every
+important Northern city, a distinct race-problem already exists, which
+must, in a few years, assume serious proportions.</p>
+
+<p>Country districts and the smaller cities in the North for the most part
+have no Negro question. A few Negroes are found in almost all localities,
+but an examination of the statistics of rural counties and of the lesser
+cities shows that the Negro population is diminishing in some localities,
+increasing slightly in others. In distinctly agricultural districts in the
+North the census exhibits an actual falling off of Negro population of 10
+per cent. between 1880 and 1900. Cass County in Michigan, which has a
+famous Negro agricultural colony&mdash;one of the few in the North&mdash;shows a
+distinct loss in population. From 1,837 inhabitants in 1880 it dropped to
+1,568 in 1900.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_110" id="Page_110">[Pg 110]</a></span> A few Negro farmers have done well in the North (at
+Wilberforce, Ohio, I met two or three who had fine large farms and were
+prosperous), but the rural population is so small as to be negligible.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><i>Negroes of Small Northern Towns</i></p>
+
+<p>Most of the Negroes in the smaller towns and cities of the North are of
+the stock which came by way of the underground railroad just before the
+Civil War or during the period of philanthropic enthusiasm which followed
+it. They have come to fit naturally into the life of the communities where
+they live, and no one thinks especially of their colour. There is, indeed,
+no more a problem with the Negro than with the Greek or Italian. In one
+community (Lansing, Mich.) with which I have been long familiar, the
+Negroes are mostly mulattoes and their numbers have remained practically
+stationary for thirty years, while the white population has increased
+rapidly. At present there are only about 500 Negroes in a city of 25,000
+people.</p>
+
+<p>As a whole the coloured people of Lansing are peaceful and industrious, a
+natural part of the wage-working population. Individuals have become
+highly prosperous and are much respected. A few of the younger generation
+are idle and worthless.</p>
+
+<p>So far as comfortable conditions of life are concerned, where there is
+little friction or discrimination and a good opportunity for earning a
+respectable livelihood, I have found no places anywhere which seemed so
+favourable to Negroes as these smaller towns and cities in the North and
+West where the coloured population is not increasing. But the moment there
+is new immigration from the South the conditions cease to be Utopian&mdash;as I
+shall show.</p>
+
+<p>The great cities of the North present a wholly different aspect; the
+increases of population there are not short of extraordinary. In 1880
+Chicago had only 6,480 coloured people; at present (1908) it has about
+45,000, an increase of some 600 per cent. The census of 1900 gives the
+Negro population of New York as 60,666. It is now (1908) probably not less
+than 80,000. Between 1890 and 1900 the Negroes of <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_111" id="Page_111">[Pg 111]</a></span>Philadelphia
+increased by 59 per cent., while the Caucasians added only 22 per cent.,
+and the growth since 1900 has been even more rapid, the coloured
+population now exceeding 80,000.</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/gs12_top.jpg" alt="" /></div>
+<p class="center">A NEGRO CABIN WITH EVIDENCES OF ABUNDANCE</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/gs12_bot.jpg" alt="" /></div>
+<p class="center">OFF FOR THE COTTON FIELDS</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>It is difficult to realise the significance of these masses of coloured
+population. The city of Washington to-day has a greater community of
+Negroes (some 100,000) than were ever before gathered together in one
+community in any part of the world, so far as we know. New York and
+Philadelphia both now probably have as many Negroes as any Southern city
+(except Washington, if that be called a Southern city). Nor must it be
+forgotten that about a ninth of the Negro population of the United States
+is in the North and West. Crowded communities of Negroes in Northern
+latitudes have never before existed anywhere. Northern city conditions
+therefore present unique and interesting problems.</p>
+
+<p>I went first to Indianapolis because I had heard so much of the political
+power of the Negroes there; afterward I visited Cincinnati, Philadelphia,
+New York, Boston, Chicago and several smaller cities and country
+neighbourhoods. In every large city both white and coloured people told me
+that race feeling and discrimination were rapidly increasing: that new and
+more difficult problems were constantly arising.</p>
+
+<p>Generally speaking, the more Negroes the sharper the expression of
+prejudice.</p>
+
+<p>While the Negroes were an inconsequential part of the population, they
+passed unnoticed, but with increasing numbers (especially of the lower
+sort of Negroes and black Negroes), accompanied by competition for the
+work of the city and active political power, they are inevitably kindling
+the fires of race-feeling. Prejudice has been incited also by echoes of
+the constant agitation in the South, the hatred-breeding speeches of
+Tillman and Vardaman, the incendiary and cruel books and plays of Dixon,
+and by the increased immigration of Southern white people with their
+strong Southern point of view.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><i>Pathetic Expectations of the Negro</i></p>
+
+<p>One finds something unspeakably pathetic in the spectacle of these untold
+thousands of Negroes who are coming North. To many of them, oppressed
+within the limitations set up by<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_112" id="Page_112">[Pg 112]</a></span> the South, it is indeed the promised
+land. I shall never forget the wistful eagerness of a Negro I met in
+Mississippi. He told me he was planning to move to Indianapolis. I asked
+him why he wanted to leave the South.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;They&#8217;re Jim Crowin&#8217; us down here too much,&#8221; he said; &#8220;there&#8217;s no chance
+for a coloured man who has any self-respect.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;But,&#8221; I said, &#8220;do you know that you will be better off when you get to
+Indianapolis?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I hear they don&#8217;t make no difference up there between white folks and
+coloured, and that a hard-working man can get two dollars a day. Is that
+all so?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Yes, that&#8217;s pretty nearly so,&#8221; I said&mdash;but as I looked at the fairly
+comfortable home he lived in, among his own people, I felt somehow that he
+would not find the promised land all that he anticipated.</p>
+
+<p>And after that I visited Indianapolis and other cities and saw hundreds of
+just such eager Negroes after they had reached the promised land. Two
+classes of coloured people came North: the worthless, ignorant,
+semi-criminal sort who find in the intermittent, high-paid day labour in
+the North, accompanied by the glittering excitements of city life, just
+the conditions they love best. Two or three years ago the Governor of
+Arkansas, Jeff Davis, pardoned a Negro criminal on condition that he would
+go to Boston and stay there! The other class is composed of
+self-respecting, hard-working people who are really seeking better
+conditions of life, a better chance for their children.</p>
+
+<p>And what do Negroes find when they reach the promised land?</p>
+
+<p>In the first place the poorer sort find in Indianapolis the alley home, in
+New York the deadly tenement. Landowners in Indianapolis have been
+building long rows of cheap one-story frame tenements in back streets and
+alleys. The apartments have two or three rooms each. When new they are
+brightly painted and papered and to many Negroes from the South,
+accustomed to the primitive cabin, they are beautiful indeed.</p>
+
+<p>Even the older buildings are more pretentious if not really better than
+anything they have known in the rural South; and how the city life, nearly
+as free to the coloured man as to the white, stirs their pulses! No
+people, either black or white, are<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_113" id="Page_113">[Pg 113]</a></span> really free until they feel free. And
+to many Negroes the first few weeks in a Northern city give them the first
+glimpses they have ever had of what they consider to be liberty.</p>
+
+<p>A striking illustration of this feeling came to my notice at Columbia,
+South Carolina. One of the most respected Negro men there&mdash;respected by
+both races&mdash;was a prosperous tailor who owned a building on the main
+street of the city. He was well to do, had a family, and his trade came
+from both races. I heard that he was planning to leave the South and I
+went to see him.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Yes,&#8221; he said, &#8220;I am going away. It&#8217;s getting to be too dangerous for a
+coloured man down here.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>It was just after the Atlanta riot.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Where are you going?&#8221; I asked.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I think I shall go to Washington,&#8221; he said.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Why Washington?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Well, you see, I want to be as near the flag as I can.&#8221;</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><i>What the Negro Really Finds in the Promised Land</i></p>
+
+<p>But they soon begin to learn things! It is true that the workingman can
+get high wages, and the domestic servant is paid an amount which
+astonishes her, but on the other hand&mdash;a fact that somehow never occurs to
+many of these people, or indeed to the foreigners who come flocking to our
+shores&mdash;the living cost is higher. For his gaudy tenements the landlord
+extorts exorbitant rentals. Ignorance is ever roundly and mercilessly
+taxed! I saw a double house built for white people just on the edge of a
+Negro neighbourhood and held at a rental of $18 a month, but not being
+able to secure white tenants the landlord rented to Negroes for $25 a
+month.</p>
+
+<p>When he came North the Negro (even though he had lived in cities in the
+South, as many of the immigrants have) never dreamed that it would require
+such an amount of fuel to keep him through the long Northern winter, or
+that his bill for lights, water, and everything else would be so high. And
+in the South many Negro families of the poorer sort are greatly assisted
+by baskets of food brought from the white man&#8217;s kitchen and the gift of
+cast-off clothes and shoes, to say nothing of tobacco, and even money&mdash;a
+lingering loose survival of the relationships of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_114" id="Page_114">[Pg 114]</a></span> slavery. But in the
+North the Negro finds himself in an intense industrial atmosphere where
+relationships are more strictly impersonal and businesslike. What he gets
+he must pay for. Charity exists on a large scale, as I shall show later,
+but it is the sharp, inquiring, organised charity of the North.</p>
+
+<p>In short, coming North to find a place where he will be treated more like
+a man and less like a serf, the Negro discovers that he must meet the
+competitive struggle to which men of the working class are subjected in
+the highly developed industrial system of the North.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><i>Sufferings of the Northern Negro</i></p>
+
+<p>In the South the great mass of Negroes have lived with their doors open,
+fireplaces have kept their homes ventilated, they could leave the matter
+of sanitation to fresh air and sunshine. And the Negro&#8217;s very lack of
+training for such an environment as that of the North causes him untold
+suffering. To save fuel, and because he loves to be warm and sociable, he
+and his family and friends crowd into one close room, which is kept at
+fever temperature, not by a healthful fireplace, but by a tight stove.
+This, with the lack of proper sanitary conveniences, often becomes a
+hotbed of disease. Even in mild weather I have been in Negro houses in the
+North where the air was almost unendurably warm and impure.</p>
+
+<p>I know of nothing more tragic than the condition of the swarming newer
+Negro populations of Northern cities&mdash;the more tragic because the Negro is
+so cheerful and patient about it all. I looked into the statistics closely
+in several of them, and in no instance does the birth-rate keep pace with
+the death-rate. Even allowing for the fact that birth statistics are not
+very accurately kept in most cities it is probable that if it were not for
+the immigration constantly rolling upward from the South the Negro
+population in Northern cities would show a falling off. Consumption and
+the diseases of vice ravage their numbers. One of the ablest Negro
+physicians I have met, Dr. S. A. Furniss, who has practised among his
+people in Indianapolis for many years, has made a careful study of
+conditions. In a paper read before a medical association Dr. Furniss says:</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_115" id="Page_115">[Pg 115]</a></span>&#8220;The reports of the Indianapolis Board of Health show that for no month in
+the last ten years has the birth-rate among Negroes equalled the
+death-rate.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Here are the statistics from 1901 to 1905:</p>
+
+<table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="5" summary="table">
+<tr><td>&nbsp;</td><td><span class="spacer">&nbsp;</span></td>
+    <td align="center">Deaths</td><td><span class="spacer">&nbsp;</span></td>
+    <td align="center">Births</td></tr>
+<tr><td>1901</td><td>&nbsp;</td>
+    <td align="center">332</td><td>&nbsp;</td>
+    <td align="center">279</td></tr>
+<tr><td>1902</td><td>&nbsp;</td>
+    <td align="center">329</td><td>&nbsp;</td>
+    <td align="center">280</td></tr>
+<tr><td>1903</td><td>&nbsp;</td>
+    <td align="center">448</td><td>&nbsp;</td>
+    <td align="center">283</td></tr>
+<tr><td>1904</td><td>&nbsp;</td>
+    <td align="center">399</td><td>&nbsp;</td>
+    <td align="center">327</td></tr>
+<tr><td>1905</td><td>&nbsp;</td>
+    <td align="center">443</td><td>&nbsp;</td>
+    <td align="center">384</td></tr></table>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><i>&#8220;Race Suicide&#8221; Among Negroes</i></p>
+
+<p>From inquiries that I have made everywhere in the North there would seem,
+indeed, to be a tendency to &#8220;race suicide&#8221; among Negroes as among the old
+American white stock. Especially is this true among the better class
+Negroes. The ignorant Negro in Southern agricultural districts is
+exceedingly prolific, but his Northern city brother has comparatively few
+children. I have saved the record from personal inquiry of perhaps two
+hundred Northern Negro families of the better class. Many have no children
+at all, many have one or two, and the largest family I found (in Boston)
+was seven children. I found one Negro family in the South with twenty-one
+children! Industrialism, of course, is not favourable to a large
+birth-rate. All Northern cities show a notable surplus, according to the
+statistics, of Negro women over Negro men. Many of these are house
+servants and, like the large class of roving single men who do day labour
+on the streets and railroads, they are without family ties and have no
+children.</p>
+
+<p>Dr. Furniss finds that the deaths of Negroes from tuberculosis constitute
+over half the total deaths from that cause in the city of Indianapolis,
+whereas, in proportion to Negro population, they should constitute only
+one-eighth.</p>
+
+<p>His observations upon these startling facts are of great interest:</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I believe the reason for these conditions is plain. First of all it is
+due to Negroes leaving the country and crowding into the larger cities,
+especially in the North, where they live in a climate totally different
+from that with which they have been familiar. They occupy unsanitary
+homes; they are frequently compelled to labour with insufficient food and
+clothing and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_116" id="Page_116">[Pg 116]</a></span> without proper rest. Of necessity they follow the hardest
+and most exposed occupations in order to make a livelihood. I regret to
+say that intemperance and immorality play a part in making these figures
+what they are. They easily fall victim to the unusual vices of the city.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Another reason for increased mortality is improper medical attention. Not
+only among the ignorant but among the intelligent we find too much trust
+put in patent medicines; the belief, latent it is true in many cases, but
+still existing among the ignorant, in the hoodoo militates against the
+close following of the doctor&#8217;s orders.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;What shall we do about it?&#8221; asks Dr. Furniss. &#8220;We must urge those around
+us to more personal cleanliness, insist on a pure home life, and less
+dissipation and intemperance: to have fewer picnics and save more money
+for a rainy day. Tell the young people in the South not to come to
+Northern cities, but to go to the smaller towns of the West, where they
+can have a fair chance. Unless something is done to change existing
+conditions, to stop this movement to our Northern cities, to provide
+proper habitations and surroundings for those who are already here, it
+will be only a question of time until the problem of the American Negro
+will reach a solution not at all desirable from our point of view.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Of course a doctor always sees the pathological side of life and his view
+is likely to be pessimistic. I saw much of the tragedy of the slum Negroes
+in the cities of the North, and yet many Negroes have been able to
+survive, many have learned how to live in towns and are making a success
+of their lives&mdash;as I shall show more particularly in the next chapter. It
+must not be forgotten that Negro families in Boston and Philadelphia
+(mostly mulattoes, it is true) as well as in Charleston, Savannah, and New
+Orleans, have lived and thrived under city conditions for many
+generations. Not a few Negroes in Indianapolis whose homes I visited are
+housed better than the average of white families.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><i>Sickness Among Northern Negroes</i></p>
+
+<p>Not only is the death-rate high in the North, but the Negro is hampered by
+sickness to a much greater degree<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_117" id="Page_117">[Pg 117]</a></span> than white people. Hospital records in
+Philadelphia show an excess of Negro patients over whites, according to
+population, of 125 per cent. About 5,000 Negroes passed through the
+hospitals of Philadelphia last year, averaging a confinement of three
+weeks each. Mr. Warner, in <i>American Charities</i>, makes sickness the chief
+cause of poverty among coloured people in New York, Boston, New Haven, and
+Baltimore. The percentage of sickness was twice or more as high as that of
+Germans, Irish, or white Americans.</p>
+
+<p>Such are the pains of readjustment which the Negroes are having to bear in
+the North.</p>
+
+<p>A question arises whether they can ever become a large factor of the
+population in Northern latitudes. They are certainly not holding their own
+in the country or in the smaller cities, and in the large cities they are
+increasing at present, not by the birth-rate, but by constant immigration.</p>
+
+<p>Hostile physical conditions of life in the North are not the only
+difficulties that the Negro has to meet. He thought he left prejudice
+behind in the South, but he finds it also showing its teeth here in the
+North. And, as in the South, a wide difference is apparent between the
+attitude of the best class of white men and the lower class.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><i>How Northerners Regard the Negro</i></p>
+
+<p>One of the first things that struck me when I began studying race
+conditions in the North was the position of the better class of white
+people with regard to the Negro. In the South every white man and woman
+has a vigorous and vital opinion on the race question. You have only to
+apply the match, the explosion is sure to follow. It is not so in the
+North. A few of the older people still preserve something of the war-time
+sentiment for the Negro; but the people one ordinarily meets don&#8217;t know
+anything about the Negro, don&#8217;t discuss him, and don&#8217;t care about him. In
+Indianapolis, and indeed in other cities, the only white people I could
+find who were much interested in the Negroes were a few politicians,
+mostly of the lower sort, the charity workers and the police. But that, of
+course, is equally true of the Russian Jews or the Italians.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_118" id="Page_118">[Pg 118]</a></span> One of the
+first white men with whom I talked (at Indianapolis) said to me with some
+impatience:</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;There are too many Negroes up here; they hurt the city.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Another told me of the increasing presence of Negroes in the parks, on the
+streets, and in the street cars. He said:</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I suppose sooner or later we shall have to adopt some of the restrictions
+of the South.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>He said it without heat, but as a sort of tentative conclusion, he hadn&#8217;t
+fully made up his mind.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><i>Race Prejudice in Boston</i></p>
+
+<p>In Boston, of all places, I expected to find much of the old sentiment. It
+does exist among some of the older men and women, but I was surprised at
+the general attitude which I encountered. It was one of hesitation and
+withdrawal. Summed up, I think the feeling of the better class of people
+in Boston (and elsewhere in Northern cities) might be thus stated:</p>
+
+<p>We have helped the Negro to liberty; we have helped to educate him; we
+have encouraged him to stand on his own feet. Now let&#8217;s see what he can do
+for himself. After all, he must survive or perish by his own efforts.</p>
+
+<p>In short, they have &#8220;cast the bantling on the rocks.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Though they still preserve the form of encouraging the Negro, the spirit
+seems to have fled. Not long ago the Negroes of Boston organised a concert
+at which Theodore Drury, a coloured musician of really notable
+accomplishments, was to appear. Aristocratic white people were appealed to
+and bought a considerable number of tickets; but on the evening of the
+concert the large block of seats purchased by white people was
+conspicuously vacant. Northern white people would seem to be more
+interested in the distant Southern Negro than in the Negro at their doors.</p>
+
+<p>Before I take up the cruder and more violent expressions of prejudice on
+the part of the lower class of white men in the North I want to show the
+beginnings of cold-shouldering as it exists in varying degrees in Northern
+cities, and especially in Boston, the old centre of abolitionism.</p>
+
+<p>Superficially, at least, the Negro in Boston still enjoys the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_119" id="Page_119">[Pg 119]</a></span> widest
+freedom; but after one gets down to real conditions he finds much
+complaint and alarm on the part of Negroes over growing restrictions.</p>
+
+<p>Boston exercises no discrimination on the street cars, on railroads, or in
+theatres or other places of public gathering. The schools are absolutely
+free. A coloured woman, Miss Maria Baldwin, is the principal of the
+Agassiz school, of Cambridge, attended by 600 white children. I heard her
+spoken of in the highest terms by the white people. Eight Negro teachers,
+chosen through the ordinary channels of competitive examination, teach in
+the public schools. There are Negro policemen, Negro firemen, Negro
+officeholders&mdash;fully as many of them as the proportion of Negro population
+in Boston would warrant. A Negro has served as commander of a white post
+of the Grand Army.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><i>Prosperous Negroes in Boston</i></p>
+
+<p>Several prosperous Negro business men have won a large white patronage.
+One of the chief merchant-tailoring stores of Boston, with a location on
+Washington Street which rents for $10,000 a year, is owned by J. H. Lewis.
+He has been in business many years. He employs both white and Negro
+workmen and clerks and he has some of the best white trade in Boston. Not
+long ago he went to North Carolina and bought the old plantation where his
+father was a slave, and he even talks of going there to spend his old age.
+Another Negro, Gilbert H. Harris, conducts the largest wig-making
+establishment in New England. I visited his place. He employs coloured
+girls and his trade is exclusively white. Another Negro has a school of
+pharmacy in which all the students are white; another, George Hamm, has a
+prosperous news and stationery store. A dentist, Dr. Grant, who has a
+reputation in his profession for a cement which he invented, was formerly
+in the faculty of the Harvard dentistry school and now enjoys a good
+practice among white people. The real estate dealer who has the most
+extensive business in Cambridge, T. H. Raymond, is a Negro. He employs
+white clerks and his business is chiefly with white people. Two or three
+Negro lawyers, Butler Wilson in particular, have many white clients. Dr.
+Courtney, a coloured physician from the Harvard Medical<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_120" id="Page_120">[Pg 120]</a></span> School, was for a
+time house physician of the Boston Lying-in-Hospital, in which the
+patients were practically all white, and has now a practice which includes
+both white and coloured patients. Dr. Courtney has also served on the
+School Board of Boston, an important elective office. The Negro poet,
+William Stanley Braithwaite, whose father took a degree at Oxford
+(England), is a member of the Authors&#8217; Club of Boston. His poems have
+appeared in various magazines, he has written a volume of poems, a
+standard anthology of Elizabethan verse, and he is about to publish a
+critical study of the works of William Dean Howells. Several of these men
+meet white people socially more or less.</p>
+
+<p>I give these examples to show the place occupied by the better and older
+class of Boston Negroes. Most of those I have mentioned are mulattoes,
+some very light. It shows what intelligent Negroes can do for themselves
+in a community where there has been little or no prejudice against them.</p>
+
+<p>But with crowding new immigration, and incited by all the other causes I
+have mentioned, these conditions are rapidly changing.</p>
+
+<p>A few years ago no hotel or restaurant in Boston refused Negro guests; now
+several hotels, restaurants, and especially confectionery stores, will not
+serve Negroes, even the best of them. The discrimination is not made
+openly, but a Negro who goes to such places is informed that there are no
+accommodations, or he is overlooked and otherwise slighted, so that he
+does not come again. A strong prejudice exists against renting flats and
+houses in many white neighbourhoods to coloured people. The Negro in
+Boston, as in other cities, is building up &#8220;quarters,&#8221; which he occupies
+to the increasing exclusion of other classes of people. The great Negro
+centre is now in the South End, a locality once occupied by some of the
+most aristocratic families of Boston. And yet, as elsewhere, they struggle
+for the right to live where they please. A case in point is that of Mrs.
+Mattie A. McAdoo, an educated coloured woman, almost white, who has
+travelled abroad, and is a woman of refinement. She had a flat in an
+apartment house among white friends. One of the renters, a Southern woman,
+finding out that Mrs. McAdoo had coloured blood, objected. The landlord
+refused to cancel Mrs. McAdoo&#8217;s lease and the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_121" id="Page_121">[Pg 121]</a></span> white woman left, but the
+next year Mrs. McAdoo found that she could not re-rent her apartment. The
+landlord in this instance was the son of an abolitionist. He said to her:</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;You know I have no prejudice against coloured people. I will rent you an
+apartment in the building where I myself live if you want it, but I can&#8217;t
+let you into my other buildings, because the tenants object.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>An attempt was even made a year or so ago by white women to force Miss
+Baldwin, the coloured school principal to whom I have referred, and who is
+almost one of the institutions of Boston, to leave Franklin House, where
+she was living. No one incident, perhaps, awakened Boston to the existence
+of race prejudice more sharply than this.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><i>Churches Draw the Colour Line</i></p>
+
+<p>One would think that the last harbour of prejudice would be the churches,
+and yet I found strange things in Boston. There are, and have been for a
+long time, numerous coloured churches in Boston, but many Negroes,
+especially those of the old families, have belonged to the white churches.
+In the last two years increased Negro attendance, especially at the
+Episcopal churches, has become a serious problem. A quarter of the
+congregation of the Church of the Ascension is coloured and the vicar has
+had to refuse any further coloured attendance at the Sunday School. St.
+Peter&#8217;s and St. Philip&#8217;s Churches in Cambridge have also been confronted
+with the colour problem.</p>
+
+<p>A proposition is now afoot to establish a Negro mission which shall
+gradually grow into a separate coloured Episcopal Church, a movement which
+causes much bitterness among the coloured people. I shall not soon forget
+the expression of hopelessness in the face of a prominent white church
+leader as he exclaimed:</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;What <i>shall</i> we do with these Negroes! I for one would like to have them
+stay. I believe it is in accordance with the doctrine of Christ, but the
+proportion is growing so large that white people are drifting away from
+us. Strangers avoid us. Our organisation is expensive to keep up and the
+Negroes are able to contribute very little in proportion to their
+numbers.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_122" id="Page_122">[Pg 122]</a></span> Think about it yourself: What shall we do? If we allow the
+Negroes to attend freely it means that eventually all the white people
+will leave and we shall have a Negro church whether we want it or not.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>In no other city are there any considerable number of Negroes who attend
+white churches&mdash;except a few Catholic churches. At New Orleans, I have
+seen white and coloured people worshipping together at the cathedrals.
+White ministers sometimes have spasms of conscience that they are not
+doing all they should for the Negro.</p>
+
+<p>Let me tell two significant incidents from Philadelphia. The worst Negro
+slum in that city is completely surrounded by business houses and the
+homes of wealthy white people. Within a few blocks of it stand several of
+the most aristocratic churches of Philadelphia. Miss Bartholomew conducts
+a neighbourhood settlement in the very centre of this social bog. Twice
+during the many years she has been there white ministers have ventured
+down from their churches. One of them said he had been troubled by the
+growing masses of ignorant coloured people.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Can&#8217;t I do something to help?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Miss Bartholomew was greatly pleased and cheered.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Of course you can,&#8221; she said heartily. &#8220;We&#8217;re trying to keep some of the
+Negro children off the streets. There is plenty of opportunity for helping
+with our boys&#8217; and girls&#8217; clubs and classes.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Oh, I didn&#8217;t mean that,&#8221; said the minister; &#8220;I thought, in cases of death
+in their families, we might offer to read the burial service.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>And he went away and did not see the humour of it!</p>
+
+<p>Another minister made a similar proposition: he wanted to establish a
+Sunday School for coloured people. He asked Miss Bartholomew anxiously
+where he could hold it.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Why not in your church in the afternoon?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Why, we couldn&#8217;t do that!&#8221; he exclaimed; &#8220;we should have to air all the
+cushions afterward!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>But to return to Boston. A proposition was recently made to organise for
+coloured people a separate Y. M. C. A., but the white members voted
+against any such discrimination. Yet a coloured man said to me hopelessly:</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_123" id="Page_123">[Pg 123]</a></span>&#8220;It&#8217;s only delayed. Next time we shall be put off with a separate
+institution.&#8221;</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><i>Colour Line at Harvard</i></p>
+
+<p>Even at Harvard where the Negro has always enjoyed exceptional
+opportunities, conditions are undergoing a marked change. A few years ago
+a large class of white students voluntarily chose a brilliant Negro
+student, R. C. Bruce, as valedictorian. But last year a Negro baseball
+player was the cause of so much discussion and embarrassment to the
+athletic association that there will probably never be another coloured
+boy on the university teams. The line has already been drawn, indeed, in
+the medical department. Although a coloured doctor only a few years ago
+was house physician at the Boston Lying-in-Hospital, coloured students are
+no longer admitted to that institution. One of them, Dr. Welker (an Iowa
+coloured man), cannot secure his degree because he hasn&#8217;t had six
+obstetrical cases, and he can&#8217;t get the six cases because he isn&#8217;t
+admitted with his white classmates to the Lying-in-Hospital. It is a
+curious fact that not only the white patients but some Negro patients
+object to the coloured doctors. In a recent address which has awakened
+much sharp comment among Boston Negroes, President Eliot of Harvard
+indicated his sympathy with the general policy of separate education in
+the South by remarking that if Negro students were in the majority at
+Harvard, or formed a large proportion of the total number, some separation
+of the races might follow.</p>
+
+<p>And this feeling is growing, notwithstanding the fact that no Negro
+student has ever disgraced Harvard and that no students are more orderly
+or law-abiding than the Negroes. On the other hand, Negro students have
+frequently made distinguished records for scholarship: last year one of
+them, Alain Leroy Locke, who took the course in three years, won the first
+of the three Bowdoin prizes (the most important bestowed at Harvard) for a
+literary essay, and passed for his degree with a <i>magna cum laude</i>. Since
+then he has been accepted, after a brilliant competitive examination, for
+the Rhodes scholarship from the state of Pennsylvania.</p>
+
+<p>Such feeling as that which is developing in the North comes<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_124" id="Page_124">[Pg 124]</a></span> hard, indeed,
+upon the intelligent, educated, ambitious Negro&mdash;especially if he happens
+to have, as a large proportion of these Negroes do have, no little white
+blood. Many coloured people in Boston are so white that they cannot be
+told from white people, yet they are classed as Negroes.</p>
+
+<p>Accompanying this change of attitude, this hesitation and withdrawal of
+the better class of white men, one finds crude sporadic outbreaks on the
+part of the rougher element of white men&mdash;who have merely a different way
+of expressing themselves.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><i>White Gangs Attack Negroes</i></p>
+
+<p>In Indianapolis the Negro comes in contact with the &#8220;bungaloo gangs,&#8221;
+crowds of rough and lawless white boys who set upon Negroes and beat them
+frightfully, often wholly without provocation. Although no law prevents
+Negroes from entering any park in Indianapolis, they are practically
+excluded from at least one of them by the danger of being assaulted by
+these gangs.</p>
+
+<p>The street cars are free in all Northern cities, but the Negro
+nevertheless sometimes finds it dangerous to ride with white people.
+Professor R. R. Wright, Jr., himself a Negro, and an acute observer of
+Negro conditions, tells this personal experience:</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I came out on the car from the University of Pennsylvania one evening in
+May about eight o&#8217;clock. Just as the car turned off Twenty-seventh to
+Lombard Street, a crowd of about one hundred little white boys from six to
+about fourteen years of age attacked it. The car was crowded, but there
+were only about a dozen Negroes on it, about half of them women. The mob
+of boys got control of the car by pulling off the trolley. They threw
+stones into the car, and finally some of them boarded the car and began to
+beat the Negroes with sticks, shouting as they did so, &#8216;Kill the nigger!&#8217;
+&#8216;Lynch &#8217;em!&#8217; &#8216;Hit that nigger!&#8217; etc. This all happened in Philadelphia.
+Doubtless these urchins had been reading in the daily papers the cry &#8216;Kill
+the Negro!&#8217; and they were trying to carry out the injunction.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>While I was in Indianapolis a clash of enough importance to be reported in
+the newspapers occurred between the races on a street car; and in New
+York, in the San Juan Hill<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_125" id="Page_125">[Pg 125]</a></span> district, one Sunday evening I saw an incident
+which illustrates the almost instinctive race antagonism which exists in
+Northern cities. The street was crowded. Several Negro boys were playing
+on the pavement. Stones were thrown. Instantly several white boys sided
+together and began to advance on the Negroes. In less time than it takes
+to tell it thirty or forty white boys and young men were chasing the
+Negroes down the street. At the next corner the Negroes were joined by
+dozens of their own race. Stones and sticks began to fly everywhere, and
+if it hadn&#8217;t been for the prompt action of two policemen there would have
+been a riot similar to those which have occurred not once but many times
+in New York City during the past two years. Of course these instances are
+exceptional, but none the less significant.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><i>Bumptiousness as a Cause of Hatred</i></p>
+
+<p>Some of the disturbances grow out of a characteristic of a certain sort of
+Negro, the expression of which seems to stir the deepest animosity in the
+city white boy. And that is the bumptiousness, the airiness, of the
+half-ignorant young Negro, who, feeling that he has rights, wants to be
+occupied constantly in using them. He mistakes liberty for licence.
+Although few in numbers among thousands of quiet coloured people, he makes
+a large showing. In the South they call him the &#8220;smart Negro,&#8221; and an
+almost irresistible instinct exists among white boys of a certain class to
+take him down. I remember walking in Indianapolis with an educated
+Northern white man. We met a young Negro immaculately dressed; his
+hat-band was blue and white; his shoes were patent leather with white
+tops; he wore a flowered waistcoat, and his tread as he walked was
+something to see.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Do you know,&#8221; said my companion, &#8220;I never see that young fellow without
+wanting to step up and knock his head off. I know something about him. He
+is absolutely worthless: he does no work, but lives on the wages of a
+hard-working coloured woman and spends all he can get on his clothes. I
+know the instinct is childish, but I am just telling you how I feel. I&#8217;m
+not sure it is racial prejudice; I presume I should feel much the same way
+toward a Frenchman<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_126" id="Page_126">[Pg 126]</a></span> if he did the same thing. And somehow I can&#8217;t help
+believing that a good thrashing would improve that boy&#8217;s character.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>I&#8217;m telling this incident just as it happened, to throw a side-light on
+one of the manifestations of the growing prejudice. One more illustration:
+Miss Eaton conducts a social settlement for Negroes in Boston. One day a
+teacher said to one of the little Negro boys in her class:</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Please pick up my handkerchief.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The boy did not stir; she again requested him to pick up the handkerchief;
+then she asked him why he refused.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;The days of slavery are over,&#8221; he said.</p>
+
+<p>Now, this spirit is not common, but it exists, and it injures the Negro
+people out of all proportion to its real seriousness.</p>
+
+<p>In certain towns in Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, on the borders of the old
+South, the feeling has reached a stage still more acute. At Springfield,
+O., two race riots have occurred, in the first of which a Negro was
+lynched and in the second many Negroes were driven out of town and a row
+of coloured tenements was burned. There are counties and towns where no
+Negro is permitted to stop over night. At Syracuse, O., Lawrenceburg,
+Ellwood, and Salem, Ind., for example, Negroes have not been permitted to
+live for years. If a Negro appears he is warned of conditions, and if he
+does not leave immediately, he is visited by a crowd of boys and men and
+forced to leave. A farmer who lives within a few miles of Indianapolis
+told me of a meeting, held only a short time ago by thirty-five farmers in
+his neighbourhood, in which an agreement was passed to hire no Negroes,
+nor to permit Negroes to live anywhere in the region.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><i>Story of a Northern Race Riot</i></p>
+
+<p>I stopped at Greensburg, Ind., on my way East and found there a remarkable
+illustration showing just how feeling arises in the North. Greensburg is a
+comfortable, well-to-do, conservative, church-going old town in eastern
+Indiana. Many of the residents are retired farmers. The population of
+7,000 is mostly of pure American stock, largely of Northern origin. And
+yet last April this quiet old town was shaken by a race riot. I made
+careful inquiries as to conditions there<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_127" id="Page_127">[Pg 127]</a></span> and I was amazed to discover how
+closely this small disturbance paralleled the greater riot at Atlanta
+which I have already written about. Negroes had lived in Greensburg for
+many years, a group of self-respecting, decent, prosperous men and women.
+They were known to and highly regarded by their white neighbours. One of
+them, named Brooks, owned a barber shop and was janitor for the
+Presbyterian Church and for one of the banks. Another, George W. Edwards,
+whom I met, has been for years an employee in the Garland Mills.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;There isn&#8217;t a better citizen in town than Edwards,&#8221; a white lawyer told
+me; and I heard the same thing from other white men.</p>
+
+<p>Another Negro, George Guess, is an engineer in the electric light plant.
+Of the local Negro boys, Robert Lewis, the first coloured graduate of the
+local schools, is now teaching engineering at Hampton Institute. Oscar
+Langston, another Negro boy, is a dentist in Indianapolis. These and other
+Negroes live in good homes, support a church and have a respectable
+society of their own. I found just such a body of good coloured people in
+Atlanta.</p>
+
+<p>Well, progress brought an electric railroad to Greensburg. To work on this
+and on improvements made by the railroad hundreds of labourers were
+required. And they were Negroes of the ignorant, wandering, unlooked-after
+sort so common in similar occupations in the South. When the work was
+finished a considerable number of them remained in Greensburg. Now
+Greensburg, like other American cities, was governed by a mayor who was a
+&#8220;good fellow,&#8221; and who depended on two influences to elect him: party
+loyalty and the saloon vote. He allowed a Negro dive to exist in one part
+of the town, where the idle and worthless Negroes congregated, where a
+murder was committed about a year before the riot. Exactly like Decatur
+Street in Atlanta! A rotten spot always causes trouble sooner or later.
+Good citizens protested and objected&mdash;to no purpose. They even organised a
+Good Citizenship League, the purpose of which was to secure a better
+enforcement of law. But the saloon interests were strong and wanted to
+sell whiskey and beer to the Negroes, and the city authorities were complaisant.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_128" id="Page_128">[Pg 128]</a></span>&#8220;Who cares,&#8221; one of them asked, &#8220;about a few worthless Negroes?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>But in a democracy people <i>must</i> care for one another.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><i>A Negro Crime in the North</i></p>
+
+<p>One day last April a Negro labourer who had been working for Mrs. Sefton,
+a highly respected widow who lived alone, appeared in the house in broad
+daylight and criminally assaulted her. His name was John Green, a Kentucky
+Negro; he was not only ignorant, but half-witted; he had already committed
+a burglary and had not been punished. He was easily caught, convicted, and
+sentenced. But the town was angry. On April 30th a crowd of men and boys
+gathered, beat two or three Negroes, and drove many out of town. They
+never thought of mobbing the city officials who had allowed the Negro
+dives to exist. And, as in Atlanta, the decent Negroes suffered with the
+criminals: a crowd broke windows in the home of George Edwards, and
+threatened other respectable coloured men. As in Atlanta, the better white
+people were horrified and scandalised; but, as in Atlanta, the white men
+who made up the mob went unpunished (though Atlanta did mildly discipline
+a few rioters). As in Atlanta, the newspaper reports that were sent out
+made no distinction between the different sorts of Negroes. The entire
+Negro population of Greensburg was blamed for the crime of a single
+ignorant and neglected man. I have several different newspaper reports of
+the affair from outside papers, and nearly all indicate in the headlines
+that all the Negroes in Greensburg were concerned in the riot and were
+driven out of town, which was not, of course, true. As a matter of fact
+the respectable Negroes are still living in Greensburg on friendly terms
+with the white people.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><i>Human Nature North and South</i></p>
+
+<p>In fact, the more I see of conditions North and South, the more I see that
+human nature north of Mason and Dixon&#8217;s line is not different from human
+nature south of the line.</p>
+
+<p>Different degrees of prejudice, it is true, are apparent in the two
+sections. In the South the social and political prejudice<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_129" id="Page_129">[Pg 129]</a></span> the natural
+result of the memories of slavery and reconstruction, of the greater mass
+of Negro population and of the backward economic development, is stronger.
+In the North, on the other hand, comparatively little social and political
+prejudice is apparent; but the Negro has a hard fight to get anything but
+the most subservient place in the economic machine.</p>
+
+<p>Over and over again, while I was in the South, I heard remarks like this:</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Down here we make the Negro keep his place socially, but in the North you
+won&#8217;t let him work.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>This leads me to one of the most important phases of race-relationship in
+the North&mdash;that is, the economic struggle of the Negro, suddenly thrown,
+as he has been, into the swift-moving, competitive conditions of Northern
+cities. Does he, or can he, survive? Do the masses of Negroes now coming
+North realise their ambitions? Is it true that the North will not let the
+Negro work?</p>
+
+<p>These questions must, perforce, be discussed in another chapter.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr style="width: 50%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_130" id="Page_130">[Pg 130]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_VII" id="CHAPTER_VII"></a>CHAPTER VII</h2>
+<h3>THE NEGROES&#8217; STRUGGLE FOR SURVIVAL IN NORTHERN CITIES</h3>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="dropcap"><span class="caps">One</span> of the questions I asked of Negroes whom I met both North and South was this:</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;What is your chief cause of complaint?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>In the South the first answer nearly always referred to the Jim Crow cars
+or the Jim Crow railroad stations; after that, the complaint was of
+political disfranchisement, the difficulty of getting justice in the
+courts, the lack of good school facilities, and in some localities, of the
+danger of actual physical violence.</p>
+
+<p>But in the North the first answer invariably referred to working
+conditions.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;The Negro isn&#8217;t given a fair opportunity to get employment. He is
+discriminated against because he is coloured.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Professor Kelly Miller, one of the acutest of Negro writers, has said:</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;The Negro (in the North) is compelled to loiter around the edges of
+industry.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Southern white men are fond of meeting Northern criticism of Southern
+treatment of the Negro with the response:</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;But the North closes the doors of industrial opportunity to the Negro.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>And yet, in spite of this complaint of conditions in the North, one who
+looks Southward can almost see the army of Negroes gathering from out of
+the cities, villages and farms, bringing nothing with them but a buoyant
+hope in a distant freedom, but tramping always Northward. And they come
+not alone from the old South, but from the West Indies, where the coloured
+population looks wistfully toward the heralded opportunities of America. A
+few are even coming from South Africa and South America. In New York,
+Boston, and Philadelphia, thousands of such foreign Negroes know nothing<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_131" id="Page_131">[Pg 131]</a></span>
+of America traditions; some of them do not even speak the English
+language.</p>
+
+<p>And why do they come if their difficulties are so great? Is it true that
+there is no chance for them in industry? Are they better or worse off in
+the North than in the South?</p>
+
+<p>In the first place, in most of the smaller Northern cities where the Negro
+population is not increasing rapidly, discrimination is hardly noticeable.
+Negroes enter the trades, find places in the shops, or even follow
+competitive business callings and still maintain friendly relationships
+with the white people.</p>
+
+<p>But the small towns are not typical of the new race conditions in the
+North; the situation in the greater centres of population where Negro
+immigration is increasing largely, is decidedly different.</p>
+
+<p>As I travelled in the North, I heard many stories of the difficulties
+which the coloured man had to meet in getting employment. Of course, as a
+Negro said to me, &#8220;there are always places for the coloured man at the
+bottom.&#8221; He can always get work at unskilled manual labour, or personal or
+domestic service&mdash;in other words, at menial employment. He has had that in
+plenty in the South. But what he seeks as he becomes educated is an
+opportunity for better grades of employment. He wants to rise.</p>
+
+<p>It is not, then, his complaint that he cannot get work in the North, but
+that he is limited in his opportunities to rise, to get positions which
+his capabilities (if it were not for his colour) would entitle him to. He
+is looking for a place where he will be judged at his worth as a man, not
+as a Negro: this he came to the North to find, and he meets difficulties
+of which he had not dreamed in the South.</p>
+
+<p>At Indianapolis I found a great discussion going on over what to do with
+the large number of idle young coloured people, some of whom had been
+through the public schools, but who could not, apparently, find any work
+to do. As an able coloured man said to me: &#8220;What shall we do? Here are our
+young people educated in the schools, capable of doing good work in many
+occupations where skill and intelligence are required&mdash;and yet with few
+opportunities opening for them. They don&#8217;t want to dig ditches or become
+porters or<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_132" id="Page_132">[Pg 132]</a></span> valets any more than intelligent white boys: they are human.
+The result is that some of them drop back into idle discouragement&mdash;or
+worse.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>In New York I had a talk with William L. Bulkley, the coloured principal
+of Public School No. 80, attended chiefly by coloured children, who told
+me of the great difficulties and discouragements which confronted the
+Negro boy who wanted to earn his living. He relates this story:</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I received a communication the other day from an electric company stating
+that they could use some bright, clean, industrious boys in their
+business, starting them at so much a week and aiding them to learn the
+business. I suspected that they did not comprehend coloured boys under the
+generic term &#8216;boys,&#8217; but thought to try. So I wrote asking if they would
+give employment to a coloured boy who could answer to the qualifications
+stated. The next mail brought the expected reply that no coloured boy,
+however promising, was wanted. I heaved a sigh and went on.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;The saddest thing that faces me in my work is the small opportunity for a
+coloured boy or girl to find proper employment. A boy comes to my office
+and asks for his working papers. He may be well up in the school, possibly
+with graduation only a few months off. I question him somewhat as follows:
+&#8216;Well, my boy, you want to go to work, do you? What are you going to do?&#8217;
+&#8216;I am going to be a door-boy, sir.&#8217; &#8216;Well, you will get $2.50 or $3 a
+week, but after a while that will not be enough; what then?&#8217; After a
+moment&#8217;s pause he will reply: &#8216;I should like to be an office boy.&#8217; &#8216;Well,
+what next?&#8217; A moment&#8217;s silence, and, &#8216;I should try to get a position as
+bell-boy.&#8217; &#8216;Well, then, what next?&#8217; A rather contemplative mood, and then,
+&#8216;I should like to climb to the position of head bell-boy.&#8217; He has now
+arrived at the top; further than this he sees no hope. He must face the
+bald fact that he must enter business as a boy and wind up as a boy.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>And yet in spite of these difficulties, Negroes come North every year in
+increasing numbers, they find living expensive, they suffer an unusual
+amount of sickness and death, they meet more prejudice than they expected
+to meet, and yet they keep coming. Much as Negroes complain of the
+hardship<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_133" id="Page_133">[Pg 133]</a></span> of Northern conditions, and though they are sometimes pitifully
+homesick for the old life in the South, I have yet to find one who wanted
+to go back&mdash;unless he had accumulated enough money to buy land.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Why do they come?&#8221; I asked a Negro minister in Philadelphia.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Well, they&#8217;re treated more like men up here in the North,&#8221; he said,
+&#8220;that&#8217;s the secret of it. There&#8217;s prejudice here, too, but the colour line
+isn&#8217;t drawn in their faces at every turn as it is in the South. It all
+gets back to a question of manhood.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>In the North prejudice is more purely economic than it is in the South&mdash;an
+incident of industrial competition.</p>
+
+<p>In the South the Negro still has the field of manual labour largely to
+himself, he is unsharpened by competition; but when he reaches the
+Northern city, he not only finds the work different and more highly
+organised and specialised, but he finds that he must meet the fierce
+competition of half a dozen eager, struggling, ambitious groups of
+foreigners, who are willing and able to work long hours at low pay in
+order to get a foothold. He has to meet often for the first time the
+Italian, the Russian Jew, the Slav, to say nothing of the white American
+labourer. He finds the pace set by competitive industry immensely harder
+than in most parts of the South. No life in the world, perhaps, requires
+as much in brain and muscle of all classes of men as that of the vast
+Northern cities in the United States. I have talked with many coloured
+workmen and I am convinced that not a few of them fail, not because of
+their colour, nor because they are lazy (Negroes in the North are of the
+most part hard workers&mdash;they <i>must</i> be, else they starve or freeze), but
+for simple lack of speed and skill; they haven&#8217;t learned to keep the pace
+set by the white man.</p>
+
+<p>A contractor in New York who employs large numbers of men, said to me:</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;It isn&#8217;t colour so much as plain efficiency. I haven&#8217;t any sentiment in
+the matter at all. It&#8217;s business. As a general rule the ordinary coloured
+man can&#8217;t do as much work nor do it as well as the ordinary white man. The
+result, is, I don&#8217;t take coloured men when I can get white men. Yet I have
+several coloured men who have been with me for years,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_134" id="Page_134">[Pg 134]</a></span> and I wouldn&#8217;t part
+with them for any white man I know. In the same way I would rather employ
+Italians than Russian Jews: they&#8217;re stronger workers.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Not unnaturally the Negro charges these competitive difficulties which he
+has to meet in the North (as he has been accustomed to do in the South) to
+the white man; he calls it colour prejudice, when as a matter of fact, it
+is often only the cold businesslike requirement of an industrial life
+which demands tremendous efficiency, which in many lines of activity has
+little more feeling than a machine, that is willing to use Italians, or
+Japanese, or Chinese, or Negroes, or Hindus, or any other people on the
+face of the earth. On the other hand, no doubt exists that many labour
+unions, especially in the skilled trades, are hostile to Negroes, even
+though they may have no rules against their admission. I heard the
+experiences of an expert Negro locomotive engineer named Burns who had a
+run out of Indianapolis to the South. Though he was much in favour with
+the company, and indeed with many trainmen who knew him personally, the
+general feeling was so strong that by soaping the tracks, injuring his
+engine, and in other ways making his work difficult and dangerous, he was
+finally forced to abandon his run. If there were space I could give many
+accounts of strikes against the employment of Negroes. The feeling among
+union labour men has undoubtedly been growing more intense in the last few
+years owing to the common use of Negroes as strike breakers. With a few
+thousand Negroes the employers broke the great stockyards strike in
+Chicago in 1904, and the teamsters&#8217; strike in the following year. Colour
+prejudice is used like any other weapon for strengthening the monopoly of
+the labour union. I know several unions which are practically monopolistic
+corporations into which any outsider, white, yellow, or black, penetrates
+with the greatest difficulty. Such closely organised unions keep the
+Negroes out in the South exactly as they do in the North. A Negro
+tile-setter, steam-fitter or plumber can no more get into a union in
+Atlanta than in New York. Of course these unions, like any other closely
+organised group of men, employ every weapon to further their cause. They
+use prejudice as a competitive fighting weapon, they seize upon the colour
+of the Negro, or the pig-tail and curious habits<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_135" id="Page_135">[Pg 135]</a></span> of the Chinaman, or
+the low-living standard of the Hindu, to fight competition and protect
+them in their labour monopoly.</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/gs13_top.jpg" alt="" /></div>
+<p class="center">WARD IN A NEGRO HOSPITAL AT PHILADELPHIA</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/gs13_bot.jpg" alt="" /></div>
+<p class="center">STUDIO OF A NEGRO SCULPTRESS</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>And yet, although I expected to find the Negro wholly ostracised by union
+labour, I discovered that where the Negro becomes numerous or skilful
+enough, he, like the Italian or the Russian Jew, begins to force his way
+into the unions. The very first Negro carpenter I chanced to meet in the
+North (from whom I had expected a complaint of discrimination) said to me:</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I&#8217;m all right. I&#8217;m a member of the union and get union wages.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>And I found after inquiry that there are a few Negroes in most of the
+unions of skilled workers, carpenters, masons, iron-workers, even in the
+exclusive typographical union and in the railroad organisations&mdash;a few
+here and there, mostly mulattoes. They have got in just as the Italians
+get in, not because they are wanted, or because they are liked, but
+because by being prepared, skilled, and energetic, the unions have had to
+take them in as a matter of self-protection. In the South the Negro is
+more readily accepted as a carpenter, blacksmith, or bricklayer than in
+the North not because he is more highly regarded but because (unlike the
+North) the South has almost no other labour supply.</p>
+
+<p>In several great industries North and South, indeed, the Negro is as much
+a part of labour unionism as the white man. Thousands of Negroes are
+members of the United Mine-Workers, John Mitchell&#8217;s great organisation,
+and they stand on an exact industrial equality with the whites. Other
+thousands are in the cigar-makers&#8217; union, where, by virtue of economic
+pressure, they have forced recognition.</p>
+
+<p>Indeed, in the North, in spite of the complaint of discrimination, I found
+Negroes working and making a good living in all sorts of industries&mdash;union
+or no union. A considerable number of Negro firemen have good positions in
+New York, a contracting Negro plumber in Indianapolis who uses coloured
+help has been able to maintain himself, not only against white
+competition, but against the opposition of organised white labour. I know
+of Negro paper-hangers and painters, not union men, but making a living at
+their trade and gradually getting hold. A good many Negro printers,
+pressmen, and the like are now found in Negro offices (over 200
+newspapers<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_136" id="Page_136">[Pg 136]</a></span> and magazines are published by Negroes in this country) who
+are getting their training. I know of several girls (all mulattoes) who
+occupy responsible positions in offices in New York and Chicago. Not a few
+coloured nurses, seamstresses and milliners have found places in the life
+of the North which they seem capable of holding. It is not easy for them
+to make progress: each coloured man who takes a step ahead must prove, for
+his race, that a coloured man can after all, do his special work as well
+as a white man. The presumption is always against him.</p>
+
+<p>Here is a little newspaper account of a successful skilled pattern maker
+in Chicago:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>A few days ago a large box containing twenty-one large and small
+patterns was shipped to the Jamestown Exhibition by the McGuire Car
+Company of Paris, Illinois, one of the largest car companies in the
+West. Before the box was shipped scores of newspaper men, engineers
+and business men were permitted to inspect what is said to be the
+most complete and most valuable exhibit of the kind ever sent to an
+exhibition in this country. The contents of this precious box is
+entirely the work of a coloured man named George A. Harrison. Mr.
+Harrison is one of the highest salaried men on the pay-roll of the
+company. He makes all the patterns for all of the steel, brass, and
+iron castings for every kind of car made by this company. He
+graduated at the head of his class of sixty members in a pattern
+making establishment in Chicago.</p></div>
+
+<p>Cases of this sort are exceptional among the vast masses of untrained
+Negro population in the cities, and yet it shows what can be done&mdash;and the
+very possibility of such advancement encourages Negroes to come North.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><i>Trades Which Negroes Dominate</i></p>
+
+<p>So much for the higher branches of industry. In some of the less skilled
+occupations, on the other hand, the Negro is not only getting hold, but
+actually becoming dominant.</p>
+
+<p>The asphalt workers are nearly all coloured. In New York they have a
+strong union and although part of the membership is white (chiefly
+Italian), the chosen representative who sits with the Central Federated
+Union of the city is James H. Wallace, a coloured man.</p>
+
+<p>In Indianapolis I found that the hod-carriers&#8217; industry was almost wholly
+in the hands of Negroes who have a strong union, with a large strike fund
+put aside. So successful have<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_137" id="Page_137">[Pg 137]</a></span> they been that they now propose erecting a
+building of their own as a club house. Although there are white men in the
+union the officers are all coloured. Not long ago some of the coloured
+members began to &#8220;rush&#8221; a white man at his work. It was reported to the
+union and hotly discussed. The coloured members finally decided that there
+should be no discrimination against white men, and fined one of the Negro
+offenders for his conduct. He couldn&#8217;t pay and had to leave town.</p>
+
+<p>Where the Negro workman gets a foothold in the North, he often does very
+well indeed. R. R. Wright, Jr., calls attention to conditions in the
+Midvale Steel Company, which is one of the largest, if not the largest
+employer of Negro labour in Philadelphia. Charles J. Harrah, the president
+of this company, said before the United States Industrial Commission in
+1900:</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;We have fully 800 or 1,000 coloured men. The balance are Americans, Irish
+and Germans. The coloured labour we have is excellent.... They are lusty
+fellows; we have some with shoulders twice as broad as mine, and with
+chests twice as deep as mine. The men come up here ignorant and untutored.
+We teach them the benefit of discipline. We teach the coloured man the
+benefit of thrift, and coax him to open a bank account; and he generally
+does it, and in a short time has money in it, and nothing can stop him
+from adding money to that bank account. We have no coloured men who
+drink.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Asked as to the friction between the white and black workmen, Mr. Harrah
+replied:</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Not a bit of it. They work cheek by jowl with Irish, and when the
+Irishman has a festivity at home he has coloured men invited. We did it
+with trepidation. We introduced one man at first to sweep up the yard, and
+we noticed the Irish and Germans looked at him askance. Then we put in
+another. Then we put them in the boiler-room, and then we got them in the
+open hearth and in the forge, and gradually we got them everywhere. They
+are intelligent and docile, and when they come in as labourers, unskilled,
+they gradually become skilled, and in the course of time we will make
+excellent foremen out of them.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_138" id="Page_138">[Pg 138]</a></span>Mr. Harrah added that there was absolutely no difference in wages of
+Negroes and whites in the same grade of work.</p>
+
+<p>I have pointed out especially in my last article how and where prejudice
+was growing in Northern cities, as it certainly is. On the other hand,
+where one gets down under the surface there are to be found many
+counteracting influences&mdash;those quiet constructive forces, which, not
+being sensational or threatening, attract too little attention. Northern
+people are able to help Negroes where Southern people are deterred by the
+intensity of social prejudice: for in most places in the South the
+teaching of Negroes still means social ostracism.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><i>Help for Negroes in the North</i></p>
+
+<p>Settlement work, in one form or another, has been instituted in most
+Northern cities, centres of enlightenment and hope. I have visited a
+number of these settlements and have seen their work. They are doing much,
+especially in giving a moral tone to a slum community: they help to keep
+the children off the streets by means of clubs and classes; they open the
+avenues of sympathy between the busy upper world and the struggling lower
+world. Such is the work of Miss Bartholomew, Miss Hancock, Miss Wharton in
+Philadelphia, Miss Eaton in Boston, Mrs. Celia Parker Woolley in Chicago,
+Miss Ovington in New York. Miss Hancock, a busy, hopeful Quaker woman, has
+a &#8220;broom squad&#8221; of Negro boys which makes a regular business of sweeping
+several of the streets in the very worst slum district in Philadelphia; it
+gives them employment and it teaches them civic responsibility and pride.</p>
+
+<p>But perhaps I can give the best idea of these movements by telling of the
+different forms of work in a single city&mdash;Indianapolis. In the first
+place, the Flanner Guild, projected by Mr. Flanner, a white man, is
+maintained largely by white contributions, but it is controlled wholly by
+coloured people. Millinery classes were opened for girls (of which there
+are now many practising graduates, eight of whom are giving lessons in
+Indianapolis and in other cities), and there are clubs and social
+gatherings of all sorts: it has been, indeed, a helpful social centre of
+influence.</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/gs14_top.jpg" alt="" /></div>
+<p class="center">A NEGRO MAGAZINE EDITOR&#8217;S OFFICE IN PHILADELPHIA</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/gs14_bot.jpg" alt="" /></div>
+<p class="center">A &#8220;BROOM SQUAD&#8221; OF NEGRO BOYS</p>
+
+<p class="note">Which makes a regular business of sweeping several of the streets in the
+very worst slum district in Philadelphia; it gives them employment and it
+teaches them civic responsibility and pride. Miss Hancock at the right.</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_139" id="Page_139">[Pg 139]</a></span>In the South, as I have shown, Negroes receive much off-hand individual
+charity&mdash;food from the kitchen, gifts of old clothes and money; but it is
+largely personal and unorganised. In the North there is comparatively
+little indiscriminate giving, but an effort to reach and help Negro
+families by making them help themselves. One of the difficulties of the
+Negro is improvidence; but once given a start on the road to money saving,
+it is often astonishing to see him try to live up to cash in the bank. The
+Charity Organisation Society of Indianapolis has long maintained a dime
+savings and loan association which employs six women collectors, one
+coloured, who visit hundreds of homes every week. These form indeed a
+corps of friendly visitors, the work of collecting the savings furnishing
+them an opportunity of getting into the homes and so winning the
+confidence of the people that they can help them in many ways. Last year
+over 6,000 depositors were registered in the association, two-thirds of
+whom were Negroes, and over $25,000 was on deposit. Not less than
+twenty-five cents a week is accepted, but many Negroes save much more. As
+soon as they get into the habit of saving they usually transfer their
+accounts to the savings bank&mdash;and once with a bank book, they are on the
+road to genuine improvement.</p>
+
+<p>Another work of great value which Mr. Grout of the Charity Organisation
+Society has organised is vacant lot cultivation. By securing the use of
+vacant land in and around the city many Negro families have been
+encouraged to make gardens, thus furnishing healthful and self-respecting
+occupation for the old or very young members of many Negro families, who
+otherwise might become public charges. The plots are ploughed and seeds
+are provided: the Negroes do their own work and take the crop. The work is
+supported by voluntary contributions from white people. A number of Negro
+women have raised enough vegetables not only to supply themselves but have
+had some to sell.</p>
+
+<p>Negro children are closely looked after in Indianapolis. Compulsory
+education applies equally to both races. Every family thus comes also
+under the more or less active attention of the school authorities. An
+officer, Miss Sarah Colton Smith, is employed exclusively to visit and
+keep watch of the Negro children. Her work also is largely that of the
+friendly<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_140" id="Page_140">[Pg 140]</a></span> visitor, helping the various overworked mothers with
+suggestions, taking an interest in Negro organisations. For example, the
+Coloured Woman&#8217;s Club, working with Miss Smith, has organised a day
+nursery which cares for some of the very young children of working Negro
+women, thereby allowing the older ones to go to school. Indianapolis
+(which has one of the most progressive and intelligent school systems,
+wholly non-political, in the country) is also thoroughly alive to the
+necessity of industrial education&mdash;for both races. Significantly enough,
+the Negro schools were first fitted with industrial departments, so that
+for a time the cost of education per capita in Indianapolis was higher for
+coloured children than for white. When I expressed my surprise at this
+unusual condition I was told:</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Of course, the immediate need of the Negro was greater.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Night schools are also held in the public school buildings from November
+to April&mdash;two schools for Negroes especially, where coloured people of all
+ages are at liberty to attend. It is a remarkable sight: Negroes fifty and
+sixty years old mingle there with mere children. The girls are taught
+sewing and cooking, the men carpentry&mdash;besides the ordinary branches. One
+old man from the South was found crying with joy over his ability to write
+his name. For the very young children, Negro equally with white, there is
+Mrs. Eliza Blaker&#8217;s Kindergarten. For the aged coloured women a home is
+now supported principally by the coloured people themselves.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><i>The Morals of Negro Women</i></p>
+
+<p>I saw a good deal of these various lines of activity and talked with the
+people who come close in touch with the struggling masses of the Negro
+poor. I wish I had room to tell some of the stories I heard: the black
+masses of poverty, disease, hopeless ignorance, and yet everywhere shot
+through with hopeful tendencies and individual uplift and success. In
+Indianapolis, as in other Northern cities, I heard much to the credit of
+the Negro women.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;If the Negro is saved here in the North,&#8221; Miss Smith told me, &#8220;it will be
+due to the women.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>They gave me many illustrations showing how hard the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_141" id="Page_141">[Pg 141]</a></span> Negro women
+worked&mdash;taking in washing or going out every day to work, raising their
+families, keeping the home, sometimes supporting worthless husbands.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;A Negro woman of the lower class,&#8221; one visitor said to me, &#8220;rarely
+expects her husband to support her. She takes the whole burden herself.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>And the women, so the loan association visitors told me, are the chief
+savers: they are the ones who get and keep the bank accounts. I have heard
+a great deal South and North about the immorality of Negro women. Much
+immorality no doubt exists, but no honest observer can go into any of the
+crowded coloured communities of Northern cities and study the life without
+coming away with a new respect for the Negro women.</p>
+
+<p>Another hopeful work in Indianapolis is the juvenile court. A boy who
+commits a crime is not immediately cast off to become a more desperate
+criminal and ultimately to take his revenge upon the society which
+neglected him. He comes into a specially organised court, where he meets
+not violence, but friendliness and encouragement. Mrs. Helen W. Rogers is
+at the head of the probation work in Indianapolis, and she has under her
+supervision a large corps of voluntary probation officers, thirty of whom
+are coloured men and women&mdash;the best in town. These coloured probation
+officers have an organisation of which George W. Cable, who is the foreman
+of the distributing department of the Indianapolis post-office, is the
+chairman. A Negro boy charged with an offence is turned over to one of
+these leading Negro men or women, required to report regularly, and helped
+until he gets on his feet again. Thus far the system has worked with great
+success. Boys whose offences are too serious for probation are sent, not
+to a jail or chain-gang, where they become habitual criminals, but to a
+reform school, where they are taught regular habits of work.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><i>Why the Negro Often Fails</i></p>
+
+<p>As I continued my inquiries I found that the leading coloured men in most
+cities, though they might be ever so discouraged over the condition of the
+ignorant, reckless masses of their<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_142" id="Page_142">[Pg 142]</a></span> people, were awakening to the fact
+that the Negro&#8217;s difficulty in the North was not all racial, not all due
+to mere colour prejudice, but also in large measure to lack of training,
+lack of aggressiveness and efficiency, lack of organisation. In New York a
+&#8220;Committee for Improving the Industrial Condition of Negroes&#8221; has been
+formed. It is composed of both white and coloured men, and the secretary
+is S. R. Scottron, an able coloured man. The object of the committee is to
+study the condition of the Negroes in New York City, find out the causes
+of idleness, and try to help the Negro to better employment.</p>
+
+<p>This committee has experienced difficulty not so much in finding openings
+for Negroes, as in getting reliable Negroes to fill them. Boys and girls,
+though educated in the public schools, come out without knowing how to do
+anything that will earn them a living. Although the advantages of Cooper
+Institute and other industrial training schools are open to Negroes, they
+have been little used, either from lack of knowledge of the opportunity,
+or because the Negroes preferred the regular literary courses of the
+schools. So many unskilled and untrained Negroes, both old and young, have
+discouraged many employers from trying any sort of Negro help. I shall not
+forget the significant remark of a white employer I met in Indianapolis: a
+broad-gauge man, known for his philanthropies.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I&#8217;ve tried Negro help over and over again, hoping to help out the
+condition of Negro idleness we have here. I have had two or three good
+Negro workers, but so many of them have been wholly undisciplined,
+irresponsible, and sometimes actually dishonest, that I&#8217;ve given up
+trying. When I hear that an applicant is coloured, I don&#8217;t employ him.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Upon this very point Professor Bulkley said to me:</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;The great need of the young coloured people is practical training in
+industry. A Negro boy can&#8217;t expect to get hold in a trade unless he has
+had training.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>R. R. Wright, Jr., who has made a study of conditions in Philadelphia,
+says:</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;It is in the skilled trades that the Negroes are at the greatest
+disadvantage. Negroes have been largely shut out of mechanical trades
+partly because of indifference and occasional active<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_143" id="Page_143">[Pg 143]</a></span> hostility of labour
+unions, partly because it has been difficult to overcome the traditional
+notion that a &#8216;Negro&#8217;s place&#8217; is in domestic service, but chiefly because
+there have been practically no opportunities for Negroes to learn trades.
+Those Negroes who know skilled trades and follow them are principally men
+from the South, who learned their trades there. The poorest of them fall
+into domestic service; the best have found places at their trades. For the
+Negro boy who is born in this city it is difficult to acquire a trade, and
+here, I say, the system has been weakest.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>With the idea of giving more practical training School No. 80 in New York,
+of which Professor Bulkley is principal, is now opened in the evenings for
+industrial instruction. Last year 1,300 coloured people, young and old,
+were registered. In short, there is a recognition in the North as in the
+South of the need of training the Negro to work. And not only the Negro,
+but the white boy and girl as well&mdash;as Germany and other European
+countries have learned.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><i>The Road from Slavery to Freedom</i></p>
+
+<p>At Indianapolis I found an organisation of Negro women, called the Woman&#8217;s
+Improvement Club. The president, Mrs. Lillian T. Fox, told me what the
+club was doing to solve the problem of the coloured girl and boy who could
+not get work. She found that, after all, white prejudice was not so much a
+bugaboo as she had imagined. The newspapers gave publicity to the work;
+the Commercial Club, the foremost business men&#8217;s organisation of the city,
+offered to lend its assistance; several white employers agreed to try
+coloured help, and one, the Van Camp Packing Company, one of the great
+concerns of its kind in the country, even fitted up a new plant to be
+operated wholly by coloured people. Last fall, after the season&#8217;s work was
+over, one of the officers of the company told me that the Negro plant had
+been a great success, that the girls had done their work faithfully and
+with great intelligence.</p>
+
+<p>Just recently a meeting of coloured carpenters was held in New York to
+organise for self-help, and they found that, by bringing pressure to bear,
+the Brotherhood of Carpenters was<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_144" id="Page_144">[Pg 144]</a></span> perfectly willing to accept them as
+members of the union, on exactly the same basis as any other carpenters.</p>
+
+<p>In short, the Negro is beginning to awaken to the fact that if he is to
+survive and succeed in Northern cities, it must be by his own skill,
+energy, and organisation. For, like any individual or any race, striving
+for a place in industry or in modern commercial life, the Negro must, in
+order to succeed, not only equal his competitor, but become more
+efficient. A Negro contractor said to me:</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Yes, I can get any amount of work, but they expect me to do it a little
+better and a little cheaper than my white competitors.&#8221; Then he added:</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;And I can do it, too!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Those are the only terms on which success can be won.</p>
+
+<p>For so long a time the Negro has been driven or forced to work, as in the
+South, that he learns only slowly, in an intense, impersonal, competitive
+life like that of the North, where work is at a premium, that he himself,
+not the white man, must do the driving. It is the lesson that raises any
+man from slavery into freedom.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><i>Pullman Porters</i></p>
+
+<p>So much for industry. The Negro in the North has also been going into
+business and into other and varied employment. The very difficulty of
+getting hold in the trades and in salaried employment has driven many
+coloured people into small business enterprises: grocery stores, tailor
+shops, real estate or renting agencies. If they are being driven out by
+white men as waiters and barbers, they enjoy, on the other hand, growing
+opportunities as railroad and Pullman porters and waiters&mdash;places which
+are often highly profitable, and lead, if the Negro saves his money, to
+better openings. A Negro banker whom I met in the South told me that he
+got his start as a Pullman porter. He had a good run, and by being active
+and accommodating, often made from $150 to $200 a month from his wages and
+tips.</p>
+
+<p>But the same change is going on in the North that I found everywhere in
+the South. I mean a growing race consciousness among Negroes&mdash;the building
+up of a more or less <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_145" id="Page_145">[Pg 145]</a></span>independent Negro community life within the greater
+white civilisation. Every force seems to be working in that direction.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><i>Business Among Boston and Philadelphia Negroes</i></p>
+
+<p>As I have showed many Negroes in Boston (and indeed in other cities) have
+made a success in business enterprises which are patronised by white
+people&mdash;or rather by both races. Coloured doctors and lawyers in Boston
+have more or less white practice. Of course, coloured men who can succeed
+without reference to their colour and do business with both races, wish to
+continue to do so&mdash;but the tendency in the North, as in the South, is all
+against such development and toward Negro enterprises for the Negro
+population. Even in Boston numerous enterprises are conducted by Negroes
+for Negroes. I visited several small but prosperous grocery stores. A
+Negro named Basil F. Hutchins has built up a thriving undertaking and
+livery establishment for Negro trade. Charles W. Alexander has a
+print-shop with coloured workmen and publishes <i>Alexander&#8217;s Magazine</i>. A
+new hotel called the Astor House, conducted by Negroes for Negroes, has
+250 rooms with telephone service in each room, a large restaurant and many
+of the other attractions of a good hotel. But in this growth the North is
+far behind the South. Scores of Negro banks are to be found in the South,
+not one in the North. Cities like Richmond, Va., Jackson, Miss.,
+Nashville, Tenn., have a really remarkable development of Negro business
+enterprises.</p>
+
+<p>Perhaps I can convey a clearer idea of the great variety of employment of
+Negroes in Northern cities by outlining the condition in a single city,
+Philadelphia&mdash;information for which I am indebted to R. R. Wright, Jr. The
+census of 1900 shows that out of 28,940 Negro males (boys and men), 21,128
+were at work, and out of 33,673 girls and women, 14,095 were wage-earners.
+Here are some of the more numerous occupations of Negro men:</p>
+
+<table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="5" summary="table">
+<tr><td>Common labourers</td><td><span class="spacer">&nbsp;</span></td><td align="right">7,690</td></tr>
+<tr><td>Servants and waiters</td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">4,378</td></tr>
+<tr><td>Teamsters and hackmen</td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">1,957</td></tr>
+<tr><td>Porters and helpers in stores</td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">921</td></tr>
+<tr><td>Barbers and hairdressers</td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">444</td></tr>
+<tr><td>Messengers and errand boys</td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">346</td></tr>
+<tr><td>Brick and stone masons</td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">308</td></tr></table>
+
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_146" id="Page_146">[Pg 146]</a></span>Most of these are, of course, low-class occupations&mdash;the hard wage-work of
+the city in which the men often sink below the poverty line. On the other
+hand the census gives these figures:</p>
+
+<table width="50%" border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="5" summary="table">
+<tr><td>Negro professional men (415) and women (170) including doctors, clergymen, dentists, teachers, electricians, architects,
+artists, musicians, lawyers, journalists, civil engineers, actors, literary and scientific persons, etc.</td><td><span class="spacer">&nbsp;</span></td><td align="right">585</td></tr>
+<tr><td>Retail merchants, men (297), women (22).</td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">319</td></tr>
+<tr><td>Hotel keepers</td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">13</td></tr></table>
+
+<p>One Negro runs a men&#8217;s furnishing store; another, a drug store; others,
+groceries, meats, etc. The beneficial society has grown to a regular
+insurance company, the renting agent has become a real estate dealer.
+Within the past twelve months Negroes have incorporated two realty
+companies, one land investment company, four building and loan
+associations, one manufacturing company, one insurance company, besides a
+number of other smaller concerns.</p>
+
+<p>The civil service has proved of advantage to the Negro of Philadelphia, as
+of every other large Northern city. In the post-office there are about 150
+clerks, carriers and other employees, on the police force about 70
+patrolmen, and 40 school-teachers and about 200 persons in other municipal
+offices.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><i>Wherein Lies Success for Negroes</i></p>
+
+<p>I have thus endeavoured to present the conditions of the Negro in the
+North and show his relationship with white people. I have tried to exhibit
+every factor, good or bad, which plays a part in racial conditions. Many
+sinister influences exist: the large increase of ignorant and unskilled
+Negroes from the South; the growing prejudice in the North, both social
+and industrial, against the Negro; the high death-rate and low birth-rate
+among the Negro population, which is due to poverty, ignorance, crime, and
+an unfriendly climate. On the other hand, many encouraging and hopeful
+tendencies are perceptible. Individual Negroes are forcing recognition in
+nearly all branches of human activity, entering business life and the
+professions. A new racial consciousness is growing up leading to
+organisations for self-help; and while white prejudice<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_147" id="Page_147">[Pg 147]</a></span> is increasing, so
+is white helpfulness as manifested in social settlements, industrial
+schools, and other useful philanthropies.</p>
+
+<p>All these forces and counter forces&mdash;economic, social, religious,
+political&mdash;are at work. We can all see them plainly, but we cannot judge
+of their respective strength. It is a tremendous struggle that is going
+on&mdash;the struggle of a backward race for survival within the swift-moving
+civilisation of an advanced race. No one can look upon it without the most
+profound fascination for its interests as a human spectacle, nor without
+the deepest sympathy for the efforts of 10,000,000 human beings to
+surmount the obstacles which beset them on every hand.</p>
+
+<p>And what a struggle it is! As I look out upon it and see this dark horde
+of men and women coming up, coming up, a few white men here and there
+cheering them on, a few bitterly holding them back, I feel that Port
+Arthur and the battles of Manchuria, bloody as they were, are not to be
+compared with such a conflict as this, for this is the silent, dogged,
+sanguinary, modern struggle in which the combatants never rest upon their
+arms. But the object is much the same: the effort of a backward race for a
+foothold upon this earth, for civilised respect and an opportunity to
+expand. And the Negro is not fighting Russians, but Americans, Germans,
+Irish, English, Italians, Jews, Slavs&mdash;all those mingling white races
+(each, indeed, engaged in the same sort of a struggle) which make up the
+nation we call America.</p>
+
+<p>The more I see of the conflict the more I seem to see that victory or
+defeat lies with the Negro himself. As a wise Negro put it to me:</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Forty years ago the white man emancipated us: but we are only just now
+discovering that we must emancipate ourselves.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Whether the Negro can survive the conflict, how it will all come out, no
+man knows. For this is the making of life itself.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_148" id="Page_148">[Pg 148]</a></span></p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr style="width: 50%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_149" id="Page_149">[Pg 149]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="PART_THREE" id="PART_THREE"></a><i>PART THREE</i></h2>
+<h2>THE NEGRO IN THE NATION</h2>
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_150" id="Page_150">[Pg 150]</a></span></p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_151" id="Page_151">[Pg 151]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_VIII" id="CHAPTER_VIII"></a>CHAPTER VIII</h2>
+<h3>THE MULATTO: THE PROBLEM OF RACE MIXTURE</h3>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="dropcap"><span class="caps">I had</span> not been long engaged in the study of the race problem when I found
+myself face to face with a curious and seemingly absurd question:</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;What is a Negro?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>I saw plenty of men and women who were unquestionably Negroes, Negroes in
+every physical characteristic, black of countenance with thick lips and
+kinky hair, but I also met men and women as white as I am, whose assertion
+that they were really Negroes I accepted in defiance of the evidence of my
+own senses. I have seen blue-eyed Negroes and golden-haired Negroes; one
+Negro girl I met had an abundance of soft straight red hair. I have seen
+Negroes I could not easily distinguish from the Jewish or French types; I
+once talked with a man I took at first to be a Chinaman but who told me he
+was a Negro. And I have met several people, passing everywhere for white,
+who, I knew, had Negro blood.</p>
+
+<p>Nothing, indeed, is more difficult to define than this curious physical
+colour line in the individual human being. Legislatures have repeatedly
+attempted to define where black leaves off and white begins, especially in
+connection with laws prohibiting marriage between the races. Some of the
+statutes define a Negro as a &#8220;person with one-eighth or more of Negro
+blood.&#8221; Southern people, who take pride in their ability to distinguish
+the drop of dark blood in the white face, are themselves frequently
+deceived. Several times I have heard police judges in the South ask
+concerning a man brought before them:</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Is this man coloured or white?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Just recently a case has arisen at Norfolk, Va., in which a Mrs. Rosa
+Stone sued the Norfolk &amp; Western Railroad Company for being compelled by
+the white conductor, who thought her a Negro, to ride in a &#8220;Jim Crow&#8221; car.
+Having been forced into the Negro compartment, it remained for a<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_152" id="Page_152">[Pg 152]</a></span> real
+coloured woman, who knew her personally, to draw the line against her.
+This coloured woman is reported as saying:</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Lor, Miss Rosa, this ain&#8217;t no place for you; you b&#8217;long in the cars back yonder.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>It appears that Mrs. Stone was tanned.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><i>Curious Story of a White Man Who Was Expelled as a Negro</i></p>
+
+<p>Here is a story well illustrating the difficulties sometimes encountered
+by Southerners in deciding who is white and who is coloured. On March 6,
+1907, the Atlanta <i>Georgian</i> published this account of how a man who, it
+was said, was a Negro passing for a white man, was expelled by a crowd of
+white men from the town of Albany, Ga.:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Peter Zeigler, a Negro, was last night escorted out of town by a
+crowd of white men. Zeigler had been here for a month and palmed
+himself off as a white man. He has been boarding with one of the best
+white families in the city and has been associating with some of
+Albany&#8217;s best people. A visiting lady recognised him as being a Negro
+who formerly lived in her city, and her assertion was investigated
+and found to be correct. Last night he was carried to Forester&#8217;s
+Station, a few miles north of here, and ordered to board an outgoing
+train.</p>
+
+<p>Zeigler has a fair education and polished manners, and his colour was
+such that he could easily pass for a white man where he was not
+known.</p></div>
+
+<p>Immediately after suffering the indignity of being expelled from Albany,
+Mr. Zeigler communicated with his friends and relatives, a delegation of
+whom came from Charleston, Orangeburg, and Summerville, S. C. and proved
+to the satisfaction of everyone that Mr. Zeigler was, in reality, a white
+man connected with several old families of South Carolina. Of this return
+of Mr. Zeigler the Albany <i>Herald</i> says:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>The <i>Herald</i> yesterday contained the account of the return to Albany
+of Peter B. Zeigler, the young man who was forced to leave Albany
+between suns on the night of March 4th. The young man upon his return
+was accompanied by a party composed of relatives and influential
+friends from his native state of South Carolina.</p></div>
+
+<p>Nothing surely could throw a more vivid light on colour line confusions in
+the South than this story.</p>
+
+<p>Another extraordinary case is that of Mrs. Elsie Massey, decided in Tipton
+County, Tenn., after years of litigation, in which one side tried to prove
+that Mrs. Massey was a Negro, the daughter of a cotton planter named &#8220;Ed&#8221;<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_153" id="Page_153">[Pg 153]</a></span>
+Barrow, and a quadroon slave, and the other side tried to prove that she
+was of pure Caucasian blood. On June 13, 1907, a jury of white men finally
+declared that Mrs. Massey was white and that she and her children might
+inherit $250,000 worth of property. Such instances as these, a few among
+almost innumerable cases, will indicate how difficult it often is to
+decide who is and who is not a Negro&mdash;the definition of Negro here being
+that used in the South, a person having any Negro blood, no matter how
+little.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><i>How Many Mulattoes There Are</i></p>
+
+<p>Few people realise how large a proportion of the so-called Negro race in
+this country is not really Negro at all, but mulatto or mixed blood,
+either half white, or quadroon, or octoroon, or some other combination. In
+the last census (1900) the government gave up the attempt in
+discouragement of trying to enumerate the mulattoes at all, and counted
+all persons as Negroes who were so classed in the communities where they
+resided. The census of 1870 showed that one-eighth (roughly) of the Negro
+population was mulatto, that of 1890 showed that the proportion had
+increased to more than one-seventh. But these statistics are confessedly
+inaccurate: the census report itself says:</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;These figures are of little value. Indeed, as an indication of the extent
+to which the races have mingled, they are misleading.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>From my own observation, and from talking and corresponding with many men
+who have had superior opportunities for investigation, I think it safe to
+say that between one-fourth and one-third of the Negroes in this country
+at the present time have a <i>visible</i> admixture of white blood. At least
+the proportion is greater than the census figures of 1870 and 1890 would
+indicate. It is probable that 3,000,000 persons out of the 10,000,000
+population are visibly mulattoes. It will be seen, then, how very
+important a matter it is, in any careful survey of the race problem, to
+consider the influence of the mixed blood. In the North, indeed, the race
+problem may almost be called a mulatto problem rather than a Negro
+problem, for in not a few places the mixed bloods are in excess of the darker types.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_154" id="Page_154">[Pg 154]</a></span>Many mulattoes have a mixed ancestry reaching back to the beginning of
+civilisation in North America; for the Negro slave appeared practically as
+soon as the white colonist. Many Negroes mixed (and are still mixing in
+Oklahoma) with the Indians, and one is to-day often astonished to see
+distinct Indian types among them. I shall never forget a woman I saw in
+Georgia&mdash;as perfect of line as any Greek statue&mdash;erect, lithe, strong,
+with sleek straight hair, the high cheekbones of the Indian, but the lips
+of the Negro. She was plainly an Indian type&mdash;but had no memory of
+anything but Negro ancestry. A strain of Arab blood from Africa runs in
+the veins of many Negroes, in others flows the blood of the Portuguese
+slave-traders or of the early Spanish adventurers or of the French who
+settled in New Orleans, to say nothing of every sort of American white
+blood. In my classification I have estimated 3,000,000 persons who are
+&#8220;visibly&#8221; mulattoes: the actual number who have some strain of
+blood&mdash;Arab, Portuguese, Spanish, French, Indian&mdash;other than Negro, must
+be considerably larger.</p>
+
+<p>It is a curious problem, this of colour. Several times, in different parts
+of the country, I have been told by both white and coloured observers that
+Negroes, even without the admixture of white blood, were gradually growing
+lighter&mdash;the effect of a cold climate, clothing and other causes. A
+tendency toward such a change, an adaptation to new environment, is
+certainly in accord with the best scientific beliefs, but whether a mere
+century or two in America has really operated to whiten the blackness of
+thousands of years of jungle life, must be left for the careful scientist
+to decide. It is certain that the darkest American Negro is far superior
+to the native African Negro.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><i>Story of a Real African Woman</i></p>
+
+<p>At Montgomery, Ala., Mr. Craik took me to see a real African woman, one of
+the very few left who were captured in Africa and brought to this country
+as slaves. She came in the <i>Wanderer</i>, long after the slave trade was
+forbidden by law, and was secretly landed at Mobile about 1858. She is a
+stocky, vigorous old woman. She speaks very little English, and I could
+not understand even that little. She asserts, I am told,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_155" id="Page_155">[Pg 155]</a></span> that she is the
+daughter of a king in Africa, and she tells yet of the hardships and
+alarms of the ocean voyage. Her daughter is married to a
+respectable-looking Negro farmer. Mr. Craik succeeded, in spite of her
+superstitious terrors, in getting her to submit to having a picture taken.</p>
+
+<p>And yet all these strange-blooded people are classed roughly together as
+Negroes. I remember sitting once on the platform at a great meeting at the
+People&#8217;s Tabernacle in Atlanta. An audience of some 1,200 coloured people
+was present. A prominent white man gave a brief address in which he urged
+the Negroes present to accept with humility the limitations imposed upon
+them by their heredity, that they were Negroes and that therefore they
+should accept with grace the place of inferiority. Now as I looked out
+over that audience, which included the best class of coloured people in
+Atlanta, I could not help asking myself:</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;What is this blood he is appealing to, anyway?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>For I saw comparatively few men and women who could really be called
+Negroes at all. Some were so light as to be indistinguishable from
+Caucasians. A bishop of the African Methodist Episcopal Church who sat
+near me on the platform was a nephew of Robert Toombs, one of the great
+men of the South, a leader of the Confederacy. Another man present was a
+grandson of a famous senator of South Carolina. Several others that I knew
+of were half-brothers or sisters or cousins of more or less well-known
+white men. And I could not hear this appeal to heredity without thinking
+of the not at all humble Southern blood which flowed in the veins of some
+of these men and women. How futile such advice really was, and how little
+it got into the hearts of the audience, was forcibly impressed on me
+afterward by the remark of a mulatto I met.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;They&#8217;ve given us their blood, whether we wanted it or not,&#8221; he said, &#8220;and
+now they ask us not to respond to the same ambitions and hopes that they
+have. They have given us fighting blood and expect us not to struggle.&#8221;</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><i>Attitude of the Mixed Blood Toward the Black Negroes</i></p>
+
+<p>In the cities of the South no inconsiderable communities of mulattoes have
+long existed, many of them highly prosperous.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_156" id="Page_156">[Pg 156]</a></span> Even before the war
+thousands of &#8220;free persons of colour&#8221; resided in Charleston, Richmond, and
+New Orleans. In places like Charleston they had (and still have to some
+extent) an exclusive society of their own which looked down on the black
+Negro with a prejudice equal to that of the white man. The census of 1860
+shows a population of 3,441 &#8220;free persons of colour&#8221; in Charleston alone,
+of whom 2,554 were mulattoes. In New Orleans in the same year lived 9,084
+free Negroes, of whom 7,357 were mulattoes; and they were so far distant
+in sympathy from the slave population that they even tendered their
+support to the Confederacy at the beginning of the war.</p>
+
+<p>But with the Emancipation Proclamation the aristocratic &#8220;free person of
+colour&#8221; who had formed a sort of third class as between the white above
+and the black below, lost his unique position: the line was drawn against
+him. When I went South I expected to find a good deal of aloofness between
+the mulatto and the black man. It does exist, but really less to-day in
+the South than in Boston! The very first mulatto, a preacher in Atlanta,
+with whom I raised the question, surprised me by denying that the mulatto
+was in any degree potentially superior to the real Negro: that if the
+black man were given the same advantages and environment as the mulatto,
+he would do as well, that the prominence of the mulatto is the result of
+the superior advantages he has long enjoyed, being the house servant in
+slavery times, with opportunities for education and discipline that the
+black man never possessed. This was his argument, and to support it he
+gave me a long list of black Negroes who had achieved success or
+leadership. I found Booker T. Washington and Professor Du Bois (themselves
+both mulattoes) arguing along the same lines. In other words, the
+prejudice of white people has forced all coloured people, light or dark,
+together, and has awakened in many ostracised men and women who are nearly
+white a spirit which expresses itself in the passionate defence of
+everything that is Negro.</p>
+
+<p>And yet, with what pathos! What is this race? The spirit and the ideals
+are not Negro: for the people are not Negro, even the darkest of them, in
+the sense that the inhabitants of the jungles of Africa are Negroes. The
+blackest<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_157" id="Page_157">[Pg 157]</a></span> of black American Negroes is far ahead of his naked cousin in
+Africa. But neither are they white!</p>
+
+<p>One evening last summer I attended a performance at Philadelphia of a
+Negro play called the &#8220;Shoo-Fly Regiment.&#8221; It was written, both words and
+music, by two clever mulattoes, Cole and Johnson; and it was wholly
+presented by Negroes. The audience was large, mostly composed of coloured
+people, and the laughter was unstinted. The point that impressed me was
+this, that the writers had chosen a distinct Negro subject. The play dealt
+with two questions of much interest among coloured people: the matter of
+industrial education, and the Negro soldier. That, it seemed to me, was
+significant: it was an effort to appeal to the class consciousness of the
+Negro.</p>
+
+<p>And yet as I sat and watched the play I could not help being impressed
+with the essential tragedy of the so-called Negro people. The players of
+the company were of every colour, from the black African type to the
+mulatto with fair hair and blue eyes. In spite of this valiant effort to
+emphasise certain racial interests, one who saw the play could not help
+asking:</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;What, after all, is this Negro race? What is the Negro spirit? Is it in
+this black African or in this white American with the drop of dark blood?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>In a recent address a coloured minister of San Francisco, J. Hugh Kelley,
+said:</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;My father&#8217;s father was a Black Hawk Indian, seven feet tall. My father&#8217;s
+mother was an Irishwoman. My mother&#8217;s father was an American white man.
+Her mother was a full-blooded African woman. What am I?&#8221;</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><i>Pathetic Desire of Negroes to Be Like White Men</i></p>
+
+<p>Even among those Negroes who are most emphatic in defence of the race
+there is, deep down, the pathetic desire to be like the dominant white
+man. It is not unreasonable, nor unnatural, for all outward opportunity of
+development lies open to the white man. To be coloured is to be
+handicapped in the race for those things in life which men call desirable.
+I remember discussing the race question one evening with a group of
+intelligent coloured men. They had made a strong case for the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_158" id="Page_158">[Pg 158]</a></span> Negro
+spirit, and the need of the race to stand for itself, but one of them said
+in a passing remark (what the investigator overhears is often of greater
+significance than what he hears), speaking of a mulatto friend of his:</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;His hair is <i>better</i> than mine.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>He meant <i>straighter</i>, more like that of the white man.</p>
+
+<p>The same evening, another Negro, referring to a light-complexioned
+coloured man, said:</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Thank God, he is passing now for white.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>At Philadelphia a dark Negro made this comment on one of the coloured
+churches where mulattoes are in the ascendancy:</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;You can&#8217;t have a good time when you go there unless you have straight
+hair.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>This remark indicated not only the ideal held by the speaker, but showed
+the line drawn by the light-coloured man against his darker brother.</p>
+
+<p>In the same way it is almost a universal desire of Negroes to &#8220;marry
+whiter;&#8221; that is, a dark man will, if possible, marry a mulatto woman, the
+lighter the better. The ideal is whiteness: for whiteness stands for
+opportunity, power, progress.</p>
+
+<p>Give a coloured man or woman white blood, educate him until he has
+glimpses of the greater possibilities of life and then lock him forever
+within the bars of colour, and you have all the elements of tragedy. Dr.
+DuBois in his remarkable book, &#8220;The Souls of Black Folk,&#8221; has expressed
+more vividly than any other writer the essential significance of this
+tragedy. I read the book before I went South and I thought it certainly
+overdrawn, the expression of a highly cultivated and exceptional Mulatto,
+but after meeting many Negroes I have been surprised to find how truly it
+voices a wide experience.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><i>Experience of a Highly Educated Mulatto</i></p>
+
+<p>DuBois tells in this book how he first came to realise that he was really
+a Negro. He was a boy in school near his home in Massachusetts.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Something,&#8221; he writes, &#8220;put it into the boys&#8217; and girls&#8217; heads to buy
+gorgeous visiting cards&mdash;ten cents a package&mdash;and exchange. The exchange
+was merry, till one girl, a tall<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_159" id="Page_159">[Pg 159]</a></span> newcomer, refused my card&mdash;refused it
+peremptorily, with a glance. Then it dawned upon me with a certain
+suddenness that I was different from the others; or like, mayhap, in heart
+and life and longing, but shut out from their world by a vast veil. I had
+thereafter no desire to tear down that veil, to creep through; I held all
+beyond it in common contempt, and lived above it in a region of blue sky
+and great wandering shadows. That sky was bluest when I could beat my
+mates at examination time, or beat them at a foot-race, or even beat their
+stringy heads. Alas, with the years all this fine contempt began to fade;
+for the worlds I longed for, and all their dazzling opportunities, were
+theirs not mine.... With other black boys the strife was not so fiercely
+sunny; their youth shrunk into tasteless sycophancy or into silent hatred
+of the pale world about them and mocking distrust of everything white; or
+wasted itself in a bitter cry, Why did God make me an outcast and a
+stranger in mine own house? The shades of the prison-house closed round
+about us all: walls strait and stubborn to the whitest, but relentlessly
+narrow, tall and unscalable to sons of night who must plod darkly on in
+resignation, or beat unavailing palms against the stone, or steadily,
+half-hopelessly, watch the streak of blue above.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>If space permitted I could tell many stories illustrative of the daily
+tragedy which many mulattoes are meeting in this country, struggles that
+are none the less tragic for being inarticulate. Here is a letter which I
+received not long ago from a mulatto professor in a Western Negro college:</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I wonder how you will treat that point to which you have thus far only
+referred in your studies, &#8216;Where does the colour line really begin?&#8217; What
+is to become of that large class of which I am a part, that class which is
+neither white nor black and yet both? There are millions of us who have
+the blood of both races, and, if heredity means anything, who have the
+traditions, feelings, and passions of both. Yet we are black in name, in
+law, in station, in everything save face and figure, despite the
+overwhelming white blood. And why? Certainly not because we have to be.
+America is a big country: it is easy to get lost, even in a neighbouring
+state. Some of us do, and the process has been going on so long in certain
+large cities of the North until we cease to think about it. But the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_160" id="Page_160">[Pg 160]</a></span>
+majority of us stay and live and work out our destiny among the people
+into whom we were born, living ofttimes side by side with our white
+brothers and sisters. When I go back to Atlanta after an absence of two
+years, I can, if I wish, go back in a Pullman, go out of the main entrance
+of the station, get my dinner at the Piedmont Hotel, and when I am tired
+of being Mr. Hyde, I can stroll down Auburn Avenue with my friends in the
+full glory of Dr. Jekyll. As a matter of fact I shall doubtless avail
+myself of the privilege of a sleeper, sneak out the side entrance, get on
+the last seat of the car, despite the conductor&#8217;s remonstrance, go on to
+my friends at once and be myself all the time I am there. I wouldn&#8217;t be a
+white man if I had to. I want to be black. I want to love those who love
+me. I want to help those who need my help. And I know hundreds just like
+me: I know others who are not.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I wonder if you can decide: &#8216;Where does the colour line really&mdash;end?&#8217;&#8221;</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><i>A Negro Who Lived First as a White Man, Then as a Negro</i></p>
+
+<p>When I was in Philadelphia I met an intelligent Negro named A. L. Manley,
+who is at present the janitor of a large apartment house. He has been
+connected with the good-government movement in Philadelphia, being the
+leader of a club of coloured men who have supported the reform party. When
+I first met him I should not have known him for a Negro, he is so white.
+His white grandfather was a famous governor of North Carolina&mdash;Charles
+Manley. He was educated at Wilmington, N. C., and at Hampton Institute.
+For a time he published a Negro newspaper at Wilmington, but during the
+race riot in that city a number of years ago he was driven out and his
+property was destroyed, his office being burned to the ground. After a
+year or two in Washington he came to Philadelphia, where he endeavoured to
+get work at his trade as a painter and decorator, but the moment he
+informed employers that he was a coloured man they refused to hire
+him&mdash;usually excusing themselves on the ground that union labour would
+refuse to work with him.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;So I tried being white,&#8221; he said: &#8220;that is, I did not reveal the fact
+that I had coloured blood, and I immediately got work<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_161" id="Page_161">[Pg 161]</a></span> in some of the best
+shops in Philadelphia. I joined the union and had no trouble at all.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>But during all this time he had to live, as he says, &#8220;the life of a
+sneak.&#8221; He had to sneak out of his home in the morning and return to it
+only after nightfall, lest someone discover that his family (he has a wife
+and two children) was coloured.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;The thing finally became unbearable,&#8221; he said; &#8220;no decent man could stand
+it. I preferred to be a Negro and hold up my head rather than to be a sneak.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>So he dropped his trade and became a janitor. In other words, he stepped
+back, as so many Negroes in the North are forced to do, into a form of
+domestic service, although in his case the position is one of
+responsibility and good pay.</p>
+
+<p>Such stories of the problem of the mulatto are innumerable; and yet I do
+not wish to imply that the life is all shadow, for it isn&#8217;t. The Negro
+blood, wherever it is, supplies an element of light-heartedness which will
+not be wholly crushed. It is this element, indeed, that accounts in no
+small degree for the survival of the Negro in this country. Where the
+Indian perished for want of adaptability, the Negro has survived by sheer
+elasticity of temperament: it is perhaps the highest natural gift of the
+Negro race. One hears much of the unfavourable traits of the Negro, but
+certainly, judging from any point of view, the power of adaptability
+displayed by the Negro in a wholly foreign environment, under the harshest
+conditions, and his ability to thrive and increase in numbers, even
+meeting the competition of the dominant race, and to keep on laughing at
+his work, is a power which in any race would be regarded as notable.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><i>Why Some Light Mulattoes do not &#8220;Cross over to White&#8221;</i></p>
+
+<p>I once asked a very light mulatto why he did not &#8220;cross the line,&#8221; as they
+call it (or &#8220;go over to white&#8221;) and quit his people. His answer surprised
+me; it was so distinctly an unexpected point of view.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Why,&#8221; he said, &#8220;white people don&#8217;t begin to have the good times that
+Negroes do. They&#8217;re stiff and cold. They aren&#8217;t sociable. They don&#8217;t
+laugh.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Here certainly was a criticism of the white man! And it was corroborated
+by a curious story I heard at Memphis, of a<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_162" id="Page_162">[Pg 162]</a></span> mulatto well known among the
+coloured people of Tennessee. A number of years ago it came to him
+suddenly one day that he was white enough to pass anywhere for white, and
+he acted instantly on the inspiration. He went to Memphis and bought a
+first-class ticket on a Mississippi River boat to Cincinnati. No one
+suspected that he was coloured; he sat at the table with white people and
+even occupied a state-room with a white man. At first he said he could
+hardly restrain his exultation, but after a time, although he said he
+talked and smoked with the white men, he began to be lonesome.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;It grew colder and colder,&#8221; he said.</p>
+
+<p>In the evening he sat on the upper deck and as he looked over the railing
+he could see, down below, the Negro passengers and deck hands talking and
+laughing. After a time, when it grew darker, they began to sing&mdash;the
+inimitable Negro songs.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;That finished me,&#8221; he said, &#8220;I got up and went downstairs and took my
+place among them. I&#8217;ve been a Negro ever since.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>An ordinary community of middle or working class white people is often
+singularly barren of any social or intellectual interest: it is often
+sombre, sodden, uninteresting. Not so the Negro community. In several
+cities I have tried to trace out the social life of various cliques,
+especially among the mulattoes, and I have been astonished to find how
+many societies there are, often with high-sounding names, how many church
+affairs must be attended to, how many suppers and picnics are constantly
+under way, how many clubs and secret societies are supported.</p>
+
+<p>Forced upon themselves, every point of contact with the white race becomes
+to the Negro a story of peculiar human interest. The view they get from
+the outside or underneath of white civilisation is not, to say the least,
+altogether our view. Once, in a gathering of mulattoes I heard the
+discussion turn to the stories of those who had &#8220;gone over to
+white&#8221;&mdash;friends or acquaintances of those who were present. Few such cases
+are known to white people, but the Negroes know many of them. It developed
+from this conversation (and afterward I got the same impression many
+times) that there is a sort of conspiracy of silence to protect the Negro
+who &#8220;crosses the line&#8221; and takes his place as a white man. Such cases even
+awaken glee among<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_163" id="Page_163">[Pg 163]</a></span> them, as though the Negro, thus, in some way, was
+getting even with the dominant white man.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><i>Stories of Negroes Who Have Crossed the Colour Line</i></p>
+
+<p>I don&#8217;t know how many times I have heard mulattoes speak of the French
+novelist Dumas as having Negro blood, and they also claim Robert Browning
+and Alexander Hamilton (how truly I do not know). But the cases which
+interest them most are those in this country; and there must be far more
+of them than white people imagine. I know of scores of them. A well-known
+white actress, whose name, of course, I cannot give, when she goes to
+Boston, secretly visits her coloured relatives. A New York man who holds a
+prominent political appointment under the state government and who has
+become an authority in his line, is a Negro. Not long ago he entered a
+hotel in Baltimore and the Negro porter who ran to take his bag said
+discreetly:</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Hello, Bob.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>As boys they had gone to the same Negro school.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Let me carry your bag,&#8221; said the porter, &#8220;I won&#8217;t give you away.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>In Philadelphia there lives a coloured woman who married a rich white man.
+Of course, no white people know she is coloured, but the Negroes do, and
+do not tell. Occasionally she drives down to a certain store, dismisses
+her carriage and walks on foot to the home of her mother and sisters.</p>
+
+<p>Only a few years ago the newspapers were filled for a day or two with the
+story of a girl who had been at Vassar College, and upon graduation by
+merest accident it was discovered that she was a Negro. A similar case
+arose last year at Chicago University, that of Miss Cecelia Johnson, who
+had been a leader in her class, a member of the Pi Delta Phi Sorority and
+president of Englewood House, an exclusive girls&#8217; club. She was the sister
+of a well-known Negro politician of Chicago.</p>
+
+<p>The Chicago <i>Tribune</i>, after publishing a story to the effect that Miss
+Johnson had kept her parentage secret apologised for the publicity in
+these words:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>The Tribune makes this reparation spontaneously and as a simple act of justice.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_164" id="Page_164">[Pg 164]</a></span>There is not the slightest mystery about Miss Johnson. Her life has
+been an open book. She has won distinction at high school, and
+university, and her career appears to have been free from any blemish
+that should lessen the love of her intimate friends or the respect in
+which she is held by her acquaintances.</p></div>
+
+<p>Some mulattoes I know of, one a prominent Wall Street broker, have
+&#8220;crossed the line&#8221; by declaring that they are Mexicans, Brazilians,
+Spanish or French; one says he is an Armenian. Under a foreign name they
+are readily accepted among white people where, as Negroes, they would be
+instantly rejected. No one, of course, can estimate the number of men and
+women with Negro blood who have thus &#8220;gone over to white&#8221;; but it must be
+large.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><i>Does Race Amalgamation Still Continue?</i></p>
+
+<p>One of the first questions that always arises concerning the mulatto is
+whether or not the mixture of blood still continues and whether it is
+increasing or decreasing. In other words, is the amalgamation of the races
+still going on and to what extent?</p>
+
+<p>Intermarriage between the races is forbidden by law in all the Southern
+states and also in the following Northern and Western states: Arizona,
+California, Colorado, Delaware, Idaho, Indiana, Missouri, Nebraska,
+Nevada, Oklahoma, Oregon, and Utah. In all other Northern and Western
+states marriage between the races is lawful.</p>
+
+<p>And yet, the marriage laws, so far as they affect the actual problem of
+amalgamation, mean next to nothing at all. No legal marriage existed
+between the races in slavery times and yet there was a widespread mixture
+of blood. Concubinage was a common practice: a mulatto was worth more in
+cash than a black man. The great body of mulattoes now in the country
+trace their origin to such relationships.</p>
+
+<p>And such practice of slavery days no more ceased instantly with a paper
+Emancipation Proclamation than many other customs and habits which had
+grown up out of centuries of slave relationships. It is a slow process,
+working out of slavery, both for white men and black.</p>
+
+<p>I made inquiries widely in every part of the South among both white and
+coloured people and I found a strong and rapidly <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_165" id="Page_165">[Pg 165]</a></span>growing sentiment
+against what the South calls &#8220;miscegenation.&#8221; For years white men in many
+communities, often prominent judges, governors, wealthy planters, made
+little or no secret of the fact that they had a Negro family as well as a
+white family.</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<table width="50%" border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="5" summary="table">
+<tr><td colspan="3"><img src="images/gs15.jpg" alt="" /></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="center"><small>A TYPE OF NEGRO GIRL</small></td>
+    <td align="center"><small>MULATTO GIRL STUDENT</small></td>
+    <td align="center"><small>MISS CECELIA JOHNSON</small></td></tr>
+<tr><td><small>Typesetter in Atlanta. Many Negro girls are entering stenography, bookkeeping, dressmaking, millinery and other occupations.</small></td>
+    <td><small>At Clark University, Atlanta. At the completion of her studies this young woman will take up missionary work in Africa.</small></td>
+    <td><small>A mulatto who could be easily taken for a white person. She was a leader in her class in Chicago University.</small></td></tr></table>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>And the practice is far from dead yet. Every Southern town knows of such
+cases, often many of them: and a large number of mulatto children to-day
+are the sons and daughters of Southern white men, often men of decided
+importance in their communities. In one town I visited I heard a white man
+expressing with great bitterness his feeling against the Negro race,
+arguing that the Negro must be kept down, else it would lead to the
+mongrelisation of the white race. The next morning as chance would have
+it, another white man with whom I was walking pointed out to me a neat
+cottage, the home of the Negro family of the white man who had talked with
+me on the previous evening. And I saw this man&#8217;s coloured children in the
+yard!</p>
+
+<p>The better class of Southern people know perfectly well of these
+conditions and are beginning to attack them boldly. At a meeting in the
+Court Street Methodist Church in Montgomery, Ala., in 1907, Dr. J. A.
+Rice, the pastor, made this statement, significant in its very
+fearlessness, of changing sentiment:</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I hesitate before I make another statement which is all too true. I
+hesitate, because I fear that in saying it I shall be charged with
+sensationalism. But even at the risk of such a charge I will say, for it
+must be said, that there are in the city of Montgomery, four hundred Negro
+women supported by white men.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The next morning this statement was reported in the Montgomery
+<i>Advertiser</i>.</p>
+
+<p>It may be said also, that these 400 cases in a city of 35,000 people do
+not represent a condition of mere vice. Many of the women are comfortably
+provided for and have families of children. Vice is wholly distinct from
+this system of concubinage; for there are in Montgomery thirty-two Negro
+dives operated for white patronage&mdash;also the statement of Dr. Rice, quoted
+in the Montgomery <i>Advertiser</i>.</p>
+
+<p>The proportion of such cases in some of the less progressive Southern
+towns even to-day, is almost appalling: and at the same time that speakers
+and writers are railing at the mulatto<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_166" id="Page_166">[Pg 166]</a></span> for his disturbing race leadership
+and his restless desire for political and other rights, and while they are
+declaiming against amalgamation and mongrelisation, the mulatto population
+is increasing. Striving to keep the Negro in his place as a Negro, the
+South is making him more and more a white man.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><i>Attempt to Stop Miscegenation</i></p>
+
+<p>Among Southern women, not unnaturally, the feeling aroused by these
+practices has been especially bitter. Here is a remarkable plea, published
+in the <i>Times-Democrat</i> on June 21, 1907, signed &#8220;A woman.&#8221;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Will you kindly publish the following without attaching my signature
+or divulging it in any way? I have several brothers who are
+old-maidish enough to have nervous prostration if they should see my
+name signed to such an unmaidenly, immodest letter, but I do my
+thinking without any assistance from them, and hope for the sake of
+peace in my family that they will not recognise me in print.</p>
+
+<p>I am a resident of a large town in the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta, where
+miscegenation is common&mdash;where, if a man isolates himself from
+feminine society, the first and only conclusion reached is, &#8220;he has a
+woman of his own&#8221; in saddle, of duskier shade. This conclusion is
+almost without exception true. If some daring woman, not afraid of
+being dubbed a Carrie Nation, were to canvass the delta counties of
+Mississippi taking the census, she would find so many cases of
+miscegenation, and their resultant mongrel families, that she would
+bow her head in shame for the &#8220;flower of Southern chivalry&#8221;&mdash;gone to
+seed.</p></div>
+
+<p>Awakened by a sense of the fearfulness of these conditions, such a strong
+paper as the New Orleans <i>Times-Democrat</i> has been conducting a campaign
+for laws which shall punish the white man who maintains illicit relations
+with Negroes. For years attempts have been made in the legislatures of
+several states (in part successfully) to enact such legislation, but the
+practice has been so firmly entrenched that many of the efforts have
+failed.</p>
+
+<p>On February 15, 1906, the <i>Times-Democrat</i> put the case in stronger
+language than I would dare to do:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>It is a public scandal that there should be no law of this kind
+(against miscegenation) on the statute book of Louisiana, and that it
+should be left to mobs to break up the miscegenatious couples. The
+failure to pass a law of this kind is attributed to white
+degenerates, men who denounce social equality yet practice it, men
+who are more dangerous to their own race than the most inflammatory
+Negro orator and social equality preacher, and who have succeeded by
+some sort of legislative trickery in pigeon-holing or killing the
+bills intended to protect Louisiana from a possible danger. Such men
+should be exposed before the people of the state in their true
+colours.</p></div>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_167" id="Page_167">[Pg 167]</a></span>It will thus be seen how deep-seated the difficulty is. And yet, as I have
+followed the editorial expression of many Southern newspapers, I have been
+astonished to see how people are beginning to talk out. Here is an
+editorial from the <i>Star</i> of Monroe, La.:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p class="center">DESTRUCTIVE CRIME OF MISCEGENATION</p>
+
+<p>There can be no greater wrong done the people of any community than
+for public sentiment to permit and tolerate this growing and
+destructive crime of miscegenation, yet in many towns and cities of
+Louisiana, especially, there are to-day white men cohabiting with
+Negro women, who have sweet and lovable families. This is a crime
+that becomes almost unbearable, and should bring the blush of shame
+to every man&#8217;s cheek who dares to flaunt his debased and degrading
+conceptions of morality in the eyes of self-respecting men and women.</p></div>
+
+<p>In January, 1907, District Attorney J. H. Currie, in Judge Cochran&#8217;s court
+at Meridian, Miss., addressed a jury on what he called &#8220;the curse of
+miscegenation.&#8221; In the course of his speech he said:</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;The accursed shadow of miscegenation hangs over the South to-day like a
+pall of hell. We talk much of the Negro question and all of its possible
+ramifications and consequences, but, gentlemen, the trouble is not far
+afield. Our own people, our white men with their black concubines, are
+destroying the integrity of the Negro race, raising up a menace to the
+white race, lowering the standard of both races and preparing the way for
+riot, mob, criminal assaults, and, finally, a death struggle for racial
+supremacy. The trouble is at our own door. We have tolerated this crime
+long enough, and if our country is not run by policy rather than by law,
+then it is time to rise up and denounce this sin of the earth.&#8221;</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><i>Anti-Miscegenation League is Formed</i></p>
+
+<p>Strong men and women, indeed, in several states have begun to organise
+against the evil. At Francisville, La., in May (1907), a meeting was
+called to organise against what one of the speakers, Mr. Wickliffe, called
+the &#8220;yellow peril&#8221; of the South. He said that &#8220;every man familiar with
+conditions in our midst knows that the enormous increase in persons of
+mixed blood is due to men of the white race openly keeping<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_168" id="Page_168">[Pg 168]</a></span> Negro women as
+concubines.&#8221; Out of this meeting grew an organisation to help stamp out
+the evil. About the same time, a mass meeting was held in Vicksburg,
+Miss., and an Anti-Miscegenation League was formed.</p>
+
+<p>The hatred and fear of such relationships have grown most rapidly, of
+course, among the better classes of white people. The class of white men
+who consort with Negro women at the present time is of a much lower sort
+than it was five or ten years ago, or than it was in slavery times.</p>
+
+<p>And the Negroes on their part are also awakening to the seriousness of
+this problem. I found in several Negro communities women&#8217;s clubs and other
+organisations which are trying, feebly enough, but significantly trying,
+to stem the evil from their side. It is a terrible slough to get out of.
+Negro women, and especially the more comely and intelligent of them, are
+surrounded by temptations difficult indeed to meet. It has been and is a
+struggle in Negro communities, especially village communities, to get a
+moral standard established which will make such relationships with white
+men unpopular. In some places to-day, the Negro concubines of white men
+are received in the Negro churches and among the Negroes generally, and
+honoured rather than ostracised. They are often among the most intelligent
+of the Negro women, they often have the best homes and the most money to
+contribute to their churches. They are proud of their light-coloured
+children. And yet, as the Negroes begin to be educated, they develop an
+intense hatred of these conditions: and the utter withdrawal of the best
+sort of Negro families from any white associations is due in part to the
+dread of such temptations. I shall never forget the bitterness in the
+reply of a coloured blacksmith who had a number of good-looking girls. I
+said to him jokingly:</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I suppose you are going to send them to college.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Why should I?&#8221; he asked. &#8220;What good will it do? Educate them to live with
+some white man!&#8221;</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><i>The Tragedy of the Negro Girl</i></p>
+
+<p>A friend of mine, Southern by birth, told me a story of an experience he
+had at Nashville, where he went to deliver an<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_169" id="Page_169">[Pg 169]</a></span> address at Fisk University,
+a Negro college. On his way home in the dark, he chanced to walk close
+behind two mulatto girls who had been at the lecture. They were discussing
+it. One of them said:</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Well, it&#8217;s no use. There is no chance down here for a yellow girl. It&#8217;s
+either get away from the South&mdash;or the usual thing.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>In that remark lay a world of bitter knowledge of conditions.</p>
+
+<p>It is remarkable, indeed, that the Negroes should have begun to develop
+moral standards as rapidly as they have. For in the South few people
+<i>expect</i> the coloured girl to be moral: everything is against her
+morality. In the first place, the home life of the great mass of Negroes
+is still primitive. They are crowded together in one or two rooms, they
+get no ideas of privacy, or of decency. The girls are the prey not only of
+white men but of men of their own race. The highest ideal before their
+eyes in many cases is the finely dressed, prosperous concubine of a white
+man. Moreover, in nearly all Southern towns, houses of prostitution are
+relegated to the Negro quarter. At Montgomery, Ala., I saw such places in
+respectable Negro neighbourhoods, against which the Negro people had
+repeatedly and bitterly objected to the city authorities, to no purpose.
+The example of such places of vice on Negro children is exactly what it
+would be on white children. In the same way, although it seems
+unbelievable, Negro schools in several cities have been built in vice
+districts. I saw a fine new brick school for coloured children at
+Louisville placed in one of the very nastiest streets of the city. The
+same conditions surround at least one coloured school which I saw at New
+Orleans.</p>
+
+<p>And yet the South, permitting such training in vice, wonders at Negro
+immorality and is convulsed over the crime of rape. Demanding that the
+Negro be self-restrained, white men set the example in every way from
+concubinage down, of immorality and lack of restraint. They sow the
+whirlwind and look for no crop!</p>
+
+<p>When the coloured girl grows up, she goes to service in a white family,
+where she either sleeps in an outbuilding (the survival of the old system
+of Negro &#8220;quarters&#8221;) or goes home at night. In either event the mistress
+rarely pays the slightest attention to her conduct in this particular. I
+talked with a<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_170" id="Page_170">[Pg 170]</a></span> woman, a fine type of the old gentlefolk, who expressed
+with frankness a common conviction in the South.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;We don&#8217;t consider,&#8221; she said, &#8220;that the Negroes have any morals. Up North
+where I was visiting this summer I was amazed to find women with coloured
+servants looking after them, trying to keep them in at night and prevent
+mischief. We never do that; we know it isn&#8217;t any use.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>It may be imagined how difficult it is in such an atmosphere for Negroes
+to build up moral standards, or to live decently. If there ever was a
+human tragedy in this world it is the tragedy of the Negro girl.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><i>Relations Between White Men and Negro Women</i></p>
+
+<p>Illicit relationships between the races have not gone on without causing
+many a troubled conscience. Nor has a difference in colour always deadened
+the deeper feelings of the human heart. In spite of laws and colour lines,
+human nature, wherever found, is profoundly alike. In making my inquiries
+among coloured colleges I found to my astonishment that in nearly all of
+them mulatto boys and girls are being educated, and well educated, by
+their white fathers. A number of them are at Atlanta University, Tuskegee,
+Hampton, Fisk&mdash;indeed, at all of the colleges. And Wilberforce College,
+next after Lincoln University of Chester County, Pa., the oldest Negro
+institution of learning in the country, founded in 1856, was largely
+supported in slavery times by Southern white men who felt a moral
+obligation to educate their coloured sons and daughters. Large farms
+around Wilberforce (near Xenia) which I have visited were originally
+bought by Southern slave-owners for their mulatto children, where they
+could get away from the South and grow up in a free state. Some of these
+mulatto children, educated in Latin and Greek, with too much money and
+little to do, went straight to the devil, while others conserved their
+property, and it is to-day in the hands of their descendants.</p>
+
+<p>Thus the relations between white men and Negro women even to-day, though
+marriage is forbidden by law, are sometimes remarkable in their expression
+of the deepest emotions of the human heart. I shall never forget the story
+of one such<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_171" id="Page_171">[Pg 171]</a></span> case among many that I heard in the South. I withhold the
+names in this case although the story is widely known among the people in
+that part of Alabama. At &mdash;&mdash; lives a planter of prominence who was
+formerly on the staff of the governor of the state. He had no white
+family, but everyone knew that he lived with a mulatto woman and was
+raising a coloured family. When the boys and girls were old enough, he
+sent them to Atlanta University, to Tuskegee, and to Spellman Seminary,
+providing them plentifully with money. He also paid for his wife&#8217;s
+sister&#8217;s schooling.</p>
+
+<p>A year or so ago his mulatto &#8220;wife&#8221; died; and he was heart-broken. He sent
+for his boys to come from college and let it be known that he would have
+something to say at the funeral. Many white and coloured people,
+therefore, attended and followed the body of the Negro woman to the
+cemetery. At the grave, General &mdash;&mdash; stepped forward and raised his hand.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I have just one word to say here to-day. These children who are here have
+always gone by their mother&#8217;s name. I want to acknowledge them now in
+front of all these people as my children; and henceforth they will bear my
+name. I wish also to say that this woman who lies here was my wife, not by
+law, but in the sight of God. I here acknowledge her. This is a duty I
+have to do not only to this woman but to God. When I leave my property I
+shall leave it to those children, and shall see that they get it.&#8221;</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><i>Intermarriage of the Races in the North</i></p>
+
+<p>So much for Southern conditions. How is it in the North where
+intermarriage is not forbidden by law?</p>
+
+<p>In 1903, during a heated political campaign in Mississippi, United States
+Senator Money repeatedly made the assertion that in Massachusetts in the
+previous year, because there were no laws to separate the Negro and
+prevent intermarriage, 2,000 white women had married Negro men. I heard
+echoes of Senator Money&#8217;s statistics in several places in the South.</p>
+
+<p>I have made a careful investigation of the facts in several northern
+cities, and I have been surprised to discover how little intermarriage
+there really is.</p>
+
+<p>If intermarriage in the North were increasing largely, Boston,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_172" id="Page_172">[Pg 172]</a></span> being the
+city where the least race prejudice exists and where the proportion of
+mulattoes is largest, would show it most plainly. As a matter of fact, in
+the year 1902, when according to Senator Money, 2,000 white women married
+coloured men, there were in Boston, which contains the great bulk of the
+Negro population of Massachusetts, just twenty-nine inter-racial
+marriages.</p>
+
+<p>Although the Negro population of Boston has been steadily increasing, the
+number of marriages between the races, which remained about stationary
+from 1875 to 1890, has since 1900 been rapidly decreasing. Here are the
+exact figures as given by the registry department:</p>
+
+<p class="center">RACIAL INTERMARRIAGES IN BOSTON</p>
+
+<table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="5" summary="table">
+<tr><td>&nbsp;</td><td><span class="spacer">&nbsp;</span></td>
+    <td align="center">Groom<br />Coloured<br />Bride<br />White</td><td><span class="spacer">&nbsp;</span></td>
+    <td align="center">Groom<br />White<br />Bride<br />Coloured</td><td><span class="spacer">&nbsp;</span></td>
+    <td align="center">Total<br />Mixed<br />Marriages</td></tr>
+<tr><td>1900</td><td>&nbsp;</td>
+    <td align="center">32</td><td>&nbsp;</td>
+    <td align="center">3</td><td>&nbsp;</td>
+    <td align="center">35</td></tr>
+<tr><td>1901</td><td>&nbsp;</td>
+    <td align="center">30</td><td>&nbsp;</td>
+    <td align="center">1</td><td>&nbsp;</td>
+    <td align="center">31</td></tr>
+<tr><td>1902</td><td>&nbsp;</td>
+    <td align="center">25</td><td>&nbsp;</td>
+    <td align="center">4</td><td>&nbsp;</td>
+    <td align="center">29</td></tr>
+<tr><td>1903</td><td>&nbsp;</td>
+    <td align="center">27</td><td>&nbsp;</td>
+    <td align="center">2</td><td>&nbsp;</td>
+    <td align="center">29</td></tr>
+<tr><td>1904</td><td>&nbsp;</td>
+    <td align="center">27</td><td>&nbsp;</td>
+    <td align="center">1</td><td>&nbsp;</td>
+    <td align="center">28</td></tr>
+<tr><td>1905</td><td>&nbsp;</td>
+    <td align="center">17</td><td>&nbsp;</td>
+    <td align="center">2</td><td>&nbsp;</td>
+    <td align="center">19</td></tr></table>
+
+<p>At Boston and in other Northern towns I made inquiries in regard to the
+actual specific instances of intermarriage.</p>
+
+<p>There are two classes of cases, first, what may be called the
+intellectuals; highly educated mulattoes who marry educated white women. I
+have the history of a number of such intermarriages, but there is not
+space here to relate the really interesting life stories which have grown
+out of them. One of the best-known Negro professors in the country has a
+white wife. I saw the home where they live under almost ideal
+surroundings. A mulatto doctor of a Southern town married a white girl who
+was a graduate of Wellesley College; they had trouble in the South and
+have &#8220;gone over to white&#8221; and are now living in the North. They have two
+children. A Negro business man of Boston has a white wife; they celebrated
+recently the twenty-fifth anniversary of their marriage.</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<table width="50%" border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="5" summary="table">
+<tr><td colspan="2"><img src="images/gs16.jpg" alt="" /></td></tr>
+<tr><td colspan="2" align="right"><small>Photograph by Clinedinst</small></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="center">MRS. BOOKER T. WASHINGTON</td><td align="center">MRS. ROBERT H. TERRELL</td></tr></table>
+<p class="center">TWO OF THE LEADING WOMEN OF THE NEGRO RACE</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>But such cases as these are rare. In the great majority of intermarriages
+the white women belong to the lower walks of life. They are German, Irish,
+or other foreign women, respectable, but ignorant. As far as I can see
+from investigating a number of such cases, the home life is as happy as
+that of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_173" id="Page_173">[Pg 173]</a></span> other people in the same stratum of life. But the white woman
+who thus marries a Negro is speedily declassed: she is ostracised by the
+white people, and while she finds a certain place among the Negroes, she
+is not even readily accepted as a Negro. In short, she is cut off from
+both races. When I was at Xenia, O., I was told of a case of a white man
+who was arrested for living with a Negro woman. The magistrate compelled
+him to marry the Negro woman as the worst punishment he could invent!</p>
+
+<p>For this reason, although there are no laws in most Northern states
+against mixed marriages, and although the Negro population has been
+increasing, the number of intermarriages is not only not increasing, but
+in many cities, as in Boston, it is decreasing. It is an unpopular
+institution!</p>
+
+<p>No one phase of the race question has aroused more acrimonious discussion
+than that of the Mulatto, especially as to the comparative physical
+strength and intelligence of the black Negro and the mulatto, a subject
+which cannot be here entered into.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><i>Most Leaders of the Negro Race are Mulattoes</i></p>
+
+<p>This much I know from my own observation: most of the leading men of the
+race to-day in every line of activity are mulattoes. Both Booker T.
+Washington and Dr. DuBois are mulattoes. Frederick Douglass was a mulatto.
+The foremost literary men, Charles W. Chesnutt and William Stanley
+Braithwaite, are mulattoes; the foremost painter of the race, H. O.
+Tanner, whose pictures have been in the Luxembourg, and who has been an
+honour to American art, is a mulatto. Both Judge Terrell and his wife,
+Mary Church Terrell, who is a member of the School Board of Washington,
+are mulattoes. On the other hand, there are notable exceptions to the
+rule. W. T. Vernon, Register of the United States Treasury, and Professor
+Kelly Miller of Washington, D. C., one of the ablest men of his race, both
+have the appearance of being full-blooded Negroes. Paul Lawrence Dunbar,
+the poet, was an undoubted Negro; so was J. C. Price, a brilliant orator;
+so is M. C. B. Mason, secretary of the Southern Aid Society of the
+Methodist Church.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_174" id="Page_174">[Pg 174]</a></span>Full-blooded Negroes often make brilliant school and college records, even
+in comparison with white boys. It is the judgment of Hampton Institute,
+after years of careful observation, that there is no difference in ability
+between light and dark Negroes. I quote from the <i>Southern Workman</i>,
+published at Hampton:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>The question as to the comparative intelligence of light and dark
+Negroes is one that is not easily settled. After long years of
+observation Hampton&#8217;s records show that about an equal number of
+mulattoes and pure blacks have made advancement in their studies and
+at their work. While it is probable that the lighter students are
+possessed of a certain quickness which does not belong to the darker,
+there is a power of endurance among the blacks that does not belong
+to their lighter brethren.</p></div>
+
+<p>As to the comparative accomplishment of light and dark Negroes after
+leaving school, the evidence is so confusing that I would not dare to
+enter upon a generalisation: that question must be left to the great
+scientific sociologist who will devote a lifetime to this most interesting
+problem in human life.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr style="width: 50%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_175" id="Page_175">[Pg 175]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_IX" id="CHAPTER_IX"></a>CHAPTER IX</h2>
+<h3>LYNCHINGS, SOUTH AND NORTH</h3>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="dropcap"><span class="caps">Most</span> of the studies for this book were made in 1906, 1907, and 1908, but I
+investigated the subject of lynching, South and North, in the fall of
+1904. Since that time the feeling against mob-vengeance has been gaining
+strength throughout the country and the number of lynchings has been
+steadily decreasing. But the number is still appalling and many recent
+cases, especially in the black belt, have been accompanied by brutal
+excesses. My studies made four years ago are typical of present
+conditions; I have, indeed, confirmed them by a somewhat careful
+examination made last year (1907) of two or three recent cases.</p>
+
+<p>Lynch-law reached its height in the late eighties and early nineties. In
+the sixteen years from 1884 to 1900 the number of persons lynched in the
+United States was 2,516. Of these 2,080 were in the Southern states and
+436 in the North; 1,678 were Negroes and 801 were white men; 2,465 were
+men and 51 were women. I am here using the accepted (indeed the only)
+statistics&mdash;those collected by the Chicago <i>Tribune</i>. As showing the
+gradual growth of the sentiment against mob-law I can do no better than to
+give the record of lynchings for a number of successive years:</p>
+
+
+
+<table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="5" summary="table">
+<tr><td>1891</td><td><span class="spacer">&nbsp;</span></td><td align="right">192</td><td><span class="spacer">&nbsp;</span><span class="spacer">&nbsp;</span></td>
+    <td>1900</td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">116</td></tr>
+<tr><td>1892</td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">235</td><td>&nbsp;</td>
+    <td>1901</td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">135</td></tr>
+<tr><td>1893</td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">200</td><td>&nbsp;</td>
+    <td>1902</td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">96</td></tr>
+<tr><td>1894</td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">190</td><td>&nbsp;</td>
+    <td>1903</td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">104</td></tr>
+<tr><td>1895</td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">171</td><td>&nbsp;</td>
+    <td>1904</td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">87</td></tr>
+<tr><td>1896</td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">131</td><td>&nbsp;</td>
+    <td>1905</td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">66</td></tr>
+<tr><td>1897</td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">166</td><td>&nbsp;</td>
+    <td>1906</td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">73</td></tr>
+<tr><td>1898</td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">127</td><td>&nbsp;</td>
+    <td>1907</td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">56</td></tr>
+<tr><td>1899</td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">107</td></tr></table>
+
+<p>Before I take up the account of specific cases an analysis of the
+lynchings for the years 1906 and 1907 will help to show in what states mob
+rule is most often invoked and for what<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_176" id="Page_176">[Pg 176]</a></span> offences lynchings are most
+common. Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana and Georgia&mdash;the black belt
+states&mdash;are thus seen to have the worst records, and the figures here
+given do not include the men killed in the Atlanta riot which would add
+twelve to the Georgia record for 1906:</p>
+
+<p>Following is the comparative number of lynchings for the two years.</p>
+
+<table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="5" summary="table">
+<tr><td>State</td><td><span class="spacer">&nbsp;</span></td>
+    <td align="center">1907</td><td><span class="spacer">&nbsp;</span></td>
+    <td align="center">1906</td></tr>
+<tr><td>Alabama</td><td>&nbsp;</td>
+    <td align="center">13</td><td>&nbsp;</td>
+    <td align="center"><span style="margin-left: .5em;">5</span></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Arkansas</td><td>&nbsp;</td>
+    <td align="center"><span style="margin-left: .5em;">3</span></td><td>&nbsp;</td>
+    <td align="center"><span style="margin-left: .5em;">4</span></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Colorado</td><td>&nbsp;</td>
+    <td align="center">&mdash;</td><td>&nbsp;</td>
+    <td align="center"><span style="margin-left: .5em;">1</span></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Florida</td><td>&nbsp;</td>
+    <td align="center">&mdash;</td><td>&nbsp;</td>
+    <td align="center"><span style="margin-left: .5em;">6</span></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Georgia</td><td>&nbsp;</td>
+    <td align="center"><span style="margin-left: .5em;">6</span></td><td>&nbsp;</td>
+    <td align="center"><span style="margin-left: .5em;">9</span></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Indian Territory</td><td>&nbsp;</td>
+   <td align="center"><span style="margin-left: .5em;">2</span></td><td>&nbsp;</td>
+   <td align="center"><span style="margin-left: .5em;">1</span></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Iowa</td><td>&nbsp;</td>
+    <td align="center"><span style="margin-left: .5em;">1</span></td><td>&nbsp;</td>
+    <td align="center">&mdash;</td></tr>
+<tr><td>Kentucky</td><td>&nbsp;</td>
+    <td align="center"><span style="margin-left: .5em;">1</span></td><td>&nbsp;</td>
+    <td align="center"><span style="margin-left: .5em;">3</span></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Louisiana</td><td>&nbsp;</td>
+    <td align="center"><span style="margin-left: .5em;">8</span></td><td>&nbsp;</td>
+    <td align="center"><span style="margin-left: .5em;">9</span></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Maryland</td><td>&nbsp;</td>
+    <td align="center"><span style="margin-left: .5em;">2</span></td><td>&nbsp;</td>
+    <td align="center"><span style="margin-left: .5em;">1</span></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Mississippi</td><td>&nbsp;</td>
+    <td align="center">12</td><td>&nbsp;</td>
+    <td align="center">13</td></tr>
+<tr><td>Missouri</td><td>&nbsp;</td>
+    <td align="center">&mdash;</td><td>&nbsp;</td>
+    <td align="center"><span style="margin-left: .5em;">3</span></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Nebraska</td><td>&nbsp;</td>
+    <td align="center"><span style="margin-left: .5em;">1</span></td><td>&nbsp;</td>
+    <td align="center">&mdash;</td></tr>
+<tr><td>North Carolina</td><td>&nbsp;</td>
+    <td align="center">&mdash;</td><td>&nbsp;</td>
+    <td align="center"><span style="margin-left: .5em;">5</span></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Oklahoma</td><td>&nbsp;</td>
+    <td align="center"><span style="margin-left: .5em;">2</span></td><td>&nbsp;</td>
+    <td align="center">&mdash;</td></tr>
+<tr><td>South Carolina</td><td>&nbsp;</td>
+    <td align="center"><span style="margin-left: .5em;">1</span></td><td>&nbsp;</td>
+    <td align="center"><span style="margin-left: .5em;">2</span></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Tennessee</td><td>&nbsp;</td>
+    <td align="center"><span style="margin-left: .5em;">1</span></td><td>&nbsp;</td>
+    <td align="center"><span style="margin-left: .5em;">5</span></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Texas</td><td>&nbsp;</td>
+   <td class="bb" align="center"><span style="margin-left: .5em;">3</span></td><td>&nbsp;</td>
+   <td class="bb" align="center"><span style="margin-left: .5em;">6</span></td></tr>
+<tr><td><span style="margin-left: 2em;">Totals</span></td><td>&nbsp;</td>
+    <td align="center">56</td><td>&nbsp;</td>
+    <td align="center">73</td></tr></table>
+
+<p>Of those lynched in 1907, 49 were Negro men, three Negro women and four
+white men. By methods:</p>
+
+<table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="5" summary="table">
+<tr><td>Hanging</td><td><span class="spacer">&nbsp;</span></td><td align="right">31</td></tr>
+<tr><td>Shot to death</td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">17</td></tr>
+<tr><td>Hanged and shot</td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">3</td></tr>
+<tr><td>Shot and burned</td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">2</td></tr>
+<tr><td>Beaten to death</td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">1</td></tr>
+<tr><td>Kicked to death</td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">1</td></tr></table>
+
+<p>The offences for which these men and woman were lynched range from
+stealing seventy-five cents and talking with white girls over the
+telephone, to rape and murder. Here is the list:</p>
+
+<table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="5" summary="table">
+<tr><td>For being father of boy who jostled white women</td><td><span class="spacer">&nbsp;</span></td><td align="right">1</td></tr>
+<tr><td>For being victor over white man in fight</td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">1</td></tr>
+<tr><td>Attempted murder</td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">5</td></tr>
+<tr><td>Murder of wife</td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">1</td></tr>
+<tr><td>Murder of husband and wife</td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">1</td></tr>
+<tr><td>Murder of wife and stepson</td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">1</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_177" id="Page_177">[Pg 177]</a></span>Murder of mistress</td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">1</td></tr>
+<tr><td>Manslaughter</td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">10</td></tr>
+<tr><td>Accessory to murder</td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">1</td></tr>
+<tr><td>Rape</td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">8</td></tr>
+<tr><td>Attempted rape</td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">11</td></tr>
+<tr><td>Raping own stepdaughter</td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">1</td></tr>
+<tr><td>For being wife and son of a raper</td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">2</td></tr>
+<tr><td>Protecting fugitive from posse</td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">1</td></tr>
+<tr><td>Talking to white girls over telephone</td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">1</td></tr>
+<tr><td>Expressing sympathy for mob&#8217;s victim</td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">3</td></tr>
+<tr><td>Three-dollar debt</td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">2</td></tr>
+<tr><td>Stealing seventy-five cents</td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">1</td></tr>
+<tr><td>Insulting white man</td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">1</td></tr>
+<tr><td>Store burglary</td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">3</td></tr></table>
+
+<p>In making my study I visited four towns where lynchings had taken place,
+two in the South, Statesboro in Ga. and Huntsville in Ala.; and two in the
+North, Springfield, O., and Danville, Ill.</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center">I.&mdash;LYNCHING IN THE SOUTH</p>
+
+<p>Statesboro, Ga., where two Negroes were burned alive under the most
+shocking circumstances, on August 16, 1904, is a thrifty county seat
+located about seventy miles from Savannah.</p>
+
+<p>For a hundred years a settlement has existed there, but it was not until
+the people discovered the wealth of the turpentine forests and of the
+sea-island cotton industry that the town became highly prosperous. Since
+1890 it has doubled in population every five years, having in 1904 some
+2,500 people. Most of the town is newly built. A fine, new court-house
+stands in the city square, and there are new churches, a large, new
+academy, a new water-works system and telephones, electric lights, rural
+free delivery&mdash;everywhere the signs of improvement and progress. It is
+distinctly a town of the New South, developed almost exclusively by the
+energy of Southerners and with Southern money. Its population is pure
+American, mostly of old Carolina, Georgia, and Virginia stock. Fully 70
+per cent. of the inhabitants are church members&mdash;Baptists, Presbyterians,
+and Methodists&mdash;and the town has not had a saloon in twenty-five years and
+rarely has a case of drunkenness. There are no beggars and practically no
+tramps. A poorhouse, built several years ago, had to be sold because no
+one would go to it. The farms are small, for the most part,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_178" id="Page_178">[Pg 178]</a></span> and owned by
+the farmers themselves; only 8 per cent. of them are mortgaged. There are
+schools for both white and coloured children, though the school year is
+short and education not compulsory.</p>
+
+<p>In short, this is a healthy, temperate, progressive American town&mdash;a
+country city, self-respecting, ambitious, with a good future before
+it&mdash;the future of the New South.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><i>Character of the Negro Population</i></p>
+
+<p>About 40 per cent. of the population of the county consists of Negroes.
+Here as elsewhere there are to be found two very distinct kinds of
+Negroes&mdash;as distinct as the classes of white men. The first of these is
+the self-respecting, resident Negro. Sometimes he is a land-owner, more
+often a renter; he is known to the white people, employed by them, and
+trusted by them. In Statesboro, as in most of the South, a large
+proportion of the Negroes are of this better class. On the other hand, one
+finds everywhere many of the so-called &#8220;worthless Negroes,&#8221; perhaps a
+growing class, who float from town to town, doing rough work, having no
+permanent place of abode, not known to the white population generally. The
+turpentine industry has brought many such Negroes to the neighbourhood of
+Statesboro. Living in the forest near the turpentine-stills, and usually
+ignorant and lazy, they and all their kind, both in the country districts
+and in the city, are doubly unfortunate in coming into contact chiefly
+with the poorer class of white people, whom they often meet as industrial
+competitors.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><i>Danger from the Floating Negro</i></p>
+
+<p>In all the towns I visited, South as well as North, I found that this
+floating, worthless Negro caused most of the trouble. He prowls the roads
+by day and by night; he steals; he makes it unsafe for women to travel
+alone. Sometimes he has gone to school long enough to enable him to read a
+little and to write his name, enough education to make him hate the hard
+work of the fields and aspire to better things, without giving him the
+determination to earn them. He has little or no regard for the family
+relations or home life, and when he commits a crime <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_179" id="Page_179">[Pg 179]</a></span>or is tired of one
+locality, he sets out, unencumbered, to seek new fields, leaving his wife
+and children without the slightest compunction.</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<table width="50%" border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="5" summary="table">
+<tr><td colspan="2"><img src="images/gs17_top.jpg" alt="" /></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="center">PAUL REED</td><td align="center">WILL CATO</td></tr>
+<tr><td colspan="2" align="center">Negroes lynched by being burned alive at Statesboro, Georgia</td></tr>
+<tr><td>&nbsp;</td></tr>
+<tr><td colspan="2"><img src="images/gs17_bot.jpg" alt="" /></td></tr>
+<tr><td colspan="2" align="center">NEGROES OF THE CRIMINAL TYPE<br /><small>Pictures taken in the Atlanta Jail</small></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Will Johnson, arrested, charged with the<br />Camp assault.</td><td>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Lucius Frazier, who entered a home<br />&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;in the residence district of Atlanta.</td></tr></table>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>About six miles from the city of Statesboro lived Henry Hodges, a
+well-to-do planter. He had a good farm, he ran three ploughs, as they say
+in the cotton country, and rumour reported that he had money laid by.
+Coming of an old family, he was widely related in Bullock County, and his
+friendliness and kindness had given him and his family a large circle of
+acquaintances. Family ties and friendships, in old-settled communities
+like those in the South, are influences of much greater importance in
+fixing public opinion and deciding political and social questions than
+they are in the new and heterogeneous communities of the North.</p>
+
+<p>The South is still, so far as the white population is concerned, a
+sparsely settled country. The farmers often live far apart; the roads are
+none too good. The Hodges home was in a lonely place, the nearest
+neighbours being Negroes, nearly half a mile distant. No white people
+lived within three-quarters of a mile. Hodges had been brought up among
+Negroes, he employed them, he was kind to them. To one of the Negroes
+suspected of complicity in the subsequent murder, he had loaned his
+shot-gun; another, afterward lynched, called at his home the very night
+before the murder, intending then to rob him, and Hodges gave him a bottle
+of turpentine to cure a &#8220;snake-graze.&#8221;</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><i>Story of the Murder</i></p>
+
+<p>On the afternoon of July 29, 1904, Mr. Hodges drove to a neighbour&#8217;s house
+to bring his nine-year-old girl home from school. No Southern white
+farmer, especially in thinly settled regions like Bulloch County, dares
+permit any woman or girl of his family to go out anywhere alone, for fear
+of the criminal Negro.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;You don&#8217;t know and you can&#8217;t know,&#8221; a Georgian said to me, &#8220;what it means
+down here to live in constant fear lest your wife or daughter be attacked
+on the road, or even in her home. Many women in the city of Statesboro
+dare not go into their backyards after dark. Every white planter knows
+that there is always danger for his daughters to visit even the nearest<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_180" id="Page_180">[Pg 180]</a></span>
+neighbour, or for his wife to go to church without a man to protect her.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>It is absolutely necessary to understand this point of view before one can
+form a true judgment upon conditions in the South.</p>
+
+<p>When Hodges arrived at his home that night, it was already dark. The
+little girl ran to join her mother; the father drove to the barn. Two
+Negroes&mdash;perhaps more&mdash;met him there and beat his brains out with a stone
+and a buggy brace. Hearing the noise, Mrs. Hodges ran out with a lamp and
+set it on the gate-post. The Negroes crept up&mdash;as nearly as can be
+gathered from the contradictory stories and confessions&mdash;and murdered her
+there in her doorway with peculiar brutality. Many of the crimes committed
+by Negroes are marked with almost animal-like ferocity. Once aroused to
+murderous rage, the Negro does not stop with mere killing; he bruises and
+batters his victim out of all semblance to humanity. For the moment, under
+stress of passion, he seems to revert wholly to savagery.</p>
+
+<p>The Negroes went into the house and ransacked it for money. The little
+girl, who must have been terror-stricken beyond belief, hid behind a
+trunk; the two younger children, one a child of two years, the other a
+mere baby, lay on the bed. Finding no money, the Negroes returned to their
+homes. Here they evidently began to dread the consequences of their deed,
+for toward midnight they returned to the Hodges home. During all this time
+the little girl had been hiding there in darkness, with the bodies of her
+father and mother in the doorway. When the Negroes appeared, she either
+came out voluntarily, hoping that friends had arrived, or she was dragged
+out.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Where&#8217;s the money?&#8221; demanded the Negroes.</p>
+
+<p>The child got out all she had, a precious five-cent piece, and offered it
+to them on condition that they would not hurt her. One of them seized her
+and beat her to death.</p>
+
+<p>I make no excuse for telling these details; they <i>must be told</i>, else we
+shall not see the depths or the lengths of this problem.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><i>Burning of the Hodges Home</i></p>
+
+<p>The Negroes then dragged the bodies of Mr. and Mrs. Hodges into their home
+and set the house afire. As nearly as<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_181" id="Page_181">[Pg 181]</a></span> can be made out from the subsequent
+confessions, the two younger children were burned alive.</p>
+
+<p>When the neighbours reached the scene of the crime, the house was wholly
+consumed, only the great end chimney left standing, and the lamp still
+burning on the gate-post.</p>
+
+<p>Well, these Southerners are warm-hearted, home-loving people. Everybody
+knew and respected the Hodges&mdash;their friends in the church, their many
+relatives in the county&mdash;and the effect of this frightful crime described
+in all its details, may possibly be imagined by Northern people living
+quietly and peacefully in their homes. When two of the prominent citizens
+of the town told me, weeks afterward, of the death of the little girl,
+they could not keep back their tears.</p>
+
+<p>The murder took place on Friday night; on Saturday the Negroes, Paul Reed
+and Will Cato, were arrested with several other suspects, including two
+Negro preachers. Both Reed and Cato were of the illiterate class; both had
+been turpentine workers, living in the forest, far from contact with white
+people. Cato was a floater from South Carolina. Reed was born in the
+county, but he was a good type of the worthless and densely ignorant
+Negro.</p>
+
+<p>It is a somewhat common impression that a whole town loses itself in a
+passion of anarchy, and is not satisfied until the criminals are killed.
+But in spite of the terrible provocation and the intense feeling, there
+yet existed in Statesboro exactly such a feeling for the sacredness of
+law, such intelligent Americanism, as exists in your town or mine. Not
+within the present generation had a lynching taken place in the town, and
+the people were deeply concerned to preserve the honour and good name of
+their community. In the midst of intense excitement a meeting of good
+citizens, both white and black, was called in the court-house. It was
+presided over by J. A. Brannan, one of the foremost citizens. Speeches
+were made by Mayor Johnstone, by the ministers of the town, and by other
+citizens, including a Negro, all calling for good order and the calm and
+proper enforcement of the law.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><i>Attempts to Prevent the Lynching</i></p>
+
+<p>And the regular machinery of justice was put in motion with commendable
+rapidity. Fearing a lynching, the Negroes<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_182" id="Page_182">[Pg 182]</a></span> who had been arrested were sent
+to Savannah and there lodged in jail. A grand jury was immediately called,
+indictments were found, and in two weeks&mdash;the shortest possible time under
+the law&mdash;the Negroes were brought back from Savannah for trial. To protect
+them, two military companies, one from Statesboro, one from Savannah, were
+called out. The proof of guilt was absolutely conclusive, and, although
+the Negroes were given every advantage to which they were entitled under
+the law, several prominent attorneys having been appointed to defend them,
+they were promptly convicted and sentenced to be hanged.</p>
+
+<p>In the meantime great excitement prevailed. The town was crowded for days
+with farmers who came flocking in from every direction. The crime was
+discussed and magnified; it was common talk that the &#8220;niggers of Madison
+County are getting too bigoty&#8221;&mdash;that they wouldn&#8217;t &#8220;keep their places.&#8221;
+Fuel was added to the flame by the common report that the murderers of the
+Hodges family were members of a Negro society known as the &#8220;Before Day
+Club,&#8221; and wild stories were told of other murders that had been planned,
+the names of intended victims even being reported.</p>
+
+<p>On the Sunday night before the trial, two Negro women, walking down the
+street are said to have crowded two respectable white girls off the
+sidewalk. A crowd dragged the women from a church where they had gone,
+took them to the outskirts of the town, whipped them both violently, and
+ordered them to leave the county.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Let the law take its course,&#8221; urged the good citizen. &#8220;The Negroes have
+been sentenced to be hanged, let them be hanged legally; we want no
+disgrace to fall on the town.&#8221;</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><i>How the Lynchers Themselves Defend a Lynching</i></p>
+
+<p>But as the trial progressed and the crowd increased, there were louder and
+louder expressions of the belief that hanging was too good for such a
+crime. I heard intelligent citizens argue that a Negro criminal, in order
+to be a hero in the eyes of his people, does not mind being hanged!</p>
+
+<p>Another distinct feeling developed&mdash;a feeling that I found in other
+lynching towns: that somehow the courts and the law<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_183" id="Page_183">[Pg 183]</a></span> were not to be
+trusted to punish the criminals properly. Although Reed and Cato were
+sentenced to be hanged, the crowd argued that &#8220;the lawyers would get them
+off,&#8221; that &#8220;the case would be appealed, and they would go free.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Members of the mob tried to get Sheriff Kendrick to promise not to remove
+the Negroes to Savannah, fearing that in some way they would be taken
+beyond the reach of justice.</p>
+
+<p>In other words, there existed a deep-seated conviction that justice too
+often miscarried in Bulloch County and that murderers commonly escaped
+punishment through the delays and technicalities of the law.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><i>A Habit of Man-killing</i></p>
+
+<p>And there is, unfortunately, a foundation for this belief. In every
+lynching town I visited I made especial inquiry as to the prevalence of
+crime, particularly as to the degree of certainty of punishment for crime.
+In all of them property is safe; laws looking to the protection of goods
+and chattels are executed with a fair degree of precision; for we are a
+business-worshipping people. But I was astounded by the extraordinary
+prevalence in all these lynching counties, North as well as South, of
+crimes of violence, especially homicide, accompanied in every case by a
+poor enforcement of the law. Bulloch County, with barely twenty-five
+thousand inhabitants, had thirty-two homicides in a little more than five
+years before the lynching&mdash;an annual average of one to every four thousand
+five hundred people (the average in the entire United States being one to
+nine thousand). Within eight months prior to the Hodges lynching, no fewer
+than ten persons (including the Hodges family) were murdered in Bulloch
+County. In twenty-eight years, notwithstanding the high rate of homicides,
+only three men, all Negroes, have been legally hanged, while four
+men&mdash;three Negroes and one white man&mdash;have been lynched.</p>
+
+<p>It is well understood that if the murderer has friends or a little money
+to hire lawyers, he can, especially if he happens to be white, nearly
+always escape with a nominal punishment. These facts are widely known and
+generally commented upon. In his subsequent charge to the grand jury,
+Judge Daley said<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_184" id="Page_184">[Pg 184]</a></span> that the mob was due in part to &#8220;delays in the execution
+of law and to the people becoming impatient.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>I am not telling these things with any idea of excusing or palliating the
+crime of lynching, but with the earnest intent of setting forth all the
+facts, so that we may understand just what the feelings and impulses of a
+lynching town really are, good as well as bad. Unless we diagnose the case
+accurately, we cannot hope to discover effective remedies.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><i>Psychology of the Mob</i></p>
+
+<p>In the intense, excited crowd gathered around the court-house on this
+Tuesday, the 16th of August, other influences were also at work,
+influences operating in a greater or less degree in every lynching mob. We
+are accustomed to look upon a mob as an entity, the expression of a single
+concrete feeling; it is not; it is itself torn with dissensions and
+compunctions, swayed by conflicting emotions. Similarly, we look upon a
+militia company as a sort of machine, which, set in operation,
+automatically performs a certain definite service. But it is not. It is
+made up of young men, each with his own intense feelings, prejudices,
+ideals; and it requires unusual discipline to inculcate such a sense of
+duty that the individual soldier will rise superior to the emotions of the
+hour. Most of these young men of Statesboro and Savannah really
+sympathised with the mob; among the crowd the Statesboro men saw their
+relatives and friends. Some of the officers were ambitious men, hoping to
+stand for political office. What would happen if they ordered the troops
+to fire on their neighbours?</p>
+
+<p>And &#8220;the nigger deserved hanging,&#8221; and &#8220;why should good white blood be
+shed for nigger brutes?&#8221; At a moment of this sort the clear perception of
+solemn abstract principles and great civic duties fades away in tumultuous
+excitement. Yet these soldier boys were not cowards; they have a fighting
+history; their fathers made good soldiers; they themselves would serve
+bravely against a foreign enemy, but when called upon for mob service they
+failed utterly, as they have failed repeatedly, both North and South.</p>
+
+<p>Up to the last moment, although the crowd believed in lynching<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_185" id="Page_185">[Pg 185]</a></span> and wanted
+to lynch, there seemed to be no real and general determination to
+forestall the law. The mob had no centre, no fixed purpose, no real plan
+of action. One determined man, knowing his duty (as I shall show in
+another story), and doing it with common sense, could have prevented
+trouble, but there was no such man. Captain Hitch, of the Savannah
+Company, a vacillating commander, allowed the crowd to pack the
+court-house, to stream in and out among his soldiers; he laid the
+responsibility (afterward) on the sheriff, and the sheriff shouldered it
+back upon him. In nearly all the cases I investigated, I found the same
+attempt to shift responsibility, the same lack of a responsible head. Our
+system too often fails when mob stress is laid upon it&mdash;unless it happens
+that some strong man stands out, assumes responsibility, and becomes a
+momentary despot.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><i>How the Soldiers Were Overpowered</i></p>
+
+<p>A mob, no matter how deeply inflamed, is always cowardly. This mob was no
+exception. It crowded up, crowded up, testing authority. It joked with the
+soldiers, and when it found that the jokes were appreciated, it took
+further liberties; it jostled the soldiers&mdash;good-humouredly. &#8220;You don&#8217;t
+dare fire,&#8221; it said, and the soldiers made no reply. &#8220;Your guns aren&#8217;t
+loaded,&#8221; it said, and some soldier confessed that they were not. In tender
+consideration for the feelings of the mob, the officers had ordered the
+men not to load their rifles. The next step was easy enough; the mob
+playfully wrenched away a few of the guns, those behind pushed
+forward&mdash;those behind always do push forward, knowing they will not be
+hurt&mdash;and in a moment the whole mob was swarming up the stairs, yelling
+and cheering.</p>
+
+<p>In the court-room, sentence had been passed on Reed and Cato, and the
+judge had just congratulated the people on &#8220;their splendid regard for the
+law under very trying conditions.&#8221; Then the mob broke in. A brother of the
+murdered Hodges, a minister from Texas, rose magnificently to the
+occasion. With tears streaming down his face, he begged the mob to let the
+law take its course.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;We don&#8217;t want religion, we want blood,&#8221; yelled a voice.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_186" id="Page_186">[Pg 186]</a></span>The mob was now thoroughly stirred; it ceased to hesitate; it was
+controlled wholly by its emotions. The leaders plunged down the court-room
+and into the witness chamber, where the Negroes sat with their wives,
+Reed&#8217;s wife with a young baby. The officers of the law accommodatingly
+indicated the right Negroes, and the mob dragged them out. Hanging was at
+first proposed, and a man even climbed a telegraph-pole just outside the
+court-house, but the mob, growing more ferocious as it gathered volume and
+excitement, yelled its determination:</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Burn them! burn them!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>They rushed up the road, intending to take the Negroes to the scene of the
+crime. But it was midday in August, with a broiling hot sun overhead and a
+dusty road underfoot. A mile from town the mob swerved into a turpentine
+forest, pausing first to let the Negroes kneel and confess. Calmer spirits
+again counselled hanging, but some one began to recite in a high-keyed
+voice the awful details of the crime, dwelling especially on the death of
+the little girl. It worked the mob into a frenzy of ferocity.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;They burned the Hodges and gave them no choice; burn the niggers!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Please don&#8217;t burn me,&#8221; pleaded Cato. And again: &#8220;Hang me or shoot me;
+please don&#8217;t burn me!&#8221;</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><i>Burning of the Negroes</i></p>
+
+<p>Some one referred the question to the father-in-law of Hodges. He said
+Hodges&#8217;s mother wished the men burned. That settled it. Men were sent into
+town for kerosene oil and chains, and finally the Negroes were bound to an
+old stump, fagots were heaped around them, and each was drenched with oil.
+Then the crowd stood back accommodatingly, while a photographer, standing
+there in the bright sunshine, took pictures of the chained Negroes.
+Citizens crowded up behind the stump and got their faces into the
+photograph. When the fagots were lighted, the crowd yelled wildly. Cato,
+the less stolid of the two Negroes, partly of white blood, screamed with
+agony; but Reed, black and stolid, bore it like a block of wood. They
+threw knots and sticks at the writhing <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_187" id="Page_187">[Pg 187]</a></span>creatures, but always left room
+for the photographer to take more pictures.</p>
+
+<p>And when it was all over, they began, in common with all mobs, to fight
+for souvenirs. They scrambled for the chains before they were cold, and
+the precious links were divided among the populace. Pieces of the stump
+were hacked off, and finally one young man&mdash;it must be told&mdash;gathered up a
+few charred remnants of bone, carried them uptown, and actually tried to
+give them to the judge who presided at the trial of the Negroes, to the
+utter disgust of that official.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><i>After Effects of Mob-law</i></p>
+
+<p>This is the law of the mob, that it never stops with the thing it sets out
+to do. It is exactly like any other manifestation of uncontrolled human
+passion&mdash;given licence it takes more licence, it releases that which is
+ugly, violent, revengeful in the community as in the individual human
+heart. I have heard often of a &#8220;quiet mob,&#8221; an &#8220;orderly mob,&#8221; which &#8220;went
+about its business and hanged the nigger,&#8221; but in all the cases I have
+known about, and I made special inquiries upon this particular point, not
+one single mob stopped when the immediate work was done, unless under
+compulsion. Even good citizens of Statesboro will tell you that &#8220;the
+niggers got only what they deserved,&#8221; and &#8220;it was all right if the mob had
+only stopped there.&#8221; But it did not stop there; it never does.</p>
+
+<p>All the stored-up racial animosity came seething to the surface; all the
+personal grudges and spite. As I have already related, two Negro women
+were whipped on the Sunday night before the lynching. On the day following
+the lynching the father of the women was found seeking legal punishment
+for the men who whipped his daughters, and he himself was taken out and
+frightfully beaten. On the same day two other young Negroes, of the
+especially hated &#8220;smart nigger&#8221; type, were caught and whipped&mdash;one for
+riding a bicycle on the sidewalk, the other, as several citizens told me,
+&#8220;on general principles.&#8221; But this was not the worst. On Wednesday night an
+old Negro man and his son&mdash;Negroes of the better class&mdash;were sitting in
+their cabin some miles from Statesboro, when they<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_188" id="Page_188">[Pg 188]</a></span> were both shot at
+through the window and badly wounded. Another respectable Negro, named
+McBride, was visited in his home by a white mob, which first whipped his
+wife, who was confined with a baby three days old, and then beat, kicked,
+and shot McBride himself so horribly that he died the next day. The better
+class of citizens, the same men who would, perhaps, condone the burning of
+Reed and Cato, had no sympathy with this sort of thing. Some of them took
+McBride&#8217;s dying statement, and four white men were arrested <ins class="correction" title="Not in the original.">and</ins> charged
+with the murder; but never punished.</p>
+
+<p>Indeed, the mob led directly to a general increase of crime in Bulloch
+County. As Judge Daley said in his charge to a subsequent grand jury:</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Mob violence begets crime. Crime has been more prevalent since this
+lynching than ever before. In the middle circuit the courts have been so
+badly crowded with murder trials that it has been almost impossible to
+attend to civil business.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Another evil result of the lynching was that it destroyed valuable
+evidence. The prosecutors had hoped to learn from the convicted Reed and
+Cato whether or not they had any companions and thereby bring to justice
+all the other Negroes suspected of complicity in the murder of the Hodges.
+If the Before Day Club ever existed and had a criminal purpose (which is
+doubtful) most of the members who composed it were left at large, awaiting
+the next opportunity to rob and murder.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><i>Mob Justice and the Cotton Crop</i></p>
+
+<p>Mob-law has not only represented a moral collapse in this community, but
+it struck, also, at the sensitive pocket of the business interests of the
+county. Frightened by the threatening attitude of the whites, the Negroes
+began to leave the county. It was just at the beginning of the
+cotton-picking season, when labour of every sort was much needed, Negro
+labour especially. It would not do to frighten away all the Negroes. On
+Thursday some of the officials and citizens of Statesboro got together,
+appointed extra marshals, and gave notice that there were to be no more
+whippings, and the mob spirit disappeared&mdash;until next time.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_189" id="Page_189">[Pg 189]</a></span>But what of the large Negro population of Statesboro during all this
+excitement? The citizens told the &#8220;decent Negroes&#8221;: &#8220;We don&#8217;t want to hurt
+you; we know you; you are all right; go home and you won&#8217;t be hurt.&#8221; Go
+home they did, and there was not a Negro to be seen during all the time of
+the lynching. From inquiry among the Negroes themselves, I found that many
+of them had no voice to raise against the burning of Reed and Cato. This
+was the grim, primitive eye-for-an-eye logic that they used, in common
+with many white men:</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Reed and Cato burned the Hodges; they ought to be burned.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Even Cato&#8217;s wife used this logic.</p>
+
+<p>But all the Negroes were bitter over the indiscriminate whippings which
+followed the lynching. These whippings widened the breach between the
+races, led to deeper suspicion and hatred, fertilised the soil for future
+outbreaks. In the same week that I visited Statesboro, no fewer than three
+cotton-gins in various parts of Bulloch County were mysteriously burned at
+night, and while no one knew the exact origin of the fires, it was openly
+charged that they were caused by revengeful Negroes. None of these
+terrible after-effects would have taken place if the law had been allowed
+to follow its course.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><i>A Fighting Parson</i></p>
+
+<p>The overwhelming majority of the people of Bulloch County undoubtedly
+condoned the lynching, even believed in it heartily and completely. And
+yet, as I have said, there was a strong dissenting opposition among the
+really thoughtful, better-class citizens. All the churches of Statesboro
+came out strongly for law and order. The Methodist church, led by a
+fighting parson, the Rev. Whitely Langston, expelled two members who had
+been in the mob&mdash;an act so unpopular that the church lost twenty-five
+members of its congregation. Of course, the members of the mob were known,
+but none of them was ever punished. The judge especially charged the grand
+jury to investigate the lynching, and this was its report:</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;We deplore the recent lawlessness in our city and community, specially
+referred to by his Honour, Judge A. F. Daley, in his able charge. We have
+investigated the matter in<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_190" id="Page_190">[Pg 190]</a></span> the light of information coming under our
+personal knowledge and obtained by the examination of a number of
+witnesses, but we have been unable to find sufficient evidence to warrant
+indictments. We tender thanks to his Honour, Judge Daley, for his able and
+comprehensive charge.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>A feeble attempt was made to discipline the military officers who allowed
+the populace to walk over them and take away their guns. A court-martial
+sat for days in Savannah and finally recommended the dismissal of Captain
+Hitch from the service of the state; but the Governor let him off with
+half the penalty suggested. Two lieutenants were also disciplined.</p>
+
+<p>In the state election which followed the lynching, numerous voters in
+Bulloch County actually scratched the name of Governor Terrell, of
+Georgia, because he ordered the troops to Statesboro, and substituted the
+name of Captain Hitch. Sheriff Kendrick, who failed to protect Reed and
+Cato, was re-elected without opposition.</p>
+
+<p>It was in a tone of deep discouragement that Mayor G. S. Johnstone, of
+Statesboro, said to me:</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;If our grand jury won&#8217;t indict these lynchers, if our petit juries won&#8217;t
+convict, and if our soldiers won&#8217;t shoot, what are we coming to?&#8221;</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><i>Revolution of Opinion in the South on Lynching</i></p>
+
+<p>Conditions at Statesboro are, perhaps, typical of those in most Southern
+towns. In most Southern towns a lynching would be conducted much as it was
+in Statesboro; there would be the same objecting but ineffective minority
+of good citizens, the troops would refuse their duty, and the lynchers
+would escape in much the same way. And yet, if we were to stop with the
+account of the Statesboro affair, we should overlook some of the greatest
+influences now affecting the lynching problem in the South. No one who
+visits the South can escape the conviction that, with its intensified
+industrial life, and the marvelous development and enrichment of the whole
+country, other equally momentous, if less tangible, changes are taking
+place. Public opinion is developing along new lines, old, set prejudices
+are breaking up, and there is, among other evident<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_191" id="Page_191">[Pg 191]</a></span> influences, a marked
+revolution in the attitude of the Southern people and the Southern
+newspapers on the lynching question. I turn now to the lynching at
+Huntsville, Ala., which reveals in a striking manner some of the features
+of the new revolt in the South against mob-law.</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/gs18.jpg" alt="" /></div>
+<p class="center"><span style="margin-left: 26em;"><small>Photographed by Collins &amp; Son</small></span></p>
+<p class="center">COURT HOUSE AND BANK IN THE PUBLIC SQUARE AT HUNTSVILLE, ALABAMA</p>
+<p class="center">The Negro, Maples, was lynched by being hung to the elm tree at the corner<br />
+of the court house, near the extreme right of the picture.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><i>A Negro Crime at Huntsville, Ala.</i></p>
+
+<p>One evening in September, 1904, a Negro of Huntsville, Ala., asked an old
+peddler named Waldrop for a ride. Waldrop was a kindly old man, well known
+and respected throughout Madison County; he drove into the city two or
+three times a week with vegetables and chickens to sell, and returned with
+the small product of his trade in his pocket.</p>
+
+<p>Waldrop knew the Negro, Maples, and, although Maples was of the worthless
+sort, and even then under indictment for thieving, the peddler made room
+for him in his waggon, and they rode out of the town together. They drove
+into a lonely road. They crossed a little bridge. Tall trees shaded and
+darkened the place. Night was falling. The Negro picked up a stone and
+beat out the brains of the inoffensive old man, robbed him, and left him
+lying there at the roadside, while the horse wandered homeward.</p>
+
+<p>How a murder cries out! The murderer fled in the darkness but it was as if
+he left great footprints. The next day, in Huntsville, the law laid its
+hand on his shoulder.</p>
+
+<p>Now, Huntsville is one of the best cities in Alabama. No other city,
+perhaps, preserves more of the aristocratic habiliments of the older
+South. It was the first capital of the state. Seven governors lie buried
+in its cemetery; its county house, its bank, some of its residences are
+noble examples of the architecture of the ante-bellum South. And while
+preserving these evidences of the wealth and refinement of an older
+civilisation, few cities in the South have responded more vigorously to
+the new impulses of progress and development. Its growth during the last
+few years has been little short of amazing. Northern capital has come in;
+nine cotton-mills have been built, drawing a large increase of population,
+and stimulating the development of the country in every direction.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_192" id="Page_192">[Pg 192]</a></span> It is
+a fine, orderly, progressive city&mdash;intensely American, ambitious,
+self-respecting.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><i>Relation of Lynching to Business Success</i></p>
+
+<p>Huntsville has had its share of lynchings in the past. Within twenty years
+seven Negroes and one white man had been the victims of mobs in Madison
+County. The best citizens knew what a lynching meant; they knew how the
+mob began, and what invariably followed its excesses, and they wanted no
+more such horrors. But this revolt was not wholly moral. With awakening
+industrial ambition the people realised that disorder had a tendency to
+frighten away capital, stop immigration, and retard development generally.
+Good business demands good order. This feeling has been expressed in
+various forms and through many channels. It existed in Statesboro, but it
+was by no means as vigorous as in this manufacturing city of Huntsville.
+We find, for instance, Congressman Richardson of Alabama, a citizen of
+Huntsville, saying in a speech on the floor of the House of
+Representatives:</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Why, Mr. Chairman, we have more reason in the South to observe the law
+and do what is right than any other section of this Union.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The Atlanta <i>Constitution</i> presents the same view in vigorous language:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Aside entirely from the consideration of the evil effects of the mob
+spirit in breeding general disrespect for the law, and aside from the
+question of the inevitable brutalising effect of lynching upon those
+who are spectators&mdash;and the effect goes even further&mdash;the practical
+question arises: Can we at the South afford it?</p>
+
+<p>Is there any use blinding ourselves to the fact, patent to everybody,
+that it is this sort of thing that has kept hundreds of thousands of
+desirable immigrants from coming to the Southern states?</p></div>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><i>Story of a Bold Judge</i></p>
+
+<p>When the murderer of the peddler Waldrop was arrested, therefore, the
+thoughtful and progressive people of the city&mdash;the kind who are creating
+the New South&mdash;took immediate steps to prevent mob disturbance. The city
+was fortunate in having an able, energetic young man as its circuit
+judge&mdash;a judge, the son of a judge, who saw his duty clearly, and who was
+not afraid to act, even though it might ruin his immediate political<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_193" id="Page_193">[Pg 193]</a></span>
+future, as, indeed, it did. Rare qualities in these days! The murder was
+committed Tuesday, September 6th, the Negro was arrested Wednesday, Judge
+Speake impanelled a special grand jury without waiting a moment, and that
+very afternoon, within six hours after the Negro&#8217;s arrest and within
+twenty hours after the crime was committed, the Negro was formally
+indicted. Arrangements were then made to call a special trial jury within
+a week, in the hope that the prospect of immediate punishment would
+prevent the gathering of a mob.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><i>A Record of Homicide as a Cause of Lynching</i></p>
+
+<p>But, unfortunately, we find here in Madison County not only a history of
+lynching&mdash;a habit, it may be called&mdash;but there existed the same disregard
+for the sacredness of human life which is the common characteristic of
+most lynching communities, South or North. I made a careful examination of
+the records of the county. In the five years preceding this lynching, no
+fewer than thirty-three murder and homicide cases were tried in the
+courts, besides eight murderers indicted, but not arrested. This is the
+record of a single county of about forty thousand people. Notwithstanding
+this record of crime, there had not been a legal hanging in the county,
+even of a Negro, for nineteen years. It was a fact&mdash;well known to
+everybody in the county&mdash;that it was next to impossible to convict a white
+man for killing. Murderers employed good lawyers, they appealed their
+cases, they brought political friendships to bear, and the relationships
+between the old families were so far extended that they reached even into
+the jury room. As a consequence, nearly every white murderer went free.
+Only a short time before the lynching, Fred Stevens a white man, who shot
+a white man in a quarrel over a bucket of water, was let out with a fine
+of $50, costs, and thirty days in jail. This for a <i>killing</i>. And the
+attorney for Stevens actually went into court afterward and asked to have
+the costs cut down.</p>
+
+<p>Negroes who committed homicide, though more vigorously punished than white
+murderers, yet frequently escaped with five or ten years in the
+penitentiary&mdash;especially if they had money or a few white friends. All
+this had induced a contempt of the courts of justice&mdash;a fear that, after
+all, through the delays and <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_194" id="Page_194">[Pg 194]</a></span>technicalities of the law and the compassion
+of the jury, the murderer of Waldrop would not be punished as he deserved.
+This was the substance of the reasoning I heard repeatedly: &#8220;That Negro,
+Maples, ought to have been hanged; we were not sure the jury would hang
+him; we hanged him to protect ourselves.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>I met an intelligent farmer during a drive through Madison County. Here
+are some of the things he said, and they voiced closely what I heard in
+one form or another from many people in all walks of life:</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Life is cheap in Madison County. If you have a grudge against a man, kill
+him; don&#8217;t wound him. If you wound him, you&#8217;ll likely be sent up; if you
+kill him, you can go free. They often punish more severely for carrying
+concealed weapons or even for chicken stealing in Madison County than they
+do for murder.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>So strong was the evidence in one murder case in an adjoining circuit that
+Judge Kyle instructed the jury to find the murderer guilty; the jury
+deliberately returned a verdict, &#8220;Not guilty.&#8221; The Alabama system of
+justice is cursed by the professional juror chosen by politicians, and
+often open to political influences. This, with the unlimited right of
+appeal and the great number of peremptory challenges allowed to the
+defence in accepting jurymen, gives such power to the lawyers for the
+defendant that convictions are exceedingly difficult. Oftentimes, also,
+the prosecuting attorney is a young, inexperienced lawyer, ill-paid, who
+is no match for the able attorneys employed by the defendant.</p>
+
+<p>No, it is not all race prejudice that causes lynchings, even in the South.
+One man in every six lynched in this country in 1903&mdash;the year before the
+lynching I am describing&mdash;was a white man. It is true that a Negro is
+often the victim of mob-law where a white man would not be, but the chief
+cause certainly seems to lie deeper, in the widespread contempt of the
+courts, and the unpunished subversion of the law in this country, both
+South and North. This, indeed, would probably be the sole cause of
+lynching, were it not for the crime of rape, of which I wish to speak
+again a little later.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><i>Composition of the Mob at Huntsville</i></p>
+
+<p>Well, a mob began gathering in Huntsville before the grand jury had ceased
+its labours. It was chiefly composed of the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_195" id="Page_195">[Pg 195]</a></span> workmen from the
+cotton-mills. These are of a peculiar class&mdash;pure American stock,
+naturally of high intelligence, but almost wholly illiterate&mdash;men from the
+hills, the descendants of the &#8220;poor white trash,&#8221; who never owned slaves,
+and who have always hated the Negroes. The poor whites are and have been
+for a long time in certain lines the industrial competitors of the
+Negroes, and the jealousy thus engendered accounts in no small degree for
+the intensity of the race feeling.</p>
+
+<p>Anticipating trouble, Judge Speake ordered the closing of all the
+saloons&mdash;there were then only fifteen to a population of some twenty-one
+thousand&mdash;and called out the local military company. But the mob ran over
+the militiamen as though they were not there, broke into the jail, built a
+fire in the hallway, and added sulphur and cayenne pepper. Fearing that
+the jail would be burned and all the prisoners suffocated, the sheriff
+released the Negro, Maples, and he jumped out of a second-story window
+into the mob. They dragged him up the street to the square in the heart of
+the city. Here, on the pleasant lawn, the Daughters of America were
+holding a festival, and the place was brilliant with Japanese lanterns.
+Scattering the women and children, the mob jostled the Negro under the
+glare of an electric light, just in front of the stately old court-house.</p>
+
+<p>Here impassioned addresses were made by several prominent young
+lawyers&mdash;J. H. Wallace, Jr., W. B. Bankhead, and Solicitor Pettus&mdash;urging
+the observance of law and order. A showing of hands afterward revealed the
+fact that a large proportion of those present favoured a legal
+administration of justice. But it was too late now.</p>
+
+<p>A peculiarly dramatic incident fired the mob anew. The Negro was suddenly
+confronted by the son of the murdered peddler. &#8220;Horace,&#8221; he demanded, &#8220;did
+you kill my old dad?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Quivering with fright, the Negro is said to have confessed the crime. He
+was instantly dragged around the corner, where they hanged him to an
+elm-tree, and while he dangled there in the light of the gala lanterns,
+they shot him full of holes. Then they cut off one of his little fingers
+and parts of his trousers for souvenirs. So he hung until daylight, and
+crowds of people came out to see.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_196" id="Page_196">[Pg 196]</a></span></p>
+<p class="center"><i>Effort to Punish the Lynchers</i></p>
+
+<p>But the forces of law and order here had vigour and energy. Judge Speake,
+communicating with the Governor, had troops sent from Birmingham, and
+then, without shilly-shallying or delaying or endeavouring to shift
+responsibility, he ordered a special grand jury to indict the lynchers the
+very next day and he saw to it that it was composed of the best citizens
+in town. When it met, so deep and solemn was its feeling of responsibility
+that it was opened with prayer, an extraordinary evidence of the awakened
+conscience of the people. More than this, the citizens generally were so
+aroused that they held a mass meeting, and denounced the lynching as a
+&#8220;blot upon our civilisation,&#8221; and declared that &#8220;each and every man taking
+part&#8221; with the mob was &#8220;guilty of murder.&#8221; Bold words, but no bolder than
+the editorials of the newspapers of the town or of the state. Every force
+of decency and good order was at work. Such strong newspapers as the
+Birmingham <i>Age-Herald</i>, the <i>Ledger</i>, and the <i>News</i>, the Montgomery
+<i>Advertiser</i>, the Chattanooga <i>News</i>, and, indeed, prominent newspapers
+all over the South united strongly in their condemnation of the lynchers
+and in their support of the efforts to bring the mob to justice.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><i>Southern Newspapers on Lynching</i></p>
+
+<p>The Huntsville <i>Mercury</i> spoke of the &#8220;deep sense of shame felt by our
+good citizens in being run over by a few lawless spirits.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;There is no justification,&#8221; said the Birmingham <i>News</i>, &#8220;for the mob who,
+in punishing one murderer, made many more.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;This lynching,&#8221; said the Birmingham <i>Ledger</i>, &#8220;is a disgrace to our
+state. The <i>Ledger</i> doesn&#8217;t put its ear to the ground to hear from the
+North, nor does it care what Northern papers say. The crime is our own,
+and the disgrace falls on us.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Where, in fact,&#8221; said the <i>Age-Herald</i>, &#8220;does such business lead to? The
+answer is summed up in a word&mdash;anarchy!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>It would be well if every community in this country could read the full
+report of Judge Speake&#8217;s grand jury. It is a work of the sort struck off
+only by men stirred to high things by<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_197" id="Page_197">[Pg 197]</a></span> what they feel to be a great
+crisis; it is of the same metal as the Declaration of Independence. Here
+is a single paragraph:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Realising that this is a supreme moment in our history; that we must
+either take a stand for the law to-day or surrender to the mob and to
+the anarchists for all time; that our actions shall make for good or
+evil in future generations; forgetting our personal friendships and
+affiliations, and with malice toward none, but acting only as sworn
+officers of the state of Alabama, we, the grand jury of Madison
+County, state of Alabama, find&mdash;&mdash;</p></div>
+
+<p>Ten members of the mob were indicted&mdash;and not for mere rioting or for
+breaking into the jail, but for <i>murder</i>. The jury also charged Sheriff
+Rodgers, Mayor Smith, and Chief of Police Overton with wilful neglect and
+incompetence, and advised their impeachment. No one not understanding the
+far-reaching family and political relationships in these old-settled
+Southern communities, and the deep-seated feeling against punishment for
+the crime of lynching, can form any adequate idea of what a sensation was
+caused by the charges of the grand jury against the foremost officials of
+the city. It came like a bolt from a clear sky; it was altogether an
+astonishing procedure, at first not fully credited. When the utter
+seriousness of Judge Speake came to be fully recognised, a good many men
+hurriedly left town. The Birmingham soldiers, led by a captain with
+backbone, arrested a number of those who remained. Judge Speake ordered a
+special trial jury, and appointed an able lawyer to assist Prosecutor
+Pettus in bringing the lynchers to justice. The very next week the trials
+were begun.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><i>Difficulty of Breaking the Lynching Habit</i></p>
+
+<p>By this time, however, the usual influences had begun to work; the moral
+revulsion had carried far, and the rebound had come. The energetic judge
+and his solicitors found themselves face to face with the bad old jury
+system, with the deep-seated distrust of the courts, with the rooted habit
+of non-punishment for lynchers. Moreover, it was found that certain wild
+young men, with good family connections, had been mixed up in the mob&mdash;and
+all the strong family and political machinery of the country began to
+array itself against conviction. A community has exactly as hard a road to
+travel in breaking a bad habit as an individual. The New South is<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_198" id="Page_198">[Pg 198]</a></span> having
+a struggle to break the habits of the Old South. It was found, also, that
+the great mass of people in the country, as well as the millworkers in the
+city, were still strongly in favour of punishment by lynching. One hundred
+and ten veniremen examined for jurors to try the lynchers were asked this
+question; &#8220;If you were satisfied from the evidence beyond a reasonable
+doubt that the defendant took part with or abetted the mob in murdering a
+Negro, would you favour his conviction?&#8221; And seventy-six of them answered,
+&#8220;No.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>In other words, a large majority believed that a white man should not be
+punished for lynching a Negro. And when the juries were finally obtained,
+although the evidence was conclusive, they acquitted the lynchers, one
+after another. Only one man in one jury stood out for conviction&mdash;a young
+clerk named S. M. Blair, a pretty good type of the modern hero. He hung
+the jury, and so bitter was the feeling against him among the millworkers
+that they threatened to boycott his employer.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><i>Relation of Lynching to the &#8220;Usual Crime&#8221;</i></p>
+
+<p>This is the reasoning of many of the men chosen as jurors; I heard it over
+and over again, not only in Huntsville but, in substance, everywhere that
+I stopped in the South:</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;If we convict these men for lynching the Negro, Maples, we shall
+establish a precedent that will prevent us from lynching for the crime of
+rape.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Every argument on lynching in the South gets back sooner or later to this
+question of rape. Ask any high-class citizen&mdash;the very highest&mdash;if he
+believes in lynching, and he will tell you roundly, &#8220;No.&#8221; Ask him about
+lynching for rape, and in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred he will
+instantly weaken.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;If my sister or my daughter&mdash;look here, if your sister or your
+daughter&mdash;&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Lynching, he says, is absolutely necessary to keep down this crime. You
+ask him why the law cannot be depended upon, and he replies:</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;It is too great an ordeal for the self-respecting white woman to go into
+court and accuse the Negro ravisher and withstand a public
+cross-examination. It is intolerable. No woman will<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_199" id="Page_199">[Pg 199]</a></span> do it. And, besides,
+the courts are uncertain. Lynching is the only remedy.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Yet the South is deeply stirred over the prevalence of lynching. The mob
+spirit, invoked to punish such a crime as rape, is defended by some people
+in the North as well as in the South; but once invoked, it spreads and
+spreads, until to-day lynching for rape forms only a very small proportion
+of the total number of mob hangings. It spreads until a Negro is lynched
+for chicken stealing, or for mere &#8220;obnoxiousness.&#8221; In the year 1903, out
+of 103 lynchings, only 11 were for rape and 10 for attempted rape, while
+47 were for murder, 15 for complicity in murderous assault, 4 for arson, 5
+for mere &#8220;race prejudice,&#8221; 2 for insults to whites, 1 for making threats,
+5 for unknown offenses, 1 for refusing to give information, and 3 were
+wholly innocent Negroes, lynched because their identity was mistaken. It
+is probable that lynching in the South would immediately be wiped out, if
+it were not for the question of rape. You will hear the problem put by
+thinking Southerners very much in this fashion:</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;We must stop mob-law; every month we recognise that fact more clearly.
+But can we stop mob-law unless we go to the heart of the matter and stop
+lynching for rape? Is there not a way of changing our methods of legal
+procedure so that the offender in this crime can be punished without
+subjecting the victim to the horrible publicity of the courts?&#8221;</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><i>Governor Cunningham&mdash;A Real Leader</i></p>
+
+<p>But I have wandered from my story. In Acting-Governor Cunningham, the
+people of Alabama had a leader who was not afraid to handle a dangerous
+subject like lynching. He sent a court of inquiry to Huntsville, which
+found the local military company &#8220;worthless and inefficient,&#8221; because it
+had failed to protect the jail. Immediately, upon the receipt of this
+report, the Governor dismissed the Huntsville company from the service,
+every man in it. Quite a contrast from the action at Statesboro! The
+Governor then went a step further: he ordered the impeachment of the
+sheriff. A little later Federal Judge Jones took up the case, charged his
+jury vigorously, and some of the mob rioters were indicted in the federal courts.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_200" id="Page_200">[Pg 200]</a></span>Governor Cunningham took a bold stand against mob-law everywhere and
+anywhere in the state:</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I am opposed to mob-law,&#8221; he said, &#8220;of whatsoever kind, for any and all
+causes. If lynching is to be justified or extenuated for any crime, be it
+ever so serious, it will lead to the same method of punishment for other
+crimes of a less degree of depravity, and through the operation of the
+process of evolution, will enlarge more and more the field of operation
+for this form of lawlessness.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>It means something also when citizens, in support of their institutions
+and out of love of their city, rise above politics. Judge Speake had been
+nominated by the Democrats to succeed himself. A Democratic nomination in
+Alabama means election. After his vigorous campaign against the lynchers,
+he became exceedingly unpopular among the majority of the people. They
+resolved to defeat him. A committee waited on Shelby Pleasants, a
+prominent Republican lawyer, and asked him to run against Judge Speake,
+assuring him a certain election.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I will not be a mob&#8217;s candidate,&#8221; he said. &#8220;I indorse every action of
+Judge Speake.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The committee approached several other lawyers, but not one of them would
+run against the judge, and the Republican newspaper of the town came out
+strongly in support of Judge Speake, even publishing his name at the head
+of its editorial columns. Before he could be elected, however, a decision
+of the State Supreme Court, unconnected in any way with the lynching,
+followed like fate, and deprived Madison County of his services. He was
+now a private citizen, and even if he had come up for nomination to any
+political office, he would undoubtedly have been defeated. The New South
+is not yet strong enough to defy the Old South politically.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><i>Influences Tending to Prevent Future Lynchings in the South</i></p>
+
+<p>The influences against lynching in the South are constantly growing
+stronger. With most (not all) of the newspapers, the preachers and the
+best citizens united against it, the outlook is full of hope. And rural
+free delivery and country telephones, spreading in every direction, are
+inestimable influences in the quickening of public opinion. Better roads<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_201" id="Page_201">[Pg 201]</a></span>
+are being built, the country is settling up with white people, schools are
+improving and the population generally, after a series of profitable
+cotton crops, is highly prosperous&mdash;all influences working toward the
+solution of this problem.</p>
+
+<p>When I went South I shared the impression of many Northerners that the
+South was lawless and did not care&mdash;an impression that arises from the
+wide publication of the horrible details of every lynching that occurs,
+and the utter silence regarding those deep, quiet, and yet powerful moral
+and industrial forces which are at the work of rejuvenation beneath the
+surface&mdash;an account of which I have given. I came away from the South
+deeply impressed with two things:</p>
+
+<p>That the South is making fully as good progress in overcoming its peculiar
+forms of lawlessness as the North is making in overcoming <i>its</i> peculiar
+forms.</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center">II.&mdash;LYNCHING IN THE NORTH</p>
+
+<p>Having looked, into two Southern lynching towns, let us now see what a
+Northern lynching is like. The comparison is highly interesting and
+illuminating.</p>
+
+<p>Springfield, O., is one of the most prosperous of the smaller cities of
+the state. It is a beautiful town having, in 1904, some 41,000 people. It
+has fine streets, fine buildings, busy factories, churches, an imposing
+library. Some of the older families have resided there for nearly a
+century. It is the seat of government of one of the most fertile and
+attractive counties in the state: an altogether progressive, enlightened
+city. Of its population in 1904 over 6,000 were Negroes (about
+one-seventh), a considerable proportion of whom are recent settlers. Large
+numbers of Negroes, as I have shown in former chapters, have been
+migrating from the South, and crowding into Northern towns located along
+the Ohio or in those portions of Indiana, Illinois, Ohio, Pennsylvania,
+Kansas, and other states, which border on the Old South. Many of the
+Negroes in Springfield came from Kentucky. We discover in these Northern
+towns exactly as in the South, the two classes of Negroes: the steady,
+resident class, more or less known to the whites, and a restless,
+unstable, ignorant class, coming to one neighbourhood to-day to help build
+a bridge, and going<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_202" id="Page_202">[Pg 202]</a></span> elsewhere to-morrow to dig a canal. For years no such
+thing as race prejudice existed in Springfield; but with the growth of
+Negro population it increased with rapidity. For instance, a druggist in
+Springfield refused to sell soda-water to a Negro college professor, the
+<ins class="correction" title="original: typsetters">typesetters</ins> in a publishing house compelled the discharge of Negro
+workmen, a Negro physician visited the high-school, found the half-dozen
+Negro pupils sitting by themselves and, angrily charging discrimination,
+ordered his child to sit among the white children. This feeling of race
+repulsion was especially noticeable between the working class of white men
+and the Negroes who come more or less into industrial competition with
+them. The use of Negroes for breaking strikes in the coalfields and
+elsewhere has been a fertile source of discord, kindling the fire of race
+prejudice in places where it never before existed.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><i>How the Negroes Sold Their Votes</i></p>
+
+<p>In Springfield there were about 1,500 Negro voters, many of whom were
+bought at every election. The Democrats and the Republicans were so evenly
+divided that the city administration was Democratic and the county
+administration Republican. The venal Negro vote went to the highest
+bidder, carried the elections, and, with the whiskey influence, governed
+the town. Springfield, enlightened, educated, progressive, highly
+American, had 145 saloons&mdash;or one to every 285 people. Before the
+lynching, nine of these were Negro saloons&mdash;some of them indescribably
+vile. A row of houses along the railroad tracks, not three blocks from the
+heart of the city, was known as the Levee. It was a Negro row composed of
+saloons and disorderly houses, where the lowest of the low, Negro men and
+both Negro and white women, made a general rendezvous. Just back of it was
+one of the foremost Catholic churches in town; hardly a block away were
+the post-office, the public library, and the foremost club of the city,
+and within three or four hundred yards were the back doors of some of the
+city&#8217;s most aristocratic residences. For years, the ineffective good
+citizen had protested against these abominable resorts, but when the
+Republicans wanted to win they needed the votes from these places, and
+when the Democrats wanted to win <i>they</i><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_203" id="Page_203">[Pg 203]</a></span> needed them. Burnett, the
+Democratic boss, said in a tone of real injury to a gentleman&mdash;a
+Democrat&mdash;who protested against the protection of the Levee:</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Don&#8217;t you want the party to win? We&#8217;ve got to have those sixty or eighty
+votes from Hurley&#8221;&mdash;Hurley being the notorious Negro proprietor of a dive
+called the Honky Tonk.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><i>Corrupt Politics and the Negro Question</i></p>
+
+<p>So these vile places remained open, protected by the police, breeding
+crime, and encouraging arrogance, idleness, and vice among the Negroes.</p>
+
+<p>And yet one will hear good citizens of Springfield complaining that the
+Negroes make themselves conspicuous and obnoxious at primaries and
+elections, standing around, waiting, and refusing to vote until they
+receive money in hand.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;To my mind,&#8221; one of these citizens said to me, &#8220;the conspicuousness of
+the Negro at elections is one of the chief causes of race prejudice.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>But who is to blame? The Negro who accepts the bribe, or the white
+politician who is eager to give it, or the white business man who,
+desiring special privileges, stands behind the white politician, or the
+ordinary citizen who doesn&#8217;t care? Talk with these politicians on the one
+hand, and the impractical reformers on the other, and they will tell you
+in all seriousness of the sins of the South in disfranchising the Negro.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Every Negro in Springfield,&#8221; I was told, &#8220;exercises his right to vote.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>If you were to tell these men that the Negroes of Springfield are
+disfranchised as absolutely as they are anywhere in the South, they would
+stare at you in amazement. But a purchased voter is a disfranchised voter.
+The Negroes have no more real voice in the government of Springfield than
+they have in the government of Savannah or New Orleans. In the South the
+Negro has been disfranchised by law or by intimidation: in the North by
+cash. Which is worse?</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><i>Story of the Crime that Led to the Lynching</i></p>
+
+<p>A few months before the lynching a Negro named Dixon arrived in
+Springfield from Kentucky. He was one of the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_204" id="Page_204">[Pg 204]</a></span> illiterate, idle, floating
+sort. He had with him a woman not his wife, with whom he quarrelled. He
+was arrested and brought into court.</p>
+
+<p>I am profoundly conscious of the seriousness of any charge which touches
+upon our courts, the last resort of justice, and yet it was a matter of
+common report that &#8220;justice was easy&#8221; in Clark County, that laws were not
+enforced, that criminals were allowed to escape on suspended sentence. I
+heard this talk everywhere, often coupled with personal accusations
+against the judges, but I could not discover that the judges were more
+remiss than other officials. They were afflicted with no other disease.</p>
+
+<p>Even in a serious sociological study of Clark County by Professor E. S.
+Tood, I find this statement:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>In Springfield, one of the chief faults of the municipal system has
+been and is the laxity and discrimination in the enforcement of the
+law. Many of the municipal ordinances have been shelved for years.
+The saloon closing ordinances are enforced intermittently, as are
+those concerning gambling.</p></div>
+
+<p>When the Negro Dixon was brought into court he was convicted and let out
+on suspended sentence. He got drunk immediately and was again arrested,
+this time serving several weeks in jail. The moment he was free <ins class="correction" title="original: be">he</ins> began
+quarrelling with his &#8220;wife,&#8221; in a house directly across the street from
+police headquarters. An officer named Collis tried to make peace and Dixon
+deliberately shot him through the stomach, also wounding the woman.</p>
+
+<p>This was on Sunday. Dixon was immediately placed in the county jail.
+Collis died the next morning.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><i>Human Life Cheap in Clark County</i></p>
+
+<p>I have called attention to the fact that the lynching town nearly always
+has a previous bad record of homicide. Disregard for the sacredness of
+human life seems to be in the air of these places. Springfield was no
+exception. Between January 1, 1902, and March 7, 1904, the day of the
+lynching, a little more than two years, no fewer than ten homicides were
+committed in the city of Springfield. White men committed five of these
+crimes and Negroes five. Three of the cases were decided within a short
+time before the lynching and the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_205" id="Page_205">[Pg 205]</a></span> punishment administered was widely
+criticised. Bishop, a coloured man who had killed a coloured man, was
+fined $200 and sentenced to six months in the workhouse. This was for
+<i>killing a man</i>. O&#8217;Brien, a white man, who killed a white man, got one
+year in the penitentiary. And only a week before the lynching,
+Schocknessy, a white man who killed a white man, but who had influential
+political friends, went scott-free!</p>
+
+<p>On the morning after the Collis murder, the <i>Daily Sun</i> published a list
+of the recent homicides in Springfield in big type on its first page and
+asked editorially:</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;What are you going to do about it?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>It then answered its own question:</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Nothing.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The following morning, after the lynching, the same paper printed in its
+headlines:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p class="center">AWFUL REBUKE TO THE COURTS</p>
+
+<p class="center"><i>They Have Temporised With the Criminal Classes Until Patience was
+Exhausted</i></p></div>
+
+<p>I cite these facts to show the underlying conditions in Springfield; a
+soil richly prepared for an outbreak of mob law&mdash;with corrupt politics,
+vile saloons, the law paralysed by non-enforcement against vice, a large
+venal Negro vote, lax courts of justice.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><i>Gathering of the Lynching Mob</i></p>
+
+<p>Well, on Monday afternoon the mob began to gather. At first it was an
+absurd, ineffectual crowd, made up largely of lawless boys of sixteen to
+twenty&mdash;a pronounced feature of every mob&mdash;with a wide fringe of more
+respectable citizens, their hands in their pockets and no convictions in
+their souls, looking on curiously, helplessly. They gathered hooting
+around the jail, cowardly, at first, as all mobs are, but growing bolder
+as darkness came on and no move was made to check them. The murder of
+Collis was not a horrible, soul-rending crime like that at Statesboro,
+Ga.; these men in the mob were not personal friends of the murdered man;
+it was a mob from the back rooms of the swarming saloons of Springfield;
+and it included also the sort of idle boys &#8220;who hang around cigar stores,&#8221;
+as one observer told me. The newspaper reports<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_206" id="Page_206">[Pg 206]</a></span> are fond of describing
+lynching mobs as &#8220;made up of the foremost citizens of the town.&#8221; In few
+cases that I know of, either South or North, except in back country
+neighbourhoods, has a mob been made up of what may be called the best
+citizens; but the best citizens have often stood afar off &#8220;decrying the
+mob&#8221;&mdash;as a Springfield man told me&mdash;and letting it go on. A mob is the
+method by which good citizens turn over the law and the government to the
+criminal or irresponsible classes.</p>
+
+<p>And no official in direct authority in Springfield that evening,
+apparently, had so much as an ounce of grit within him. The sheriff came
+out and made a weak speech in which he said he &#8220;didn&#8217;t want to hurt
+anybody.&#8221; They threw stones at him and broke his windows. The chief of
+police sent eighteen men to the jail but did not go near himself. All of
+these policemen undoubtedly sympathised with the mob in its efforts to get
+at the slayer of their brother officer; at least, they did nothing
+effective to prevent the lynching. An appeal was made to the Mayor to
+order out the engine companies that water might be turned on the mob. He
+said he didn&#8217;t like to; <i>the hose might be cut</i>. The local militia company
+was called to its barracks, but the officer in charge hesitated,
+vacillated, doubted his authority, and objected finally because he had no
+ammunition <i>except</i> Krag-Jorgenson cartridges, which, if fired into a mob,
+would kill too many people! The soldiers did not stir that night from the
+safe and comfortable precincts of their armoury.</p>
+
+<p>A sort of dry rot, a moral paralysis, seems to strike the administrators
+of law in a town like Springfield. What can be expected of officers who
+are not accustomed to enforce the law, or of a people not accustomed to
+obey it&mdash;or who make reservations and exceptions when they do enforce it
+or obey it?</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><i>Threats to Lynch the Judges</i></p>
+
+<p>When the sheriff made his speech to the mob, urging them to let the law
+take its course they jeered him. The law! When, in the past, had the law
+taken its proper course in Clark County? Some one shouted, referring to
+Dixon:</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;He&#8217;ll only get fined for shooting in the city limits.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;He&#8217;ll get ten days in jail and suspended sentence.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Then there were voices:</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_207" id="Page_207">[Pg 207]</a></span>&#8220;Let&#8217;s go hang Mower and Miller&#8221;&mdash;the two judges.</p>
+
+<p>This threat indeed, was frequently repeated both on the night of the
+lynching and on the day following.</p>
+
+<p>So the mob came finally, and cracked the door of the jail with a railroad
+rail. This jail is said to be the strongest in Ohio, and having seen it, I
+can well believe that the report is true. But steel bars have never yet
+kept out a mob; it takes something a good deal stronger: human courage
+backed up by the consciousness of being right.</p>
+
+<p>They murdered the Negro in cold blood in the jail doorway; then they
+dragged him to the principal business street and hung him to a
+telegraph-pole, afterward riddling his lifeless body with revolver shots.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><i>Lesson of a Hanging Negro</i></p>
+
+<p>That was the end of that! Mob justice administered! And there the Negro
+hung until daylight the next morning&mdash;an unspeakably grizzly, dangling
+horror, advertising the shame of the town. His head was shockingly crooked
+to one side, his ragged clothing, cut for souvenirs, exposed in places his
+bare body: he dripped blood. And, with the crowds of men both here and at
+the morgue where the body was publicly exhibited, came young boys in
+knickerbockers, and little girls and women by scores, horrified but
+curious. They came even with baby carriages! Men made jokes: &#8220;A dead
+nigger is a good nigger.&#8221; And the purblind, dollars-and-cents man, most
+despicable of all, was congratulating the public:</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;It&#8217;ll save the county a lot of money!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Significant lessons, these, for the young!</p>
+
+<p>But the mob wasn&#8217;t through with its work. Easy people imagine that, having
+hanged a Negro, the mob goes quietly about its business; but that is never
+the way of the mob. Once released, the spirit of anarchy spreads and
+spreads, not subsiding until it has accomplished its full measure of evil.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><i>Mob Burning of Negro Saloons</i></p>
+
+<p>All the following day a rumbling, angry crowd filled the streets of
+Springfield, threatening to burn out the notorious Levee, threatening
+Judges Mower and Miller, threatening<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_208" id="Page_208">[Pg 208]</a></span> the &#8220;niggers.&#8221; The local troops&mdash;to
+say nothing of the police force&mdash;which might easily have broken up the
+mob, remained sedulously in their armouries, vacillating, doubtful of
+authority, knowing that there were threats to burn and destroy, and making
+not one move toward the protection of the public. One of the captains was
+even permitted to go to a neighbouring city to a dance! At the very same
+time the panic-stricken officials were summoning troops from other towns.
+So night came on, the mob gathered around the notorious dives, some one
+touched a match, and the places of crime suddenly disgorged their foul
+inhabitants. Black and white, they came pouring out and vanished into the
+darkness where they belonged&mdash;from whence they did not return. Eight
+buildings went up in smoke, the fire department
+deliberating&mdash;intentionally, it is said&mdash;until the flames could not be
+controlled. The troops, almost driven out by the county prosecutor,
+McGrew, appeared after the mob had completed its work.</p>
+
+<p>Good work, badly done, a living demonstration of the inevitability of
+law&mdash;if not orderly, decent law, then of mob-law.</p>
+
+<p>For days following the troops filled Springfield, costing the state large
+sums of money, costing the county large sums of money. They chiefly
+guarded the public fountain; the mob had gone home&mdash;until next time.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><i>Efforts to Punish the Mob</i></p>
+
+<p>What happened after that? A perfunctory court-martial, that did absolutely
+nothing. A grand jury of really good citizens that sat for weeks, off and
+on; and like the mountain that was in travail and brought forth a mouse,
+they indicted two boys and two men out of all that mob, not for murder,
+but for &#8220;breaking into jail.&#8221; And, curiously enough, it developed&mdash;how do
+such things develop?&mdash;that every man on the grand jury was a Republican,
+chosen by Republican county officers, and in their report they severely
+censured the police force (Democratic), and the mayor (Democratic), and
+had not one word of disapproval for the sheriff (Republican). Curiously
+enough, also, the public did not become enthusiastic over the report of
+that grand jury.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_209" id="Page_209">[Pg 209]</a></span>But the worst feature of all in this Springfield lynching was the apathy
+of the public. No one really seemed to care. A &#8220;nigger&#8221; had been hanged:
+what of it? But the law itself had been lynched. What of that? I had just
+come from the South, where I had found the people of several lynching
+towns in a state of deep excitement&mdash;moral excitement if you like,
+thinking about this problem, quarrelling about it, expelling men from the
+church, impeaching sheriffs, dishonourably discharging whole militia
+companies. Here in Springfield, I found cold apathy, except for a few fine
+citizens, one of whom, City Solicitor Stewart L. Tatum, promptly offered
+his services to the sheriff and assisted in a vain effort to remove the
+Negro in a closed carriage and afterward at the risk of personal assault
+earnestly attempted to defeat the purposes of the mob. Another of these
+citizens, the Rev. Father Cogan, pleaded with the mob on the second night
+of the rioting at risk to himself; another withdrew from the militia
+company because it had not done its duty. And afterward the city officials
+were stirred by the faintest of faint spasms of righteousness: some of the
+Negro saloons were closed up, but within a month, the most notorious of
+all the dive-keepers, Hurley, the Negro political boss, was permitted to
+open an establishment&mdash;through the medium of a brother-in-law!</p>
+
+<p>If there ever was an example of good citizenship lying flat on its back
+with political corruption squatting on its neck, Springfield furnished an
+example of that condition. There was no reconstructive movement, no rising
+and organisation of the better sort of citizens. Negro dives gradually
+reopened, the same corrupt politics continued: and the result was logical
+and inevitable. About two years later, in February, 1906, another race
+riot broke out in Springfield&mdash;worse in some ways than the first. On
+February 26th, Martin M. Davis, a white brakeman, was shot in the railroad
+yards near a row of notorious Negro houses, by Edward Dean, a coloured
+man. The Negro was at once removed from the city and a mob which had
+gathered in anticipation of another lynching, when it was cheated of its
+victim, set fire to a number of houses in the Negro settlement. The
+militia was at once called out, but the following night the mob gathered
+as before and visiting the Negro settlement, tried to set fire to other buildings.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_210" id="Page_210">[Pg 210]</a></span>It is significant that on the very night that this riot occurred the city
+council had under consideration an ordinance prohibiting the use of
+screens or other obstructions to the view of the interior of saloons after
+closing hours on <ins class="correction" title="original: weeks">week</ins> days or during Sundays. A committee of the council,
+favourable to the saloon interests, had recommended that the ordinance be
+not acted upon by council but referred to the people at a distant
+election, a proposition wholly illegal. While Stewart L. Tatum the city
+solicitor to whom I have already referred, argued to the council the
+illegality of the proposal made by the committee the noise of the mob
+reached the council chamber and the friends of the ordinance seized the
+opportunity to adjourn and delay action that would evidently result in the
+defeat of the ordinance.</p>
+
+<p>Finally, as a result of both these riots, the city was mildly stirred; a
+Civic League was formed by prominent citizens and the <i>attack on property</i>
+vigorously deprecated; the passage of the screen ordinance was recommended
+and at the next meeting of the council this ordinance, which had been
+vetoed by the mayor of the previous administration and had excited
+considerable public interest during a period of two years, was passed and
+has proved of great assistance to the police department in controlling the
+low saloons where the riot spirit is bred.</p>
+
+<p>I turn with pleasure from the story of this lynching to <ins class="correction" title="original: anorthern">another</ins> Northern
+town, where I found as satisfying an example of how to deal with a mob as
+this country has known.</p>
+
+<p>In Springfield we had an exhibition of nearly complete supineness and
+apathy before the mob; in Statesboro, Ga., we discovered a decided
+law-and-order element, not strong enough, however, to do much; in
+Huntsville, Ala., we had a tremendous moral awakening. In Danville, Ill.,
+we find an example of law vindicated, magnificently and completely,
+through the heroism of a single man, backed up later by wholesome public
+opinion.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><i>Character of Danville, Ill.</i></p>
+
+<p>Danville presented many of the characteristics of Springfield, O. It had a
+growing Negro population and there<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_211" id="Page_211">[Pg 211]</a></span> had been an awakening race prejudice
+between the white workingmen and the Negroes, especially in the
+neighbouring coal mines.</p>
+
+<p>As in other places where lynchings have occurred, I found that Vermilion
+County, of which Danville is the seat, had also a heavy record of homicide
+and other crime. They counted there on a homicide every sixty days; at the
+term of court preceding the lynching seven murder trials were on the
+docket; and in all its history the county never had had a legal hanging,
+though it had suffered two lynchings. The criminal record of Vermilion
+County was exceeded at that time only by Cook County (Chicago), and St.
+Clair County (East St. Louis), where the horrible lynching of a Negro
+schoolmaster took place (at Belleville) in the preceding summer.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><i>Story of a Starved Negro</i></p>
+
+<p>The crime which caused the rioting was committed by the familiar vagrant
+Negro from the South&mdash;in this case a Kentucky Negro named Wilson&mdash;a
+miserable, illiterate, half-starved creature who had been following a
+circus. He had begged along the road in Indiana and no one would feed him.
+He came across the line into Illinois, found a farmhouse door open, saw
+food on the table, and darted in to steal it. As he was leaving, the woman
+of the house appeared. In an animal-like panic, the Negro darted for the
+door, knocking the woman down as he escaped. Immediately the cry went up
+that there had been an attempted criminal assault, but the sheriff told me
+that the woman never made any such charge and the Negro bore all the
+evidence of the truthfulness of the assertion that he was starving; he was
+so emaciated with hunger that even after his arrest the sheriff dared not
+allow him a full meal.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><i>Hot Weather and Mobs</i></p>
+
+<p>But it was enough to stir up the mob spirit. It was Saturday night, July
+25th, and the usual crowd from all over the county had gathered in the
+town. Among the crowd were many coal miners, who had just been paid off
+and were drinking. As in Springfield, the town had a very large number of
+saloons, ninety-one within a radius of five miles, to a population of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_212" id="Page_212">[Pg 212]</a></span>
+some 25,000. Most Northern towns are far worse in this respect than the
+average Southern town. It was a hot night; mobs work best in hot weather.
+Statistics, indeed, show that the great majority of lynchings take place
+in the summer, particularly in July and August.</p>
+
+<p>It was known that the sheriff had brought his Negro prisoner to the jail,
+and the crime was widely discussed. The whole city was a sort of human
+tinder-box, ready to flare up at a spark of violence.</p>
+
+<p>Well, the spark came&mdash;in a saloon. Metcalf, a Negro, had words with a
+well-known white butcher named Henry Gatterman. Both had been drinking.
+The Negro drew a revolver and shot Gatterman dead. Instantly the city was
+in a furor of excitement. The police appeared and arrested Metcalf, and
+got him finally with great difficulty to the police station, where he was
+locked up. A mob formed instantly. It was led, at first, by a crowd of
+lawless boys from sixteen to eighteen years old. Rapidly gathering
+strength, it rushed into the city hall, and although the mayor, the chief
+of police, and nearly the entire police force were present, they got the
+Negro out and hanged him to a telegraph-pole in the main street of the
+town, afterward shooting his body full of holes.</p>
+
+<p>Intoxicated by their swift success and, mob-like, growing in recklessness
+and bloodthirstiness, they now turned upon the jail determined to lynch
+the Negro Wilson. It was a much uglier mob than any I have hitherto
+described; it was a drunken mob, and it had already tasted blood. It
+swarmed around the jail, yelling, shooting, and breaking the windows with
+stones.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><i>A &#8220;Strict&#8221; Sheriff</i></p>
+
+<p>Sheriff Hardy H. Whitlock of Vermilion County had never been looked upon
+as an especially remarkable man&mdash;except, as I was told everywhere, he had
+a record as <i>a strict sheriff</i>, as a man who did his best to enforce the
+law in times of peace. He and the state&#8217;s attorney were so industrious
+that they caught and punished four times as many criminals in proportion
+to population as were convicted in Chicago. The sheriff was a big, solid,
+deliberate man with gray eyes. He was born in Tennessee. His father was an
+itinerant Presbyterian<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_213" id="Page_213">[Pg 213]</a></span> preacher, always poor, doing good for everybody
+but himself, and stern in his conceptions of right and wrong. His mother,
+as the sheriff related, made him obey the law with peach-tree switches.
+His history was the commonest of the common; not much education, had to
+make his living, worked in a livery stable. He was faithful at that,
+temperate, friendly. They elected him constable, an office that he held
+for seven years. He was faithful at that. They elected him sheriff of the
+county. He went at the new task as he had at all his other work, with no
+especial brilliancy, but steadily doing his duty, catching criminals. He
+found a great deal to learn and he learned. The extradition laws of the
+states troubled him when he wanted to bring prisoners home. There was no
+compilation of the laws on the subject. Here was work to be done. Although
+no lawyer, he went at it laboriously and compiled a book of five hundred
+pages, containing all the extradition laws of the country, and had it
+published at his own expense.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><i>Defending a Jail With a Riot-gun</i></p>
+
+<p>And when the crisis came that night with the mob howling around his jail,
+Hardy Whitlock had become so accustomed to doing his duty that he didn&#8217;t
+know how to do anything else. Here was the jail to be protected: he
+intended to protect it. He sent for no troops&mdash;there was no time
+anyhow&mdash;nor for the police. He had a couple of deputies and his wife.
+Though the mob was breaking the windows of the house and the children were
+there, his wife said:</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Give me a gun, Hardy, and I&#8217;ll stay by you.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The sheriff went out on the porch, unarmed, in his shirt-sleeves, and made
+them a little speech. They yelled at him, threw stones, fired revolvers.
+They brought a railroad rail to break in the door. He went out among them,
+called them Bill, and Jim, and Dick, and persuaded them to put it down;
+but others took it up willingly.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Are you going to open the door?&#8221; they yelled.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;No!&#8221; said the sheriff.</p>
+
+<p>Then he went in and got his riot-gun, well loaded with duck-shot. He was
+one man against two thousand. They began battering on the iron door,
+yelling and shooting. It was not<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_214" id="Page_214">[Pg 214]</a></span> an especially strong door, and it began
+to give at the bottom, and finally bent inward enough to admit a man&#8217;s
+body. The crucial moment had come: and the sheriff was there to meet it.
+He stuck his riot-gun out of the opening and began firing. The mob fell
+back but came charging forward again, wild with passion. The sheriff fired
+again, seven times in all, and one of his deputies opened with a revolver.
+For a time pandemonium reigned; they attempted the house entrance of the
+jail; the sheriff was there also with his riot-gun; they threatened
+dynamite and fire. They cut down the Negro, Metcalf, brought him in front
+of the jail, piled straw on the body and attempted to burn it. Part of the
+time they were incited to greater violence by a woman who stood in a
+waggon-box across the street. So they raged all night, firing at the jail,
+but not daring to come too near the man with the riot-gun.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;On Sunday,&#8221; the sheriff told me, &#8220;I realised I was up against it. I knew
+the tough element in town had it in for me.&#8221;</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><i>How a Real Sheriff Punished a Mob</i></p>
+
+<p>They even threatened him on the street. A large number of men had been
+wounded by the firing, some dangerously, though no one, fortunately, was
+killed. The sheriff stood alone in the town. A lesser man might still have
+failed ignominiously. But Whitlock went about the nearest duty: punishing
+the rioters. He had warrants issued and arrested every man he could find
+who was streaked or speckled with shot&mdash;indubitable evidence of his
+presence in the mob at the jail door. Many fled the city, but he got
+twenty or thirty.</p>
+
+<p>Vermilion County also had a prosecuting attorney who knew his duty&mdash;J. W.
+Keeslar. Judge Thompson called a grand jury, Attorney Keeslar pushed the
+cases with great vigour, and this was the result: thirteen men and one
+woman (the disorderly woman of the waggon-box) were sent to the
+penitentiary, eight others were heavily fined. At the same time the Negro,
+Wilson, came up for trial, pleaded guilty, and was legally punished by a
+term in the penitentiary.</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/gs19.jpg" alt="" /></div>
+<p class="center"><span style="margin-left: 10em;"><small>Photograph by Edmondson</small></span></p>
+<p class="center">CHARLES W. CHESNUTT<br />
+The well-known novelist, author of &#8220;The Colonel&#8217;s Dream,&#8221;<br /> &#8220;The House Behind the Cedars,&#8221;
+&#8220;The Conjure Woman,&#8221; etc.<br />Mr. Chesnutt is a lawyer in
+Cleveland, Ohio.</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>And the people came strongly to the support of their officers. Hardy
+Whitlock became one of the most popular men in the county. Keeslar, coming
+up for re&euml;lection the following fall,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_215" id="Page_215">[Pg 215]</a></span> with mob-law for the essential
+issue, was returned to his office with an overwhelming majority. The
+sheriff told me that, in his opinion, the success of the officers in
+convicting the lynchers was due largely to a thoroughly awakened public
+opinion, the strong attitude of the newspapers, especially those of
+Chicago, the help of the governor, and the feeling, somehow, that the best
+sentiment of the county was behind them.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><i>Conclusions Regarding Lynching in This Country</i></p>
+
+<p>And finally, we may, perhaps venture upon a few general conclusions.</p>
+
+<p>Lynching in this country is peculiarly the white man&#8217;s burden. The white
+man has taken all the responsibility of government; he really governs in
+the North as well as in the South, in the North disfranchising the Negro
+with cash, in the South by law or by intimidation. All the machinery of
+justice is in his hands. How keen is the need, then, of calmness and
+strict justice in dealing with the Negro! Nothing more surely tends to
+bring the white man down to the lowest level of the criminal Negro than
+yielding to those blind instincts of savagery which find expression in the
+mob. The man who joins a mob, by his very acts, puts himself on a level
+with the Negro criminal: both have given way wholly to brute passion. For,
+if civilisation means anything, it means self-restraint; casting away
+self-restraint the white man becomes as savage as the criminal Negro.</p>
+
+<p>If the white man sets an example of non-obedience to law, of
+non-enforcement of law, and of unequal justice, what can be expected of
+the Negro? A criminal father is a poor preacher of homilies to a wayward
+son. The Negro sees a man, white or black, commit murder and go free, over
+and over again in all these lynching counties. Why should he fear to
+murder? Every passion of the white man is reflected and emphasised in the
+criminal Negro.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr style="width: 50%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_216" id="Page_216">[Pg 216]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_X" id="CHAPTER_X"></a>CHAPTER X</h2>
+<h3>AN OSTRACISED RACE IN FERMENT</h3>
+<h3>THE CONFLICT OF NEGRO PARTIES AND NEGRO LEADERS OVER METHODS OF DEALING WITH THEIR OWN PROBLEM</h3>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="dropcap"><span class="caps">One</span> of the things that has interested me most of all in studying Negro
+communities, especially in the North, has been to find them so torn by
+cliques and divided by such wide differences of opinion.</p>
+
+<p>No other element of our population presents a similar condition; the
+Italians, the Jews, the Germans and especially the Chinese and Japanese
+are held together not only by a different language, but by ingrained and
+ancient national habits. They group themselves naturally. But the Negro is
+an American in language and customs; he knows no other traditions and he
+has no other conscious history; a large proportion, indeed, possess
+varying degrees of white American blood (restless blood!) and yet the
+Negro is not accepted as an American. Instead of losing himself gradually
+in the dominant race, as the Germans, Irish, and Italians are doing,
+adding those traits or qualities with which Time fashions and modifies
+this human mosaic called the American nation, the Negro is set apart as a
+peculiar people.</p>
+
+<p>With every Negro, then, an essential question is: &#8220;How shall I meet this
+attempt to put me off by myself?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>That question in one form or another&mdash;politically, industrially,
+socially&mdash;is being met daily, almost hourly, by every Negro in this
+country. It colours his very life.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;You don&#8217;t know, and you can&#8217;t know,&#8221; a Negro said to me, &#8220;what it is to
+be a problem, to understand that everyone is watching you and studying
+you, to have your mind constantly on your own actions. It has made us
+think and talk about ourselves more than other people do. It has made us
+self-conscious and sensitive.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_217" id="Page_217">[Pg 217]</a></span>It is scarcely surprising, then, that upon such a vital question there
+should be wide differences of opinion among Negroes. As a matter of fact,
+there are almost innumerable points of view and suggested modes of
+conduct, but they all group themselves into two great parties which are
+growing more distinct in outline and purpose every day. Both parties exist
+in every part of the country, but it is in the North that the struggle
+between them is most evident. I have found a sharper feeling and a
+bitterer discussion of race relationships among the Negroes of the North
+than among those of the South. If you want to hear the race question
+discussed with fire and fervour, go to Boston!</p>
+
+<p>For two hundred and fifty years the Negro had no thought, no leadership,
+no parties; then suddenly he was set free, and became, so far as law could
+make him, an integral and indistinguishable part of the American people.
+But it was only in a few places in the North and among comparatively few
+individuals that he ever approximately reached the position of a free
+citizen, that he ever really enjoyed the rights granted to him under the
+law. In the South he was never free politically, socially, and
+industrially, in the sense that the white man is free, and is not so
+to-day.</p>
+
+<p>But in Boston, and in other Northern cities in lesser degree, a group of
+Negroes reached essentially equal citizenship. A few families trace their
+lineage back to the very beginnings of civilisation in this country,
+others were freemen long before the war, a few had revolutionary war
+records of which their descendants are intensely and justly proud. Some of
+the families have far more white blood than black; though the census shows
+that only about 40 per cent. of the Negroes of Boston are mulattoes, the
+real proportion is undoubtedly very much higher.</p>
+
+<p>In abolition times these Negroes were much regarded. Many of them attained
+and kept a certain real position among the whites; they were even accorded
+unusual opportunities and favours. They found such a place as an educated
+Negro might find to-day (or at least as he found a few years ago) in
+Germany. In some instances they became wealthy. At a time when the North
+was passionately concerned in the abolition of slavery the colour of his
+skin sometimes gave the Negro special advantages, even honours.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_218" id="Page_218">[Pg 218]</a></span>For years after the war this condition continued; then a stream of
+immigration of Southern Negroes began to appear, at first a mere rivulet,
+but latterly increasing in volume, until to-day all of our Northern cities
+have swarming coloured colonies. Owing to the increase of the Negro
+population and for other causes which I have already mentioned, sentiment
+in the North toward the Negro has been undergoing a swift change.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><i>How Colour Lines Are Drawn</i></p>
+
+<p>Now the tragedy of the Negro is the colour of his skin: he is easily
+recognisable. The human tendency is to class people together by outward
+appearances. When the line began to be drawn it was drawn not alone
+against the unworthy Negro, but against the Negro. It was not so much
+drawn by the highly intelligent white man as by the white man. And the
+white man alone has not drawn it, but the Negroes themselves are drawing
+it&mdash;and more and more every day. So we draw the line in this country
+against the Chinese, the Japanese, and in some measure against the Jews
+(and they help to draw it). So we speak with disparagement of &#8220;dagoes&#8221; and
+&#8220;square heads.&#8221; Right or wrong, these lines, in our present state of
+civilisation, are drawn. They are here; they must be noted and dealt with.</p>
+
+<p>What was the result? The Northern Negro who has been enjoying the free
+life of Boston and Philadelphia has protested passionately against the
+drawing of a colour line: he wishes to be looked upon, and not at all
+unnaturally, for he possesses human ambitions and desires, solely for his
+worth as a man, not as a Negro.</p>
+
+<p>In Philadelphia I heard of the old Philadelphia Negroes, in Indianapolis
+of the old Indianapolis families, in Boston a sharp distinction was drawn
+between the &#8220;Boston Negroes&#8221; and the recent Southern importation. Even in
+Chicago, where there is nothing old, I found the same spirit.</p>
+
+<p>In short, it is the protest against separation, against being deprived of
+the advantages and opportunities of a free life. In the South the most
+intelligent and best educated Negroes are, generally speaking, the leaders
+of their race, but in Northern cities some of the ablest Negroes will have
+nothing to do with the masses of their own people or with racial
+movements;<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_219" id="Page_219">[Pg 219]</a></span> they hold themselves aloof, asserting that there is no
+colour line, and if there is, there should not be. Their associations and
+their business are largely with white people and they cling passionately
+to the fuller life.</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/gs20.jpg" alt="" /></div>
+<p class="center"><span style="margin-left: 12em;"><small>Photograph by Dimock</small></span></p>
+<p class="center">DR. BOOKER T. WASHINGTON</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;When I am sick,&#8221; one of them said to me, &#8220;I don&#8217;t go to a Negro doctor,
+but to a doctor. Colour has nothing to do with it.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>In the South the same general setting apart of Negroes as Negroes is going
+on, of course, on an immeasurably wider scale. By disfranchisement they
+are being separated politically, the Jim Crow laws set them apart socially
+and physically, the hostility of white labour in some callings pushes them
+aside in the industrial activities. But the South presents no such
+striking contrasts as the North, because no Southern Negroes were ever
+really accorded a high degree of citizenship.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><i>Two Great Negro Parties</i></p>
+
+<p>Now, the Negroes of the country are meeting the growing discrimination
+against them in two ways, out of which have grown the two great parties to
+which I have referred. One party has sprung, naturally, from the thought
+of the Northern Negro and is a product of the freedom which the Northern
+Negro has enjoyed; although, of course, it finds many followers in the
+South.</p>
+
+<p>The other is the natural product of the far different conditions in the
+South, where the Negro cannot speak his mind, where he has never realised
+any large degree of free citizenship. Both are led by able men, and both
+are backed by newspapers and magazines. It has come, indeed, to the point
+where most Negroes of any intelligence at all have taken their place on
+one side or the other.</p>
+
+<p>The second-named party, which may best, perhaps, be considered first, is
+made up of the great mass of the coloured people both South and North; its
+undisputed leader is Booker T. Washington.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><i>The Rise of Booker T. Washington</i></p>
+
+<p>Nothing has been more remarkable in the recent history of the Negro than
+Washington&#8217;s rise to influence as a leader,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_220" id="Page_220">[Pg 220]</a></span> and the spread of his ideals
+of education and progress. It is noteworthy that he was born in the South,
+a slave, that he knew intimately the common struggling life of his people
+and the attitude of the white race toward them. He worked his way to
+education in Southern schools and was graduated at Hampton&mdash;a story which
+he tells best himself in his book, &#8220;Up From Slavery.&#8221; He was and is
+Southern in feeling and point of view. When he began to think how he could
+best help his people the same question came to him that comes to every
+Negro:</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;What shall we do about this discrimination and separation?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>And his was the type of character which answered, &#8220;Make the best of it;
+overcome it with self-development.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The very essence of his doctrine is this:</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Get yourself right, and the world will be all right.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>His whole work and his life have said to the white man:</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;You&#8217;ve set us apart. You don&#8217;t want us. All right; we&#8217;ll be apart. We can
+succeed as Negroes.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>It is the doctrine of the opportunist and optimist: peculiarly, indeed,
+the doctrine of the man of the soil, who has come up fighting, dealing
+with the world, not as he would like to have it, but as it overtakes him.
+Many great leaders have been like that: Lincoln was one. They have the
+simplicity and patience of the soil, and the immense courage and faith. To
+prevent being crushed by circumstances they develop humour; they laugh off
+their troubles. Washington has all of these qualities of the common life:
+he possesses in high degree what some one has called &#8220;great commonness.&#8221;
+And finally he has a simple faith in humanity, and in the just purposes of
+the Creator of humanity.</p>
+
+<p>Being a hopeful opportunist Washington takes the Negro as he finds him,
+often ignorant, weak, timid, surrounded by hostile forces, and tells him
+to go to work at anything, anywhere, but go to work, learn how to work
+better, save money, have a better home, raise a better family.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><i>What Washington Teaches the Negro</i></p>
+
+<p>The central idea of his doctrine, indeed, is work. He teaches that if the
+Negro wins by real worth a strong economic<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_221" id="Page_221">[Pg 221]</a></span> position in the country, other
+rights and privileges will come to him naturally. He should get his
+rights, not by gift of the white man, but by earning them himself.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I noticed,&#8221; he says, &#8220;when I first went to Tuskegee to start the Tuskegee
+Normal and Industrial Institute, that some of the white people about there
+looked rather doubtfully at me. I thought I could get their influence by
+telling them how much algebra and history and science and all those things
+I had in my head, but they treated me about the same as they did before.
+They didn&#8217;t seem to care about the algebra, history, and science that were
+in my head only. Those people never even began to have confidence in me
+until we commenced to build a large three-story brick building; and then
+another and another, until now we have eighty-six buildings which have
+been erected largely by the labour of our students, and to-day we have the
+respect and confidence of all the white people in that section.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;There is an unmistakable influence that comes over a white man when he
+sees a black man living in a two-story brick house that has been paid
+for.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>In another place he has given his ideas of what education should be:</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;How I wish that, from the most cultured and highly endowed university in
+the great North to the humblest log cabin schoolhouse in Alabama, we could
+burn, as it were, into the hearts and heads of all that usefulness, that
+service to our brother is the supreme end of education.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>It is, indeed, to the teaching of service in the highest sense that
+Washington&#8217;s life has been devoted. While he urges every Negro to reach as
+high a place as he can, he believes that the great masses of the Negroes
+are best fitted to-day for manual labour; his doctrine is that they should
+be taught to do that labour better: that when the foundations have been
+laid in sound industry and in business enterprise, the higher callings and
+honours will come of themselves.</p>
+
+<p>His emphasis is rather upon duties than upon rights. He does not advise
+the Negro to surrender a single right: on the other hand, he urges his
+people to use fully every right they have or can get&mdash;for example, to vote
+wherever possible, and vote thoughtfully. But he believes that some of the
+rights<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_222" id="Page_222">[Pg 222]</a></span> given the Negro have been lost because the Negro had neither the
+wisdom nor the strength to use them properly.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><i>Washington&#8217;s Influence on His People</i></p>
+
+<p>I have not said much thus far in these articles about Booker T.
+Washington, but as I have been travelling over this country, South and
+North, studying Negro communities, I have found the mark of him everywhere
+in happier human lives. Wherever I found a prosperous Negro enterprise, a
+thriving business place, a good home, there I was almost sure to find
+Booker T. Washington&#8217;s picture over the fireplace or a little framed motto
+expressing his gospel of work and service. I have heard bitter things said
+about Mr. Washington by both coloured people and white. I have waited and
+investigated many of these stories, and I am telling here what I have seen
+and known of his influence among thousands of common, struggling human
+beings. Many highly educated Negroes, especially, in the North, dislike
+him and oppose him, but he has brought new hope and given new courage to
+the masses of his race. He has given them a working plan of life. And is
+there a higher test of usefulness? Measured by any standard, white or
+black, Washington must be regarded to-day as one of the great men of this
+country: and in the future he will be so honoured.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><i>Dr. Du Bois and the Negro</i></p>
+
+<p>The party led by Washington is made up of the masses of the common people;
+the radical party, on the other hand, represents what may be called the
+intellectuals. The leading exponent of its point of view is unquestionably
+Professor W. E. B. Du Bois of Atlanta University&mdash;though, like all
+minority parties, it is torn with dissension and discontent. Dr. Du Bois
+was born in Massachusetts of a family that had no history of Southern
+slavery. He has a large intermixture of white blood. Broadly educated at
+Harvard and in the universities of Germany, he is to-day one of the able
+sociologists of this country. His economic studies of the Negro made for
+the United States Government and for the Atlanta University conference
+(which he organised) are works of sound scholarship and furnish the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_223" id="Page_223">[Pg 223]</a></span>
+student with the best single source of accurate information regarding the
+Negro at present obtainable in this country. And no book gives a deeper
+insight into the inner life of the Negro, his struggles and his
+aspirations, than &#8220;The Souls of Black Folk.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Dr. Du Bois has the temperament of the scholar and idealist&mdash;critical,
+sensitive, unhumorous, impatient, often covering its deep feeling with
+sarcasm and cynicism. When the question came to him:</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;What shall the Negro do about discrimination?&#8221; his answer was the exact
+reverse of Washington&#8217;s: it was the voice of Massachusetts:</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Do not submit! agitate, object, fight.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Where Washington reaches the hearts of his people, Du Bois appeals to
+their heads. Du Bois is not a leader of men, as Washington is: he is
+rather a promulgator of ideas. While Washington is building a great
+educational institution and organising the practical activities of the
+race, Du Bois is the lonely critic holding up distant ideals. Where
+Washington cultivates friendly human relationships with the white people
+among whom the lot of the Negro is cast, Du Bois, sensitive to rebuffs,
+draws more and more away from white people.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><i>A Negro Declaration of Independence</i></p>
+
+<p>Several years ago Du Bois organised the Niagara movement for the purpose
+of protesting against the drawing of the colour line. It is important, not
+so much for the extent of its membership, which is small, but because it
+represents, genuinely, a more or less prevalent point of view among many
+coloured people.</p>
+
+<p>Its declaration of principles says:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>We refuse to allow the impression to remain that the Negro-American
+assents to inferiority, is submissive under oppression and apologetic
+before insults. Through helplessness we may submit, but the voice of
+protest of ten million Americans must never cease to assail the ears
+of their fellows, so long as America is unjust.</p>
+
+<p>Any discrimination based simply on race or colour is barbarous, we
+care not how hallowed it be by custom, expediency, or prejudice.
+Differences made on account of ignorance, immorality, or disease are
+legitimate methods of fighting evil, and against them we have no word
+of protest, but discriminations based simply and solely on physical
+peculiarities, place of birth, colour of skin, are relics of that
+unreasoning human savagery of which the world is, and ought to be,
+thoroughly ashamed.</p></div>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_224" id="Page_224">[Pg 224]</a></span>The object of the movement is to protest against disfranchisement and Jim
+Crow laws and to demand equal rights of education, equal civil rights,
+equal economic opportunities, and justice in the courts. Taking the ballot
+from the Negro they declare to be only a step to economic slavery; that it
+leaves the Negro defenceless before his competitor&mdash;that the
+disfranchisement laws in the South are being followed by all manner of
+other discriminations which interfere with the progress of the Negro.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Persistent manly agitation is the way to liberty,&#8221; says the declaration,
+&#8220;and toward this goal the Niagara movement has started.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The annual meeting of the movement was held last August in Boston, the
+chief gathering being in Faneuil Hall. Every reference in the speeches to
+Garrison, Phillips, and Sumner was cheered to the echo. &#8220;It seemed,&#8221; said
+one newspaper report, &#8220;like a revival of the old spirit of
+abolitionism&mdash;with the white man left out.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Several organisations in the country, like the New England Suffrage
+League, the Equal Rights League of Georgia, and others, take much the same
+position as the Niagara movement.</p>
+
+<p>The party led by Dr. Du Bois is, in short, a party of protest which
+endeavours to prevent Negro separation and discrimination against Negroes
+by agitation and political influence.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><i>Two Negro Parties Compared</i></p>
+
+<p>These two points of view, of course, are not peculiar to Negroes; they
+divide all human thought. The opportunist and optimist on the one hand
+does his great work with the world as he finds it: he is resourceful,
+constructive, familiar. On the other hand, the idealist, the agitator, who
+is also a pessimist, performs the function of the critic, he sees the
+world as it should be and cries out to have it instantly changed.</p>
+
+<p>Thus with these two great Negro parties. Each is working for essentially
+the same end&mdash;better conditions of life for the Negro&mdash;each contains brave
+and honest men, and each is sure, humanly enough, that the other side is
+not only wrong, but venally wrong, whereas both parties are needed and
+both perform a useful function.</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/gs21.jpg" alt="" /></div>
+<p class="center"><span style="margin-left: 12em;"><small>Photograph by Purdy</small></span></p>
+<p class="center">DR. W. E. B. DU BOIS<br />of Atlanta University</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_225" id="Page_225">[Pg 225]</a></span>The chief, and at present almost the only, newspaper exponent of the
+radical Negro point of view is the Boston <i>Guardian</i>, published by William
+Monroe Trotter. Mr. Trotter is a mulatto who was graduated a few years ago
+with high honours from Harvard. His wife, who is active with him in his
+work, has so little Negro blood that she would ordinarily pass for white.
+Mr. Trotter&#8217;s father fought in the Civil War and rose to be a lieutenant
+in Colonel Hallowell&#8217;s Massachusetts regiment. He was one of the leaders
+of the Negro soldiers who refused to accept $8 a month as servants when
+white soldiers received $13. He argued that if a Negro soldier stood up
+and stopped a bullet, he was as valuable to the country as the white
+soldier. Though his family suffered, he served without pay rather than
+accept the money. It was the uncompromising spirit of Garrison and
+Phillips.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><i>A Negro Newspaper of Agitation</i></p>
+
+<p>The <i>Guardian</i> is as violent and bitter in some of its denunciations as
+the most reactionary white paper in the South. It would have the North
+take up arms again and punish the South for its position on the Negro
+question! It breathes the spirit of prejudice. Reading it sometimes, I am
+reminded of Senator Tillman&#8217;s speeches. It answers the white publicity
+given in the South to black crime against white women by long accounts of
+similar crimes of white men. One of its chief points of conflict is the
+position of President Roosevelt regarding the Brownsville riot and the
+discharge of Negro soldiers; the attack on Roosevelt is unceasing, and in
+this viewpoint, at least, it is supported undoubtedly by no small
+proportion of the Negroes of the country. Another leading activity is its
+fight on Booker T. Washington and his work. Denouncing Washington as a
+&#8220;notorious and incorrigible Jim Crowist,&#8221; it says that he &#8220;dares to assert
+that the best way to get rights is not to oppose their being taken away,
+but to get money.&#8221; Two or three years ago, when Mr. Washington went to
+Boston to address a coloured audience in Zion Church, Mr. Trotter and his
+friends scattered cayenne pepper on the rostrum and created a disturbance
+which broke up the meeting. Mr. Trotter went to jail for the offence. From
+the <i>Guardian</i><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_226" id="Page_226">[Pg 226]</a></span> of September 2d I cut part of the leading editorial which
+will show its attitude:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p class="center">PROPHET OF SLAVERY AND TRAITOR TO RACE</p>
+
+<p>As another mark of the treacherous character of Booker Washington in
+matters concerning the race, come his discordant notes in support of
+Secretary Taft for President of the United States in spite of the
+fact that every Negro organisation of any note devoted to the cause
+of equal rights and justice have condemned President Roosevelt for
+his unpardonable treatment of the soldiers of the 25th Infantry, U.
+S. A., and Secretary Taft for his duplicity, and declared their
+determination to seek the defeat of either if nominated for the
+office of President of these United States, or anyone named by them
+for said office. Booker Washington, ever concerned for his own
+selfish ambitions, indifferent to the cries of the race so long as he
+wins the approval of white men who do not believe in the Negro,
+defies the absolutely unanimous call of all factions of the race for
+Foraker. Leader of the self-seekers, he has persistently, but thank
+heaven unsuccessfully, sought to entangle the whole race in the
+meshes of subordination. Knowing the race could only be saved by
+fighting cowardice, we have just as persistently resisted every
+attempt he has made to plant his white flag on the domains of equal
+manhood rights and our efforts have been rewarded by the universal
+denunciation of his doctrines of submission and his utter elimination
+as a possible leader of his race.</p></div>
+
+<p>Generally speaking, the radical party has fought every movement of any
+sort that tends to draw a colour line.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><i>Boston Hotel for Coloured People</i></p>
+
+<p>One of the enterprises of Boston which interested me deeply was a Negro
+hotel, the Astor House, which is operated by Negroes for Negro guests. It
+has 200 rooms, with a telephone in each room, a restaurant, and other
+accommodations. It struck me that it was a good example of Negro self-help
+that Negroes should be proud of. But upon mentioning it to a coloured man
+I met I found that he was violently opposed to it.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Why hotels for coloured men?&#8221; he asked. &#8220;I believe in hotels for men. The
+coloured man must not draw the line himself if he doesn&#8217;t want the white
+man to do it. He must demand and insist constantly upon his rights as an
+American citizen.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>I found in Boston and in other Northern cities many Negroes who took this
+position. A white woman, who sought to establish a help and rescue mission
+for coloured girls similar to those conducted for the Jews, Italians, and
+other nationalities in other cities, was violently opposed, on the ground
+that it set up<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_227" id="Page_227">[Pg 227]</a></span> a precedent for discrimination. In the same way separate
+settlement work (though there is a separate settlement for Jews in Boston)
+and the proposed separate Y. M. C. A. have met with strong protests.
+Everything that tends to set the Negro off as a Negro, whether the white
+man does it or the Negro does it, is bitterly opposed by this party of
+coloured people.</p>
+
+<p>They fought the Jamestown Exposition because it had a Negro Building,
+which they called the &#8220;Jim Crow Annex,&#8221; and they fought the National
+Christian Endeavour Convention because the leaders could not assure Negro
+delegates exactly equal facilities in the hotels and restaurants. Of
+course the denunciation of the white South is continuous and bitter. It is
+noteworthy, however, that even the leaders of the movement not only
+recognise and conduct separate newspapers and ask Negroes to support them,
+but that they urge Negroes to stand together politically.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><i>Boston Negroes Seen by a New York Negro Newspaper</i></p>
+
+<p>But the large proportion of coloured newspapers in the country, the
+strongest and ablest of which is perhaps the New York <i>Age</i>, are
+supporters of Washington and his ideals. The Boston correspondent of the
+<i>Age</i> said recently:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>It is unfortunate in Boston that we have a hall which we can get free
+of charge: we refer to Faneuil Hall. They work Faneuil Hall for all
+it is worth. Scarcely a month ever passes by that does not see a
+crowd of Afro-Americans in Faneuil Hall throwing up their hats,
+yelling and going into hysterics over some subject usually relating
+to somebody a thousand miles away, never in relation to conditions
+right at home. The better element of Negroes and the majority of our
+white friends in this city have become disgusted over the policy that
+is being pursued and has been pursued for several months in Boston.
+Your correspondent can give you no better evidence of the disgust
+than to state that a few days ago there was one of these hysterical
+meetings held in Faneuil Hall and our people yelled and cried and
+agitated for two hours and more. The next day not one of the leading
+papers, such as the <i>Herald</i> and the <i>Transcript</i>, had a single line
+concerning this meeting. A few years ago had a meeting been held in
+Faneuil Hall under the leadership of safe and conservative
+Afro-Americans, both of these newspapers and papers of similar
+character would have devoted from two to three columns to a
+discussion of it. Now, in Boston, they let such meetings completely
+alone.</p>
+
+<p>If there ever was a place where the Negro seems to have more freedom
+than he seems to know what to do with, it is in this city.</p></div>
+
+<p>In spite of the agitation against drawing the colour line by the radical
+party, however, the separation is still going on.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_228" id="Page_228">[Pg 228]</a></span> And it is not merely
+the demand of the white man that the Negro step aside by himself, for the
+Negro himself is drawing the colour line, and drawing it with as much
+enthusiasm as the white man. A genuine race-spirit or race-consciousness
+is developing. Negroes are meeting prejudice with self-development.</p>
+
+<p>It is a significant thing to find that many Negroes who a few years ago
+called themselves &#8220;Afro-Americans,&#8221; or &#8220;Coloured Americans,&#8221; and who
+winced at the name Negro, now use Negro as the race name with pride. While
+in Indianapolis I went to a Negro church to hear a speech by W. T. Vernon,
+one of the leading coloured men of the country, who was appointed Register
+of the United States Treasury by President Roosevelt. On the walls of the
+church hung the pictures of coloured men who had accomplished something
+for their race, and the essence of the speaker&#8217;s address was an appeal to
+racial pride and the demand that the race stand up for itself, encourage
+Negro business and patronise Negro industry. All of which, surely, is
+significant.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><i>How Negroes Themselves Draw the Colour Line</i></p>
+
+<p>The pressure for separation among the Negroes themselves is growing
+rapidly stronger. Where there are mixed schools in the North there is
+often pressure by Negroes for separate schools. The Philadelphia
+<i>Courant</i>, a Negro newspaper, in objecting to this new feeling, says:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Public sentiment, so far as the white people are concerned, does not
+object to the mixed school system in vogue in our city half as much
+as the Afro-American people seem to be doing themselves. We find them
+the chief objectors.</p></div>
+
+<p>One reason why the South to-day has a better development of Negro
+enterprise, one reason why Booker T. Washington believes that the South is
+a better place for the Negro than the North, and advises him to remain
+there, is this more advanced racial spirit. Prejudice there, being
+sharper, has forced the Negro back upon his own resources.</p>
+
+<p>Dr. Frissell of Hampton is always talking to his students of the
+&#8220;advantages of disadvantages.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>I was much struck with the remark of a Negro business man I met in Indianapolis:</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_229" id="Page_229">[Pg 229]</a></span>&#8220;The trouble here is,&#8221; he said,
+&#8220;that there is not enough prejudice against us.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;How is that?&#8221; I inquired.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Well, you see we are still clinging too much to the skirts of the white
+man. When you hate us more it will drive us together and make us support
+coloured enterprises.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>When in Chicago I heard of an interesting illustration of this idea. With
+the increasing number of Negro students prejudice has increased in the
+Chicago medical schools, until recently some of them have, by agreement,
+been closed to coloured graduate students. Concerning this condition, the
+Chicago <i>Conservator</i>, a Negro newspaper, says: &#8220;The cause of this
+extraordinary announcement is that the Southern students object to the
+presence of Negroes in the classes. Now it is up to the Negro doctors of
+the country to meet this insult by establishing a post-graduate school of
+their own. They can do it if they have the manhood, self-respect, and
+push. Let Doctors Hall, Williams, Boyd and others get busy.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>To this the New York <i>Age</i> adds:</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Yes; let us have a school of that sort of our own.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>And this is no idle suggestion. Few people have any conception of the
+growing progress of Negroes in the medical profession. In August, 1907,
+the Coloured National Medical Association held its ninth annual session at
+Baltimore. Over three hundred delegates and members were in attendance
+from thirty different states. Graduates were there not only from Harvard,
+Yale, and other white colleges, but from coloured medical schools like
+Meharry and Howard University. Negro hospitals have been opened and are
+well supported in several cities.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><i>National Negro Business League</i></p>
+
+<p>All over the country the Negro is organised in business leagues and these
+leagues have formed a National Business League which met last August in
+Topeka, Kansas. I can do no better in interpreting the spirit of this
+work, which is indeed the practical spirit of the Southern party, than in
+quoting briefly from the address of Booker T. Washington, who is the
+president of the league:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Despite much talk, the Negro is not discouraged, but is going
+forward. The race owns to-day an acreage equal to the combined
+acreage of Holland and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_230" id="Page_230">[Pg 230]</a></span> Belgium. The Negro owns more land, more
+houses, more stores, more banks, than has ever been true in his
+history. We are learning that no race can occupy a soil unless it
+gets as much out of it as any other race gets out of it. Soil,
+sunshine, rain, and the laws of trade have no regard for race or
+colour. We are learning that we must be builders if we would succeed.
+As we learn this lesson we shall find help at the South and at the
+North. We must not be content to be tolerated in communities, we must
+make ourselves needed. The law that governs the universe knows no
+race or colour. The force of nature will respond as readily to the
+hand of the Chinaman, the Italian, or the Negro as to any other race.
+Man may discriminate, but nature and the laws that control the
+affairs of men will not and cannot. Nature does not hide her wealth
+from a black hand.</p></div>
+
+<p>All along the line one finds this spirit of hopeful progress. A vivid
+picture of conditions, showing frankly both the weakness and strength of
+the Negro, is given by a coloured correspondent of the Indianapolis
+<i>Freeman</i>. He begins by telling of the organisation at Carbondale, Ill.,
+of a joint stock company composed of thirty-nine coloured men to operate a
+dry goods store. The correspondent writes:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>The question is, &#8220;Will the coloured people support this enterprise
+with their patronage?&#8221; It is a general cry all over the country that
+coloured people pass by the doors of our merchants and trade with any
+other concerns&mdash;Jews, Dagoes, Polacks, and what not. This is a very
+unfortunate fact which stands before us as a living shame. The very
+people who preach &#8220;race union, race support, race enterprise,&#8221; are
+often the first to pass our own mercantile establishments by. The
+only places where coloured men can prosper in business are where our
+people are driven out of other people&#8217;s places of business and
+actually forced to patronise our own. A certain cigar manufacturer in
+St. Louis, a first-class business man, putting out the very best
+classes of cigars, said, a few days ago, that some of the hardest
+work he ever did was to get a few of our own dealers to handle his
+goods. If but one-third of the stores and stands that sell cigars and
+tobacco in St. Louis alone would buy their goods of him he could in a
+few more years employ one or two dozen more men and women in his
+factory. A dry goods company in the same city is suffering from the
+same trouble. Our people will condescend to look in, but more often
+their purchases are made at a neighbouring Jew store. There are also
+in that neighbourhood several first-class, up-to-date, clean and
+tasty-looking coloured restaurants: but twice as many Negroes take
+their meals at the cheap-John, filthy, fourth-class chop counters run
+by other people near by. But, after all, my people are doing better
+in these matters than they did some time past. It was a most pleasant
+surprise to learn, the other day, that the coloured undertakers in
+St. Louis do every dollar&#8217;s worth of business for our people in that
+line. This information was given by a reliable white undertaker and
+substantiated by the coloured undertakers. The white man was asked
+what he thought of it. He said he thought it was a remarkable
+illustration of the loyalty of the Negro to his own people and that
+they should be commended for it. And then there are two sides to
+every question. It is too often true that our people run their
+business on a low order&mdash;noisy, uncleanly, questionable, dive-like
+concerns&mdash;therefore do not deserve the patronage of decent people.
+Too many of our men do not know anything about business. They don&#8217;t
+believe in investing their money in advertising<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_231" id="Page_231">[Pg 231]</a></span> their business in
+good first-class periodicals. We must not expect everybody to know
+where we are or what we have to sell unless we advertise. Many of our
+nickels would find their way to the cash drawer of a coloured man if
+we just knew where to find the store, restaurant or hotel.</p></div>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><i>Remarkable Development of Negroes</i></p>
+
+<p>It is not short of astonishing, indeed, to discover how far the Negro has
+been able to develop in the forty-odd years since slavery a distinct race
+spirit and position. It is pretty well known that he has been going into
+business, that he is acquiring much land, that he has many professional
+men, that he worships in his own churches and has many schools which he
+conducts&mdash;but in other lines of activity he is also getting a foothold.
+Just as an illustration: I was surprised at finding so many Negro theatres
+in the country&mdash;theatres not only owned or operated by Negroes, but
+presenting plays written and acted by Negroes. I saw a fine new Negro
+theatre in New Orleans; I visited a smaller coloured theatre in Jackson,
+Miss., and in Chicago the Pekin Theatre is an enterprise wholly conducted
+by Negroes. Williams and Walker, Negro comedians, have long amused large
+audiences, both white and coloured. Their latest production, &#8220;Bandanna
+Land,&#8221; written and produced wholly by Negroes, is not only funny, but
+clean.</p>
+
+<p>Many other illustrations could be given to show how the Negro is
+developing in one way or another&mdash;but especially along racial lines. The
+extensive organisation of Negro lodges of Elks and Masons and other secret
+orders, many of them with clubhouses, might be mentioned. Attention might
+be called to the almost innumerable insurance societies and companies
+maintained by Negroes, the largest of which, the True Reformers, of
+Richmond, has over 50,000 members, and to the growth of Negro newspapers
+and magazines (there are now over two hundred in the country), but enough
+has been said, perhaps, to make the point that there has been a real
+development of a Negro spirit and self-consciousness. Of course these
+signal successes loom large among the ten million of the country and yet
+they show the possibilities: there is this hopeful side of Negro
+conditions in this country as well as the dark and evil aspects of which
+we hear all too much.</p>
+
+<p>Out of this ferment of racial self-consciousness and readjustment<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_232" id="Page_232">[Pg 232]</a></span> has
+grown, as I have shown, the two great Negro parties. Between them and
+within them lie the destinies of the race in this country, and to no small
+extent also the destiny of the dominant white race. It is, therefore, of
+the highest importance for white men to understand the real tendencies of
+thought and organisation among these ten million Americans. For here is
+vigour and ability, and whatever may be the white man&#8217;s attitude toward
+the Negro, the contempt of mere ignorance of what the Negro is doing is
+not only short-sighted but positively foolish. Only by a complete
+understanding can the white man who has assumed the entire responsibility
+of government in this country meet the crises, like that of the Atlanta
+riot, which are constantly arising between the races.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr style="width: 50%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_233" id="Page_233">[Pg 233]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XI" id="CHAPTER_XI"></a>CHAPTER XI</h2>
+<h3>THE NEGRO IN POLITICS</h3>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="dropcap"><span class="caps">The</span> discussion of the Negro in politics will of necessity deal chiefly
+with conditions in the South; for it is there, and there only, that the
+Negro is, at the present time, a great political problem. Negroes in the
+North are indeed beginning to play a conscious part in politics; but they
+are only one element among many. They take their place with the &#8220;Irish
+vote,&#8221; the &#8220;German vote,&#8221; the &#8220;Polish vote,&#8221; the &#8220;labour vote,&#8221; each of
+which must be courted or placated by the politicians. I have looked into
+Negro political conditions in several cities, notably Indianapolis and
+Philadelphia, and I cannot see that they are in any marked way different
+from the condition of any other class of our population which through
+ignorance, or fear, or ambition, votes more or less <i>en masse</i>. Many
+Negroes do not vote at all; some are as conscientious and incorruptible as
+any white citizen; but a large proportion, ignorant and short-sighted, are
+disfranchised by the use of money in one form or another at every
+election. One of the broadest observers in Indianapolis said to me:</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;The Negro voters are no worse and no better than our foreign voting
+population.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Mayor Tom Johnson, himself Southern by birth, writes me regarding the
+Negro vote of Cleveland:</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I do not believe there is any larger percentage of unintelligent or
+dishonest votes among the coloured voters than among the white voters in
+the same walks of life.&#8221;</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><i>Negro a National Problem</i></p>
+
+<p>I wish here to emphasise again the fact that the Negro is not a sectional
+but a <i>national</i> problem. Anything that affects the South favourably or
+unfavourably reacts upon the whole country. And the same latent race
+feeling exists in the North<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_234" id="Page_234">[Pg 234]</a></span> that exists in the South (for it is human,
+not Southern). The North, indeed, as I have shown in previous chapters,
+confronted with a large influx of Negroes, is coming more and more to
+understand and sympathise with the heart-breaking problems which beset the
+South. Nothing short of the patient co&ouml;peration of the entire country,
+North and South, white and black, will ever solve the race question.</p>
+
+<p>In this country, as elsewhere, political thought divides itself into two
+opposing forces, two great parties or points of view.</p>
+
+<p>Whatever their momentary names have been, whether Federalist, Democratic,
+Whig, Republican, Populist, or Socialist, one of these parties has been an
+Aristocratic or conservative party, the other a democratic or progressive
+party. The political struggle in this country (and the world over) has
+been between the aristocratic idea that a few men (or one man) should
+control the country and supervise the division of labour and the products
+of labour and the democratic idea that more people should have a hand in
+it.</p>
+
+<p>The abolition of slavery in the South was an incident in this struggle.
+Slavery was not abolished because the North agitated, or because John
+Brown raided or Mrs. Stowe wrote a book, or for any other sentimental or
+superficial reason, but because it was undemocratic.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><i>What Slavery Did</i></p>
+
+<p>This is what slavery did: It enabled a comparatively few men (only about
+one in ten of the white men of the South was a slave-owner or
+slave-renter) to control eleven states of the Union, to monopolise
+learning, to hold all the political offices, to own most of the good land
+and nearly all of the wealth. Not only did it keep the Negro in slavery,
+but nine-tenths of the white people (the so-called &#8220;poor whites,&#8221; whom
+even the Negroes despised) were hardly more than peasants or serfs. It was
+in many ways a charming aristocracy, but it was doomed from the beginning.
+If there had been no North, slavery in the South would have disappeared
+just as inevitably. It was the restless yeast of democracy, spreading
+abroad upon the earth (in Europe as well as America) that killed slavery
+and liberated both Negro and poor white men.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_235" id="Page_235">[Pg 235]</a></span>Revolutions such as the Civil War change names: they do not at once change
+human relationships. Mankind is reconstructed not by proclamations or
+legislation or military occupation, but by time, growth, education,
+religion, thought.</p>
+
+<p>When the South got on its feet again after Reconstruction and took account
+of itself, what did it find? It found 4,000,000 ignorant Negroes changed
+in name from &#8220;slave&#8221; to &#8220;freeman,&#8221; but not changed in nature. It found the
+poor whites still poor whites; and the aristocrats, although they had lost
+both property and position, were still aristocrats. For values, after all,
+are not outward, but inward: not material, but spiritual. It was as
+impossible for the Negro at that time to be less than a slave as it was
+for the aristocrat to be less than an aristocrat. And this is what so many
+legal-minded men will not or cannot see.</p>
+
+<p>What happened?</p>
+
+<p>Exactly what might have been predicted. Southern society had been turned
+wrong side up by force, and it righted itself again by force. The Ku Klux
+Klan, the Patrollers, the Bloody Shirt movement, were the agencies
+(violent and cruel indeed, but inevitable) which readjusted the
+relationships, put the aristocrats on top, the poor whites in the middle,
+and the Negroes at the bottom. In short, society instinctively reverted to
+its old human relationships. I once saw a man shot through the body in a
+street riot. Mortally wounded, he stumbled and rolled over in the dust,
+but sprung up again as though uninjured and ran a hundred yards before he
+finally fell dead. Thus the Old South, though mortally wounded, sprung up
+and ran again.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><i>The Struggle in South Carolina</i></p>
+
+<p>The political reactions after Reconstruction varied, of course, in the
+different states, being most violent in states like South Carolina, where
+the old aristocratic r&eacute;gime was most firmly entrenched, and least violent
+in North Carolina, which has always been the most democratic of Southern
+states.</p>
+
+<p>In South Carolina then, for example, the aristocrats in 1875 returned to
+political supremacy.</p>
+
+<p>General Wade Hampton, who represented all that was highest in the old
+r&eacute;gime, became governor of the state. A<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_236" id="Page_236">[Pg 236]</a></span> similar tendency developed, of
+course, in the other Southern states, and a notable group of statesmen
+(and they <i>were</i> statesmen) appeared in politics&mdash;Hill and Gordon of
+Georgia, Lamar and George of Mississippi, Butler of South Carolina, Morgan
+of Alabama, all aristocrats of the old school.</p>
+
+<p>Apparently the ancient order was restored; apparently the wounded man ran
+as well as ever. But the Old South, after all, had received its mortal
+wound. There <i>had</i> been a revolution; society <i>had</i> been overturned. The
+institution on which it had reared its ancient splendour was gone: for the
+aristocrat no longer enjoyed the special privilege, the enormous economic
+advantage of <i>owning</i> his labourers. He was reduced to an economic
+equality with other white men, and even with the Negro, either of whom
+could <i>hire</i> labour as easily and cheaply as he could. And the baronial
+plantation which had been the mark of his grandeur before the war was now
+the millstone of his doom.</p>
+
+<p>Special privilege, always the bulwark of aristocracy, being thus removed,
+the germ of democracy began to work among the poor whites. The
+disappearance of competitive slave labour made them unexpectedly
+prosperous; it secured a more equable division of wealth. With prosperity
+came more book-reading, more schooling, a greater <i>feeling</i> of
+independence. And this feeling animated the poor white with a new sense of
+freedom and power.</p>
+
+<p>Enter now, when the time was fully ripe for a leader, the rude man of the
+people.</p>
+
+<p>How often he appears in the pages of history, the sure product of
+revolutions, bursting upward like some devastating force, not at all
+silken-handed or subtle-minded, but crude, virile, direct, truthful.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><i>Tillman, the Prophet</i></p>
+
+<p>So Tillman came in South Carolina. I can see him as he rode to the
+farmers&#8217; fairs and court days in the middle eighties, a sallow-faced,
+shaggy-haired man with one gleaming, restless, angry eye. He had been long
+preparing in silence for his task&mdash;struggling upward in the
+poverty-stricken days of the war and through the Reconstruction, without
+schooling, or chance of schooling, but endowed with a virile-mindedness<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_237" id="Page_237">[Pg 237]</a></span>
+which fed eagerly upon certain fermentative books of an inherited library.
+Lying on his back in the evening on the porch of his farmhouse, he read
+Carlyle&#8217;s &#8220;French Revolution&#8221; and Gibbon&#8217;s &#8220;Rome.&#8221; He had in him, indeed,
+the veritable spirit of the revolutionist: in the days of the Patrollers,
+he, too, had ridden and hunted Negroes. He had seen the aristocracy come
+again into power; he had heard the whisperings of discontent among the
+poor whites. And at fairs and on court days in the eighties I hear him
+screaming his speeches of defiance, raucous, immoderate, denouncing all
+gentlemen, denouncing government by gentlemen, demanding that government
+be restored to the &#8220;plain people!&#8221; On one of the transparencies of those
+days he himself had printed the words (strange reminder of the Commune!):</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Awake! arise! or be forever fallen.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>He spoke not only to the farmers, but he flung defiance at the aristocrats
+in the heart of the aristocracy. At Charleston, one of the proudest of
+Southern cities, he said:</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Men of Charleston, I have always heard that you were the most
+self-idolatrous people that ever lived; but I want to say to you that the
+sun does not rise in the Cooper and set in the Ashley. It shines all over
+the state.... If the tales that have been told me or the reports which
+have come to me are one-tenth true, you are the most arrant set of cowards
+God ever made.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>And everywhere he went he closed his speeches with this appeal:</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Organise, organise, organise. With organisation you will become free once
+more. Without it, you will remain slaves.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Once, upon an historic occasion on the floor of the United States Senate,
+Tillman paused in the heat of a debate to explain (not to excuse) his
+fiery utterances.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I am a rude man,&#8221; he said, &#8220;and don&#8217;t care.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>That is Tillman. They tried to keep him and his followers out of the
+political conventions; but he would not be kept out, nor kept down. Years
+later he himself expressed the spirit of revolt in the United States
+Senate. Zach McGhee tells how he had been making one of his fierce
+attacks, an ebullition in general against things as they are. A senator
+arose to snuff him out in the genial senatorial way.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_238" id="Page_238">[Pg 238]</a></span>&#8220;I would like to ask, Mr. President, what is before the Senate?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;<i>I</i> am before the Senate,&#8221; screamed Tillman.</p>
+
+<p>In 1890 Tillman was elected governor of South Carolina: the poor white, at
+last, was in power.</p>
+
+<p>The same change was going on all over the South. In Mississippi the rise
+of the people (no longer poor) was represented by Vardaman, in Arkansas by
+Jeff Davis, and Georgia and Alabama have experienced the same overturn in
+a more complicated form. It has become a matter of pride to many of the
+new leaders of the &#8220;plain people&#8221; that they do not belong to the &#8220;old
+families&#8221; or to the &#8220;aristocracy.&#8221; Governor Comer told me that he was a
+&#8220;doodle-blower&#8221;&mdash;a name applied to the poor white dwellers on the sand
+hills of Alabama. Governor Swanson of Virginia is proud of the fact that
+he is the first governor of the state wholly educated in the public
+schools and colleges. Call these men demagogues if you will, and some of
+them certainly are open to the charge of appealing to the prejudices and
+passions of the people, they yet represent a genuine movement for a more
+democratic government in the South.</p>
+
+<p>The old aristocrats gibe at the new leaders even to the point of bitter
+hatred (in South Carolina at least one murder has grown out of the
+hostility of the factions); they see (how acutely!) the blunders of
+untrained administrators, their pride in their states is rubbed blood-raw
+by the unblushing crudities of the Tillmans, the Vardamans, the Jeff
+Davises. Go South and talk with any of these men of the ancient order and
+you will come away feeling that conditions in the South are without hope.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><i>&#8220;High Men&#8221; of the Old South</i></p>
+
+<p>And those old aristocrats had their virtues. One loves to hear the names
+still applied at Richmond, Montgomery, Macon, and Charleston to the men of
+the old type, by other men of the old type. How often I have heard the
+terms a &#8220;high man,&#8221; an &#8220;incorruptible man.&#8221; Beautiful names! For there was
+a personal honour, a personal devotion to public duties among many of
+these ante-bellum slave-owners that made them indeed &#8220;high men.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>When they were in power their reign was usually skilful<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_239" id="Page_239">[Pg 239]</a></span> and honest: the
+reign of a beneficent oligarchy. But it was selfish: it reigned for
+itself&mdash;with nine-tenths of the people serfs or slaves. Its luxuries, its
+culture, its gentleness, like that of all aristocracies, was enjoyed at
+the fearful cost of poverty, ignorance, and slavery of millions of human
+beings. It had no sympathy, therefore it perished from off the earth.</p>
+
+<p>The new men of the Tillman type made glaring, even violent mistakes, but
+for the most part honest mistakes; they saw clearly what they wanted: they
+wanted more power in the hands of the people, more democracy, and they
+went crudely at the work of getting it. In spite of the bitterness against
+Vardaman among some of the best people of Mississippi I heard no one
+accuse him of corruption in any department of his administration. On the
+whole, they said he had directed the business of the state with judgment.
+And Tillman, in spite of the dire predictions of the aristocrats, did not
+ruin the state. Quite to the contrary, he performed a notable service in
+extending popular education, establishing an agricultural college,
+regulating the liquor traffic (even though the system he established has
+since degenerated). Never before, indeed, has South Carolina, and the
+South generally, been more prosperous than it has since these men went
+into power, never has wealth increased so rapidly, never has education
+been so general nor the percentage of illiteracy so low. The &#8220;highest
+citizen&#8221; may not be so high (if it can be called high) in luxury and
+culture as he was before the war, but the average citizen is decidedly
+higher.</p>
+
+<p>Having thus acquired a proper historical perspective, we may now consider
+the part which the Negro has played in the politics of the South. Where
+does <i>he</i> come in?</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><i>Where the Negro Comes In</i></p>
+
+<p>Though it may seem a sweeping generalisation, it is none the less
+literally true that up to the present time the Negro&#8217;s real influence in
+politics in the South has been almost negligible. He has been an <i>issue</i>,
+but not an <i>actor</i> in politics. In the ante-bellum slavery agitation no
+Negroes appeared; they were an inert lump of humanity possessing no power
+of inner direction; the leaders on both sides were white men. The Negroes
+did<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_240" id="Page_240">[Pg 240]</a></span> not even follow poor old John Brown. And since the war, as I have
+shown, the struggle has been between the aristocrats and the poor whites.
+They have talked <i>about</i> the Negro, but they have not let <i>him</i> talk. Even
+in Reconstruction times, and I am not forgetting exceptional Negroes like
+Bruce, Revels, Pinchback, and others, the Negro was in politics by virtue
+of the power of the North. As a class, the Negroes were not self-directed
+but used by Northern carpetbaggers and political Southerners who took most
+of the offices and nearly all of the stealings.</p>
+
+<p>In short, the Negro in times past has never been in politics in the South
+in any positive sense. And that is not in the least surprising. Coming out
+of slavery, the Negro had no power of intelligent self-direction,
+practically no leaders who knew anything. He was still a slave in
+everything except name, and slaves have never yet ruled, or helped rule.</p>
+
+<p>The XV Amendment to the Constitution could not really enfranchise the
+Negro slaves. Men must enfranchise themselves.</p>
+
+<p>And this political equality by decree, not by growth and development,
+caused many of the woes of Reconstruction.</p>
+
+<p>Two distinct impulses mark the effort of the South to disfranchise the
+Negro. The first was the blind revolt of Reconstruction times, in which
+force and fraud were frankly and openly applied. The effort to eliminate
+the Negro brought the white people together in one dominant party and the
+&#8220;Solid South&#8221; was born. For years this method sufficed; but in the
+meantime the Negro was getting a little education, acquiring
+self-consciousness, and developing leaders of more or less ability. It
+became necessary, therefore, both because the Negro was becoming more
+restive, less easily controlled by force, and because the awakening white
+man disliked and feared the basis of fraud on which his elections rested,
+to establish legal sanction for disfranchisement, to define the political
+status of the Negro by law.</p>
+
+<p>Now, the truth is that the mass of Southerners have <i>never believed that
+the Negro has or should have any political rights</i>. The South as a whole
+does not now approve and never has approved of the voting Negro. A few
+Negroes vote everywhere, &#8220;but not enough,&#8221; as a Southerner said to me, &#8220;to
+do any hurt.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The South, then, has been placed in the position of <i>providing by law for
+something that it did not really believe in</i>.</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<table width="50%" border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="5" summary="table">
+<tr><td colspan="3"><img src="images/gs22.jpg" alt="" /></td></tr>
+<tr><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right"><small>Photograph by G. V. Buck</small></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="center"><small>COLONEL JAMES LEWIS<br />United States Receiver at New Orleans</small></td>
+    <td align="center"><small>W. T. VERNON<br />Register of the United States Treasury</small></td>
+    <td align="center"><small>RALPH W. TYLER<br />An auditor of the Government at Washington</small></td></tr></table>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_241" id="Page_241">[Pg 241]</a></span>It was prophesied that when the Negro was disfranchised by law and
+&#8220;eliminated from politics&#8221; the South would immediately stop discussing the
+Negro question and divide politically along new lines. But this has not
+happened. Though disfranchisement laws have been in force in Mississippi
+for years there is less division in the white party of that state than
+ever before.</p>
+
+<p>Why is this so? Because the Negro, through gradual education and the
+acquisition of property, is becoming more and more a real as well as a
+potential factor in politics. For he is just beginning to be <i>really</i>
+free. And the South has not yet decided how to deal with a Negro who owns
+property and is self-respecting and intelligent and who demands rights.
+The South is suspicious of this new Negro: it dreads him; and the
+politicians in power are quick to play upon this sentiment in order that
+the South may remain solid and the present political leadership remain
+undisturbed.</p>
+
+<p>For the South, however much it may talk of the ignorant masses of Negroes,
+does not really fear them; it wants to keep them, and keep them ignorant.
+It loves the ignorant, submissive old Negroes, the &#8220;mammies&#8221; and &#8220;uncles&#8221;;
+it wants Negroes who, as one Southerner put it to me, &#8220;will do the dirty
+work and not fuss about it.&#8221; It wants Negroes who are really inferior and
+who <i>feel</i> inferior. The Negro that the South fears and dislikes is the
+educated, property-owning Negro who is beginning to demand rights, to take
+his place among men as a citizen. This is not an unsupported statement of
+mine, but has been expressed over and over again by speakers and writers
+in every part of the South. I have before me a letter from Charles P.
+Lane, editor of the Huntsville (Alabama) <i>Daily Tribune</i>, written to
+Governor Comer. It was published in the Atlanta <i>Constitution</i>. The writer
+is arguing that the Negro disfranchisement laws in Alabama are too
+lenient, that they permit too many Negroes to vote. He says:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>We thought then (in 1901, when the new Alabama Constitution
+disfranchising the Negro was under discussion), as we do now, that
+the menace to peace, the danger to society and white supremacy was
+not in the illiterate Negro, but in the upper branches of Negro
+society, the educated, the man who, after ascertaining his political
+rights, forced the way to assert them.</p></div>
+
+<p>He continues:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_242" id="Page_242">[Pg 242]</a></span>We, the Southern people, entertain no prejudice toward the ignorant
+per se inoffensive Negro. It is because we know him and for him we
+entertain a compassion. But our blood boils when the educated Negro
+asserts himself politically. We regard each assertion as an
+unfriendly encroachment upon our native superior rights, and a
+dare-devil menace to our control of the affairs of the state.</p>
+
+<p>In this are we not speaking the truth? Does not every Southern
+Caucasian &#8220;to the manor born&#8221; bear witness to this version? Hence we
+present that the way to dampen racial prejudice, avert the impending
+horrors, is to emasculate the Negro politically by repealing the XV
+Amendment of the Constitution of the United States.</p></div>
+
+<p>I use this statement of Mr. Lane&#8217;s not because it represents the broadest
+and freest thought in the South, for it does not, but because it
+undoubtedly states frankly and clearly the point of view of the <i>majority</i>
+of Southern people. It is the point of view which, talked all over Georgia
+last year, helped to elect Hoke Smith governor of the state, as it has
+elected other governors. Hoke Smith&#8217;s argument was essentially this:</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><i>Hoke Smith&#8217;s Views</i></p>
+
+<p>The uneducated Negro is a good Negro; &#8220;he is contented to occupy the
+natural status of his race, the position of inferiority.&#8221; The educated and
+intelligent Negro, who wants to vote, is a disturbing and threatening
+influence. We don&#8217;t want him down here; let him go North.</p>
+
+<p>This feeling regarding the educated Negro, who, as Mr. Lane says,
+&#8220;ascertains his rights and forces his way to assert them,&#8221; is the basic
+fact in Southern politics. It is what keeps the white people welded
+together in a single party; it is what sternly checks revolts and
+discourages independence.</p>
+
+<p>Keeping this fact in mind, let us look more intimately into Southern
+conditions.</p>
+
+<p>Following ordinary usage I have spoken of the Solid South. As a matter of
+fact the South is not solid, nor is there a single party. The very
+existence of one strong party presupposes another, potentially as strong.
+In the South to-day there are, as inevitably as human nature, two parties
+and two political points of view. And one is aristocratic and the other is
+democratic.</p>
+
+<p>It is noteworthy in the pages of history that parties which were once
+democratic become in time aristocratic. We are<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_243" id="Page_243">[Pg 243]</a></span> accustomed for example, to
+look back upon Magna Charta as a mighty instrument of democracy; which it
+was; but it was not democracy according to our understanding of the word.
+It merely substituted a baronial oligarchy for the divine-right rule of
+one man, King John. It did not touch the downtrodden slaves, serfs and
+peasants of England. And yet that struggle of the barons was of profound
+moment in history, for it started the spirit of democracy on its way
+downward, it was the seed from which sprung English constitutionalism,
+which finally flowered in the American republic.</p>
+
+<p>Tillman, as I have shown, wrung democracy from the old slave-owning
+oligarchy. He conquered: he established a democracy in South Carolina
+which included poor whites as well as aristocrats. But Tillman in his
+fiery pleas for the rights of men no more considered the Negro than the
+old barons considered the serfs of their day in the struggle against King
+John. It was and is incomprehensible to him that the Negro &#8220;has any rights
+which the white man is bound to respect.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>In short we have in the South the familiar and ancient division of social
+forces, but instead of two white parties, we now see a white aristocratic
+party, which seeks to control the government, monopolise learning, and
+supervise the division of labour and the products of labour, struggling
+with a democratic party consisting of a few white and many coloured
+people, which clamours for a part in the government. That, in plain words,
+is the true situation in the South to-day.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><i>Has the Spirit of Democracy Crossed the Colour Line?</i></p>
+
+<p>For democracy is like this: once its ferment begins to work in a nation it
+does not stop until it reaches and animates the uttermost man. Though
+Tillman&#8217;s hatred and contempt of the Negro who has aspirations is without
+bounds, the spirit which he voiced in his wild campaigns does not stop at
+the colour line. Movements are so much greater than men, often going so
+much further than men intend. A prophet who stands out for truth as
+Tillman did cannot, having uttered it, thereafter limit it nor recall it.
+As I have been travelling about the country, how often I have heard the
+same animating whisper<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_244" id="Page_244">[Pg 244]</a></span> from the Negroes that Tillman heard in older days
+among the poor whites:</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;We are free; we are free.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Yes, Tillman and Vardaman are right; education, newspapers, books,
+commercial prosperity, are working in the Negro too; he, too, has the
+world-old disease of restlessness, ambition, hope. And many a Negro leader
+and many a Negro organisation&mdash;and that is what is causing the turmoil in
+the South, the fear of the white aristocracy&mdash;are voicing the equivalent
+of Tillman&#8217;s bold words:</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Awake! arise! or be forever fallen.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Now we may talk all we like about the situation, we may say that the Negro
+is wrong in entertaining such ambitions, that his hopes can never be
+gratified, that he is doomed forever to menial and inferior
+occupations&mdash;the plain fact remains (as Tillman himself testifies), that
+the democratic spirit <i>has</i> crossed the colour line irrespective of laws
+and conventions, that the Negro is restless with the ambition to rise, to
+enjoy all that is best, finest, most complete in this world. How humanly
+the ancient struggle between aristocracy seeking to maintain its
+&#8220;superiority&#8221; and democracy fighting for &#8220;equality&#8221; is repeating itself!
+And this struggle in the South is complicated, deeply and variously, by
+the fact that the lower people are black and of a different race. They
+wear on their faces the badge of their position.</p>
+
+<p>What is being done about it?</p>
+
+<p>As every student of history is well aware, no aristocracy ever lets go
+until it is compelled to. How bitterly King John fought his barons; how
+bitterly the South Carolina gentlemen fought the rude Tillman! Having
+control of the government, the newspapers, the political parties, the
+schools, an aristocracy surrounds and fortifies itself with every possible
+safeguard. It maintains itself at any cost. And that is both human and
+natural; that is what is happening in the South to-day. Exactly the same
+conflict occurred before the war when the old slave-owning aristocracy
+(which everyone now acknowledges to have been wrong) was defending itself
+and the institution upon which its existence depended. The old
+slave-owning aristocrats believed that they were made of finer clay than
+the &#8220;poor whites,&#8221; that their rule was peculiarly beneficent, that if
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_245" id="Page_245">[Pg 245]</a></span>anything should happen to depose them the country would go to ruin and
+destruction. It was the old, old conviction, common to kings and
+oligarchies, that they were possessed of a divine right, a special and
+perpetual franchise from God.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><i>The White South Defends Itself</i></p>
+
+<p>The present white aristocratic party in the South is defending itself
+exactly after the manner of all aristocracies.</p>
+
+<p>In the first place, having control of the government it has entrenched
+itself with laws. The moment, for example, that the Negro began to develop
+any real intelligence and leadership, the disfranchisement process was
+instituted. Laws were so worded that every possible white man be admitted
+to the franchise and every possible Negro (regardless of his intelligence)
+be excluded. These laws now exist in nearly all the Southern states.
+Although the XV Amendment to the Federal Constitution declares that the
+right to vote shall not be &#8220;denied or abridged ... on account of race or
+colour or previous condition of servitude,&#8221; the South, in defence of its
+white aristocracy, has practically nullified this amendment. Governor Hoke
+Smith of Georgia, for example, said (June 9, 1906):</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Legislation can be passed which will ... not interfere with the right
+of any white man to vote, and get rid of 95 per cent. of the Negro
+voters.</p></div>
+
+<p>Not only do the enacted laws disfranchise all possible Negroes, but many
+other Negroes who have enough property or education to qualify, are
+further disfranchised by the dishonest administration of those laws. For
+the machinery of government, being wholly in white hands, the registers
+and judges of election have power to keep out any Negro, however fit he
+may be. I know personally of many instances in which educated and
+well-to-do Negroes have been refused the right to register where ignorant
+white men were readily admitted.</p>
+
+<p>The law, after all, in this matter, plays very little figure. The white
+majority has determined to control the government utterly and to give the
+Negro, whether educated or not, no political influence. That is the plain
+truth of the matter. Listen to Hoke Smith in his campaign pledge of last
+year:</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I favour, and if elected will urge with all my power, the elimination of
+the Negro from politics.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_246" id="Page_246">[Pg 246]</a></span>Let us also quote the plain-speaking Vardaman in his address of April,
+1907, at Poplarville, Miss.:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>How is the white man going to control the government? The way we do
+it is to pass laws to fit the white man and make the other people
+(Negroes) come to them.... If it is necessary every Negro in the
+state will be lynched; it will be done to maintain white
+supremacy.... The XV Amendment ought to be wiped out. We all agree on
+that. Then why don&#8217;t we do it?</p></div>
+
+<p>It may be argued that this violent expression does not represent the best
+sentiment of the South. It does not; and yet Vardaman, Tillman, Jeff
+Davis, Hoke Smith, and others of the type are <i>elected</i>, the <i>majority</i> in
+their states support them. And I am talking here of politics, which deals
+with majorities. In a following chapter I shall hope to deal with the
+reconstructive and progressive minority in the South as it expresses
+itself especially in the more democratic border states like North
+Carolina.</p>
+
+<p>Thus the spirit of democracy has really escaped among the coloured people
+and it is running abroad like a prairie fire. Tillman, the prophet, sees
+it:</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Every man,&#8221; he says, &#8220;who can look before his nose can see that with
+Negroes constantly going to school, the increasing number of people who
+can read and write among the coloured race ... will in time encroach upon
+our white men.&#8221;</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><i>Demand Repeal of XV Amendment</i></p>
+
+<p>In order, then, to prevent the Negro getting into politics, the Tillmans,
+Vardamans, and others declare that the South must strike at the foundation
+of his political liberty: the XV Amendment must be repealed. In short, the
+moment the Negro meets one test of citizenship, these political leaders
+advance a more difficult one: now proposing to take away entirely every
+hope of ultimate citizenship. In the recent campaign for the United States
+senatorship in Mississippi, Vardaman and John Sharp Williams were quite in
+accord on this point, though they disagreed on methods of accomplishing
+the purpose. When the political liberty of the Negro has thus been finally
+removed, the South, say these men, will again have two parties, and will
+be able to take the place it should occupy in the counsels of the nation.</p>
+
+<p>Take the next point in the logic of the political leaders.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_247" id="Page_247">[Pg 247]</a></span> It is a fact
+of common knowledge in history that aristocracies cannot long survive when
+free education is permitted among all classes of people. Education is more
+potent against oligarchies and aristocracies than dynamite bombs. Every
+aristocracy that has survived has had to monopolise learning more or less
+completely&mdash;else it went to the wall. It is not surprising that there
+should have been no effective public-school system in the South before the
+war where the poor whites could get an education, or that the teaching of
+Negroes was in many states a crime punishable by law. Education enables
+the Negro, as Mr. Lane says, to &#8220;ascertain his rights and force his way to
+assert them.&#8221; Therefore to prevent his ascertaining his rights he must not
+be educated. The undivided supremacy of the white party, it is clearly
+discerned, is bound up with Negro ignorance. Therefore we have seen and
+are now seeing in certain parts of the South continuous agitation against
+the education of Negroes. That is one reason for the feeling in the South
+against &#8220;Northern philanthropy&#8221; which is contributing money to support
+Negro schools and colleges.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;What the North is sending South is not money,&#8221; says Vardaman, &#8220;but
+dynamite; this education is ruining our Negroes. They&#8217;re demanding
+equality.&#8221;</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><i>A Southern View of Negro Education</i></p>
+
+<p>When I was in Montgomery, Ala., a letter was published in one of the
+newspapers from Alexander Troy, a well-known lawyer. It did not express
+the view of the most thoughtful men of that city, but I am convinced that
+it represented with directness and force the belief of a large proportion
+of the white people of Alabama. The letter says:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>All the millions which have been spent by the state since the war in
+Negro education ... have been worse than wasted. Should anyone ask
+&#8220;Has not Booker Washington&#8217;s school been of benefit to the Negro?&#8221;
+the so-called philanthropists of the North would say &#8220;yes,&#8221; but a
+hundred thousand white people of Alabama would say &#8220;no.&#8221;... Ask any
+gentleman from the country what he thinks of the matter, and a very
+large majority of them will tell you that they never saw a Negro
+benefited by education, but hundreds ruined. He ceases to be a hewer
+of wood and a drawer of water....</p>
+
+<p>Exclude the air and a man will die, keep away the moisture and the
+flower will wither. Stop the appropriations for Negro education, by
+amendment to the Constitution if necessary, and the school-house in
+which it is taught will decay. <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_248" id="Page_248">[Pg 248]</a></span>Not only that, but the Negro will
+take the place the Creator intended he should take in the economy of
+the world&mdash;a dutiful, faithful, and law-abiding servant.</p></div>
+
+<p>These are Mr. Troy&#8217;s words and they found reflection in the discussions of
+the Alabama legislature then in session. A compulsory education bill had
+been introduced; the problem was to pass a law that would apply to white
+people, not to Negroes. In this connection I heard a significant
+discussion in the state senate. I use the report of it, for accuracy, as
+given the next morning in the <i>Advertiser</i>:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Senator Thomas said ... he would oppose any bills that would compel
+Negroes to educate their children, for it had come to his knowledge
+that Negroes would give the clothing off their backs to send their
+children to school, while too often the white man, secure in his
+supremacy, would be indifferent to his duty.</p>
+
+<p>At this point Senator Lusk arose excitedly to his feet and said:</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Does the Senator from Barbour mean to say that the Negro race is
+more ambitious and has more aspirations than the white race?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;The question of the gentleman ... is an insult to the senate of
+Alabama,&#8221; replied Senator Thomas deliberately. &#8220;It is an insult to
+the great Caucasian race, the father of all the arts and sciences, to
+compare it to that black and kinky race which lived in a state of
+black and ignorant savagery until the white race seized it and lifted
+it to its present position.&#8221;</p></div>
+
+<p>The result of this feeling against Negro education has shown itself in an
+actual reduction of Negro schooling in many localities, especially in
+Louisiana, and little recent progress anywhere else, compared with the
+rapid educational development among the whites, except through the work of
+the Negroes themselves, or by Northern initiative.</p>
+
+<p>In cutting off an $8,000 appropriation for Alcorn College (coloured)
+Governor Vardaman, as a member of the board of trustees, said:</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I am not anxious even to see the Negro turned into a skilled mechanic.
+God Almighty intended him to till the soil under the direction of the
+white man and that is what we are going to teach him down there at Alcorn
+College.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Without arguing the rights or wrongs or necessities of their position, I
+have thus endeavoured to set down the purposes of the present political
+leadership in the South.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><i>Economic Cause for White Supremacy</i></p>
+
+<p>Now the chief object of any aristocracy, the reason why it wishes to
+monopolise government and learning, is because<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_249" id="Page_249">[Pg 249]</a></span> it wishes to supervise the
+division of labour and the products of labour. That is the bottom fact.</p>
+
+<p>In slavery times, of course, the white man supervised labour absolutely
+and took <i>all</i> the profits. In some cases to-day, by a system of peonage,
+he still controls the labourer and takes all the profits. But as the Negro
+has grown in education and property he not only wishes to supervise his
+own labour, but demands a larger share in the returns of labour. He is no
+longer willing to be an abject &#8220;hewer of wood and a drawer of water&#8221; as he
+was in slavery times; he has an ambition to own his own farm, do his own
+business, employ his own professional men, and so on. He will not &#8220;keep
+his place&#8221; as a servant. And that is the basis of all the trouble.</p>
+
+<p>Many of the utterances of white political leaders resolve themselves into
+a statement of this position.</p>
+
+<p>At the American Bankers&#8217; Association last fall Governor Swanson of
+Virginia said:</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;At last the offices, the business houses, and the financial institutions
+are all in the hands of intelligent Anglo-Saxons, and with God&#8217;s help and
+our own good right hand we will hold him (the Negro) where he is.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>In other words, the white man will by force hold all political, business
+and financial positions; he will be boss, and the Negro must do the menial
+work; he must be a servant.</p>
+
+<p>Hoke Smith says in his speech (the italics are mine):</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Those Negroes who are contented to occupy the natural status of their
+race, the position of inferiority, <i>all competition being eliminated
+between the whites and the blacks</i>, will be treated with greater
+kindness.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>In other words, if the Negro will be contented to keep himself inferior
+and not compete with the white man, everything will be all right. And
+thus, curiously enough, while Hoke Smith in his campaign was thundering
+against railroad corporations for destroying competition, while he was
+glorifying the principle of &#8220;free and unrestricted trade,&#8221; he was
+advocating the formation of a monopoly of all white men by the elimination
+of the competition of all coloured men.</p>
+
+<p>Indeed, we find sporadic attempts to pass laws to compel the Negro to
+engage only in certain sorts of menial work. In Texas not long ago a bill
+was introduced in the legislature &#8220;to<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_250" id="Page_250">[Pg 250]</a></span> confine coloured labour to the farm
+whenever it was found in city and town communities to be competing with
+white labour.&#8221; In the last session of the Arkansas legislature Senator
+McKnight introduced a bill providing that Negroes be forbidden &#8220;from
+waiting on white persons in hotels, restaurants, or becoming barbers, or
+porters on trains, and to prevent any white man from working for any
+Negro.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>In a number of towns respectable, educated, and prosperous Negro doctors,
+grocers, and others have been forcibly driven out. I visited Monroe, La.,
+where two Negro doctors had been forced to leave town because they were
+taking the practice of white physicians. In the same town a Negro grocer
+was burned out, because he was encroaching on the trade of white grocers.</p>
+
+<p>Neither of the laws above referred to, of course, was passed; and the
+instances of violence I have given are sporadic and unusual. For the South
+has not followed the dominant political leaders to the extremes of their
+logic. Human nature never, finally, goes to extremes: it is forever
+compromising, never wholly logical. While perhaps a large proportion of
+Southerners would agree perfectly with Hoke Smith or Tillman in his
+<i>theory</i> of a complete supremacy of all white men in all respects, as a
+matter of fact nearly every white Southerner is encouraging some practical
+exception which quite overturns the theory. Tens of thousands of white
+Southerners swear by Booker T. Washington, and though doubtful about Negro
+education, the South is expending millions of dollars every year on
+coloured schools. Vardaman, declaiming violently against Negro colleges,
+has actually, in specific instances, given them help and encouragement. I
+told how he had cut off an $8,000 appropriation from Alcorn College
+because he did not believe in Negro education: but he turned around and
+gave Alcorn College $14,000 for a new lighting system, <i>because he had
+come in personal contact with the Negro president of Alcorn College, and
+liked him</i>.</p>
+
+<p>And though the politicians may talk about complete Negro disfranchisement,
+the Negro has nowhere been completely disfranchised: a few Negroes vote in
+every part of the South.</p>
+
+<p>I once heard a Southerner argue for an hour against the participation of
+the Negro in politics, and then ten minutes<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_251" id="Page_251">[Pg 251]</a></span> later tell me with pride of a
+certain Negro banker in his city whom we both knew.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Dr. &mdash;&mdash;&#8217;s all right,&#8221; he said. &#8220;He&#8217;s a sensible Negro. I went with him
+myself when he registered. He ought to vote.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>So personal relationships, the solving touch of human nature, play havoc
+with political theories and generalities. Mankind develops not by rules
+but by exceptions to rules. While the white aristocracy has indeed
+succeeded in controlling local government in the South almost completely,
+it has not been able to dominate the federal political organisations,
+which include many Negroes. And though often opposing education for the
+Negro, the aristocracy has not, after all, monopolised education; and the
+Negro, in spite of Jim Crow laws and occasional violence, has actually
+been pushing ahead, getting a foothold in landownership, entering the
+professions, even competing in some lines of business with white men. So
+democracy, though black, is encroaching in the world-old way on
+aristocracy; how far Negroes can go toward real democratic citizenship in
+the various lines&mdash;industrial, political, social&mdash;no man knows. We can see
+the fight; we do not know how the spoils of war will finally be divided.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr style="width: 50%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_252" id="Page_252">[Pg 252]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XII" id="CHAPTER_XII"></a>CHAPTER XII</h2>
+<h3>THE BLACK MAN&#8217;S SILENT POWER</h3>
+<h3>HOW THE DOMINANCE OF THE IDEA OF THE NEGRO STIFLES FREEDOM OF THOUGHT AND SPEECH IN SOUTHERN POLITICS</h3>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="dropcap"><span class="caps">At present</span> the point of view of a large proportion of Southern white
+people on the Negro question is adequately expressed by such men as
+Tillman, Jeff Davis, and Hoke Smith. They are the political leaders. Their
+policies are, in general, the policies adopted; they are the men elected
+to office. Even in the border states, where the coloured population is not
+so dense as in the black belt, the attitude of the politicians is much the
+same as it is in the black belt. So far as the Negro question is
+concerned, Governor Swanson of Virginia stands on practically the same
+platform as Tillman and Hoke Smith&mdash;though he has not found it necessary
+to express his views as vigorously. And the position of the black-belt
+states in regard to the disfranchisement of the Negro and the extension of
+&#8220;Jim Crow&#8221; laws is being accepted by the border state of Maryland and the
+Western state of Oklahoma.</p>
+
+<p>But there also exists, and particularly in Virginia, North Carolina,
+Tennessee, and Georgia, a vigorous minority point of view, which I have
+referred to in a former chapter as the &#8220;broadest and freest thought of the
+South.&#8221; Although it has not yet attained political position, it is a party
+of ideas, force, convictions, with a definite constructive programme. To
+this constructive point of view I have been able, thus far, to refer only
+incidentally.</p>
+
+<p>In the present chapter I wish to consider some of the effects upon
+Southern life of the domination of the Negro as a political issue, and the
+result of the continued supremacy of leaders like Tillman.</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<table width="50%" border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="5" summary="table">
+<tr><td colspan="2"><img src="images/gs23_top.jpg" alt="" /></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="center">J. POPE BROWN<br />of Pulaski County, Georgia</td><td align="center">EX-GOVERNOR<br />JAMES K. VARDAMAN<br />of Mississippi</td></tr>
+<tr><td>&nbsp;</td></tr>
+<tr><td colspan="2"><img src="images/gs23_mid.jpg" alt="" /></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right"><span style="margin-left: 4em;"><small>Photograph by Harris-Ewing</small></span></td><td align="right"><small>Copyright, 1906, by Hallen Studios</small></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="center">SENATOR JEFF DAVIS<br />of Arkansas</td><td align="center">GOVERNOR HOKE SMITH<br />of Georgia</td></tr>
+<tr><td>&nbsp;</td></tr>
+<tr><td colspan="2"><img src="images/gs23_bot.jpg" alt="" /></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right"><small>Photograph by F. B. Johnston</small></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="center">SENATOR B. R. TILLMAN<br />of South Carolina</td><td align="center">EX-GOVERNOR W. J. NORTHEN<br />of Georgia</td></tr></table>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_253" id="Page_253">[Pg 253]</a></span>In the next chapter, under the title &#8220;The New Southern Statesmanship,&#8221; I
+shall outline the programme and recount the activities of the new Southern
+leaders.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><i>The Most Sinister Form of Negro Domination</i></p>
+
+<p>Travelling in the South one hears much of the &#8220;threat of Negro
+domination,&#8221; by which is generally meant political control by Negro voters
+or the election of Negro officeholders. But there already exists a far
+more real and sinister form of Negro domination. For the Negro still
+dominates the <i>thought</i> of the South. For over eighty years, until quite
+recently, few great or serious issues have occupied the attention of the
+South save those growing out of slavery and the Negro problem. Though the
+very existence of our nation is due largely to the courage, wisdom, and
+political genius of Southern statesmanship&mdash;to Washington, Jefferson,
+Marshall, Patrick Henry, and their compatriots&mdash;the South, since the
+enunciation of the Monroe doctrine in 1823, has played practically no
+constructive part in national affairs. As Professor Mitchell of Richmond
+well points out, the great, vitalising influences which swept over the
+entire civilised world during the first half of the nineteenth century,
+the liberalising, nationalising, industrialising influences, left the
+South untouched. For it was chained in common slavery with the Negro.
+Instead of expanding with the new thought, it clung to slavery in
+opposition to the liberal tendency of the age, it insisted upon states&#8217;
+rights in opposition to nationality, it contented itself with agriculture
+alone, instead of embracing the rising industrialism. &#8220;It was an
+instance,&#8221; as Professor Mitchell says, &#8220;of arrested development.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Dr. John E. White of Atlanta has ably expressed the ethical result upon a
+people of confining their thought to a single selfish interest:</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;As long as we struggled for that which was good for everybody
+everywhere,&#8221; he says, &#8220;we moved with Providence and the South led the van.
+There were great human concerns in the building up of the Republic. The
+whole world was interested in it. It was a work ennobling to a people&mdash;the
+inspiration of a great national usefulness. The disaster began when the
+South began to think only for and of itself&mdash;began to have only one
+problem.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_254" id="Page_254">[Pg 254]</a></span>Thus the South, owing to the presence of the Negro, dropped behind in the
+progress of the world. And while the new and vitalising world influences
+are now spreading abroad throughout the South, manifesting themselves in
+factories, mines, mills, better schools, and more railroads, the old, ugly
+Negro problem still shackles political thought and cripples freedom of
+action. In other words, the South is being rapidly industrialised, but not
+so rapidly liberalised and nationalised, though these developments are
+certainly following.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><i>Exploiting Negro Prejudice</i></p>
+
+<p>The cause of this dominance of thought by the Negro lies chiefly with a
+certain group of politicians whose interest it is to maintain their party
+control and to keep the South solid. And they do this by harping
+perpetually on the Negro problem. I observed, wherever I went in the South
+and found busy and prosperous industries, that the Negro problem was
+little discussed. One manufacturer in New Orleans said to me, when I asked
+him about the Negro question:</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Why, I&#8217;m so busy I never think about it.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>And that is the attitude of the progressive, constructive Southerner: he
+is impatient with the talk about the Negro and the Negro problem. He wants
+to forget it.</p>
+
+<p>But there remains a body of men in the South who, not prosperous in other
+industries, still make the Negro a sort of industry: they live by
+exploiting Negro prejudice. They prevent the expression of new ideas and
+force a great people to confine its political genius to a worn-out issue.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><i>Roosevelt Democrats Down South</i></p>
+
+<p>Talking with all classes of white men in the South, I was amazed to
+discover how many of them had ceased to be Democrats (in the party sense)
+at all, and were followers in their beliefs of Roosevelt and the
+Republican party. Many of them told me that they wished they could break
+away and express themselves openly and freely, but they did not dare. A
+considerable number have ventured to vote the Republican ticket in
+national elections (especially on the free-silver issue),<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_255" id="Page_255">[Pg 255]</a></span> but few indeed
+have had the courage to declare their independence in state or local
+affairs. For the instant a rift appears in the harmony of the white party
+(and that is a better name for it than Democratic) the leaders talk Negro,
+and the would-be independents are driven back into the fold. Over and over
+again leaders with new issues have endeavoured to get a hearing. A number
+of years ago the Populist movement spread widely throughout the South. Tom
+Watson of Georgia, Kolb of Alabama, Butler of North Carolina, led revolts
+against the old Democratic party. By fusion with the Republicans the
+Populists carried North Carolina. But the old political leaders
+immediately raised the Negro issue, declared that the Populists were
+encouraging the Negro vote, and defeated the insurgents, driving most of
+their leaders into political obscurity. Now, I am not arguing that
+Populism was an ideal movement, nor that its leaders were ideal men; I am
+merely trying to show the cost of independence in the South. A number of
+years ago Emory Speer, of Georgia, now Federal Judge, ran for Congress on
+an independent ticket. His platform was &#8220;The Union and the Constitution, a
+free ballot and a fair count.&#8221; The inevitable Negro issue was raised
+against him, it was insisted that there must be no division among white
+people lest the Negro secure the balance of political power, and Speer was
+finally defeated. He became a Republican and has since had no influence in
+state politics.</p>
+
+<p>Upon this point an able Southern writer, Professor Edwin Mims of Trinity
+College, N. C., has said:</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;The independents in the South have to face the same state of affairs that
+the independents of the North did in the &#8217;80&#8217;s&mdash;all the better traditions
+connected with one party, and most of the respectable people belonging to
+the same party. Just as George William Curtis and his followers were
+accused of being Democrats in disguise and of being traitors to the &#8216;grand
+old party&#8217; that had saved the Union and freed the slaves, and deserters to
+a party of Copperheads, so the Southern independent is said to be a
+Republican in disguise, and is told of the awful crimes of the
+Reconstruction era. When all other arguments have failed, there is the
+inevitable appeal to the threatened domination of an inferior race which
+is not now even a remote possibility.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_256" id="Page_256">[Pg 256]</a></span>As a result of this domination of a worn-out issue, political contests in
+the South have ordinarily concerned themselves not with stimulating public
+questions, but with the personal qualifications of the candidates. The
+South has not dared to face real problems lest the white party be split
+and the Negro voter somehow slip into influence. A campaign was fought
+last year in Mississippi. Of course the candidates all belonged to the
+white party; all therefore subscribed to identically the same
+platform&mdash;which had been prepared by the party leaders&mdash;so that the only
+issue was the personality of the candidates. Let me quote from the
+Mississippi correspondent of the New Orleans <i>Times-Democrat</i>, April 29,
+1907:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>The only &#8220;issue&#8221; ... is the personality of the candidate himself. The
+voter may take the speeches of each candidate and analyse them from
+start to finish, and he will fail to find where there is any
+difference of opinion between the candidates on any of the live
+questions of the day which are likely to affect Mississippi. He must,
+therefore, turn from the speeches to the candidate himself for an
+&#8220;issue&#8221; and must take his choice of the several candidates as men,
+and decide which of them will do most good to the state and be the
+safest man to entrust with the helm.</p></div>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><i>Negro Holds Democratic Party Together</i></p>
+
+<p>I am speaking here, of course, of the Negro as a dominant issue, the
+essential element which holds the Democratic party together and without
+which other policies could not be carried or candidates elected. Vigorous
+divisions on other issues have taken place locally within the lines of the
+Democratic party, especially during the last two or three years. The
+railroad and trust questions have been prominently before the people in
+most of the Southern states. During his long campaign for governor Hoke
+Smith talked railroads and railroad influence in politics constantly, but
+in order to be elected he raised the Negro question and talked it
+vigorously, especially in all of his country addresses. It is also highly
+significant that the South should have taken so strong a lead in the
+prohibition movement, although even this question has been more or less
+connected with the Negro problem, the argument being that the South must
+forbid the liquor traffic because of its influence on the Negro. No states
+in the Union, indeed, have been more radical in dealing with the trust<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_257" id="Page_257">[Pg 257]</a></span>
+question than Texas and Arkansas; and Alabama, Georgia, and North Carolina
+have been the scenes of some of the hottest fights in the country on the
+railroad question. All this goes to show that, once freed from the incubus
+of the Negro on Southern thought, the South would instantly become a great
+factor in national questions. And being almost exclusively American in its
+population, with few rich men and ideals of life not yet so subservient to
+the dollar as those of the North, it would become a powerful factor in the
+progressive and constructive movements of the country. The influence of a
+single bold man like Tillman in the Senate has been notable. In the future
+the country has much to look for from the idealism of Southern
+statesmanship.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><i>Stifling Free Speech</i></p>
+
+<p>But the unfortunate result of the dominance of the single idea of the
+Negro upon politics has been to benumb the South intellectually; to stifle
+free thought and free speech. Let a man advance a new issue and if the
+party leaders do not favour it they have only to cry out &#8220;Negro,&#8221; twisting
+the issue so as to emphasise its Negro side (and every question in the
+South has a Negro side), and the independent thinker is crushed. I once
+talked with the editor of a newspaper in the South who said to me, &#8220;such
+and such is my belief.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;But,&#8221; I said, &#8220;you take just the opposite position in your paper.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Yes&mdash;but I can&#8217;t talk out; it would kill my business.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>This timorousness has touched not only politics, but has reached the
+schools and the churches&mdash;and still shackles the freest speech. George W.
+Cable, the novelist, was practically forced to leave the South because he
+advocated the &#8220;continual and diligent elevation of that lower man which
+human society is constantly precipitating,&#8221; because he advocated justice
+for the Negro.</p>
+
+<p>Professor Andrew Slade was compelled to resign from Emory College in
+Georgia because he published an article in the <i>Atlantic Monthly</i> taking a
+point of view not supported by the majority in Southern sentiment!
+Professor John Spencer Bassett was saved from a forced resignation from
+Trinity<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_258" id="Page_258">[Pg 258]</a></span> College in North Carolina for a similar offence after a lively
+fight in the Board of Trustees which left Trinity with the reputation of
+being one of the freest institutions in the South.</p>
+
+<p>The situation in the South has made people afraid of the truth. Political
+oratory, particularly, often gets away entirely from the wholesome and
+regenerative world of actual facts. I quoted in the last chapter from a
+speech of Governor Swanson of Virginia, in which he said: &#8220;The business
+houses and financial institutions are in the hands of intelligent
+Anglo-Saxons, and with God&#8217;s help and our own good right hand we will hold
+him (the Negro) where he is.&#8221;</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><i>Negro&#8217;s Progress in Richmond</i></p>
+
+<p>What a curious thing oratory is! Right in Governor Swanson&#8217;s own city of
+Richmond there are four banks owned and operated by Negroes; one of the
+Negro bankers sat in the convention to which Governor Swanson was at that
+moment speaking. There is a Negro insurance company, &#8220;The True Reformers,&#8221;
+in which I saw eighty Negro clerks and stenographers at work. It has a
+surplus of $300,000, with a business in thirty states. Negroes also own
+and operate in Richmond four clothing stores, five drug stores, many
+grocery stores (some very small, of course), two hotels, four livery
+stables, five printing establishments, eight fraternal insurance
+companies, seven meat markets, fifty eating-places, and many other sorts
+of business enterprises, small, of course, but growing rapidly. In
+Richmond also, there are ten Negro lawyers, fifteen physicians, three
+dentists, two photographers, eighty-five school teachers, forty-six Negro
+churches.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><i>Southerners Who See the Danger</i></p>
+
+<p>When I make the assertion regarding &#8220;free speech&#8221; and the fear of truth in
+the South, I am making no statement which has not been far more forcibly
+put by thoughtful and fearless Southerners who see and dread this sinister
+tendency.</p>
+
+<p>The late Chancellor Hill, of the University of Georgia, spoke of the
+&#8220;deadly paralysis of intellect caused by the enforced uniformity of
+thought within the lines of one party.&#8221; He said:</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Before the war the South was in opposition to the rest of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_259" id="Page_259">[Pg 259]</a></span> civilisation
+on the question of slavery. It defended itself: its thinking, its
+political science, even its religion was not directed toward a search for
+truth, but it was concentrated on the defence of a civil and political
+order of things. These conditions made impossible a vigorous intellectual
+life.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>William Preston Few, dean of Trinity College, North Carolina, writes
+(<i>South Atlantic Quarterly</i>, January, 1905):</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;This prevalent lack of first hand thinking and of courage to speak out
+has brought about an unfortunate scarcity of intellectual honesty.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>An excellent illustration of this condition grew out of the statement of
+Dr. Edwin A. Alderman, president of the University of Virginia, at a
+dinner a year or so ago, in which he compared the recent political
+leadership of the South somewhat unfavourably with the statesmanship of
+the Old South. Upon hearing of this remark Senator Bailey of Texas angrily
+resigned from the alumni committee of the University. Chancellor Hill
+said, concerning the incident:</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;The question whether Dr. Alderman was right or wrong becomes
+insignificant beside the larger question whether Senator Bailey was right
+or wrong in his method of dealing with a difference of opinion. And this
+leads to the question: Have we freedom of opinion in the South? Must every
+man who thinks above a whisper do so at the peril of his reputation and
+his influence, or at the deadlier risk of having an injury inflicted upon
+the institution which he represents?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>In giving so much space to the words and position of Vardaman, Tillman,
+Hoke Smith, and others, I have not yet sufficiently emphasised the work
+and influence of the thoughtful and constructive men of the South. But it
+must be borne in mind that I am writing of politics, of majorities: and
+politicians of the Tillman type are still the political forces in the
+South. They are in control: they are elected. Yet there is the growing
+class of new statesmen whose work I shall recount in the next chapter.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><i>Whites Disfranchised as Well as Blacks</i></p>
+
+<p>But the limitation of intellectual freedom has not been the only result of
+the political dominance of the Negro issue. It<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_260" id="Page_260">[Pg 260]</a></span> is curious to observe that
+when one class of men in any society is forced downward politically,
+another is forced up: for so mankind keeps its balances and averages. A
+significant phase of the movement in the South to eliminate the Negro is
+the sure return to government by a white aristocracy. For disfranchisement
+of the Negro has also served to disfranchise a very large proportion of
+the white people as well. In every Southern state where Negro
+disfranchisement has been forced, the white vote also has been steadily
+dwindling. To-day in Alabama not half the white males of voting age are
+qualified voters. In Mississippi the proportion is still lower.</p>
+
+<p>In the last Presidential election the state of Mississippi was carried by
+Parker with a total vote of only 58,383, out of a total of 349,177
+citizens (both white and coloured) of voting age. Only one-third of the
+white men voted. It has been found, indeed, in several counties in
+Mississippi, that while the number of white eligibles has been decreasing,
+the number of Negroes on the registration lists has been increasing. In
+the city of Jackson, Miss., last year, 1,200 voters were registered out of
+a population of 32,000 people.</p>
+
+<p>To show the dwindling process, take the single country of Tallapoosa in
+Alabama. The last census shows 4,203 whites and 2,036 blacks of voting
+age, 6,259 in all. After the adoption of the new constitution
+disfranchising the Negro in 1901, the total registration was 4,008. Last
+fall, although the important question of prohibition had arisen and an
+especial effort was made to get voters out, an investigation showed there
+were only 1,700 qualified voters in the country.</p>
+
+<p>This astonishing condition is due primarily to the fact that there is no
+vital party division on new issues in the South; but it is also due to the
+franchise tests, which, having been made severe to keep the Negro out,
+operate also to disfranchise hundreds of thousands of poor and ignorant
+white men. I spent much time talking with white workingmen, both in the
+cities and in the country. I asked them why so many workingmen and farmers
+did not vote. Here is one comprehensive reply of a labour leader:</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;What&#8217;s the use? We have to pay two dollars a year poll-tax, and pay it
+nearly a year before election. And why vote? There are no real issues at
+stake. An election is merely<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_261" id="Page_261">[Pg 261]</a></span> a personal quarrel in the clique of men who
+control the Democratic party. Why should we pay two dollars a year and go
+to the bother of satisfying the personal ambition of some man we are not
+interested in?&#8221;</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><i>A White Oligarchy</i></p>
+
+<p>So the white vote is dwindling; the political power is being gathered into
+the hands of fewer and fewer men. And there is actually springing up a
+large class of non-voting white men not unlike the powerless &#8220;poor whites&#8221;
+of ante-bellum times. The white politicians, indeed, in some places do not
+encourage the poorer white men to qualify, for the fewer voters, the more
+certain their control.</p>
+
+<p>Of course the chief fights in Mississippi and elsewhere are not at the
+elections, but in the Democratic (white) primaries; but this fact only
+accentuates the point I wish to make: the limitation of political
+independence of action. Such conditions are deeply concerning the
+thoughtful men of the South; but while they think, few dare to brave
+political extinction by speaking out. One would think that the Republican
+party, which ostensibly stands for the opposition in the South, would cry
+out about conditions. But it does not. The fact is, the Republican party,
+as now constituted in the South, is even a more restricted white oligarchy
+than the Democratic party. In nearly all parts of the South, indeed, it is
+a close corporation which controls or seeks to control all the federal
+offices. Speak out? Of course not. It, too, is attempting to eliminate the
+Negro (in some places it calls itself &#8220;lily white&#8221;), and it works not
+inharmoniously with the Democratic politicians. For the Republican machine
+in the South really has no quarrel with the Democratic machine; it takes
+the federal offices which the Democrats cannot get, and the Democrats take
+local offices which the Republicans know they cannot get.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><i>The South a Weapon in National Conventions</i></p>
+
+<p>The Republican Presidents at Washington have, unfortunately, played into
+the hands of the Southern office-holding machine. Why? Partly because
+Republicans are few in the South and partly because a solid Republican
+delegation<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_262" id="Page_262">[Pg 262]</a></span> from the South, easily handled and controlled and favouring
+the administration, is a powerful weapon in national conventions. McKinley
+played almost absolutely into the hands of this Southern Republican
+machine, and Hanna operated it. Indeed, McKinley&#8217;s nomination was probably
+due to the skill with which Hanna marshaled this solid phalanx of Southern
+delegates. Roosevelt has made a number of first-class appointments outside
+of the machine, even appointing a few Democrats of the high type of Judge
+Jones of Alabama.</p>
+
+<p>Over and over in this book I have spoken of the Negro as a national, not a
+Southern issue; and in politics this is peculiarly true. Though having few
+Republicans, the South, through its office-holding Republican delegations,
+has largely influenced the choice of more than one Republican president.
+The &#8220;Solid South&#8221; is as useful to the Republican party as to the
+Democratic party. Why the certainty expressed by Republican politicians of
+the nomination of Taft? Because the national organisation felt sure it
+could control the Southern delegations. It counted on the &#8220;Solid South.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Thus in a very real sense the government of this entire nation turns upon
+the despised black man&mdash;whether he votes or not!</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><i>The Negro&#8217;s Political Power in the North</i></p>
+
+<p>In another way the Southern attitude toward the Negro affects the nation.
+Owing to disfranchisement and &#8220;Jim Crow&#8221; laws, thousands of Negroes have
+moved northward and settled in the great cities, until to-day Negro
+voters, though they may not (as has been claimed) hold the balance of
+power, yet wield a great influence in the politics of at least four
+states&mdash;Indiana, Ohio, New Jersey, and Rhode Island&mdash;and are also
+considerable factors in the political destiny of Illinois, Pennsylvania,
+New York, and Delaware. The potential influence of the Negro voter in the
+North is excellently illustrated in the recent campaign for the Republican
+nomination to the Presidency, especially in the fight in Ohio between
+Foraker and Taft and in the eagerness displayed by Taft to placate the
+Negro vote.</p>
+
+<p>In still another way the Negro affects the entire nation. Through its
+attitude of exclusion the South exercises an influence on national
+legislation out of all proportion to its<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_263" id="Page_263">[Pg 263]</a></span> voting population. Though nearly
+all Negroes are disfranchised, as well as a large number of white voters,
+all these disfranchised voters are counted in the allotment of Congressmen
+to Southern states.</p>
+
+<p>Out of this has grown a curious condition. In 1904 Alabama, Arkansas,
+Georgia, and Mississippi, which have thirty-five members in Congress, cast
+413,516 votes, while Massachusetts alone, with only fourteen Congressmen,
+cast 445,098 votes.</p>
+
+<p>Here, for example, is the record of South Carolina:</p>
+
+<table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="5" summary="table">
+<tr><td>Total population of voting age, both white and coloured (1900)</td><td><span class="spacer">&nbsp;</span></td><td align="right">283,325</td></tr>
+<tr><td>Total white voting population</td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">130,375</td></tr>
+<tr><td>Total actual vote in 1902 for Congressmen</td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">32,185</td></tr>
+<tr><td>Total Democratic vote which elected seven Congressmen</td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">29,343</td></tr></table>
+
+<p>Thus in South Carolina in 1902 an average of about 4,600 voters voted at
+the election for each Congressman (in 1904, a Presidential year, the
+average was about 8,100) while in New York State over 40,000 votes are
+cast in each Congressional district and in Pennsylvania about 38,000.</p>
+
+<p>Now, I am not here criticising this condition; I am merely endeavouring to
+set down the facts as I find them. My purpose is to illustrate the
+profound and far-reaching effects of the Negro issue upon the nation. And
+is it not curious, when all is said, to observe how this rejected black
+man, whom the South has attempted to eliminate utterly from politics, has
+been for years changing and warping the entire government of this nation
+in the most fundamental ways! Did he not cause a civil war, the results of
+which still curse the country? And though excluded in large measure from
+the polls, does he not in reality cast his mighty vote for Presidents,
+Congressmen, Governors?</p>
+
+<p>Often, looking out across the South, it appears to the observer that the
+Negro has a more far-reaching and real influence on our national life for
+being excluded from the polls than he would have if he were frankly and
+justly admitted to the franchise on the same basis as white men.</p>
+
+<p>All the real thinkers and statesmen of the South have looked and longed
+for the hour when the South, free of this dominance of an ugly issue,
+should again take its great place in national affairs. In 1875, at the
+close of Reconstruction, Senator Lamar of Mississippi predicted in a
+speech at Jackson that<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_264" id="Page_264">[Pg 264]</a></span> the South, having eliminated the Negro from
+politics, would now divide on new economic issues and become politically
+healthy. But that has not happened; less division on real issues probably
+exists in Mississippi to-day than in 1875. Why? Is it not possible that
+the manner of the elimination of the Negro from politics is wrong? Has it
+occurred to leaders and statesmen that Negroes who are qualified can be
+eliminated <i>into</i> politics; that the present method in reality makes the
+Negro a more dangerous political factor than he would be if he were
+allowed to vote regularly and quietly?</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><i>Southerners Who Are Speaking Out</i></p>
+
+<p>In spite of the domination of both parties in the South by narrowing
+groups of leaders there are not wanting men to fight for a new alignment.
+On the Republican side one of these men is Joseph C. Manning, of Alexander
+City, Ala., who publishes a paper called the <i>Southern American</i>. He has
+shown how white men are being disfranchised as well as Negroes, how the
+South is controlled by a &#8220;Bourbon oligarchy&#8221; in the Democratic party and a
+&#8220;federal-for-revenue&#8221; Republican party&mdash;as he calls them. His paper
+appears every week with his denunciations in big letters, urging the
+Republican party to reform and become a party of truth and progress.</p>
+
+<p>He says:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p class="center">THE RALLYING CRY</p>
+
+<p>The great body of the people of the white South, the masses of the
+white people of Alabama, are to-day suppressed by the strategy of a
+political autocracy dominating under the guise and pretence of a
+democracy.</p>
+
+<p>Why not throw off the yoke and get in the fight?</p>
+
+<p>Rise up above this petty delegate getting, patronage manipulating,
+state chairman squabbling, until this small politics shall become
+lost in the great and the supreme issue.</p>
+
+<p>Stop this &#8220;lily-white&#8221; nonsense. Quit being sidetracked by this
+Bourbon wail of Negro. Recognise this vital force of the immovable
+truth that an injustice to one American citizen will react upon all.
+You can&#8217;t have one law for the white man and another for the Negro in
+our form of government. You know that those who have the most talked
+of suppressing blacks have really suppressed you, white Republicans,
+and the most of the Southern whites.</p>
+
+<p>The outcry of Negro and social equality and the like is the very
+essence of political moonshine.</p></div>
+
+<p>A number of men inside the Democratic party are not afraid to speak out.
+Ex-Congressman Fleming of Georgia said in a notable address at Athens, Ga.:</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_265" id="Page_265">[Pg 265]</a></span>&#8220;Those whose stock in trade is &#8216;hating the nigger&#8217; may easily gain some
+temporary advantage for themselves in our white primaries, where it
+requires no courage, either physical or moral, to strike those who have no
+power to strike back&mdash;not even with a paper ballot. But these men will
+achieve nothing permanent for the good of the state or of the nation by
+stirring up race passion and prejudice. Injustice and persecution will not
+solve any of the problems of the ages. God did not so ordain his universe.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Justly proud of our race, we refuse to amalgamate with the Negro, but the
+Negro is an American citizen, and is protected as such by guarantees of
+the Constitution that are as irrepealable almost as the Bill of Rights
+itself. Nor, if such a thing as repealing these guarantees were possible,
+would it be wise for the South. Suppose we admit the oft-reiterated
+proposition that no two races so distinct as the Caucasian and the Negro
+can live together on terms of perfect equality; yet it is equally true
+that without some access to the ballot, present or prospective, some
+participation in the government, no inferior race in an elective republic
+could long protect itself against reduction to slavery in many of its
+substantial forms&mdash;and God knows the South wants no more of that curse.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Men of the type of Mr. Fleming are far in the minority in the South; they
+are so few as yet as to count, politically speaking, for little or
+nothing. But the fact that they are there, that they are not afraid to
+speak out, even though it ruins them politically, is significant and
+hopeful.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><i>Ante-bellum Aggression</i></p>
+
+<p>Now it is this way with a party having only one issue: when attacked, it
+can only become more and more violent and vociferous upon that issue. And
+this is what we discover in the South: an increasing bitterness of leaders
+like Tillman and Vardaman, for they know that their own existence and that
+of the party which they represent depends upon keeping the Negro issue
+prominent. The very fact that they are violent is significant: it shows
+that they recognise powerful and growing new elements in the South, which,
+though not yet apparent politically, are getting hold of the people.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_266" id="Page_266">[Pg 266]</a></span>In other words, the present group of autocratic leaders is seeking at any
+length to defend itself. And its work is not only defensive, it is also
+offensive. It must be. The institution of slavery might have lasted many
+years longer if the Southern leaders had been content with the slave
+territory they already held. But they were not so content. They tried to
+extend slavery to the new territories of the Union, and it was this
+aggression that was the chief immediate cause of the Civil War. It was the
+struggle over Missouri and Kansas, and the policy of the country regarding
+the new West, whether it should be admitted slave or free, which
+precipitated hostilities.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Continual aggression,&#8221; John Hay once said, &#8220;is the necessity of a false
+position.&#8221; The ante-bellum Southern leaders saw that they must either
+extend their institution or else face its ultimate extinction.</p>
+
+<p>At the present time we have a repetition of the ante-bellum aggression. As
+it happened then, we have speakers like Tillman and others coming North
+urging the validity of the Southern treatment of the Negro. Writers like
+Thomas Dixon rekindle old fires of hatred. At the same moment that Tillman
+is abusing the North for its interest in Southern education, he himself is
+speaking from Northern platforms to make sentiment for the Southern
+position. So we have the extension of disfranchisement and &#8220;Jim Crow&#8221; laws
+to the new Western state of Oklahoma and the agitation for
+disfranchisement in Maryland. So we have the advancing demand by
+Southerners in Congress for the repeal of the XV Amendment. And just
+recently Congressman Heflin of Alabama has introduced a bill seeking to
+provide for &#8220;Jim Crow&#8221; distinctions upon the street-cars of Washington.
+How all this recalls the efforts of the ante-bellum Southern Congressmen
+to force the United States Government to take the Southern position on the
+slavery question!</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><i>Fighting to Put the Negro Down</i></p>
+
+<p>I have recently read some of the voluminous discussions upon the subject
+of slavery which took place before the Civil War, and I have been
+astonished to find the arguments of the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_267" id="Page_267">[Pg 267]</a></span> Southern political leaders of
+to-day almost identical in substance (though changed somewhat in form)
+with the reasoning of the old slave-owning class. One hears the same
+arguments regarding the physiological and ethnological inferiority of all
+coloured men to all white men: the argument that &#8220;one drop of Negro blood
+makes a Negro,&#8221; and even that the Negro is not a human being at all, but a
+beast.</p>
+
+<p>I have before me a book recently published by a Bible house (of all
+places!) in St. Louis and widely circulated in the South. It is entitled
+&#8220;Is the Negro a Beast?&#8221; and it goes on to prove by Biblical quotation that
+he has no soul! Being a beast, it becomes a small matter to kill him.</p>
+
+<p>One also hears the argument now, as in slavery times, of the divine right
+of the white man to rule the Negro. &#8220;God intended the white man to rule,&#8221;
+says Vardaman, &#8220;and the Negro to be a humble servant.&#8221; And finally there
+is the frank argument of physical force; that the white man, being strong,
+will and must rule the Negro.</p>
+
+<p>Hoke Smith to-day is supporting much the same position that Robert Toombs
+held before the war. Of course Hoke Smith has receded from the belief in
+the chattel slavery of the Negro for which Toombs contended; but in many
+other respects he evidently believes that the Negro should be reduced (as
+Ex-Congressman Fleming of Georgia says in the quotation given above) &#8220;to
+slavery in many of its substantial forms.&#8221; In order to validate its
+position and keep its place (and make the Negro keep his) the white
+aristocracy has been forced to defend the doctrine of all monarchies and
+aristocracies&mdash;the inequality of men in all respects. Hoke Smith states
+the fundamental assumption thus plainly in his address (June 9, 1906):</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I believe the wise course is to plant ourselves squarely upon the
+proposition in Georgia that the Negro is in no respect the equal of the
+white man, and that he cannot in the future in this state occupy a
+position of equality.&#8221;</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><i>Both the South and the North Undemocratic</i></p>
+
+<p>Thus I have attempted to present the political situation in the South and
+the reasoning which underlies it. It possesses a large significance for
+the entire country.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_268" id="Page_268">[Pg 268]</a></span>Here is the fact: the war and the emancipation proclamation did not make
+the South completely democratic; it merely cut away one bulwark of
+aristocracy&mdash;slavery. The South is still dominated by the aristocratic
+idea, and more or less frankly so. The South has admitted only grudgingly,
+and not yet fully, the &#8220;poor white&#8221; man to democratic political
+fellowship. There are, as I have shown, hundreds of thousands of
+disfranchised white Americans in the South. Moreover many white leaders
+look askance on the new Italian immigrants, though they, too, are white
+men. The extreme point of view in regard to the foreigner was expressed in
+a speech by the Hon. Jeff Truly, candidate for governor of Mississippi, at
+Magnolia in that state on March 18, 1907:</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I am opposed to any inferior race. The Italian immigration scheme does
+not settle the labour question; Italians are a threat and a danger to our
+racial, industrial, and commercial supremacy. Mississippi needs no such
+immigration. Leave your lands to your own children. As governor of the
+state, I promise that not one dollar of the state shall be spent for the
+immigration of any such.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>As for the Negro, of course, the South has never believed in a democracy
+which really includes him.</p>
+
+<p>But neither does the North. When we get right down to it, the controlling
+white men in the North do not believe in an inclusive democracy much more
+than the South. I have talked with many Northerners who go South, and it
+is astonishing to see how quickly most of them adopt the Southern point of
+view. For it is the doctrine which many of them, down in their hearts,
+really believe.</p>
+
+<p>In reality the North also has an aristocratic government, an oligarchy
+based upon wealth and property, which dominates politics and governs the
+country more or less completely. Roosevelt has been fighting some of the
+more boisterous aspects of the rule of this oligarchy&mdash;and has showed the
+country how powerful it is!</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><i>The Underman Fighting All Over the World</i></p>
+
+<p>It is curious, indeed, when one&#8217;s attention is awakened to the facts, how
+strong the parallel is between the South and the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_269" id="Page_269">[Pg 269]</a></span> North. I mean here a
+parallel not in laws or even in customs, but in spirit, in the living
+reality which lies down deep under institutions, which is, after all, the
+only thing that really counts.</p>
+
+<p>The cause of all the trouble in the North is similar to what it is in the
+South: the underman will not keep his place. He is restless, ambitious, he
+wants civil, political, and industrial equality. Thus we see the growth of
+labour organisations, and the spread of populists and socialists, who
+demand new rights and a greater share in the products of labour. They will
+not, as Hoke Smith says of the Negroes, &#8220;content themselves with the place
+of inferiority.&#8221; The essential feature of the history of the last five
+years in this country, and it will go down in history as the beginning of
+great things, has been the vague, crudely powerful effort of the underman
+(half his strength wasted because he is blind) to limit in some degree the
+power of this moneyed aristocracy. Such is the meaning of the demand for
+trust and railroad legislation, such the significance of the insurance
+investigation, such the effort to curb the power of men like Rockefeller,
+Harriman, Morgan.</p>
+
+<p>So the North, in spirit, also disfranchises its lower class. It does it by
+the purchase at elections in one form or another of its &#8220;poor whites&#8221; and
+its Negroes. What else is the meaning of Tammany Hall and the boss and
+machine system in other cities? Tammany Hall is our method of
+disfranchisement: it is our cunning machine for nullifying the fourteenth
+and fifteenth amendments. While the South is disfranchising by
+legislation, the North is doing it by cash.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><i>The Question We Are Coming To</i></p>
+
+<p>I have spoken of the lack of free speech in the South; but that is not
+peculiar to the South. Though there is undoubtedly a far greater
+intellectual freedom to-day in the North than in the South, yet the North
+has disciplined more than one professor for his utterances on the trust or
+railroad questions. South or North, it is dangerous to attack the
+entrenched privilege of those in control.</p>
+
+<p>We criticise the frankness of Vardaman in advocating different standards
+of justice for white men and Negroes, but do we not have the same custom
+in the North? How extremely<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_270" id="Page_270">[Pg 270]</a></span> difficult it is sometimes to get a rich
+criminal into jail in the North!</p>
+
+<p>In short, we are coming again face to face in this country with the same
+tremendous (even revolutionary) question which presents itself in every
+crisis of the world&#8217;s history:</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;What is democracy? What does democracy include? Does democracy really
+include Negroes as well as white men? Does it include Russian Jews,
+Italians, Japanese? Does it include Rockefeller and the Slavonian
+street-sweeper? And Tillman and the Negro farmhand?&#8221;</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr style="width: 50%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_271" id="Page_271">[Pg 271]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XIII" id="CHAPTER_XIII"></a>CHAPTER XIII</h2>
+<h3>THE NEW SOUTHERN STATESMANSHIP</h3>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>&#8220;Democracy is the progress of all through all, under the leadership of
+the best and the wisest.&#8221;&mdash;<i>Mazzini.</i></p></div>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="dropcap"><span class="caps">In former</span> chapters I have had much to tell that was unpleasant and perhaps
+discouraging; but it had to be told, for it is there, and must be honestly
+met and reckoned with.</p>
+
+<p>But the chief pleasure of the present task has been the opportunity it has
+given me to meet the working idealists of the South, and to see the
+courageous and unselfish way in which they are meeting the obstacles which
+confront them. If any man would brighten his faith in human nature, if he
+would attain a deeper and truer grasp upon the best things of life, let
+him attend one of the educational rallies of Virginia, North Carolina,
+Tennessee, Georgia, or Texas, and hear the talks of Dr. S. C. Mitchell,
+President Alderman, J. Y. Joyner, P. P. Claxton, Chancellor Barrow,
+President Houston, and others; or let him spend a few days at Hampton with
+Dr. Frissell, or at Tuskegee with Dr. Washington, or at Calhoun with Miss
+Thorne. Coming away from a meeting one night at Tuskegee after there had
+been speaking in the chapel by both white and coloured men, I could not
+help saying to myself:</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;The Negro problem is not unsolvable; it is being solved, here and now, as
+fast as any human problem can be solved.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Men may be found straining their vision to see some distant and complex
+solution to the question (have we not heard talk of deportation,
+extermination, amalgamation, segregation, and the like?) when the real
+solution is under their very eyes, going forward naturally and simply.</p>
+
+<p>It is this quiet, constructive movement among the white people in the
+South which I wish to consider here.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_272" id="Page_272">[Pg 272]</a></span>In a former chapter I showed how the Negroes of the country are divided
+into two parties or points of view, the greater led by Booker T.
+Washington, the lesser by W. E. B. DuBois. Washington&#8217;s party is the party
+of the opportunist and optimist, which deals with the world as it is: it
+is a constructive, practical, cheerful party. It emphasises duties rather
+than rights. Dr. DuBois&#8217;s party, on the other hand, represents the
+critical point of view. It is idealistic and pessimistic: a party of
+agitation, emphasising rights rather than duties.</p>
+
+<p>But these two points of view are by no means peculiar to Negroes: they
+divide all human thought; and the action and reaction between them is the
+mode of human progress.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><i>Division of White Leadership in the South</i></p>
+
+<p>White leadership in the South, then, is divided along similar lines with
+Negro leadership&mdash;a party of rights and a party of duties. But with this
+wide difference: among the Negroes as I showed, the party of agitation and
+criticism led by DuBois is far inferior both numerically and in influence
+to the party of opportunity and duties led by Washington. For the Negroes
+have been forced to concede the futility of trying to progress by
+political action and legislation, by rights specified but not earned.
+Washington&#8217;s preaching has been:</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Stop thinking about your rights and get down to work. Get yourself right
+and the world will be all right.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>But among the white people of the South the party of agitation and the
+emphasis of rights rather than duties is still far in the ascendency. Led
+by such men as Tillman, Vardaman, Jeff Davis, Hoke Smith, and others, it
+controls, for the present, the policies of the entire South. It has much
+to say of the rights of the white man, very little about his duties. It
+is, indeed, doing for the whites by agitation and legislation (often a
+kind of force) exactly what Dr. DuBois would like to do for the Negro, if
+he could.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Agitate, object, fight,&#8221; say both Tillman and DuBois.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Work,&#8221; says Washington.</p>
+
+<p>Now, the same logic of circumstances which produced Booker T. Washington
+and his significant movement among the Negroes has produced a group of new
+and highly able<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_273" id="Page_273">[Pg 273]</a></span> white leaders. These new leaders saw that agitation
+(while most necessary in its place) would not, after all, build up the
+South; they saw that although the sort of leader typified by Tillman and
+Vardaman was passing laws and winning elections, he was not, after all,
+getting anywhere; that race feeling was growing more bitter, often to the
+injury of Southern prosperty; that progress is not built upon stump
+speeches. The answer to all this was plain enough.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Let us stop talking, forget the race problem, and get to work. It does
+not matter where we take hold, but let us go to work.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>And the doctrine of work in the South has become a great propaganda,
+almost, indeed, a passion. It has found expression in a remarkable growth
+of industrial activities, cotton-mills, coal-mines, iron and steel
+industries; in new methods of farming; in spreading railroads. But more
+than all else, perhaps, it has developed a new enthusiasm for education,
+not only for education of the old classical sort, but for industrial and
+agricultural education&mdash;the training of workers. All this, indeed,
+represents the rebound from years of agitation in which the Negro has been
+&#8220;cussed and discussed,&#8221; as one Southerner put it to me, beyond the limit
+of endurance. Wherever I went in the South among the new industrial and
+educational leaders I found an active distaste for the discussion of the
+Negro problem. These men were too busy with fine new enterprises to be
+bothered with ancient and unprofitable issues.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><i>New Prescriptions for Solving the Negro Problem</i></p>
+
+<p>When I asked Professor Dillard of New Orleans how he thought the Negro
+question should be treated, he replied:</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;With silence.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;My prescription,&#8221; says President Alderman in his address on &#8220;Southern
+Idealism,&#8221; &#8220;is &#8216;silence and slow time,&#8217; faith in the South, and wise
+training for both white and black.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Edgar Gardner Murphy of Alabama, himself one of the new leaders, has thus
+outlined the position of the rising Southern leadership:</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;The South is growing weary of extremists and of <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_274" id="Page_274">[Pg 274]</a></span>sensational
+problem-solvers.... Our coming leadership will have a sense of proportion
+which will involve a steady refusal to be stampeded by antique nightmares
+and ethnological melodrama. It will possess an increasing passion for
+getting hold of the real things in a real world. And it will ... deal with
+one task at a time. It will subordinate paper schemes of distant
+amelioration to duties that will help right now.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Emphasis here is laid upon &#8220;real things in a real world&#8221; and &#8220;duties that
+will help right now&#8221;; and that is the voice everywhere of the new
+statesmanship.</p>
+
+<p>But let us be clear upon one point at the start. The platforms of these
+parties are matters of emphasis. One emphasises rights; the other
+emphasises duties. I have no doubt that Booker T. Washington believes as
+firmly in the rights of the Negro as any leader of his race; he has merely
+ceased to emphasise these rights by agitation until his people have gained
+more education and more property, until by honest achievement they are
+prepared to exercise their rights with intelligence.</p>
+
+<p>In the same way, the views of many of the new Southern white leaders of
+whom I shall speak in this article have not radically changed, so far as
+the Negro is concerned; some of them, I have found, do not differ from
+Tillman upon essential points; but, like Washington, they have decided not
+to emphasise controversial matters, and go to work and develop the South,
+and the people of the South, for the good of the whole country. If the
+test has to come in the long run between white men and coloured men, as it
+will have to come and is coming all the time, they want it to be an honest
+test of efficiency. The fittest here, too, will survive (there is no
+escaping the great law!), but these new thinkers wish the test of fitness
+to be, not mere physical force, not mere brute power, whether expressed in
+lynching or politics, but the higher test of real capacity. They have
+supreme confidence that the white man is superior on his merits in any
+contest; and Washington, on his side, is willing to (indeed, he must) take
+up the gauntlet thus thrown down.</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<table width="50%" border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="5" summary="table">
+<tr><td colspan="2"><img src="images/gs24_top.jpg" alt="" /></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right"><small>Photograph by Hitchler</small></td><td align="right"><small>Photograph by Pach Bros.</small></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="center">JAMES H. DILLARD<br />of New Orleans, President<br />Jeanes Fund Board.</td><td align="center">EDWIN A. ALDERMAN<br />President of the<br />University of Virginia.</td></tr>
+<tr><td>&nbsp;</td></tr>
+<tr><td colspan="2"><img src="images/gs24_mid.jpg" alt="" /></td></tr>
+<tr><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right"><small>Photograph by The Elliotts</small></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="center">A. M. SOULE<br />President Georgia State<br />College of Agriculture.</td><td align="center">D. F. HOUSTON<br />President of the<br />University of Texas.</td></tr>
+<tr><td>&nbsp;</td></tr>
+<tr><td colspan="2"><img src="images/gs24_bot.jpg" alt="" /></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right"><small>Photograph by Pach Bros.</small></td><td align="right"><small>Photograph by Knafft &amp; Bro.</small></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="center">GEORGE FOSTER PEABODY<br />of New York, member of the<br />Southern Education and<br />Jeanes Fund Boards.</td>
+<td align="center">P. P. CLAXTON<br />of the University of Tennessee,<br />leader of the educational<br />campaign in Tennessee.</td></tr></table>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>The condition in the South may be likened to a battle in which the
+contestants, weary of profitless and wordy warfare, are turning homeward
+to gather up new ammunition. Each <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_275" id="Page_275">[Pg 275]</a></span>side is passionately getting
+education, acquiring land, developing wealth and industry, preparing for
+the struggles of the future. And it is a fine and wholesome tendency. In a
+large sense, indeed, this movement typifies the progressive thought of the
+entire country for it means a sincere attempt to change the plane of
+battle (for battle there must be) from one of crude, primitive force,
+whether physical, political, or, indeed, industrial, to one of
+intellectual efficiency or usefulness to society.</p>
+
+<p>And these working idealists of both races understand one another better
+than most people think. Dr. Mitchell and President Alderman understand
+Booker T. Washington, and he understands them. This is not saying that
+they agree. But agreement upon every abstract principle is not necessary
+where both parties are hard at work at practical, definite, and immediate
+tasks.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><i>Self-Criticism in the South</i></p>
+
+<p>The new Southern statesmanship began (as all new movements begin) with
+self-criticism. Henry W. Grady, a real statesman, by criticising the old
+order of things, announced the beginning of the &#8220;New South&#8221;&mdash;an active,
+working, hopeful South.</p>
+
+<p>He saw the faults of the old exclusive agricultural life and the danger of
+low-class, uneducated labour, and he urged industrial development and a
+better school system. R. H. Edmonds of Baltimore, through the
+<i>Manufacturers&#8217; Record</i>, and many other able business leaders have done
+much to bring about the new industrial order: the day of new railroads,
+cotton-mills, and coal-mines; the day of cities.</p>
+
+<p>But it is in the educational field that the development of the new
+statesmanship has been most remarkable. Although it was unfortunate in one
+way that so much of the political leadership of the South should have
+fallen to men of the type of Vardaman, Jeff Davis, and Heflin, it is
+<ins class="correction" title="original: hightly">highly</ins> fortunate in another way. For it has driven the broadest and ablest
+minds in the South to seek expression in other lines of activity, in
+industry and in the church, but particularly in educational leadership. It
+is not without profound significance that the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_276" id="Page_276">[Pg 276]</a></span> great American, General
+Lee, turned his attention and gave his highest energies after Appomattox,
+not to politics, but to education. The South to-day has a group of
+schoolmen who are leaders of extraordinary force and courage. The ministry
+has also attained an influence in the South which it does not possess in
+most parts of the North. The influence of Bishop Galloway of Mississippi,
+Dr. John E. White and Dr. C. B. Wilmer of Atlanta, and many others has
+been notable.</p>
+
+<p>For many years after the war the South was passive with exhaustion. Young
+men, who were not afraid, had to grow up to the task of reconstruction.
+And no one who has not traced the history of the South since the war can
+form any conception of the magnitude of that task. It was essentially the
+building of a new civilisation. The leaders were compelled not only to
+face abject poverty, but they have had to deal constantly with the problem
+of a labouring class just released from slavery. At every turn, in
+politics, in industry, in education, they were confronted with the Negro
+and the problem of what to do with him. Where one school-house would do in
+the North, they were compelled to build two school-houses, one for white
+children, one for black. It took from twenty-five to forty years of hard
+work after the war before the valuation of wealth in the South had again
+reached the figures of 1860. The valuations in the year 1890 for several
+of the states were less than in 1860. South Carolina in 1900&mdash;forty years
+after the beginning of the war&mdash;had only just caught up with the record of
+1860. Since 1890, however, the increase everywhere has been swift and
+sure.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><i>Courage and Vision of New Leaders</i></p>
+
+<p>Well, it required courage and vision in the earlier days to go before a
+poverty-stricken people, who had not yet enough means for living
+comfortably, and to demand of them that they build up and support two
+systems of education in the South. And yet that was exactly the task of
+the educational pioneers. Statesmanship, as I have said, begins with
+self-criticism. While the mere politician is flattering his followers and
+confirming them in their errors, the true statesman is criticising them
+and spurring them to new beliefs and stronger<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_277" id="Page_277">[Pg 277]</a></span> activities. While the
+politician is pleading rights, the statesman also dares to emphasise
+duties. While the politicians in the South (not all, but many of them)
+have been harping on race prejudice and getting themselves elected to
+office by reviving ancient hatred, these new statesmen have been facing
+courageously forward, telling the people boldly of the conditions of
+illiteracy which surround them, and demanding that schools be built and
+every child, white and black, be educated. In many cases they have had to
+overcome a settled prejudice against education, especially education of
+Negroes; and after that was overcome they have had to build up a sense of
+social responsibility for universal education before they could count on
+getting the money they needed for their work.</p>
+
+<p>After the war the North, in one form or another, poured much money into
+the South for teaching the Negroes; lesser sums, like those coming from
+the Peabody fund, were contributed toward white schools. But in the long
+run there can be no real education which is not self-education; outside
+influences may help (or indeed hurt), but until a state&mdash;like a man&mdash;is
+inspired with a desire for education and a willingness to make sacrifices
+to get it, the people will not become enlightened.</p>
+
+<p>In the middle eighties the fire of this inspiration began to blaze up in
+many parts of the South. Various combustible elements were present: a
+sense of the appalling condition of illiteracy existing in the South; a
+pride and independence of character which was hurt by the gifts of money
+from the North; a feeling that the Negroes in some instances were getting
+better educational opportunities than the white children; and, finally,
+the splendid idealism of young men who saw clearly that the only sure
+foundation for democracy is universal education.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><i>Inspiration of Democracy in North Carolina</i></p>
+
+<p>Not unnaturally the movement found its earliest expression in North
+Carolina, which has been the most instinctively democratic of Southern
+states. From the beginning of the country North Carolina, with its
+population of <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_278" id="Page_278">[Pg 278]</a></span>Scotch-Presbyterians and Quakers, has been inspired with a
+peculiar spirit of independence. When I was in Charlotte I went to see the
+monument which commemorates the Mecklenburg Declaration of Independence:
+the work of a group of stout-hearted citizens who decided, before the
+country at large was ready for it, to declare their independence of
+British rule. North Carolina was among the last of the Southern states to
+secede from the Union, and its treatment of its Negroes all along has been
+singularly liberal. For example, in several Southern states little or no
+provision is made for the Negro defective classes, but at Raleigh I
+visited a large asylum for Negro deaf, dumb, and blind which is conducted
+according to the most improved methods. And to-day North Carolina is freer
+politically, the state is nearer a new and healthy party alignment, than
+any other Southern state except Tennessee and possibly Kentucky.</p>
+
+<p>Such a soil was fertile for new ideas and new movements. In 1885 two young
+men, Charles D. McIver and Edwin A. Alderman, now president of the
+University of Virginia, began a series of educational campaigns under the
+supervision of the state. They spoke in every county, rousing the people
+to build better school-houses and to send legislators to Raleigh who
+should be more liberal in educational appropriations. In many cases their
+rallies were comparable with the most enthusiastic political
+meetings&mdash;only no one was asking to be elected to office, and the only
+object was public service. As Alderman has said:</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;It was an effort to move the centre of gravity from the court-house to
+the school-house.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>And it really moved; the state took fire and has been afire ever since.
+Governor Aycock made the educational movement a part of his campaign;
+Governor Glenn has been hardly less enthusiastic; and the development of
+the school system has been little short of amazing. When I was in Raleigh
+last spring J. Y. Joyner, State Superintendent of Schools, who was also
+one of the pioneer campaigners, told me that a new school-house was being
+built for every day in the year, and new school libraries established at
+the same rate. Between 1900 and 1906 the total amount of money expended
+for schools in North Carolina more than doubled, and while the school<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_279" id="Page_279">[Pg 279]</a></span>
+population in the same years had increased only 6 per cent., the daily
+attendance had increased 28 per cent.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><i>North Carolina Compared with Massachusetts</i></p>
+
+<p>To give a graphic idea of the progress in education, I can do no better
+than to show the increase in public expenditures since 1872:</p>
+
+<table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="5" summary="table">
+<tr><td>1872 Total school expenditures</td><td><span class="spacer">&nbsp;</span></td><td align="right">$&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;42,856</td></tr>
+<tr><td>1880 Total school expenditures</td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">349,831</td></tr>
+<tr><td>1890 Total school expenditures</td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">787,145</td></tr>
+<tr><td>1900 Total school expenditures</td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">1,091,610</td></tr>
+<tr><td>1906 Total school expenditures</td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">2,291,053</td></tr></table>
+
+<p>I have looked into the statistics and I find that North Carolina spends
+more per hundred dollars of taxable property for school purposes than
+Massachusetts, which is perhaps the leading American state in educational
+expenditures. In 1906 North Carolina raised $.40 on every one hundred
+dollars, while Massachusetts raised $.387. But this does not mean, of
+course, that North Carolina has reached the standard of Massachusetts; it
+only shows how the people, though not rich, have been willing to tax
+themselves. And they have only just begun; the rate of illiteracy of the
+state, as in all the South, is still excessive among both white and
+coloured people. According to the last census, North Carolina has more
+illiterate white people than any other state in the Union, a condition
+due, of course, to its large population of mountaineers. While the
+progress already made is notable the leaders still have a stupendous task
+before them. At the present time, although taxing itself more per hundred
+dollars&#8217; worth of property than Massachusetts, North Carolina pays only
+$2.63 each year for the education of each child, whereas Massachusetts
+expends $24.89&mdash;nearly ten times as much.</p>
+
+<p>I do not wish to over-emphasise the work in North Carolina; I am merely
+using conditions there as a convenient illustration of what is going on in
+greater or less degree all over the South. One of the group of early
+enthusiasts in North Carolina was P. P. Claxton, who is now in charge of
+the educational campaign in Tennessee. With President Dabney, formerly of
+the University of Tennessee and State Superintendent Mynders,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_280" id="Page_280">[Pg 280]</a></span> Mr. Claxton
+has conducted a state-wide campaign for education. Every available
+occasion has been utilised: picnics, court-days, Decoration Days: and
+often the audiences have been larger and more enthusiastic than political
+rallies. Indeed, the meetings have been carried on much like a political
+campaign. At one time over one hundred speakers were in the field. Every
+county in the state was stumped, and in two years it was estimated that
+over half of the entire population of the state actually attended the
+meetings. Labour unions and women&#8217;s clubs were stirred to activity,
+resolutions were passed, politicians were called upon to declare
+themselves, and teachers&#8217; organisations were formed. The result was most
+notable. In 1902 the state expended $1,800,000 for educational purposes;
+in 1908&mdash;six years later&mdash;the total will exceed $4,000,000.</p>
+
+<p>A similar campaign has been going on in Virginia, under the auspices of
+the Co&ouml;perative Educational Association, in which the leaders have been
+Dr. S. C. Mitchell, Professor Bruce Payne, President Alderman, and others.
+In this work Ex-Governor Montague has also been a force for good, both
+while he was governor and since, and Governor Swanson at present is
+actively interested. Local leagues were formed in every part of the state
+to the number of 324. Negroes have also organised along the same line and
+now have ten local associations in five counties.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><i>How the South Is Taxing Itself</i></p>
+
+<p>One of the most striking features of the movement has been the development
+of the system of local taxation for school purposes&mdash;which is a long step
+in the direction of democracy. In the past the people have looked more or
+less to some outside source for help&mdash;to state or national funds, or the
+private gifts of philanthropists, or they have depended upon private
+schools&mdash;but now they are voting to take the burden themselves. In other
+words, with the building up of a popular school system, supported by local
+taxation, education in the South is becoming, for the first time,
+democratic. It would be difficult to overestimate the importance of this
+movement in stimulating the local pride and self-reliance of the people,
+or in inspiring each community with educational enthusiasm.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_281" id="Page_281">[Pg 281]</a></span>Another development of profound influence has been going on in the South.
+As I have already pointed out, the so-called &#8220;Northern philanthropist&#8221; has
+long been interested in Southern education, especially Negro education.
+For years his activities awakened, and indeed still awaken, a good deal of
+hostility in some parts of the South. Many Southerners have felt that the
+Northerners, however good their intentions, did not understand Southern
+conditions, and that some of the money was expended in a way that did not
+help the cause of progress in the South.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><i>South and North Work Together</i></p>
+
+<p>But both the Northerners (whatever their mistakes in method may have been)
+and the new Southern leaders were intensely and sincerely interested in
+the same thing: namely, better education and better conditions in the
+South. It was natural that these two groups of earnest and reasonable men
+should finally come together in a spirit of co&ouml;peration; and this is,
+indeed, what has happened. Out of a series of quiet conferences held in
+the South grew what has been called the &#8220;Ogden movement&#8221; and the Southern
+Education Board. This organisation was made up of three different classes
+of men: first, a group of the Southern leaders of whom I have
+spoken&mdash;Mitchell, Alderman, Dabney, Curry, Houston, Hill, McIver, Claxton,
+Edgar Gardner Murphy, Sydney J. Bowie, and Henry E. Fries; second,
+Southern men who, living in the North, were yet deeply interested in the
+progress of the South&mdash;men like Walter H. Page, George Foster Peabody, and
+Frank R. Chambers; and, finally, the Northerners&mdash;Robert C. Ogden, who was
+president of the board, William H. Baldwin, H. H. Hanna, Dr. Wallace
+Buttrick, Albert Shaw, and Dr. G. S. Dickerman.</p>
+
+<p>One of the inspirers of the movement, also a member of the board, was Dr.
+H. B. Frissell, who followed General Armstrong as principal of Hampton
+Institute.</p>
+
+<p>Each year conferences have been held in the South, a feature of which has
+been the &#8220;Ogden Special&#8221;&mdash;a special train from the North bringing Northern
+citizens to Southern institutions and encouraging a more intimate
+acquaintanceship on<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_282" id="Page_282">[Pg 282]</a></span> both sides. No one influence has been more potent
+than this in developing a spirit of nationalisation in the Southern
+educational movement.</p>
+
+<p>So far in this chapter I have had very little to say about the Negro, and
+especially Negro education. It is important to know the view of the new
+leadership on this question. I have shown in previous articles that the
+majority view in the South was more or less hostile to the education of
+the Negro, or, at least, to his education beyond the bare rudiments.</p>
+
+<p>The new leaders have recognised this feeling, and while without exception
+they believe that the Negro must be educated and most of them have said so
+openly, the general policy has been to emphasise white education and unite
+the people on that.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;In education,&#8221; one of the leaders said to me, &#8220;it doesn&#8217;t matter much
+where we begin. If we can arouse the spirit of the school, the people are
+going to see that it is as important to the state to have a trained Negro
+as it is to have a trained white man.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>One of the troubles in the South, one of the reasons for the prejudice
+against education, and particularly Negro education, has arisen from the
+fact that what has been called education was not really education at all.
+In the first place many of the schools have been so poor and the teachers
+so inefficient that the &#8220;education&#8221; acquired was next to worthless. There
+was not enough of it, nor was it of a kind to give the Negro any real hold
+upon life, and it often hurt him far more than it helped. Much of the
+prejudice in the South against Negro education is unquestionably due to
+the wretched school system, which in many places has not really educated
+anybody. But, deeper than all this, the old conception in the South of a
+school was for a long time the old aristocratic conception&mdash;what some one
+has called &#8220;useless culture&#8221;&mdash;of educating a class of men, not to work,
+but to despise work. That idea of education has wrought much evil,
+especially among the Negroes. It has taught both white and coloured men,
+not the doctrine of service, which is necessary to democracy, but it has
+given them a desire for artificial superiority, which is the
+characteristic of aristocracies. It has made the Negro &#8220;uppish&#8221; and
+&#8220;bumptious&#8221;; it has caused some white men to argue their<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_283" id="Page_283">[Pg 283]</a></span> superiority when
+they had no basis of accomplishment or usefulness to make them really
+superior.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><i>The Inspiration of Hampton Institute</i></p>
+
+<p>But when the idea of education began to be democratic, when men began to
+think more of their duties than of their rights, a wholly new sort of
+school appeared; and it appeared first among the Negroes. The country has
+not yet begun to realise the debt of gratitude which it owes to the
+promoters of Hampton Institute&mdash;to the genius of General Armstrong, its
+founder and to the organising ability of Dr. H. B. Frissell who followed
+him. These men will be more highly honoured a hundred years from now than
+they are to-day, for Americans will then appreciate more fully their
+service to the democracy.</p>
+
+<p>The &#8220;Hampton idea&#8221; is the teaching of work&mdash;of service, of humility, of
+duties to God and to man. It is in the highest sense the democratic idea
+in education. And it has come, as most great movements have come, from the
+needs and the struggles of those who are downtrodden and outcast. And how
+wonderfully the idea has spread! Out of Hampton sprung Tuskegee and
+Calhoun and Kowaliga and scores of other Negro schools, until to-day
+nearly all Negro institutions for higher training in the South have
+industrial or agricultural departments.</p>
+
+<p>The best Southern white people were and are friendly to schools of this
+new type. They thought at first that Hampton and Tuskegee were going to
+train servants in the old personal sense of servants who become only
+cooks, butlers, and farmers, and many still have that aristocratic
+conception of service. But the &#8220;Hampton idea&#8221; of servants is a much
+greater one, for it is the democratic idea of training men who will serve
+their own people and thereby serve the country. Men who graduate from
+Hampton and Tuskegee become leaders of their race. They buy and cultivate
+land, they set up business establishments&mdash;in short, they become producers
+and state-builders in the largest sense.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><i>New World Idea of Education</i></p>
+
+<p>The idea of Hampton is the new world idea of education, and white people
+in the South (and in the North<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_284" id="Page_284">[Pg 284]</a></span> as well) are now applying it everywhere in
+their educational movements. Agricultural and industrial schools for white
+boys and girls are spreading throughout the South: schools to teach work,
+just as Hampton teaches it. Only last year the state of Georgia provided
+for eleven new agricultural schools in various parts of the state, and
+there is already talk in the South, as in the North, of agricultural
+training in high schools. These men, white and black, who are educated for
+democratic service will in time become masters of the state.</p>
+
+<p>The new leaders, then, of whom I have spoken, do not oppose Negro
+education: they favour it and will go forward steadily with the task of
+bring it about. So far, the Negro public schools have felt little of the
+new impulse; in some states and localities, as I have shown in other
+chapters, the Negro schools have actually retrograded, where the white
+schools have been improving rapidly. But that is the continuing influence
+of the old leadership; the new men have not yet come fully into their own.</p>
+
+<p>I could quote indefinitely from the real statesmen of the South regarding
+Negro education, but I have too little space. Senator Lamar of Mississippi
+once said:</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;The problem of race, in a large part, is a problem of illiteracy. Most of
+the evils which have grown up out of the problem have arisen from a
+condition of ignorance, prejudice and superstition. Remove these and the
+simpler elements of the question will come into play.... I will go with
+those who will go furthest in this matter.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>No higher note has been struck in educational ideals than in the
+Declaration of Principles adopted last winter (1907) at the meeting of the
+Southern Educational Association at Lexington, Ky., an exclusively
+Southern gathering of white men and women. Their resolutions, which for
+lack of space cannot be here printed in full, should be read by every man
+and woman in the country who is interested in the future of democratic
+institutions. I copy here only a few of the <ins class="correction" title="original: declaractions">declarations</ins>:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>1. All children, regardless of race, creed, sex, or the social
+station or economic condition of their parents, have equal right to,
+and should have equal opportunity for, such education as will develop
+to the fullest possible degree all that<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_285" id="Page_285">[Pg 285]</a></span> is best in their individual
+natures, and fit them for the duties of life and citizenship in the
+age and community in which they live.</p>
+
+<p>2. To secure this right and provide this opportunity to all children
+is the first and highest duty of the modern democratic state, and the
+highest economic wisdom of an industrial age and community. Without
+universal education of the best and highest type, there can be no
+real democracy, either political or social; nor can agriculture,
+manufactures, or commerce ever attain their highest development.</p>
+
+<p>3. Education in all grades and in all legitimate directions, being
+for the public good, the public should bear the burden of it. The
+most just taxes levied by the state, or with the authority of the
+state, by any smaller political division, are those levied for the
+support of education. No expenditures can possibly produce greater
+returns and none should be more liberal.</p></div>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><i>The New South on Negro Education</i></p>
+
+<p>Concerning Negro education, I am publishing the resolutions in full,
+because they voice the present thought of the best leadership in the
+South:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>1. We endorse the accepted policy of the states of the South in
+providing educational facilities for the youth of the Negro race,
+believing that whatever the ultimate solution of this grievous
+problem may be, education must be an important factor in that
+solution.</p>
+
+<p>2. We believe that the education of the Negro in the elementary
+branches of education should be made thorough, and should include
+specific instruction in hygiene and home sanitation, for the better
+protection of both races.</p>
+
+<p>3. We believe that in the secondary education of Negro youth emphasis
+should be placed upon agriculture and the industrial occupations,
+including nurse training, domestic science, and home economics.</p>
+
+<p>4. We believe that for practical, economical and psychological
+reasons Negro teachers should be provided for Negro schools.</p>
+
+<p>5. We advise instruction in normal schools and normal institutions by
+white teachers, whenever possible, and closer supervision of courses
+of study and methods of teaching in Negro normal schools by the State
+Department of Education.</p>
+
+<p>6. We recommend that in urban and rural Negro schools there should be
+closer and more thorough supervision, not only by city and county
+superintendents, but also by directors of music, drawing, manual
+training, and other special topics.</p>
+
+<p>7. We urge upon school authorities everywhere the importance of
+adequate buildings, comfortable seating, and sanitary accommodations
+for Negro youth.</p>
+
+<p>8. We deplore the isolation of many Negro schools, established
+through motives of philanthropy, from the life and the sympathies of
+the communities in which they are located. We recommend the
+supervision of all such schools by the state, and urge that their
+work and their methods be adjusted to the civilisation in which they
+exist, in order that the maximum good of the race and of the
+community may be thereby attained.</p>
+
+<p>9. On account of economic and psychological differences in the two
+races, we believe that there should be a difference in courses of
+study and methods of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_286" id="Page_286">[Pg 286]</a></span> teaching, and that there should be such an
+adjustment of school curricula as shall meet the evident needs of
+Negro youth.</p>
+
+<p>10. We insist upon such an equitable distribution of the school funds
+that all the youth of the Negro race shall have at least an
+opportunity to receive the elementary education provided by the
+state, and in the administration of state laws, and in the execution
+of this educational policy, we urge patience, toleration, and
+justice.</p>
+
+<p><span style="margin-left: 4em;">(Signed) <span class="smcap">G. R. Glenn, P. P. Claxton, J. H. Phillips,</span></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 7.5em;"><span class="smcap">C. B. Gibson, R. N. Roark, J. H. Van Sickle</span>,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 24em;"><i>Committee</i>.</span></p></div>
+
+<p>In this connection also let me call attention to the reports of J. Y.
+Joyner, Superintendent of Education, and Charles L. Coon of North
+Carolina, for a broad view of Negro education.</p>
+
+<p>I have already shown how the South and the North came together in
+educational relationships in the Southern Education Board. I have pointed
+it out as a tendency toward nationalisation in educational interests. But
+the Southern Education Board, while it contained both Northern and
+Southern white men, was primarily interested in white education and
+contained no Negro members. At the time the board was organised, an active
+interest in the Negro would have defeated, in part at least, its declared
+purpose.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<table width="50%" border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="5" summary="table">
+<tr><td colspan="2"><img src="images/gs25_top.jpg" alt="" /></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right">&nbsp;</td><td align="right"><small>Photograph by Curtiss Studio</small></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="center">S. C. MITCHELL<br />of Richmond College;<br />President of the Co&ouml;perative<br />Education Association of Virginia.</td>
+<td align="center">JUDGE EMORY SPEER<br />of Georgia. After two<br />terms in Congress he was<br />appointed to the Federal bench.</td></tr>
+<tr><td>&nbsp;</td></tr>
+<tr><td colspan="2"><img src="images/gs25_mid.jpg" alt="" /></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right"><span style="margin-left: 4em;"><small>Photograph by Sol. Young</small></span></td><td align="right"><small>Photograph by Rockwood</small></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="center">EDGAR GARDNER MURPHY<br />of Alabama, member<br />Southern Education Board;<br />author &#8220;Problems of the<br />Present South.&#8221;</td>
+<td align="center">DR. H. B. FRISSELL<br />Principal Hampton Institute and<br />member of Southern Education<br />and Jeanes Fund Boards</td></tr>
+<tr><td>&nbsp;</td></tr>
+<tr><td colspan="2"><img src="images/gs25_bot.jpg" alt="" /></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right"><small>Copyright, 1907, by Pach Bros.</small></td><td align="right"><small>Photograph by Wharton &amp; Tyree</small></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="center">R. C. OGDEN<br />of New York, President of<br />the Southern Education Board.</td>
+<td align="center">J. Y. JOYNER<br />Superintendent of Public<br />Instruction of North Carolina.</td></tr></table>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><i>The South, the North, and the Negro at Last Work Together</i></p>
+
+<p>Since that time another highly significant movement has arisen. In 1907
+Miss Jeanes, a wealthy Quakeress of Philadelphia, gave $1,000,000 for the
+encouragement of Negro primary education. She placed it in the hands of
+Dr. H. B. Frissell of Hampton and Dr. Booker T. Washington of Tuskegee. In
+the organisation of the board for the control of this fund and its work, a
+further step forward in nationalisation and, indeed, in the direction of
+democracy, was made. It marks a new development in the co&ouml;peration of all
+the forces for good in the solution of this difficult national problem.
+The membership of the board includes not only Southern and Northern white
+men, but also several leading Negroes. The president and general director
+is a Southern white man, coming of an old family, James H. Dillard, dean
+of Tulane University of New Orleans. It will be of interest to publish
+here a full list of the members, because they represent, in more ways
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_287" id="Page_287">[Pg 287]</a></span>than one, the new leadership not only in the South, but in the nation:</p>
+
+<p>Southern white men:</p>
+
+<p class="blockquot">James H. Dillard, President.<br />
+David C. Barrow, chancellor University of Georgia.<br />
+Belton Gilreath, manufacturer and mine-owner, Alabama.<br />
+Dr. S. C. Mitchell, of Richmond College, Richmond, Va.</p>
+
+<p>Northern white men:</p>
+
+<p class="blockquot">Robert C. Ogden, of New York.<br />
+Andrew Carnegie, of New York.<br />
+Talcott Williams, of Philadelphia.<br />
+George McAneny, president of the City Club of New York.<br />
+William H. Taft, of Ohio.</p>
+
+<p>To these must be added:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Dr. H. B. Frissell, of Hampton Institute, a Northerner, whose work
+and residence has long been in the South.</p>
+
+<p>George Foster Peabody, treasurer, a Georgian, trustee of the
+University of Georgia, who resides in the North.</p>
+
+<p>Walter H. Page, the editor of the <i>World&#8217;s Work</i>, a North Carolinian
+who has long lived in the North.</p></div>
+
+<p>Negro membership:</p>
+
+<p class="blockquot">Booker T. Washington.<br />
+Bishop Abraham Grant, of Kan.<br />
+R. R. Moton, of Hampton Institute, secretary of the board.<br />
+J. C. Napier, a banker of Nashville, Tenn.<br />
+R. D. Smith, a farmer of Paris, Tex.</p>
+
+<p>In a true sense the Southern Education Board and the Jeanes Fund Board
+represent organisations of working idealists. Such co&ouml;peration as this,
+between reasonable, broad-minded, and unselfish men of the entire country,
+is, at the present moment, the real solution of our problems. It is the
+solution of the Negro problem&mdash;all the solution there ever will be. For
+there is no finality in human endeavour: there is only activity; and when
+that activity is informed with the truth and inspired with faith and
+courage, it is not otherwise than success, for it is the best that human
+nature at any given time can do.</p>
+
+<p>In making this statement, I do not, of course wish to infer that
+conditions are as good as can be expected, and that nothing remains to be
+done. As a matter of fact, the struggle is just beginning; as I have shown
+in previous chapters, all the forces of entrenched prejudice and ignorance
+are against the <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_288" id="Page_288">[Pg 288]</a></span>movement, the political leaders who still dominate the
+South are as hostile as they dare to be. The task is, indeed, too big for
+the South alone, or the North alone, or the white man alone: it will
+require all the strength and courage the nation possesses.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><i>Universities Feel the New Impulse</i></p>
+
+<p>Besides the campaign for better common schools, the educational revival
+has also renewed and revivified all the higher institutions of learning in
+the South. The state universities, especially, have been making
+extraordinary progress. I shall not soon forget my visit to the University
+of Georgia, at Athens, nor the impression I received while there of strong
+men at work, not merely erecting buildings of mortar and brick, but
+establishing a new sort of university system, which shall unify and direct
+to one common end all of the educational activities of the state:
+beginning with the common school and reaching upward to the university
+itself; including the agricultural and industrial schools, and even the
+Negro college of agriculture. The University of Georgia is one of the
+oldest state colleges in America, and the ambition of its leaders is to
+make it one of the greatest. Mr. Hodgson drove me around the campus, which
+has recently been extended until it contains nearly 1,000 acres. He showed
+me where the new buildings are to be, the drives and the bridges. Much of
+it is yet a vision of the future, but it is the sort of vision that comes
+true. I spent a day with President Soule of the Agricultural College, on
+his special educational train, which covered a considerable part of the
+state of Georgia, stopping at scores of towns where the speakers appeared
+before great audiences of farmers and made practical addresses on cotton
+and corn and cattle-raising, and on education generally. And everywhere
+the practical work of these public educators was greeted with enthusiasm.</p>
+
+<p>I heard from Professor Stewart of his work in organising rural high
+schools, in encouraging local taxation, and in bringing the work of the
+public schools into closer correlation with that of the university.</p>
+
+<p>Seeing the educational work of states like Georgia, North Carolina,
+Virginia, and others, one cannot but feel that the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_289" id="Page_289">[Pg 289]</a></span> time is coming shortly
+when the North will be going South for new ideas and new inspiration in
+education.</p>
+
+<p>In a brief review like this, I have been able, of course, to give only the
+barest outline of a very great work, and I have mentioned only a few among
+hundreds of leaders; the work I have described is only illustrative of
+what is going on in greater or less degree everywhere in the South.</p>
+
+<p>Many important developments have come from these campaigns for education.
+The actual building of new school-houses and the expenditure of more money
+for the struggle with illiteracy is only one of many results. For the
+crusade for education, supplemented by the new industrial impulse in the
+South, has awakened a new spirit of self-help. The success with which the
+public was aroused in the educational campaign has inspired leaders in all
+lines of activity with new courage and faith. It is a spirit of
+youthfulness which is not afraid to attempt anything.</p>
+
+<p>Much printers&#8217; ink has been expended in trying to account for the spread
+of the anti-saloon movement throughout the South. But there is nothing
+strange about it: it is, indeed, only another manifestation of the new
+Southern spirit, the desire to get things right in the South. And this
+movement will further stir men&#8217;s minds, develop self-criticism, and reveal
+to the people their power of concerted action whether the politicians are
+with them or not. It is, indeed, significant that the women of the South,
+perhaps for the first time, have become a powerful influence in public
+affairs. Their organisations have helped, in some instances led, in both
+the educational and the anti-saloon movement. No leaders in the Virginia
+educational movement have been more useful than Mrs. L. R. Dashiell and
+Mrs. B. B. Munford of Richmond.</p>
+
+<p>Practically all the progress of the South, both industrial and
+educational, has been made by non-political movements and non-political
+leaders&mdash;often in opposition to the political leaders. Indeed, nearly
+every one of the hopeful movements of the South has had to capture some
+entrenched stronghold of the old political captains. In several states,
+for example, the school systems a few years ago were crippled by political
+domination and nepotism. Superintendents, principals, and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_290" id="Page_290">[Pg 290]</a></span> teachers were
+frequently appointed not for their ability, but because they were good
+members of the party or because they were related to politicians.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><i>New Statesmen Against Old Politicians</i></p>
+
+<p>In Alabama I found prominent men attacking the fee system of payment of
+lesser magistrates. The evil in this system lies in the encouragement it
+gives to trivial litigation and the arrest of citizens for petty offences.
+Let me give a single example. A Negro had another Negro arrested for
+&#8220;&#8217;sault and battery.&#8221; Both appeared in court. The accused Negro was tried,
+and finally sent to the chain-gang. The justice suggested to the convicted
+man that if he wanted satisfaction he should turn around and have his
+accuser arrested; which he did, promptly accusing him of &#8220;&#8217;busive
+language.&#8221; Another trial was held; and in the end both Negroes found
+themselves side by side in the chain-gang; the magistrate, the constable,
+the sheriff, had all drawn liberal fees, and the private contractor who
+hired the chain-gang, and who also &#8220;stood in&#8221; with the politicians, had
+obtained another cheap labourer for his work. It is a vicious circle,
+which has enabled the politicians and their backers to profit at every
+turn from the weakness and evil of both Negro and low-class white man.</p>
+
+<p>In attacking the fee system and the old, evil chain-gang system as the new
+leaders are doing in many parts of the South, in closing the saloons
+(always a bulwark of low politics), in building up a new school system
+free from selfish control, the new leaders are striking squarely at the
+roots of the old political aristocracy, undermining it and cutting it
+away. It is sure to fall; and in its place the South will rear a splendid
+new leadership of constructive ability and unselfish patriotism. There
+will be a division on matters of vital concern, and a turning from ancient
+and worn-out issues to new interests and activities. When that time comes
+the whole nation will again profit by the genius of Southern statesmanship
+and we shall again have Southern Presidents.</p>
+
+<p>Already the old type of politician sees the handwriting of fate. He knows
+not which way to turn. At one moment he harps more fiercely and bitterly
+than ever before on the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_291" id="Page_291">[Pg 291]</a></span> issue which has maintained him so long in power,
+the Negro; and at the next moment he seizes frantically on some one of the
+new issues&mdash;education, prohibition, anti-railroad&mdash;hoping thereby to
+maintain himself and his old party control. But he cannot do it; every
+force in the South is already making for new things, for more democracy,
+for more nationalisation.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr style="width: 50%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_292" id="Page_292">[Pg 292]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XIV" id="CHAPTER_XIV"></a>CHAPTER XIV</h2>
+<h3>WHAT TO DO ABOUT THE NEGRO&mdash;A FEW CONCLUSIONS</h3>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="dropcap"><span class="caps">The</span> deeper one delves into the problem of race, the humbler he becomes
+concerning his own views. Studying a black man, he discovers that he must
+study human nature. The best he can do, then, is to present his latest and
+clearest thought, knowing that newer light and deeper knowledge may modify
+his conclusions. It is out of such expressions of individual thought (no
+one man has or can have all the truth) and the kindly discussion which
+follows it (and why shouldn&#8217;t it be kindly?) that arises finally that
+power of social action which we call public opinion. Together&mdash;not
+otherwise&mdash;we may approach the truth.</p>
+
+<p>The world to-day is just beginning to meet new phases of the problem of
+race difference. Improved transportation and communication are yearly
+making the earth smaller. As Americans we are being brought every year
+into closer contact with black and yellow people. We are already disturbed
+not only by a Negro race problem, but on our Pacific coast and in Hawaii
+we have a Japanese and Chinese problem. In the Philippine Islands we have
+a tangle of race problems in comparison with which our Southern situation
+seems simple. Other nations are facing complexities equally various and
+difficult. England&#8217;s problems in both South Africa and India are largely
+racial. The great issue in Australia, where Chinese labour has become a
+political question, is expressed in the campaign slogan: &#8220;A white
+Australia.&#8221;</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><i>What Is the Race Problem?</i></p>
+
+<p>Essentially, then, what is the race problem?</p>
+
+<p>The race problem is the problem of living with human beings who are not
+like us, whether they are, in our estimation, our &#8220;superiors&#8221; or
+&#8220;inferiors,&#8221; whether they have kinky hair<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_293" id="Page_293">[Pg 293]</a></span> or pigtails, whether they are
+slant-eyed, hook-nosed, or thick-lipped. In its essence it is the same
+problem, magnified, which besets every neighbourhood, even every family.</p>
+
+<p>In our own country we have 10,000,000 Negroes distributed among 75,000,000
+white people. They did not come here to invade us, or because they wanted
+to come. We brought them by force, and at a fearful and cruel sacrifice of
+life. We brought them, not to do them good, but selfishly, that they might
+be compelled to do the hard work and let us live lazily, eat richly, sleep
+softly. We treated them as beasts of burden. I say &#8220;we,&#8221; for the North
+owned slaves, too, at first, and emancipated them (by selling them to the
+South) because it did not pay to keep them. Nor was the anti-slavery
+sentiment peculiar to the North; voices were raised against the
+institution of slavery by many Southern statesmen from Jefferson down&mdash;men
+who knew by familiar observation of the evil of slavery, especially for
+the white man.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><i>Differences Between Southern and Northern Attitudes Toward the Race
+Problem</i></p>
+
+<p>But differences are apparent in the outlook of the South and North which
+must be pointed out before we can arrive at any general conclusions. By
+understanding the reasons for race feeling we shall be the better able to
+judge of the remedies proposed.</p>
+
+<p>In the first place, the South is still clouded with bitter memories of the
+war, and especially of the Reconstruction period. The North cannot
+understand how deep and real this feeling is, how it has been warped into
+the souls of even the third generation. The North, victorious, forgot; but
+the South, broken and defeated, remembered. Until I had been a good while
+in the South and talked with many people I had no idea what a social
+cataclysm like the Civil War really meant to those who are defeated, how
+long it echoes in the hearts of men and women. The Negro has indeed
+suffered&mdash;suffered on his way upward; but the white man, with his higher
+cultivation, his keener sensibilities, his memories of a departed glory,
+has suffered far more. I have tried, as I have listened to the stories of
+struggle which only the South knows, to put<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_294" id="Page_294">[Pg 294]</a></span> myself in the place of these
+Anglo-Saxon men and women, and I think I can understand a little at least
+of what it must have meant to meet defeat, loss of relatives and friends,
+grinding poverty, the chaos of reconstruction&mdash;and after all that to have,
+always at elbow-touch, the unconscious cause of all their trouble, the
+millions of inert, largely helpless Negroes who, imbued with a sharp sense
+of their rights, are attaining only slowly a corresponding appreciation of
+their duties and responsibilities.</p>
+
+<p>The ruin of the war left the South poor, and it has provided itself slowly
+with educational advantages. It is a long step behind the North in the
+average of education among white people not less than coloured. But more
+than all else, perhaps, the South is in the throes of vast economic
+changes. It is in the transition stage between the old wasteful,
+semi-feudal civilisation and the sharp new city and industrial life. It is
+suffering the common pains of readjustment; and, being hurt, it is not
+wholly conscious of the real reason.</p>
+
+<p>For example, many of the troubles between the races attributed to the
+perversity of the Negro are often only the common difficulties which arise
+out of the relationship of employer and employee. In other words,
+difficulties in the South are often attributed to the race problem which
+in the North we know as the labour problem. For the South even yet has not
+fully established itself on the wage system. Payment of Negroes in the
+country is still often a matter of old clothes, baskets from the white
+man&#8217;s kitchen or store, with occasionally a little money, which is often
+looked upon as an indulgence rather than a right. No race ever yet has
+sprung directly from slavery into the freedom of a full-fledged wage
+system, no matter what the laws were. It is not insignificant of progress
+that the &#8220;basket habit&#8221; is coming to be looked upon as thievery, organised
+charity in the cities is taking the place of indiscriminate personal
+gifts, wages are more regularly paid and measure more accurately the value
+of the service rendered.</p>
+
+<p>But the relationships between the races still smack in no small degree,
+especially in matters of social contact (which are always the last to
+change), of the old feudal character; they are personal and sentimental.
+They express themselves in the personal liking for the old &#8220;mammies,&#8221; in
+the personal contempt for the &#8220;smart Negro.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_295" id="Page_295">[Pg 295]</a></span>A large part of the South still believes that the Negro was created to
+serve the white man, and for no other purpose. This is especially the
+belief in the conservative country districts.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;If these Negroes become doctors and merchants or buy their own farms,&#8221; a
+Southern woman said to me as a clinching argument against Negro education,
+&#8220;what shall we do for servants?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Another reason for the feeling in the South against the Negro is that the
+South has never had any other labouring class of people (to speak of) with
+which to compare the Negro. All the employers have been white; most of the
+workers have been black. The North, on the other hand, has had a constant
+procession of ignorant working people of various sorts. The North is
+<ins class="correction" title="original: familar">familiar</ins> with the progress of alien people, wherein the workingman of
+to-day becomes the employer of to-morrow&mdash;which has not happened in the
+South.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><i>Confusion of Labour and Race Problems</i></p>
+
+<p>An illustration of the confusion between the race problem and the labour
+problem is presented in certain Southern neighbourhoods by the influx of
+European immigrants. Because the Italian does the work of the Negro, a
+tendency exists to treat him like a Negro. In Louisiana on the sugar
+plantations Italian white women sometimes work under Negro foremen and no
+objection is made. A movement is actually under way in Mississippi to keep
+the children of Italian immigrants out of the white schools. In not a few
+instances white workmen have been held in peonage like Negroes; several
+such cases are now pending in the courts. Here is a dispatch showing how
+new Italian immigrants were treated in one part of Mississippi&mdash;only the
+Italians, unlike the Negroes, have an active government behind them:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p><span class="smcap">Mobile, Ala.</span>, October 3.&mdash;The Italian Government has taken notice of
+the situation at Sumrall, Miss., where the native whites are
+endeavouring to keep Italian children out of the schools and where a
+leader of the Italians was taken to the woods and whipped.</p>
+
+<p>The Italian Consul at New Orleans, Count G. Morroni, reached Mobile
+this afternoon and began an investigation of the situation. He to-day
+heard the story of Frank Seaglioni, the leader of the Italian colony
+at Sumrall, who was a few days ago decoyed from his home at night
+with a bogus message from New Orleans and unmercifully whipped by a
+mob of white men.</p></div>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_296" id="Page_296">[Pg 296]</a></span>A decided tendency also exists to charge up to the Negro, because he is a
+Negro, all the crimes which are commonly committed by any ignorant,
+neglected, poverty-stricken people. Only last summer we had in New York
+what the newspaper reporters called a &#8220;crime wave.&#8221; The crime in that case
+was what is designated in the South as the &#8220;usual crime&#8221; (offences against
+women) for which Negroes are lynched. But in New York not a Negro was
+implicated.</p>
+
+<p>I was struck while in Philadelphia by a presentment of a grand jury in
+Judge Kinsey&#8217;s court upon the subject of a &#8220;crime wave&#8221; which read thus:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>In closing our duties as jurymen, we wish to call to the attention of
+this court the large proportion of cases presented to us for action
+wherein the offences were charged to either persons of foreign birth
+or those of the coloured race, and we feel that some measures should
+be taken to the end that our city should be relieved of both the
+burden of the undesirable alien and the irresponsible coloured
+person.</p></div>
+
+<p>Here, it will be seen, the &#8220;undesirable alien&#8221; and &#8220;irresponsible coloured
+person&#8221; are classed together, although it is significant of the greater
+prejudice against the coloured man that the newspaper report of the action
+of the grand jury should be headed &#8220;Negro Crime Abnormal,&#8221; without
+referring to the alien at all. When I inquired at the prosecutor&#8217;s office
+about the presentiment, I was told:</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Oh, the dagoes are just as bad as the Negroes.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>And both are bad, not because they are Negroes or Italians, but because
+they are ignorant, neglected, poverty-stricken.</p>
+
+<p>Thus in the dust and confusion of the vast readjustments now going on in
+the South, the discomfort of which both races feel but neither quite
+understands, we have the white man blindly blaming the Negro and the Negro
+blindly hating the white. When they both understand that many of the
+troubles they are having are only the common gall-spots of the new
+industrial harness there will be a better living together.</p>
+
+<p>I do not wish to imply, of course, that an industrial age or the wage
+system furnishes an ideal condition for race relationships; for in the
+North the Negro&#8217;s struggle for survival in the competitive field is
+accompanied, as I have shown elsewhere, by the severest suffering. The
+condition of Negroes in Indianapolis, New York, and Philadelphia is in
+some ways<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_297" id="Page_297">[Pg 297]</a></span> worse than it is anywhere in the South. But, say what we will,
+the wage system is one step upward from the old feudalism. The Negro is
+treated less like a slave and more like a man in the North. It is for this
+reason that Negroes, no matter what their difficulties of making a living
+in the North, rarely wish to go back to the South. And as the South
+develops industrially it will approximate more nearly to Northern
+conditions. In Southern cities to-day, because of industrial development,
+the Negro is treated more like a man than he is in the country; and this
+is one reason why Negroes crowd into the cities and can rarely be
+persuaded to go back into the country&mdash;unless they can own their own land.</p>
+
+<p>But the South is rapidly shaking off the remnants of the old feudalism.
+Development of mines and forests, the extension of manufacturing, the
+introduction of European immigrants, the inflow of white Northerners,
+better schools, more railroads and telephones, are all helping to bring
+the South up to the economic standard of the North. There will be a
+further break-up of baronial tenant farming, the plantation store will
+disappear, the ruinous credit system will be abolished, and there will be
+a widespread appearance of independent farm-owners, both white and black.
+This will all tend to remove the personal and sentimental attitude of the
+old Southern life; the Negro will of necessity be judged more and more as
+a man, not as a slave or dependent. In short, the country, South and
+North, will become economically more homogeneous.</p>
+
+<p>But even when the South reaches the industrial development of the North
+the Negro problem will not be solved; it is certainly not solved in New
+York or Philadelphia, where industrial development has reached its highest
+form. The prejudice in those cities, as I have shown, has been growing
+more intense as Negro population increased. What, then, will happen?</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><i>Two Elements in Every Race Problem</i></p>
+
+<p>Two elements appear in every race problem: the first, race prejudice&mdash;the
+repulsion of the unlike; second, economic or competitive jealousy. Both
+operate, for example, in the case of the Irishman or Italian, but with the
+Negro and Chinaman race prejudice is greater because the difference is
+greater.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_298" id="Page_298">[Pg 298]</a></span> The difficulty of the Negro in this country is the colour of his
+skin, the symbol of his difference. In China the difficulty of the white
+trader is his whiteness, his difference. Race lines, in short, are drawn
+by white men, not because the other race is inferior (the Japanese and
+Chinese are in many ways our superiors), nor because of criminality
+(certain classes of foreigners are more criminal in our large cities than
+the Negroes), nor because of laziness, but because of discernible physical
+differences&mdash;black skin, almond eyes, pigtails, hook noses, a peculiar
+bodily odour, or small stature. That dislike of a different people is more
+or less instinctive in all men.</p>
+
+<p>A tendency has existed on the part of Northern students who have no
+first-hand knowledge of the masses of Negroes to underestimate the force
+of race repulsion; on the other hand, the Southern student who is
+confronted with the Negroes themselves is likely to overestimate racial
+repulsion and underestimate economic competition as a cause of the
+difficulty. The profoundest question, indeed, is to decide how much of the
+so-called problem is due to race repulsion and how much to economic
+competition.</p>
+
+<p>This leads us to the most sinister phase of the race problem. As I have
+shown, we have the two elements of conflict: instinctive race repulsion
+and competitive jealousy. What is easier for the race in power, the white
+race in this country (the yellow race in Asia) than to play upon race
+instinct in order to serve selfish ends? How shrewdly the labour union,
+whether in San Francisco or Atlanta, seizes upon that race hatred to keep
+the black or yellow man out of the union and thereby control all the work
+for its members! Race prejudice played upon becomes a tool in clinching
+the power of the labour monopoly.</p>
+
+<p>How the politician in the South excites race hatred in order that he may
+be elected to office! Vardaman governed because he could make men hate one
+another more bitterly than his opponent. The Rev. Thomas Dixon has
+appealed in his books and plays to the same passion.</p>
+
+<p>In several places in this country Negroes have been driven out by
+mobs&mdash;not because they were criminal, or because they were bad citizens,
+but because they were going into the grocery and drug business, they were
+becoming doctors, dentists, and the like, and taking away the trade of
+their white<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_299" id="Page_299">[Pg 299]</a></span> competitors. So the stores and restaurants of highly
+efficient Japanese were wrecked in San Francisco.</p>
+
+<p>What is easier or cruder to use as a weapon for crushing a rival than the
+instinctive dislike of man for man? And that usage is not peculiar to the
+white man. In Africa the black man wastes no time with the
+different-looking white man; he kills him, if he dares, on the spot. And
+how ably the Chinaman has employed the instinctive hatred of his
+countrymen for &#8220;foreign devils&#8221; in order to fight American trade and
+traders! We hate the Chinaman and drive him out, and he hates us and
+drives us out.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><i>Chief Danger of Race Prejudice</i></p>
+
+<p>And this is one of the dangers of the race problem in this country&mdash;the
+fostering of such an instinct to make money or to get political office.
+Such a basis of personal prosperty is all the more dangerous because the
+white man is in undisputed power in this country; the Negro has no great
+navy behind him; he is like a child in the house of a harsh parent. All
+that stands between him and destruction is the ethical sense of the white
+man. Will the white man&#8217;s sense of justice and virtue be robust enough to
+cause him to withhold the hand of unlimited power? Will he see, as Booker
+T. Washington says, that if he keeps the Negro in the gutter he must stay
+there with him? The white man and his civilisation, not alone the Negro,
+will rise or fall by that ethical test.</p>
+
+<p>The Negro, on his part, as I have shown repeatedly in former chapters,
+employs the same methods as the white man, for Negro nature is not
+different from human nature. He argues: &#8220;The white man hates you; hate
+him. Trade with Negro storekeepers; employ Negro doctors; don&#8217;t go to
+white dentists and lawyers.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Out of this condition proceed two tendencies. The first is the natural
+result of mutual fear and suspicion, and that is, a rapid flying apart of
+the races. All through my former chapters I have been showing how the
+Negroes are being segregated. So are the Chinese segregated, and the
+blacks in South Africa, and certain classes in India. Parts of the South
+are growing blacker. Negroes crowd into &#8220;coloured<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_300" id="Page_300">[Pg 300]</a></span> quarters&#8221; in the
+cities. More and more they are becoming a people wholly apart&mdash;separate in
+their churches, separate in their schools, separate in cars, conveyances,
+hotels, restaurants, with separate professional men. In short, we discover
+tendencies in this country toward the development of a caste system.</p>
+
+<p>Now, one of the most striking facts in our recent history is the progress
+of the former slave. And this finds its world parallel in the progress of
+people whom the vainglorious Anglo-Saxon once despised: the Japanese,
+Chinese, and East Indians. In forty years the Negro has advanced a
+distance that would have been surprising in almost any race. In the bare
+accomplishments&mdash;area of land owned, crops raised, professional men
+supported, business enterprises conducted, books and poetry written, music
+composed, pictures painted&mdash;the slaves of forty years ago have made the
+most astonishing progress. This leads to the second tendency, which
+proceeds slowly out of the growing conviction that hatred and suspicion
+and fear as motives in either national or individual progress will not
+work; that there must be some other way for different people to work side
+by side in peace and justice. And thus we discover a tendency toward a
+friendly living together under the new relationship, in which the Negro is
+not a slave or a dependent, but a man and a citizen. Booker T. Washington
+preaches the gospel of this new life. And gradually as race prejudice
+becomes inconvenient, threatens financial adversity, ruffles the smooth
+current of comfortable daily existence, the impulse grows to set <ins class="correction" title="original: is">it</ins> aside.
+Men don&#8217;t keep on fighting when it is no longer profitable to fight.</p>
+
+<p>And thus, side by side, these two impulses exist&mdash;the one pointing toward
+the development of a hard caste system which would ultimately petrify our
+civilisation as it has petrified that of India; and the other looking to a
+reasonable, kindly, and honourable working together of the races.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><i>What Are the Remedies for the Evil Conditions?</i></p>
+
+<p>So much for conditions; what of remedies?</p>
+
+<p>I have heard the most extraordinary remedies proposed. Serious men
+actually talk of the deportation of the entire<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_301" id="Page_301">[Pg 301]</a></span> Negro population to
+Africa, not stopping to inquire whether we have any right to deport them,
+or calculating the economic revolution and bankruptcy which the
+deportation of the entire labouring class would cause in the South,
+without stopping to think that even if we could find a spot in the world
+for 10,000,000 Negroes, and they all wanted to go, that all the ships
+flying the American flag, if constantly employed, could probably not
+transport the natural increase of the Negro population, let alone the
+10,000,000 present inhabitants. I have heard talk of segregation in
+reservations, like the Indians&mdash;segregation out of existence! I have even
+heard unspeakable talk of the wholesale extinction of the race by
+preventing the breeding of children! All quack remedies and based upon
+hatred, not upon justice.</p>
+
+<p>There is no sudden or cut-and-dried solution of the Negro problem, or of
+any other problem. Men are forever demanding formul&aelig; which will enable
+them to progress without effort. They seek to do quickly by medication
+what can only be accomplished by deliberate hygiene. A problem that has
+been growing for two hundred and fifty years in America, and for thousands
+of years before that in Africa, warping the very lives of the people
+concerned, changing their currents of thought as well as their conduct,
+cannot be solved in forty years. Why expect it?</p>
+
+<p>And yet there are definite things that can be done which, while working no
+immediate miracles, will set our faces to the light and keep us trudging
+toward the true goal.</p>
+
+<p>Down at the bottom&mdash;it will seem trite, but it is eternally true&mdash;the
+cause of the race &#8220;problem&#8221; and most other social problems is simply lack
+of understanding and sympathy between man and man. And the remedy is
+equally simple&mdash;a gradual substitution of understanding and sympathy for
+blind repulsion and hatred.</p>
+
+<p>Consider, for example, the Atlanta riot. Increasing misunderstanding and
+hatred caused a dreadful explosion and bloodshed. What happened? Instantly
+the wisest white men in Atlanta invited the wisest coloured men to meet
+them. They got together: general explanations followed. They found that
+there had been error on both sides; they found that there were reasonable
+human beings on both sides.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_302" id="Page_302">[Pg 302]</a></span> One of the leading white men said: &#8220;I did not
+know there were any such broad-minded Negroes in the South.&#8221; In other
+words, they tried to understand and sympathise with one another. Over and
+over again men will be found hating Negroes, or Chinamen, or &#8220;dagoes,&#8221; and
+yet liking some individual Negro, or Chinaman, or &#8220;dago.&#8221; When they get
+acquainted they see that the Negro or Chinaman is a human being like
+themselves, full of faults, but not devoid of good qualities.</p>
+
+<p>As a fundamental proposition, then, it will be found that the solution of
+the Negro problem lies in treating the Negro more and more as a human
+being like ourselves. Treating the Negro as a human being, we must judge
+him, not by his colour, or by any other outward symbol, but upon his worth
+as a man. Nothing that fails of that full honesty and fairness of judgment
+in the smallest particular will suffice. We disgrace and injure ourselves
+more than we do the Negro when we are not willing to admit virtue or
+learning or power in another human being because his face happens to be
+yellow or black.</p>
+
+<p>Of the soundness of this fundamental standard of judgment there can be no
+doubt; the difficulty lies in applying it practically to society as it is
+to-day. In the suggestions which I offer here I am trying to do two
+things: to outline the present programme, and to keep open a clear view to
+the future goal.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><i>Shall the Negro Vote?</i></p>
+
+<p>Let us approach, then, without fear the first of the three groups of
+problems&mdash;political, industrial, and social&mdash;which confront us.</p>
+
+<p>Shall the Negro vote?</p>
+
+<p>Thousands of Negroes in this country are fully as well equipped, fully as
+patriotic, as the average white citizen. Moreover, they are as much
+concerned in the real welfare of the country. The principle that our
+forefathers fought for, &#8220;taxation only with representation,&#8221; is as true
+to-day as it ever was.</p>
+
+<p>On the other hand, the vast majority of Negroes (and many foreigners and
+&#8220;poor whites&#8221;) are still densely ignorant, and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_303" id="Page_303">[Pg 303]</a></span> have little or no
+appreciation of the duties of citizenship. It seems right that they should
+be required to wait before being allowed to vote until they are prepared.
+A wise parent hedges his son about with restrictions; he does not
+authorise his signature at the bank or allow him to run a locomotive; and
+until he is twenty-one years old he is disfranchised and has no part in
+the government. But the parent restricts his son because it seems the
+wisest course for him, for the family, and for the state that he should
+grow to manhood before he is burdened with grave responsibilities. So the
+state limits suffrage; and rightly limits it, so long as it accompanies
+that limitation with a determined policy of education. But the suffrage
+law is so executed in the South to-day as to keep many capable Negroes
+from the exercise of their rights, to prevent recognition of honest merit,
+and it is executed unjustly as between white men and coloured. It is no
+condonement of the Southern position to say that the North also
+disfranchises a large part of the Negro vote by bribery, which it does; it
+is only saying that the North is also wrong.</p>
+
+<p>As for the agitation for the repeal of the Fifteenth Amendment to the
+Federal Constitution, which gives the right of suffrage to the coloured
+man, it must be met by every lover of justice and democracy with a face of
+adamant. If there were only one Negro in the country capable of
+citizenship, the way for him must, at least, be kept open. No doubt full
+suffrage was given to the mass of Negroes before they were prepared for
+it, while yet they were slaves in everything except bodily shackles, and
+the result during the Reconstruction period was disastrous. But the
+principle of a free franchise&mdash;fortunately, as I believe, for this
+country&mdash;has been forever established. If the white man is not willing to
+meet the Negro in any contest whatsoever without plugging the dice, then
+he is not the superior but the inferior of the Negro.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><i>What Shall Be the Industrial Relation of the Races?</i></p>
+
+<p>So much for the political relationships of the races. How about the
+industrial relationships?</p>
+
+<p>The same test of inherent worth must here also apply, and the question
+will not be settled until it does apply. A carpenter<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_304" id="Page_304">[Pg 304]</a></span> must be asked, not
+&#8220;What colour are you?&#8221; but &#8220;How cunningly and efficiently can you build a
+house?&#8221; Of all absurdities, the judgment of the skill of a surgeon by the
+kink of his hair will certainly one day be looked upon as the most absurd.
+The same observation applies broadly to the attempt to confine a whole
+people, regardless of their capabilities, to menial occupations because
+they are dark-coloured. No, the place of the Negro is the place he can
+fill most efficiently and the longer we attempt to draw artificial lines
+the longer we shall delay the solution of the race problem. On the other
+hand, the Negro must not clamour for places he cannot yet fill.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;The trouble with the Negro,&#8221; says Booker T. Washington, &#8220;is that he is
+all the time trying to get recognition, whereas what he should do is to
+get something to recognise.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Negroes as a class are to-day far inferior in education, intelligence, and
+efficiency to the white people as a class. Here and there an able Negro
+will develop superior abilities; but the mass of Negroes for years to come
+must find their activities mostly in physical and more or less menial
+labour. Like any race, they must first prove themselves in these simple
+lines of work before they can expect larger opportunities.</p>
+
+<p>There must always be men like Dr. DuBois who agitate for rights; their
+service is an important one, but at the present time it would seem that
+the thing most needed was the teaching of such men as Dr. Washington,
+emphasising duties and responsibilities, urging the Negro to prepare
+himself for his rights.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><i>Social Contact</i></p>
+
+<p>We come now, having considered the political and industrial relationships
+of the races, to the most difficult and perplexing of all the phases of
+the Negro question&mdash;that of social contact. Political and industrial
+relationships are more or less outward, but social contact turns upon the
+delicate and deep questions of home life, personal inclinations, and of
+privileges rather than rights. It is always in the relationships of oldest
+developments, like those that cling around the home, that human nature is
+slowest to change. Indeed, much of the complexity<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_305" id="Page_305">[Pg 305]</a></span> of the Negro problem
+has arisen from a confusion in people&#8217;s minds between rights and
+privileges.</p>
+
+<p>Everyone recalls the excitement caused&mdash;it became almost a national
+issue&mdash;when President Roosevelt invited Booker T. Washington to luncheon
+at the White House. Well, that feeling is deep in the South, as deep
+almost as human nature. Many Northern people who go South to live come to
+share it; indeed, it is the gravest question in ethics to decide at what
+point natural instincts should be curbed.</p>
+
+<p>Social contact is a privilege, not a right; it is not a subject for
+legislation or for any other sort of force. &#8220;Social questions,&#8221; as Colonel
+Watterson of Kentucky says, &#8220;create their own laws and settle themselves.
+They cannot be forced.&#8221; All such relationships will work themselves out
+gradually, naturally, quietly, in the long course of the years: and the
+less they are talked about the better.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><i>Jim Crow Laws</i></p>
+
+<p>As for the Jim Crow laws in the South, many of them, at least, are at
+present necessary to avoid the danger of clashes between the ignorant of
+both race. They are the inevitable scaffolding of progress. As a matter of
+fact, the Negro has profited in one way by such laws. For the white man
+has thus driven the Negroes together, forced ability to find its outlet in
+racial leadership, and by his severity produced a spirit of self-reliance
+which would not otherwise have existed. Dr. Frissell of Hampton is always
+talking to his students of the &#8220;advantages of disadvantages.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>As for laws against the intermarriage of the races, they do not prevent
+what they are designed to prevent: the mixing of white and coloured blood.
+In many parts of the South, despite the existence of such laws,
+miscegenation, though decreasing rapidly, still continues. On the other
+hand, in the North, where Negroes and whites may marry, there is actually
+very little marriage and practically no concubinage. The solution of this
+question, too, lies far more in education than in law. As a matter of
+fact, the more education both races receive, the less the amalgamation. In
+the South, as in the North, the present tendency of the educated and
+prosperous<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_306" id="Page_306">[Pg 306]</a></span> Negroes is to build up a society of their own, entirely apart
+from and independent of white people. As I have shown in a former chapter,
+a white woman in the North who marries a Negro is declassed&mdash;ostracised by
+both races. The danger of amalgamation lies with ignorant and vicious
+people, black or white, not with educated and sensitive people.</p>
+
+<p>As in the case of the Jim Crow laws, separate schools in the South are
+necessary, and in one way I believe them to be of great advantage to the
+Negroes themselves. In Northern cities like Indianapolis and New York,
+where there are no separation laws of any kind, separate schools have
+appeared, naturally and quietly, in districts where the Negro population
+is dense. That the pupils in each should be treated with exact justice in
+the matter of expenditures by the state is axiomatic. And the Negro boy
+should have the same unbounded opportunity for any sort of education he is
+capable of using as the white boy; nothing less will suffice.</p>
+
+<p>One influence at present growing rapidly will have its profound effect on
+the separation laws. Though a tendency exists toward local segregation of
+Negroes to which I have already referred, there is also a counter-tendency
+toward a scattering of Negroes throughout the entire country. The white
+population in the South, now 20,000,000 against 9,000,000 Negroes, is
+increasing much more rapidly than the Negro population. The death-rate of
+Negroes is exceedingly high; and the sharper the conditions of competition
+with white workers, the greater will probably be the limitation of
+increase of the more inefficient Negro population.</p>
+
+<p>As for the predictions of &#8220;amalgamation,&#8221; &#8220;a mongrel people,&#8221; &#8220;black
+domination,&#8221; and other bogies of prophecy, we must not, as I see it, give
+them any weight whatsoever. We cannot regulate our short lives by the fear
+of something far in the future which will probably never happen at all.
+All we can do is to be right at this moment and let the future take care
+of itself; it will anyway. There is no other sane method of procedure.
+Much as we may desire it, the future arrangement of this universe is not
+in our hands. As to the matter of &#8220;superiority&#8221; or &#8220;inferiority,&#8221; it is
+not a subject of argument at all; nor can we keep or attain &#8220;superiority&#8221;
+by laws or colour lines, or in any other way, except by being superior.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_307" id="Page_307">[Pg 307]</a></span>
+If we are right, absolutely right, in the eternal principles, we can rest
+in peace that the matter of our superiority will take care of itself.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><i>The Real Solution of the Negro Problem</i></p>
+
+<p>I remember asking a wise Southern man I met what, in his opinion, was the
+chief factor in the solution of the Negro problem.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Time,&#8221; he said, &#8220;and patience.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>But time must be occupied with discipline and education&mdash;more and more
+education, not less education, education that will teach first of all the
+dignity of service not only for Negroes but for white men. The white man,
+South and North, needs it quite as much as the coloured man. And this is
+exactly the programme of the new Southern statesmanship of which I spoke
+in a former chapter. These wise Southerners have resolved to forget the
+discouragements and complexities of the Negro problem, forget even their
+disagreements, and go to work on present problems: the development of
+education and industry.</p>
+
+<p>Whether we like it or not the whole nation (indeed, the whole world) is
+tied by unbreakable bonds to its Negroes, its Chinamen, its slum-dwellers,
+its thieves, its murderers, its prostitutes. We cannot elevate ourselves
+by driving them back either with hatred or violence or neglect; but only
+by bringing them forward: by service.</p>
+
+<p>For good comes to men, not as they work alone, but as they work together
+with that sympathy and understanding which is the only true Democracy. The
+Great Teacher never preached the flat equality of men, social or
+otherwise. He gave mankind a working principle by means of which, being so
+different, some white, some black, some yellow, some old, some young, some
+men, some women, some accomplished, some stupid&mdash;mankind could, after all,
+live together in harmony and develop itself to the utmost possibility. And
+that principle was the Golden Rule. It is the least sentimental, the most
+profoundly practical teaching known to men.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_308" id="Page_308">[Pg 308]</a></span></p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr style="width: 50%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_309" id="Page_309">[Pg 309]</a></span></p>
+<h2>INDEX</h2>
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_310" id="Page_310">[Pg 310]</a></span></p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_311" id="Page_311">[Pg 311]</a></span></p>
+<p class="center"><strong>INDEX</strong></p>
+
+<div class="index">
+<p><strong>A</strong><br />
+<br />
+Alcorn College, <a href="#Page_248">248</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Alderman, President Edwin A., <a href="#Page_259">259</a>, <a href="#Page_271">271</a>, <a href="#Page_273">273</a>, <a href="#Page_278">278</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Amalgamation of Races, <a href="#Page_153">153</a>, <a href="#Page_164">164</a>, <a href="#Page_171">171</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Amos, Moses, <a href="#Page_42">42</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Atlanta, colour line in, <a href="#Page_27">27</a>.<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">riot, <a href="#Page_3">3</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+Atlanta University, <a href="#Page_40">40</a>, <a href="#Page_49">49</a>, <a href="#Page_54">54</a>, <a href="#Page_92">92</a>, <a href="#Page_170">170</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<strong>B</strong><br />
+<br />
+Barrow, Chancellor D. C., <a href="#Page_271">271</a>, <a href="#Page_287">287</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Bassett, Professor John Spencer, <a href="#Page_257">257</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Black Belt, <a href="#Page_67">67</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Boston, race prejudice in, <a href="#Page_118">118</a>.<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">prosperous Negroes in, <a href="#Page_119">119</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+Bowie, Sydney J., <a href="#Page_281">281</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Boycott by Negroes, <a href="#Page_34">34</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Bradley, Rev. H. S., quoted, <a href="#Page_56">56</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Brittain, M. L., quoted, <a href="#Page_37">37</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Brown, J. Pope, <a href="#Page_68">68</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Broyles, Judge, <a href="#Page_18">18</a>, <a href="#Page_45">45</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Bulkley, William L., quoted, <a href="#Page_131">131</a>, <a href="#Page_142">142</a>.<br />
+<br />
+&#8220;Bumptiousness,&#8221; <a href="#Page_125">125</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Buttrick, Dr. Wallace, <a href="#Page_281">281</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<strong>C</strong><br />
+<br />
+Cable, George W., <a href="#Page_141">141</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Cable, George W., the novelist, <a href="#Page_257">257</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Carnegie, Andrew, <a href="#Page_35">35</a>, <a href="#Page_287">287</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Chain-gang, <a href="#Page_50">50</a>, <a href="#Page_96">96</a>, <a href="#Page_98">98</a>, <a href="#Page_290">290</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Chambers, Frank R., <a href="#Page_281">281</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Charities, attitude toward Negroes, <a href="#Page_35">35</a>, <a href="#Page_114">114</a>, <a href="#Page_138">138</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Churches, Negro, <a href="#Page_89">89</a>, <a href="#Page_168">168</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Civil Service, Negroes in, <a href="#Page_146">146</a>.<br />
+<br />
+&#8220;Clansman, The,&#8221; <a href="#Page_4">4</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Clark University, <a href="#Page_12">12</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Clark, Walter, President Mississippi Cotton Association, quoted, <a href="#Page_104">104</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Claxton, P. P., <a href="#Page_271">271</a>, <a href="#Page_279">279</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Cocaine, use of by Negroes, <a href="#Page_46">46</a>, <a href="#Page_89">89</a>, <a href="#Page_104">104</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Colour line, drawn by Negroes, <a href="#Page_226">226</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Concubinage, a case of, <a href="#Page_48">48</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Convicts, Negro, make profits for Georgia, <a href="#Page_50">50</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Cooper, W. G., report on Atlanta riot, <a href="#Page_15">15</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Cotton mill workers, <a href="#Page_53">53</a>, <a href="#Page_70">70</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Courts and the Negro, <a href="#Page_45">45</a>, <a href="#Page_96">96</a>, <a href="#Page_141">141</a>, <a href="#Page_185">185</a>, <a href="#Page_205">205</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Credit system, influence on Negro, <a href="#Page_105">105</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Crime against women, <a href="#Page_5">5</a>, <a href="#Page_128">128</a>, <a href="#Page_296">296</a>.<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">as incentive to riot, <a href="#Page_3">3</a>, <a href="#Page_4">4</a>, <a href="#Page_46">46</a>, <a href="#Page_183">183</a>, <a href="#Page_193">193</a>, <a href="#Page_204">204</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">condoned to keep Negro on farms, <a href="#Page_98">98</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">juvenile, <a href="#Page_51">51</a>, <a href="#Page_141">141</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+&#8220;Crossing the Line,&#8221; <a href="#Page_161">161</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Cunningham, Acting Governor, <a href="#Page_199">199</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Currie, J. H., District Attorney, quoted, <a href="#Page_167">167</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<strong>D</strong><br />
+<br />
+Danville, Ill., lynching, <a href="#Page_212">212</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Davis, Jefferson, way with Negroes, <a href="#Page_103">103</a>, <a href="#Page_275">275</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Davis, Senator Jeff, <a href="#Page_112">112</a>, <a href="#Page_238">238</a>, <a href="#Page_252">252</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Death rate among Negroes, <a href="#Page_115">115</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Dickerman, Dr. G. S., <a href="#Page_281">281</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Dillard, Professor James H., <a href="#Page_273">273</a>, <a href="#Page_286">286</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Dixon, Rev. Thomas, 111, <a href="#Page_266">266</a>, <a href="#Page_298">298</a>.<br />
+<br />
+DuBois, Dr. W. E. B., <a href="#Page_100">100</a>, <a href="#Page_156">156</a>, <a href="#Page_158">158</a>, <a href="#Page_173">173</a>, <a href="#Page_222">222</a>, <a href="#Page_272">272</a>, <a href="#Page_304">304</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<strong>E</strong><br />
+<br />
+Edmonds, R. H., <a href="#Page_275">275</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Education, <a href="#Page_65">65</a>, <a href="#Page_139">139</a>.<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Booker T. Washington on, <a href="#Page_221">221</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">in South, <a href="#Page_271">271</a>, <a href="#Page_273">273</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Negro, <a href="#Page_282">282</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">&#8220;New South&#8221; on Negro, <a href="#Page_285">285</a>.</span><br />
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_312" id="Page_312">[Pg 312]</a></span><br />
+<br />
+<strong>F</strong><br />
+<br />
+Farmer, Negro, <a href="#Page_6">6</a>, <a href="#Page_100">100</a>.<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">in the North, <a href="#Page_109">109</a>, <a href="#Page_170">170</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">organization among, <a href="#Page_93">93</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+Fear of Negroes, <a href="#Page_8">8</a>.<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">prevalence of, in the South, <a href="#Page_7">7</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+Few, Dean William Preston, <a href="#Page_259">259</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Fifteenth Amendment, <a href="#Page_245">245</a>, <a href="#Page_246">246</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Fisk University, <a href="#Page_170">170</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Fleming, Ex-Congressman William H., <a href="#Page_264">264</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Fraternal Orders, <a href="#Page_231">231</a>.<br />
+<br />
+&#8220;Free Persons of Colour&#8221; <a href="#Page_156">156</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Free Speech, <a href="#Page_257">257</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Fries, Henry E., <a href="#Page_281">281</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Frissell, Dr. H. B., of Hampton, <a href="#Page_228">228</a>, <a href="#Page_271">271</a>, <a href="#Page_281">281</a>, <a href="#Page_286">286</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Furniss, Dr. S. A., quoted, <a href="#Page_114">114</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<strong>G</strong><br />
+<br />
+Gaines, Bishop, J. W., <a href="#Page_8">8</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Galloway, Bishop C. B., <a href="#Page_276">276</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Gammon Theological Seminary, <a href="#Page_12">12</a>, <a href="#Page_13">13</a>.<br />
+<br />
+George, P. S., letter, <a href="#Page_69">69</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Gilreath, Belton, <a href="#Page_287">287</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Grady, Henry W., <a href="#Page_275">275</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Grant, Bishop Abram, <a href="#Page_287">287</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Graves, John Temple, <a href="#Page_72">72</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<strong>H</strong><br />
+<br />
+Hampton Institute, <a href="#Page_170">170</a>, <a href="#Page_283">283</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Hampton, General Wade, <a href="#Page_235">235</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Hanna, H. H., <a href="#Page_281">281</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Harrah, Charles J., President Midvale Steel Company, quoted, <a href="#Page_137">137</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Harvard University, colour line at, <a href="#Page_123">123</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Hill, Walter B., Chancellor, <a href="#Page_258">258</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Hopkins, Charles T., <a href="#Page_18">18</a>, <a href="#Page_32">32</a>, <a href="#Page_49">49</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Houston, President D. F., <a href="#Page_271">271</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Howell, Clark, Editor Atlanta <i>Constitution</i>, <a href="#Page_24">24</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Huntsville, Alabama, lynching, <a href="#Page_191">191</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<strong>I</strong><br />
+<br />
+Immigrants in the South, <a href="#Page_28">28</a>, <a href="#Page_268">268</a>, <a href="#Page_295">295</a>.<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">take Negroes&#8217; places, <a href="#Page_59">59</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+Intermarriage of races, <a href="#Page_164">164</a>, <a href="#Page_171">171</a>, <a href="#Page_305">305</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<strong>J</strong><br />
+<br />
+Jeanes Fund, <a href="#Page_286">286</a>.<br />
+<br />
+&#8220;Jim Crow,&#8221; laws, <a href="#Page_30">30</a>, <a href="#Page_112">112</a>, <a href="#Page_130">130</a>, <a href="#Page_151">151</a>, <a href="#Page_219">219</a>, <a href="#Page_224">224</a>, <a href="#Page_251">251</a>, <a href="#Page_252">252</a>, <a href="#Page_262">262</a>, <a href="#Page_266">266</a>, <a href="#Page_305">305</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Johnson, Mayor Tom, <a href="#Page_233">233</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Joyner, J. Y., <a href="#Page_271">271</a>, <a href="#Page_278">278</a>, <a href="#Page_286">286</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<strong>K</strong><br />
+<br />
+Ku Klux Klan, <a href="#Page_4">4</a>, <a href="#Page_235">235</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<strong>L</strong><br />
+<br />
+Labour problems in North, <a href="#Page_130">130</a>.<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">in South, <a href="#Page_57">57</a>, <a href="#Page_78">78</a>, <a href="#Page_83">83</a>, <a href="#Page_249">249</a>, <a href="#Page_294">294</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+Labour unions, attitude toward Negroes, <a href="#Page_135">135</a>, <a href="#Page_143">143</a>, <a href="#Page_160">160</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Lamar, Senator J. Q., <a href="#Page_263">263</a>, <a href="#Page_284">284</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Landrum, Rev. W. W., <a href="#Page_24">24</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Lane, Charles P., letter, <a href="#Page_241">241</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Lawlessness, as incentive to riot, <a href="#Page_4">4</a>, <a href="#Page_183">183</a>, <a href="#Page_193">193</a>, <a href="#Page_204">204</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Leaders of Negro race, <a href="#Page_216">216</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Legislation against Negroes, <a href="#Page_249">249</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Lynching, <a href="#Page_175">175</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<strong>M</strong><br />
+<br />
+McAneny, George, <a href="#Page_287">287</a>.<br />
+<br />
+McIver, Charles D., <a href="#Page_278">278</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Manley, Charles quoted, <a href="#Page_160">160</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Manning, Joseph C., <a href="#Page_264">264</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Medicines, patent and the Negro, <a href="#Page_62">62</a>, <a href="#Page_116">116</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Mertins, George Frederick, quoted, <a href="#Page_85">85</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Miller, Professor Kelley, quoted, <a href="#Page_130">130</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Millsaps, Major R. W., <a href="#Page_102">102</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Mims, Professor Edwin, <a href="#Page_255">255</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Miscegenation, <a href="#Page_165">165</a>, <a href="#Page_305">305</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Mitchell, Professor S. C., <a href="#Page_253">253</a>, <a href="#Page_271">271</a>, <a href="#Page_280">280</a>, <a href="#Page_281">281</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Mob, psychology of, <a href="#Page_10">10</a>, <a href="#Page_184">184</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Mob, rule results of, <a href="#Page_13">13</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Money, United States Senator, H. D., <a href="#Page_171">171</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Moton, R. R., <a href="#Page_287">287</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Mulattoes, <a href="#Page_149">149</a>.<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">leaders of the race, <a href="#Page_173">173</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+Murphy, Edgar Gardner, <a href="#Page_273">273</a>.<br />
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_313" id="Page_313">[Pg 313]</a></span><br />
+<br />
+<strong>N</strong><br />
+<br />
+Napier, J. C., <a href="#Page_287">287</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Negroes, boycott by, <a href="#Page_34">34</a>.<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">domination of, <a href="#Page_252">252</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">driven out, <a href="#Page_71">71</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">in Government service, <a href="#Page_29">29</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">in Northern cities, <a href="#Page_113">113</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">in street cars, <a href="#Page_30">30</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">labour unions, <a href="#Page_135">135</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">land ownership among, <a href="#Page_91">91</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">private schools, <a href="#Page_53">53</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">racial consciousness among, <a href="#Page_38">38</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">what they talk about, <a href="#Page_26">26</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">why they go to cities, <a href="#Page_101">101</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">with white blood, <a href="#Page_149">149</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">worthless, <a href="#Page_60">60</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">(<i>See</i> <a href="#vagrants">Vagrants</a>)</span><br />
+<br />
+Negro business enterprises, <a href="#Page_39">39</a>.<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">business league, <a href="#Page_229">229</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">dramatic efforts, <a href="#Page_157">157</a>, <a href="#Page_231">231</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">in Boston, <a href="#Page_119">119</a>, <a href="#Page_145">145</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">story of Negro druggist, <a href="#Page_42">42</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">story of successful farmer, <a href="#Page_90">90</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+Newspapers, influence of sensational, <a href="#Page_9">9</a>, <a href="#Page_25">25</a>.<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Negro, <a href="#Page_225">225</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+Niagara Movement, <a href="#Page_223">223</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Northen, Ex-Governor W. J., <a href="#Page_24">24</a>, <a href="#Page_25">25</a>, <a href="#Page_65">65</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<strong>O</strong><br />
+<br />
+&#8220;Ogden Movement,&#8221; <a href="#Page_281">281</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Ogden, Robert C., <a href="#Page_281">281</a>, <a href="#Page_287">287</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Organised Labour and the Negro, <a href="#Page_135">135</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Orphans, Negro, <a href="#Page_51">51</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<strong>P</strong><br />
+<br />
+Page, Walter H., <a href="#Page_281">281</a>, <a href="#Page_287">287</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Parties among Negroes, <a href="#Page_216">216</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Peabody, George Foster, <a href="#Page_281">281</a>, <a href="#Page_287">287</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Penn, Dr. W. F., <a href="#Page_19">19</a>, <a href="#Page_33">33</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Peonage, <a href="#Page_96">96</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Politics, Negro in, <a href="#Page_98">98</a>, <a href="#Page_160">160</a>, <a href="#Page_233">233</a>, <a href="#Page_252">252</a>, <a href="#Page_262">262</a>.<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">and lynching, <a href="#Page_203">203</a>, <a href="#Page_224">224</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+Populism in South, <a href="#Page_255">255</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Porters, Pullman, <a href="#Page_144">144</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Prejudice, race, in North, <a href="#Page_111">111</a>, <a href="#Page_117">117</a>, <a href="#Page_125">125</a>, <a href="#Page_133">133</a>, <a href="#Page_138">138</a>.<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">in churches, <a href="#Page_121">121</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Negro, <a href="#Page_226">226</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+Prejudice, race, and economic necessity, <a href="#Page_81">81</a>.<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">cases of, <a href="#Page_55">55</a>, <a href="#Page_82">82</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">superficial manifestations, <a href="#Page_26">26</a>, <a href="#Page_296">296</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+Prohibition movement, <a href="#Page_256">256</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Psychology of the South, <a href="#Page_37">37</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">mob, <a href="#Page_184">184</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<strong>R</strong><br />
+<br />
+Race, world problems of, <a href="#Page_292">292</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Rape, investigation of cases, <a href="#Page_5">5</a>.<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">trial of Negro for, <a href="#Page_22">22</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">a northern case, <a href="#Page_128">128</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+Reconstruction, <a href="#Page_235">235</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Rice, Dr. J. A., quoted, <a href="#Page_165">165</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Rice, Rev. Theron H., quoted, <a href="#Page_54">54</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Richardson, Congressman William, quoted, <a href="#Page_192">192</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Riot, Atlanta, <a href="#Page_3">3</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Riots, effect on crime, <a href="#Page_22">22</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">in Northern cities, <a href="#Page_124">124</a>, <a href="#Page_126">126</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Wilmington, <a href="#Page_160">160</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">lynching riot at Danville, <a href="#Page_211">211</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">at Huntsville, Ala., <a href="#Page_191">191</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">at Springfield, O., <a href="#Page_201">201</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">at Statesboro, Ga., <a href="#Page_186">186</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<strong>S</strong><br />
+<br />
+Saloons, <a href="#Page_10">10</a>, <a href="#Page_18">18</a>, <a href="#Page_21">21</a>, <a href="#Page_25">25</a>, <a href="#Page_36">36</a>, <a href="#Page_46">46</a>, <a href="#Page_49">49</a>, <a href="#Page_88">88</a>, <a href="#Page_98">98</a>, <a href="#Page_104">104</a>, <a href="#Page_127">127</a>, <a href="#Page_207">207</a>, <a href="#Page_266">266</a>, <a href="#Page_289">289</a>, <a href="#Page_290">290</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Schools, appropriations for, <a href="#Page_248">248</a>.<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">in Atlanta, <a href="#Page_53">53</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">in bad neighbourhoods, <a href="#Page_169">169</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">in North, <a href="#Page_132">132</a>, <a href="#Page_139">139</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">industrial, <a href="#Page_140">140</a>, <a href="#Page_143">143</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">North Carolina, <a href="#Page_279">279</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">private for Negroes, <a href="#Page_53">53</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">retrogression of Negro, <a href="#Page_284">284</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">separate, <a href="#Page_306">306</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">why Negroes are not in, <a href="#Page_52">52</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+Secret Societies among Negroes, <a href="#Page_231">231</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Segregation of races, <a href="#Page_300">300</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">natural going on, <a href="#Page_70">70</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+Settlement work among Negroes, <a href="#Page_122">122</a>, <a href="#Page_126">126</a>, <a href="#Page_138">138</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Shaw, Albert, <a href="#Page_281">281</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Sickness among Negroes, <a href="#Page_116">116</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Slade, Professor Andrew, <a href="#Page_257">257</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Slavery, evils of, <a href="#Page_234">234</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Smith, Governor Hoke, <a href="#Page_11">11</a>, <a href="#Page_242">242</a>, <a href="#Page_245">245</a>, <a href="#Page_249">249</a>, <a href="#Page_250">250</a>, <a href="#Page_252">252</a>, <a href="#Page_256">256</a>, <a href="#Page_267">267</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Smith, R. D., <a href="#Page_287">287</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Social contact of races, <a href="#Page_304">304</a>.<br />
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_314" id="Page_314">[Pg 314]</a></span><br />
+Solution of race problems, <a href="#Page_300">300</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Soule, President A. M., <a href="#Page_288">288</a>.<br />
+<br />
+&#8220;Souls of Black Folk, The,&#8221; <a href="#Page_158">158</a>.<br />
+<br />
+South Carolina, political struggles in, <a href="#Page_235">235</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Southern Education Board, <a href="#Page_281">281</a>, <a href="#Page_286">286</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Speake, Judge Paul, <a href="#Page_195">195</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Speer, Judge Emory, <a href="#Page_255">255</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Springfield, O., lynching, <a href="#Page_191">191</a>.<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">and riot, <a href="#Page_201">201</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+Statesboro, Ga., lynching, <a href="#Page_177">177</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Stewart, Professor J. B., <a href="#Page_288">288</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Strikes and Negroes, <a href="#Page_134">134</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Swanson, Governor Claude A., <a href="#Page_249">249</a>, <a href="#Page_252">252</a>, <a href="#Page_258">258</a>, <a href="#Page_280">280</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<strong>T</strong><br />
+<br />
+Taft, William H., <a href="#Page_287">287</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Tatum, Stewart L., <a href="#Page_209">209</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Tenant System, <a href="#Page_74">74</a>, <a href="#Page_87">87</a>, <a href="#Page_100">100</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Thomas, Judge William H., <a href="#Page_96">96</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Tillman, Senator B. R., <a href="#Page_111">111</a>, <a href="#Page_236">236</a>, <a href="#Page_246">246</a>, <a href="#Page_250">250</a>, <a href="#Page_252">252</a>, <a href="#Page_259">259</a>, <a href="#Page_265">265</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Trades, Negroes in, <a href="#Page_135">135</a>, <a href="#Page_145">145</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Trinity College, <a href="#Page_258">258</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Troy, Alexander, letter, <a href="#Page_247">247</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Tuberculosis among Negroes, <a href="#Page_114">114</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Tuskegee, <a href="#Page_60">60</a>, <a href="#Page_170">170</a>, <a href="#Page_221">221</a>, <a href="#Page_283">283</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<strong>U</strong><br />
+<br />
+University of Georgia, <a href="#Page_288">288</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<strong>V</strong><br />
+<br /><a name="vagrants" id="vagrants"></a>
+Vagrants among Negroes, <a href="#Page_57">57</a>, <a href="#Page_60">60</a>, <a href="#Page_81">81</a>, <a href="#Page_178">178</a>, <a href="#Page_211">211</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Vardaman, <ins class="correction" title="original: Govenor">Governor</ins> J. K., <a href="#Page_111">111</a>, <a href="#Page_238">238</a>, <a href="#Page_246">246</a>, <a href="#Page_265">265</a>, <a href="#Page_267">267</a>, <a href="#Page_275">275</a>, <a href="#Page_298">298</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Vernon, W. T., Register of Treasury, <a href="#Page_228">228</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Vice among Negroes, <a href="#Page_165">165</a>, <a href="#Page_169">169</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Vote, shall the Negro? <a href="#Page_202">202</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<strong>W</strong><br />
+<br />
+Washington, Booker T., <a href="#Page_33">33</a>, <a href="#Page_56">56</a>, <a href="#Page_64">64</a>, <a href="#Page_99">99</a>, <a href="#Page_156">156</a>, <a href="#Page_173">173</a>, <a href="#Page_219">219</a>, <a href="#Page_250">250</a>, <a href="#Page_271">271</a>, <a href="#Page_274">274</a>, <a href="#Page_286">286</a>, <a href="#Page_299">299</a>, <a href="#Page_300">300</a>, <a href="#Page_304">304</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Watterson, Henry, <a href="#Page_305">305</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Weather and mobs, <a href="#Page_211">211</a>.<br />
+<br />
+White, Rev. John E., <a href="#Page_24">24</a>, <a href="#Page_253">253</a>, <a href="#Page_276">276</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Whitlock, Hardy H., sheriff, <a href="#Page_212">212</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Wilberforce College, <a href="#Page_170">170</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Williams, &#8220;Pegleg,&#8221; <a href="#Page_80">80</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Williams, Talcott, <a href="#Page_287">287</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Wilmer, Rev. C. B., <a href="#Page_24">24</a>, <a href="#Page_276">276</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Women, Negro, arrested in Atlanta, <a href="#Page_46">46</a>.<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">clubs, <a href="#Page_143">143</a>, <a href="#Page_168">168</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">morals of, <a href="#Page_140">140</a>, <a href="#Page_169">169</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+Wright, President R. R., <a href="#Page_92">92</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Wright, Professor R. R., Jr., quoted, <a href="#Page_124">124</a>, <a href="#Page_137">137</a>, <a href="#Page_142">142</a>, <a href="#Page_145">145</a>.</p></div>
+
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr style="width: 50%;" />
+<p><strong>Footnotes:</strong></p>
+
+<p><a name="f1" id="f1" href="#f1.1">[1]</a> Since these notes were made, in 1907, the prohibition movement has abolished all the saloons in Georgia.</p>
+
+<p><a name="f2" id="f2" href="#f2.1">[2]</a> Since the closing of the saloons on January 1, 1908, the number of
+arrests has largely decreased, but the observations here made still apply to a large number of Southern cities.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr style="width: 50%;" />
+<p><strong>Transcriber&#8217;s Notes:</strong></p>
+
+<p>Images have been moved from the middle of a paragraph to a nearby paragraph break.</p>
+
+<p>The text in the list of illustrations is presented as in the original text, but the links
+navigate to the page number closest to the illustration&#8217;s loaction in this document.</p>
+
+<p>Punctuation has been corrected without note.</p>
+
+<p>Other than the corrections noted by hover information, inconsistencies in
+spelling and hyphenation have been retained from the original.</p>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<pre>
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's Following the Color Line, by Ray Stannard Baker
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+</body>
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@@ -0,0 +1,13488 @@
+Project Gutenberg's Following the Color Line, by Ray Stannard Baker
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Following the Color Line
+       an account of Negro citizenship in the American democracy
+
+Author: Ray Stannard Baker
+
+Release Date: January 4, 2011 [EBook #34847]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK FOLLOWING THE COLOR LINE ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Suzanne Shell and the Online Distributed
+Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was
+produced from images generously made available by The
+Internet Archive/Canadian Libraries.)
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+FOLLOWING THE COLOR LINE
+
+
+
+
+BY THE SAME AUTHOR
+
+  OUR NEW PROSPERITY
+  SEEN IN GERMANY
+  BOYS' BOOK OF INVENTIONS
+  SECOND BOYS' BOOK OF INVENTIONS
+
+  AND MANY STORIES
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration: AN OLD BLACK "MAMMY" WITH WHITE CHILD]
+
+
+
+
+  Following the Color Line
+
+  AN ACCOUNT OF NEGRO CITIZENSHIP
+  IN THE AMERICAN DEMOCRACY
+
+
+  By RAY STANNARD BAKER
+
+
+  _ILLUSTRATED_
+
+
+  New York
+  Doubleday, Page & Company
+  1908
+
+
+
+
+  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED, INCLUDING THAT OF TRANSLATION
+  INTO FOREIGN LANGUAGES, INCLUDING THE SCANDINAVIAN
+
+  COPYRIGHT, 1904, 1905, BY THE S. S. McCLURE COMPANY
+
+  COPYRIGHT, 1907, 1908, BY THE PHILLIPS PUBLISHING COMPANY
+
+  COPYRIGHT, 1908, BY DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY
+
+  PUBLISHED, OCTOBER, 1908
+
+
+
+
+"I AM OBLIGED TO CONFESS THAT I DO NOT REGARD THE ABOLITION OF SLAVERY AS
+A MEANS OF PUTTING OFF THE STRUGGLE BETWEEN THE TWO RACES IN THE SOUTHERN
+STATES."
+
+--_De Tocqueville, "Democracy in America"_ (1835)
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE
+
+
+My purpose in writing this book has been to make a clear statement of the
+exact present conditions and relationships of the Negro in American life.
+I am not vain enough to imagine that I have seen all the truth, nor that I
+have always placed the proper emphasis upon the facts that I here present.
+Every investigator necessarily has his personal equation or point of view.
+The best he can do is to set down the truth as he sees it, without bating
+a jot or adding a tittle, and this I have done.
+
+I have endeavoured to see every problem, not as a Northerner, nor as a
+Southerner, but as an American. And I have looked at the Negro, not merely
+as a menial, as he is commonly regarded in the South, nor as a curiosity,
+as he is often seen in the North, but as a plain human being, animated
+with his own hopes, depressed by his own fears, meeting his own problems
+with failure or success.
+
+I have accepted no statement of fact, however generally made, until I was
+fully persuaded from my own personal investigation that what I heard was
+really a fact and not a rumour.
+
+Wherever I have ventured upon conclusions, I claim for them neither
+infallibility nor originality. They are offered frankly as my own latest
+and clearest thoughts upon the various subjects discussed. If any man can
+give me better evidence for the error of my conclusions than I have for
+the truth of them I am prepared to go with him, and gladly, as far as he
+can prove his way. And I have offered my conclusions, not in a spirit of
+controversy, nor in behalf of any party or section of the country, but in
+the hope that, by inspiring a broader outlook, they may lead, finally, to
+other conclusions more nearly approximating the truth than mine.
+
+While these chapters were being published in the _American Magazine_ (one
+chapter, that on lynching, in _McClure's Magazine_) I received many
+hundreds of letters from all parts of the country. I acknowledge them
+gratefully. Many of them contained friendly criticisms, suggestions, and
+corrections, which I have profited by in the revision of the chapters for
+book publication. Especially have the letters from the South, describing
+local conditions and expressing local points of view, been valuable to me.
+I wish here, also, to thank the many men and women, South and North, white
+and coloured, who have given me personal assistance in my inquiries.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+  CHAPTER                                               PAGE
+
+  PREFACE                                                vii
+
+
+  PART I
+
+  THE NEGRO IN THE SOUTH
+
+     I. A Race Riot and After                              3
+
+    II. Following the Colour Line in the South: A
+        Superficial View of Conditions                    26
+
+   III. The Southern City Negro                           45
+
+    IV. In the Black Belt: The Negro Farmer               66
+
+     V. Race Relationships in the Country Districts       87
+
+
+  PART II
+
+  THE NEGRO IN THE NORTH
+
+    VI. Following the Colour Line in the North           109
+
+   VII. The Negroes' Struggle for Survival in Northern
+        Cities                                           130
+
+
+  PART III
+
+  THE NEGRO IN THE NATION
+
+  VIII. The Mulatto: The Problem of Race Mixture         151
+
+    IX. Lynching, South and North                        175
+
+     X. An Ostracised Race in Ferment: The Conflict of
+        Negro Parties and Negro Leaders over Methods
+        of Dealing with Their Own Problem                216
+
+    XI. The Negro in Politics                            233
+
+   XII. The Black Man's Silent Power                     252
+
+  XIII. The New Southern Statesmanship                   271
+
+   XIV. What to Do About the Negro--A Few Conclusions    292
+
+  Index                                                  311
+
+
+
+
+ILLUSTRATIONS
+
+
+  An Old Black "Mammy" with White Child      _Frontispiece_
+
+                                                 FACING PAGE
+
+  Fac-similes of Certain Atlanta Newspapers of
+  September 22, 1906                                       7
+
+  James H. Wallace                                        10
+
+  R. R. Wright                                            10
+
+  H. O. Tanner                                            10
+
+  Rev. H. H. Proctor                                      10
+
+  Dr. W. F. Penn                                          10
+
+  George W. Cable                                         10
+
+  Showing how the Colour Line Was Drawn by the Saloons
+  at Atlanta, Georgia                                     35
+
+  Interior of a Negro Working-man's Home, Atlanta,
+  Georgia                                                 46
+
+  Interior of a Negro Home of the Poorest Sort in
+  Indianapolis                                            46
+
+  Map Showing the Black Belt                              66
+
+  Where White Mill Hands Live in Atlanta, Georgia         71
+
+  Where some of the Poorer Negroes Live in Atlanta,
+  Georgia                                                 71
+
+  A "Poor White" Family                                   74
+
+  A Model Negro School                                    74
+
+  Old and New Cabins for Negro Tenants on the Brown
+  Plantation                                              85
+
+  Cane Syrup Kettle                                       92
+
+  Chain-gang Workers on the Roads                         92
+
+  A Type of the Country Chain-gang Negro                  99
+
+  A Negro Cabin with Evidences of Abundance              110
+
+  Off for the Cotton Fields                              110
+
+  Ward in a Negro Hospital at Philadelphia               135
+
+  Studio of a Negro Sculptress                           135
+
+  A Negro Magazine Editor's Office in Philadelphia       138
+
+  A "Broom Squad" of Negro Boys                          138
+
+  A Type of Negro Girl Typesetter in Atlanta             164
+
+  Mulatto Girl Student                                   164
+
+  Miss Cecelia Johnson                                   164
+
+  Mrs. Booker T. Washington                              173
+
+  Mrs. Robert H. Terrell                                 173
+
+  Negroes Lynched by Being Burned Alive at Statesboro,
+  Georgia                                                179
+
+  Negroes of the Criminal Type                           179
+
+  Court House and Bank in the Public Square at
+  Huntsville, Alabama                                    190
+
+  Charles W. Chesnutt                                    215
+
+  Dr. Booker T. Washington                               218
+
+  Dr. W. E. B. DuBois                                    225
+
+  Colonel James Lewis                                    240
+
+  W. T. Vernon                                           240
+
+  Ralph W. Tyler                                         240
+
+  J. Pope Brown                                          252
+
+  James K. Vardaman                                      252
+
+  Senator Jeff Davis                                     252
+
+  Governor Hoke Smith                                    252
+
+  Senator B. R. Tillman                                  252
+
+  Ex-Governor W. J. Northen                              252
+
+  James H. Dillard                                       275
+
+  Edwin A. Alderman                                      275
+
+  A. M. Soule                                            275
+
+  D. F. Houston                                          275
+
+  George Foster Peabody                                  275
+
+  P. P. Claxton                                          275
+
+  S. C. Mitchell                                         286
+
+  Judge Emory Speer                                      286
+
+  Edgar Gardner Murphy                                   286
+
+  Dr. H. B. Frissell                                     286
+
+  R. C. Ogden                                            286
+
+  J. Y. Joyner                                           286
+
+
+
+
+_PART ONE_
+
+THE NEGRO IN THE SOUTH
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+A RACE RIOT, AND AFTER
+
+
+Upon the ocean, of antagonism between the white and Negro races in this
+country, there arises occasionally a wave, stormy in its appearance, but
+soon subsiding into quietude. Such a wave was the Atlanta riot. Its
+ominous size, greater by far than the ordinary race disturbances which
+express themselves in lynchings, alarmed the entire country and awakened
+in the South a new sense of the dangers which threatened it. A description
+of that spectacular though superficial disturbance, the disaster incident
+to its fury, and the remarkable efforts at reconstruction will lead the
+way naturally--as human nature is best interpreted in moments of
+passion--to a clearer understanding, in future chapters, of the deep and
+complex race feeling which exists in this country.
+
+On the twenty-second day of September, 1906, Atlanta had become a
+veritable social tinder-box. For months the relation of the races had been
+growing more strained. The entire South had been sharply annoyed by a
+shortage of labour accompanied by high wages and, paradoxically, by an
+increasing number of idle Negroes. In Atlanta the lower class--the
+"worthless Negro"--had been increasing in numbers: it showed itself too
+evidently among the swarming saloons, dives, and "clubs" which a
+complaisant city administration allowed to exist in the very heart of the
+city. Crime had increased to an alarming extent; an insufficient and
+ineffective police force seemed unable to cope with it. With a population
+of 115,000 Atlanta had over 17,000 arrests in 1905; in 1906 the number
+increased to 21,602. Atlanta had many more arrests than New Orleans with
+nearly three times the population and twice as many Negroes; and almost
+four times as many as Milwaukee, Wisconsin, a city nearly three times as
+large. Race feeling had been sharpened through a long and bitter
+political campaign, Negro disfranchisement being one of the chief issues
+under discussion. An inflammatory play called "The Clansman," though
+forbidden by public sentiment in many Southern cities, had been given in
+Atlanta and other places with the effect of increasing the prejudice of
+both races. Certain newspapers in Atlanta, taking advantage of popular
+feeling, kept the race issue constantly agitated, emphasising Negro crimes
+with startling headlines. One newspaper even recommended the formation of
+organisations of citizens in imitation of the Ku Klux movement of
+reconstruction days. In the clamour of this growing agitation, the voice
+of the right-minded white people and industrious, self-respecting Negroes
+was almost unheard. A few ministers of both races saw the impending storm
+and sounded a warning--to no effect; and within the week before the riot
+the citizens, the city administration and the courts all woke up together.
+There were calls for mass-meetings, the police began to investigate the
+conditions of the low saloons and dives, the country constabulary was
+increased in numbers, the grand jury was called to meet in special session
+on Monday the 24th.
+
+
+_Prosperity and Lawlessness_
+
+But the awakening of moral sentiment in the city, unfortunately, came too
+late. Crime, made more lurid by agitation, had so kindled the fires of
+hatred that they could not be extinguished by ordinary methods. The best
+people of Atlanta were like the citizens of prosperous Northern cities,
+too busy with money-making to pay attention to public affairs. For Atlanta
+is growing rapidly. Its bank clearings jumped from ninety millions in 1900
+to two hundred and twenty-two millions in 1906, its streets are well paved
+and well lighted, its street-car service is good, its sky-scrapers are
+comparable with the best in the North. In other words, it was
+progressive--few cities I know of more so--but it had forgotten its public
+duties.
+
+Within a few months before the riot there had been a number of crimes of
+worthless Negroes against white women. Leading Negroes, while not one of
+them with whom I talked wished to protect any Negro who was really
+guilty, asserted that the number of these crimes had been greatly
+exaggerated and that in special instances the details had been
+over-emphasised because the criminal was black; that they had been used to
+further inflame race hatred. I had a personal investigation made of every
+crime against a white woman committed in the few months before and after
+the riot. Three, charged to white men, attracted comparatively little
+attention in the newspapers, although one, the offence of a white man
+named Turnadge, was shocking in its details. Of twelve such charges
+against Negroes in the six months preceding the riot two were cases of
+rape, horrible in their details, three were aggravated attempts at rape,
+three may have been attempts, three were pure cases of fright on the part
+of the white woman, and in one the white woman, first asserting that a
+Negro had assaulted her, finally confessed attempted suicide.
+
+The facts of two of these cases I will narrate--and without excuse for the
+horror of the details. If we are to understand the true conditions in the
+South, these things _must_ be told.
+
+
+_Story of One Negro's Crime_
+
+One of the cases was that of Mrs. Knowles Etheleen Kimmel, twenty-five
+years old, wife of a farmer living near Atlanta. A mile beyond the end of
+the street-car line stands a small green bungalow-like house in a lonely
+spot near the edge of the pine woods. The Kimmels who lived there were not
+Southerners by birth but of Pennsylvania Dutch stock. They had been in the
+South four or five years, renting their lonesome farm, raising cotton and
+corn and hopefully getting a little ahead. On the day before the riot a
+strange rough-looking Negro called at the back door of the Kimmel home. He
+wore a soldier's cast-off khaki uniform. He asked a foolish question and
+went away. Mrs. Kimmel was worried and told her husband. He, too, was
+worried--the fear of this crime is everywhere present in the South--and
+when he went away in the afternoon he asked his nearest neighbour to look
+out for the strange Negro. When he came back a few hours later, he found
+fifty white men in his yard. He knew what had happened without being told:
+his wife was under medical attendance in the house. She had been able to
+give a clear description of the Negro: bloodhounds were brought, but the
+pursuing white men had so obliterated the criminal's tracks that he could
+not be traced. Through information given by a Negro a suspect was arrested
+and nearly lynched before he could be brought to Mrs. Kimmel for
+identification; when she saw him she said: "He is not the man." The real
+criminal was never apprehended.
+
+One day, weeks afterward, I found the husband working alone in his field;
+his wife, to whom the surroundings had become unbearable, had gone away to
+visit friends. He told me the story hesitatingly. His prospects, he said,
+were ruined: his neighbours had been sympathetic but he could not continue
+to live there with the feeling that they all knew. He was preparing to
+give up his home and lose himself where people did not know his story. I
+asked him if he favoured lynching, and his answer surprised me.
+
+"I've thought about that," he said. "You see, I'm a Christian man, or I
+try to be. My wife is a Christian woman. We've talked about it. What good
+would it do? We should make criminals of ourselves, shouldn't we? No, let
+the law take its course. When I came here, I tried to help the Negroes as
+much as I could. But many of them won't work even when the wages are high:
+they won't come when they agree to and when they get a few dollars ahead
+they go down to the saloons in Atlanta. Everyone is troubled about getting
+labour and everyone is afraid of prowling idle Negroes. Now, the thing has
+come to me, and it's just about ruined my life."
+
+When I came away the poor lonesome fellow followed me half-way up the
+hill, asking: "Now, what would you do?"
+
+One more case. One of the prominent florists in Atlanta is W. C. Lawrence.
+He is an Englishman, whose home is in the outskirts of the city. On the
+morning of August 20th his daughter Mabel, fourteen years old, and his
+sister Ethel, twenty-five years old, a trained nurse who had recently come
+from England, went out into the nearby woods to pick ferns. Being in broad
+daylight and within sight of houses, they had no fear. Returning along an
+old Confederate breastworks, they were met by a brutal-looking Negro with
+a club in one hand and a stone in the other. He first knocked the little
+girl down, then her aunt. When the child "came to" she found herself
+partially bound with a rope. "Honey," said the Negro, "I want you to come
+with me." With remarkable presence of mind the child said: "I can't, my
+leg is broken," and she let it swing limp from the knee. Deceived, the
+Negro went back to bind the aunt. Mabel, instantly untying the rope,
+jumped up and ran for help. When he saw the child escaping the Negro ran
+off.
+
+
+[Illustration: FAC-SIMILES OF CERTAIN ATLANTA NEWSPAPERS OF SEPTEMBER 22,
+1906
+
+Showing the sensational news headings]
+
+
+"When I got there," said Mr. Lawrence, "my sister was lying against the
+bank, face down. The back of her head had been beaten bloody. The bridge
+of her nose was cut open, one eye had been gouged out of its socket. My
+daughter had three bad cuts on her head--thank God, nothing worse to
+either. But my sister, who was just beginning her life, will be totally
+blind in one eye, probably in both. Her life is ruined."
+
+About a month later, through the information of a Negro, the criminal was
+caught, identified by the Misses Lawrence, and sent to the penitentiary
+for forty years (two cases), the limit of punishment for attempted
+criminal assault.
+
+In both of these cases arrests were made on the information of Negroes.
+
+
+_Terror of Both White and Coloured People_
+
+The effect of a few such crimes as these may be more easily imagined than
+described. They produced a feeling of alarm which no one who has not lived
+in such a community can in any wise appreciate. I was astonished in
+travelling in the South to discover how widely prevalent this dread has
+become. Many white women in Atlanta dare not leave their homes alone after
+dark; many white men carry arms to protect themselves and their families.
+And even these precautions do not always prevent attacks.
+
+But this is not the whole story. Everywhere I went in Atlanta I heard of
+the fear of the white people, but not much was said of the terror which
+the Negroes also felt. And yet every Negro I met voiced in some way that
+fear. It is difficult here in the North for us to understand what such a
+condition means: a whole community namelessly afraid!
+
+The better-class Negroes have two sources of fear: one of the criminals of
+their own race--such attacks are rarely given much space in the
+newspapers--and the other the fear of the white people. My very first
+impression of what this fear of the Negroes might be came, curiously
+enough, not from Negroes but from a fine white woman on whom I called
+shortly after going South. She told this story:
+
+"I had a really terrible experience one evening a few days ago. I was
+walking along ---- Street when I saw a rather good-looking young Negro
+come out of a hallway to the sidewalk. He was in a great hurry, and, in
+turning suddenly, as a person sometimes will do, he accidentally brushed
+my shoulder with his arm. He had not seen me before. When he turned and
+found it was a white woman he had touched, such a look of abject terror
+and fear came into his face as I hope never again to see on a human
+countenance. He knew what it meant if I was frightened, called for help,
+and accused him of insulting or attacking me. He stood still a moment,
+then turned and ran down the street, dodging into the first alley he came
+to. It shows, doesn't it, how little it might take to bring punishment
+upon an innocent man!"
+
+The next view I got was through the eyes of one of the able Negroes of the
+South, Bishop Gaines of the African Methodist Episcopal Church. He is now
+an old man, but of imposing presence. Of wide attainments, he has
+travelled in Europe, he owns much property, and rents houses to white
+tenants. He told me of services he had held some time before in south
+Georgia. Approaching the church one day through the trees, he suddenly
+encountered a white woman carrying water from a spring. She dropped her
+pail instantly, screamed, and ran up the path toward her house.
+
+"If I had been some Negroes," said Bishop Gaines, "I should have turned
+and fled in terror; the alarm would have been given, and it is not
+unlikely that I should have had a posse of white men with bloodhounds on
+my trail. If I had been caught what would my life have been worth? The
+woman would have identified me--and what could I have said? But I did not
+run. I stepped out in the path, held up one hand and said:
+
+"'Don't worry, madam, I am Bishop Gaines, and I am holding services here
+in this church.' So she stopped running and I apologised for having
+startled her."
+
+The Negro knows he has little chance to explain, if by accident or
+ignorance he insults a white woman or offends a white man. An educated
+Negro, one of the ablest of his race, telling me of how a friend of his
+who by merest chance had provoked a number of half-drunken white men, had
+been set upon and frightfully beaten, remarked: "It might have been me!"
+
+Now, I am telling these things just as they look to the Negro; it is quite
+as important, as a problem in human nature, to know how the Negro feels
+and what he says, as it is to know how the white man feels.
+
+
+_How the Newspapers Fomented the Riot_
+
+On the afternoon of the riot the newspapers in flaming headlines
+chronicled four assaults by Negroes on white women. I had a personal
+investigation made of each of those cases. Two of them may have been
+attempts at assaults, but two palpably were nothing more than fright on
+the part of both the white woman and the Negro. As an instance, in one
+case an elderly woman, Mrs. Martha Holcombe, going to close her blinds in
+the evening, saw a Negro on the sidewalk. In a terrible fright she
+screamed. The news was telephoned to the police station, but before the
+officials could respond, Mrs. Holcombe telephoned them not to come out.
+And yet this was one of the "assaults" chronicled in letters five inches
+high in a newspaper extra.
+
+And finally on this hot Saturday half-holiday, when the country people had
+come in by hundreds, when everyone was out of doors, when the streets were
+crowded, when the saloons had been filled since early morning with white
+men and Negroes, both drinking--certain newspapers in Atlanta began to
+print extras with big headings announcing new assaults on white women by
+Negroes. The Atlanta News published five such extras, and newsboys cried
+them through the city:
+
+"Third assault."
+
+"Fourth assault."
+
+The whole city, already deeply agitated, was thrown into a veritable
+state of panic. The news in the extras was taken as truthful; for the city
+was not in a mood then for cool investigation. Calls began to come in from
+every direction for police protection. A loafing Negro in a backyard, who
+in ordinary times would not have been noticed, became an object of real
+terror. The police force, too small at best, was thus distracted and
+separated.
+
+In Atlanta the proportion of men who go armed continually is very large;
+the pawnshops of Decatur and Peters Streets, with windows like arsenals,
+furnish the low class of Negroes and whites with cheap revolvers and
+knives. Every possible element was here, then, for a murderous outbreak.
+The good citizens, white and black, were far away in their homes; the bad
+men had been drinking in the dives permitted to exist by the respectable
+people of Atlanta; and here they were gathered, by night, in the heart of
+the city.
+
+
+_The Mob Gathers_
+
+And, finally, a trivial incident fired the tinder. Fear and vengeance
+generated it: it was marked at first by a sort of rough, half-drunken
+horseplay, but when once blood was shed, the brute, which is none too well
+controlled in the best city, came out and gorged itself. Once permit the
+shackles of law and order to be cast off, and men, white or black,
+Christian or pagan, revert to primordial savagery. There is no such thing
+as an orderly mob.
+
+Crime had been committed by Negroes, but this mob made no attempt to find
+the criminals: it expressed its blind, unreasoning, uncontrolled race
+hatred by attacking every man, woman, or boy it saw who had a black face.
+A lame boot-black, an inoffensive, industrious Negro boy, at that moment
+actually at work shining a man's shoes, was dragged out and cuffed, kicked
+and beaten to death in the street. Another young Negro was chased and
+stabbed to death with jack-knives in the most unspeakably horrible manner.
+The mob entered barber shops where respectable Negro men were at work
+shaving white customers, pulled them away from their chairs and beat them.
+Cars were stopped and inoffensive Negroes were thrown through the windows
+or dragged out and beaten. They did not stop with killing and maiming;
+they broke into hardware stores and armed themselves, they demolished not
+only Negro barber shops and restaurants, but they robbed stores kept by
+white men.
+
+
+[Illustration: JAMES H. WALLACE
+
+"The asphalt workers are nearly all coloured. In New York ... the chosen
+representative who sits with the Central Federated Union of the city is
+James H. Wallace, a coloured man."]
+
+[Illustration: R. R. WRIGHT
+
+Organiser of the Negro State Fair in Georgia. Of full-blooded African
+descent, his grandmother, who reared him, being an African Negro of the
+Mandingo tribe.]
+
+[Illustration: H. O. TANNER
+
+One of whose pictures hangs in the Luxembourg; winner N. W. Harris prize
+for the best American painting at Chicago.]
+
+[Illustration: REV. H. H. PROCTOR
+
+Pastor of the First Congregational Church (coloured), to which belong many
+of the best coloured families of Atlanta.]
+
+[Illustration: DR. W. F. PENN
+
+This prosperous Negro physician's home in Atlanta was visited by the mob.]
+
+[Illustration: GEORGE W. CABLE
+
+Chairman of the coloured probation officers of the Juvenile Court,
+Indianapolis.
+
+Photograph by Sexton & Maxwell]
+
+
+Of course the Mayor came out, and the police force and the fire
+department, and finally the Governor ordered out the militia--to apply
+that pound of cure which should have been an ounce of prevention.
+
+It is highly significant of Southern conditions--which the North does not
+understand--that the first instinct of thousands of Negroes in Atlanta,
+when the riot broke out, was not to run away from the white people but to
+run to them. The white man who takes the most radical position in
+opposition to the Negro race will often be found loaning money to
+individual Negroes, feeding them and their families from his kitchen, or
+defending "his Negroes" in court or elsewhere. All of the more prominent
+white citizens of Atlanta, during the riot, protected and fed many
+coloured families who ran to them in their terror. Even Hoke Smith,
+Governor-elect of Georgia, who is more distrusted by the Negroes as a race
+probably than any other white man in Georgia, protected many Negroes in
+his house during the disturbance. In many cases white friends armed
+Negroes and told them to protect themselves. One widow I know of who had a
+single black servant, placed a shot-gun in his hands and told him to fire
+on any mob that tried to get him. She trusted him absolutely. Southern
+people possess a real liking, wholly unknown in the North, for individual
+Negroes whom they know.
+
+So much for Saturday night. Sunday was quiescent but nervous--the
+atmosphere full of the electricity of apprehension. Monday night, after a
+day of alarm and of prowling crowds of men, which might at any moment
+develop into mobs, the riot broke forth again--in a suburb of Atlanta
+called Brownsville.
+
+
+_Story of the Mob's Work in a Southern Negro Town_
+
+When I went out to Brownsville, knowing of its bloody part in the riot, I
+expected to find a typical Negro slum. I looked for squalour, ignorance,
+vice. And I was surprised to find a large settlement of Negroes
+practically every one of whom owned his own home, some of the houses being
+as attractive without and as well furnished within as the ordinary homes
+of middle-class white people. Near at hand, surrounded by beautiful
+grounds, were two Negro colleges--Clark University and Gammon Theological
+Seminary. The post-office was kept by a Negro. There were several stores
+owned by Negroes. The school-house, though supplied with teachers by the
+county, was built wholly with money personally contributed by the Negroes
+of the neighbourhood, in order that there might be adequate educational
+facilities for their children. They had three churches and not a saloon.
+The residents were all of the industrious, property-owning sort, bearing
+the best reputation among white people who knew them.
+
+Think, then, of the situation in Brownsville during the riot in Atlanta.
+All sorts of exaggerated rumours came from the city. _The Negroes of
+Atlanta were being slaughtered wholesale._ A condition of panic fear
+developed. Many of the people of the little town sought refuge in Gammon
+Theological Seminary, where, packed together, they sat up all one night
+praying. President Bowen did not have his clothes off for days, expecting
+the mob every moment. He telephoned for police protection on Sunday, but
+none was provided. Terror also existed among the families which remained
+in Brownsville; most of the men were armed, and they had decided, should
+the mob appear, to make a stand in defence of their homes.
+
+At last, on Monday evening, just at dark, a squad of the county police,
+led by Officer Poole, marched into the settlement at Brownsville. Here,
+although there had been not the slightest sign of disturbance, they began
+arresting Negroes for being armed. Several armed white citizens, who were
+not officers, joined them.
+
+Finally, looking up a little street they saw dimly in the next block a
+group of Negro men. Part of the officers were left with the prisoners and
+part went up the street. As they approached the group of Negroes, the
+officers began firing: the Negroes responded. Officer Heard was shot dead;
+another officer was wounded, and several Negroes were killed or injured.
+
+The police went back to town with their prisoners. On the way two of the
+Negroes in their charge were shot. A white man's wife, who saw the
+outrage, being with child, dropped dead of fright.
+
+The Negroes (all of this is now a matter of court record) declared that
+they were expecting the mob; that the police--not mounted as usual, not
+armed as usual, and accompanied by citizens--looked to them in the
+darkness like a mob. In their fright the firing began.
+
+The wildest reports, of course, were circulated. One sent broadcast was
+that five hundred students of Clark University, all armed, had decoyed the
+police in order to shoot them down. As a matter of fact, the university
+did not open its fall session until October 3d, over a week later--and on
+this night there were just two students on the grounds. The next morning
+the police and the troops appeared and arrested a very large proportion of
+the male inhabitants of the town. Police officers accompanied by white
+citizens, entered one Negro home, where lay a man named Lewis, badly
+wounded the night before. He was in bed; they opened his shirt, placed
+their revolvers at his breast, and in cold blood shot him through the body
+several times in the presence of his relatives. They left him for dead,
+but he has since recovered.
+
+President Bowen, of Gammon Theological Seminary, one of the able Negroes
+in Atlanta, who had nothing whatever to do with the riot, was beaten over
+the head by one of the police with his rifle-butt. The Negroes were all
+disarmed, and about sixty of them were finally taken to Atlanta and locked
+up charged with the murder of Officer Heard.
+
+In the Brownsville riot four Negroes were killed. One was a decent,
+industrious, though loud-talking, citizen named Fambro, who kept a small
+grocery store and owned two houses besides, which he rented. He had a
+comfortable home, a wife and one child. Another was an inoffensive Negro
+named Wilder, seventy years old, a pensioner as a soldier of the Civil
+War, who was well spoken of by all who knew him. He was found--not shot,
+but murdered by a knife-cut in the abdomen--lying in a woodshed back of
+Fambro's store. McGruder, a brick mason, who earned $4 a day at his trade,
+and who had laid aside enough to earn his own home, was killed while under
+arrest by the police; and Robinson, an industrious Negro carpenter, was
+shot to death on his way to work Tuesday morning after the riot.
+
+
+_Results of the Riot_
+
+And after the riot in Brownsville, what? Here was a self-respecting
+community of hard-working Negroes, disturbing no one, getting an honest
+living. How did the riot affect them? Well, it demoralised them, set them
+back for years. Not only were four men killed and several wounded, but
+sixty of their citizens were in jail. Nearly every family had to go to the
+lawyers, who would not take their cases without money in hand. Hence the
+little homes had to be sold or mortgaged, or money borrowed in some other
+way to defend those arrested, doctors' bills were to be paid, the
+undertaker must be settled with. A riot is not over when the shooting
+stops! And when the cases finally came up in court and all the evidence
+was brought out every Negro went free; but two of the county policemen who
+had taken part in the shooting, were punished. George Muse, one of the
+foremost merchants of Atlanta, who was foreman of the jury which tried the
+Brownsville Negroes, said:
+
+"We think the Negroes were gathered just as white people were in other
+parts of the town, for the purpose of defending their homes. We were
+shocked by the conduct which the evidence showed some of the county police
+had been guilty of."
+
+After the riot was over many Negro families, terrified and feeling
+themselves unprotected, sold out for what they could get--I heard a good
+many pitiful stories of such sudden and costly sacrifices--and left the
+country, some going to California, some to Northern cities. The best and
+most enterprising are those who go: the worst remain. Not only did the
+Negroes leave Brownsville, but they left the city itself in considerable
+numbers. Labour was thus still scarcer and wages higher in Atlanta because
+of the riot.
+
+
+_Report of a White Committee on the Riot_
+
+It is significant that not one of the Negroes killed and wounded in the
+riot was of the criminal class. Every one was industrious, respectable
+and law-abiding. A white committee, composed of W. G. Cooper, Secretary of
+the Chamber of Commerce, and George Muse, a prominent merchant, backed by
+the sober citizenship of the town, made an honest investigation and issued
+a brave and truthful report. Here are a few of its conclusions:
+
+     1. Among the victims of the mob there was not a single vagrant.
+
+     2. They were earning wages in useful work up to the time of the riot.
+
+     3. They were supporting themselves and their families or dependent
+     relatives.
+
+     4. Most of the dead left small children and widows, mothers or
+     sisters with practically no means and very small earning capacity.
+
+     5. The wounded lost from one to eight weeks' time, at 50 cents to $4
+     a day each.
+
+     6. About seventy persons were wounded, and among these there was an
+     immense amount of suffering. In some cases it was prolonged and
+     excruciating pain.
+
+     7. Many of the wounded are disfigured, and several are permanently
+     disabled.
+
+     8. Most of them were in humble circumstances, but they were honest,
+     industrious and law-abiding citizens and useful members of society.
+
+     9. These statements are true of both white and coloured.
+
+     10. Of the wounded, ten are white and sixty are coloured. Of the
+     dead, two are white and ten are coloured; two female, and ten male.
+     This includes three killed at Brownsville.
+
+     11. Wild rumours of a larger number killed have no foundation that we
+     can discover. As the city was paying the funeral expenses of victims
+     and relief was given their families, they had every motive to make
+     known their loss. In one case relatives of a man killed in a broil
+     made fruitless efforts to secure relief.
+
+     12. Two persons reported as victims of the riot had no connection
+     with it. One, a Negro man, was killed in a broil over a crap game;
+     and another, a Negro woman, was killed by her paramour. Both
+     homicides occurred at some distance from the scene of the riot.
+
+The men who made this brave report did not mince matters. They called
+murder, murder; and robbery, robbery. Read this:
+
+     13. As twelve persons were killed and seventy were murderously
+     assaulted, and as, by all accounts, a number took part in each
+     assault, it is clear that several hundred murderers or would-be
+     murderers are at large in this community.
+
+At first, after the riot, there was an inclination in some quarters to
+say:
+
+"Well, at any rate, the riot cleared the atmosphere. The Negroes have had
+their lesson. There won't be any more trouble soon."
+
+But read the sober conclusions in the Committee's report. The riot did not
+prevent further crime.
+
+     14. Although less than three months have passed since the riot,
+     events have already demonstrated that the slaughter of the innocent
+     does not deter the criminal class from committing more crimes. Rapes
+     and robbery have been committed in the city during that time.
+
+     15. The slaughter of the innocent does drive away good citizens. From
+     one small neighbourhood twenty-five families have gone. A great many
+     of them were buying homes on the instalment plan.
+
+     16. The crimes of the mob include robbery as well as murder. In a
+     number of cases the property of innocent and unoffending people was
+     taken. Furniture was destroyed, small shops were looted, windows were
+     smashed, trunks were burst open, money was taken from the small
+     hoard, and articles of value were appropriated. In the commission of
+     these crimes the victims, both men and women, were treated with
+     unspeakable brutality.
+
+     17. As a result of four days of lawlessness there are in this glad
+     Christmas-time widows of both races mourning their husbands, and
+     husbands of both races mourning for their wives; there are orphan
+     children of both races who cry out in vain for faces they will see no
+     more; there are grown men of both races disabled for life, and all
+     this sorrow has come to people who are absolutely innocent of any
+     wrong-doing.
+
+In trying to find out exactly the point of view and the feeling of the
+Negroes--which is most important in any honest consideration of
+conditions--I was handed the following letter, written by a young coloured
+man, a former resident in Atlanta now a student in the North. He is
+writing frankly to a friend. It is valuable as showing a _real_ point of
+view--the bitterness, the hopelessness, the distrust.
+
+"... It is possible that you have formed at least a good idea of how we
+feel as the result of the horrible eruption in Georgia. I have not spoken
+to a Caucasian on the subject since then. But, listen: How would you feel,
+if with our history, there came a time when, after speeches and papers and
+teachings you acquired property and were educated, and were a fairly good
+man, it were impossible for you to walk the street (for whose maintenance
+you were taxed) with your sister without being in mortal fear of death if
+you resented any insult offered to her? How would you feel if you saw a
+governor, a mayor, a sheriff, whom you could not oppose at the polls,
+encourage by deed or word or both, a mob of 'best' and worst citizens to
+slaughter your people in the streets and in their own homes and in their
+places of business? Do you think that you could resist the same wrath that
+caused God to slay the Philistines and the Russians to throw bombs? I can
+resist it, but with each new outrage I am less able to resist it. And yet
+if I gave way to my feelings I should become just like other men ... of
+the mob! But I do not ... not quite, and I must hurry through the only
+life I shall live on earth, tortured by these experiences and these
+horrible impulses, with no hope of ever getting away from them. They are
+ever present, like the just God, the devil, and my conscience.
+
+"If there were no such thing as Christianity we should be hopeless."
+
+Besides this effect on the Negroes the riot for a week or more practically
+paralysed the city of Atlanta. Factories were closed, railroad cars were
+left unloaded in the yards, the street-car system was crippled, and there
+was no cab-service (cab-drivers being Negroes), hundreds of servants
+deserted their places, the bank clearings slumped by hundreds of thousands
+of dollars, the state fair, then just opening, was a failure. It was,
+indeed, weeks before confidence was fully restored and the city returned
+to its normal condition.
+
+
+_Who Made Up the Mob?_
+
+One more point I wish to make before taking up the extraordinary
+reconstructive work which followed the riot. I have not spoken of the men
+who made up the mob. We know the dangerous Negro class--after all a very
+small proportion of the entire Negro population. There is a corresponding
+low class of whites quite as illiterate as the Negroes.
+
+The poor white hates the Negro, and the Negro dislikes the poor white. It
+is in these lower strata of society, where the races rub together in
+unclean streets, that the fire is generated. Decatur and Peters streets,
+with their swarming saloons and dives, furnish the point of contact. I
+talked with many people who saw the mobs at different times, and the
+universal testimony was that it was made up largely of boys and young men,
+and of the low criminal and semi-criminal class. The ignorant Negro and
+the uneducated white; there lies the trouble!
+
+This idea that 115,000 people of Atlanta--respectable, law-abiding, good
+citizens, white and black--should be disgraced before the world by a few
+hundred criminals was what aroused the strong, honest citizenship of
+Atlanta to vigorous action.
+
+The riot brought out all that was worst in human nature; the
+reconstruction brought out all that was best and finest.
+
+Almost the first act of the authorities was to close every saloon in the
+city, afterward revoking all the licences--and for two weeks no liquor was
+sold in the city. The police, at first accused of not having done their
+best in dealing with the mob, arrested a good many white rioters, and
+Judge Broyles, to show that the authorities had no sympathy with such
+disturbers of the peace, sent every man brought before him, twenty-four in
+all, to the chain gang for the largest possible sentence, without the
+alternative of a fine. The grand jury met and boldly denounced the mob;
+its report said in part:
+
+"That the sensationalism of the afternoon papers in the presentation of
+the criminal news to the public prior to the riots of Saturday night,
+especially in the case of the Atlanta _News_, deserves our severest
+condemnation."
+
+But the most important and far-reaching effect of the riot was in arousing
+the strong men of the city. It struck at the pride of those men of the
+South, it struck at their sense of law and order, it struck at their
+business interests. On Sunday following the first riot a number of
+prominent men gathered at the Piedmont Hotel, and had a brief discussion;
+but it was not until Tuesday afternoon, when the worst of the news from
+Brownsville had come in, that they gathered in the court-house with the
+serious intent of stopping the riot at all costs. Most of the prominent
+men of Atlanta were present. Sam D. Jones, president of the Chamber of
+Commerce, presided. One of the first speeches was made by Charles T.
+Hopkins, who had been the leading spirit in the meetings on Sunday and
+Monday. He expressed with eloquence the humiliation which Atlanta felt.
+
+"Saturday evening at eight o'clock," he said, "the credit of Atlanta was
+good for any number of millions of dollars in New York or Boston or any
+financial centre; to-day we couldn't borrow fifty cents. The reputation we
+have been building up so arduously for years has been swept away in two
+short hours. Not by men who have made and make Atlanta, not by men who
+represent the character and strength of our city, but by hoodlums,
+understrappers and white criminals. Innocent Negro men have been struck
+down for no crime whatever, while peacefully enjoying the life and liberty
+guaranteed to every American citizen. The Negro race is a child race. We
+are a strong race, their guardians. We have boasted of our superiority and
+we have now sunk to this level--we have shed the blood of our helpless
+wards. Christianity and humanity demand that we treat the Negro fairly. He
+is here, and here to stay. He only knows how to do those things we teach
+him to do; it is our Christian duty to protect him. I for one, and I
+believe I voice the best sentiment of this city, am willing to lay down my
+life rather than to have the scenes of the last few days repeated."
+
+
+_The Plea of a Negro Physician_
+
+In the midst of the meeting a coloured man arose rather doubtfully. He
+was, however, promptly recognized as Dr. W. F. Penn, one of the foremost
+coloured physicians of Atlanta, a graduate of Yale College--a man of much
+influence among his people. He said that he had come to ask the protection
+of the white men of Atlanta. He said that on the day before a mob had come
+to his home; that ten white men, some of whose families he knew and had
+treated professionally, had been sent into his house to look for concealed
+arms; that his little girl had run to them, one after another, and begged
+them not to shoot her father; that his life and the lives of his family
+had afterward been threatened, so that he had had to leave his home; that
+he had been saved from a gathering mob by a white man in an automobile.
+
+"What shall we do?" he asked the meeting--and those who heard his speech
+said that the silence was profound. "We have been disarmed: how shall we
+protect our lives and property? If living a sober, industrious, upright
+life, accumulating property and educating his children as best he knows
+how, is not the standard by which a coloured man can live and be protected
+in the South, what is to become of him? If the kind of life I have lived
+isn't the kind you want, shall I leave and go North?
+
+"When we aspire to be decent and industrious we are told that we are bad
+examples to other coloured men. Tell us what your standards are for
+coloured men. What are the requirements under which we may live and be
+protected? What shall we do?"
+
+When he had finished, Colonel A. J. McBride, a real estate owner and a
+Confederate veteran, arose and said with much feeling that he knew Dr.
+Penn and that he was a good man, and that Atlanta meant to protect such
+men.
+
+"If necessary," said Colonel McBride, "I will go out and sit on his porch
+with a rifle."
+
+Such was the spirit of this remarkable meeting. Mr. Hopkins proposed that
+the white people of the city express their deep regret for the riot and
+show their sympathy for the Negroes who had suffered at the hands of the
+mob by raising a fund of money for their assistance. Then and there $4,423
+was subscribed, to which the city afterward added $1,000.
+
+But this was not all. These men, once thoroughly aroused, began looking to
+the future, to find some new way of preventing the recurrence of such
+disturbances.
+
+A committee of ten, appointed to work with the public officials in
+restoring order and confidence, consisted of some of the foremost citizens
+of Atlanta:
+
+Charles T. Hopkins, Sam D. Jones, President of the Chamber of Commerce; L.
+Z. Rosser, president of the Board of Education; J. W. English, president
+of the Fourth National Bank; Forrest Adair, a leading real estate owner;
+Captain W. D. Ellis, a prominent lawyer; A. B. Steele, a wealthy lumber
+merchant; M. L. Collier, a railroad man; John E. Murphy, capitalist; and
+H. Y. McCord, president of a wholesale grocery house.
+
+One of the first and most unexpected things that this committee did was to
+send for several of the leading Negro citizens of Atlanta: the Rev. H. H.
+Proctor, B. J. Davis, editor of the _Independent_, a Negro journal, the
+Rev. E. P. Johnson, the Rev. E. R. Carter, the Rev. J. A. Rush, and Bishop
+Holsey.
+
+
+_Committees of the Two Races Meet_
+
+This was the first important occasion in the South upon which an attempt
+was made to get the two races together for any serious consideration of
+their differences.
+
+They held a meeting. The white men asked the Negroes, "What shall we do to
+relieve the irritation?" The Negroes said that they thought that coloured
+men were treated with unnecessary roughness on the street-cars and by the
+police. The white members of the committee admitted that this was so and
+promised to take the matter up immediately with the street-car company and
+the police department, which was done. The discussion was harmonious.
+After the meeting Mr. Hopkins said:
+
+"I believe those Negroes understood the situation better than we did. I
+was astonished at their intelligence and diplomacy. They never referred to
+the riot: they were looking to the future. I didn't know that there were
+such Negroes in Atlanta."
+
+Out of this beginning grew the Atlanta Civic League. Knowing that race
+prejudice was strong, Mr. Hopkins sent out 2,000 cards, inviting the most
+prominent men in the city to become members. To his surprise 1,500
+immediately accepted, only two refused, and those anonymously; 500 men not
+formally invited were also taken as members. The league thus had the great
+body of the best citizens of Atlanta behind it. At the same time Mr.
+Proctor and his committee of Negroes had organised a Coloured Co-operative
+Civic League, which secured a membership of 1,500 of the best coloured men
+in the city. A small committee of Negroes met a small committee of the
+white league.
+
+Fear was expressed that there would be another riotous outbreak during the
+Christmas holidays, and the league proceeded with vigour to prevent it.
+New policemen were put on, and the committee worked with Judge Broyles and
+Judge Roan in issuing statements warning the people against lawlessness.
+They secured an agreement among the newspapers not to publish sensational
+news; the sheriff agreed, if necessary, to swear in some of the best men
+in town as extra deputies; they asked that saloons be closed at four
+o'clock on Christmas Eve; and through the Negro committee, they brought
+influence to bear to keep all coloured people off the streets. When two
+county police got drunk at Brownsville and threatened Mrs. Fambro, the
+wife of one of the Negroes killed in the riot, a member of the committee,
+Mr. Seeley, publisher of the _Georgian_, informed the sheriff and sent
+his automobile to Brownsville, where the policemen were arrested and
+afterward discharged from the force. As a result, it was the quietest
+Christmas Atlanta had had in years.
+
+But the most important of all the work done, because of the spectacular
+interest it aroused, was the defence of a Negro charged with an assault
+upon a white woman. It is an extraordinary and dramatic story.
+
+
+_Does a Riot Prevent Further Crime?_
+
+Although many people said that the riot would prevent any more Negro
+crime, several attacks on white women occurred within a few weeks
+afterward. On November 13th Mrs. J. D. Camp, living in the suburbs of
+Atlanta, was attacked in broad daylight in her home and brutally assaulted
+by a Negro, who afterward robbed the house and escaped. Though the crime
+was treated with great moderation by the newspapers, public feeling was
+intense. A Negro was arrested, charged with the crime. Mr. Hopkins and his
+associates believed that the best way to secure justice and prevent
+lynchings was to have a prompt trial. Accordingly, they held a conference
+with Judge Roan, as a result of which three lawyers in the city, Mr.
+Hopkins, L. Z. Rosser, and J. E. McClelland, were appointed to defend the
+accused Negro, serving without pay. A trial-jury, composed of twelve
+citizens, among the most prominent in Atlanta, was called--one of the
+ablest juries ever drawn in Georgia. There was a determination to have
+immediate and complete justice.
+
+The Negro arrested, one Joe Glenn, had been completely identified by Mrs.
+Camp as her assailant. Although having no doubt of his guilt, the
+attorneys went at the case thoroughly. The first thing they did was to
+call in two members of the Negro committee, Mr. Davis and Mr. Carter.
+These men went to the jail and talked with Glenn, and afterward they all
+visited the scene of the crime. They found that Glenn, who was a man fifty
+years old with grandchildren, bore an excellent reputation. He rented a
+small farm about two miles from Mrs. Camp's home and had some property; he
+was sober and industrious. After making a thorough examination and
+getting all the evidence they could, they came back to Atlanta, persuaded,
+in spite of the fact that the Negro had been positively identified by Mrs.
+Camp--which in these cases is usually considered conclusive--that Glenn
+was not guilty. It was a most dramatic trial; at first, when Mrs. Camp was
+placed on the stand she failed to identify Glenn; afterward, reversing
+herself she broke forth into a passionate denunciation of him. But after
+the evidence was all in, the jury retired, and reported two minutes later
+with a verdict "Not guilty." Remarkably enough, just before the trial was
+over the police informed the court that another Negro, named Will Johnson,
+answering Mrs. Camp's description, had been arrested, charged with the
+crime. He was subsequently identified by Mrs. Camp.
+
+Without this energetic defence, an innocent, industrious Negro would
+certainly have been hanged--or if the mob had been ahead of the police, as
+it usually is, he would have been lynched.
+
+But what of Glenn afterward?
+
+When the jury left the box Mr. Hopkins turned to Glenn and said:
+
+"Well, Joe, what do you think of the case?"
+
+He replied: "Boss I 'spec's they will hang me, for that lady said I was
+the man, but they won't hang me, will they, 'fore I sees my wife and
+chilluns again?"
+
+He was kept in the tower that night and the following day for protection
+against a possible lynching. Plans were made by his attorneys to send him
+secretly out of the city to the home of a farmer in Alabama, whom they
+could trust with the story. Glenn's wife was brought to visit the jail and
+Glenn was told of the plans for his safety, and instructed to change his
+name and keep quiet until the feeling of the community could be
+ascertained.
+
+A ticket was purchased by his attorneys, with a new suit of clothes, hat,
+and shoes. He was taken out of jail about midnight under a strong guard,
+and safely placed on the train. From that day to this he has never been
+heard of. He did not go to Alabama. The poor creature, with the instinct
+of a hunted animal, did not dare after all to trust the white men who had
+befriended him. He is a fugitive, away from his family, not daring,
+though innocent, to return to his home.
+
+
+_Other Reconstruction Movements_
+
+Another strong movement also sprung into existence. Its inspiration was
+religious. Ministers wrote a series of letters to the Atlanta
+_Constitution_. Clark Howell, its editor, responded with an editorial
+entitled "Shall We Blaze the Trail?" W. J. Northen, Ex-Governor of
+Georgia, and one of the most highly respected men in the state, took up
+the work, asking himself, as he says:
+
+"What am I to do, who have to pray every night?"
+
+He answered that question by calling a meeting at the Coloured Y. M. C. A.
+building, where some twenty white men met an equal number of Negroes,
+mostly preachers, and held a prayer meeting.
+
+The South still looks to its ministers for leadership--and they really
+lead. The sermons of men like the Rev. John E. White, the Rev. C. B.
+Wilmer, the Rev. W. W. Landrum, who have spoken with power and ability
+against lawlessness and injustice to the Negro, have had a large influence
+in the reconstruction movement.
+
+Ex-Governor Northen travelled through the state of Georgia, made a notable
+series of speeches, urged the establishment of law and order
+organisations, and met support wherever he went. He talked against mob-law
+and lynching in plain language. Here are some of the things he said:
+
+"We shall never settle this until we give absolute justice to the Negro.
+We are not now doing justice to the Negro in Georgia.
+
+"Get into contact with the best Negroes; there are plenty of good Negroes
+in Georgia. What we must do is to get the good white folks to leaven the
+bad white folks and the good Negroes to leaven the bad Negroes."
+
+"There must be no aristocracy of crime: a white fiend is as much to be
+dreaded as a black brute."
+
+These movements did not cover specifically, it will be observed, the
+enormously difficult problems of politics, and the political relationships
+of the races, nor the subject of Negro education, nor the most
+exasperating of all the provocatives--those problems which arise from
+human contact in street cars, railroad trains, and in life generally.
+
+That they had to meet the greatest difficulties in their work is shown by
+such an editorial as the following, published December 12th by the Atlanta
+_Evening News_:
+
+     No law of God or man can hold back the vengeance of our white men
+     upon such a criminal [the Negro who attacks a white woman]. If
+     necessary, we will double and treble and quadruple the law of Moses,
+     and hang off-hand the criminal, or failing to find that a remedy, we
+     will hang two, three, or four of the Negroes nearest to the crime,
+     until the crime is no longer done or feared in all this Southern land
+     that we inhabit and love.
+
+On January 31, 1907, the newspaper which published this editorial went
+into the hands of a receiver--its failure being due largely to the strong
+public sentiment against its course before and during the riot.
+
+After the excitement of the riot and the evil results which followed it
+began to disappear it was natural that the reconstruction movements should
+quiet down. Ex-Governor Northen continued his work for many months and is
+indeed, still continuing it: and there is no doubt that his campaigns have
+had a wide influence. The feeling that the saloons and dives of Atlanta
+were partly responsible for the riot was a powerful factor in the
+anti-saloon campaign which took place in 1907 and resulted in closing
+every saloon in the state of Georgia on January 1, 1908. And the riot and
+the revulsion which followed it will combine to make a recurrence of such
+a disturbance next to impossible.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+FOLLOWING THE COLOUR LINE IN THE SOUTH
+
+
+Before entering upon a discussion of the more serious aspects of the Negro
+question in the South, it may prove illuminating if I set down, briefly,
+some of the more superficial evidences of colour line distinctions in the
+South as they impress the investigator. The present chapter consists of a
+series of sketches from my note-books giving the earliest and freshest
+impressions of my studies in the South.
+
+When I first went South I expected to find people talking about the Negro,
+but I was not at all prepared to find the subject occupying such an
+overshadowing place in Southern affairs. In the North we have nothing at
+all like it; no question which so touches every act of life, in which
+everyone, white or black, is so profoundly interested. In the North we are
+mildly concerned in many things; the South is overwhelmingly concerned in
+this one thing.
+
+And this is not surprising, for the Negro in the South is both the labour
+problem and the servant question; he is preeminently the political issue,
+and his place, socially, is of daily and hourly discussion. A Negro
+minister I met told me a story of a boy who went as a sort of butler's
+assistant in the home of a prominent family in Atlanta. His people were
+naturally curious about what went on in the white man's house. One day
+they asked him:
+
+"What do they talk about when they're eating?"
+
+The boy thought a moment; then he said:
+
+"Mostly they discusses us culled folks."
+
+
+_What Negroes Talk About_
+
+The same consuming interest exists among the Negroes. A very large part of
+their conversation deals with the race question. I had been at the
+Piedmont Hotel only a day or two when my Negro waiter began to take
+especially good care of me. He flecked off imaginary crumbs and gave me
+unnecessary spoons. Finally, when no one was at hand, he leaned over and
+said:
+
+"I understand you're down here to study the Negro problem."
+
+"Yes," I said, a good deal surprised. "How did you know it?"
+
+"Well, sir," he replied, "we've got ways of knowing things."
+
+He told me that the Negroes had been much disturbed ever since the riot
+and that he knew many of them who wanted to go North. "The South," he
+said, "is getting to be too dangerous for coloured people." His language
+and pronunciation were surprisingly good. I found that he was a college
+student, and that he expected to study for the ministry.
+
+"Do you talk much about these things among yourselves?" I asked.
+
+"We don't talk about much else," he said. "It's sort of life and death
+with us."
+
+Another curious thing happened not long afterward. I was lunching with
+several fine Southern men, and they talked, as usual, with the greatest
+freedom in the full hearing of the Negro waiters. Somehow, I could not
+help watching to see if the Negroes took any notice of what was said. I
+wondered if they were sensitive. Finally, I put the question to one of my
+friends:
+
+"Oh," he said, "we never mind them; they don't care."
+
+One of the waiters instantly spoke up:
+
+"No, don't mind me; I'm only a block of wood."
+
+
+_First Views of the Negroes_
+
+I set out from the hotel on the morning of my arrival to trace the colour
+line as it appears, outwardly, in the life of such a town.
+
+Atlanta is a singularly attractive place, as bright and new as any Western
+city. Sherman left it in ashes at the close of the war; the old buildings
+and narrow streets were swept away and a new city was built, which is now
+growing in a manner not short of astonishing. It has 115,000 to 125,000
+inhabitants, about a third of whom are Negroes, living in more or less
+detached quarters in various parts of the city, and giving an
+individuality to the life interesting enough to the unfamiliar Northerner.
+A great many of them are always on the streets far better dressed and
+better-appearing than I had expected to see--having in mind, perhaps, the
+tattered country specimens of the penny postal cards. Crowds of Negroes
+were at work mending the pavement, for the Italian and Slav have not yet
+appeared in Atlanta, nor indeed to any extent anywhere in the South. I
+stopped to watch a group of them. A good deal of conversation was going
+on, here and there a Negro would laugh with great good humour, and several
+times I heard a snatch of a song: much jollier workers than our grim
+foreigners, but evidently not working so hard. A fire had been built to
+heat some of the tools, and a black circle of Negroes were gathered around
+it like flies around a drop of molasses and they were all talking while
+they warmed their shins--evidently having plenty of leisure.
+
+As I continued down the street, I found that all the drivers of waggons
+and cabs were Negroes; I saw Negro newsboys, Negro porters, Negro barbers,
+and it being a bright day, many of them were in the street--on the sunny
+side.
+
+I commented that evening to some Southern people I met, on the impression,
+almost of jollity, given by the Negro workers I had seen. One of the older
+ladies made what seemed to me a very significant remark.
+
+"They don't sing as they used to," she said. "You should have known the
+old darkeys of the plantation. Every year, it seems to me, they have been
+losing more and more of their care-free good humour. I sometimes feel that
+I don't know them any more. Since the riot they have grown so glum and
+serious that I'm free to say I'm scared of them!"
+
+One of my early errands that morning led me into several of the great new
+office buildings, which bear testimony to the extraordinary progress of
+the city. And here I found one of the first evidences of the colour line
+for which I was looking. In both buildings, I found a separate elevator
+for coloured people. In one building, signs were placed reading:
+
+     FOR WHITES ONLY
+
+In another I copied this sign:
+
+     THIS CAR FOR COLOURED PASSENGERS,
+      FREIGHT, EXPRESS AND PACKAGES
+
+Curiously enough, as giving an interesting point of view, an intelligent
+Negro with whom I was talking a few days later asked me:
+
+"Have you seen the elevator sign in the Century Building?"
+
+I said I had.
+
+"How would you like to be classed with 'freight, express and packages'?"
+
+I found that no Negro ever went into an elevator devoted to white people,
+but that white people often rode in cars set apart for coloured people. In
+some cases the car for Negroes is operated by a white man, and in other
+cases, all the elevators in a building are operated by coloured men. This
+is one of the curious points of industrial contact in the South which
+somewhat surprise the Northern visitor. In the North a white workman will
+often refuse to work with a Negro; in the South, while the social
+prejudice is strong, Negroes and whites work together side by side in many
+kinds of employment.
+
+I had an illustration in point not long afterward. Passing the post
+office, I saw several mail-carriers coming out, some white, some black,
+talking and laughing, with no evidence, at first, of the existence of any
+colour line. Interested to see what the real condition was, I went in and
+made inquiries. A most interesting and significant condition developed. I
+found that the postmaster, who is a wise man, sent Negro carriers up
+Peachtree and other fashionable streets, occupied by wealthy white people,
+while white carriers were assigned to beats in the mill districts and
+other parts of town inhabited by the poorer classes of white people.
+
+"You see," said my informant, "the Peachtree people know how to treat
+Negroes. They really prefer a Negro carrier to a white one; it's natural
+for them to have a Negro doing such service. But if we sent Negro carriers
+down into the mill district they might get their heads knocked off."
+
+Then he made a philosophical observation:
+
+"If we had only the best class of white folks down here and the
+industrious Negroes, there wouldn't be any trouble."
+
+
+_The Jim Crow Car_
+
+One of the points in which I was especially interested was the "Jim Crow"
+regulations, that is, the system of separation of the races in street cars
+and railroad trains. Next to the question of Negro suffrage, I think the
+people of the North have heard more of the Jim Crow legislation than of
+anything else connected with the Negro problem. The street car is an
+excellent place for observing the points of human contact between the
+races, betraying as it does every shade of feeling upon the part of both.
+In almost no other relationship do the races come together, physically, on
+anything like a common footing. In their homes and in ordinary employment,
+they meet as master and servant; but in the street cars they touch as free
+citizens, each paying for the right to ride, the white not in a place of
+command, the Negro without an obligation of servitude. Street-car
+relationships are, therefore, symbolic of the new conditions. A few years
+ago the Negro came and went in the street cars in most cities and sat
+where he pleased, but gradually Jim Crow laws or local regulations were
+passed, forcing him into certain seats at the back of the car.
+
+While I was in Atlanta, the newspapers reported two significant new
+developments in the policy of separation. In Savannah Jim Crow ordinances
+have gone into effect for the first time, causing violent protestations on
+the part of the Negroes and a refusal by many of them to use the cars at
+all. Montgomery, Ala., about the same time, went one step further and
+demanded, not separate seats in the same car, but entirely separate cars
+for whites and blacks. There could be no better visible evidence of the
+increasing separation of the races, and of the determination of the white
+man to make the Negro "keep his place," than the evolution of the Jim Crow
+regulations.
+
+I was curious to see how the system worked out in Atlanta. Over the door
+of each car, I found this sign:
+
+       WHITE PEOPLE WILL SEAT FROM FRONT OF CAR TOWARD
+     THE BACK AND COLORED PEOPLE FROM REAR TOWARD FRONT
+
+Sure enough, I found the white people in front and the Negroes behind. As
+the sign indicates, there is no definite line of division between the
+white seats and the black seats, as in many other Southern cities. This
+very absence of a clear demarcation is significant of many relationships
+in the South. The colour line is drawn, but neither race knows just where
+it is. Indeed, it can hardly be definitely drawn in many relationships,
+because it is constantly changing. This uncertainty is a fertile source of
+friction and bitterness. The very first time I was on a car in Atlanta, I
+saw the conductor--all conductors are white--ask a Negro woman to get up
+and take a seat farther back in order to make a place for a white man. I
+have also seen white men requested to leave the Negro section of the car.
+
+At one time, when I was on a car the conductor shouted: "Heh, you nigger,
+get back there," which the Negro, who had taken a seat too far forward,
+proceeded hastily to do.
+
+No other one point of race contact is so much and so bitterly discussed
+among the Negroes as the Jim Crow car. I don't know how many Negroes
+replied to my question: "What is the chief cause of friction down here?"
+with a complaint of their treatment on street cars and in railroad trains.
+
+
+_Why the Negro Objects to the Jim Crow Car_
+
+Fundamentally, of course they object to any separation which gives them
+inferior accommodations. This point of view--and I am trying to set down
+every point of view, both coloured and white, exactly as I find it, is
+expressed in many ways.
+
+"We pay first-class fare," said one of the leading Negroes in Atlanta,
+"exactly as the white man does, but we don't get first-class service. I
+say it isn't fair."
+
+In answer to this complaint, the white man says: "The Negro is inferior,
+he must be made to keep his place. Give him a chance and he assumes social
+equality, and that will lead to an effort at intermarriage and
+amalgamation of the races. The Anglo-Saxon will never stand for that."
+
+One of the first complaints made by the Negroes after the riot, was of
+rough and unfair treatment on the street cars.
+
+The committee admitted that the Negroes were not always well treated on
+the cars, and promised to improve conditions. Charles T. Hopkins, a leader
+in the Civic League and one of the prominent lawyers of the city, told me
+that he believed the Negroes should be given their definite seats in every
+car; he said that he personally made it a practice to stand up rather than
+to take any one of the four back seats, which he considered as belonging
+to the Negroes. Two other leading men, on a different occasion, told me
+the same thing.
+
+One result of the friction over the Jim Crow regulations is that many
+Negroes ride on the cars as little as possible. One prominent Negro I met
+said he never entered a car, and that he had many friends who pursued the
+same policy; he said that Negro street car excursions, familiar a few
+years ago, had entirely ceased. It is significant of the feeling that one
+of the features of the Atlanta riot was an attack on the street cars in
+which all Negroes were driven out of their seats. One Negro woman was
+pushed through an open window, and, after falling to the pavement, she was
+dragged by the leg across the sidewalk and thrown through a shop window.
+In another case when the mob stopped a car the motorman, instead of
+protecting his passengers, went inside and beat down a Negro with his
+brass control-lever.
+
+
+_Story of an Encounter on a Street Car_
+
+I heard innumerable stories from both white people and Negroes of
+encounters in the street cars. Dr. W. F. Penn, one of the foremost Negro
+physicians of the city, himself partly white, a graduate of Yale College,
+told me of one occasion in which he entered a car and found there Mrs.
+Crogman, wife of the coloured president of Clark University. Mrs. Crogman
+is a mulatto so light of complexion as to be practically undistinguishable
+from white people. Dr. Penn, who knew her well, sat down beside her and
+began talking. A white man who occupied a seat in front with his wife
+turned and said:
+
+"Here, you nigger, get out of that seat. What do you mean by sitting down
+with a white woman?"
+
+Dr. Penn replied somewhat angrily:
+
+"It's come to a pretty pass when a coloured man cannot sit with a woman of
+his own race in his own part of the car."
+
+The white man turned to his wife and said:
+
+"Here, take these bundles. I'm going to thrash that nigger."
+
+In half a minute the car was in an uproar, the two men struggling.
+Fortunately the conductor and motorman were quickly at hand, and Dr. Penn
+slipped off the car.
+
+Conditions on the railroad trains, while not resulting so often in
+personal encounters, are also the cause of constant irritation. When I
+came South, I took particular pains to observe the arrangement on the
+trains. In some cases Negroes are given entire cars at the front of the
+train, at other times they occupy the rear end of a combination coach and
+baggage car, which is used in the North as a smoking compartment. The
+complaint here is that, while the Negro is required to pay first-class
+fare, he is provided with second-class accommodations. Well-to-do Negroes
+who can afford to travel, also complain that they are not permitted to
+engage sleeping-car berths. Booker T. Washington usually takes a
+compartment where he is entirely cut off from the white passengers. Some
+other Negroes do the same thing, although they are often refused even this
+expensive privilege. Railroad officials with whom I talked, and it is
+important to hear what they say, said that it was not only a question of
+public opinion--which was absolutely opposed to any intermingling of the
+races in the cars--but that Negro travel in most places was small compared
+with white travel, that the ordinary Negro was unclean and careless, and
+that it was impractical to furnish them the same accommodations, even
+though it did come hard on a few educated Negroes. They said that when
+there was a delegation of Negroes, enough to fill an entire sleeping car,
+they could always get accommodations. All of which gives a glimpse of the
+enormous difficulties accompanying the separation of the races in the
+South.
+
+Another interesting point significant of tendencies came early to my
+attention. They had recently finished at Atlanta one of the finest
+railroad stations in this country. The ordinary depot in the South has two
+waiting-rooms of about the same size, one for whites and one for Negroes.
+But when this new station was built the whole front was given up to white
+people, and the Negroes were assigned a side entrance, and a small
+waiting-room. Prominent coloured men regarded it as a new evidence of the
+crowding out of the Negro, the further attempt to give him unequal
+accommodations, to handicap him in his struggle for survival. A delegation
+was sent to the railroad people to protest, but to no purpose. Result:
+further bitterness. There are in the station two lunch-rooms, one for
+whites, one for Negroes.
+
+A leading coloured man said to me:
+
+"No Negro goes to the lunch-room in the station who can help it. We don't
+like the way we have been treated."
+
+
+_A Negro Boycott_
+
+Of course this was an unusually intelligent coloured man, and he spoke for
+his own sort; how far the same feeling of a race consciousness strong
+enough to carry out such a boycott as this--and it is like the boycott of
+a labour union--actuates the masses of ignorant Negroes is a question upon
+which I hope to get more light as I proceed. I have already heard more
+than one coloured leader complain that Negroes do not stand together. And
+a white planter, whom I met in the hotel, said a significant thing along
+this very line:
+
+"If once the Negroes got together and saved their money, they'd soon own
+the country, but they can't do it, and they never will."
+
+After I had begun to trace the colour line I found evidences of it
+everywhere--literally in every department of life. In the theatres,
+Negroes never sit downstairs, but the galleries are black with them. Of
+course, white hotels and restaurants are entirely barred to Negroes, with
+the result that coloured people have their own eating and sleeping places,
+many of them inexpressibly dilapidated and unclean. "Sleepers wanted" is a
+familiar sign in Atlanta, giving notice of places where for a few cents a
+Negro can find a bed or a mattress on the floor, often in a room where
+there are many other sleepers, sometimes both men and women in the same
+room crowded together in a manner both unsanitary and immoral. No good
+public accommodations exist for the educated or well-to-do Negro in
+Atlanta, although other cities are developing good Negro hotels. Indeed
+one cannot long remain in the South without being impressed with extreme
+difficulties which beset the exceptional coloured man.
+
+
+[Illustration: COMPANION PICTURES
+
+Showing how the colour line was drawn by the saloons at Atlanta, Georgia.
+Many of the saloons for Negroes were kept by foreigners, usually Jews.]
+
+
+In slavery time many Negroes attended white churches and Negro children
+were often taught by white women. Now, a Negro is never (or very rarely)
+seen in a white man's church. Once since I have been in the South, I saw a
+very old Negro woman, some much-loved mammy, perhaps--sitting down in
+front near the pulpit, but that is the only exception to the rule that has
+come to my attention. Negroes are not wanted in white churches.
+Consequently the coloured people have some sixty churches of their own in
+Atlanta. Of course, the schools are separate, and have been ever since the
+Civil War.
+
+In one of the parks of Atlanta I saw this sign:
+
+     NO NEGROES ALLOWED IN THIS PARK
+
+
+_Colour Line in the Public Library_
+
+A story significant of the growing separation of the races is told about
+the public library at Atlanta, which no Negro is permitted to enter.
+Carnegie gave the money for building it, and when the question came up as
+to the support of it by the city, the inevitable colour question arose.
+Leading Negroes asserted that their people should be allowed admittance,
+that they needed such an educational advantage even more than white
+people, and that they were to be taxed their share--even though it was
+small--for buying the books and maintaining the building. They did not win
+their point of course, but Mr. Carnegie proposed a solution of the
+difficulty by offering more money to build a Negro branch library,
+provided the city would give the land and provide for its support. The
+city said to the Negroes:
+
+"You contribute the land and we will support the library."
+
+Influential Negroes at once arranged for buying and contributing a site
+for the library. Then the question of control arose. The Negroes thought
+that inasmuch as they gave the land and the building was to be used
+entirely for coloured people, they should have one or two members on the
+board of control. This the city officials, who had charge of the matter,
+would not hear of; result, the Negroes would not give the land, and the
+branch library has never been built.
+
+Right in this connection: while I was in Atlanta, the Art School, which in
+the past has often used Negro models, decided to draw the colour line
+there, too, and no longer employ them.
+
+Formerly Negroes and white men went to the same saloons, and drank at the
+same bars, as they do now, I am told, in some parts of the South. In a few
+instances, in Atlanta, there were Negro saloon-keepers, and many Negro
+bartenders. The first step toward separation was to divide the bar, the
+upper end for white men, the lower for Negroes. After the riot, by a new
+ordinance no saloon was permitted to serve both white and coloured men.
+
+Consequently, going along Decatur Street, one sees the saloons designated
+by conspicuous signs:[1]
+
+     "WHITES ONLY"      "COLOURED ONLY"
+
+And when the Negro suffers the ordinary consequences of a prolonged visit
+to Decatur Street, and finds himself in the city prison, he is separated
+there, too, from the whites. And afterward in court, if he comes to trial,
+two Bibles are provided; he may take his oath on one; the other is for the
+white man. When he dies he is buried in a separate cemetery.
+
+One curious and enlightening example of the infinite ramifications of the
+colour line was given me by Mr. Logan, secretary of the Atlanta Associated
+Charities, which is supported by voluntary contributions. One day, after
+the riot, a subscriber called Mr. Logan on the telephone and said: "Do you
+help Negroes in your society?"
+
+"Why, yes, occasionally," said Mr. Logan.
+
+"What do you do that for?"
+
+"A Negro gets hungry and cold like anybody else," answered Mr. Logan.
+
+"Well, you can strike my name from your subscription list. I won't give
+any of my money to a society that helps Negroes."
+
+
+_Psychology of the South_
+
+Now, this sounds rather brutal, but behind it lies the peculiar psychology
+of the South. This very man who refused to contribute to the associated
+charities, may have fed several Negroes from his kitchen and had a number
+of Negro pensioners who came to him regularly for help. It was simply
+amazing to me, considering the bitterness of racial feeling, to see how
+lavish many white families are in giving food, clothing, and money to
+individual Negroes whom they know. A Negro cook often supports her whole
+family, including a lazy husband, on what she gets daily from the white
+man's kitchen. In some old families the "basket habit" of the Negroes is
+taken for granted; in the newer ones, it is, significantly, beginning to
+be called stealing, showing that the old order is passing and that the
+Negro is being held more and more strictly to account, not as a dependent
+vassal, but as a moral being, who must rest upon his own responsibility.
+
+And often a Negro of the old sort will literally bulldoze his hereditary
+white protector into the loan of quarters and half dollars, which both
+know will never be paid back.
+
+Mr. Brittain, superintendent of schools in Fulton County, gave me an
+incident in point. A big Negro with whom he was wholly unacquainted came
+to his office one day, and demanded--he did not ask, but demanded--a job.
+
+"What's your name?" asked the superintendent.
+
+"Marion Luther Brittain," was the reply.
+
+"That sounds familiar," said Mr. Brittain--it being, indeed, his own name.
+
+"Yas, sah. Ah'm the son of yo' ol' mammy."
+
+In short, Marion Luther had grown up on the old plantation; it was the
+spirit of the hereditary vassal demanding the protection and support of
+the hereditary baron, and he got it, of course.
+
+The Negro who makes his appeal on the basis of this old relationship
+finds no more indulgent or generous friend than the Southern white man,
+indulgent to the point of excusing thievery and other petty offences, but
+the moment he assumes or demands any other relationship or stands up as an
+independent citizen, the white men--at least some white men--turn upon him
+with the fiercest hostility. The incident of the associated charities may
+now be understood. It was not necessarily cruelty to a cold or hungry
+Negro that inspired the demand of the irate subscriber, but the feeling
+that the associated charities helped Negroes and whites on the same basis,
+as men; that, therefore, it encouraged "social equality," and that,
+therefore, it was to be stopped.
+
+Most of the examples so far given are along the line of social contact,
+where, of course, the repulsion is intense. Negroes and whites can go to
+different schools, churches, and saloons, and sit in different street
+cars, and still live pretty comfortably. But the longer I remain in the
+South, the more clearly I come to understand how wide and deep, in other,
+less easily discernible ways, the chasm between the races is becoming.
+
+
+_The New Racial Consciousness Among Negroes_
+
+One of the natural and inevitable results of the effort of the white man
+to set the Negro off, as a race, by himself, is to awaken in him a new
+consciousness--a sort of racial consciousness. It drives the Negroes
+together for defence and offence. Many able Negroes, some largely of white
+blood, cut off from all opportunity of success in the greater life of the
+white man, become of necessity leaders of their own people. And one of
+their chief efforts consists in urging Negroes to work together and to
+stand together. In this they are only developing the instinct of defence
+against the white man which has always been latent in the race. This
+instinct exhibits itself in the way in which the mass of Negroes sometimes
+refuse to turn over a criminal of their colour to white justice; it is
+like the instinctive clannishness of the Highland Scotch or the peasant
+Irish. I don't know how many Southern people have told me in different
+ways of how extremely difficult it is to get at the real feeling of a
+Negro, to make him tell what goes on in his clubs and churches or in his
+innumerable societies.
+
+A Southern woman told me of a cook who had been in her service for
+nineteen years. The whole family really loved the old servant: her
+mistress made her a confidant, in the way of the old South, in the most
+intimate private and family matters, the daughters told her their love
+affairs; they all petted her and even submitted to many small tyrannies
+upon her part.
+
+"But do you know," said my hostess, "Susie never tells us a thing about
+her life or her friends, and we couldn't, if we tried, make her tell what
+goes on in the society she belongs to."
+
+The Negro has long been defensively secretive. Slavery made him that. In
+the past, the instinct was passive and defensive; but with growing
+education and intelligent leadership it is rapidly becoming conscious,
+self-directive and offensive. And right there, it seems to me, lies the
+great cause of the increased strain in the South.
+
+Let me illustrate. In the People's Tabernacle in Atlanta, where thousands
+of Negroes meet every Sunday, I saw this sign in huge letters:
+
+     FOR PHOTOGRAPHS, GO TO AUBURN PHOTO
+      GALLERY OPERATED BY COLOURED MEN
+
+The old-fashioned Negro preferred to go to the white man for everything;
+he didn't trust his own people; the new Negro, with growing race
+consciousness, and feeling that the white man is against him, urges his
+friends to patronise Negro doctors and dentists, and to trade with Negro
+storekeepers. The extent to which this movement has gone was one of the
+most surprising things that I, as an unfamiliar Northerner, found in
+Atlanta. In other words, the struggle of the races is becoming more and
+more rapidly economic.
+
+
+_Story of a Negro Shoe-store_
+
+One day, walking in Broad Street, I passed a Negro shoe-store. I did not
+know that there was such a thing in the country. I went in to make
+inquiries. It was neat, well kept, and evidently prosperous. I found that
+it was owned by a stock company, organised and controlled wholly by
+Negroes; the manager was a brisk young mulatto named Harper, a graduate of
+Atlanta University. I found him dictating to a Negro girl stenographer.
+There were two reasons, he said, why the store had been opened; one was
+because the promoters thought it a good business opportunity, and the
+other was because many Negroes of the better class felt that they did not
+get fair treatment at white stores. At some places--not all, he said--when
+a Negro woman went to buy a pair of shoes, the clerk would hand them to
+her without offering to help her try them on; and a Negro was always kept
+waiting until all the white people in the store had been served. Since the
+new business was opened, he said, it had attracted much of the Negro
+trade; all the leaders advising their people to patronise him. I was much
+interested to find out how this young man looked upon the race question.
+His first answer struck me forcibly, for it was the universal and typical
+answer of the business man the world over whether white, yellow, or black:
+
+"All I want," he said, "is to be protected and let alone, so that I can
+build up this business."
+
+"What do you mean by protection?" I asked.
+
+"Well, justice between the races. That doesn't mean social equality. We
+have a society of our own, and that is all we want. If he can have justice
+in the courts, and fair protection, we can learn to compete with the white
+stores and get along all right."
+
+Such an enterprise as this indicates the new, economic separation between
+the races.
+
+"Here is business," says the Negro, "which I am going to do."
+
+Considering the fact that only a few years ago, the Negro did no business
+at all, and had no professional men, it is really surprising to a
+Northerner to see what progress he has made. One of the first lines he
+took up was--not unnaturally--the undertaking business. Some of the most
+prosperous Negroes in every Southern city are undertakers, doing work
+exclusively, of course, for coloured people. Other early enterprises,
+growing naturally out of a history of personal service, were barbering
+and tailoring. Atlanta has many small Negro tailor and clothes-cleaning
+shops.
+
+
+_Wealthiest Negro in Atlanta_
+
+The wealthiest Negro in Atlanta, A. F. Herndon, operates the largest
+barber shop in the city; he is the president of a Negro insurance company
+(of which there are four in the city) and he owns and rents some fifty
+dwelling houses. He is said to be worth $80,000, all made, of course,
+since slavery.
+
+Another occupation developing naturally from the industrial training of
+slavery was the business of the building contractor. Several such Negroes,
+notably Alexander Hamilton, do a considerable business in Atlanta, and
+have made money. They are employed by white men, and they hire for their
+jobs both white and Negro workmen.
+
+Small groceries and other stores are of later appearance; I saw at least a
+score of them in various parts of Atlanta. For the most part they are very
+small, many are exceedingly dirty and ill-kept; usually much poorer than
+corresponding places kept by foreigners, indiscriminately called "Dagoes"
+down here, who are in reality mostly Russian Jews and Greeks. But there
+are a few Negro grocery stores in Atlanta which are highly creditable.
+Other business enterprises include restaurants (for Negroes), printing
+establishments, two newspapers, and several drug-stores. In other words,
+the Negro is rapidly building up his own business enterprises, tending to
+make himself independent as a race.
+
+The appearance of Negro drug-stores was the natural result of the
+increasing practice of Negro doctors and dentists. Time was when all
+Negroes preferred to go to white practitioners, but since educated
+coloured doctors became common, they have taken a very large
+part--practically all, I am told--of the practice in Atlanta. Several of
+them have had degrees from Northern universities, two from Yale; and one
+of them, at least, has some little practice among white people. The
+doctors are leaders among their people. Naturally they give prescriptions
+to be filled by druggists of their own race; hence the growth of the drug
+business among Negroes everywhere in the South. The first store to be
+established in Atlanta occupies an old wooden building in Auburn Avenue.
+It is operated by Moses Amos, a mulatto, and enjoys, I understand, a high
+degree of prosperity. I visited it. A post-office occupies one corner of
+the room; and it is a familiar gathering place for coloured men. Moses
+Amos told me his story, and I found it so interesting, and so significant
+of the way in which Negro business men have come up, that I am setting it
+down briefly here.
+
+
+_Rise of a Negro Druggist_
+
+"I never shall forget," he said, "my first day in the drug business. It
+was in 1876. I remember I was with a crowd of boys in Peachtree Street,
+where Dr. Huss, a Southern white man, kept a drug-store. The old doctor
+was sitting out in front smoking his pipe. He called one little Negro
+after another, and finally chose me. He said:
+
+"'I want you to live with me, work in the store, and look after my horse.'
+
+"He sent me to his house and told me to tell his wife to give me some
+breakfast, and I certainly delivered the first message correctly. His
+wife, who was a noble lady, not only fed me, but made me take a bath in a
+sure enough porcelain tub, the first I had ever seen. When I went back to
+the store, I was so regenerated that the doctor had to adjust his
+spectacles before he knew me. He said to me:
+
+"'You can wash bottles, put up castor oil, salts and turpentine, sell
+anything you _know_ and put the money in the drawer.'
+
+"He showed me how to work the keys of the cash drawer. 'I am going to
+trust you,' he said. 'Don't steal from me; if you want anything ask for
+it, and you can have it. And don't lie; I hate a liar. A boy who will lie
+will steal, too.'
+
+"I remained with Dr. Huss thirteen years. He sent me to school and paid my
+tuition out of his own pocket; he trusted me fully, often leaving me in
+charge of his business for weeks at a time. When he died I formed a
+partnership with Dr. Butler, Dr. Slater, and others, and bought the store.
+Our business grew and prospered, so that within a few years we had a stock
+worth $3,000, and cash of $800. That made us ambitious. We bought land,
+built a new store, and went into debt to do it. We didn't know much about
+business--that's the Negro's chief trouble--and we lost trade by changing
+our location, so that in spite of all we could do, we failed and lost
+everything, though we finally paid our creditors every cent. After many
+trials we started again in 1896 in our present store; to-day we are doing
+a good business; we can get all the credit we want from wholesale houses,
+we employ six clerks, and pay good interest on the capital invested."
+
+
+_Greatest Difficulties Met by Negro Business Men_
+
+I asked him what was the greatest difficulty he had to meet. He said it
+was the credit system; the fact that many Negroes have not learned
+financial responsibility. Once, he said, he nearly stopped business on
+this account.
+
+"I remember," he said, "the last time we got into trouble. We needed $400
+to pay our bills. I picked out some of our best customers and gave them a
+heart-to-heart talk and told them what trouble we were in. They all
+promised to pay; but on the day set for payment, out of $1,680 which they
+owed us we collected just $8.25. After that experience we came down to a
+cash basis. We trust no one, and since then we have been doing well."
+
+He said he thought the best opportunity for Negro development was in the
+South where he had his whole race behind him. He said he had once been
+tempted to go North looking for an opening.
+
+"How did you make out?" I asked.
+
+"Well, I'll tell you," he said, "when I got there I wanted a shave; I
+walked the streets two hours visiting barber shops, and they all turned me
+away with some excuse. I finally had to buy a razor and shave myself! That
+was just a sample. I came home disgusted and decided to fight it out down
+here where I understood conditions."
+
+Of course only a comparatively few Negroes are able to get ahead in
+business. They must depend almost exclusively on the trade of their own
+race, and they must meet the highly organised competition of white men.
+But it is certainly significant that even a few are able to make progress
+along these unfamiliar lines. Many Southern men I met had little or no
+idea of the remarkable extent of this advancement among the better class
+of Negroes. Here is a strange thing. I don't know how many Southern men
+have prefaced their talks with me with words something like this:
+
+"You can't expect to know the Negro after a short visit. You must live
+down here like we do. Now, I know the Negroes like a book. I was brought
+up with them. I know what they'll do and what they won't do. I have had
+Negroes in my house all my life."
+
+But curiously enough I found that these men rarely knew anything about the
+better class of Negroes--those who were in business, or in independent
+occupations, those who owned their own homes. They _did_ come into contact
+with the servant Negro, the field hand, the common labourer, who make up,
+of course, the great mass of the race. On the other hand, the best class
+of Negroes did not know the higher class of white people, and based their
+suspicion and hatred upon the acts of the poorer sort of whites with whom
+they naturally came into contact. The best elements of the two races are
+as far apart as though they lived in different continents; and that is one
+of the chief causes of the growing danger of the Southern situation. It is
+a striking fact that one of the first--almost instinctive--efforts at
+reconstruction after the Atlanta riot was to bring the best elements of
+both races together, so that they might, by becoming acquainted and
+gaining confidence in each other, allay suspicion and bring influence to
+bear upon the lawless elements of both white people and coloured.
+
+Many Southerners look back wistfully to the faithful, simple, ignorant,
+obedient, cheerful, old plantation Negro and deplore his disappearance.
+They want the New South, but the old Negro. That Negro is disappearing
+forever along with the old feudalism and the old-time exclusively
+agricultural life.
+
+A new Negro is not less inevitable than a new white man and a new South.
+And the new Negro, as my clever friend says, doesn't laugh as much as the
+old one. It is grim business he is in, this being free, this new, fierce
+struggle in the open competitive field for the daily loaf. Many go down to
+vagrancy and crime in that struggle; a few will rise. The more rapid the
+progress (with the trained white man setting the pace), the more frightful
+the mortality.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+THE SOUTHERN CITY NEGRO
+
+
+After my arrival in Atlanta, and when I had begun to understand some of
+the more superficial ramifications of the colour line (as I related in the
+last chapter,) I asked several Southern men whose acquaintance I had made
+where I could best see the poorer or criminal class of Negroes. So much
+has been said of the danger arising from this element of Southern
+population and it plays such a part in every discussion of the race
+question that I was anxious to learn all I could about it.
+
+"Go down any morning to Judge Broyles's court," they said to me, "and
+you'll see the lowest of the low."
+
+So I went down--the first of many visits I made to police and justice
+courts. I chose a Monday morning that I might see to the best advantage
+the accumulation of the arrests of Saturday and Sunday.
+
+The police station stands in Decatur Street, in the midst of the very
+worst section of the city, surrounded by low saloons, dives, and
+pawn-shops. The court occupies a great room upstairs, and it was crowded
+that morning to its capacity. Besides the police, lawyers, court officers,
+and white witnesses, at least one hundred and fifty spectators filled the
+seats behind the rail, nearly all of them Negroes. The ordinary Negro
+loves nothing better than to sit and watch the proceedings of a court.
+Judge Broyles kindly invited me to a seat on the platform at his side
+where I could look into the faces of the prisoners and hear all that was
+said.
+
+
+_In a Southern Police Court_
+
+It was a profoundly interesting and significant spectacle. In the first
+place the very number of cases was staggering. The docket that morning
+carried over one hundred names--men, women, and children, white and
+black; the court worked hard, but it was nearly two o'clock in the
+afternoon before the room was cleared. Atlanta, as I showed in a former
+chapter, has the largest number of arrests, considering the population, of
+any important city in the United States. I found that 13,511 of the total
+of 21,702 persons arrested in 1906 were Negroes, or 62 per cent., whereas
+the coloured population of the city is only 40 per cent. of the total.[2]
+
+A very large proportion of the arrests that Monday morning were Negroes,
+with a surprising proportion of women and of mere children. In 1906 3,194
+Negro women were arrested in Atlanta. It was altogether a pitiful and
+disheartening exhibition, a spectacle of sodden ignorance, reckless vice,
+dissipation. Most of the cases, ravelled out, led back to the saloon.
+
+"Where's your home?" the judge would ask, and in a number of cases the
+answer was:
+
+"Ah come here fum de country."
+
+Over and over again it was the story of the country Negro, or the Negro
+who had been working on the railroad, in the cotton fields or in the
+sawmills, who had entered upon the more complex life of the city. Most of
+the country districts of the South prohibit the sale of liquor; and
+Negroes, especially, have comparatively little temptation of this nature,
+nor are they subjected to the many other glittering pitfalls of city life.
+But of late years the opportunities of the city have attracted the black
+people, just as they have the whites, in large numbers. Atlanta had many
+saloons and other places of vice; and the results are to be seen in Judge
+Broyles's court any morning. And not only Negroes, but the "poor whites"
+who have come in from the mountains and the small farms to work in the
+mills: they, too, suffer fully as much as the Negroes.
+
+
+_Negro Cocaine Victims_
+
+Not a few of the cases both black and white showed evidences of cocaine or
+morphine poisoning--the blear eyes, the unsteady nerves.
+
+
+
+[Illustration: INTERIOR OF A NEGRO WORKINGMAN'S HOME, ATLANTA, GEORGIA]
+
+[Illustration: INTERIOR OF A NEGRO HOME OF THE POOREST SORT IN
+INDIANAPOLIS]
+
+
+"What's the trouble here?" asked the judge.
+
+"Coke," said the officer.
+
+"Ten-seventy-five," said the judge, naming the amount of the fine.
+
+They buy the "coke" in the form of a powder and snuff it up the nose; a
+certain patent catarrh medicine which is nearly all cocaine is sometimes
+used; ten cents will purchase enough to make a man wholly irresponsible
+for his acts, and capable of any crime. The cocaine habit, which seems to
+be spreading, for there are always druggists who will break the law, has
+been a curse to the Negro and has resulted, directly, as the police told
+me, in much crime. I was told of two cases in particular, of offences
+against women, in which the Negro was a victim of the drug habit.
+
+So society, in pursuit of wealth, South and North, preys upon the ignorant
+and weak--and then wonders why crime is prevalent!
+
+One has only to visit police courts in the South to see in how many
+curious ways the contact of the races generates fire.
+
+"What's the trouble here?" inquires the judge.
+
+The white complainant--a boy--says:
+
+"This nigger insulted me!" and he tells the epithet the Negro applied.
+
+"Did you call him that?"
+
+"No sah, I never called him no such name."
+
+"Three-seventy-five--you mustn't insult white people."
+
+And here is the report of the case of a six-year-old Negro boy from the
+_Georgian_:
+
+     Because Robert Lee Buster, a six-year-old Negro boy, insulted Maggie
+     McDermott, a little girl, who lives at 507 Simpson Street, Wednesday
+     afternoon, he was given a whipping in the police station Thursday
+     morning that will make him remember to be good.
+
+     The case was heard in the juvenile court before Judge Broyles. It was
+     shown that the little Negro had made an insulting remark to the
+     little girl.
+
+
+_Story of a Negro Arrest_
+
+The very suspicion and fear that exist give rise to many difficulties. One
+illuminating case came up that morning. A strapping Negro man was brought
+before the judge. He showed no marks of dissipation and was respectably
+dressed. Confronting him were two plain-clothes policemen, one with his
+neck wrapped up, one with a bandage around his arm. Both said they had
+been stabbed by the Negro with a jack-knife. The Negro said he was a hotel
+porter and he had the white manager of the hotel in court to testify to
+his good character, sobriety, and industry. It seems that he was going
+home from work at nine o'clock in the evening, and it was dark. He said he
+was afraid and had been afraid since the riot. At the same time the two
+policemen were looking for a burglar. They saw the Negro porter and
+ordered him to stop. Not being in uniform the Negro said he thought the
+officers were "jes' plain white men" who were going to attack him. When he
+started to run the officers tried to arrest him, and he drew his
+jack-knife and began to fight. And here he was in court! The judge said:
+
+"You mustn't attack officers," and bound him over to trial in the higher
+court.
+
+
+_A White Man and a Negro Woman_
+
+Another case shows one of the strange relationships which grow out of
+Southern conditions. An old white man, much agitated and very pale, was
+brought before the judge. With him came a much younger, comely appearing
+woman. Both were well dressed and looked respectable--so much so, indeed,
+that there was a stir of interest and curiosity among the spectators. Why
+had they been arrested? As they stood in front of the judge's desk, the
+old man hung his head, but the woman looked up with such an expression,
+tearless and tragic, as I hope I shall not have to see again.
+
+"What's the charge?" asked the judge.
+
+"Adultery," said the officer.
+
+The woman winced, the old man did not look up.
+
+The judge glanced from one to the other in surprise.
+
+"Why don't you get married?" he asked.
+
+"The woman," said the officer, "is a nigger."
+
+She was as white as I am, probably an octoroon; I could not have
+distinguished her from a white person, and she deceived even the
+experienced eye of the judge.
+
+"Is that so?" asked the judge.
+
+The man continued to hang his head, the woman looked up; neither said a
+word. It then came out that they had lived together as man and wife for
+many years and that they had children nearly grown. One of the girls--and
+a very bright, ambitious girl--as I learned later, was a student in
+Atlanta University, a Negro college, where she was supported by her
+father, who made good wages as a telegraph operator. Some neighbour had
+complained and the man and woman were arrested.
+
+"Is this all true?" asked the judge.
+
+Neither said a word.
+
+"You can't marry under the Georgia law," said the judge; "I'll have to
+bind you over for trial in the county court."
+
+They were led back to the prisoners' rooms. A few minutes later the
+bailiff came out quickly and said to the judge:
+
+"The old man has fallen in a faint."
+
+Not long afterward they half led, half carried him out across the court
+room.
+
+One thing impressed me especially, not only in this court but in all
+others I have visited: a Negro brought in for drunkenness, for example,
+was punished much more severely than a white man arrested for the same
+offence. The injustice which the weak everywhere suffer--North and
+South--is in the South visited upon the Negro. The white man sometimes
+escaped with a reprimand, he was sometimes fined three dollars and costs,
+but the Negro, especially if he had no white man to intercede for him, was
+usually punished with a ten or fifteen dollar fine, which often meant that
+he must go to the chain-gang. One of the chief causes of complaint by the
+Negroes of Atlanta has been of the rough treatment of the police and of
+unjust arrests. After the riot, when the Civic League, composed of the
+foremost white citizens of Atlanta, was organised, one of the first
+subjects that came up was that of justice to the Negro. Mr. Hopkins, the
+leader of the League, said to me: "We complain that the Negroes will not
+help to bring the criminals of their race to justice. One reason for that
+is that the Negro has too little confidence in our courts. We must give
+him that, above all things."
+
+In accordance with this plan, the Civic League, heartily supported by
+Judge Broyles, employed a young lawyer, Mr. Underwood, to appear
+regularly in court and look after the interests of Negroes.
+
+
+_Convicts Making a Profit for Georgia_
+
+One reason for the very large number of arrests--in Georgia
+particularly--lies in the fact that the state and the counties make a
+profit out of their prison system. No attempt is ever made to reform a
+criminal, either white or coloured. Convicts are hired out to private
+contractors or worked on the public roads. Last year the net profit to
+Georgia from its chain-gangs, to which the prison commission refers with
+pride, reached the great sum of $354,853.55.
+
+Of course a very large proportion of the prisoners are Negroes. The demand
+for convicts by rich sawmill operators, owners of brick-yards, large
+farmers, and others is far in advance of the supply. The natural tendency
+is to convict as many men as possible--it furnishes steady, cheap labour
+to the contractors and a profit to the state. Undoubtedly this explains in
+some degree the very large number of criminals, especially Negroes, in
+Georgia. One of the leading political forces in Atlanta is a very
+prominent banker who is a dominant member of the city police board. He is
+also the owner of extensive brick-yards near Atlanta, where many convicts
+are employed. Some of the large fortunes in Atlanta have come chiefly from
+the labour of chain-gangs of convicts leased from the state.
+
+
+_Fate of the Black Boy_
+
+As I have already suggested, one of the things that impressed me strongly
+in visiting Judge Broyles's court--and others like it--was the astonishing
+number of children, especially Negroes, arrested. Some of them were very
+young and often exceedingly bright-looking. From the records I find that
+in 1906 1 boy six years old, 7 of seven years, 33 of eight years, 69 of
+nine years, 107 of ten years, 142 of eleven years, and 219 of twelve years
+were arrested and brought into court--in other words, 578 boys and girls,
+mostly Negroes, under twelve years of age!
+
+"I should think," I said to a police officer, "you would have trouble in
+taking care of all these children in your reformatories."
+
+"Reformatories!" he said, "there aren't any."
+
+"What do you do with them?"
+
+"Well, if they're bad we put 'em in the stockade or the chain-gang,
+otherwise they're turned loose."
+
+I found, however, that a new state juvenile reformatory was just being
+opened at Milledgeville--which may accommodate a few Negro boys. An
+attempt is also being made in Atlanta to get hold of some of the children
+through a new probation system. I talked with the excellent officer, Mr.
+Gloer, who works in conjunction with Judge Broyles. He reaches a good many
+white boys, but very few Negroes. Of 1,011 boys and girls under sixteen,
+arrested in 1905, 819 were black, but of those given the advantage of the
+probation system, 50 were white and only 7 coloured. In other words, out
+of 819 arrests of Negro children only 7 enjoyed the benefit of the
+probation system.
+
+Mr. Gloer has endeavoured to secure a coloured assistant who would help
+look after the swarming Negro children who are becoming criminals. The
+city refused to appropriate money for that purpose, but some of the
+leading coloured citizens agreed to contribute one dollar a month each,
+and a Negro woman was employed to help with the coloured children brought
+into court. Excellent work was done, but owing to the feeling after the
+riot the Negro assistant discontinued her work.
+
+
+_Care of Negro Orphans_
+
+With many hundreds of Negro orphans, waifs, and foundlings, the state or
+city does very little to help them. If it were not for the fact that the
+Negroes, something like the Jews, are wonderfully helpful to one another,
+adopting orphan children with the greatest willingness, there would be
+much suffering. Several orphanages in the state are conducted by the
+coloured people themselves, either through their churches or by private
+subscription. In Atlanta the Carrie Steele orphanage, which is managed by
+Negroes, has received an appropriation yearly from the city, and has taken
+children sent by the city charities department. After the riot the
+appropriation was suddenly cut off without explanation, but through the
+activities of the new Civic League, it was, I understand, restored.
+
+Without proper reformatories or asylums, with small advantage of the
+probation system, hundreds of Negro children are on the streets of Atlanta
+every day--shooting craps, stealing, learning to drink. A few, shut up in
+the stockade, or in chain-gangs, without any attempt to reform them or
+teach them, take lessons in crime from older offenders and come out worse
+than they went in. They spread abroad the lawlessness they learn and
+finally commit some frightful crime and get back into the chain-gang for
+life--where they make a profit for the state!
+
+Every child, white or coloured, is getting an education somewhere. If that
+education is not in schools, or at home, or, in cases of incorrigibility,
+in proper reformatories, then it is on the streets or in chain-gangs.
+
+
+_Why Negro Children Are Not in School_
+
+My curiosity, aroused by the very large number of young prisoners, led me
+next to inquire why these children were not in school. I visited a number
+of schools and I talked with L. M. Landrum, the assistant superintendent.
+Compulsory education is not enforced anywhere in the South, so that
+children may run the streets unless their parents insist upon sending them
+to school. I found more than this, however, that Atlanta did not begin to
+have enough school facilities for the children who wanted to go. Like many
+rapidly growing cities, both South and North, it has been difficult to
+keep up with the demand. Just as in the North the tenement classes are
+often neglected, so in the South the lowest class--which is the Negro--is
+neglected. Several new schools have been built for white children, but
+there has been no new school for coloured children in fifteen or twenty
+years (though one Negro private school has been taken over within the last
+few years by the city). So crowded are the coloured schools that they have
+two sessions a day, one squad of children coming in the forenoon, another
+in the afternoon. The coloured teachers, therefore, do double work, for
+which they receive about two-thirds as much salary as the white teachers.
+
+Though many Southern cities have instituted industrial training in the
+public schools, Atlanta so far has done nothing. The president of the
+board of education in his last published report (1903) calls attention to
+this fact, and says also:
+
+     While on the subject of Negro schools, permit me to call your
+     attention to their overcrowded condition. In every Negro school many
+     teachers teach two sets of pupils, each set for one-half of a school
+     day.
+
+     The last bond election was carried by a majority of only thirty-three
+     votes. To my personal knowledge more than thirty-three Negroes voted
+     for the bonds on the solemn assurance that by the passage of the
+     bonds the Negro children would receive more school accommodations.
+
+The eagerness of the coloured people for a chance to send their children
+to school is something astonishing and pathetic. They will submit to all
+sorts of inconveniences in order that their children may get an education.
+One day I visited the mill neighbourhood of Atlanta to see how the poorer
+classes of white people lived. I found one very comfortable home occupied
+by a family of mill employees. They hired a Negro woman to cook for them,
+and while they sent their children to the mill to work, the cook sent her
+children to school!
+
+
+_How Negroes Educate Themselves_
+
+Here is a curious and significant thing I found in Atlanta. Because there
+is not enough room for Negro children in public schools, the coloured
+people maintain many private schools. The largest of these, called Morris
+Brown College, has nearly 1,000 pupils. Some of them are boarders from the
+country, but the greater proportion are day pupils from seven years old up
+who come in from the neighbourhood. This "college," in reality a grammar
+school, is managed and largely supported by tuition and contributions from
+Negroes, though some subscriptions are obtained in the North. Besides this
+"college" there are many small private schools conducted by Negro women
+and supported wholly by the tuition paid--the Negroes thus voluntarily
+taxing themselves heavily for their educational opportunities. One
+afternoon in Atlanta I passed a small, rather dilapidated home. Just as I
+reached the gate I heard a great cackling of voices and much laughter.
+Coloured children began to pour out of the house. "What's this?" I said,
+and I turned in to see. I found a Negro woman, the teacher, standing in
+the doorway. She had just dismissed her pupils for recess. She was holding
+school in two little rooms where some fifty children must have been
+crowded to suffocation. Everything was very primitive and
+inconvenient--but it was a school! She collected, she told me, a dollar a
+month tuition for each child. Mollie McCue's school, perhaps the best
+known private school for Negroes in the city, has 250 pupils.
+
+Many children also find educational opportunities in the Negro colleges of
+the city--Clark University, Atlanta University and Spellman Seminary,
+which are supported partly by the Negroes themselves but mostly by
+Northern philanthropy.
+
+Mr. Landrum gave me a copy of the last statistical report of the school
+board (1903), from which these facts appear:
+
+               School     No. of             With   Without
+             Population  Schools  Teachers  Seats    Seats
+
+  White        14,465      20       200     10,052   4,413
+  Coloured      8,118       5        49      2,445   5,673
+
+Even with a double daily session for coloured pupils nearly half of the
+Negro children in Atlanta, even in 1903, were barred from the public
+schools from lack of facilities, and the number has increased largely in
+the last four years. Some of these are accommodated in the private schools
+and colleges which I have mentioned, but there still remain hundreds, even
+thousands, who are getting no schooling of any kind, but who are
+nevertheless being educated--on the streets, and for criminal lives.
+
+
+_White Instruction for Black Children_
+
+I made a good many inquiries to find out what was being done outside of
+the public schools by the white people toward training the Negro either
+morally, industrially or intellectually--and I was astonished to find that
+it was next to nothing. The Negro is, of course, not welcome at the white
+churches or Sunday schools, and the sentiment is so strong against
+teaching the Negro that it is a brave Southern man or woman, indeed, who
+dares attempt anything of the sort. I did find, however, that the Central
+Presbyterian Church of Atlanta conducted a Negro Sunday School. Of this
+Dr. Theron H. Rice, the pastor, said:
+
+"The Sunday School conducted in Atlanta by my church is the outcome of the
+effort of some of the most earnest and thoughtful of our people to give
+careful religious training to the Negroes of this generation and thus to
+conserve the influence begun with the fathers and mothers and the
+grandfathers and grandmothers of these coloured children when they were
+taught personally by their devoted Christian masters and mistresses. The
+work is small in point of the number reached, but it has been productive
+of sturdy character and law-abiding citizenship."
+
+A white man or woman, and especially a Northern white man or woman, in
+Atlanta who teaches Negroes is rigorously ostracised by white society. I
+visited one of the Negro colleges where there are a number of white
+teachers from the North. We had quite a talk. When I came to leave one of
+the teachers said to me:
+
+"You don't know how good it seems to talk with some one from the outside
+world. We work here year in and year out without a white visitor, except
+those who have some necessary business with the institution."
+
+Explaining the attitude toward these Northern teachers (and we must
+understand just how the Southern people feel in this matter), a prominent
+clergyman said that a lady who made a social call upon a teacher in that
+institution would not feel secure against having to meet Negroes socially
+and that when the call was returned a similar embarrassing situation might
+be created.
+
+
+_Apologising for Helping Negroes_
+
+Just in this connection: I found a very remarkable and significant letter
+published in the Orangeburg, S. C., _News_, signed by a well-to-do white
+citizen who thus apologises for a kind act to a Negro school:
+
+     I had left my place of business here on a business trip a few miles
+     below, on returning I came by the above-mentioned school (the Prince
+     Institute, coloured), and was held up by the teacher and begged to
+     make a few remarks to the children. Very reluctantly I did so, not
+     thinking that publicity would be given to it or that I was doing
+     anything that would offend anyone. I wish to say here and now that I
+     am heartily sorry for what I did, and I hope after this humble
+     confession and expression of regret that all whom I have offended
+     will forgive me.
+
+The sentiment indicated by this letter, while widely prevalent, is by no
+means universal. I have seen Southern white men address Negro schools and
+Negro gatherings many times since I have been down here. Some of the
+foremost men in the South have accepted Booker T. Washington's invitations
+to speak at Tuskegee. And concerning the very letter that I reproduce
+above, the _Charlotte Observer_, a strong Southern newspaper, which copied
+it, said:
+
+     A man would better be dead than to thus abase himself. This man did
+     right to address the pupils of a coloured school, but has spoiled all
+     by apologising for it. Few people have conceived that race prejudice
+     went so far, even in South Carolina, as is here indicated. Logically
+     it is to be assumed that this jelly-fish was about to be put under
+     the ban, and to secure exemption from this, published this abject
+     card. To it was appended a certificate from certain citizens, saying
+     they 'are as anxious to see the coloured race elevated as any people,
+     but by all means let it be done inside the colour line.'... The
+     narrowness and malignity betrayed in this Orangeburg incident is
+     exceedingly unworthy, and those guilty of it should be ashamed of
+     themselves.
+
+The Rev. H. S. Bradley, for a long time one of the leading clergymen of
+Atlanta, now of St. Louis, said in a sermon published in the Atlanta
+_Constitution_:
+
+     ... We have not been wholly lacking in our effort to help. There are
+     a few schools and churches supported by Southern whites for the
+     Negroes. Here and there a man like George Williams Walker, of the
+     aristocracy of South Carolina, and a woman like Miss Belle H.
+     Bennett, of the blue blood of Kentucky, goes as teacher to the Negro
+     youth, and seeks in a Christly spirit of fraternity to bring them to
+     a higher plane of civil and moral manhood, but the number like them
+     can almost be counted on fingers of both hands.
+
+     Our Southern churches have spent probably a hundred times as much
+     money since the Civil War in an effort to evangelise the people of
+     China, Japan, India, South America, Africa, Mexico, and Cuba, as they
+     have spent to give the Gospel to the Negroes at our doors. It is
+     often true that opportunity is overlooked because it lies at our
+     feet.
+
+
+_Concerning the Vagrant Negro_
+
+Before I get away from observations of the low-class Negro, I must speak
+of the subject of vagrancy. Many white men have told me with impatience of
+the great number of idle or partly idle Negroes--idle while every industry
+and most of the farming districts of Georgia are crying for more labour.
+And from my observation in Atlanta, I should say that there were good many
+idle or partly idle Negroes--even after the riot, which served, I
+understand, to drive many of them away. Five days before the riot of last
+September, a committee of the city council visited some forty saloons one
+afternoon, and by actual count found 2,455 Negroes (and 152 white men)
+drinking at the bars or lounging around the doorways. In some of these
+saloons--conducted by white men and permitted to exist by the city
+authorities--pictures of nude white women were displayed as an added
+attraction. Has this anything to do with Negro crimes against white women?
+After the riot these conditions in Atlanta were much improved and in
+January, 1908, all the saloons were closed.
+
+Increased Negro idleness is the result, in large measure, of the
+marvellous and rapid changes in Southern conditions. The South has been
+and is to-day dependent on a single labour supply--the Negro. Now Negroes,
+though recruited by a high birth rate, have not been increasing in any
+degree as rapidly as the demand for labour incident to the development of
+every sort of industry, railroads, lumbering, mines, to say nothing of the
+increased farm area and the added requirements of growing cities. With
+this enormous increased demand for labour the Negro supply has,
+relatively, been decreasing. Many have gone North and West, many have
+bought farms of their own, thousands, by education, have became
+professional men, teachers, preachers, and even merchants and
+bankers--always draining away the best and most industrious men of the
+race and reducing by so much the available supply of common labour. In
+short, those Negroes who were capable have been going the same way as the
+unskilled Irishman and German in the North--upward through the door of
+education--but, unlike the North, there have been no other labourers
+coming in to take their places.
+
+What has been the result? Naturally a fierce contest between agriculture
+and industry for the limited and dwindling supply of the only labour they
+had.
+
+
+_Negro Monopoly on Labour_
+
+So they bid against one another--it was as though the Negro had a monopoly
+on labour--and within the last few years day wages for Negro workers have
+jumped from fifty or sixty cents to $1.25 and $1.50, often more--a pure
+matter of competition. A similar advance has affected all sorts of servant
+labour--cooks, waiters, maids, porters.
+
+High wages, scarcity of labour, and the consequent loss of opportunity for
+taking advantage of the prevailing prosperity would, in any community,
+South or North, whether the labour was white or black, produce a spirit of
+impatience and annoyance on the part of the employing class. I found it
+evident enough last summer in Kansas where the farmers were unable to get
+workers to save their crops; and the servant problem is not more
+provoking, certainly, in the South than in the North and West. Indeed, it
+is the labour problem more than any other one cause, that has held the
+South back and is holding it back to-day.
+
+But the South has an added cause of annoyance. Higher wages, instead of
+producing more and better labour, as they would naturally be expected to
+do, have actually served to reduce the supply. This may, at first, seem
+paradoxical: but it is easily explainable and it lies deep down beneath
+many of the perplexities which surround the race problem.
+
+Most Negroes, as I have said, were (and still are, of course)
+farm-dwellers, and farm-dwellers in the hitherto wasteful Southern way.
+Their living is easy to get and very simple. In that warm climate they
+need few clothes; a shack for a home. Their living standards are low; they
+have not learned to save; there has not been time since slavery for them
+to attain the sense of responsibility which would encourage them to get
+ahead. And moreover they have been and are to-day largely under the
+discipline of white land owners.
+
+What was the effect, then, of a rapid advance in wages? The poorer class
+of Negroes, naturally indolent and happy-go-lucky, found that they could
+make as much money in two or three days as they had formerly earned in a
+whole week. It was enough to live on as well as they had ever lived: why,
+then, work more than two days a week? It was the logic of a child, but it
+was the logic used. Everywhere I went in the South I heard the same story:
+high wages coupled with the difficulty of getting anything like continuous
+work from this class of coloured men.
+
+On the other hand the better and more industrious Negroes, who would work
+continuously--and there are unnumbered thousands of them, as faithful as
+any workers--occasionally saved their surplus, bought little farms or
+businesses of their own and began to live on a better scale. One of the
+first things they did after getting their footing was to take their wives
+and daughters out of the white man's kitchen, and to send their children
+from the cotton fields (where the white man needed them) to the
+school-house where the tendency (exactly as with white children) was to
+educate them away from farm employment. With the development of ambition
+and a higher standard of living, the Negro follows the steps of the rising
+Irishman or Italian: he has a better home, he wants his wife to take care
+of it, and he insists upon the education of his children.
+
+In this way higher wages have tended to cut down the already limited
+supply of labour, producing annoyance, placing greater obstacles in the
+way of that material development of which the Southerner is so justly
+proud. And this, not at all unnaturally, has given rise on the one hand to
+complaints against the lazy Negro who will work only two days in the week
+that he may loaf the other five; and on the other hand it has found
+expression in blind and bitter hostility to the education which enables
+the better sort of Negro to rise above the unskilled employment and the
+domestic service of which the South is so keenly in need. It is human
+nature to blame men, not conditions. Here is unlimited work to do: here is
+the Negro who has been for centuries and is to-day depended upon to do it;
+it is not done. The natural result is to throw the blame wholly upon the
+Negro, and not upon the deep economic conditions and tendencies which have
+actually caused the scarcity of labour.
+
+
+_Immigrants to Take the Negroes' Places_
+
+But within the last year or two thinking men in the South have begun to
+see this particular root of the difficulty and a great new movement
+looking to the encouragement of immigration from foreign countries has
+been started. In November, 1906, the first shipload of immigrants ever
+brought from Europe directly to a South Carolina port were landed at
+Charleston with great ceremony and rejoicing. If a steady stream of
+immigrants can be secured and if they can be employed on satisfactory
+terms with the Negro it will go far toward relieving race tension in the
+South.
+
+Of course idleness leads to crime, and one of the present efforts in the
+South is toward a more rigid enforcement of laws against vagrancy. In this
+the white people have the sympathy of the leading Negroes. I was struck
+with one passage in the discussion at the last Workers' Conference at
+Tuskegee. William E. Holmes, president of a coloured college at Macon,
+Georgia, was speaking. Some one interrupted him:
+
+"I would like to ask if you think the Negro is any more disposed to become
+a loafer or vagrant than any other people under the same conditions?"
+
+"Well," said Mr. Holmes, taking a deep breath, "we cannot afford to do
+what other races do. We haven't a single, solitary man or woman among us
+we can afford to support as an idler. It may be that other races have made
+so much progress that they can afford to support loafers. But we are not
+yet in that condition. Some of us have the impression that the world owes
+us a living. That is a misfortune. I must confess that I have become
+convinced that at the present time we furnish a larger number of loafers
+than any other race of people on this continent."
+
+These frank remarks did not meet with the entire approval of the members
+of the conference, but the discussion seemed to indicate that there was a
+great deal more of truth in them than the leaders and teachers of the
+Negro are disposed to admit.
+
+
+_The Worthless Negro_
+
+I tried to see as much as I could of this "worthless Negro," who is about
+the lowest stratum of humanity, it seems to me, of any in our American
+life. He is usually densely ignorant, often a wanderer, working to-day
+with a railroad gang, to-morrow on some city works, the next day picking
+cotton. He has lost his white friends--his "white folks," as he calls
+them--and he has not attained the training or self-direction to stand
+alone. He works only when he is hungry, and he is as much a criminal as he
+dares to be. Many such Negroes are supported by their wives or by women
+with whom they live--for morality and the home virtues among this class
+are unknown. A woman who works as a cook in a white family will often take
+enough from the kitchen to feed a worthless vagabond of a man and keep him
+in idleness--or worse. A Negro song exactly expresses this state of
+beatitude:
+
+  "I doan has to work so ha'd
+  I's got a gal in a white man's ya'd;
+  Ebery night 'bout half pas' eight
+  I goes 'round to the white man's gate:
+  She brings me butter and she brings me la'd--
+  I doan has to work so ha'd!"
+
+This worthless Negro, without training or education, grown up from the
+neglected children I have already spoken of, evident in his idleness
+around saloons and depots--this Negro provokes the just wrath of the
+people, and gives a bad name to the entire Negro race. In numbers he is,
+of course, small, compared with the 8,000,000 Negroes in the South, who
+perform the enormous bulk of hard manual labour upon which rests Southern
+prosperity.
+
+
+_How the Working Negro Lives_
+
+Above this low stratum of criminal or semi-criminal Negroes is a middle
+class, comprising the great body of the race--the workers. They are
+crowded into straggling settlements like Darktown and Jackson Row, a few
+owning their homes, but the majority renting precariously, earning good
+wages, harmless for the most part, but often falling into petty crime.
+Poverty here, however, lacks the tragic note that it strikes in the
+crowded sections of Northern cities. The temperament of the Negro is
+irrepressibly cheerful, he overflows from his small home and sings and
+laughs in his streets; no matter how ragged or forlorn he may be good
+humour sits upon his countenance, and his squalour is not unpicturesque. A
+banjo, a mullet supper from time to time, an exciting revival, give him
+real joys. Most of the families of this middle class, some of whom are
+deserted wives with children, have their "white folks" for whom they do
+washing, cooking, gardening, or other service, and all have church
+connections, so that they have a real place in the social fabric and a
+certain code of self-respect.
+
+I tried to see all I could of this phase of life. I visited many of the
+poorer Negro homes and I was often received in squalid rooms with a
+dignity of politeness which would have done credit to a society woman. For
+the Negro, naturally, is a sort of Frenchman. And if I can sum up the many
+visits I made in a single conclusion I should say, I think, that I was
+chiefly impressed by the tragic punishment meted out to ignorance and
+weakness by our complex society. I would find a home of one or two rooms
+meanly furnished, but having in one corner a glittering cottage organ, or
+on the mantel shelf a glorified gilt clock; crayon portraits,
+inexpressibly crude and ugly, but framed gorgeously, are not uncommon--the
+first uncertain, primitive (not unpitiful) reachings out after some of the
+graces of a broader life. Many of these things are bought from agents and
+the prices paid are extortionate. Often a Negro family will pay monthly
+for a year or so on some showy clock or chromo or music-box or decorated
+mirror--paying the value of it a dozen times over, only to have it seized
+when through sickness, or lack of foresight, they fail to meet a single
+note. Installment houses prey upon them, pawnbrokers suck their blood, and
+they are infinitely the victims of patent medicines. It is rare, indeed,
+that I entered a Negro cabin, even the poorest, without seeing one or more
+bottles of some abominable cure-all. The amount yearly expended by Negroes
+for patent medicines, which are glaringly advertised in all Southern
+newspapers, must be enormous--millions of dollars. I had an interesting
+side light on conditions one day while walking in one of the most
+fashionable residence districts of Atlanta. I saw a magnificent gray-stone
+residence standing somewhat back from the street. I said to my companion,
+who was a resident of the city:
+
+"That's a fine home."
+
+"Yes; stop a minute," he said, "I want to tell you about that. The
+anti-kink man lives there."
+
+"Anti-kink?" I asked in surprise.
+
+"Yes; the man who occupies that house is one of the wealthiest men here.
+He made his money by selling to Negroes a preparation to smooth the kinks
+out of their wool. They're simply crazy on that subject."
+
+"Does it work?"
+
+"You haven't seen any straight-haired Negroes, have you?" he asked.
+
+Ignorance carries a big burden and climbs a rocky road!
+
+
+_Old Mammies and Nurses_
+
+The mass of coloured people still maintain, as I have said, a more or less
+intimate connection with white families--frequently a very beautiful and
+sympathetic relationship like that of the old mammies or nurses. To one
+who has heard so much of racial hatred as I have since I have been down
+here, a little incident that I observed the other day comes with a charm
+hardly describable. I saw a carriage stop in front of a home. The expected
+daughter had arrived--a very pretty girl indeed. She stepped out eagerly.
+Her father was halfway down to the gate; but ahead of him was a very old
+Negro woman in the cleanest of clean starched dresses.
+
+"Honey," she said eagerly.
+
+"Mammy!" exclaimed the girl, and the two rushed into each other's arms,
+clasping and kissing--the white girl and the old black woman.
+
+I thought to myself: "There's no Negro problem there: that's just plain
+human love!"
+
+
+_"Master" Superseded by "Boss"_
+
+Often I have heard Negroes refer to "my white folks" and similarly the
+white man still speaks of "my Negroes." The old term of slavery, the use
+of the word "master," has wholly disappeared, and in its place has arisen,
+not without significance, the round term "Boss," or sometimes "Cap," or
+"Cap'n." To this the white man responds with the first name of the Negro,
+"Jim" or "Susie"--or if the Negro is old or especially respected: "Uncle
+Jim" or "Aunt Susan."
+
+To an unfamiliar Northerner one of the very interesting and somewhat
+amusing phases of conditions down here is the panic fear displayed over
+the use of the word "Mr." or "Mrs." No Negro is ever called Mr. or Mrs. by
+a white man; that would indicate social equality. A Southern white man
+told me with humour of his difficulties:
+
+"Now I admire Booker Washington. I regard him as a great man, and yet I
+couldn't call him Mr. Washington. We were all in a quandary until a
+doctor's degree was given him. That saved our lives! we all call him 'Dr.'
+Washington now."
+
+Sure enough! I don't think I have heard him called Mr. Washington since I
+came down here. It is always "Dr." or just "Booker." They are ready to
+call a Negro "Professor" or "Bishop" or "The Reverend"--but not "Mr."
+
+In the same way a Negro may call Miss Mary Smith by the familiar "Miss
+Mary," but if he called her Miss Smith she would be deeply incensed. The
+formal "Miss Smith" would imply social equality.
+
+I digress: but I have wanted to impress these relationships. There are all
+gradations of Negroes between the wholly dependent old family servant and
+the new, educated Negro professional or business man, and,
+correspondingly, every degree of treatment from indulgence to intense
+hostility.
+
+I must tell, in spite of lack of room, one beautiful story I heard at
+Atlanta, which so well illustrates the old relationship. There is in the
+family of Dr. J. S. Todd, a well-known citizen of Atlanta, an old, old
+servant called, affectionately, Uncle Billy. He has been so long in the
+family that in reality he is served as much as he serves. During the riot
+last September he was terrified: he did not dare to go home at night. So
+Miss Louise, the doctor's daughter, took Uncle Billy home through the dark
+streets. When she was returning one of her friends met her and was much
+alarmed that she should venture out in a time of so much danger.
+
+"What are you doing out here this time of night?" he asked.
+
+"Why," she replied, as if it were the most natural answer in the world, "I
+had to take Uncle Billy safely home."
+
+Over against this story I want to reproduce a report from a Kentucky
+newspaper which will show quite the other extreme:
+
+     _Tennessee Farmer Has Negro Bishop and His Wife Ejected from a
+     Sleeping Car_
+
+     Irvine McGraw, a Tennessee farmer, brought Kentucky's Jim Crow law
+     into prominent notice yesterday on an Illinois Central Pullman car.
+     When McGraw entered the car he saw the coloured divine, Rev. Dr. C.
+     H. Phillips, bishop of the coloured Methodist Episcopal Churches in
+     Tennessee, North Carolina, Texas and a portion of Arizona and New
+     Mexico, and his wife preparing to retire for the night. He demanded
+     that the conductor order them out of the car, but the conductor
+     refused.
+
+     After he entered Kentucky he hunted for an officer at every station
+     and finally at Hopkinsville Policeman Bryant Baker agreed to
+     undertake the task of ejecting the Negroes from the car. The train
+     was held nine minutes while they dressed and repaired to the coloured
+     compartment.
+
+I have now described two of the three great classes of Negroes: First, the
+worthless and idle Negro, often a criminal, comparatively small in numbers
+but perniciously evident. Second, the great middle class of Negroes who do
+the manual work of the South. Above these, a third class, few in numbers,
+but most influential in their race, are the progressive, property-owning
+Negroes, who have wholly severed their old intimate ties with the white
+people--and who have been getting further and further away from them.
+
+
+_A White Man's Problem_
+
+It keeps coming to me that this is more a white man's problem than it is a
+Negro problem. The white man as well as the black is being tried by fire.
+The white man is in full control of the South, politically, socially,
+industrially: the Negro, as ex-Governor Northen points out, is his
+helpless ward. What will he do with him? Speaking of the education of the
+Negro, and in direct reference to the conditions in Atlanta which I have
+already described, many men have said to me:
+
+"Think of the large sums that the South has spent and is spending on the
+education of the Negro. The Negro does not begin to pay for his education
+in taxes."
+
+Neither do the swarming Slavs, Italians, and Poles in our Northern cities.
+They pay little in taxes and yet enormous sums are expended in their
+improvement. For their benefit? Of course, but chiefly for ours. It is
+better to educate men in school than to let them so educate themselves as
+to become a menace to society. The present _kind_ of education in the
+South may possibly be wrong; but for the protection of society it is as
+necessary to train every Negro as it is every white man.
+
+When I saw the crowds of young Negroes being made criminal--through lack
+of proper training--I could not help thinking how pitilessly ignorance
+finally revenges itself upon that society which neglects or exploits it.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+IN THE BLACK BELT: THE NEGRO FARMER
+
+
+The cotton picking season was drawing to its close when I left for the
+black belt of Georgia. So many friends in Atlanta had said:
+
+"The city Negro isn't the real Negro. You must go out on the cotton
+plantations in the country; there you'll see the genuine black African in
+all his primitive glory."
+
+It is quite true that the typical Negro is a farmer. The great mass of the
+race in the South dwells in the country. According to the last census, out
+of 8,000,000 Negroes in the Southern states 6,558,173, or 83 per cent.,
+lived on the farms or in rural villages. The crowded city life which I
+have already described represents not the common condition of the masses
+of the Negro race but the newer development which accompanies the growth
+of industrial and urban life. In the city the races are forced more
+violently together, socially and economically, than in the country,
+producing acute crises, but it is in the old agricultural regions where
+the Negro is in such masses, where ideas change slowly, and old
+institutions persist, that the problem really presents the greatest
+difficulties.
+
+There is no better time of year to see the South than November; for then
+it wears the smile of abundance. The country I went through--rolling red
+hills, or black bottoms, pine-clad in places, with pleasant farm openings
+dotted with cabins, often dilapidated but picturesque, and the busy little
+towns--wore somehow an air of brisk comfort. The fields were lively with
+Negro cotton pickers; I saw bursting loads of the new lint drawn by mules
+or oxen, trailing along the country roads; all the gins were puffing
+busily; at each station platform cotton bales by scores or hundreds stood
+ready for shipment and the towns were cheerful with farmers white and
+black, who now had money to spend. The heat of the summer had gone, the
+air bore the tang of a brisk autumn coolness. It was a good time of the
+year--and everybody seemed to feel it. Many Negroes got on or off at every
+station with laughter and snouted good-byes.
+
+
+_What Is the Black Belt?_
+
+[Illustration: THE BLACK BELT
+
+In the region shaded more than half of the inhabitants are Negroes.]
+
+And so, just at evening, after a really interesting journey, I reached
+Hawkinsville, a thriving town of some 3,000 people just south of the
+centre of Georgia. Pulaski County, of which Hawkinsville is the seat, with
+an ambitious new court-house, is a typical county of the black belt. A
+census map which is here reproduced well shows the region of largest
+proportionate Negro population, extending from South Carolina through
+central Georgia and Alabama to Mississippi. More than half the inhabitants
+of all this broad belt, including also the Atlantic coastal counties and
+the lower Mississippi Valley (as shaded on the map), are Negroes, chiefly
+farm Negroes. There the race question, though perhaps not so immediately
+difficult as in cities like Atlanta, is with both white and coloured
+people the imminent problem of daily existence. Several times while in
+the black belt I was amused at the ardent response of people to whom I
+mentioned the fact that I had already seen something of conditions in
+Kentucky, Maryland, and Virginia:
+
+"Why, they haven't any Negro problem. They're _North_."
+
+In Maryland, Kentucky, and Texas the problem is a sharp irritant--as it
+is, for that matter, in Ohio, in Indianapolis, and on the west side of New
+York City--but it is not the life and death question that it is in the
+black belt or in the Yazoo delta.
+
+All the country of Central Georgia has been long settled. Pulaski County
+was laid out in 1808; and yet the population to-day may be considered
+sparse. The entire county has only 8,000 white people, a large proportion
+of whom live in the towns of Hawkinsville and Cochran, and 12,000 Negroes,
+leaving not inconsiderable areas of forest and uncultivated land which
+will some day become immensely valuable.
+
+
+_A Southern Country Gentleman_
+
+At Hawkinsville I met J. Pope Brown, the leading citizen of the county. In
+many ways he is an example of the best type of the new Southerner. In
+every way open to him, and with energy, he is devoting himself to the
+improvement of his community. For five years he was president of the State
+Agricultural Society; he has been a member of the legislature and chairman
+of the Georgia Railroad Commission, and he represents all that is best in
+the new progressive movement in the South.
+
+One of the unpleasant features of the villages in the South are the poor
+hotels. In accounting for this condition I heard a story illustrating the
+attitude of the old South toward public accommodations. A number of years
+ago, before the death of Robert Toombs, who, as a member of Jefferson
+Davis's cabinet was called the "backbone of the confederacy," the spirit
+of progress reached the town where Toombs lived. The thing most needed was
+a new hotel. The business men got together and subscribed money with
+enthusiasm, counting upon Toombs, who was their richest man, for the
+largest subscription. But when they finally went to him, he said:
+
+"What do we want of a hotel? When a gentleman comes to town I will
+entertain him myself; those who are not gentlemen we don't want!"
+
+That was the old spirit of aristocratic individualism; the town did not
+get its hotel.
+
+One of the public enterprises of Mr. Brown at Hawkinsville is a good
+hotel; and what is rarer still, North and South, he has made his hotel
+building really worthy architecturally.
+
+Mr. Brown took me out to his plantation--a drive of some eight miles. In
+common with most of the larger plantation owners, as I found not only in
+Georgia, but in other Southern states which I afterward visited, Mr. Brown
+makes his home in the city. After a while I came to feel a reasonable
+confidence in assuming that almost any prominent merchant, banker, lawyer,
+or politician whom I met in the towns owned a plantation in the country.
+From a great many stories of the fortunes of families that I heard I
+concluded that the movement of white owners from the land to nearby towns
+was increasing every year. High prices for cotton and consequent
+prosperity seem to have accelerated rather than retarded the movement.
+White planters can now afford to live in town where they can have the
+comforts and conveniences, where the servant question is not impossibly
+difficult, and where there are good schools for the children. Another
+potent reason for the movement is the growing fear of the whites, and
+especially the women and children, at living alone on great farms where
+white neighbours are distant. Statistics show that less crime is committed
+in the black belt than in other parts of the South. I found that the fear
+was not absent even among these people.
+
+I have a letter from a white man, P. S. George, of Greenwood, Mississippi,
+which expresses the country white point of view with singular earnestness:
+
+     I live in a country of large plantations; if there are 40,000 people
+     in that country, at least 30,000 are Negroes, and we never have any
+     friction between the races. I have been here as a man for twenty
+     years and I never heard of but one case of attempted assault by a
+     Negro on a white woman. That Negro was taken out and hanged. I said
+     that we never had any trouble with Negroes, but it's because we never
+     take our eyes off the gun. You may wager that I never leave my wife
+     and daughter at home without a man in the house after ten o'clock at
+     night--because I am afraid.
+
+As a result of these various influences a traveller in the black belt sees
+many plantation houses, even those built in recent years, standing vacant
+and forlorn or else occupied by white overseers, who are in many parts of
+the South almost as difficult to keep as the Negro tenants.
+
+Thousands of small white farmers, both owners and renters, of course,
+remain, but when the leading planters leave the country, these men, too,
+grow discontented and get away at the first opportunity. Going to town,
+they find ready employment for the whole family in the cotton mill or in
+other industries where they make more money and live with a degree of
+comfort that they never before imagined possible.
+
+
+_Story of the Mill People_
+
+Many cotton mills, indeed, employ agents whose business it is to go out
+through the country urging the white farmers to come to town and painting
+glowing pictures of the possibilities of life there. I have visited a
+number of mill neighbourhoods and talked with the operatives. I found the
+older men sometimes homesick for free life of the farm. One lanky old
+fellow said rather pathetically:
+
+"When it comes to cotton picking time and I know that they are grinding
+cane and hunting possums, I jest naturally get lonesome for the country."
+
+But nothing would persuade the women and children to go back to the old
+hard life. Hawkinsville has a small cotton mill and just such a community
+of white workers around it. Owing to the scarcity of labour, wages in the
+mills have been going up rapidly all over the South, during the last two
+or three years, furnishing a still more potent attraction for country
+people.
+
+All these various tendencies are uniting to produce some very remarkable
+conditions in the South. A natural segregation of the races is apparently
+taking place. I saw it everywhere I went in the black belt. The white
+people were gravitating toward the towns or into white neighbourhoods and
+leaving the land, even though still owned by white men, more and more to
+the exclusive occupation of Negroes. Many black counties are growing
+blacker while not a few white counties are growing whiter.
+
+
+[Illustration: WHERE WHITE MILL HANDS LIVE IN ATLANTA, GEORGIA]
+
+[Illustration: WHERE SOME OF THE POORER NEGROES LIVE IN ATLANTA, GEORGIA
+
+COMPANION PICTURES
+
+to show that there is comparatively little difference in the material
+comfort of the two classes]
+
+
+Take, for example, Pulaski County, through which I drove that November
+morning with Mr. Brown. In 1870 the coloured and white population were
+almost exactly equal--about 6,000 for each. In 1880 the Negroes had
+increased to 8,225 while the whites showed a loss. By 1890 the towns had
+begun to improve and the white population grew by about 700, but the
+Negroes increased nearly 2,000. And, finally, here are the figures for
+1900: Negroes 11,029; Whites 7,460.
+
+I have not wished to darken our observations with too many statistics, but
+this tendency is so remarkable that I wish to set down for comparison the
+figures of a "white county" in northern Georgia--Polk County--which is
+growing whiter every year.
+
+         Negroes    Whites
+
+  1880    4,147      7,805
+  1890    4,654     10,289
+  1900    4,916     12,940
+
+
+_Driving out Negroes_
+
+One of the most active causes of this movement is downright fear--or race
+repulsion expressing itself in fear. White people dislike and fear to live
+in dense coloured neighbourhoods, while Negroes are often terrorised in
+white neighbourhoods--and not in the South only but in parts of Ohio,
+Indiana, Illinois, as I shall show when I come to treat of Northern race
+conditions. I have accumulated many instances showing how Negroes are
+expelled from white neighbourhoods. There is a significant report from
+Little Rock, Arkansas:
+
+     (_Special to the Georgian._)
+
+     Little Rock, Ark., Jan. 1.--Practically every Negro in Evening Shade,
+     Sharp County, in this state, has left town as the result of threats
+     which have been made against the Negroes. For several years a small
+     colony of Negroes has lived just on the outskirts of the town. A
+     short time ago notices were posted warning the Negroes to leave the
+     town at once. About the same time Joe Brooks, a Negro who lived with
+     his family two miles north of town, was called to his door and fired
+     upon by unknown persons. A load of shot struck the house close by his
+     side and some of the shot entered his arm. Brooks and his family have
+     left the country, and practically every member of the Negro colony
+     has gone. They have abandoned their property or disposed of it for
+     whatever they could get.
+
+From the New Orleans _Times Democrat_ of March 20, 1907, I cut the
+following dispatch showing one method pursued by the whites of Oklahoma:
+
+     BLACKS ORDERED OUT
+
+     Lawton, Okla., March 20.--"Negroes, beware the cappers. We, the Sixty
+     Sons of Waurika, demand the Negroes to leave here at once. We mean
+     Go! Leave in twenty-four hours, or after that your life is
+     uncertain." These were the words on placards which the eighty Negroes
+     of the town of Waurika, forty miles south of Lawton, saw posted
+     conspicuously in a number of public places this morning.
+
+     Dispatches from here to-night stated that the whites are in earnest,
+     and that the Negroes will be killed if they do not leave town.
+
+Not a few students of Southern conditions like John Temple Graves among
+the whites and Bishop Turner among the coloured people have argued that
+actual physical separation of the races (either by deportation of the
+Negroes to Africa or elsewhere, or by giving them certain reservation-like
+parts of the South to live in) is the only solution. But here is, in
+actuality, a natural segregation going forward in certain parts of the
+South, though in a very different way from that recommended by Mr. Graves
+and Bishop Turner; for even in the blackest counties the white people own
+most of the land, occupy the towns, and dominate everywhere politically,
+socially, and industrially.
+
+Mr. Brown's plantation contains about 5,000 acres, of which some 3,500
+acres are in cultivation, a beautiful rolling country, well watered, with
+here and there clumps of pines, and dotted with the small homes of the
+tenantry.
+
+As we drove along the country road we met or passed many Negroes who bowed
+with the greatest deference. Some were walking, but many drove horses or
+mules and rode not infrequently in top buggies, looking most prosperous,
+as indeed, Mr. Brown informed me that they were. He knew them all, and
+sometimes stopped to ask them how they were getting along. The outward
+relationships between the races in the country seem to me to be smoother
+than it is in the city.
+
+Cotton, as in all this country, is almost the exclusive crop. In spite of
+the constant preaching of agricultural reformers, like Mr. Brown himself,
+hardly enough corn is raised to supply the people with food, and I was
+surprised here and elsewhere at seeing so few cattle and hogs. Sheep are
+non-existent. In Hawkinsville, though the country round about raises
+excellent grass, I saw in front of a supply store bales of hay which had
+been shipped in 400 miles--from Tennessee. Enough sugar cane is raised,
+mostly in small patches, to supply syrup for domestic uses. At the time of
+my visit the Negroes were in the cane-fields with their long knives,
+getting in the crop. We saw several little one-horse grinding mills
+pressing the juice from the cane, while near at hand, sheltered by a
+shanty-like roof, was the great simmering syrup kettle, with an expert
+Negro at work stirring and skimming. And always there were Negroes round
+about, all the boys and girls with jolly smeared faces--and the older ones
+peeling and sucking the fresh cane.
+
+It was a great time of year!
+
+How does the landlord--and a lord he is in a very true sense--manage his
+great estate? The same system is in use with slight variations everywhere
+in the cotton country and a description of Mr. Brown's methods, with
+references here and there to what I have seen or heard elsewhere, will
+give an excellent idea of the common procedure.
+
+
+_A Country of Great Plantations_
+
+The black belt is a country of great plantations, some owners having as
+high as 30,000 acres, interspersed with smaller farms owned by the poorer
+white families or Negroes. In one way the conditions are similar to those
+prevailing in Ireland; great landlords and a poor tenantry or peasantry,
+the tenants here being very largely black.
+
+It requires about 100 families, or 600 people, to operate Mr. Brown's
+plantation. Of these, 90 per cent. are coloured and 10 per cent. white. I
+was much interested in what Mr. Brown said about his Negro tenants, which
+varies somewhat from the impression I had in the city of the younger Negro
+generation.
+
+"I would much rather have young Negroes for tenants," he said, "because
+they work better and seem more disposed to take care of their farms. The
+old Negroes ordinarily will shirk--a habit of slavery."
+
+Besides the residence of the overseer and the homes of the tenants there
+is on the plantation a supply store owned by Mr. Brown, a blacksmith shop
+and a Negro church, which is also used as a school-house. This is, I found
+all through the black belt, a common equipment.
+
+Three different methods are pursued by the landlord in getting his land
+cultivated. First, the better class of tenants rent the land for cash, a
+"standing rent" of some $3 an acre, though in many places in Mississippi
+it ranges as high as $6 and $8 an acre. Second, a share-crop rental, in
+which the landlord and the tenant divide the cotton and corn produced.
+Third, the ordinary wage system; that is, the landlord hires workers at so
+much a month and puts in his own crop. All three of these methods are
+usually employed on the larger plantations. Mr. Brown rents 2,500 acres
+for cash, 400 on shares, and farms 600 himself with wage workers.
+
+All the methods of land measurement are very different here from what they
+are in the North. The plantation is irregularly divided up into what are
+called one-mule or one-plough farms--just that amount of land which a
+family can cultivate with one mule--usually about thirty acres. Some
+ambitious tenants will take a two-mule or even a four-mule farm.
+
+
+_The Negro Tenant_
+
+Most of the tenants, especially the Negroes, are very poor, and wholly
+dependent upon the landlord. Many Negro families possess practically
+nothing of their own, save their ragged clothing, and a few dollars' worth
+of household furniture, cooking utensils and a gun. The landlord must
+therefore supply them not only with enough to live on while they are
+making their crop, but with the entire farming outfit. Let us say that a
+Negro comes in November to rent a one-mule farm from the landlord for the
+coming year.
+
+"What have you got?" asks the landlord.
+
+"Noting', boss," he is quite likely to say.
+
+The "boss" furnishes him with a cabin to live in--which goes with the land
+rented--a mule, a plough, possibly a one-horse waggon and a few tools.
+He is often given a few dollars in cash near Christmas time which
+(ordinarily) he immediately spends--wastes. He is then allowed to draw
+upon the plantation supply store a regular amount of corn to feed his
+mule, and meat, bread, and tobacco, and some clothing for his family. The
+cost of the entire outfit and supplies for a year is in the neighbourhood
+of $300, upon which the tenant pays interest at from 10 to 30 per cent.
+from the time of signing the contract in November, although most of the
+supplies are not taken out until the next summer. Besides this interest
+the planter also makes a large profit on all the groceries and other
+necessaries furnished by his supply store. Having made his contract the
+Negro goes to work with his whole family and keeps at it until the next
+fall when the cotton is all picked and ginned. Then he comes in for his
+"settlement"--a great time of year. The settlements were going forward
+while I was in the black belt. The Negro is credited with the amount of
+cotton he brings in and he is charged with all the supplies he has had,
+and interest, together with the rent of his thirty acres of land. If the
+season has been good and he has been industrious, he will often have a
+nice profit in cash, but sometimes he not only does not come out even, but
+closes his year of work actually in deeper debt to the landlord.
+
+
+[Illustration: A "POOR WHITE" FAMILY
+
+"Among them is a spirit of pride and independence which, rightly directed,
+would uplift and make them prosperous, but which, misguided and blind, as
+it sometimes is, keeps them in poverty."]
+
+[Illustration: A MODEL NEGRO SCHOOL
+
+Inspired by Tuskegee; different, indeed, from the ordinary country Negro
+school in the South]
+
+
+Some Negroes, nowadays usually of the poorer sort, work for wages. They
+get from $12 to $15 a month (against $5 to $8 a few years ago) with a
+cabin to live in. They are allowed a garden patch, where they can, if they
+are industrious and their families help, raise enough vegetables to feed
+them comfortably, or part of a bale of cotton, which is their own. But it
+is sadly to be commented upon that few Negro tenants, or whites either, as
+far as I could see, do anything with their gardens save perhaps to raise a
+few collards, peanuts, and peppers--and possibly a few sweet potatoes.
+This is due in part to indolence and lack of ambition, and in part to the
+steady work required by the planter. The wife and children of an
+industrious wage-working Negro nearly always help in the fields, earning
+an additional income from chopping cotton in spring and picking the lint
+in the fall.
+
+This is the system as it is in theory; but the interest for us lies not in
+the plan, but in the actual practice. How does it all work out for good
+or for evil, for landlord and for tenant?
+
+Tenantry in the South is a very different thing from what it is in the
+North. In the North, a man who rents a farm is nearly as free to do as he
+pleases as if he were the owner. But in the South, the present tenant
+system is much nearer the condition that prevailed in slavery times than
+it is to the present Northern tenant system. This grows naturally out of
+slavery; the white man had learned to operate big plantations with
+ignorant help; and the Negro on his part had no training for any other
+system. The white man was the natural master and the Negro the natural
+dependent and a mere Emancipation Proclamation did not at once change the
+_spirit_ of the relationship.
+
+To-day a white overseer resides on every large plantation and he or the
+owner himself looks after and disciplines the tenants. The tenant is in
+debt to him (in some cases reaching a veritable condition of debt slavery
+or peonage) and he _must_ see that the crop is made. Hence he watches the
+work of every Negro (and indeed that of the white tenants as well) sees
+that the land is properly fertilised, and that the dikes (to prevent
+washing) are kept up, that the cotton is properly chopped (thinned) and
+regularly cultivated. Some of the greater landowners employ assistant
+overseers or "riders" who are constantly travelling from farm to farm. On
+one plantation I saw four such riders start out one day, each with a rifle
+on his saddle. And on a South Carolina plantation I had a glimpse of one
+method of discipline. A planter was telling me of his difficulties--how a
+spirit of unruliness sometimes swept abroad through a plantation, inspired
+by some "bigoty nigger."
+
+"Do you know what I do with such cases?" he said. "Come with me, I'll show
+you."
+
+He took me back through his house to the broad porch and reaching up to a
+shelf over the door he took down a hickory waggon spoke, as long as my
+arm.
+
+"When there's trouble," he said, "I just go down with that and lay one or
+two of 'em out. That ends the trouble. We've got to do it; they're like
+children and once in a while they simply have to be punished. It's far
+better for them to take it this way, from a white man who is their
+friend, than to be arrested and taken to court and sent to the
+chain-gang."
+
+
+_Troubles of the Landlord_
+
+Planters told me of all sorts of difficulties they had to meet with their
+tenants. One of them, after he had spent a whole evening telling me of the
+troubles which confronted any man who tried to work Negroes, summed it all
+up with the remark:
+
+"You've just got to make up your mind that you are dealing with children,
+and handle them as firmly and kindly as you know how."
+
+He told me how hard it was to get a Negro tenant even in the busy season
+to work a full week--and it was often only by withholding the weekly food
+allowance that it could be done. Saturday afternoon (or "evening," as they
+say in the South) the Negro goes to town or visits his friends. Often he
+spends all day Sunday driving about the country and his mule comes back so
+worn out that it cannot be used on Monday. There are often furious
+religious revivals which break into the work, to say nothing of "frolics"
+and fish suppers at which the Negroes often remain all night long. Many of
+them are careless with their tools, wasteful of supplies, irresponsible in
+their promises. One planter told me how he had built neat fences around
+the homes of his Negroes, and fixed up their houses to encourage them in
+thrift and give them more comfort, only to have the fences and even parts
+of the houses used for firewood.
+
+Toward fall, if the season has been bad, and the crop of cotton is short,
+so short that a Negro knows that he will not be able to "pay out" and have
+anything left for himself, he will sometimes desert the plantation
+entirely, leaving the cotton unpicked and a large debt to the landlord. If
+he attempts that, however, he must get entirely away, else the planter
+will chase him down and bring him back to his work. Illiterate, without
+discipline or training, with little ambition and much indolence, a large
+proportion of Negro tenants are looked after and driven like children or
+slaves. I say "a large proportion"--but there are thousands of industrious
+Negro landowners and tenants who are rapidly getting ahead--as I shall
+show in my next chapter.
+
+In this connection it is a noteworthy fact that a considerable number of
+the white tenants require almost as much attention as the Negroes, though
+they are, of course, treated in an entirely different way. One planter in
+Alabama said to me:
+
+"Give me Negroes every time. I wouldn't have a low-down white tenant on my
+place. You can get work out of any Negro if you know how to handle him;
+but there are some white men who won't work and can't be driven, because
+they are white."
+
+
+_Race Troubles in the Country_
+
+In short, when slavery was abolished it gave place to a sort of feudal
+tenantry system which continues widely to-day. And it has worked with
+comparative satisfaction, at least to the landlords, until within the last
+few years, when the next step in the usual evolution of human
+society--industrial and urban development--began seriously to disturb the
+feudal equilibrium of the cotton country. It was a curious idea--human
+enough--that men should attempt to legislate slaves immediately into
+freedom. But nature takes her own methods of freeing slaves; they are
+slower than men's ways, but more certain.
+
+The change now going on in the South from the feudal agricultural life to
+sharpened modern conditions has brought difficulties for the planter
+compared with which all others pale into insignificance. I mean the
+scarcity of labour. Industry is competing with agriculture for the limited
+supply of Negro workers. Negroes, responding to exactly the same natural
+laws that control the white farmers, have been moving cityward, entering
+other occupations, migrating west or north--where more money is to be
+made. Agricultural wages have therefore gone up and rents, relatively,
+have gone down, and had the South not been blessed for several years with
+wonderful returns from its monopoly crop, there might have been a more
+serious crisis.
+
+
+_Cry of the South: "More Labour"_
+
+If the South to-day could articulate its chief need, we should hear a
+single great shout:
+
+"More labour!"
+
+Out of this struggle for tenants, servants, and workers has grown the
+chief complications of the Negro problem--and I am not forgetting race
+prejudice, or the crimes against women. Indeed, it has seemed to me that
+the chief difficulty in understanding the Negro problem lies in showing
+how much of the complication in the South is due to economic readjustments
+and how much to instinctive race repulsion or race prejudice.
+
+
+_A Tenant Stealer_
+
+In one town I visited--not Hawkinsville--I was standing talking with some
+gentlemen in the street when I saw a man drive by in a buggy.
+
+"Do you see that man?" they asked me. I nodded.
+
+"Well, he is the greatest tenant-stealer in this country."
+
+I heard a good deal about these "tenant stealers." A whole neighbourhood
+will execrate one planter who, to keep his land cultivated, will lure away
+his neighbours' Negroes. Sometimes he will offer more wages, sometimes he
+will give the tenants better houses to live in, and sometimes he succeeds
+by that sheer force of a masterful personality which easily controls an
+ignorant tenantry.
+
+I found, moreover, that there was not only a struggle between individual
+planters for Negro tenants, but between states and sections. Many of the
+old farms in South Carolina and Alabama have been used so long that they
+require a steady and heavy annual treatment of fertiliser, with the result
+that cotton growing costs more than it does in the rich alluvial lands of
+Mississippi, or the newer regions of Arkansas and Texas. The result is
+that the planters of the West, being able to pay more wages and give the
+tenants better terms, lure away the Negroes of the East. Georgia and other
+states have met this competitive disadvantage in the usual way in which
+such disadvantages, when first felt but not fully understood, are met, by
+counteracting legislation. Georgia has made the most stringent laws to
+keep her Negroes on the land. The Georgian code (Section 601) says:
+
+     Any person who shall solicit or procure emigrants, or shall attempt
+     to do so, without first procuring a licence as required by law, shall
+     be guilty of a misdemeanour.
+
+Ex-Congressman William H. Fleming, one of the ablest statesmen of Georgia,
+said:
+
+"Land and other forms of capital cannot spare the Negro and will not give
+him up until a substitute is found. His labour is worth millions upon
+millions. In Georgia we now make it a crime for anyone to solicit
+emigrants without taking out a licence, and then we make the licence as
+nearly prohibitive as possible. One of the most dangerous occupations for
+any one to follow in this state would be that of an emigrant agent--as
+some have found by experience."
+
+In this connection I have an account published in April, 1907, in an
+Augusta newspaper of just such a case:
+
+     The heaviest fine given in the city court of Richmond County within
+     the last two years was imposed upon E. F. Arnett yesterday morning.
+     He was sentenced to pay a fine of one thousand dollars or serve six
+     months in the county jail.
+
+     Arnett was convicted of violating the state emigration laws regarding
+     the carrying of labour out of the state. He was alleged to have
+     employed thirteen Negroes to work on the Georgia and Atlantic
+     Railroad, which operates in this state and Alabama. The jury on the
+     case returned a verdict of guilty when court convened yesterday,
+     although it had been reported that a mistrial was probable.
+
+
+_"Peg Leg" Williams_
+
+A famous railroad emigration agent called "Peg Leg" Williams, who promoted
+Negro emigration from Georgia to Mississippi and Texas a few years ago,
+was repeatedly prosecuted and finally driven out of business. In a letter
+which he wrote some time ago to the Atlanta _Constitution_ he said:
+
+     I know of several counties not a hundred miles from Atlanta where
+     it's more than a man's life is worth to go in to get Negroes to move
+     to some other state. There are farmers that would not hesitate to
+     shoot their brother were he to come from Mississippi to get "his
+     niggers," as he calls them, even though he had no contract with them.
+     I know personally numbers of Negro men who have moved West and after
+     accumulating a little, return to get a brother, sister, or an old
+     father or mother, and they were compelled to return without them,
+     their lives being imperilled; they had to leave and leave quick.
+
+In view of such a feeling it may be imagined how futile is the talk of the
+deportation of the Negro race. What the Southern planter wants to-day is
+not fewer Negroes but more Negroes--Negroes who will "keep their place."
+
+
+_Laws to Make the Negro Work_
+
+Many other laws have been passed in the Southern states which are designed
+to keep the Negro on the land, and having him there, to make him work.
+The contract law, the abuses of which lead to peonage and debt slavery, is
+an excellent example--which I shall discuss more fully in the next
+chapter. The criminal laws, the chain-gang system, and the hiring of Negro
+convicts to private individuals are all, in one way or another, devices to
+keep the Negro at work on farms, in brick-yards and in mines. The vagrancy
+laws, not unlike those of the North and excellent in their purpose, are
+here sometimes executed with great severity. In Alabama the last
+legislature passed a law under which a Negro arrested for vagrancy must
+prove that he is not a vagrant. In short, the old rule of law that a man
+is innocent until proved guilty is here reversed for the Negro so that the
+burden of proving that he is not guilty of vagrancy rests upon him, not
+upon the state. The last Alabama legislature also passed a stringent game
+law, one argument in its favour being that by preventing the Negro from
+pot-hunting it would force him to work more steadily in the cotton fields.
+
+
+_Race Hatred Versus Economic Necessity_
+
+One of the most significant things I saw in the South--and I saw it
+everywhere--was the way in which the white people were torn between their
+feeling of race prejudice and their downright economic needs. Hating and
+fearing the Negro as a race (though often loving individual Negroes), they
+yet want him to work for them; they can't get along without him. In one
+impulse a community will rise to mob Negroes or to drive them out of the
+country because of Negro crime or Negro vagrancy, or because the Negro is
+becoming educated, acquiring property and "getting out of his place"; and
+in the next impulse laws are passed or other remarkable measures taken to
+keep him at work--because the South can't get along without him. From the
+Atlanta _Georgian_ I cut recently a letter which well illustrates the way
+in which racial hatred clashes with economic necessity.
+
+     TROUBLES OF COUNTRY FOLK
+
+     But aren't there two sides to every question? Here we are out here in
+     the country, right in the midst of hundreds of Negroes, and do you
+     know, sir, that all this talk about lynching and ku-kluxing is
+     frightening the farm hands to such an extent we begin to fear that
+     soon the farmers will sustain a great loss of labour, by their
+     running away? Already it is beginning to have its effect. After night
+     the Negroes are afraid to leave their farm to go anywhere on errands
+     of business. Why, sir, two miles from this town, the Negroes are
+     afraid to come here to trade at night. The country merchants are
+     feeling the force of it very sorely, and if this foolishness isn't
+     stopped their losses in fall trade will be very heavy.
+
+     Even some of the ladies of our community are complaining of this
+     rashness. That it is demoralising the labour in the home department.
+     So in conclusion, in behalf of my community and other country
+     communities, I feel it my duty to raise a warning voice against all
+     such new foolish ku-kluxism.
+
+     Mableton, Ga.
+
+          T. J. LOWE.
+
+While I was in Georgia a case came up which threw a flood of light upon
+the inner complexities of this problem. In the county of Habersham in
+North Georgia the population is largely of the type known as "poor
+white"--the famous mountain folk who were never slave-owners and many of
+whom fought in the Union army during the Civil War. Habersham is one of
+the "white counties" which is growing whiter. It has about 2,000 Negroes
+and 12,000 whites--many of the latter having come in from the North to
+grow peaches and raise sheep. One of the Negroes of Habersham County was
+Frank Grant, described by a white neighbour as "a Negro of good character,
+a property owner, setting an example of thrift and honesty that ought to
+have made his example a benefit to any community."
+
+Grant had saved money from his labour and bought a home. He was such a
+good worker that people were willing sometimes to pay him twice the wages
+of the average labourer, white or black. On the night of December 16,
+1906, the Negro's house was fired into by a party of white men who then
+went to the house of his tenant, Henry Scism, also a Negro, and shot
+promiscuously around Scism's house, and warned him to leave the country in
+one week, threatening him with severe penalties if he did not go. As a
+result Grant had to sell out his little home, won after such hard work,
+and he and his tenant Scism with their families both fled the county.
+
+"In Grant," said his white neighbour, "the county lost a capable
+labourer--in its present situation, a most valuable asset--and a good
+citizen."
+
+Here, then, we have race hatred versus economic necessity. The important
+citizens and employers of Habersham County came to Atlanta and presented
+a petition to Governor Terrell, January 18, 1907, as follows:
+
+     TO HIS EXCELLENCY, J. M. TERRELL,
+     GOVERNOR OF GEORGIA, ATLANTA:
+
+     Whereas, on the night of December 16, 1906, parties unknown came to
+     the quiet home of one Frank Grant, coloured, a citizen of this
+     county, and shot into his residence, and then went to the home of
+     Henry Scism, coloured, a tenant of said Frank Grant, and shot
+     promiscuously around his (the said Scism's) house, and demanded of
+     him to leave the county under severe penalty.
+
+     This has caused the tenant, Henry Scism, to leave, and Frank Grant to
+     sell his little house at a sacrifice and leave. It comes to us that
+     Frank Grant is a quiet, innocent, hard-working citizen. Therefore,
+     we, the undersigned officers and citizens of Habersham County,
+     Georgia, pray you to offer a liberal reward for the arrest and
+     conviction or these unknown parties--say $100 for the first and $50
+     for each succeeding one.
+
+          (Signed) C. W. GRANT,
+              _County School Commissioner_.
+                  J. A. ERWIN CLERK, S. C.,
+                  M. FRANKLIN, Ordinary
+                  J. D. HILL, T. C. H. C.
+
+But, of course, nothing could be done that would keep the Negroes on the
+land under such conditions.
+
+
+_Why Negroes Are Driven Out_
+
+What does it all mean? Listen to the explanation given by a prominent
+white man of Habersham County--not to me--but to the Atlanta _Georgian_,
+where it was published:
+
+"It is not a problem of Negro labour, because there is little of that kind
+there. The white labour will not work for the fruit growers at prices they
+can afford, even when it is a good fruit year. Often they decline to work
+at any price. They have many admirable qualities; among them is a spirit
+of pride and independence, which, rightly directed, would uplift and make
+them prosperous, but which misguided and blind, as it sometimes is, keeps
+them in poverty and puts the region in which they live at great
+disadvantage.
+
+"Landowners and employers, native, and new, are indignant but helpless.
+They are in the power of the shiftless element of the whites, who say, 'I
+will work or not, as I please, and when I please, and at my own price; and
+I will not have Negroes taking my work away from me.' This is not a race
+question, pure and simple; it is an industrial question, a labour issue,
+not confined to one part of the country."
+
+Here, it will be observed, the same complaint is made against the "poor
+white" as against the Negro--that he is shiftless and that he won't work
+even for high wages.
+
+Generally speaking, the race hatred in the South comes chiefly from the
+poorer class of whites who either own land which they work themselves or
+are tenant farmers in competition with Negroes and from politicians who
+seek to win the votes of this class of white men. The larger landowners
+and employers of labour, while they do not love the Negro, want him to
+work and work steadily, and will do almost anything to keep him on the
+land--so long as he is a faithful, obedient, unambitious worker. When he
+becomes prosperous, or educated, or owns land, many white people no longer
+"have any use for him" and turn upon him with hostility, but the best type
+of the Southern white men is not only glad to see the Negro become a
+prosperous and independent farmer but will do much to help him.
+
+
+_Vivid Illustration of Race Feeling_
+
+I have had innumerable illustrations of the extremes to which race feeling
+reaches among a certain class of Southerners. In a letter to the Atlanta
+_Constitution_, November 5, 1906, a writer who signs himself Mark Johnson,
+says:
+
+     The only use we have for the Negro is as a labourer. It is only as
+     such that we need him; it is only as such that we can use him. If the
+     North wants to take him and educate him we will bid him godspeed and
+     contribute to his education if schools are located on the other side
+     of the line.
+
+And here are extracts from a remarkable letter from a Southern white
+working man signing himself Forrest Pope and published in the Atlanta
+_Georgian_, October 22, 1906:
+
+     When the skilled negro appears and begins to elbow the white man in
+     the struggle for existence, don't you know the white man rebels and
+     won't have it so? If you don't it won't take you long to find it out;
+     just go out and ask a few of them, those who tell you the whole
+     truth, and see what you will find out about it.
+
+
+_What Is the Negro's Place?_
+
+     All the genuine Southern people like the Negro as a servant, and so
+     long as he remains the hewer of wood and carrier of water, and
+     remains strictly in what we choose to call his place, everything is
+     all right, but when ambition, prompted by real education, causes
+     the Negro to grow restless and he bestir himself to get out of that
+     servile condition, then there is, or at least there will be, trouble,
+     sure enough trouble, that all the great editors, parsons and
+     philosophers can no more check than they can now state the whole
+     truth and nothing but the truth, about this all-absorbing,
+     far-reaching miserable race question. There are those among Southern
+     editors and other public men who have been shouting into the ears of
+     the North for twenty-five years that education would solve the Negro
+     question; there is not an honest, fearless, thinking man in the South
+     but who knows that to be a bare-faced lie. Take a young Negro of
+     little more than ordinary intelligence, even, get hold of him in
+     time, train him thoroughly as to books, and finish him up with a good
+     industrial education, send him out into the South with ever so good
+     intentions both on the part of his benefactor and himself, send him
+     to take my work away from me and I will kill him.
+
+
+[Illustration: COMPANION PICTURES
+
+Old and new cabins for Negro tenants on the Brown plantation]
+
+
+The writer says in another part of this remarkable letter, giving as it
+does a glimpse of the bare bones of the economic struggle for existence:
+
+     I am, I believe, a typical Southern white workingman of the skilled
+     variety, and I'll tell the whole world, including Drs. Abbott and
+     Eliot, that I don't want any educated property-owning Negro around
+     me. The Negro would be desirable to me for what I could get out of
+     him in the way of labour that I don't want to have to perform myself,
+     and I have no other uses for him.
+
+
+_Who Will Do the Dirty Work?_
+
+One illustration more and I am through. I met at Montgomery, Alabama, a
+lawyer named Gustav Frederick Mertins. We were discussing the "problem,"
+and Mr. Mertins finally made a striking remark, not at all expressing the
+view that I heard from some of the strongest citizens of Montgomery, but
+excellently voicing the position of many Southerners.
+
+"It's a question," he said, "who will do the dirty work. In this country
+the white man won't: the Negro must. There's got to be a mudsill
+somewhere. If you educate the Negroes they won't stay where they belong;
+and you must consider them as a race, because if you let a few rise it
+makes the others discontented."
+
+Mr. Mertins presented me with a copy of his novel called "The Storm
+Signal," in which he further develops the idea (p. 342):
+
+     The Negro is the mudsill of the social and industrial South to-day.
+     Upon his labour in the field, in the forest, and in the mine, the
+     whole structure rests. Slip the mudsill out and the system must be
+     reorganised.... Educate him and he quits the field. Instruct him in
+     the trades and sciences and he enters into active competition with
+     the white man in what are called the higher planes of life. That
+     competition brings on friction, and that friction in the end means
+     the Negroe's undoing.
+
+Is not this mudsill stirring to-day, and is not that the deep reason for
+many of the troubles in the South--and in the North as well, where the
+Negro has appeared in large numbers? The friction of competition has
+arrived, and despite the demand for justice by many of the best class of
+the Southern whites, the struggle is certainly of growing intensity.
+
+And out of this economic struggle of whites and blacks grows an ethical
+struggle far more significant. It is the struggle of the white man with
+himself. How shall he, who is supreme in the South as in the North, treat
+the Negro? That is the _real_ struggle!
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+RACE RELATIONSHIPS IN THE SOUTH
+
+
+I
+
+Generally speaking, the sharpest race prejudice in the South is exhibited
+by the poorer class of white people, whether farmers, artisans, or
+unskilled workers, who come into active competition with the Negroes, or
+from politicians who are seeking the votes of this class of people. It is
+this element which has driven the Negroes out of more than one community
+in the South and it commonly forms the lynching mobs. A similar antagonism
+of the working classes exists in the North wherever the Negro has appeared
+in large numbers--as I shall show when I come to write of the treatment of
+the Northern Negro.
+
+On the other hand, the larger landowners and employers of the South, and
+all professional and business men who hire servants, while they dislike
+and fear the Negro as a race (though often loving and protecting
+individual Negroes), want the black man to work for them. More than that,
+they _must have him_: for he has a practical monopoly on labour in the
+South. White men of the employing class will do almost anything to keep
+the Negro on the land and his wife in the kitchen--so long as they are
+obedient and unambitious workers.
+
+
+_"Good" and "Bad" Landlords_
+
+But I had not been very long in the black belt before I began to see that
+the large planters--the big employers of labour--often pursued very
+different methods in dealing with the Negro. In the feudal middle ages
+there were good and bad barons; so in the South to-day there are "good"
+and "bad" landlords (for lack of a better designation) and every gradation
+between them.
+
+The good landlord, generally speaking, is the one who knows by inheritance
+how a feudal system should be operated. In other words, he is the old
+slave-owner or his descendant, who not only feels the ancient
+responsibility of slavery times, but believes that the good treatment of
+tenants, as a policy, will produce better results than harshness and
+force.
+
+The bad landlord represents the degeneration of the feudal system: he is
+in farming to make all he can out of it this year and next, without
+reference to human life.
+
+I have already told something of J. Pope Brown's plantation near
+Hawkinsville. On the November day, when we drove out through it, I was
+impressed with the fact that nearly all the houses used by the Negro
+tenants were new, and much superior to the old log cabins built either
+before or after the war, some of which I saw still standing, vacant and
+dilapidated, in various parts of the plantation. I asked the reason why he
+had built new houses:
+
+"Well," he answered, "I find I can keep a better class of tenants, if the
+accommodations are good."
+
+
+_Liquor and "the Resulting Trouble"_
+
+Mr. Brown has other methods for keeping the tenantry on his plantation
+satisfied. Every year he gives a barbecue and "frolic" for his Negroes,
+with music and speaking and plenty to eat. A big watermelon patch is also
+a feature of the plantation, and during all the year the tenants are
+looked after, not only to see that the work is properly done, but in more
+intimate and sympathetic ways. On one trip through the plantation we
+stopped in front of a Negro cabin. Inside lay a Negro boy close to death
+from a bullet wound in the head. He had been at a Negro party a few nights
+before where there was liquor. Someone had overturned the lamp: shooting
+began, and the young fellow was taken out for dead. Such accidents or
+crimes are all too familiar in the plantation country. Although Pulaski
+County, Georgia, prohibits the sale or purchase of liquor (most of the
+South, indeed, is prohibition in its sentiment), the Negroes are able from
+time to time to get jugs of liquor--and, as one Southerner put it to me,
+"enjoy the resulting trouble."
+
+The boy's father came out of the field and told us with real eloquence of
+sorrow of the patient's condition.
+
+"Las' night," he said, "we done thought he was a-crossin' de ribbah."
+
+Mr. Brown had already sent the doctor out from the city; he now made
+arrangements to transport the boy to a hospital in Macon where he could be
+properly treated.
+
+
+_Use of Cocaine Among Negroes_
+
+As I have said before, the white landlord who really tries to treat his
+Negroes well, often has a hard time of it. Many of those (not all) he
+deals with are densely ignorant, irresponsible, indolent--and often
+rendered more careless from knowing that the white man must have labour.
+Many of them will not keep up the fences, or take care of their tools, or
+pick the cotton even after it is ready, without steady attention. A
+prominent Mississippi planter gave me an illustration of one of the
+troubles he just then had to meet. An eighteen-year-old Negro left his
+plantation to work in a railroad camp. There he learned to use cocaine,
+and when he came back to the plantation he taught the habit to a dozen of
+the best Negroes there, to their complete ruin. The planter had the entire
+crowd arrested, searched for cocaine and kept in jail until the habit was
+broken. Then he prosecuted the white druggist who sold the cocaine.
+
+Some Southern planters, to prevent the Negroes from leaving, have built
+churches for them, and in one instance I heard of a school-house as well.
+
+Another point of the utmost importance--for it strikes at the selfish
+interest of the landlord--lies in the treatment of the Negro, who, by
+industry or ability, can "get ahead." A good landlord not only places no
+obstacles in the way of such tenants, but takes a real pride in their
+successes. Mr. Brown said:
+
+"If a tenant sees that other Negroes on the same plantation have been able
+to save money and get land of their own, it tends to make them more
+industrious. It pays the planter to treat his tenants well."
+
+
+_Negro with $1,000 in the Bank_
+
+The result is that a number of Mr. Brown's tenants have bought and own
+good farms near the greater plantation. The plantation, indeed, becomes a
+sort of central sun around which revolves like planets the lesser life of
+the Negro landowner. Mr. Brown told me with no little pride of the
+successes of several Negroes. We met one farmer driving to town in a top
+buggy with a Negro school-teacher. His name was Robert Polhill--a good
+type of the self-respecting, vigorous, industrious Negro. Afterward we
+visited his farm. He had an excellent house with four rooms. In front
+there were vines and decorative "chicken-corn"; a fence surrounded the
+place and it was really in good repair. Inside the house everything was
+scrupulously neat, from the clean rag rugs to the huge post beds with
+their gay coverlets. The wife evidently had some Indian blood in her
+veins; she could read and write, but Polhill himself was a full black
+Negro, intelligent, but illiterate. The children, and there were a lot of
+them, are growing up practically without opportunity for education because
+the school held in the Negro church is not only very poor, but it is in
+session only a short time every year. Near the house was a one-horse
+syrup-mill then in operation, grinding cane brought in by neighbouring
+farmers--white as well as black--the whites thus patronising the
+enterprise of their energetic Negro neighbour.
+
+"I first noticed Polhill when he began work on the plantation," said Mr.
+Brown, "because he was the only Negro on the place whom I could depend
+upon to stop hog-cracks in the fences."
+
+His history is the common history of the Negro farmer who "gets ahead."
+Starting as a wages' hand, he worked hard and steadily, saving enough
+finally to buy a mule--the Negro's first purchase; then he rented land,
+and by hard work and close calculating made money steadily. With his first
+$75 he started out to see the world, travelling by railroad to Florida,
+and finally back home again. The "moving about" instinct is strong in all
+Negroes--sometimes to their destruction. Then he bought 100 acres of land
+on credit and having good crops, paid for it in six or seven years. Now he
+has a comfortable home, he is out of debt, and has money in the bank, a
+painted house, a top buggy and a cabinet organ! These are the values of
+his property:
+
+  His farm is worth    $2,000
+  Two mules               300
+  Horse                   150
+  Other equipment         550
+  Money in the bank     1,000
+                       ------
+                       $4,000
+
+
+_Negro Who Owns 1,000 Acres of Land_
+
+All of this shows what a Negro who is industrious, and who comes up on a
+plantation where the landlord is not oppressive, can do. And despite the
+fact that much is heard on the one hand of the lazy and worthless Negro,
+and on the other of the landlord who holds his Negroes in practical
+slavery--it is significant that many Negroes are able to get ahead. In
+Pulaski County there are Negroes who own as high as 1,000 acres of land.
+Ben Gordon is one of them, his brother Charles has 500 acres, John Nelson
+has 400 acres worth $20 an acre, the Miller family has 1,000 acres,
+January Lawson, another of Mr. Brown's former tenants, has 500 acres; Jack
+Daniel 200 acres, Tom Whelan 600 acres. A mulatto merchant in
+Hawkinsville, whose creditable store I visited, also owns his plantation
+in the country and rents it to Negro tenants on the same system employed
+by the white landowners. Indeed, a few Negroes in the South are coming to
+be not inconsiderable landlords, and have many tenants.
+
+Hawkinsville also has a Negro blacksmith, Negro barbers and Negro
+builders--and like the white man, the Negro also develops his own
+financial sharks. One educated coloured man in Hawkinsville is a "note
+shaver"; he "stands for" other Negroes and signs their notes--at a
+frightful commission.
+
+Statistics will give some idea of how the industrious Negro in a black
+belt county like Pulaski has been succeeding.
+
+                     Total Assessed
+          Acres of      Value of
+         Land Owned     Property
+
+  1875     4,490       $ 43,230
+  1880     5,988         60,760
+  1885     6,901         59,022
+  1890    12,294        122,926
+  1895    14,145        144,158
+  1900    13,205        138,800
+
+It is surprising to an unfamiliar visitor to find out that the Negroes in
+the South have acquired so much land. In Georgia alone in 1906 coloured
+people owned 1,400,000 acres and were assessed for over $28,000,000 worth
+of property, practically all of which, of course, has been acquired in the
+forty years since slavery.
+
+Negro farmers in some instances have made a genuine reputation for
+ability. John Roberts, a Richmond County Negro, won first prize over many
+white exhibitors in the fall of 1906 at the Georgia-Carolina fair at
+Augusta for the best bale of cotton raised.
+
+
+_Little Coloured Boy's Famous Speech_
+
+I was at Macon while the first State fair ever held by Negroes in Georgia
+was in progress. In spite of the fact that racial relationships, owing to
+the recent riot at Atlanta, were acute, the fair was largely attended, and
+not only by Negroes, but by many white visitors. The brunt of the work of
+organisation fell upon R. R. Wright, president of the Georgia State
+Industrial College (coloured) of Savannah. President Wright is of
+full-blooded African descent, his grandmother, who reared him, being an
+African Negro of the Mandingo tribe. Just at the close of the war he was a
+boy in a freedman's school at Atlanta. One Sunday General O. O. Howard
+came to address the pupils. When he had finished, he expressed a desire to
+take a message back to the people of the North.
+
+"What shall I tell them for you?" he asked.
+
+A little black boy in front stood up quickly, and said:
+
+"Tell 'em, massa, we is rising."
+
+Upon this incident John Greenleaf Whittier wrote a famous poem: and at the
+Negro fair, crowning the charts which had been prepared to show the
+progress of the Negroes of Georgia, I saw this motto:
+
+     "WE ARE RISING"
+
+The little black boy grew up, was graduated at Atlanta University, studied
+at Harvard, travelled in Europe, served in the Spanish-American War, and
+is now seeking to help his race to get an industrial training in the
+college which he organised in 1891. The attendance at the fair in Macon
+was between 25,000 and 30,000, the Negroes raised $11,000 and spent
+$7,000, and planned for a greater fair the next year. In this enterprise
+they had the sympathy and approval of the best white people. A vivid
+glimpse of what the fair meant is given by the _Daily News_ of Macon--a
+white newspaper:
+
+     The fair shows what progress can be accomplished by the industrious
+     and thrifty Negro, who casts aside the belief that he is a dependent,
+     and sails right in to make a living and a home for himself. Some of
+     the agricultural exhibits of black farmers have never been surpassed
+     in Macon. On the whole, the exposition just simply astounded folks
+     who did not know what the Negro is doing for himself.
+
+     Another significant feature about the fair was the excellent
+     behaviour of the great throngs of coloured people who poured into the
+     city during its progress. There was not an arrest on the fair grounds
+     and very few in the city.
+
+
+[Illustration: CANE SYRUP KETTLE. EXPERT NEGRO STIRRING AND SKIMMING]
+
+[Illustration: CHAIN-GANG WORKERS ON THE ROADS]
+
+
+The better class of Negro farmers, indeed, have shown not only a capacity
+for getting ahead individually, but for organising for self-advancement,
+and even for working with corresponding associations of white farmers. The
+great cotton and tobacco associations of the South, which aim to direct
+the marketing of the product of the farms, have found it not only wise,
+but necessary to enlist the coeoperation of Negro farmers. At the annual
+rally of the dark-tobacco growers at Guthrie, Kentucky, last September,
+many Negro planters were in the line of parade with the whites. The
+farmers' conferences held at Hampton, Tuskegee, Calhoun, and at similar
+schools, illustrate in other ways the possibilities of advancement which
+grow out of landownership by the Negroes.
+
+
+_The Penalties of Being Free_
+
+So much for the sunny side of the picture: the broad-gauge landlord and
+the prosperous tenantry. Conditions in the black belt are in one respect
+much as they were in slavery times, or as they would be under any feudal
+system: if the master or lord is "good," the Negro prospers; if he is
+harsh, grasping, unkind, the Negro suffers bitterly. It gets back finally
+to the white man. In assuming supreme rights in the South--political,
+social, and industrial, the white man also assumes heavy duties and
+responsibilities; he cannot have the one without the other: and he takes
+to himself the pain and suffering which goes with power and
+responsibility.
+
+Of course, scarcity of labour and high wages have given the really
+ambitious and industrious Negro his opportunity, and many thousands of
+them are becoming more and more independent of the favour or the ill-will
+of the whites. And therein lies a profound danger, not only to the Negro,
+but to the South. Gradually losing the support and advice of the best type
+of white man, the independent Negro finds himself in competition with the
+poorer type of white man, whose jealousy he must meet. He takes the
+penalties of being really free. Escaping the exactions of a feudal life,
+he finds he must meet the sharper difficulties of a free industrial
+system. And being without the political rights of his poor white
+competitor and wholly without social recognition, discredited by the
+bestial crimes of the lower class of his own race, he has, indeed, a hard
+struggle before him. In many neighbourhoods he is peculiarly at the mercy
+of this lower class white electorate, and the self-seeking politicians
+whose stock in trade consists in playing upon the passions of race-hatred.
+
+
+II
+
+I come now to the reverse of the picture. When the Negro tenant takes up
+land or hires out to the landlord, he ordinarily signs a contract, or if
+he cannot sign (about half the Negro tenants of the black belt are wholly
+illiterate) he makes his mark. He often has no way of knowing certainly
+what is in the contract, though the arrangement is usually clearly
+understood, and he must depend on the landlord to keep both the rent and
+the supply-store accounts. In other words, he is wholly at the planter's
+mercy--a temptation as dangerous for the landlord as the possibilities
+which it presents are for the tenant. It is so easy to make large profits
+by charging immense interest percentages or outrageous prices for supplies
+to tenants who are too ignorant or too weak to protect themselves, that
+the stories of the oppressive landlord in the South are scarcely
+surprising. It is easy, when the tenant brings in his cotton in the fall
+not only to underweigh it, but to credit it at the lowest prices of the
+week; and this dealing of the strong with the weak is not Southern, it is
+human. Such a system has encouraged dishonesty, and wastefulness; it has
+made many landlords cruel and greedy, it has increased the helplessness,
+hopelessness and shiftlessness of the Negro. In many cases it has meant
+downright degeneration, not only to the Negro, but to the white man. These
+are strong words, but no one can travel in the black belt without seeing
+enough to convince him of the terrible consequences growing out of these
+relationships.
+
+
+_The Story of a Negro Tenant_
+
+A case which came to my attention at Montgomery, Alabama, throws a vivid
+light on one method of dealing with the Negro tenant. Some nine miles from
+Montgomery lives a planter named T. L. McCullough. In December, 1903, he
+made a contract with a Negro named Jim Thomas to work for him. According
+to this contract, a copy of which I have, the landlord agreed to furnish
+Jim the Negro with a ration of 14 lbs. of meat and one bushel of meal a
+month, and to pay him besides $96 for an entire year's labour.
+
+On his part Jim agreed to "do good and faithful labour for the said T. L.
+McCullough." "Good and faithful labour" means from sunrise to sunset every
+day but Sunday, and excepting Saturday afternoon.
+
+A payment of five dollars was made to bind the bargain--just before
+Christmas. Jim probably spent it the next day. It is customary to furnish
+a cabin for the worker to live in; no such place was furnished, and Jim
+had to walk three or four miles morning and evening to a house on another
+plantation. He worked faithfully until May 15th. Then he ran away, but
+when he heard that the landlord was after him, threatening punishment, he
+came back and agreed to work twenty days for the ten he had been away. Jim
+stayed some time, but he was not only given no cabin and paid no money,
+but his food ration was cut off! So he ran away again, claiming that he
+could not work unless he had a place to live. The landlord went after him
+and had him arrested, and although the Negro had worked nearly half a
+year, McCullough prosecuted him for fraud because he had got $5 in cash at
+the signing of the contract. In such a case the Alabama law gives the
+landlord every advantage; it says that when a person receives money under
+a contract and stops work, the presumption is that he intended to defraud
+the landowner and that therefore he is criminally punishable. The
+practical effect of the law is to permit imprisonment for debt, for it
+places a burden of proof on the Negro that he can hardly overturn. The law
+is defended on the ground that Negroes will get money any way they can,
+sign any sort of paper for it, and then run off--if there is not a
+stringent law to punish them. But it may be imagined how this law could be
+used, and is used, in the hands of unscrupulous men to keep the Negro in a
+sort of debt-slavery. When the case came up before Judge William H. Thomas
+of Montgomery, the constitutionality of the law was brought into question,
+and the Negro was finally discharged.
+
+Often an unscrupulous landlord will deliberately give a Negro a little
+money before Christmas, knowing that he will promptly waste it in a
+"celebration" thus getting him into debt so that he dare not leave the
+plantation for fear of arrest and criminal prosecution. If he attempts to
+leave he is arrested and taken before a friendly justice of the peace, and
+fined or threatened with imprisonment. If he is not in debt, it sometimes
+happens that the landlord will have him arrested on the charge of stealing
+a bridle or a few potatoes (for it is easy to find something against
+almost any Negro), and he is brought into court. In several cases I know
+of the escaping Negro has even been chased down with bloodhounds. On
+appearing in court the Negro is naturally badly frightened. The white man
+is there and offers as a special favour to take him back and let him work
+out the fine--which sometimes requires six months, often a whole year. In
+this way Negroes are kept in debt--so-called debt-slavery or peonage--year
+after year, they and their whole family. One of the things that I couldn't
+at first understand in some of the courts I visited was the presence of so
+many white men to stand sponsor for Negroes who had committed various
+offences. Often this grows out of the feudal protective instinct which the
+landlord feels for the tenant or servant of whom he is fond; but often it
+is merely the desire of the white man to get another Negro worker. In one
+case in particular, I saw a Negro brought into court charged with stealing
+cotton.
+
+"Does anybody know this Negro?" asked the judge.
+
+Two white men stepped up and both said they did.
+
+The judge fined the Negro $20 and costs, and there was a real contest
+between the two white men as to who should pay it--and get the Negro. They
+argued for some minutes, but finally the judge said to the prisoner:
+
+"Who do you want to work for, George?"
+
+The Negro chose his employer, and agreed to work four months to pay off
+his $20 fine and costs.
+
+Sometimes a man who has a debt against a Negro will sell the claim--which
+is practically selling the Negro--to some farmer who wants more labour.
+
+A case of this sort came up in the winter of 1907 in Rankin County,
+Mississippi--the facts of which are all in testimony. A Negro named Dan
+January was in debt to a white farmer named Levi Carter. Carter agreed to
+sell the Negro and his entire family to another white farmer named
+Patrick. January refused to be sold. According to the testimony Carter and
+some of his companions seized January, bound him hand and foot and beat
+him most brutally, taking turns in doing the whipping until they were
+exhausted and the victim unconscious.
+
+January's children removed him to his home, but the white men returned the
+next day, produced a rope and threatened to hang him unless he consented
+to go to the purchaser of the debt. The case came into court but the white
+men were never punished. January was in Jackson, Miss., when I was there;
+he still showed the awful effects of his beating.
+
+
+_Keeping Negroes Poor_
+
+This system has many bad results. It encourages the Negro in crime. He
+knows that unless he does something pretty bad, he will not be prosecuted
+because the landlord doesn't want to lose the work of a single hand; he
+knows that if he _is_ prosecuted, the white man will, if possible, "pay
+him out." It disorganises justice and confuses the ignorant Negro mind as
+to what is a crime and what is not. A Negro will often do things that he
+would not do if he thought he were really to be punished. He comes to the
+belief that if the white man wants him arrested, he will be arrested, and
+if he protects him, he won't suffer, no matter what he does. Thousands of
+Negroes, ignorant, weak, indolent, to-day work under this system. There
+are even landlords and employers who will trade upon the Negro's worst
+instincts--his love for liquor, for example--in order to keep him at work.
+An instance of this sort came to my attention at Hawkinsville while I was
+there. The white people of the town were making a strong fight for
+prohibition; the women held meetings, and on the day of the election
+marched in the streets singing and speaking. But the largest employer of
+Negro labor in the county had registered several hundred of his Negroes
+and declared his intention of voting them against prohibition. He said
+bluntly: "If my niggers can't get whisky they won't stay with me; you've
+got to keep a nigger poor or he won't work."
+
+This employer actually voted sixty of his Negroes against prohibition, but
+the excitement was so great that he dared vote no more--and prohibition
+carried.
+
+A step further brings the Negro to the chain-gang. If there is no white
+man to pay him out, or if his crime is too serious to be paid out, he goes
+to the chain-gang--and in several states he is then hired out to private
+contractors. The private employer thus gets him sooner or later. Some of
+the largest farms in the South are operated by chain-gang labour. The
+demand for more convicts by white employers is exceedingly strong. In the
+Montgomery _Advertiser_ for April 10, 1907, I find an account of the
+sentencing of fifty-four prisoners in the city court, fifty-two of whom
+were Negroes. The _Advertiser_ says:
+
+     The demand for their labour is probably greater now than it ever has
+     been before. Numerous labour agents of companies employing convict
+     labour reached Montgomery yesterday, and were busily engaged in
+     manoeuvring to secure part or even all of the convicts for their
+     respective companies. The competition for labour of all kinds, it
+     seems, is keener than ever before known.
+
+The natural tendency of this demand, and from the further fact that the
+convict system makes yearly a huge profit for the State, is to convict as
+many Negroes as possible, and to punish the offences charged as severely
+as possible. From the Atlanta _Constitution_ of October 13, 1906, I have
+this clipping:
+
+     SIX MONTHS FOR POTATO THEFT
+
+     COLUMBUS, GA., October 12 (Special)
+
+     In the city court yesterday Charley Carter, a Negro, was sentenced to
+     six months on the chain-gang or to pay a fine of $25 for stealing a
+     potato valued at 5 cents.
+
+Serious crimes are sometimes compromised. In a newspaper dispatch, October
+6, 1906, from Eaton Ga., I find a report of the trial of six Negroes
+charged with assault with the intent to kill. All were found guilty, but
+upon a recommendation of mercy they were sentenced as having committed
+misdemeanours rather than felonies. They could therefore have their fines
+paid, and five were immediately released by farmers who wanted their
+labour. The report says that of thirty-one misdemeanours during the month
+it is expected that "none will reach the chain-gang," since there are
+"three farmers to every convict ready to pay the fine."
+
+
+[Illustration: A TYPE OF THE COUNTRY CHAIN-GANG NEGRO]
+
+
+Still other methods are pursued by certain landlords to keep their tenants
+on the land. In one extreme case a Negro tenant, after years of work,
+decided to leave the planter. He had had a place offered him where he
+could make more money. There was nothing against him; he simply wanted to
+move. But the landlord informed him that no waggon would be permitted to
+cross his (the planter's) land to get his household belongings. The Negro,
+being ignorant, supposed he could thus be prevented from moving, and
+although the friend who was trying to help him assured him that the
+landlord could not prevent his moving, he dared not go. In another
+instance--also extreme--a planter refused to let his tenants raise hogs,
+because he wanted them to buy salt pork at his store. It is, indeed,
+through the plantation store (which corresponds to the company or "truck"
+store of Northern mining regions) that the unscrupulous planter reaps his
+most exorbitant profits. Negroes on some plantations, whether they work
+hard or not, come out at the end of the year with nothing. Part of this is
+due, of course, to their own improvidence; but part, in too many cases, is
+due to exploitation by the landlord.
+
+
+_One Biscuit to Eat and no Place to Sleep_
+
+Booker T. Washington, in a letter to the Montgomery _Advertiser_ on the
+Negro labour problem, tells this story:
+
+     I recall that some years ago a certain white farmer asked me to
+     secure for him a young coloured man to work about the house and to
+     work in the field. The young man was secured, a bargain was entered
+     into to the effect that he was to be paid a certain sum monthly and
+     his board and lodging furnished as well. At the end of the coloured
+     boy's first day on the farm he returned. I asked the reason, and he
+     said that after working all the afternoon he was handed a buttered
+     biscuit for his supper, and no place was provided for him to sleep.
+
+     At night he was told he could find a place to sleep in the fodder
+     loft. This white farmer, whom I know well, is not a cruel man and
+     seeks generally to do the right thing; but in this case he simply
+     overlooked the fact that it would have paid him in dollars and cents
+     to give some thought and attention to the comfort of his helper.
+
+     This case is more or less typical. Had this boy been well cared for,
+     he would have advertised the place that others would have sought work
+     there.
+
+Such methods mean, of course, the lowest possible efficiency of
+labour--ignorant, hopeless, shiftless. The harsh planter naturally opposes
+Negro education in the bitterest terms and prevents it wherever possible;
+for education means the doom of the system by which he thrives.
+
+
+_Negro with Nineteen Children_
+
+Life for the tenants is often not a pleasant thing to contemplate. I spent
+much time driving about on the great plantations and went into many of the
+cabins. Usually they were very poor, of logs or shacks, sometimes only one
+room, sometimes a room and a sort of lean-to. At one side there was a
+fireplace, often two beds opposite, with a few broken chairs or boxes, and
+a table. Sometimes the cabin was set up on posts and had a floor,
+sometimes it was on the ground and had no floor at all. The people are
+usually densely ignorant and superstitious; the preachers they follow are
+often the worst sort of characters, dishonest and immoral; the schools, if
+there are any, are practically worthless. The whole family works from
+sunrise to sunset in the fields. Even children of six and seven years old
+will drop seed or carry water. Dr. W. E. B. DuBois, himself a Negro, who
+has made many valuable and scholarly studies of Negro life, gives this
+vivid glimpse into a home where the Negro and his wife had nineteen
+children. He says:
+
+     This family of twenty-one is a poverty stricken, reckless, dirty set.
+     The children are stupid and repulsive, and fight for their food at
+     the table. They are poorly dressed, sickly and cross. The table
+     dishes stand from one meal to another unwashed, and the house is in
+     perpetual disorder. Now and then the father and mother engage in a
+     hand-to-hand fight.
+
+
+_Never Heard the Name of Roosevelt_
+
+It would be impossible to over-emphasise the ignorance of many Negro
+farmers. It seems almost unbelievable, but after some good-humoured talk
+with a group of old Negroes I tried to find out how much they knew of the
+outside world. I finally asked them if they knew Theodore Roosevelt. They
+looked puzzled, and finally one old fellow scratched his head and said:
+
+"Whah you say dis yere man libes?"
+
+"In Washington," I said; "you've heard of the President of the United
+States?"
+
+"I reckon I dunno," he said.
+
+And yet this old man gave me a first-class religious exhortation; and one
+in the group had heard of Booker T. Washington, whom he described as a
+"pow'ful big nigger."
+
+
+_Why Negroes Go to Cities_
+
+I made inquiries among the Negroes as to why they wanted to leave the
+farms and go to cities. The answer I got from all sorts of sources was
+first, the lack of schooling in the country, and second, the lack of
+protection.
+
+And I heard also many stories of ill-treatment of various sorts, the
+distrust of the tenant of the landlord in keeping his accounts--all of
+which, dimly recognised, tends to make many Negroes escape the country, if
+they can. Indeed, it is growing harder and harder on the great
+plantations, especially where the management is by overseers, to keep a
+sufficient labour supply. In some places the white landlords have begun to
+break up their plantations, selling small farms to ambitious Negroes--a
+significant sign, indeed, of the passing of the feudal system. An instance
+of this is found near Thomaston, Ga., where Dr. C. B. Thomas has long been
+selling land to Negroes, and encouraging them to buy by offering easy
+terms. Near Dayton, Messrs. Price and Allen have broken up their "Lockhart
+Plantation" and are selling it out to Negroes. I found similar instances
+in many places I visited. Commenting on this tendency, the Thomaston
+_Post_ says:
+
+     This is, in part, a solution of the so-called Negro problem, for
+     those of the race who have property interests at stake cannot afford
+     to antagonise their white neighbours or transgress the laws. The
+     ownership of land tends to make them better citizens in every way,
+     more thoughtful of the right of others, and more ambitious for their
+     own advancement.
+
+     At this place a number of neat and comfortable homes, a commodious
+     high school, and a large lodge building, besides a number of
+     churches, testify to the enterprise and thrift the best class of our
+     coloured population.... The tendency towards cutting up the large
+     plantations is beginning to show itself, and when all of them are so
+     divided, there will be no agricultural labour problem, except,
+     perhaps, in the gathering of an especially large crop.
+
+
+III
+
+I have endeavoured thus to give a picture of both sides of conditions in
+the black belt exactly as I saw them. I can now do no better in further
+illumination of the conditions I have described than by looking at them
+through the eyes and experiences of two exceptionally able white men of
+the South, both leaders in their respective walks of life, neither of them
+politicians and both, incidentally, planters.
+
+At Jackson, Miss., I met Major R. W. Millsaps, a leading citizen of the
+state. He comes of a family with the best Southern traditions behind it;
+he was born in Mississippi, graduated before the war at Harvard College,
+and although his father, a slave owner, had opposed secession, the son
+fought four years in the Confederate army, rising to the rank of Major. He
+came out of the war, as he says, "with no earthly possessions but a jacket
+and a pair of pants, with a hole in them." But he was young and energetic;
+he began hauling cotton from Jackson to Natchez when cotton was worth
+almost its weight in gold. He received $10 a bale for doing it and made
+$4,000 in three months. He is now the president of one of the leading
+banks in Mississippi, interested in many important Southern enterprises,
+and the founder of Millsaps College at Jackson: a modest, useful,
+Christian gentleman.
+
+
+_An Experiment in Trusting Negroes_
+
+Near Greenville, Miss., Major Millsaps owns a plantation of 500 acres,
+occupied by 20 tenants, some 75 people in all. It is in one of the richest
+agricultural sections--the Mississippi bottoms--in the United States. Up
+to 1890 he had a white overseer and he was constantly in trouble of one
+kind or another with his tenants. When the price of cotton dropped, he
+decided to dispense with the overseer entirely and try a rather daring
+experiment. In short, he planned to trust the Negroes. He got them
+together and said:
+
+"I am going to try you. I'm going to give you every possible opportunity;
+if you don't make out, I will go back to the overseer system."
+
+In the sixteen years since then no white man has been on that plantation
+except as a visitor. The land was rented direct to the Negroes on terms
+that would give both landlord and tenant a reasonable profit.
+
+"Did it work?" I asked.
+
+"I have never lost one cent," said Major Millsaps, "no Negro has ever
+failed to pay up and you couldn't drive them off the place. When other
+farmers complain of shortage of labour and tenants, I never have had any
+trouble."
+
+Every Negro on the place owns his own mules and waggons and is out of
+debt. Nearly every family has bought or is buying a home in the little
+town of Leland, nearby, some of which are comfortably furnished. They are
+all prosperous and contented.
+
+"How do you do it?" I asked.
+
+"The secret," he said, "is to treat the Negro well and give him a chance.
+I have found that a Negro, like a white man, is most responsive to good
+treatment. Even a dog responds to kindness! The trouble is that most
+planters want to make too much money out of the Negro; they charge him too
+much rent; they make too large profits on the supplies they furnish. I
+know merchants who expect a return of 50 per cent. on supplies alone. The
+best Negroes I have known are those who are educated; Negroes need more
+education of the right kind--not less--and it will repay us well if we
+give it to them. It makes better, not worse, workers."
+
+I asked him about the servant problem.
+
+"We never have any trouble," he said. "I apply the same rule to servants
+as to the farmers. Treat them well, don't talk insultingly of their people
+before them, don't expect them to do too much work. I believe in treating
+a Negro with respect. That doesn't mean to make equals of them. You people
+in the North don't make social equals of your white servants."
+
+
+_Jefferson Davis's Way with Negroes_
+
+Then he told a striking story of Jefferson Davis.
+
+"I got a lesson in the treatment of Negroes when I was a young man
+returning South from Harvard. I stopped in Washington and called on
+Jefferson Davis, then United States Senator from Mississippi. We walked
+down Pennsylvania Avenue. Many Negroes bowed to Mr. Davis and he returned
+the bow. He was a very polite man. I finally said to him that I thought he
+must have a good many friends among the Negroes. He replied:
+
+"'I can't allow any Negro to outdo me in courtesy.'"
+
+
+_Plain Words from a White Man_
+
+A few days later on my way North I met at Clarksdale, Miss., Walter Clark,
+one of the well-known citizens of the state and President of the
+Mississippi Cotton Association. In the interests of his organisation he
+has been speaking in different parts of the state on court-days and at
+fairs. And the burden of his talks has been, not only organisation by the
+farmers, but a more intelligent and progressive treatment of Negro labour.
+Recognising the instability of the ordinary Negro, the crime he commits,
+the great difficulties which the best-intentioned Southern planters have
+to meet, Mr. Clark yet tells his Southern audiences some vigorous truths.
+He said in a recent speech:
+
+"Every dollar I own those Negroes made for me. Our ancestors chased them
+down and brought them here. They are just what we make them. By our own
+greed and extravagance we have spoiled a good many of them. It has been
+popular here--now happily growing less so--to exploit the Negro by high
+store-prices and by encouraging him to get into debt. It has often made
+him hopeless. We have a low element of white people who are largely
+responsible for the Negro's condition. They sell him whiskey and cocaine;
+they corrupt Negro women. A white man who shoots craps with Negroes or who
+consorts with Negro women is worse than the meanest Negro that ever
+lived."
+
+At Coffeeville, where Mr. Clark talked somewhat to this effect, an old man
+who sat in front suddenly jumped up and said: "That's the truth! Bully for
+you; bully for you!"
+
+In his talk with me, Mr. Clark said other significant things:
+
+"Our people have treated the Negroes as helpless children all their days.
+The Negro has not been encouraged to develop even the capacities he has.
+He must be made to use his own brains, not ours; put him on his
+responsibility and he will become more efficient. A Negro came to me not
+long ago complaining that the farmer for whom he worked would not give him
+an itemised account of his charges at the store. I met the planter and
+asked him about it. He said to me:
+
+"'The black nigger! What does he know about it? He can't read it.'
+
+"'But he is entitled to it, isn't he?' I asked him--and the Negro got it.
+
+"The credit system has been the ruin of many Negroes. It keeps them in
+hopeless debt and it encourages the planter to exploit them. That's the
+truth. My plan is to put the Negro on a strict cash basis; give him an
+idea of what money is by letting him use it. Three years ago I started it
+on my plantation. A Negro would come to me and say: 'Boss, I want a pair
+of shoes.' 'All right,' I'd say. 'I'll pay you spot cash every night and
+you can buy your own shoes.' In the same way I made up my mind that we
+must stop paying Negroes' fines when they got into trouble. I know
+planters who expect regularly every Monday to come into court and pay out
+about so many Negroes. It encourages the Negroes to do things they would
+not think of doing if they knew they would be regularly punished. I've
+quit paying fines; my Negroes, if they get into trouble, have got to
+recognise their own responsibility for it and take what follows. That's
+the only way to make men of them.
+
+"What we need in the South is intelligent labour, more efficient labour. I
+believe in the education of the Negro. Industrial training is needed, not
+only for the Negro, but for the whites as well. The white people down here
+have simply got to take the Negro and make a man of him; in the long run
+it will make him more valuable to us."
+
+
+
+
+_PART TWO_
+
+THE NEGRO IN THE NORTH
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+FOLLOWING THE COLOUR LINE IN THE NORTH
+
+
+Having followed the colour line in the South, it is of extraordinary
+interest and significance to learn how the Negro fares in the North. Is he
+treated better or worse? Is Boston a more favourable location for him than
+Atlanta or New Orleans? A comparison of the "Southern attitude" and the
+"Northern attitude" throws a flood of light upon the Negro as a national
+problem in this country.
+
+Most of the perplexing questions in the North pertain to the city, but in
+the South the great problems are still agricultural. In the South the
+masses of Negroes live on the land; they are a part of the cotton, sugar,
+lumber and turpentine industries; but in the North the Negro is
+essentially a problem of the great cities. He has taken his place in the
+babel of the tenements; already he occupies extensive neighbourhoods like
+the San Juan Hill district in New York and Bucktown in Indianapolis, and,
+by virtue of an increasing volume of immigration from the South, he is
+overflowing his boundaries in all directions, expanding more rapidly,
+perhaps, than any other single element of urban population. In every
+important Northern city, a distinct race-problem already exists, which
+must, in a few years, assume serious proportions.
+
+Country districts and the smaller cities in the North for the most part
+have no Negro question. A few Negroes are found in almost all localities,
+but an examination of the statistics of rural counties and of the lesser
+cities shows that the Negro population is diminishing in some localities,
+increasing slightly in others. In distinctly agricultural districts in the
+North the census exhibits an actual falling off of Negro population of 10
+per cent. between 1880 and 1900. Cass County in Michigan, which has a
+famous Negro agricultural colony--one of the few in the North--shows a
+distinct loss in population. From 1,837 inhabitants in 1880 it dropped to
+1,568 in 1900. A few Negro farmers have done well in the North (at
+Wilberforce, Ohio, I met two or three who had fine large farms and were
+prosperous), but the rural population is so small as to be negligible.
+
+
+_Negroes of Small Northern Towns_
+
+Most of the Negroes in the smaller towns and cities of the North are of
+the stock which came by way of the underground railroad just before the
+Civil War or during the period of philanthropic enthusiasm which followed
+it. They have come to fit naturally into the life of the communities where
+they live, and no one thinks especially of their colour. There is, indeed,
+no more a problem with the Negro than with the Greek or Italian. In one
+community (Lansing, Mich.) with which I have been long familiar, the
+Negroes are mostly mulattoes and their numbers have remained practically
+stationary for thirty years, while the white population has increased
+rapidly. At present there are only about 500 Negroes in a city of 25,000
+people.
+
+As a whole the coloured people of Lansing are peaceful and industrious, a
+natural part of the wage-working population. Individuals have become
+highly prosperous and are much respected. A few of the younger generation
+are idle and worthless.
+
+So far as comfortable conditions of life are concerned, where there is
+little friction or discrimination and a good opportunity for earning a
+respectable livelihood, I have found no places anywhere which seemed so
+favourable to Negroes as these smaller towns and cities in the North and
+West where the coloured population is not increasing. But the moment there
+is new immigration from the South the conditions cease to be Utopian--as I
+shall show.
+
+The great cities of the North present a wholly different aspect; the
+increases of population there are not short of extraordinary. In 1880
+Chicago had only 6,480 coloured people; at present (1908) it has about
+45,000, an increase of some 600 per cent. The census of 1900 gives the
+Negro population of New York as 60,666. It is now (1908) probably not less
+than 80,000. Between 1890 and 1900 the Negroes of Philadelphia
+increased by 59 per cent., while the Caucasians added only 22 per cent.,
+and the growth since 1900 has been even more rapid, the coloured
+population now exceeding 80,000.
+
+
+[Illustration: A NEGRO CABIN WITH EVIDENCES OF ABUNDANCE]
+
+[Illustration: OFF FOR THE COTTON FIELDS]
+
+
+It is difficult to realise the significance of these masses of coloured
+population. The city of Washington to-day has a greater community of
+Negroes (some 100,000) than were ever before gathered together in one
+community in any part of the world, so far as we know. New York and
+Philadelphia both now probably have as many Negroes as any Southern city
+(except Washington, if that be called a Southern city). Nor must it be
+forgotten that about a ninth of the Negro population of the United States
+is in the North and West. Crowded communities of Negroes in Northern
+latitudes have never before existed anywhere. Northern city conditions
+therefore present unique and interesting problems.
+
+I went first to Indianapolis because I had heard so much of the political
+power of the Negroes there; afterward I visited Cincinnati, Philadelphia,
+New York, Boston, Chicago and several smaller cities and country
+neighbourhoods. In every large city both white and coloured people told me
+that race feeling and discrimination were rapidly increasing: that new and
+more difficult problems were constantly arising.
+
+Generally speaking, the more Negroes the sharper the expression of
+prejudice.
+
+While the Negroes were an inconsequential part of the population, they
+passed unnoticed, but with increasing numbers (especially of the lower
+sort of Negroes and black Negroes), accompanied by competition for the
+work of the city and active political power, they are inevitably kindling
+the fires of race-feeling. Prejudice has been incited also by echoes of
+the constant agitation in the South, the hatred-breeding speeches of
+Tillman and Vardaman, the incendiary and cruel books and plays of Dixon,
+and by the increased immigration of Southern white people with their
+strong Southern point of view.
+
+
+_Pathetic Expectations of the Negro_
+
+One finds something unspeakably pathetic in the spectacle of these untold
+thousands of Negroes who are coming North. To many of them, oppressed
+within the limitations set up by the South, it is indeed the promised
+land. I shall never forget the wistful eagerness of a Negro I met in
+Mississippi. He told me he was planning to move to Indianapolis. I asked
+him why he wanted to leave the South.
+
+"They're Jim Crowin' us down here too much," he said; "there's no chance
+for a coloured man who has any self-respect."
+
+"But," I said, "do you know that you will be better off when you get to
+Indianapolis?"
+
+"I hear they don't make no difference up there between white folks and
+coloured, and that a hard-working man can get two dollars a day. Is that
+all so?"
+
+"Yes, that's pretty nearly so," I said--but as I looked at the fairly
+comfortable home he lived in, among his own people, I felt somehow that he
+would not find the promised land all that he anticipated.
+
+And after that I visited Indianapolis and other cities and saw hundreds of
+just such eager Negroes after they had reached the promised land. Two
+classes of coloured people came North: the worthless, ignorant,
+semi-criminal sort who find in the intermittent, high-paid day labour in
+the North, accompanied by the glittering excitements of city life, just
+the conditions they love best. Two or three years ago the Governor of
+Arkansas, Jeff Davis, pardoned a Negro criminal on condition that he would
+go to Boston and stay there! The other class is composed of
+self-respecting, hard-working people who are really seeking better
+conditions of life, a better chance for their children.
+
+And what do Negroes find when they reach the promised land?
+
+In the first place the poorer sort find in Indianapolis the alley home, in
+New York the deadly tenement. Landowners in Indianapolis have been
+building long rows of cheap one-story frame tenements in back streets and
+alleys. The apartments have two or three rooms each. When new they are
+brightly painted and papered and to many Negroes from the South,
+accustomed to the primitive cabin, they are beautiful indeed.
+
+Even the older buildings are more pretentious if not really better than
+anything they have known in the rural South; and how the city life, nearly
+as free to the coloured man as to the white, stirs their pulses! No
+people, either black or white, are really free until they feel free. And
+to many Negroes the first few weeks in a Northern city give them the first
+glimpses they have ever had of what they consider to be liberty.
+
+A striking illustration of this feeling came to my notice at Columbia,
+South Carolina. One of the most respected Negro men there--respected by
+both races--was a prosperous tailor who owned a building on the main
+street of the city. He was well to do, had a family, and his trade came
+from both races. I heard that he was planning to leave the South and I
+went to see him.
+
+"Yes," he said, "I am going away. It's getting to be too dangerous for a
+coloured man down here."
+
+It was just after the Atlanta riot.
+
+"Where are you going?" I asked.
+
+"I think I shall go to Washington," he said.
+
+"Why Washington?"
+
+"Well, you see, I want to be as near the flag as I can."
+
+
+_What the Negro Really Finds in the Promised Land_
+
+But they soon begin to learn things! It is true that the workingman can
+get high wages, and the domestic servant is paid an amount which
+astonishes her, but on the other hand--a fact that somehow never occurs to
+many of these people, or indeed to the foreigners who come flocking to our
+shores--the living cost is higher. For his gaudy tenements the landlord
+extorts exorbitant rentals. Ignorance is ever roundly and mercilessly
+taxed! I saw a double house built for white people just on the edge of a
+Negro neighbourhood and held at a rental of $18 a month, but not being
+able to secure white tenants the landlord rented to Negroes for $25 a
+month.
+
+When he came North the Negro (even though he had lived in cities in the
+South, as many of the immigrants have) never dreamed that it would require
+such an amount of fuel to keep him through the long Northern winter, or
+that his bill for lights, water, and everything else would be so high. And
+in the South many Negro families of the poorer sort are greatly assisted
+by baskets of food brought from the white man's kitchen and the gift of
+cast-off clothes and shoes, to say nothing of tobacco, and even money--a
+lingering loose survival of the relationships of slavery. But in the
+North the Negro finds himself in an intense industrial atmosphere where
+relationships are more strictly impersonal and businesslike. What he gets
+he must pay for. Charity exists on a large scale, as I shall show later,
+but it is the sharp, inquiring, organised charity of the North.
+
+In short, coming North to find a place where he will be treated more like
+a man and less like a serf, the Negro discovers that he must meet the
+competitive struggle to which men of the working class are subjected in
+the highly developed industrial system of the North.
+
+
+_Sufferings of the Northern Negro_
+
+In the South the great mass of Negroes have lived with their doors open,
+fireplaces have kept their homes ventilated, they could leave the matter
+of sanitation to fresh air and sunshine. And the Negro's very lack of
+training for such an environment as that of the North causes him untold
+suffering. To save fuel, and because he loves to be warm and sociable, he
+and his family and friends crowd into one close room, which is kept at
+fever temperature, not by a healthful fireplace, but by a tight stove.
+This, with the lack of proper sanitary conveniences, often becomes a
+hotbed of disease. Even in mild weather I have been in Negro houses in the
+North where the air was almost unendurably warm and impure.
+
+I know of nothing more tragic than the condition of the swarming newer
+Negro populations of Northern cities--the more tragic because the Negro is
+so cheerful and patient about it all. I looked into the statistics closely
+in several of them, and in no instance does the birth-rate keep pace with
+the death-rate. Even allowing for the fact that birth statistics are not
+very accurately kept in most cities it is probable that if it were not for
+the immigration constantly rolling upward from the South the Negro
+population in Northern cities would show a falling off. Consumption and
+the diseases of vice ravage their numbers. One of the ablest Negro
+physicians I have met, Dr. S. A. Furniss, who has practised among his
+people in Indianapolis for many years, has made a careful study of
+conditions. In a paper read before a medical association Dr. Furniss
+says:
+
+"The reports of the Indianapolis Board of Health show that for no month in
+the last ten years has the birth-rate among Negroes equalled the
+death-rate."
+
+Here are the statistics from 1901 to 1905:
+
+         Deaths    Births
+
+  1901    332       279
+  1902    329       280
+  1903    448       283
+  1904    399       327
+  1905    443       384
+
+
+_"Race Suicide" Among Negroes_
+
+From inquiries that I have made everywhere in the North there would seem,
+indeed, to be a tendency to "race suicide" among Negroes as among the old
+American white stock. Especially is this true among the better class
+Negroes. The ignorant Negro in Southern agricultural districts is
+exceedingly prolific, but his Northern city brother has comparatively few
+children. I have saved the record from personal inquiry of perhaps two
+hundred Northern Negro families of the better class. Many have no children
+at all, many have one or two, and the largest family I found (in Boston)
+was seven children. I found one Negro family in the South with twenty-one
+children! Industrialism, of course, is not favourable to a large
+birth-rate. All Northern cities show a notable surplus, according to the
+statistics, of Negro women over Negro men. Many of these are house
+servants and, like the large class of roving single men who do day labour
+on the streets and railroads, they are without family ties and have no
+children.
+
+Dr. Furniss finds that the deaths of Negroes from tuberculosis constitute
+over half the total deaths from that cause in the city of Indianapolis,
+whereas, in proportion to Negro population, they should constitute only
+one-eighth.
+
+His observations upon these startling facts are of great interest:
+
+"I believe the reason for these conditions is plain. First of all it is
+due to Negroes leaving the country and crowding into the larger cities,
+especially in the North, where they live in a climate totally different
+from that with which they have been familiar. They occupy unsanitary
+homes; they are frequently compelled to labour with insufficient food and
+clothing and without proper rest. Of necessity they follow the hardest
+and most exposed occupations in order to make a livelihood. I regret to
+say that intemperance and immorality play a part in making these figures
+what they are. They easily fall victim to the unusual vices of the city.
+
+"Another reason for increased mortality is improper medical attention. Not
+only among the ignorant but among the intelligent we find too much trust
+put in patent medicines; the belief, latent it is true in many cases, but
+still existing among the ignorant, in the hoodoo militates against the
+close following of the doctor's orders.
+
+"What shall we do about it?" asks Dr. Furniss. "We must urge those around
+us to more personal cleanliness, insist on a pure home life, and less
+dissipation and intemperance: to have fewer picnics and save more money
+for a rainy day. Tell the young people in the South not to come to
+Northern cities, but to go to the smaller towns of the West, where they
+can have a fair chance. Unless something is done to change existing
+conditions, to stop this movement to our Northern cities, to provide
+proper habitations and surroundings for those who are already here, it
+will be only a question of time until the problem of the American Negro
+will reach a solution not at all desirable from our point of view."
+
+Of course a doctor always sees the pathological side of life and his view
+is likely to be pessimistic. I saw much of the tragedy of the slum Negroes
+in the cities of the North, and yet many Negroes have been able to
+survive, many have learned how to live in towns and are making a success
+of their lives--as I shall show more particularly in the next chapter. It
+must not be forgotten that Negro families in Boston and Philadelphia
+(mostly mulattoes, it is true) as well as in Charleston, Savannah, and New
+Orleans, have lived and thrived under city conditions for many
+generations. Not a few Negroes in Indianapolis whose homes I visited are
+housed better than the average of white families.
+
+
+_Sickness Among Northern Negroes_
+
+Not only is the death-rate high in the North, but the Negro is hampered by
+sickness to a much greater degree than white people. Hospital records in
+Philadelphia show an excess of Negro patients over whites, according to
+population, of 125 per cent. About 5,000 Negroes passed through the
+hospitals of Philadelphia last year, averaging a confinement of three
+weeks each. Mr. Warner, in _American Charities_, makes sickness the chief
+cause of poverty among coloured people in New York, Boston, New Haven, and
+Baltimore. The percentage of sickness was twice or more as high as that of
+Germans, Irish, or white Americans.
+
+Such are the pains of readjustment which the Negroes are having to bear in
+the North.
+
+A question arises whether they can ever become a large factor of the
+population in Northern latitudes. They are certainly not holding their own
+in the country or in the smaller cities, and in the large cities they are
+increasing at present, not by the birth-rate, but by constant immigration.
+
+Hostile physical conditions of life in the North are not the only
+difficulties that the Negro has to meet. He thought he left prejudice
+behind in the South, but he finds it also showing its teeth here in the
+North. And, as in the South, a wide difference is apparent between the
+attitude of the best class of white men and the lower class.
+
+
+_How Northerners Regard the Negro_
+
+One of the first things that struck me when I began studying race
+conditions in the North was the position of the better class of white
+people with regard to the Negro. In the South every white man and woman
+has a vigorous and vital opinion on the race question. You have only to
+apply the match, the explosion is sure to follow. It is not so in the
+North. A few of the older people still preserve something of the war-time
+sentiment for the Negro; but the people one ordinarily meets don't know
+anything about the Negro, don't discuss him, and don't care about him. In
+Indianapolis, and indeed in other cities, the only white people I could
+find who were much interested in the Negroes were a few politicians,
+mostly of the lower sort, the charity workers and the police. But that, of
+course, is equally true of the Russian Jews or the Italians. One of the
+first white men with whom I talked (at Indianapolis) said to me with some
+impatience:
+
+"There are too many Negroes up here; they hurt the city."
+
+Another told me of the increasing presence of Negroes in the parks, on the
+streets, and in the street cars. He said:
+
+"I suppose sooner or later we shall have to adopt some of the restrictions
+of the South."
+
+He said it without heat, but as a sort of tentative conclusion, he hadn't
+fully made up his mind.
+
+
+_Race Prejudice in Boston_
+
+In Boston, of all places, I expected to find much of the old sentiment. It
+does exist among some of the older men and women, but I was surprised at
+the general attitude which I encountered. It was one of hesitation and
+withdrawal. Summed up, I think the feeling of the better class of people
+in Boston (and elsewhere in Northern cities) might be thus stated:
+
+We have helped the Negro to liberty; we have helped to educate him; we
+have encouraged him to stand on his own feet. Now let's see what he can do
+for himself. After all, he must survive or perish by his own efforts.
+
+In short, they have "cast the bantling on the rocks."
+
+Though they still preserve the form of encouraging the Negro, the spirit
+seems to have fled. Not long ago the Negroes of Boston organised a concert
+at which Theodore Drury, a coloured musician of really notable
+accomplishments, was to appear. Aristocratic white people were appealed to
+and bought a considerable number of tickets; but on the evening of the
+concert the large block of seats purchased by white people was
+conspicuously vacant. Northern white people would seem to be more
+interested in the distant Southern Negro than in the Negro at their doors.
+
+Before I take up the cruder and more violent expressions of prejudice on
+the part of the lower class of white men in the North I want to show the
+beginnings of cold-shouldering as it exists in varying degrees in Northern
+cities, and especially in Boston, the old centre of abolitionism.
+
+Superficially, at least, the Negro in Boston still enjoys the widest
+freedom; but after one gets down to real conditions he finds much
+complaint and alarm on the part of Negroes over growing restrictions.
+
+Boston exercises no discrimination on the street cars, on railroads, or in
+theatres or other places of public gathering. The schools are absolutely
+free. A coloured woman, Miss Maria Baldwin, is the principal of the
+Agassiz school, of Cambridge, attended by 600 white children. I heard her
+spoken of in the highest terms by the white people. Eight Negro teachers,
+chosen through the ordinary channels of competitive examination, teach in
+the public schools. There are Negro policemen, Negro firemen, Negro
+officeholders--fully as many of them as the proportion of Negro population
+in Boston would warrant. A Negro has served as commander of a white post
+of the Grand Army.
+
+
+_Prosperous Negroes in Boston_
+
+Several prosperous Negro business men have won a large white patronage.
+One of the chief merchant-tailoring stores of Boston, with a location on
+Washington Street which rents for $10,000 a year, is owned by J. H. Lewis.
+He has been in business many years. He employs both white and Negro
+workmen and clerks and he has some of the best white trade in Boston. Not
+long ago he went to North Carolina and bought the old plantation where his
+father was a slave, and he even talks of going there to spend his old age.
+Another Negro, Gilbert H. Harris, conducts the largest wig-making
+establishment in New England. I visited his place. He employs coloured
+girls and his trade is exclusively white. Another Negro has a school of
+pharmacy in which all the students are white; another, George Hamm, has a
+prosperous news and stationery store. A dentist, Dr. Grant, who has a
+reputation in his profession for a cement which he invented, was formerly
+in the faculty of the Harvard dentistry school and now enjoys a good
+practice among white people. The real estate dealer who has the most
+extensive business in Cambridge, T. H. Raymond, is a Negro. He employs
+white clerks and his business is chiefly with white people. Two or three
+Negro lawyers, Butler Wilson in particular, have many white clients. Dr.
+Courtney, a coloured physician from the Harvard Medical School, was for a
+time house physician of the Boston Lying-in-Hospital, in which the
+patients were practically all white, and has now a practice which includes
+both white and coloured patients. Dr. Courtney has also served on the
+School Board of Boston, an important elective office. The Negro poet,
+William Stanley Braithwaite, whose father took a degree at Oxford
+(England), is a member of the Authors' Club of Boston. His poems have
+appeared in various magazines, he has written a volume of poems, a
+standard anthology of Elizabethan verse, and he is about to publish a
+critical study of the works of William Dean Howells. Several of these men
+meet white people socially more or less.
+
+I give these examples to show the place occupied by the better and older
+class of Boston Negroes. Most of those I have mentioned are mulattoes,
+some very light. It shows what intelligent Negroes can do for themselves
+in a community where there has been little or no prejudice against them.
+
+But with crowding new immigration, and incited by all the other causes I
+have mentioned, these conditions are rapidly changing.
+
+A few years ago no hotel or restaurant in Boston refused Negro guests; now
+several hotels, restaurants, and especially confectionery stores, will not
+serve Negroes, even the best of them. The discrimination is not made
+openly, but a Negro who goes to such places is informed that there are no
+accommodations, or he is overlooked and otherwise slighted, so that he
+does not come again. A strong prejudice exists against renting flats and
+houses in many white neighbourhoods to coloured people. The Negro in
+Boston, as in other cities, is building up "quarters," which he occupies
+to the increasing exclusion of other classes of people. The great Negro
+centre is now in the South End, a locality once occupied by some of the
+most aristocratic families of Boston. And yet, as elsewhere, they struggle
+for the right to live where they please. A case in point is that of Mrs.
+Mattie A. McAdoo, an educated coloured woman, almost white, who has
+travelled abroad, and is a woman of refinement. She had a flat in an
+apartment house among white friends. One of the renters, a Southern woman,
+finding out that Mrs. McAdoo had coloured blood, objected. The landlord
+refused to cancel Mrs. McAdoo's lease and the white woman left, but the
+next year Mrs. McAdoo found that she could not re-rent her apartment. The
+landlord in this instance was the son of an abolitionist. He said to her:
+
+"You know I have no prejudice against coloured people. I will rent you an
+apartment in the building where I myself live if you want it, but I can't
+let you into my other buildings, because the tenants object."
+
+An attempt was even made a year or so ago by white women to force Miss
+Baldwin, the coloured school principal to whom I have referred, and who is
+almost one of the institutions of Boston, to leave Franklin House, where
+she was living. No one incident, perhaps, awakened Boston to the existence
+of race prejudice more sharply than this.
+
+
+_Churches Draw the Colour Line_
+
+One would think that the last harbour of prejudice would be the churches,
+and yet I found strange things in Boston. There are, and have been for a
+long time, numerous coloured churches in Boston, but many Negroes,
+especially those of the old families, have belonged to the white churches.
+In the last two years increased Negro attendance, especially at the
+Episcopal churches, has become a serious problem. A quarter of the
+congregation of the Church of the Ascension is coloured and the vicar has
+had to refuse any further coloured attendance at the Sunday School. St.
+Peter's and St. Philip's Churches in Cambridge have also been confronted
+with the colour problem.
+
+A proposition is now afoot to establish a Negro mission which shall
+gradually grow into a separate coloured Episcopal Church, a movement which
+causes much bitterness among the coloured people. I shall not soon forget
+the expression of hopelessness in the face of a prominent white church
+leader as he exclaimed:
+
+"What _shall_ we do with these Negroes! I for one would like to have them
+stay. I believe it is in accordance with the doctrine of Christ, but the
+proportion is growing so large that white people are drifting away from
+us. Strangers avoid us. Our organisation is expensive to keep up and the
+Negroes are able to contribute very little in proportion to their
+numbers. Think about it yourself: What shall we do? If we allow the
+Negroes to attend freely it means that eventually all the white people
+will leave and we shall have a Negro church whether we want it or not."
+
+In no other city are there any considerable number of Negroes who attend
+white churches--except a few Catholic churches. At New Orleans, I have
+seen white and coloured people worshipping together at the cathedrals.
+White ministers sometimes have spasms of conscience that they are not
+doing all they should for the Negro.
+
+Let me tell two significant incidents from Philadelphia. The worst Negro
+slum in that city is completely surrounded by business houses and the
+homes of wealthy white people. Within a few blocks of it stand several of
+the most aristocratic churches of Philadelphia. Miss Bartholomew conducts
+a neighbourhood settlement in the very centre of this social bog. Twice
+during the many years she has been there white ministers have ventured
+down from their churches. One of them said he had been troubled by the
+growing masses of ignorant coloured people.
+
+"Can't I do something to help?"
+
+Miss Bartholomew was greatly pleased and cheered.
+
+"Of course you can," she said heartily. "We're trying to keep some of the
+Negro children off the streets. There is plenty of opportunity for helping
+with our boys' and girls' clubs and classes."
+
+"Oh, I didn't mean that," said the minister; "I thought, in cases of death
+in their families, we might offer to read the burial service."
+
+And he went away and did not see the humour of it!
+
+Another minister made a similar proposition: he wanted to establish a
+Sunday School for coloured people. He asked Miss Bartholomew anxiously
+where he could hold it.
+
+"Why not in your church in the afternoon?"
+
+"Why, we couldn't do that!" he exclaimed; "we should have to air all the
+cushions afterward!"
+
+But to return to Boston. A proposition was recently made to organise for
+coloured people a separate Y. M. C. A., but the white members voted
+against any such discrimination. Yet a coloured man said to me
+hopelessly:
+
+"It's only delayed. Next time we shall be put off with a separate
+institution."
+
+
+_Colour Line at Harvard_
+
+Even at Harvard where the Negro has always enjoyed exceptional
+opportunities, conditions are undergoing a marked change. A few years ago
+a large class of white students voluntarily chose a brilliant Negro
+student, R. C. Bruce, as valedictorian. But last year a Negro baseball
+player was the cause of so much discussion and embarrassment to the
+athletic association that there will probably never be another coloured
+boy on the university teams. The line has already been drawn, indeed, in
+the medical department. Although a coloured doctor only a few years ago
+was house physician at the Boston Lying-in-Hospital, coloured students are
+no longer admitted to that institution. One of them, Dr. Welker (an Iowa
+coloured man), cannot secure his degree because he hasn't had six
+obstetrical cases, and he can't get the six cases because he isn't
+admitted with his white classmates to the Lying-in-Hospital. It is a
+curious fact that not only the white patients but some Negro patients
+object to the coloured doctors. In a recent address which has awakened
+much sharp comment among Boston Negroes, President Eliot of Harvard
+indicated his sympathy with the general policy of separate education in
+the South by remarking that if Negro students were in the majority at
+Harvard, or formed a large proportion of the total number, some separation
+of the races might follow.
+
+And this feeling is growing, notwithstanding the fact that no Negro
+student has ever disgraced Harvard and that no students are more orderly
+or law-abiding than the Negroes. On the other hand, Negro students have
+frequently made distinguished records for scholarship: last year one of
+them, Alain Leroy Locke, who took the course in three years, won the first
+of the three Bowdoin prizes (the most important bestowed at Harvard) for a
+literary essay, and passed for his degree with a _magna cum laude_. Since
+then he has been accepted, after a brilliant competitive examination, for
+the Rhodes scholarship from the state of Pennsylvania.
+
+Such feeling as that which is developing in the North comes hard, indeed,
+upon the intelligent, educated, ambitious Negro--especially if he happens
+to have, as a large proportion of these Negroes do have, no little white
+blood. Many coloured people in Boston are so white that they cannot be
+told from white people, yet they are classed as Negroes.
+
+Accompanying this change of attitude, this hesitation and withdrawal of
+the better class of white men, one finds crude sporadic outbreaks on the
+part of the rougher element of white men--who have merely a different way
+of expressing themselves.
+
+
+_White Gangs Attack Negroes_
+
+In Indianapolis the Negro comes in contact with the "bungaloo gangs,"
+crowds of rough and lawless white boys who set upon Negroes and beat them
+frightfully, often wholly without provocation. Although no law prevents
+Negroes from entering any park in Indianapolis, they are practically
+excluded from at least one of them by the danger of being assaulted by
+these gangs.
+
+The street cars are free in all Northern cities, but the Negro
+nevertheless sometimes finds it dangerous to ride with white people.
+Professor R. R. Wright, Jr., himself a Negro, and an acute observer of
+Negro conditions, tells this personal experience:
+
+"I came out on the car from the University of Pennsylvania one evening in
+May about eight o'clock. Just as the car turned off Twenty-seventh to
+Lombard Street, a crowd of about one hundred little white boys from six to
+about fourteen years of age attacked it. The car was crowded, but there
+were only about a dozen Negroes on it, about half of them women. The mob
+of boys got control of the car by pulling off the trolley. They threw
+stones into the car, and finally some of them boarded the car and began to
+beat the Negroes with sticks, shouting as they did so, 'Kill the nigger!'
+'Lynch 'em!' 'Hit that nigger!' etc. This all happened in Philadelphia.
+Doubtless these urchins had been reading in the daily papers the cry 'Kill
+the Negro!' and they were trying to carry out the injunction."
+
+While I was in Indianapolis a clash of enough importance to be reported in
+the newspapers occurred between the races on a street car; and in New
+York, in the San Juan Hill district, one Sunday evening I saw an incident
+which illustrates the almost instinctive race antagonism which exists in
+Northern cities. The street was crowded. Several Negro boys were playing
+on the pavement. Stones were thrown. Instantly several white boys sided
+together and began to advance on the Negroes. In less time than it takes
+to tell it thirty or forty white boys and young men were chasing the
+Negroes down the street. At the next corner the Negroes were joined by
+dozens of their own race. Stones and sticks began to fly everywhere, and
+if it hadn't been for the prompt action of two policemen there would have
+been a riot similar to those which have occurred not once but many times
+in New York City during the past two years. Of course these instances are
+exceptional, but none the less significant.
+
+
+_Bumptiousness as a Cause of Hatred_
+
+Some of the disturbances grow out of a characteristic of a certain sort of
+Negro, the expression of which seems to stir the deepest animosity in the
+city white boy. And that is the bumptiousness, the airiness, of the
+half-ignorant young Negro, who, feeling that he has rights, wants to be
+occupied constantly in using them. He mistakes liberty for licence.
+Although few in numbers among thousands of quiet coloured people, he makes
+a large showing. In the South they call him the "smart Negro," and an
+almost irresistible instinct exists among white boys of a certain class to
+take him down. I remember walking in Indianapolis with an educated
+Northern white man. We met a young Negro immaculately dressed; his
+hat-band was blue and white; his shoes were patent leather with white
+tops; he wore a flowered waistcoat, and his tread as he walked was
+something to see.
+
+"Do you know," said my companion, "I never see that young fellow without
+wanting to step up and knock his head off. I know something about him. He
+is absolutely worthless: he does no work, but lives on the wages of a
+hard-working coloured woman and spends all he can get on his clothes. I
+know the instinct is childish, but I am just telling you how I feel. I'm
+not sure it is racial prejudice; I presume I should feel much the same way
+toward a Frenchman if he did the same thing. And somehow I can't help
+believing that a good thrashing would improve that boy's character."
+
+I'm telling this incident just as it happened, to throw a side-light on
+one of the manifestations of the growing prejudice. One more illustration:
+Miss Eaton conducts a social settlement for Negroes in Boston. One day a
+teacher said to one of the little Negro boys in her class:
+
+"Please pick up my handkerchief."
+
+The boy did not stir; she again requested him to pick up the handkerchief;
+then she asked him why he refused.
+
+"The days of slavery are over," he said.
+
+Now, this spirit is not common, but it exists, and it injures the Negro
+people out of all proportion to its real seriousness.
+
+In certain towns in Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, on the borders of the old
+South, the feeling has reached a stage still more acute. At Springfield,
+O., two race riots have occurred, in the first of which a Negro was
+lynched and in the second many Negroes were driven out of town and a row
+of coloured tenements was burned. There are counties and towns where no
+Negro is permitted to stop over night. At Syracuse, O., Lawrenceburg,
+Ellwood, and Salem, Ind., for example, Negroes have not been permitted to
+live for years. If a Negro appears he is warned of conditions, and if he
+does not leave immediately, he is visited by a crowd of boys and men and
+forced to leave. A farmer who lives within a few miles of Indianapolis
+told me of a meeting, held only a short time ago by thirty-five farmers in
+his neighbourhood, in which an agreement was passed to hire no Negroes,
+nor to permit Negroes to live anywhere in the region.
+
+
+_Story of a Northern Race Riot_
+
+I stopped at Greensburg, Ind., on my way East and found there a remarkable
+illustration showing just how feeling arises in the North. Greensburg is a
+comfortable, well-to-do, conservative, church-going old town in eastern
+Indiana. Many of the residents are retired farmers. The population of
+7,000 is mostly of pure American stock, largely of Northern origin. And
+yet last April this quiet old town was shaken by a race riot. I made
+careful inquiries as to conditions there and I was amazed to discover how
+closely this small disturbance paralleled the greater riot at Atlanta
+which I have already written about. Negroes had lived in Greensburg for
+many years, a group of self-respecting, decent, prosperous men and women.
+They were known to and highly regarded by their white neighbours. One of
+them, named Brooks, owned a barber shop and was janitor for the
+Presbyterian Church and for one of the banks. Another, George W. Edwards,
+whom I met, has been for years an employee in the Garland Mills.
+
+"There isn't a better citizen in town than Edwards," a white lawyer told
+me; and I heard the same thing from other white men.
+
+Another Negro, George Guess, is an engineer in the electric light plant.
+Of the local Negro boys, Robert Lewis, the first coloured graduate of the
+local schools, is now teaching engineering at Hampton Institute. Oscar
+Langston, another Negro boy, is a dentist in Indianapolis. These and other
+Negroes live in good homes, support a church and have a respectable
+society of their own. I found just such a body of good coloured people in
+Atlanta.
+
+Well, progress brought an electric railroad to Greensburg. To work on this
+and on improvements made by the railroad hundreds of labourers were
+required. And they were Negroes of the ignorant, wandering, unlooked-after
+sort so common in similar occupations in the South. When the work was
+finished a considerable number of them remained in Greensburg. Now
+Greensburg, like other American cities, was governed by a mayor who was a
+"good fellow," and who depended on two influences to elect him: party
+loyalty and the saloon vote. He allowed a Negro dive to exist in one part
+of the town, where the idle and worthless Negroes congregated, where a
+murder was committed about a year before the riot. Exactly like Decatur
+Street in Atlanta! A rotten spot always causes trouble sooner or later.
+Good citizens protested and objected--to no purpose. They even organised a
+Good Citizenship League, the purpose of which was to secure a better
+enforcement of law. But the saloon interests were strong and wanted to
+sell whiskey and beer to the Negroes, and the city authorities were
+complaisant.
+
+"Who cares," one of them asked, "about a few worthless Negroes?"
+
+But in a democracy people _must_ care for one another.
+
+
+_A Negro Crime in the North_
+
+One day last April a Negro labourer who had been working for Mrs. Sefton,
+a highly respected widow who lived alone, appeared in the house in broad
+daylight and criminally assaulted her. His name was John Green, a Kentucky
+Negro; he was not only ignorant, but half-witted; he had already committed
+a burglary and had not been punished. He was easily caught, convicted, and
+sentenced. But the town was angry. On April 30th a crowd of men and boys
+gathered, beat two or three Negroes, and drove many out of town. They
+never thought of mobbing the city officials who had allowed the Negro
+dives to exist. And, as in Atlanta, the decent Negroes suffered with the
+criminals: a crowd broke windows in the home of George Edwards, and
+threatened other respectable coloured men. As in Atlanta, the better white
+people were horrified and scandalised; but, as in Atlanta, the white men
+who made up the mob went unpunished (though Atlanta did mildly discipline
+a few rioters). As in Atlanta, the newspaper reports that were sent out
+made no distinction between the different sorts of Negroes. The entire
+Negro population of Greensburg was blamed for the crime of a single
+ignorant and neglected man. I have several different newspaper reports of
+the affair from outside papers, and nearly all indicate in the headlines
+that all the Negroes in Greensburg were concerned in the riot and were
+driven out of town, which was not, of course, true. As a matter of fact
+the respectable Negroes are still living in Greensburg on friendly terms
+with the white people.
+
+
+_Human Nature North and South_
+
+In fact, the more I see of conditions North and South, the more I see that
+human nature north of Mason and Dixon's line is not different from human
+nature south of the line.
+
+Different degrees of prejudice, it is true, are apparent in the two
+sections. In the South the social and political prejudice the natural
+result of the memories of slavery and reconstruction, of the greater mass
+of Negro population and of the backward economic development, is stronger.
+In the North, on the other hand, comparatively little social and political
+prejudice is apparent; but the Negro has a hard fight to get anything but
+the most subservient place in the economic machine.
+
+Over and over again, while I was in the South, I heard remarks like this:
+
+"Down here we make the Negro keep his place socially, but in the North you
+won't let him work."
+
+This leads me to one of the most important phases of race-relationship in
+the North--that is, the economic struggle of the Negro, suddenly thrown,
+as he has been, into the swift-moving, competitive conditions of Northern
+cities. Does he, or can he, survive? Do the masses of Negroes now coming
+North realise their ambitions? Is it true that the North will not let the
+Negro work?
+
+These questions must, perforce, be discussed in another chapter.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+THE NEGROES' STRUGGLE FOR SURVIVAL IN NORTHERN CITIES
+
+
+One of the questions I asked of Negroes whom I met both North and South
+was this:
+
+"What is your chief cause of complaint?"
+
+In the South the first answer nearly always referred to the Jim Crow cars
+or the Jim Crow railroad stations; after that, the complaint was of
+political disfranchisement, the difficulty of getting justice in the
+courts, the lack of good school facilities, and in some localities, of the
+danger of actual physical violence.
+
+But in the North the first answer invariably referred to working
+conditions.
+
+"The Negro isn't given a fair opportunity to get employment. He is
+discriminated against because he is coloured."
+
+Professor Kelly Miller, one of the acutest of Negro writers, has said:
+
+"The Negro (in the North) is compelled to loiter around the edges of
+industry."
+
+Southern white men are fond of meeting Northern criticism of Southern
+treatment of the Negro with the response:
+
+"But the North closes the doors of industrial opportunity to the Negro."
+
+And yet, in spite of this complaint of conditions in the North, one who
+looks Southward can almost see the army of Negroes gathering from out of
+the cities, villages and farms, bringing nothing with them but a buoyant
+hope in a distant freedom, but tramping always Northward. And they come
+not alone from the old South, but from the West Indies, where the coloured
+population looks wistfully toward the heralded opportunities of America. A
+few are even coming from South Africa and South America. In New York,
+Boston, and Philadelphia, thousands of such foreign Negroes know nothing
+of America traditions; some of them do not even speak the English
+language.
+
+And why do they come if their difficulties are so great? Is it true that
+there is no chance for them in industry? Are they better or worse off in
+the North than in the South?
+
+In the first place, in most of the smaller Northern cities where the Negro
+population is not increasing rapidly, discrimination is hardly noticeable.
+Negroes enter the trades, find places in the shops, or even follow
+competitive business callings and still maintain friendly relationships
+with the white people.
+
+But the small towns are not typical of the new race conditions in the
+North; the situation in the greater centres of population where Negro
+immigration is increasing largely, is decidedly different.
+
+As I travelled in the North, I heard many stories of the difficulties
+which the coloured man had to meet in getting employment. Of course, as a
+Negro said to me, "there are always places for the coloured man at the
+bottom." He can always get work at unskilled manual labour, or personal or
+domestic service--in other words, at menial employment. He has had that in
+plenty in the South. But what he seeks as he becomes educated is an
+opportunity for better grades of employment. He wants to rise.
+
+It is not, then, his complaint that he cannot get work in the North, but
+that he is limited in his opportunities to rise, to get positions which
+his capabilities (if it were not for his colour) would entitle him to. He
+is looking for a place where he will be judged at his worth as a man, not
+as a Negro: this he came to the North to find, and he meets difficulties
+of which he had not dreamed in the South.
+
+At Indianapolis I found a great discussion going on over what to do with
+the large number of idle young coloured people, some of whom had been
+through the public schools, but who could not, apparently, find any work
+to do. As an able coloured man said to me: "What shall we do? Here are our
+young people educated in the schools, capable of doing good work in many
+occupations where skill and intelligence are required--and yet with few
+opportunities opening for them. They don't want to dig ditches or become
+porters or valets any more than intelligent white boys: they are human.
+The result is that some of them drop back into idle discouragement--or
+worse."
+
+In New York I had a talk with William L. Bulkley, the coloured principal
+of Public School No. 80, attended chiefly by coloured children, who told
+me of the great difficulties and discouragements which confronted the
+Negro boy who wanted to earn his living. He relates this story:
+
+"I received a communication the other day from an electric company stating
+that they could use some bright, clean, industrious boys in their
+business, starting them at so much a week and aiding them to learn the
+business. I suspected that they did not comprehend coloured boys under the
+generic term 'boys,' but thought to try. So I wrote asking if they would
+give employment to a coloured boy who could answer to the qualifications
+stated. The next mail brought the expected reply that no coloured boy,
+however promising, was wanted. I heaved a sigh and went on.
+
+"The saddest thing that faces me in my work is the small opportunity for a
+coloured boy or girl to find proper employment. A boy comes to my office
+and asks for his working papers. He may be well up in the school, possibly
+with graduation only a few months off. I question him somewhat as follows:
+'Well, my boy, you want to go to work, do you? What are you going to do?'
+'I am going to be a door-boy, sir.' 'Well, you will get $2.50 or $3 a
+week, but after a while that will not be enough; what then?' After a
+moment's pause he will reply: 'I should like to be an office boy.' 'Well,
+what next?' A moment's silence, and, 'I should try to get a position as
+bell-boy.' 'Well, then, what next?' A rather contemplative mood, and then,
+'I should like to climb to the position of head bell-boy.' He has now
+arrived at the top; further than this he sees no hope. He must face the
+bald fact that he must enter business as a boy and wind up as a boy."
+
+And yet in spite of these difficulties, Negroes come North every year in
+increasing numbers, they find living expensive, they suffer an unusual
+amount of sickness and death, they meet more prejudice than they expected
+to meet, and yet they keep coming. Much as Negroes complain of the
+hardship of Northern conditions, and though they are sometimes pitifully
+homesick for the old life in the South, I have yet to find one who wanted
+to go back--unless he had accumulated enough money to buy land.
+
+"Why do they come?" I asked a Negro minister in Philadelphia.
+
+"Well, they're treated more like men up here in the North," he said,
+"that's the secret of it. There's prejudice here, too, but the colour line
+isn't drawn in their faces at every turn as it is in the South. It all
+gets back to a question of manhood."
+
+In the North prejudice is more purely economic than it is in the South--an
+incident of industrial competition.
+
+In the South the Negro still has the field of manual labour largely to
+himself, he is unsharpened by competition; but when he reaches the
+Northern city, he not only finds the work different and more highly
+organised and specialised, but he finds that he must meet the fierce
+competition of half a dozen eager, struggling, ambitious groups of
+foreigners, who are willing and able to work long hours at low pay in
+order to get a foothold. He has to meet often for the first time the
+Italian, the Russian Jew, the Slav, to say nothing of the white American
+labourer. He finds the pace set by competitive industry immensely harder
+than in most parts of the South. No life in the world, perhaps, requires
+as much in brain and muscle of all classes of men as that of the vast
+Northern cities in the United States. I have talked with many coloured
+workmen and I am convinced that not a few of them fail, not because of
+their colour, nor because they are lazy (Negroes in the North are of the
+most part hard workers--they _must_ be, else they starve or freeze), but
+for simple lack of speed and skill; they haven't learned to keep the pace
+set by the white man.
+
+A contractor in New York who employs large numbers of men, said to me:
+
+"It isn't colour so much as plain efficiency. I haven't any sentiment in
+the matter at all. It's business. As a general rule the ordinary coloured
+man can't do as much work nor do it as well as the ordinary white man. The
+result, is, I don't take coloured men when I can get white men. Yet I have
+several coloured men who have been with me for years, and I wouldn't part
+with them for any white man I know. In the same way I would rather employ
+Italians than Russian Jews: they're stronger workers."
+
+Not unnaturally the Negro charges these competitive difficulties which he
+has to meet in the North (as he has been accustomed to do in the South) to
+the white man; he calls it colour prejudice, when as a matter of fact, it
+is often only the cold businesslike requirement of an industrial life
+which demands tremendous efficiency, which in many lines of activity has
+little more feeling than a machine, that is willing to use Italians, or
+Japanese, or Chinese, or Negroes, or Hindus, or any other people on the
+face of the earth. On the other hand, no doubt exists that many labour
+unions, especially in the skilled trades, are hostile to Negroes, even
+though they may have no rules against their admission. I heard the
+experiences of an expert Negro locomotive engineer named Burns who had a
+run out of Indianapolis to the South. Though he was much in favour with
+the company, and indeed with many trainmen who knew him personally, the
+general feeling was so strong that by soaping the tracks, injuring his
+engine, and in other ways making his work difficult and dangerous, he was
+finally forced to abandon his run. If there were space I could give many
+accounts of strikes against the employment of Negroes. The feeling among
+union labour men has undoubtedly been growing more intense in the last few
+years owing to the common use of Negroes as strike breakers. With a few
+thousand Negroes the employers broke the great stockyards strike in
+Chicago in 1904, and the teamsters' strike in the following year. Colour
+prejudice is used like any other weapon for strengthening the monopoly of
+the labour union. I know several unions which are practically monopolistic
+corporations into which any outsider, white, yellow, or black, penetrates
+with the greatest difficulty. Such closely organised unions keep the
+Negroes out in the South exactly as they do in the North. A Negro
+tile-setter, steam-fitter or plumber can no more get into a union in
+Atlanta than in New York. Of course these unions, like any other closely
+organised group of men, employ every weapon to further their cause. They
+use prejudice as a competitive fighting weapon, they seize upon the colour
+of the Negro, or the pig-tail and curious habits of the Chinaman, or
+the low-living standard of the Hindu, to fight competition and protect
+them in their labour monopoly.
+
+
+[Illustration: WARD IN A NEGRO HOSPITAL AT PHILADELPHIA]
+
+[Illustration: STUDIO OF A NEGRO SCULPTRESS]
+
+
+And yet, although I expected to find the Negro wholly ostracised by union
+labour, I discovered that where the Negro becomes numerous or skilful
+enough, he, like the Italian or the Russian Jew, begins to force his way
+into the unions. The very first Negro carpenter I chanced to meet in the
+North (from whom I had expected a complaint of discrimination) said to me:
+
+"I'm all right. I'm a member of the union and get union wages."
+
+And I found after inquiry that there are a few Negroes in most of the
+unions of skilled workers, carpenters, masons, iron-workers, even in the
+exclusive typographical union and in the railroad organisations--a few
+here and there, mostly mulattoes. They have got in just as the Italians
+get in, not because they are wanted, or because they are liked, but
+because by being prepared, skilled, and energetic, the unions have had to
+take them in as a matter of self-protection. In the South the Negro is
+more readily accepted as a carpenter, blacksmith, or bricklayer than in
+the North not because he is more highly regarded but because (unlike the
+North) the South has almost no other labour supply.
+
+In several great industries North and South, indeed, the Negro is as much
+a part of labour unionism as the white man. Thousands of Negroes are
+members of the United Mine-Workers, John Mitchell's great organisation,
+and they stand on an exact industrial equality with the whites. Other
+thousands are in the cigar-makers' union, where, by virtue of economic
+pressure, they have forced recognition.
+
+Indeed, in the North, in spite of the complaint of discrimination, I found
+Negroes working and making a good living in all sorts of industries--union
+or no union. A considerable number of Negro firemen have good positions in
+New York, a contracting Negro plumber in Indianapolis who uses coloured
+help has been able to maintain himself, not only against white
+competition, but against the opposition of organised white labour. I know
+of Negro paper-hangers and painters, not union men, but making a living at
+their trade and gradually getting hold. A good many Negro printers,
+pressmen, and the like are now found in Negro offices (over 200
+newspapers and magazines are published by Negroes in this country) who
+are getting their training. I know of several girls (all mulattoes) who
+occupy responsible positions in offices in New York and Chicago. Not a few
+coloured nurses, seamstresses and milliners have found places in the life
+of the North which they seem capable of holding. It is not easy for them
+to make progress: each coloured man who takes a step ahead must prove, for
+his race, that a coloured man can after all, do his special work as well
+as a white man. The presumption is always against him.
+
+Here is a little newspaper account of a successful skilled pattern maker
+in Chicago:
+
+     A few days ago a large box containing twenty-one large and small
+     patterns was shipped to the Jamestown Exhibition by the McGuire Car
+     Company of Paris, Illinois, one of the largest car companies in the
+     West. Before the box was shipped scores of newspaper men, engineers
+     and business men were permitted to inspect what is said to be the
+     most complete and most valuable exhibit of the kind ever sent to an
+     exhibition in this country. The contents of this precious box is
+     entirely the work of a coloured man named George A. Harrison. Mr.
+     Harrison is one of the highest salaried men on the pay-roll of the
+     company. He makes all the patterns for all of the steel, brass, and
+     iron castings for every kind of car made by this company. He
+     graduated at the head of his class of sixty members in a pattern
+     making establishment in Chicago.
+
+Cases of this sort are exceptional among the vast masses of untrained
+Negro population in the cities, and yet it shows what can be done--and the
+very possibility of such advancement encourages Negroes to come North.
+
+
+_Trades Which Negroes Dominate_
+
+So much for the higher branches of industry. In some of the less skilled
+occupations, on the other hand, the Negro is not only getting hold, but
+actually becoming dominant.
+
+The asphalt workers are nearly all coloured. In New York they have a
+strong union and although part of the membership is white (chiefly
+Italian), the chosen representative who sits with the Central Federated
+Union of the city is James H. Wallace, a coloured man.
+
+In Indianapolis I found that the hod-carriers' industry was almost wholly
+in the hands of Negroes who have a strong union, with a large strike fund
+put aside. So successful have they been that they now propose erecting a
+building of their own as a club house. Although there are white men in the
+union the officers are all coloured. Not long ago some of the coloured
+members began to "rush" a white man at his work. It was reported to the
+union and hotly discussed. The coloured members finally decided that there
+should be no discrimination against white men, and fined one of the Negro
+offenders for his conduct. He couldn't pay and had to leave town.
+
+Where the Negro workman gets a foothold in the North, he often does very
+well indeed. R. R. Wright, Jr., calls attention to conditions in the
+Midvale Steel Company, which is one of the largest, if not the largest
+employer of Negro labour in Philadelphia. Charles J. Harrah, the president
+of this company, said before the United States Industrial Commission in
+1900:
+
+"We have fully 800 or 1,000 coloured men. The balance are Americans, Irish
+and Germans. The coloured labour we have is excellent.... They are lusty
+fellows; we have some with shoulders twice as broad as mine, and with
+chests twice as deep as mine. The men come up here ignorant and untutored.
+We teach them the benefit of discipline. We teach the coloured man the
+benefit of thrift, and coax him to open a bank account; and he generally
+does it, and in a short time has money in it, and nothing can stop him
+from adding money to that bank account. We have no coloured men who
+drink."
+
+Asked as to the friction between the white and black workmen, Mr. Harrah
+replied:
+
+"Not a bit of it. They work cheek by jowl with Irish, and when the
+Irishman has a festivity at home he has coloured men invited. We did it
+with trepidation. We introduced one man at first to sweep up the yard, and
+we noticed the Irish and Germans looked at him askance. Then we put in
+another. Then we put them in the boiler-room, and then we got them in the
+open hearth and in the forge, and gradually we got them everywhere. They
+are intelligent and docile, and when they come in as labourers, unskilled,
+they gradually become skilled, and in the course of time we will make
+excellent foremen out of them."
+
+Mr. Harrah added that there was absolutely no difference in wages of
+Negroes and whites in the same grade of work.
+
+I have pointed out especially in my last article how and where prejudice
+was growing in Northern cities, as it certainly is. On the other hand,
+where one gets down under the surface there are to be found many
+counteracting influences--those quiet constructive forces, which, not
+being sensational or threatening, attract too little attention. Northern
+people are able to help Negroes where Southern people are deterred by the
+intensity of social prejudice: for in most places in the South the
+teaching of Negroes still means social ostracism.
+
+
+_Help for Negroes in the North_
+
+Settlement work, in one form or another, has been instituted in most
+Northern cities, centres of enlightenment and hope. I have visited a
+number of these settlements and have seen their work. They are doing much,
+especially in giving a moral tone to a slum community: they help to keep
+the children off the streets by means of clubs and classes; they open the
+avenues of sympathy between the busy upper world and the struggling lower
+world. Such is the work of Miss Bartholomew, Miss Hancock, Miss Wharton in
+Philadelphia, Miss Eaton in Boston, Mrs. Celia Parker Woolley in Chicago,
+Miss Ovington in New York. Miss Hancock, a busy, hopeful Quaker woman, has
+a "broom squad" of Negro boys which makes a regular business of sweeping
+several of the streets in the very worst slum district in Philadelphia; it
+gives them employment and it teaches them civic responsibility and pride.
+
+But perhaps I can give the best idea of these movements by telling of the
+different forms of work in a single city--Indianapolis. In the first
+place, the Flanner Guild, projected by Mr. Flanner, a white man, is
+maintained largely by white contributions, but it is controlled wholly by
+coloured people. Millinery classes were opened for girls (of which there
+are now many practising graduates, eight of whom are giving lessons in
+Indianapolis and in other cities), and there are clubs and social
+gatherings of all sorts: it has been, indeed, a helpful social centre of
+influence.
+
+
+[Illustration: A NEGRO MAGAZINE EDITOR'S OFFICE IN PHILADELPHIA]
+
+[Illustration: A "BROOM SQUAD" OF NEGRO BOYS
+
+Which makes a regular business of sweeping several of the streets in the
+very worst slum district in Philadelphia; it gives them employment and it
+teaches them civic responsibility and pride. Miss Hancock at the right.]
+
+
+
+In the South, as I have shown, Negroes receive much off-hand individual
+charity--food from the kitchen, gifts of old clothes and money; but it is
+largely personal and unorganised. In the North there is comparatively
+little indiscriminate giving, but an effort to reach and help Negro
+families by making them help themselves. One of the difficulties of the
+Negro is improvidence; but once given a start on the road to money saving,
+it is often astonishing to see him try to live up to cash in the bank. The
+Charity Organisation Society of Indianapolis has long maintained a dime
+savings and loan association which employs six women collectors, one
+coloured, who visit hundreds of homes every week. These form indeed a
+corps of friendly visitors, the work of collecting the savings furnishing
+them an opportunity of getting into the homes and so winning the
+confidence of the people that they can help them in many ways. Last year
+over 6,000 depositors were registered in the association, two-thirds of
+whom were Negroes, and over $25,000 was on deposit. Not less than
+twenty-five cents a week is accepted, but many Negroes save much more. As
+soon as they get into the habit of saving they usually transfer their
+accounts to the savings bank--and once with a bank book, they are on the
+road to genuine improvement.
+
+Another work of great value which Mr. Grout of the Charity Organisation
+Society has organised is vacant lot cultivation. By securing the use of
+vacant land in and around the city many Negro families have been
+encouraged to make gardens, thus furnishing healthful and self-respecting
+occupation for the old or very young members of many Negro families, who
+otherwise might become public charges. The plots are ploughed and seeds
+are provided: the Negroes do their own work and take the crop. The work is
+supported by voluntary contributions from white people. A number of Negro
+women have raised enough vegetables not only to supply themselves but have
+had some to sell.
+
+Negro children are closely looked after in Indianapolis. Compulsory
+education applies equally to both races. Every family thus comes also
+under the more or less active attention of the school authorities. An
+officer, Miss Sarah Colton Smith, is employed exclusively to visit and
+keep watch of the Negro children. Her work also is largely that of the
+friendly visitor, helping the various overworked mothers with
+suggestions, taking an interest in Negro organisations. For example, the
+Coloured Woman's Club, working with Miss Smith, has organised a day
+nursery which cares for some of the very young children of working Negro
+women, thereby allowing the older ones to go to school. Indianapolis
+(which has one of the most progressive and intelligent school systems,
+wholly non-political, in the country) is also thoroughly alive to the
+necessity of industrial education--for both races. Significantly enough,
+the Negro schools were first fitted with industrial departments, so that
+for a time the cost of education per capita in Indianapolis was higher for
+coloured children than for white. When I expressed my surprise at this
+unusual condition I was told:
+
+"Of course, the immediate need of the Negro was greater."
+
+Night schools are also held in the public school buildings from November
+to April--two schools for Negroes especially, where coloured people of all
+ages are at liberty to attend. It is a remarkable sight: Negroes fifty and
+sixty years old mingle there with mere children. The girls are taught
+sewing and cooking, the men carpentry--besides the ordinary branches. One
+old man from the South was found crying with joy over his ability to write
+his name. For the very young children, Negro equally with white, there is
+Mrs. Eliza Blaker's Kindergarten. For the aged coloured women a home is
+now supported principally by the coloured people themselves.
+
+
+_The Morals of Negro Women_
+
+I saw a good deal of these various lines of activity and talked with the
+people who come close in touch with the struggling masses of the Negro
+poor. I wish I had room to tell some of the stories I heard: the black
+masses of poverty, disease, hopeless ignorance, and yet everywhere shot
+through with hopeful tendencies and individual uplift and success. In
+Indianapolis, as in other Northern cities, I heard much to the credit of
+the Negro women.
+
+"If the Negro is saved here in the North," Miss Smith told me, "it will be
+due to the women."
+
+They gave me many illustrations showing how hard the Negro women
+worked--taking in washing or going out every day to work, raising their
+families, keeping the home, sometimes supporting worthless husbands.
+
+"A Negro woman of the lower class," one visitor said to me, "rarely
+expects her husband to support her. She takes the whole burden herself."
+
+And the women, so the loan association visitors told me, are the chief
+savers: they are the ones who get and keep the bank accounts. I have heard
+a great deal South and North about the immorality of Negro women. Much
+immorality no doubt exists, but no honest observer can go into any of the
+crowded coloured communities of Northern cities and study the life without
+coming away with a new respect for the Negro women.
+
+Another hopeful work in Indianapolis is the juvenile court. A boy who
+commits a crime is not immediately cast off to become a more desperate
+criminal and ultimately to take his revenge upon the society which
+neglected him. He comes into a specially organised court, where he meets
+not violence, but friendliness and encouragement. Mrs. Helen W. Rogers is
+at the head of the probation work in Indianapolis, and she has under her
+supervision a large corps of voluntary probation officers, thirty of whom
+are coloured men and women--the best in town. These coloured probation
+officers have an organisation of which George W. Cable, who is the foreman
+of the distributing department of the Indianapolis post-office, is the
+chairman. A Negro boy charged with an offence is turned over to one of
+these leading Negro men or women, required to report regularly, and helped
+until he gets on his feet again. Thus far the system has worked with great
+success. Boys whose offences are too serious for probation are sent, not
+to a jail or chain-gang, where they become habitual criminals, but to a
+reform school, where they are taught regular habits of work.
+
+
+_Why the Negro Often Fails_
+
+As I continued my inquiries I found that the leading coloured men in most
+cities, though they might be ever so discouraged over the condition of the
+ignorant, reckless masses of their people, were awakening to the fact
+that the Negro's difficulty in the North was not all racial, not all due
+to mere colour prejudice, but also in large measure to lack of training,
+lack of aggressiveness and efficiency, lack of organisation. In New York a
+"Committee for Improving the Industrial Condition of Negroes" has been
+formed. It is composed of both white and coloured men, and the secretary
+is S. R. Scottron, an able coloured man. The object of the committee is to
+study the condition of the Negroes in New York City, find out the causes
+of idleness, and try to help the Negro to better employment.
+
+This committee has experienced difficulty not so much in finding openings
+for Negroes, as in getting reliable Negroes to fill them. Boys and girls,
+though educated in the public schools, come out without knowing how to do
+anything that will earn them a living. Although the advantages of Cooper
+Institute and other industrial training schools are open to Negroes, they
+have been little used, either from lack of knowledge of the opportunity,
+or because the Negroes preferred the regular literary courses of the
+schools. So many unskilled and untrained Negroes, both old and young, have
+discouraged many employers from trying any sort of Negro help. I shall not
+forget the significant remark of a white employer I met in Indianapolis: a
+broad-gauge man, known for his philanthropies.
+
+"I've tried Negro help over and over again, hoping to help out the
+condition of Negro idleness we have here. I have had two or three good
+Negro workers, but so many of them have been wholly undisciplined,
+irresponsible, and sometimes actually dishonest, that I've given up
+trying. When I hear that an applicant is coloured, I don't employ him."
+
+Upon this very point Professor Bulkley said to me:
+
+"The great need of the young coloured people is practical training in
+industry. A Negro boy can't expect to get hold in a trade unless he has
+had training."
+
+R. R. Wright, Jr., who has made a study of conditions in Philadelphia,
+says:
+
+"It is in the skilled trades that the Negroes are at the greatest
+disadvantage. Negroes have been largely shut out of mechanical trades
+partly because of indifference and occasional active hostility of labour
+unions, partly because it has been difficult to overcome the traditional
+notion that a 'Negro's place' is in domestic service, but chiefly because
+there have been practically no opportunities for Negroes to learn trades.
+Those Negroes who know skilled trades and follow them are principally men
+from the South, who learned their trades there. The poorest of them fall
+into domestic service; the best have found places at their trades. For the
+Negro boy who is born in this city it is difficult to acquire a trade, and
+here, I say, the system has been weakest."
+
+With the idea of giving more practical training School No. 80 in New York,
+of which Professor Bulkley is principal, is now opened in the evenings for
+industrial instruction. Last year 1,300 coloured people, young and old,
+were registered. In short, there is a recognition in the North as in the
+South of the need of training the Negro to work. And not only the Negro,
+but the white boy and girl as well--as Germany and other European
+countries have learned.
+
+
+_The Road from Slavery to Freedom_
+
+At Indianapolis I found an organisation of Negro women, called the Woman's
+Improvement Club. The president, Mrs. Lillian T. Fox, told me what the
+club was doing to solve the problem of the coloured girl and boy who could
+not get work. She found that, after all, white prejudice was not so much a
+bugaboo as she had imagined. The newspapers gave publicity to the work;
+the Commercial Club, the foremost business men's organisation of the city,
+offered to lend its assistance; several white employers agreed to try
+coloured help, and one, the Van Camp Packing Company, one of the great
+concerns of its kind in the country, even fitted up a new plant to be
+operated wholly by coloured people. Last fall, after the season's work was
+over, one of the officers of the company told me that the Negro plant had
+been a great success, that the girls had done their work faithfully and
+with great intelligence.
+
+Just recently a meeting of coloured carpenters was held in New York to
+organise for self-help, and they found that, by bringing pressure to bear,
+the Brotherhood of Carpenters was perfectly willing to accept them as
+members of the union, on exactly the same basis as any other carpenters.
+
+In short, the Negro is beginning to awaken to the fact that if he is to
+survive and succeed in Northern cities, it must be by his own skill,
+energy, and organisation. For, like any individual or any race, striving
+for a place in industry or in modern commercial life, the Negro must, in
+order to succeed, not only equal his competitor, but become more
+efficient. A Negro contractor said to me:
+
+"Yes, I can get any amount of work, but they expect me to do it a little
+better and a little cheaper than my white competitors." Then he added:
+
+"And I can do it, too!"
+
+Those are the only terms on which success can be won.
+
+For so long a time the Negro has been driven or forced to work, as in the
+South, that he learns only slowly, in an intense, impersonal, competitive
+life like that of the North, where work is at a premium, that he himself,
+not the white man, must do the driving. It is the lesson that raises any
+man from slavery into freedom.
+
+
+_Pullman Porters_
+
+So much for industry. The Negro in the North has also been going into
+business and into other and varied employment. The very difficulty of
+getting hold in the trades and in salaried employment has driven many
+coloured people into small business enterprises: grocery stores, tailor
+shops, real estate or renting agencies. If they are being driven out by
+white men as waiters and barbers, they enjoy, on the other hand, growing
+opportunities as railroad and Pullman porters and waiters--places which
+are often highly profitable, and lead, if the Negro saves his money, to
+better openings. A Negro banker whom I met in the South told me that he
+got his start as a Pullman porter. He had a good run, and by being active
+and accommodating, often made from $150 to $200 a month from his wages and
+tips.
+
+But the same change is going on in the North that I found everywhere in
+the South. I mean a growing race consciousness among Negroes--the building
+up of a more or less independent Negro community life within the greater
+white civilisation. Every force seems to be working in that direction.
+
+
+_Business Among Boston and Philadelphia Negroes_
+
+As I have showed many Negroes in Boston (and indeed in other cities) have
+made a success in business enterprises which are patronised by white
+people--or rather by both races. Coloured doctors and lawyers in Boston
+have more or less white practice. Of course, coloured men who can succeed
+without reference to their colour and do business with both races, wish to
+continue to do so--but the tendency in the North, as in the South, is all
+against such development and toward Negro enterprises for the Negro
+population. Even in Boston numerous enterprises are conducted by Negroes
+for Negroes. I visited several small but prosperous grocery stores. A
+Negro named Basil F. Hutchins has built up a thriving undertaking and
+livery establishment for Negro trade. Charles W. Alexander has a
+print-shop with coloured workmen and publishes _Alexander's Magazine_. A
+new hotel called the Astor House, conducted by Negroes for Negroes, has
+250 rooms with telephone service in each room, a large restaurant and many
+of the other attractions of a good hotel. But in this growth the North is
+far behind the South. Scores of Negro banks are to be found in the South,
+not one in the North. Cities like Richmond, Va., Jackson, Miss.,
+Nashville, Tenn., have a really remarkable development of Negro business
+enterprises.
+
+Perhaps I can convey a clearer idea of the great variety of employment of
+Negroes in Northern cities by outlining the condition in a single city,
+Philadelphia--information for which I am indebted to R. R. Wright, Jr. The
+census of 1900 shows that out of 28,940 Negro males (boys and men), 21,128
+were at work, and out of 33,673 girls and women, 14,095 were wage-earners.
+Here are some of the more numerous occupations of Negro men:
+
+  Common labourers                 7,690
+  Servants and waiters             4,378
+  Teamsters and hackmen            1,957
+  Porters and helpers in stores      921
+  Barbers and hairdressers           444
+  Messengers and errand boys         346
+  Brick and stone masons             308
+
+Most of these are, of course, low-class occupations--the hard wage-work of
+the city in which the men often sink below the poverty line. On the other
+hand the census gives these figures:
+
+  Negro professional men (415) and women (170)
+  including doctors, clergymen, dentists, teachers,
+  electricians, architects, artists, musicians,
+  lawyers, journalists, civil engineers, actors,
+  literary and scientific persons, etc.                585
+
+  Retail merchants, men (297), women (22).             319
+
+  Hotel keepers                                         13
+
+One Negro runs a men's furnishing store; another, a drug store; others,
+groceries, meats, etc. The beneficial society has grown to a regular
+insurance company, the renting agent has become a real estate dealer.
+Within the past twelve months Negroes have incorporated two realty
+companies, one land investment company, four building and loan
+associations, one manufacturing company, one insurance company, besides a
+number of other smaller concerns.
+
+The civil service has proved of advantage to the Negro of Philadelphia, as
+of every other large Northern city. In the post-office there are about 150
+clerks, carriers and other employees, on the police force about 70
+patrolmen, and 40 school-teachers and about 200 persons in other municipal
+offices.
+
+
+_Wherein Lies Success for Negroes_
+
+I have thus endeavoured to present the conditions of the Negro in the
+North and show his relationship with white people. I have tried to exhibit
+every factor, good or bad, which plays a part in racial conditions. Many
+sinister influences exist: the large increase of ignorant and unskilled
+Negroes from the South; the growing prejudice in the North, both social
+and industrial, against the Negro; the high death-rate and low birth-rate
+among the Negro population, which is due to poverty, ignorance, crime, and
+an unfriendly climate. On the other hand, many encouraging and hopeful
+tendencies are perceptible. Individual Negroes are forcing recognition in
+nearly all branches of human activity, entering business life and the
+professions. A new racial consciousness is growing up leading to
+organisations for self-help; and while white prejudice is increasing, so
+is white helpfulness as manifested in social settlements, industrial
+schools, and other useful philanthropies.
+
+All these forces and counter forces--economic, social, religious,
+political--are at work. We can all see them plainly, but we cannot judge
+of their respective strength. It is a tremendous struggle that is going
+on--the struggle of a backward race for survival within the swift-moving
+civilisation of an advanced race. No one can look upon it without the most
+profound fascination for its interests as a human spectacle, nor without
+the deepest sympathy for the efforts of 10,000,000 human beings to
+surmount the obstacles which beset them on every hand.
+
+And what a struggle it is! As I look out upon it and see this dark horde
+of men and women coming up, coming up, a few white men here and there
+cheering them on, a few bitterly holding them back, I feel that Port
+Arthur and the battles of Manchuria, bloody as they were, are not to be
+compared with such a conflict as this, for this is the silent, dogged,
+sanguinary, modern struggle in which the combatants never rest upon their
+arms. But the object is much the same: the effort of a backward race for a
+foothold upon this earth, for civilised respect and an opportunity to
+expand. And the Negro is not fighting Russians, but Americans, Germans,
+Irish, English, Italians, Jews, Slavs--all those mingling white races
+(each, indeed, engaged in the same sort of a struggle) which make up the
+nation we call America.
+
+The more I see of the conflict the more I seem to see that victory or
+defeat lies with the Negro himself. As a wise Negro put it to me:
+
+"Forty years ago the white man emancipated us: but we are only just now
+discovering that we must emancipate ourselves."
+
+Whether the Negro can survive the conflict, how it will all come out, no
+man knows. For this is the making of life itself.
+
+
+
+
+_PART THREE_
+
+THE NEGRO IN THE NATION
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+THE MULATTO: THE PROBLEM OF RACE MIXTURE
+
+
+I had not been long engaged in the study of the race problem when I found
+myself face to face with a curious and seemingly absurd question:
+
+"What is a Negro?"
+
+I saw plenty of men and women who were unquestionably Negroes, Negroes in
+every physical characteristic, black of countenance with thick lips and
+kinky hair, but I also met men and women as white as I am, whose assertion
+that they were really Negroes I accepted in defiance of the evidence of my
+own senses. I have seen blue-eyed Negroes and golden-haired Negroes; one
+Negro girl I met had an abundance of soft straight red hair. I have seen
+Negroes I could not easily distinguish from the Jewish or French types; I
+once talked with a man I took at first to be a Chinaman but who told me he
+was a Negro. And I have met several people, passing everywhere for white,
+who, I knew, had Negro blood.
+
+Nothing, indeed, is more difficult to define than this curious physical
+colour line in the individual human being. Legislatures have repeatedly
+attempted to define where black leaves off and white begins, especially in
+connection with laws prohibiting marriage between the races. Some of the
+statutes define a Negro as a "person with one-eighth or more of Negro
+blood." Southern people, who take pride in their ability to distinguish
+the drop of dark blood in the white face, are themselves frequently
+deceived. Several times I have heard police judges in the South ask
+concerning a man brought before them:
+
+"Is this man coloured or white?"
+
+Just recently a case has arisen at Norfolk, Va., in which a Mrs. Rosa
+Stone sued the Norfolk & Western Railroad Company for being compelled by
+the white conductor, who thought her a Negro, to ride in a "Jim Crow" car.
+Having been forced into the Negro compartment, it remained for a real
+coloured woman, who knew her personally, to draw the line against her.
+This coloured woman is reported as saying:
+
+"Lor, Miss Rosa, this ain't no place for you; you b'long in the cars back
+yonder."
+
+It appears that Mrs. Stone was tanned.
+
+
+_Curious Story of a White Man Who Was Expelled as a Negro_
+
+Here is a story well illustrating the difficulties sometimes encountered
+by Southerners in deciding who is white and who is coloured. On March 6,
+1907, the Atlanta _Georgian_ published this account of how a man who, it
+was said, was a Negro passing for a white man, was expelled by a crowd of
+white men from the town of Albany, Ga.:
+
+     Peter Zeigler, a Negro, was last night escorted out of town by a
+     crowd of white men. Zeigler had been here for a month and palmed
+     himself off as a white man. He has been boarding with one of the best
+     white families in the city and has been associating with some of
+     Albany's best people. A visiting lady recognised him as being a Negro
+     who formerly lived in her city, and her assertion was investigated
+     and found to be correct. Last night he was carried to Forester's
+     Station, a few miles north of here, and ordered to board an outgoing
+     train.
+
+     Zeigler has a fair education and polished manners, and his colour was
+     such that he could easily pass for a white man where he was not
+     known.
+
+Immediately after suffering the indignity of being expelled from Albany,
+Mr. Zeigler communicated with his friends and relatives, a delegation of
+whom came from Charleston, Orangeburg, and Summerville, S. C. and proved
+to the satisfaction of everyone that Mr. Zeigler was, in reality, a white
+man connected with several old families of South Carolina. Of this return
+of Mr. Zeigler the Albany _Herald_ says:
+
+     The _Herald_ yesterday contained the account of the return to Albany
+     of Peter B. Zeigler, the young man who was forced to leave Albany
+     between suns on the night of March 4th. The young man upon his return
+     was accompanied by a party composed of relatives and influential
+     friends from his native state of South Carolina.
+
+Nothing surely could throw a more vivid light on colour line confusions in
+the South than this story.
+
+Another extraordinary case is that of Mrs. Elsie Massey, decided in Tipton
+County, Tenn., after years of litigation, in which one side tried to prove
+that Mrs. Massey was a Negro, the daughter of a cotton planter named "Ed"
+Barrow, and a quadroon slave, and the other side tried to prove that she
+was of pure Caucasian blood. On June 13, 1907, a jury of white men finally
+declared that Mrs. Massey was white and that she and her children might
+inherit $250,000 worth of property. Such instances as these, a few among
+almost innumerable cases, will indicate how difficult it often is to
+decide who is and who is not a Negro--the definition of Negro here being
+that used in the South, a person having any Negro blood, no matter how
+little.
+
+
+_How Many Mulattoes There Are_
+
+Few people realise how large a proportion of the so-called Negro race in
+this country is not really Negro at all, but mulatto or mixed blood,
+either half white, or quadroon, or octoroon, or some other combination. In
+the last census (1900) the government gave up the attempt in
+discouragement of trying to enumerate the mulattoes at all, and counted
+all persons as Negroes who were so classed in the communities where they
+resided. The census of 1870 showed that one-eighth (roughly) of the Negro
+population was mulatto, that of 1890 showed that the proportion had
+increased to more than one-seventh. But these statistics are confessedly
+inaccurate: the census report itself says:
+
+"These figures are of little value. Indeed, as an indication of the extent
+to which the races have mingled, they are misleading."
+
+From my own observation, and from talking and corresponding with many men
+who have had superior opportunities for investigation, I think it safe to
+say that between one-fourth and one-third of the Negroes in this country
+at the present time have a _visible_ admixture of white blood. At least
+the proportion is greater than the census figures of 1870 and 1890 would
+indicate. It is probable that 3,000,000 persons out of the 10,000,000
+population are visibly mulattoes. It will be seen, then, how very
+important a matter it is, in any careful survey of the race problem, to
+consider the influence of the mixed blood. In the North, indeed, the race
+problem may almost be called a mulatto problem rather than a Negro
+problem, for in not a few places the mixed bloods are in excess of the
+darker types.
+
+Many mulattoes have a mixed ancestry reaching back to the beginning of
+civilisation in North America; for the Negro slave appeared practically as
+soon as the white colonist. Many Negroes mixed (and are still mixing in
+Oklahoma) with the Indians, and one is to-day often astonished to see
+distinct Indian types among them. I shall never forget a woman I saw in
+Georgia--as perfect of line as any Greek statue--erect, lithe, strong,
+with sleek straight hair, the high cheekbones of the Indian, but the lips
+of the Negro. She was plainly an Indian type--but had no memory of
+anything but Negro ancestry. A strain of Arab blood from Africa runs in
+the veins of many Negroes, in others flows the blood of the Portuguese
+slave-traders or of the early Spanish adventurers or of the French who
+settled in New Orleans, to say nothing of every sort of American white
+blood. In my classification I have estimated 3,000,000 persons who are
+"visibly" mulattoes: the actual number who have some strain of
+blood--Arab, Portuguese, Spanish, French, Indian--other than Negro, must
+be considerably larger.
+
+It is a curious problem, this of colour. Several times, in different parts
+of the country, I have been told by both white and coloured observers that
+Negroes, even without the admixture of white blood, were gradually growing
+lighter--the effect of a cold climate, clothing and other causes. A
+tendency toward such a change, an adaptation to new environment, is
+certainly in accord with the best scientific beliefs, but whether a mere
+century or two in America has really operated to whiten the blackness of
+thousands of years of jungle life, must be left for the careful scientist
+to decide. It is certain that the darkest American Negro is far superior
+to the native African Negro.
+
+
+_Story of a Real African Woman_
+
+At Montgomery, Ala., Mr. Craik took me to see a real African woman, one of
+the very few left who were captured in Africa and brought to this country
+as slaves. She came in the _Wanderer_, long after the slave trade was
+forbidden by law, and was secretly landed at Mobile about 1858. She is a
+stocky, vigorous old woman. She speaks very little English, and I could
+not understand even that little. She asserts, I am told, that she is the
+daughter of a king in Africa, and she tells yet of the hardships and
+alarms of the ocean voyage. Her daughter is married to a
+respectable-looking Negro farmer. Mr. Craik succeeded, in spite of her
+superstitious terrors, in getting her to submit to having a picture taken.
+
+And yet all these strange-blooded people are classed roughly together as
+Negroes. I remember sitting once on the platform at a great meeting at the
+People's Tabernacle in Atlanta. An audience of some 1,200 coloured people
+was present. A prominent white man gave a brief address in which he urged
+the Negroes present to accept with humility the limitations imposed upon
+them by their heredity, that they were Negroes and that therefore they
+should accept with grace the place of inferiority. Now as I looked out
+over that audience, which included the best class of coloured people in
+Atlanta, I could not help asking myself:
+
+"What is this blood he is appealing to, anyway?"
+
+For I saw comparatively few men and women who could really be called
+Negroes at all. Some were so light as to be indistinguishable from
+Caucasians. A bishop of the African Methodist Episcopal Church who sat
+near me on the platform was a nephew of Robert Toombs, one of the great
+men of the South, a leader of the Confederacy. Another man present was a
+grandson of a famous senator of South Carolina. Several others that I knew
+of were half-brothers or sisters or cousins of more or less well-known
+white men. And I could not hear this appeal to heredity without thinking
+of the not at all humble Southern blood which flowed in the veins of some
+of these men and women. How futile such advice really was, and how little
+it got into the hearts of the audience, was forcibly impressed on me
+afterward by the remark of a mulatto I met.
+
+"They've given us their blood, whether we wanted it or not," he said, "and
+now they ask us not to respond to the same ambitions and hopes that they
+have. They have given us fighting blood and expect us not to struggle."
+
+
+_Attitude of the Mixed Blood Toward the Black Negroes_
+
+In the cities of the South no inconsiderable communities of mulattoes have
+long existed, many of them highly prosperous. Even before the war
+thousands of "free persons of colour" resided in Charleston, Richmond, and
+New Orleans. In places like Charleston they had (and still have to some
+extent) an exclusive society of their own which looked down on the black
+Negro with a prejudice equal to that of the white man. The census of 1860
+shows a population of 3,441 "free persons of colour" in Charleston alone,
+of whom 2,554 were mulattoes. In New Orleans in the same year lived 9,084
+free Negroes, of whom 7,357 were mulattoes; and they were so far distant
+in sympathy from the slave population that they even tendered their
+support to the Confederacy at the beginning of the war.
+
+But with the Emancipation Proclamation the aristocratic "free person of
+colour" who had formed a sort of third class as between the white above
+and the black below, lost his unique position: the line was drawn against
+him. When I went South I expected to find a good deal of aloofness between
+the mulatto and the black man. It does exist, but really less to-day in
+the South than in Boston! The very first mulatto, a preacher in Atlanta,
+with whom I raised the question, surprised me by denying that the mulatto
+was in any degree potentially superior to the real Negro: that if the
+black man were given the same advantages and environment as the mulatto,
+he would do as well, that the prominence of the mulatto is the result of
+the superior advantages he has long enjoyed, being the house servant in
+slavery times, with opportunities for education and discipline that the
+black man never possessed. This was his argument, and to support it he
+gave me a long list of black Negroes who had achieved success or
+leadership. I found Booker T. Washington and Professor Du Bois (themselves
+both mulattoes) arguing along the same lines. In other words, the
+prejudice of white people has forced all coloured people, light or dark,
+together, and has awakened in many ostracised men and women who are nearly
+white a spirit which expresses itself in the passionate defence of
+everything that is Negro.
+
+And yet, with what pathos! What is this race? The spirit and the ideals
+are not Negro: for the people are not Negro, even the darkest of them, in
+the sense that the inhabitants of the jungles of Africa are Negroes. The
+blackest of black American Negroes is far ahead of his naked cousin in
+Africa. But neither are they white!
+
+One evening last summer I attended a performance at Philadelphia of a
+Negro play called the "Shoo-Fly Regiment." It was written, both words and
+music, by two clever mulattoes, Cole and Johnson; and it was wholly
+presented by Negroes. The audience was large, mostly composed of coloured
+people, and the laughter was unstinted. The point that impressed me was
+this, that the writers had chosen a distinct Negro subject. The play dealt
+with two questions of much interest among coloured people: the matter of
+industrial education, and the Negro soldier. That, it seemed to me, was
+significant: it was an effort to appeal to the class consciousness of the
+Negro.
+
+And yet as I sat and watched the play I could not help being impressed
+with the essential tragedy of the so-called Negro people. The players of
+the company were of every colour, from the black African type to the
+mulatto with fair hair and blue eyes. In spite of this valiant effort to
+emphasise certain racial interests, one who saw the play could not help
+asking:
+
+"What, after all, is this Negro race? What is the Negro spirit? Is it in
+this black African or in this white American with the drop of dark blood?"
+
+In a recent address a coloured minister of San Francisco, J. Hugh Kelley,
+said:
+
+"My father's father was a Black Hawk Indian, seven feet tall. My father's
+mother was an Irishwoman. My mother's father was an American white man.
+Her mother was a full-blooded African woman. What am I?"
+
+
+_Pathetic Desire of Negroes to Be Like White Men_
+
+Even among those Negroes who are most emphatic in defence of the race
+there is, deep down, the pathetic desire to be like the dominant white
+man. It is not unreasonable, nor unnatural, for all outward opportunity of
+development lies open to the white man. To be coloured is to be
+handicapped in the race for those things in life which men call desirable.
+I remember discussing the race question one evening with a group of
+intelligent coloured men. They had made a strong case for the Negro
+spirit, and the need of the race to stand for itself, but one of them said
+in a passing remark (what the investigator overhears is often of greater
+significance than what he hears), speaking of a mulatto friend of his:
+
+"His hair is _better_ than mine."
+
+He meant _straighter_, more like that of the white man.
+
+The same evening, another Negro, referring to a light-complexioned
+coloured man, said:
+
+"Thank God, he is passing now for white."
+
+At Philadelphia a dark Negro made this comment on one of the coloured
+churches where mulattoes are in the ascendancy:
+
+"You can't have a good time when you go there unless you have straight
+hair."
+
+This remark indicated not only the ideal held by the speaker, but showed
+the line drawn by the light-coloured man against his darker brother.
+
+In the same way it is almost a universal desire of Negroes to "marry
+whiter;" that is, a dark man will, if possible, marry a mulatto woman, the
+lighter the better. The ideal is whiteness: for whiteness stands for
+opportunity, power, progress.
+
+Give a coloured man or woman white blood, educate him until he has
+glimpses of the greater possibilities of life and then lock him forever
+within the bars of colour, and you have all the elements of tragedy. Dr.
+DuBois in his remarkable book, "The Souls of Black Folk," has expressed
+more vividly than any other writer the essential significance of this
+tragedy. I read the book before I went South and I thought it certainly
+overdrawn, the expression of a highly cultivated and exceptional Mulatto,
+but after meeting many Negroes I have been surprised to find how truly it
+voices a wide experience.
+
+
+_Experience of a Highly Educated Mulatto_
+
+DuBois tells in this book how he first came to realise that he was really
+a Negro. He was a boy in school near his home in Massachusetts.
+
+"Something," he writes, "put it into the boys' and girls' heads to buy
+gorgeous visiting cards--ten cents a package--and exchange. The exchange
+was merry, till one girl, a tall newcomer, refused my card--refused it
+peremptorily, with a glance. Then it dawned upon me with a certain
+suddenness that I was different from the others; or like, mayhap, in heart
+and life and longing, but shut out from their world by a vast veil. I had
+thereafter no desire to tear down that veil, to creep through; I held all
+beyond it in common contempt, and lived above it in a region of blue sky
+and great wandering shadows. That sky was bluest when I could beat my
+mates at examination time, or beat them at a foot-race, or even beat their
+stringy heads. Alas, with the years all this fine contempt began to fade;
+for the worlds I longed for, and all their dazzling opportunities, were
+theirs not mine.... With other black boys the strife was not so fiercely
+sunny; their youth shrunk into tasteless sycophancy or into silent hatred
+of the pale world about them and mocking distrust of everything white; or
+wasted itself in a bitter cry, Why did God make me an outcast and a
+stranger in mine own house? The shades of the prison-house closed round
+about us all: walls strait and stubborn to the whitest, but relentlessly
+narrow, tall and unscalable to sons of night who must plod darkly on in
+resignation, or beat unavailing palms against the stone, or steadily,
+half-hopelessly, watch the streak of blue above."
+
+If space permitted I could tell many stories illustrative of the daily
+tragedy which many mulattoes are meeting in this country, struggles that
+are none the less tragic for being inarticulate. Here is a letter which I
+received not long ago from a mulatto professor in a Western Negro college:
+
+"I wonder how you will treat that point to which you have thus far only
+referred in your studies, 'Where does the colour line really begin?' What
+is to become of that large class of which I am a part, that class which is
+neither white nor black and yet both? There are millions of us who have
+the blood of both races, and, if heredity means anything, who have the
+traditions, feelings, and passions of both. Yet we are black in name, in
+law, in station, in everything save face and figure, despite the
+overwhelming white blood. And why? Certainly not because we have to be.
+America is a big country: it is easy to get lost, even in a neighbouring
+state. Some of us do, and the process has been going on so long in certain
+large cities of the North until we cease to think about it. But the
+majority of us stay and live and work out our destiny among the people
+into whom we were born, living ofttimes side by side with our white
+brothers and sisters. When I go back to Atlanta after an absence of two
+years, I can, if I wish, go back in a Pullman, go out of the main entrance
+of the station, get my dinner at the Piedmont Hotel, and when I am tired
+of being Mr. Hyde, I can stroll down Auburn Avenue with my friends in the
+full glory of Dr. Jekyll. As a matter of fact I shall doubtless avail
+myself of the privilege of a sleeper, sneak out the side entrance, get on
+the last seat of the car, despite the conductor's remonstrance, go on to
+my friends at once and be myself all the time I am there. I wouldn't be a
+white man if I had to. I want to be black. I want to love those who love
+me. I want to help those who need my help. And I know hundreds just like
+me: I know others who are not.
+
+"I wonder if you can decide: 'Where does the colour line really--end?'"
+
+
+_A Negro Who Lived First as a White Man, Then as a Negro_
+
+When I was in Philadelphia I met an intelligent Negro named A. L. Manley,
+who is at present the janitor of a large apartment house. He has been
+connected with the good-government movement in Philadelphia, being the
+leader of a club of coloured men who have supported the reform party. When
+I first met him I should not have known him for a Negro, he is so white.
+His white grandfather was a famous governor of North Carolina--Charles
+Manley. He was educated at Wilmington, N. C., and at Hampton Institute.
+For a time he published a Negro newspaper at Wilmington, but during the
+race riot in that city a number of years ago he was driven out and his
+property was destroyed, his office being burned to the ground. After a
+year or two in Washington he came to Philadelphia, where he endeavoured to
+get work at his trade as a painter and decorator, but the moment he
+informed employers that he was a coloured man they refused to hire
+him--usually excusing themselves on the ground that union labour would
+refuse to work with him.
+
+"So I tried being white," he said: "that is, I did not reveal the fact
+that I had coloured blood, and I immediately got work in some of the best
+shops in Philadelphia. I joined the union and had no trouble at all."
+
+But during all this time he had to live, as he says, "the life of a
+sneak." He had to sneak out of his home in the morning and return to it
+only after nightfall, lest someone discover that his family (he has a wife
+and two children) was coloured.
+
+"The thing finally became unbearable," he said; "no decent man could stand
+it. I preferred to be a Negro and hold up my head rather than to be a
+sneak."
+
+So he dropped his trade and became a janitor. In other words, he stepped
+back, as so many Negroes in the North are forced to do, into a form of
+domestic service, although in his case the position is one of
+responsibility and good pay.
+
+Such stories of the problem of the mulatto are innumerable; and yet I do
+not wish to imply that the life is all shadow, for it isn't. The Negro
+blood, wherever it is, supplies an element of light-heartedness which will
+not be wholly crushed. It is this element, indeed, that accounts in no
+small degree for the survival of the Negro in this country. Where the
+Indian perished for want of adaptability, the Negro has survived by sheer
+elasticity of temperament: it is perhaps the highest natural gift of the
+Negro race. One hears much of the unfavourable traits of the Negro, but
+certainly, judging from any point of view, the power of adaptability
+displayed by the Negro in a wholly foreign environment, under the harshest
+conditions, and his ability to thrive and increase in numbers, even
+meeting the competition of the dominant race, and to keep on laughing at
+his work, is a power which in any race would be regarded as notable.
+
+
+_Why Some Light Mulattoes do not "Cross over to White"_
+
+I once asked a very light mulatto why he did not "cross the line," as they
+call it (or "go over to white") and quit his people. His answer surprised
+me; it was so distinctly an unexpected point of view.
+
+"Why," he said, "white people don't begin to have the good times that
+Negroes do. They're stiff and cold. They aren't sociable. They don't
+laugh."
+
+Here certainly was a criticism of the white man! And it was corroborated
+by a curious story I heard at Memphis, of a mulatto well known among the
+coloured people of Tennessee. A number of years ago it came to him
+suddenly one day that he was white enough to pass anywhere for white, and
+he acted instantly on the inspiration. He went to Memphis and bought a
+first-class ticket on a Mississippi River boat to Cincinnati. No one
+suspected that he was coloured; he sat at the table with white people and
+even occupied a state-room with a white man. At first he said he could
+hardly restrain his exultation, but after a time, although he said he
+talked and smoked with the white men, he began to be lonesome.
+
+"It grew colder and colder," he said.
+
+In the evening he sat on the upper deck and as he looked over the railing
+he could see, down below, the Negro passengers and deck hands talking and
+laughing. After a time, when it grew darker, they began to sing--the
+inimitable Negro songs.
+
+"That finished me," he said, "I got up and went downstairs and took my
+place among them. I've been a Negro ever since."
+
+An ordinary community of middle or working class white people is often
+singularly barren of any social or intellectual interest: it is often
+sombre, sodden, uninteresting. Not so the Negro community. In several
+cities I have tried to trace out the social life of various cliques,
+especially among the mulattoes, and I have been astonished to find how
+many societies there are, often with high-sounding names, how many church
+affairs must be attended to, how many suppers and picnics are constantly
+under way, how many clubs and secret societies are supported.
+
+Forced upon themselves, every point of contact with the white race becomes
+to the Negro a story of peculiar human interest. The view they get from
+the outside or underneath of white civilisation is not, to say the least,
+altogether our view. Once, in a gathering of mulattoes I heard the
+discussion turn to the stories of those who had "gone over to
+white"--friends or acquaintances of those who were present. Few such cases
+are known to white people, but the Negroes know many of them. It developed
+from this conversation (and afterward I got the same impression many
+times) that there is a sort of conspiracy of silence to protect the Negro
+who "crosses the line" and takes his place as a white man. Such cases even
+awaken glee among them, as though the Negro, thus, in some way, was
+getting even with the dominant white man.
+
+
+_Stories of Negroes Who Have Crossed the Colour Line_
+
+I don't know how many times I have heard mulattoes speak of the French
+novelist Dumas as having Negro blood, and they also claim Robert Browning
+and Alexander Hamilton (how truly I do not know). But the cases which
+interest them most are those in this country; and there must be far more
+of them than white people imagine. I know of scores of them. A well-known
+white actress, whose name, of course, I cannot give, when she goes to
+Boston, secretly visits her coloured relatives. A New York man who holds a
+prominent political appointment under the state government and who has
+become an authority in his line, is a Negro. Not long ago he entered a
+hotel in Baltimore and the Negro porter who ran to take his bag said
+discreetly:
+
+"Hello, Bob."
+
+As boys they had gone to the same Negro school.
+
+"Let me carry your bag," said the porter, "I won't give you away."
+
+In Philadelphia there lives a coloured woman who married a rich white man.
+Of course, no white people know she is coloured, but the Negroes do, and
+do not tell. Occasionally she drives down to a certain store, dismisses
+her carriage and walks on foot to the home of her mother and sisters.
+
+Only a few years ago the newspapers were filled for a day or two with the
+story of a girl who had been at Vassar College, and upon graduation by
+merest accident it was discovered that she was a Negro. A similar case
+arose last year at Chicago University, that of Miss Cecelia Johnson, who
+had been a leader in her class, a member of the Pi Delta Phi Sorority and
+president of Englewood House, an exclusive girls' club. She was the sister
+of a well-known Negro politician of Chicago.
+
+The Chicago _Tribune_, after publishing a story to the effect that Miss
+Johnson had kept her parentage secret apologised for the publicity in
+these words:
+
+     The Tribune makes this reparation spontaneously and as a simple act
+     of justice.
+
+     There is not the slightest mystery about Miss Johnson. Her life has
+     been an open book. She has won distinction at high school, and
+     university, and her career appears to have been free from any blemish
+     that should lessen the love of her intimate friends or the respect in
+     which she is held by her acquaintances.
+
+Some mulattoes I know of, one a prominent Wall Street broker, have
+"crossed the line" by declaring that they are Mexicans, Brazilians,
+Spanish or French; one says he is an Armenian. Under a foreign name they
+are readily accepted among white people where, as Negroes, they would be
+instantly rejected. No one, of course, can estimate the number of men and
+women with Negro blood who have thus "gone over to white"; but it must be
+large.
+
+
+_Does Race Amalgamation Still Continue?_
+
+One of the first questions that always arises concerning the mulatto is
+whether or not the mixture of blood still continues and whether it is
+increasing or decreasing. In other words, is the amalgamation of the races
+still going on and to what extent?
+
+Intermarriage between the races is forbidden by law in all the Southern
+states and also in the following Northern and Western states: Arizona,
+California, Colorado, Delaware, Idaho, Indiana, Missouri, Nebraska,
+Nevada, Oklahoma, Oregon, and Utah. In all other Northern and Western
+states marriage between the races is lawful.
+
+And yet, the marriage laws, so far as they affect the actual problem of
+amalgamation, mean next to nothing at all. No legal marriage existed
+between the races in slavery times and yet there was a widespread mixture
+of blood. Concubinage was a common practice: a mulatto was worth more in
+cash than a black man. The great body of mulattoes now in the country
+trace their origin to such relationships.
+
+And such practice of slavery days no more ceased instantly with a paper
+Emancipation Proclamation than many other customs and habits which had
+grown up out of centuries of slave relationships. It is a slow process,
+working out of slavery, both for white men and black.
+
+I made inquiries widely in every part of the South among both white and
+coloured people and I found a strong and rapidly growing sentiment
+against what the South calls "miscegenation." For years white men in many
+communities, often prominent judges, governors, wealthy planters, made
+little or no secret of the fact that they had a Negro family as well as a
+white family.
+
+
+[Illustration: A TYPE OF NEGRO GIRL
+
+Typesetter in Atlanta. Many Negro girls are entering stenography,
+bookkeeping, dressmaking, millinery and other occupations.]
+
+[Illustration: MULATTO GIRL STUDENT
+
+At Clark University, Atlanta. At the completion of her studies this young
+woman will take up missionary work in Africa.]
+
+[Illustration: MISS CECELIA JOHNSON
+
+A mulatto who could be easily taken for a white person. She was a leader
+in her class in Chicago University.]
+
+
+And the practice is far from dead yet. Every Southern town knows of such
+cases, often many of them: and a large number of mulatto children to-day
+are the sons and daughters of Southern white men, often men of decided
+importance in their communities. In one town I visited I heard a white man
+expressing with great bitterness his feeling against the Negro race,
+arguing that the Negro must be kept down, else it would lead to the
+mongrelisation of the white race. The next morning as chance would have
+it, another white man with whom I was walking pointed out to me a neat
+cottage, the home of the Negro family of the white man who had talked with
+me on the previous evening. And I saw this man's coloured children in the
+yard!
+
+The better class of Southern people know perfectly well of these
+conditions and are beginning to attack them boldly. At a meeting in the
+Court Street Methodist Church in Montgomery, Ala., in 1907, Dr. J. A.
+Rice, the pastor, made this statement, significant in its very
+fearlessness, of changing sentiment:
+
+"I hesitate before I make another statement which is all too true. I
+hesitate, because I fear that in saying it I shall be charged with
+sensationalism. But even at the risk of such a charge I will say, for it
+must be said, that there are in the city of Montgomery, four hundred Negro
+women supported by white men."
+
+The next morning this statement was reported in the Montgomery
+_Advertiser_.
+
+It may be said also, that these 400 cases in a city of 35,000 people do
+not represent a condition of mere vice. Many of the women are comfortably
+provided for and have families of children. Vice is wholly distinct from
+this system of concubinage; for there are in Montgomery thirty-two Negro
+dives operated for white patronage--also the statement of Dr. Rice, quoted
+in the Montgomery _Advertiser_.
+
+The proportion of such cases in some of the less progressive Southern
+towns even to-day, is almost appalling: and at the same time that speakers
+and writers are railing at the mulatto for his disturbing race leadership
+and his restless desire for political and other rights, and while they are
+declaiming against amalgamation and mongrelisation, the mulatto population
+is increasing. Striving to keep the Negro in his place as a Negro, the
+South is making him more and more a white man.
+
+
+_Attempt to Stop Miscegenation_
+
+Among Southern women, not unnaturally, the feeling aroused by these
+practices has been especially bitter. Here is a remarkable plea, published
+in the _Times-Democrat_ on June 21, 1907, signed "A woman."
+
+     Will you kindly publish the following without attaching my signature
+     or divulging it in any way? I have several brothers who are
+     old-maidish enough to have nervous prostration if they should see my
+     name signed to such an unmaidenly, immodest letter, but I do my
+     thinking without any assistance from them, and hope for the sake of
+     peace in my family that they will not recognise me in print.
+
+     I am a resident of a large town in the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta, where
+     miscegenation is common--where, if a man isolates himself from
+     feminine society, the first and only conclusion reached is, "he has a
+     woman of his own" in saddle, of duskier shade. This conclusion is
+     almost without exception true. If some daring woman, not afraid of
+     being dubbed a Carrie Nation, were to canvass the delta counties of
+     Mississippi taking the census, she would find so many cases of
+     miscegenation, and their resultant mongrel families, that she would
+     bow her head in shame for the "flower of Southern chivalry"--gone to
+     seed.
+
+Awakened by a sense of the fearfulness of these conditions, such a strong
+paper as the New Orleans _Times-Democrat_ has been conducting a campaign
+for laws which shall punish the white man who maintains illicit relations
+with Negroes. For years attempts have been made in the legislatures of
+several states (in part successfully) to enact such legislation, but the
+practice has been so firmly entrenched that many of the efforts have
+failed.
+
+On February 15, 1906, the _Times-Democrat_ put the case in stronger
+language than I would dare to do:
+
+     It is a public scandal that there should be no law of this kind
+     (against miscegenation) on the statute book of Louisiana, and that it
+     should be left to mobs to break up the miscegenatious couples. The
+     failure to pass a law of this kind is attributed to white
+     degenerates, men who denounce social equality yet practice it, men
+     who are more dangerous to their own race than the most inflammatory
+     Negro orator and social equality preacher, and who have succeeded by
+     some sort of legislative trickery in pigeon-holing or killing the
+     bills intended to protect Louisiana from a possible danger. Such men
+     should be exposed before the people of the state in their true
+     colours.
+
+It will thus be seen how deep-seated the difficulty is. And yet, as I have
+followed the editorial expression of many Southern newspapers, I have been
+astonished to see how people are beginning to talk out. Here is an
+editorial from the _Star_ of Monroe, La.:
+
+     DESTRUCTIVE CRIME OF MISCEGENATION
+
+     There can be no greater wrong done the people of any community than
+     for public sentiment to permit and tolerate this growing and
+     destructive crime of miscegenation, yet in many towns and cities of
+     Louisiana, especially, there are to-day white men cohabiting with
+     Negro women, who have sweet and lovable families. This is a crime
+     that becomes almost unbearable, and should bring the blush of shame
+     to every man's cheek who dares to flaunt his debased and degrading
+     conceptions of morality in the eyes of self-respecting men and women.
+
+In January, 1907, District Attorney J. H. Currie, in Judge Cochran's court
+at Meridian, Miss., addressed a jury on what he called "the curse of
+miscegenation." In the course of his speech he said:
+
+"The accursed shadow of miscegenation hangs over the South to-day like a
+pall of hell. We talk much of the Negro question and all of its possible
+ramifications and consequences, but, gentlemen, the trouble is not far
+afield. Our own people, our white men with their black concubines, are
+destroying the integrity of the Negro race, raising up a menace to the
+white race, lowering the standard of both races and preparing the way for
+riot, mob, criminal assaults, and, finally, a death struggle for racial
+supremacy. The trouble is at our own door. We have tolerated this crime
+long enough, and if our country is not run by policy rather than by law,
+then it is time to rise up and denounce this sin of the earth."
+
+
+_Anti-Miscegenation League is Formed_
+
+Strong men and women, indeed, in several states have begun to organise
+against the evil. At Francisville, La., in May (1907), a meeting was
+called to organise against what one of the speakers, Mr. Wickliffe, called
+the "yellow peril" of the South. He said that "every man familiar with
+conditions in our midst knows that the enormous increase in persons of
+mixed blood is due to men of the white race openly keeping Negro women as
+concubines." Out of this meeting grew an organisation to help stamp out
+the evil. About the same time, a mass meeting was held in Vicksburg,
+Miss., and an Anti-Miscegenation League was formed.
+
+The hatred and fear of such relationships have grown most rapidly, of
+course, among the better classes of white people. The class of white men
+who consort with Negro women at the present time is of a much lower sort
+than it was five or ten years ago, or than it was in slavery times.
+
+And the Negroes on their part are also awakening to the seriousness of
+this problem. I found in several Negro communities women's clubs and other
+organisations which are trying, feebly enough, but significantly trying,
+to stem the evil from their side. It is a terrible slough to get out of.
+Negro women, and especially the more comely and intelligent of them, are
+surrounded by temptations difficult indeed to meet. It has been and is a
+struggle in Negro communities, especially village communities, to get a
+moral standard established which will make such relationships with white
+men unpopular. In some places to-day, the Negro concubines of white men
+are received in the Negro churches and among the Negroes generally, and
+honoured rather than ostracised. They are often among the most intelligent
+of the Negro women, they often have the best homes and the most money to
+contribute to their churches. They are proud of their light-coloured
+children. And yet, as the Negroes begin to be educated, they develop an
+intense hatred of these conditions: and the utter withdrawal of the best
+sort of Negro families from any white associations is due in part to the
+dread of such temptations. I shall never forget the bitterness in the
+reply of a coloured blacksmith who had a number of good-looking girls. I
+said to him jokingly:
+
+"I suppose you are going to send them to college."
+
+"Why should I?" he asked. "What good will it do? Educate them to live with
+some white man!"
+
+
+_The Tragedy of the Negro Girl_
+
+A friend of mine, Southern by birth, told me a story of an experience he
+had at Nashville, where he went to deliver an address at Fisk University,
+a Negro college. On his way home in the dark, he chanced to walk close
+behind two mulatto girls who had been at the lecture. They were discussing
+it. One of them said:
+
+"Well, it's no use. There is no chance down here for a yellow girl. It's
+either get away from the South--or the usual thing."
+
+In that remark lay a world of bitter knowledge of conditions.
+
+It is remarkable, indeed, that the Negroes should have begun to develop
+moral standards as rapidly as they have. For in the South few people
+_expect_ the coloured girl to be moral: everything is against her
+morality. In the first place, the home life of the great mass of Negroes
+is still primitive. They are crowded together in one or two rooms, they
+get no ideas of privacy, or of decency. The girls are the prey not only of
+white men but of men of their own race. The highest ideal before their
+eyes in many cases is the finely dressed, prosperous concubine of a white
+man. Moreover, in nearly all Southern towns, houses of prostitution are
+relegated to the Negro quarter. At Montgomery, Ala., I saw such places in
+respectable Negro neighbourhoods, against which the Negro people had
+repeatedly and bitterly objected to the city authorities, to no purpose.
+The example of such places of vice on Negro children is exactly what it
+would be on white children. In the same way, although it seems
+unbelievable, Negro schools in several cities have been built in vice
+districts. I saw a fine new brick school for coloured children at
+Louisville placed in one of the very nastiest streets of the city. The
+same conditions surround at least one coloured school which I saw at New
+Orleans.
+
+And yet the South, permitting such training in vice, wonders at Negro
+immorality and is convulsed over the crime of rape. Demanding that the
+Negro be self-restrained, white men set the example in every way from
+concubinage down, of immorality and lack of restraint. They sow the
+whirlwind and look for no crop!
+
+When the coloured girl grows up, she goes to service in a white family,
+where she either sleeps in an outbuilding (the survival of the old system
+of Negro "quarters") or goes home at night. In either event the mistress
+rarely pays the slightest attention to her conduct in this particular. I
+talked with a woman, a fine type of the old gentlefolk, who expressed
+with frankness a common conviction in the South.
+
+"We don't consider," she said, "that the Negroes have any morals. Up North
+where I was visiting this summer I was amazed to find women with coloured
+servants looking after them, trying to keep them in at night and prevent
+mischief. We never do that; we know it isn't any use."
+
+It may be imagined how difficult it is in such an atmosphere for Negroes
+to build up moral standards, or to live decently. If there ever was a
+human tragedy in this world it is the tragedy of the Negro girl.
+
+
+_Relations Between White Men and Negro Women_
+
+Illicit relationships between the races have not gone on without causing
+many a troubled conscience. Nor has a difference in colour always deadened
+the deeper feelings of the human heart. In spite of laws and colour lines,
+human nature, wherever found, is profoundly alike. In making my inquiries
+among coloured colleges I found to my astonishment that in nearly all of
+them mulatto boys and girls are being educated, and well educated, by
+their white fathers. A number of them are at Atlanta University, Tuskegee,
+Hampton, Fisk--indeed, at all of the colleges. And Wilberforce College,
+next after Lincoln University of Chester County, Pa., the oldest Negro
+institution of learning in the country, founded in 1856, was largely
+supported in slavery times by Southern white men who felt a moral
+obligation to educate their coloured sons and daughters. Large farms
+around Wilberforce (near Xenia) which I have visited were originally
+bought by Southern slave-owners for their mulatto children, where they
+could get away from the South and grow up in a free state. Some of these
+mulatto children, educated in Latin and Greek, with too much money and
+little to do, went straight to the devil, while others conserved their
+property, and it is to-day in the hands of their descendants.
+
+Thus the relations between white men and Negro women even to-day, though
+marriage is forbidden by law, are sometimes remarkable in their expression
+of the deepest emotions of the human heart. I shall never forget the story
+of one such case among many that I heard in the South. I withhold the
+names in this case although the story is widely known among the people in
+that part of Alabama. At ---- lives a planter of prominence who was
+formerly on the staff of the governor of the state. He had no white
+family, but everyone knew that he lived with a mulatto woman and was
+raising a coloured family. When the boys and girls were old enough, he
+sent them to Atlanta University, to Tuskegee, and to Spellman Seminary,
+providing them plentifully with money. He also paid for his wife's
+sister's schooling.
+
+A year or so ago his mulatto "wife" died; and he was heart-broken. He sent
+for his boys to come from college and let it be known that he would have
+something to say at the funeral. Many white and coloured people,
+therefore, attended and followed the body of the Negro woman to the
+cemetery. At the grave, General ---- stepped forward and raised his hand.
+
+"I have just one word to say here to-day. These children who are here have
+always gone by their mother's name. I want to acknowledge them now in
+front of all these people as my children; and henceforth they will bear my
+name. I wish also to say that this woman who lies here was my wife, not by
+law, but in the sight of God. I here acknowledge her. This is a duty I
+have to do not only to this woman but to God. When I leave my property I
+shall leave it to those children, and shall see that they get it."
+
+
+_Intermarriage of the Races in the North_
+
+So much for Southern conditions. How is it in the North where
+intermarriage is not forbidden by law?
+
+In 1903, during a heated political campaign in Mississippi, United States
+Senator Money repeatedly made the assertion that in Massachusetts in the
+previous year, because there were no laws to separate the Negro and
+prevent intermarriage, 2,000 white women had married Negro men. I heard
+echoes of Senator Money's statistics in several places in the South.
+
+I have made a careful investigation of the facts in several northern
+cities, and I have been surprised to discover how little intermarriage
+there really is.
+
+If intermarriage in the North were increasing largely, Boston, being the
+city where the least race prejudice exists and where the proportion of
+mulattoes is largest, would show it most plainly. As a matter of fact, in
+the year 1902, when according to Senator Money, 2,000 white women married
+coloured men, there were in Boston, which contains the great bulk of the
+Negro population of Massachusetts, just twenty-nine inter-racial
+marriages.
+
+Although the Negro population of Boston has been steadily increasing, the
+number of marriages between the races, which remained about stationary
+from 1875 to 1890, has since 1900 been rapidly decreasing. Here are the
+exact figures as given by the registry department:
+
+  RACIAL INTERMARRIAGES IN BOSTON
+
+           Groom       Groom
+          Coloured     White        Total
+           Bride       Bride        Mixed
+           White      Coloured    Marriages
+
+  1900      32           3           35
+  1901      30           1           31
+  1902      25           4           29
+  1903      27           2           29
+  1904      27           1           28
+  1905      17           2           19
+
+At Boston and in other Northern towns I made inquiries in regard to the
+actual specific instances of intermarriage.
+
+There are two classes of cases, first, what may be called the
+intellectuals; highly educated mulattoes who marry educated white women. I
+have the history of a number of such intermarriages, but there is not
+space here to relate the really interesting life stories which have grown
+out of them. One of the best-known Negro professors in the country has a
+white wife. I saw the home where they live under almost ideal
+surroundings. A mulatto doctor of a Southern town married a white girl who
+was a graduate of Wellesley College; they had trouble in the South and
+have "gone over to white" and are now living in the North. They have two
+children. A Negro business man of Boston has a white wife; they celebrated
+recently the twenty-fifth anniversary of their marriage.
+
+
+[Illustration: MRS. BOOKER T. WASHINGTON
+
+MRS. ROBERT H. TERRELL Photograph by Clinedinst
+
+TWO OF THE LEADING WOMEN OF THE NEGRO RACE]
+
+
+But such cases as these are rare. In the great majority of intermarriages
+the white women belong to the lower walks of life. They are German, Irish,
+or other foreign women, respectable, but ignorant. As far as I can see
+from investigating a number of such cases, the home life is as happy as
+that of other people in the same stratum of life. But the white woman
+who thus marries a Negro is speedily declassed: she is ostracised by the
+white people, and while she finds a certain place among the Negroes, she
+is not even readily accepted as a Negro. In short, she is cut off from
+both races. When I was at Xenia, O., I was told of a case of a white man
+who was arrested for living with a Negro woman. The magistrate compelled
+him to marry the Negro woman as the worst punishment he could invent!
+
+For this reason, although there are no laws in most Northern states
+against mixed marriages, and although the Negro population has been
+increasing, the number of intermarriages is not only not increasing, but
+in many cities, as in Boston, it is decreasing. It is an unpopular
+institution!
+
+No one phase of the race question has aroused more acrimonious discussion
+than that of the Mulatto, especially as to the comparative physical
+strength and intelligence of the black Negro and the mulatto, a subject
+which cannot be here entered into.
+
+
+_Most Leaders of the Negro Race are Mulattoes_
+
+This much I know from my own observation: most of the leading men of the
+race to-day in every line of activity are mulattoes. Both Booker T.
+Washington and Dr. DuBois are mulattoes. Frederick Douglass was a mulatto.
+The foremost literary men, Charles W. Chesnutt and William Stanley
+Braithwaite, are mulattoes; the foremost painter of the race, H. O.
+Tanner, whose pictures have been in the Luxembourg, and who has been an
+honour to American art, is a mulatto. Both Judge Terrell and his wife,
+Mary Church Terrell, who is a member of the School Board of Washington,
+are mulattoes. On the other hand, there are notable exceptions to the
+rule. W. T. Vernon, Register of the United States Treasury, and Professor
+Kelly Miller of Washington, D. C., one of the ablest men of his race, both
+have the appearance of being full-blooded Negroes. Paul Lawrence Dunbar,
+the poet, was an undoubted Negro; so was J. C. Price, a brilliant orator;
+so is M. C. B. Mason, secretary of the Southern Aid Society of the
+Methodist Church.
+
+Full-blooded Negroes often make brilliant school and college records, even
+in comparison with white boys. It is the judgment of Hampton Institute,
+after years of careful observation, that there is no difference in ability
+between light and dark Negroes. I quote from the _Southern Workman_,
+published at Hampton:
+
+     The question as to the comparative intelligence of light and dark
+     Negroes is one that is not easily settled. After long years of
+     observation Hampton's records show that about an equal number of
+     mulattoes and pure blacks have made advancement in their studies and
+     at their work. While it is probable that the lighter students are
+     possessed of a certain quickness which does not belong to the darker,
+     there is a power of endurance among the blacks that does not belong
+     to their lighter brethren.
+
+As to the comparative accomplishment of light and dark Negroes after
+leaving school, the evidence is so confusing that I would not dare to
+enter upon a generalisation: that question must be left to the great
+scientific sociologist who will devote a lifetime to this most interesting
+problem in human life.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+LYNCHINGS, SOUTH AND NORTH
+
+
+Most of the studies for this book were made in 1906, 1907, and 1908, but I
+investigated the subject of lynching, South and North, in the fall of
+1904. Since that time the feeling against mob-vengeance has been gaining
+strength throughout the country and the number of lynchings has been
+steadily decreasing. But the number is still appalling and many recent
+cases, especially in the black belt, have been accompanied by brutal
+excesses. My studies made four years ago are typical of present
+conditions; I have, indeed, confirmed them by a somewhat careful
+examination made last year (1907) of two or three recent cases.
+
+Lynch-law reached its height in the late eighties and early nineties. In
+the sixteen years from 1884 to 1900 the number of persons lynched in the
+United States was 2,516. Of these 2,080 were in the Southern states and
+436 in the North; 1,678 were Negroes and 801 were white men; 2,465 were
+men and 51 were women. I am here using the accepted (indeed the only)
+statistics--those collected by the Chicago _Tribune_. As showing the
+gradual growth of the sentiment against mob-law I can do no better than to
+give the record of lynchings for a number of successive years:
+
+  1891    192
+  1892    235
+  1893    200
+  1894    190
+  1895    171
+  1896    131
+  1897    166
+  1898    127
+  1899    107
+  1900    116
+  1901    135
+  1902     96
+  1903    104
+  1904     87
+  1905     66
+  1906     73
+  1907     56
+
+Before I take up the account of specific cases an analysis of the
+lynchings for the years 1906 and 1907 will help to show in what states mob
+rule is most often invoked and for what offences lynchings are most
+common. Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana and Georgia--the black belt
+states--are thus seen to have the worst records, and the figures here
+given do not include the men killed in the Atlanta riot which would add
+twelve to the Georgia record for 1906:
+
+Following is the comparative number of lynchings for the two years.
+
+  State               1907    1906
+
+  Alabama              13       5
+  Arkansas              3       4
+  Colorado             --       1
+  Florida              --       6
+  Georgia               6       9
+  Indian Territory      2       1
+  Iowa                  1      --
+  Kentucky              1       3
+  Louisiana             8       9
+  Maryland              2       1
+  Mississippi          12      13
+  Missouri             --       3
+  Nebraska              1      --
+  North Carolina       --       5
+  Oklahoma              2      --
+  South Carolina        1       2
+  Tennessee             1       5
+  Texas                 3       6
+                       --      --
+      Totals           56      73
+
+Of those lynched in 1907, 49 were Negro men, three Negro women and four
+white men. By methods:
+
+  Hanging            31
+  Shot to death      17
+  Hanged and shot     3
+  Shot and burned     2
+  Beaten to death     1
+  Kicked to death     1
+
+The offences for which these men and woman were lynched range from
+stealing seventy-five cents and talking with white girls over the
+telephone, to rape and murder. Here is the list:
+
+  For being father of boy who jostled white women     1
+  For being victor over white man in fight            1
+  Attempted murder                                    5
+  Murder of wife                                      1
+  Murder of husband and wife                          1
+  Murder of wife and stepson                          1
+  Murder of mistress                                  1
+  Manslaughter                                       10
+  Accessory to murder                                 1
+  Rape                                                8
+  Attempted rape                                     11
+  Raping own stepdaughter                             1
+  For being wife and son of a raper                   2
+  Protecting fugitive from posse                      1
+  Talking to white girls over telephone               1
+  Expressing sympathy for mob's victim                3
+  Three-dollar debt                                   2
+  Stealing seventy-five cents                         1
+  Insulting white man                                 1
+  Store burglary                                      3
+
+In making my study I visited four towns where lynchings had taken place,
+two in the South, Statesboro in Ga. and Huntsville in Ala.; and two in the
+North, Springfield, O., and Danville, Ill.
+
+
+I.--LYNCHING IN THE SOUTH
+
+Statesboro, Ga., where two Negroes were burned alive under the most
+shocking circumstances, on August 16, 1904, is a thrifty county seat
+located about seventy miles from Savannah.
+
+For a hundred years a settlement has existed there, but it was not until
+the people discovered the wealth of the turpentine forests and of the
+sea-island cotton industry that the town became highly prosperous. Since
+1890 it has doubled in population every five years, having in 1904 some
+2,500 people. Most of the town is newly built. A fine, new court-house
+stands in the city square, and there are new churches, a large, new
+academy, a new water-works system and telephones, electric lights, rural
+free delivery--everywhere the signs of improvement and progress. It is
+distinctly a town of the New South, developed almost exclusively by the
+energy of Southerners and with Southern money. Its population is pure
+American, mostly of old Carolina, Georgia, and Virginia stock. Fully 70
+per cent. of the inhabitants are church members--Baptists, Presbyterians,
+and Methodists--and the town has not had a saloon in twenty-five years and
+rarely has a case of drunkenness. There are no beggars and practically no
+tramps. A poorhouse, built several years ago, had to be sold because no
+one would go to it. The farms are small, for the most part, and owned by
+the farmers themselves; only 8 per cent. of them are mortgaged. There are
+schools for both white and coloured children, though the school year is
+short and education not compulsory.
+
+In short, this is a healthy, temperate, progressive American town--a
+country city, self-respecting, ambitious, with a good future before
+it--the future of the New South.
+
+
+_Character of the Negro Population_
+
+About 40 per cent. of the population of the county consists of Negroes.
+Here as elsewhere there are to be found two very distinct kinds of
+Negroes--as distinct as the classes of white men. The first of these is
+the self-respecting, resident Negro. Sometimes he is a land-owner, more
+often a renter; he is known to the white people, employed by them, and
+trusted by them. In Statesboro, as in most of the South, a large
+proportion of the Negroes are of this better class. On the other hand, one
+finds everywhere many of the so-called "worthless Negroes," perhaps a
+growing class, who float from town to town, doing rough work, having no
+permanent place of abode, not known to the white population generally. The
+turpentine industry has brought many such Negroes to the neighbourhood of
+Statesboro. Living in the forest near the turpentine-stills, and usually
+ignorant and lazy, they and all their kind, both in the country districts
+and in the city, are doubly unfortunate in coming into contact chiefly
+with the poorer class of white people, whom they often meet as industrial
+competitors.
+
+
+_Danger from the Floating Negro_
+
+In all the towns I visited, South as well as North, I found that this
+floating, worthless Negro caused most of the trouble. He prowls the roads
+by day and by night; he steals; he makes it unsafe for women to travel
+alone. Sometimes he has gone to school long enough to enable him to read a
+little and to write his name, enough education to make him hate the hard
+work of the fields and aspire to better things, without giving him the
+determination to earn them. He has little or no regard for the family
+relations or home life, and when he commits a crime or is tired of one
+locality, he sets out, unencumbered, to seek new fields, leaving his wife
+and children without the slightest compunction.
+
+
+[Illustration: PAUL REED
+
+WILL CATO
+
+Negroes lynched by being burned alive at Statesboro, Georgia]
+
+[Illustration: NEGROES OF THE CRIMINAL TYPE
+
+Pictures taken in the Atlanta Jail
+
+Will Johnson, arrested, charged with the Camp assault.
+
+Lucius Frazier, who entered a home in the residence district of Atlanta.]
+
+
+About six miles from the city of Statesboro lived Henry Hodges, a
+well-to-do planter. He had a good farm, he ran three ploughs, as they say
+in the cotton country, and rumour reported that he had money laid by.
+Coming of an old family, he was widely related in Bullock County, and his
+friendliness and kindness had given him and his family a large circle of
+acquaintances. Family ties and friendships, in old-settled communities
+like those in the South, are influences of much greater importance in
+fixing public opinion and deciding political and social questions than
+they are in the new and heterogeneous communities of the North.
+
+The South is still, so far as the white population is concerned, a
+sparsely settled country. The farmers often live far apart; the roads are
+none too good. The Hodges home was in a lonely place, the nearest
+neighbours being Negroes, nearly half a mile distant. No white people
+lived within three-quarters of a mile. Hodges had been brought up among
+Negroes, he employed them, he was kind to them. To one of the Negroes
+suspected of complicity in the subsequent murder, he had loaned his
+shot-gun; another, afterward lynched, called at his home the very night
+before the murder, intending then to rob him, and Hodges gave him a bottle
+of turpentine to cure a "snake-graze."
+
+
+_Story of the Murder_
+
+On the afternoon of July 29, 1904, Mr. Hodges drove to a neighbour's house
+to bring his nine-year-old girl home from school. No Southern white
+farmer, especially in thinly settled regions like Bulloch County, dares
+permit any woman or girl of his family to go out anywhere alone, for fear
+of the criminal Negro.
+
+"You don't know and you can't know," a Georgian said to me, "what it means
+down here to live in constant fear lest your wife or daughter be attacked
+on the road, or even in her home. Many women in the city of Statesboro
+dare not go into their backyards after dark. Every white planter knows
+that there is always danger for his daughters to visit even the nearest
+neighbour, or for his wife to go to church without a man to protect her."
+
+It is absolutely necessary to understand this point of view before one can
+form a true judgment upon conditions in the South.
+
+When Hodges arrived at his home that night, it was already dark. The
+little girl ran to join her mother; the father drove to the barn. Two
+Negroes--perhaps more--met him there and beat his brains out with a stone
+and a buggy brace. Hearing the noise, Mrs. Hodges ran out with a lamp and
+set it on the gate-post. The Negroes crept up--as nearly as can be
+gathered from the contradictory stories and confessions--and murdered her
+there in her doorway with peculiar brutality. Many of the crimes committed
+by Negroes are marked with almost animal-like ferocity. Once aroused to
+murderous rage, the Negro does not stop with mere killing; he bruises and
+batters his victim out of all semblance to humanity. For the moment, under
+stress of passion, he seems to revert wholly to savagery.
+
+The Negroes went into the house and ransacked it for money. The little
+girl, who must have been terror-stricken beyond belief, hid behind a
+trunk; the two younger children, one a child of two years, the other a
+mere baby, lay on the bed. Finding no money, the Negroes returned to their
+homes. Here they evidently began to dread the consequences of their deed,
+for toward midnight they returned to the Hodges home. During all this time
+the little girl had been hiding there in darkness, with the bodies of her
+father and mother in the doorway. When the Negroes appeared, she either
+came out voluntarily, hoping that friends had arrived, or she was dragged
+out.
+
+"Where's the money?" demanded the Negroes.
+
+The child got out all she had, a precious five-cent piece, and offered it
+to them on condition that they would not hurt her. One of them seized her
+and beat her to death.
+
+I make no excuse for telling these details; they _must be told_, else we
+shall not see the depths or the lengths of this problem.
+
+
+_Burning of the Hodges Home_
+
+The Negroes then dragged the bodies of Mr. and Mrs. Hodges into their home
+and set the house afire. As nearly as can be made out from the subsequent
+confessions, the two younger children were burned alive.
+
+When the neighbours reached the scene of the crime, the house was wholly
+consumed, only the great end chimney left standing, and the lamp still
+burning on the gate-post.
+
+Well, these Southerners are warm-hearted, home-loving people. Everybody
+knew and respected the Hodges--their friends in the church, their many
+relatives in the county--and the effect of this frightful crime described
+in all its details, may possibly be imagined by Northern people living
+quietly and peacefully in their homes. When two of the prominent citizens
+of the town told me, weeks afterward, of the death of the little girl,
+they could not keep back their tears.
+
+The murder took place on Friday night; on Saturday the Negroes, Paul Reed
+and Will Cato, were arrested with several other suspects, including two
+Negro preachers. Both Reed and Cato were of the illiterate class; both had
+been turpentine workers, living in the forest, far from contact with white
+people. Cato was a floater from South Carolina. Reed was born in the
+county, but he was a good type of the worthless and densely ignorant
+Negro.
+
+It is a somewhat common impression that a whole town loses itself in a
+passion of anarchy, and is not satisfied until the criminals are killed.
+But in spite of the terrible provocation and the intense feeling, there
+yet existed in Statesboro exactly such a feeling for the sacredness of
+law, such intelligent Americanism, as exists in your town or mine. Not
+within the present generation had a lynching taken place in the town, and
+the people were deeply concerned to preserve the honour and good name of
+their community. In the midst of intense excitement a meeting of good
+citizens, both white and black, was called in the court-house. It was
+presided over by J. A. Brannan, one of the foremost citizens. Speeches
+were made by Mayor Johnstone, by the ministers of the town, and by other
+citizens, including a Negro, all calling for good order and the calm and
+proper enforcement of the law.
+
+
+_Attempts to Prevent the Lynching_
+
+And the regular machinery of justice was put in motion with commendable
+rapidity. Fearing a lynching, the Negroes who had been arrested were sent
+to Savannah and there lodged in jail. A grand jury was immediately called,
+indictments were found, and in two weeks--the shortest possible time under
+the law--the Negroes were brought back from Savannah for trial. To protect
+them, two military companies, one from Statesboro, one from Savannah, were
+called out. The proof of guilt was absolutely conclusive, and, although
+the Negroes were given every advantage to which they were entitled under
+the law, several prominent attorneys having been appointed to defend them,
+they were promptly convicted and sentenced to be hanged.
+
+In the meantime great excitement prevailed. The town was crowded for days
+with farmers who came flocking in from every direction. The crime was
+discussed and magnified; it was common talk that the "niggers of Madison
+County are getting too bigoty"--that they wouldn't "keep their places."
+Fuel was added to the flame by the common report that the murderers of the
+Hodges family were members of a Negro society known as the "Before Day
+Club," and wild stories were told of other murders that had been planned,
+the names of intended victims even being reported.
+
+On the Sunday night before the trial, two Negro women, walking down the
+street are said to have crowded two respectable white girls off the
+sidewalk. A crowd dragged the women from a church where they had gone,
+took them to the outskirts of the town, whipped them both violently, and
+ordered them to leave the county.
+
+"Let the law take its course," urged the good citizen. "The Negroes have
+been sentenced to be hanged, let them be hanged legally; we want no
+disgrace to fall on the town."
+
+
+_How the Lynchers Themselves Defend a Lynching_
+
+But as the trial progressed and the crowd increased, there were louder and
+louder expressions of the belief that hanging was too good for such a
+crime. I heard intelligent citizens argue that a Negro criminal, in order
+to be a hero in the eyes of his people, does not mind being hanged!
+
+Another distinct feeling developed--a feeling that I found in other
+lynching towns: that somehow the courts and the law were not to be
+trusted to punish the criminals properly. Although Reed and Cato were
+sentenced to be hanged, the crowd argued that "the lawyers would get them
+off," that "the case would be appealed, and they would go free."
+
+Members of the mob tried to get Sheriff Kendrick to promise not to remove
+the Negroes to Savannah, fearing that in some way they would be taken
+beyond the reach of justice.
+
+In other words, there existed a deep-seated conviction that justice too
+often miscarried in Bulloch County and that murderers commonly escaped
+punishment through the delays and technicalities of the law.
+
+
+_A Habit of Man-killing_
+
+And there is, unfortunately, a foundation for this belief. In every
+lynching town I visited I made especial inquiry as to the prevalence of
+crime, particularly as to the degree of certainty of punishment for crime.
+In all of them property is safe; laws looking to the protection of goods
+and chattels are executed with a fair degree of precision; for we are a
+business-worshipping people. But I was astounded by the extraordinary
+prevalence in all these lynching counties, North as well as South, of
+crimes of violence, especially homicide, accompanied in every case by a
+poor enforcement of the law. Bulloch County, with barely twenty-five
+thousand inhabitants, had thirty-two homicides in a little more than five
+years before the lynching--an annual average of one to every four thousand
+five hundred people (the average in the entire United States being one to
+nine thousand). Within eight months prior to the Hodges lynching, no fewer
+than ten persons (including the Hodges family) were murdered in Bulloch
+County. In twenty-eight years, notwithstanding the high rate of homicides,
+only three men, all Negroes, have been legally hanged, while four
+men--three Negroes and one white man--have been lynched.
+
+It is well understood that if the murderer has friends or a little money
+to hire lawyers, he can, especially if he happens to be white, nearly
+always escape with a nominal punishment. These facts are widely known and
+generally commented upon. In his subsequent charge to the grand jury,
+Judge Daley said that the mob was due in part to "delays in the execution
+of law and to the people becoming impatient."
+
+I am not telling these things with any idea of excusing or palliating the
+crime of lynching, but with the earnest intent of setting forth all the
+facts, so that we may understand just what the feelings and impulses of a
+lynching town really are, good as well as bad. Unless we diagnose the case
+accurately, we cannot hope to discover effective remedies.
+
+
+_Psychology of the Mob_
+
+In the intense, excited crowd gathered around the court-house on this
+Tuesday, the 16th of August, other influences were also at work,
+influences operating in a greater or less degree in every lynching mob. We
+are accustomed to look upon a mob as an entity, the expression of a single
+concrete feeling; it is not; it is itself torn with dissensions and
+compunctions, swayed by conflicting emotions. Similarly, we look upon a
+militia company as a sort of machine, which, set in operation,
+automatically performs a certain definite service. But it is not. It is
+made up of young men, each with his own intense feelings, prejudices,
+ideals; and it requires unusual discipline to inculcate such a sense of
+duty that the individual soldier will rise superior to the emotions of the
+hour. Most of these young men of Statesboro and Savannah really
+sympathised with the mob; among the crowd the Statesboro men saw their
+relatives and friends. Some of the officers were ambitious men, hoping to
+stand for political office. What would happen if they ordered the troops
+to fire on their neighbours?
+
+And "the nigger deserved hanging," and "why should good white blood be
+shed for nigger brutes?" At a moment of this sort the clear perception of
+solemn abstract principles and great civic duties fades away in tumultuous
+excitement. Yet these soldier boys were not cowards; they have a fighting
+history; their fathers made good soldiers; they themselves would serve
+bravely against a foreign enemy, but when called upon for mob service they
+failed utterly, as they have failed repeatedly, both North and South.
+
+Up to the last moment, although the crowd believed in lynching and wanted
+to lynch, there seemed to be no real and general determination to
+forestall the law. The mob had no centre, no fixed purpose, no real plan
+of action. One determined man, knowing his duty (as I shall show in
+another story), and doing it with common sense, could have prevented
+trouble, but there was no such man. Captain Hitch, of the Savannah
+Company, a vacillating commander, allowed the crowd to pack the
+court-house, to stream in and out among his soldiers; he laid the
+responsibility (afterward) on the sheriff, and the sheriff shouldered it
+back upon him. In nearly all the cases I investigated, I found the same
+attempt to shift responsibility, the same lack of a responsible head. Our
+system too often fails when mob stress is laid upon it--unless it happens
+that some strong man stands out, assumes responsibility, and becomes a
+momentary despot.
+
+
+_How the Soldiers Were Overpowered_
+
+A mob, no matter how deeply inflamed, is always cowardly. This mob was no
+exception. It crowded up, crowded up, testing authority. It joked with the
+soldiers, and when it found that the jokes were appreciated, it took
+further liberties; it jostled the soldiers--good-humouredly. "You don't
+dare fire," it said, and the soldiers made no reply. "Your guns aren't
+loaded," it said, and some soldier confessed that they were not. In tender
+consideration for the feelings of the mob, the officers had ordered the
+men not to load their rifles. The next step was easy enough; the mob
+playfully wrenched away a few of the guns, those behind pushed
+forward--those behind always do push forward, knowing they will not be
+hurt--and in a moment the whole mob was swarming up the stairs, yelling
+and cheering.
+
+In the court-room, sentence had been passed on Reed and Cato, and the
+judge had just congratulated the people on "their splendid regard for the
+law under very trying conditions." Then the mob broke in. A brother of the
+murdered Hodges, a minister from Texas, rose magnificently to the
+occasion. With tears streaming down his face, he begged the mob to let the
+law take its course.
+
+"We don't want religion, we want blood," yelled a voice.
+
+The mob was now thoroughly stirred; it ceased to hesitate; it was
+controlled wholly by its emotions. The leaders plunged down the court-room
+and into the witness chamber, where the Negroes sat with their wives,
+Reed's wife with a young baby. The officers of the law accommodatingly
+indicated the right Negroes, and the mob dragged them out. Hanging was at
+first proposed, and a man even climbed a telegraph-pole just outside the
+court-house, but the mob, growing more ferocious as it gathered volume and
+excitement, yelled its determination:
+
+"Burn them! burn them!"
+
+They rushed up the road, intending to take the Negroes to the scene of the
+crime. But it was midday in August, with a broiling hot sun overhead and a
+dusty road underfoot. A mile from town the mob swerved into a turpentine
+forest, pausing first to let the Negroes kneel and confess. Calmer spirits
+again counselled hanging, but some one began to recite in a high-keyed
+voice the awful details of the crime, dwelling especially on the death of
+the little girl. It worked the mob into a frenzy of ferocity.
+
+"They burned the Hodges and gave them no choice; burn the niggers!"
+
+"Please don't burn me," pleaded Cato. And again: "Hang me or shoot me;
+please don't burn me!"
+
+
+_Burning of the Negroes_
+
+Some one referred the question to the father-in-law of Hodges. He said
+Hodges's mother wished the men burned. That settled it. Men were sent into
+town for kerosene oil and chains, and finally the Negroes were bound to an
+old stump, fagots were heaped around them, and each was drenched with oil.
+Then the crowd stood back accommodatingly, while a photographer, standing
+there in the bright sunshine, took pictures of the chained Negroes.
+Citizens crowded up behind the stump and got their faces into the
+photograph. When the fagots were lighted, the crowd yelled wildly. Cato,
+the less stolid of the two Negroes, partly of white blood, screamed with
+agony; but Reed, black and stolid, bore it like a block of wood. They
+threw knots and sticks at the writhing creatures, but always left room
+for the photographer to take more pictures.
+
+And when it was all over, they began, in common with all mobs, to fight
+for souvenirs. They scrambled for the chains before they were cold, and
+the precious links were divided among the populace. Pieces of the stump
+were hacked off, and finally one young man--it must be told--gathered up a
+few charred remnants of bone, carried them uptown, and actually tried to
+give them to the judge who presided at the trial of the Negroes, to the
+utter disgust of that official.
+
+
+_After Effects of Mob-law_
+
+This is the law of the mob, that it never stops with the thing it sets out
+to do. It is exactly like any other manifestation of uncontrolled human
+passion--given licence it takes more licence, it releases that which is
+ugly, violent, revengeful in the community as in the individual human
+heart. I have heard often of a "quiet mob," an "orderly mob," which "went
+about its business and hanged the nigger," but in all the cases I have
+known about, and I made special inquiries upon this particular point, not
+one single mob stopped when the immediate work was done, unless under
+compulsion. Even good citizens of Statesboro will tell you that "the
+niggers got only what they deserved," and "it was all right if the mob had
+only stopped there." But it did not stop there; it never does.
+
+All the stored-up racial animosity came seething to the surface; all the
+personal grudges and spite. As I have already related, two Negro women
+were whipped on the Sunday night before the lynching. On the day following
+the lynching the father of the women was found seeking legal punishment
+for the men who whipped his daughters, and he himself was taken out and
+frightfully beaten. On the same day two other young Negroes, of the
+especially hated "smart nigger" type, were caught and whipped--one for
+riding a bicycle on the sidewalk, the other, as several citizens told me,
+"on general principles." But this was not the worst. On Wednesday night an
+old Negro man and his son--Negroes of the better class--were sitting in
+their cabin some miles from Statesboro, when they were both shot at
+through the window and badly wounded. Another respectable Negro, named
+McBride, was visited in his home by a white mob, which first whipped his
+wife, who was confined with a baby three days old, and then beat, kicked,
+and shot McBride himself so horribly that he died the next day. The better
+class of citizens, the same men who would, perhaps, condone the burning of
+Reed and Cato, had no sympathy with this sort of thing. Some of them took
+McBride's dying statement, and four white men were arrested and charged
+with the murder; but never punished.
+
+Indeed, the mob led directly to a general increase of crime in Bulloch
+County. As Judge Daley said in his charge to a subsequent grand jury:
+
+"Mob violence begets crime. Crime has been more prevalent since this
+lynching than ever before. In the middle circuit the courts have been so
+badly crowded with murder trials that it has been almost impossible to
+attend to civil business."
+
+Another evil result of the lynching was that it destroyed valuable
+evidence. The prosecutors had hoped to learn from the convicted Reed and
+Cato whether or not they had any companions and thereby bring to justice
+all the other Negroes suspected of complicity in the murder of the Hodges.
+If the Before Day Club ever existed and had a criminal purpose (which is
+doubtful) most of the members who composed it were left at large, awaiting
+the next opportunity to rob and murder.
+
+
+_Mob Justice and the Cotton Crop_
+
+Mob-law has not only represented a moral collapse in this community, but
+it struck, also, at the sensitive pocket of the business interests of the
+county. Frightened by the threatening attitude of the whites, the Negroes
+began to leave the county. It was just at the beginning of the
+cotton-picking season, when labour of every sort was much needed, Negro
+labour especially. It would not do to frighten away all the Negroes. On
+Thursday some of the officials and citizens of Statesboro got together,
+appointed extra marshals, and gave notice that there were to be no more
+whippings, and the mob spirit disappeared--until next time.
+
+But what of the large Negro population of Statesboro during all this
+excitement? The citizens told the "decent Negroes": "We don't want to hurt
+you; we know you; you are all right; go home and you won't be hurt." Go
+home they did, and there was not a Negro to be seen during all the time of
+the lynching. From inquiry among the Negroes themselves, I found that many
+of them had no voice to raise against the burning of Reed and Cato. This
+was the grim, primitive eye-for-an-eye logic that they used, in common
+with many white men:
+
+"Reed and Cato burned the Hodges; they ought to be burned."
+
+Even Cato's wife used this logic.
+
+But all the Negroes were bitter over the indiscriminate whippings which
+followed the lynching. These whippings widened the breach between the
+races, led to deeper suspicion and hatred, fertilised the soil for future
+outbreaks. In the same week that I visited Statesboro, no fewer than three
+cotton-gins in various parts of Bulloch County were mysteriously burned at
+night, and while no one knew the exact origin of the fires, it was openly
+charged that they were caused by revengeful Negroes. None of these
+terrible after-effects would have taken place if the law had been allowed
+to follow its course.
+
+
+_A Fighting Parson_
+
+The overwhelming majority of the people of Bulloch County undoubtedly
+condoned the lynching, even believed in it heartily and completely. And
+yet, as I have said, there was a strong dissenting opposition among the
+really thoughtful, better-class citizens. All the churches of Statesboro
+came out strongly for law and order. The Methodist church, led by a
+fighting parson, the Rev. Whitely Langston, expelled two members who had
+been in the mob--an act so unpopular that the church lost twenty-five
+members of its congregation. Of course, the members of the mob were known,
+but none of them was ever punished. The judge especially charged the grand
+jury to investigate the lynching, and this was its report:
+
+"We deplore the recent lawlessness in our city and community, specially
+referred to by his Honour, Judge A. F. Daley, in his able charge. We have
+investigated the matter in the light of information coming under our
+personal knowledge and obtained by the examination of a number of
+witnesses, but we have been unable to find sufficient evidence to warrant
+indictments. We tender thanks to his Honour, Judge Daley, for his able and
+comprehensive charge."
+
+A feeble attempt was made to discipline the military officers who allowed
+the populace to walk over them and take away their guns. A court-martial
+sat for days in Savannah and finally recommended the dismissal of Captain
+Hitch from the service of the state; but the Governor let him off with
+half the penalty suggested. Two lieutenants were also disciplined.
+
+In the state election which followed the lynching, numerous voters in
+Bulloch County actually scratched the name of Governor Terrell, of
+Georgia, because he ordered the troops to Statesboro, and substituted the
+name of Captain Hitch. Sheriff Kendrick, who failed to protect Reed and
+Cato, was re-elected without opposition.
+
+It was in a tone of deep discouragement that Mayor G. S. Johnstone, of
+Statesboro, said to me:
+
+"If our grand jury won't indict these lynchers, if our petit juries won't
+convict, and if our soldiers won't shoot, what are we coming to?"
+
+
+_Revolution of Opinion in the South on Lynching_
+
+Conditions at Statesboro are, perhaps, typical of those in most Southern
+towns. In most Southern towns a lynching would be conducted much as it was
+in Statesboro; there would be the same objecting but ineffective minority
+of good citizens, the troops would refuse their duty, and the lynchers
+would escape in much the same way. And yet, if we were to stop with the
+account of the Statesboro affair, we should overlook some of the greatest
+influences now affecting the lynching problem in the South. No one who
+visits the South can escape the conviction that, with its intensified
+industrial life, and the marvelous development and enrichment of the whole
+country, other equally momentous, if less tangible, changes are taking
+place. Public opinion is developing along new lines, old, set prejudices
+are breaking up, and there is, among other evident influences, a marked
+revolution in the attitude of the Southern people and the Southern
+newspapers on the lynching question. I turn now to the lynching at
+Huntsville, Ala., which reveals in a striking manner some of the features
+of the new revolt in the South against mob-law.
+
+
+[Illustration: COURT HOUSE AND BANK IN THE PUBLIC SQUARE AT HUNTSVILLE,
+ALABAMA
+
+The Negro, Maples, was lynched by being hung to the elm tree at the corner
+of the court house, near the extreme right of the picture.
+
+Photographed by Collins & Son]
+
+
+_A Negro Crime at Huntsville, Ala._
+
+One evening in September, 1904, a Negro of Huntsville, Ala., asked an old
+peddler named Waldrop for a ride. Waldrop was a kindly old man, well known
+and respected throughout Madison County; he drove into the city two or
+three times a week with vegetables and chickens to sell, and returned with
+the small product of his trade in his pocket.
+
+Waldrop knew the Negro, Maples, and, although Maples was of the worthless
+sort, and even then under indictment for thieving, the peddler made room
+for him in his waggon, and they rode out of the town together. They drove
+into a lonely road. They crossed a little bridge. Tall trees shaded and
+darkened the place. Night was falling. The Negro picked up a stone and
+beat out the brains of the inoffensive old man, robbed him, and left him
+lying there at the roadside, while the horse wandered homeward.
+
+How a murder cries out! The murderer fled in the darkness but it was as if
+he left great footprints. The next day, in Huntsville, the law laid its
+hand on his shoulder.
+
+Now, Huntsville is one of the best cities in Alabama. No other city,
+perhaps, preserves more of the aristocratic habiliments of the older
+South. It was the first capital of the state. Seven governors lie buried
+in its cemetery; its county house, its bank, some of its residences are
+noble examples of the architecture of the ante-bellum South. And while
+preserving these evidences of the wealth and refinement of an older
+civilisation, few cities in the South have responded more vigorously to
+the new impulses of progress and development. Its growth during the last
+few years has been little short of amazing. Northern capital has come in;
+nine cotton-mills have been built, drawing a large increase of population,
+and stimulating the development of the country in every direction. It is
+a fine, orderly, progressive city--intensely American, ambitious,
+self-respecting.
+
+
+_Relation of Lynching to Business Success_
+
+Huntsville has had its share of lynchings in the past. Within twenty years
+seven Negroes and one white man had been the victims of mobs in Madison
+County. The best citizens knew what a lynching meant; they knew how the
+mob began, and what invariably followed its excesses, and they wanted no
+more such horrors. But this revolt was not wholly moral. With awakening
+industrial ambition the people realised that disorder had a tendency to
+frighten away capital, stop immigration, and retard development generally.
+Good business demands good order. This feeling has been expressed in
+various forms and through many channels. It existed in Statesboro, but it
+was by no means as vigorous as in this manufacturing city of Huntsville.
+We find, for instance, Congressman Richardson of Alabama, a citizen of
+Huntsville, saying in a speech on the floor of the House of
+Representatives:
+
+"Why, Mr. Chairman, we have more reason in the South to observe the law
+and do what is right than any other section of this Union."
+
+The Atlanta _Constitution_ presents the same view in vigorous language:
+
+     Aside entirely from the consideration of the evil effects of the mob
+     spirit in breeding general disrespect for the law, and aside from the
+     question of the inevitable brutalising effect of lynching upon those
+     who are spectators--and the effect goes even further--the practical
+     question arises: Can we at the South afford it?
+
+     Is there any use blinding ourselves to the fact, patent to everybody,
+     that it is this sort of thing that has kept hundreds of thousands of
+     desirable immigrants from coming to the Southern states?
+
+
+_Story of a Bold Judge_
+
+When the murderer of the peddler Waldrop was arrested, therefore, the
+thoughtful and progressive people of the city--the kind who are creating
+the New South--took immediate steps to prevent mob disturbance. The city
+was fortunate in having an able, energetic young man as its circuit
+judge--a judge, the son of a judge, who saw his duty clearly, and who was
+not afraid to act, even though it might ruin his immediate political
+future, as, indeed, it did. Rare qualities in these days! The murder was
+committed Tuesday, September 6th, the Negro was arrested Wednesday, Judge
+Speake impanelled a special grand jury without waiting a moment, and that
+very afternoon, within six hours after the Negro's arrest and within
+twenty hours after the crime was committed, the Negro was formally
+indicted. Arrangements were then made to call a special trial jury within
+a week, in the hope that the prospect of immediate punishment would
+prevent the gathering of a mob.
+
+
+_A Record of Homicide as a Cause of Lynching_
+
+But, unfortunately, we find here in Madison County not only a history of
+lynching--a habit, it may be called--but there existed the same disregard
+for the sacredness of human life which is the common characteristic of
+most lynching communities, South or North. I made a careful examination of
+the records of the county. In the five years preceding this lynching, no
+fewer than thirty-three murder and homicide cases were tried in the
+courts, besides eight murderers indicted, but not arrested. This is the
+record of a single county of about forty thousand people. Notwithstanding
+this record of crime, there had not been a legal hanging in the county,
+even of a Negro, for nineteen years. It was a fact--well known to
+everybody in the county--that it was next to impossible to convict a white
+man for killing. Murderers employed good lawyers, they appealed their
+cases, they brought political friendships to bear, and the relationships
+between the old families were so far extended that they reached even into
+the jury room. As a consequence, nearly every white murderer went free.
+Only a short time before the lynching, Fred Stevens a white man, who shot
+a white man in a quarrel over a bucket of water, was let out with a fine
+of $50, costs, and thirty days in jail. This for a _killing_. And the
+attorney for Stevens actually went into court afterward and asked to have
+the costs cut down.
+
+Negroes who committed homicide, though more vigorously punished than white
+murderers, yet frequently escaped with five or ten years in the
+penitentiary--especially if they had money or a few white friends. All
+this had induced a contempt of the courts of justice--a fear that, after
+all, through the delays and technicalities of the law and the compassion
+of the jury, the murderer of Waldrop would not be punished as he deserved.
+This was the substance of the reasoning I heard repeatedly: "That Negro,
+Maples, ought to have been hanged; we were not sure the jury would hang
+him; we hanged him to protect ourselves."
+
+I met an intelligent farmer during a drive through Madison County. Here
+are some of the things he said, and they voiced closely what I heard in
+one form or another from many people in all walks of life:
+
+"Life is cheap in Madison County. If you have a grudge against a man, kill
+him; don't wound him. If you wound him, you'll likely be sent up; if you
+kill him, you can go free. They often punish more severely for carrying
+concealed weapons or even for chicken stealing in Madison County than they
+do for murder."
+
+So strong was the evidence in one murder case in an adjoining circuit that
+Judge Kyle instructed the jury to find the murderer guilty; the jury
+deliberately returned a verdict, "Not guilty." The Alabama system of
+justice is cursed by the professional juror chosen by politicians, and
+often open to political influences. This, with the unlimited right of
+appeal and the great number of peremptory challenges allowed to the
+defence in accepting jurymen, gives such power to the lawyers for the
+defendant that convictions are exceedingly difficult. Oftentimes, also,
+the prosecuting attorney is a young, inexperienced lawyer, ill-paid, who
+is no match for the able attorneys employed by the defendant.
+
+No, it is not all race prejudice that causes lynchings, even in the South.
+One man in every six lynched in this country in 1903--the year before the
+lynching I am describing--was a white man. It is true that a Negro is
+often the victim of mob-law where a white man would not be, but the chief
+cause certainly seems to lie deeper, in the widespread contempt of the
+courts, and the unpunished subversion of the law in this country, both
+South and North. This, indeed, would probably be the sole cause of
+lynching, were it not for the crime of rape, of which I wish to speak
+again a little later.
+
+
+_Composition of the Mob at Huntsville_
+
+Well, a mob began gathering in Huntsville before the grand jury had ceased
+its labours. It was chiefly composed of the workmen from the
+cotton-mills. These are of a peculiar class--pure American stock,
+naturally of high intelligence, but almost wholly illiterate--men from the
+hills, the descendants of the "poor white trash," who never owned slaves,
+and who have always hated the Negroes. The poor whites are and have been
+for a long time in certain lines the industrial competitors of the
+Negroes, and the jealousy thus engendered accounts in no small degree for
+the intensity of the race feeling.
+
+Anticipating trouble, Judge Speake ordered the closing of all the
+saloons--there were then only fifteen to a population of some twenty-one
+thousand--and called out the local military company. But the mob ran over
+the militiamen as though they were not there, broke into the jail, built a
+fire in the hallway, and added sulphur and cayenne pepper. Fearing that
+the jail would be burned and all the prisoners suffocated, the sheriff
+released the Negro, Maples, and he jumped out of a second-story window
+into the mob. They dragged him up the street to the square in the heart of
+the city. Here, on the pleasant lawn, the Daughters of America were
+holding a festival, and the place was brilliant with Japanese lanterns.
+Scattering the women and children, the mob jostled the Negro under the
+glare of an electric light, just in front of the stately old court-house.
+
+Here impassioned addresses were made by several prominent young
+lawyers--J. H. Wallace, Jr., W. B. Bankhead, and Solicitor Pettus--urging
+the observance of law and order. A showing of hands afterward revealed the
+fact that a large proportion of those present favoured a legal
+administration of justice. But it was too late now.
+
+A peculiarly dramatic incident fired the mob anew. The Negro was suddenly
+confronted by the son of the murdered peddler. "Horace," he demanded, "did
+you kill my old dad?"
+
+Quivering with fright, the Negro is said to have confessed the crime. He
+was instantly dragged around the corner, where they hanged him to an
+elm-tree, and while he dangled there in the light of the gala lanterns,
+they shot him full of holes. Then they cut off one of his little fingers
+and parts of his trousers for souvenirs. So he hung until daylight, and
+crowds of people came out to see.
+
+
+_Effort to Punish the Lynchers_
+
+But the forces of law and order here had vigour and energy. Judge Speake,
+communicating with the Governor, had troops sent from Birmingham, and
+then, without shilly-shallying or delaying or endeavouring to shift
+responsibility, he ordered a special grand jury to indict the lynchers the
+very next day and he saw to it that it was composed of the best citizens
+in town. When it met, so deep and solemn was its feeling of responsibility
+that it was opened with prayer, an extraordinary evidence of the awakened
+conscience of the people. More than this, the citizens generally were so
+aroused that they held a mass meeting, and denounced the lynching as a
+"blot upon our civilisation," and declared that "each and every man taking
+part" with the mob was "guilty of murder." Bold words, but no bolder than
+the editorials of the newspapers of the town or of the state. Every force
+of decency and good order was at work. Such strong newspapers as the
+Birmingham _Age-Herald_, the _Ledger_, and the _News_, the Montgomery
+_Advertiser_, the Chattanooga _News_, and, indeed, prominent newspapers
+all over the South united strongly in their condemnation of the lynchers
+and in their support of the efforts to bring the mob to justice.
+
+
+_Southern Newspapers on Lynching_
+
+The Huntsville _Mercury_ spoke of the "deep sense of shame felt by our
+good citizens in being run over by a few lawless spirits."
+
+"There is no justification," said the Birmingham _News_, "for the mob who,
+in punishing one murderer, made many more."
+
+"This lynching," said the Birmingham _Ledger_, "is a disgrace to our
+state. The _Ledger_ doesn't put its ear to the ground to hear from the
+North, nor does it care what Northern papers say. The crime is our own,
+and the disgrace falls on us."
+
+"Where, in fact," said the _Age-Herald_, "does such business lead to? The
+answer is summed up in a word--anarchy!"
+
+It would be well if every community in this country could read the full
+report of Judge Speake's grand jury. It is a work of the sort struck off
+only by men stirred to high things by what they feel to be a great
+crisis; it is of the same metal as the Declaration of Independence. Here
+is a single paragraph:
+
+     Realising that this is a supreme moment in our history; that we must
+     either take a stand for the law to-day or surrender to the mob and to
+     the anarchists for all time; that our actions shall make for good or
+     evil in future generations; forgetting our personal friendships and
+     affiliations, and with malice toward none, but acting only as sworn
+     officers of the state of Alabama, we, the grand jury of Madison
+     County, state of Alabama, find----
+
+Ten members of the mob were indicted--and not for mere rioting or for
+breaking into the jail, but for _murder_. The jury also charged Sheriff
+Rodgers, Mayor Smith, and Chief of Police Overton with wilful neglect and
+incompetence, and advised their impeachment. No one not understanding the
+far-reaching family and political relationships in these old-settled
+Southern communities, and the deep-seated feeling against punishment for
+the crime of lynching, can form any adequate idea of what a sensation was
+caused by the charges of the grand jury against the foremost officials of
+the city. It came like a bolt from a clear sky; it was altogether an
+astonishing procedure, at first not fully credited. When the utter
+seriousness of Judge Speake came to be fully recognised, a good many men
+hurriedly left town. The Birmingham soldiers, led by a captain with
+backbone, arrested a number of those who remained. Judge Speake ordered a
+special trial jury, and appointed an able lawyer to assist Prosecutor
+Pettus in bringing the lynchers to justice. The very next week the trials
+were begun.
+
+
+_Difficulty of Breaking the Lynching Habit_
+
+By this time, however, the usual influences had begun to work; the moral
+revulsion had carried far, and the rebound had come. The energetic judge
+and his solicitors found themselves face to face with the bad old jury
+system, with the deep-seated distrust of the courts, with the rooted habit
+of non-punishment for lynchers. Moreover, it was found that certain wild
+young men, with good family connections, had been mixed up in the mob--and
+all the strong family and political machinery of the country began to
+array itself against conviction. A community has exactly as hard a road to
+travel in breaking a bad habit as an individual. The New South is having
+a struggle to break the habits of the Old South. It was found, also, that
+the great mass of people in the country, as well as the millworkers in the
+city, were still strongly in favour of punishment by lynching. One hundred
+and ten veniremen examined for jurors to try the lynchers were asked this
+question; "If you were satisfied from the evidence beyond a reasonable
+doubt that the defendant took part with or abetted the mob in murdering a
+Negro, would you favour his conviction?" And seventy-six of them answered,
+"No."
+
+In other words, a large majority believed that a white man should not be
+punished for lynching a Negro. And when the juries were finally obtained,
+although the evidence was conclusive, they acquitted the lynchers, one
+after another. Only one man in one jury stood out for conviction--a young
+clerk named S. M. Blair, a pretty good type of the modern hero. He hung
+the jury, and so bitter was the feeling against him among the millworkers
+that they threatened to boycott his employer.
+
+
+_Relation of Lynching to the "Usual Crime"_
+
+This is the reasoning of many of the men chosen as jurors; I heard it over
+and over again, not only in Huntsville but, in substance, everywhere that
+I stopped in the South:
+
+"If we convict these men for lynching the Negro, Maples, we shall
+establish a precedent that will prevent us from lynching for the crime of
+rape."
+
+Every argument on lynching in the South gets back sooner or later to this
+question of rape. Ask any high-class citizen--the very highest--if he
+believes in lynching, and he will tell you roundly, "No." Ask him about
+lynching for rape, and in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred he will
+instantly weaken.
+
+"If my sister or my daughter--look here, if your sister or your
+daughter----"
+
+Lynching, he says, is absolutely necessary to keep down this crime. You
+ask him why the law cannot be depended upon, and he replies:
+
+"It is too great an ordeal for the self-respecting white woman to go into
+court and accuse the Negro ravisher and withstand a public
+cross-examination. It is intolerable. No woman will do it. And, besides,
+the courts are uncertain. Lynching is the only remedy."
+
+Yet the South is deeply stirred over the prevalence of lynching. The mob
+spirit, invoked to punish such a crime as rape, is defended by some people
+in the North as well as in the South; but once invoked, it spreads and
+spreads, until to-day lynching for rape forms only a very small proportion
+of the total number of mob hangings. It spreads until a Negro is lynched
+for chicken stealing, or for mere "obnoxiousness." In the year 1903, out
+of 103 lynchings, only 11 were for rape and 10 for attempted rape, while
+47 were for murder, 15 for complicity in murderous assault, 4 for arson, 5
+for mere "race prejudice," 2 for insults to whites, 1 for making threats,
+5 for unknown offenses, 1 for refusing to give information, and 3 were
+wholly innocent Negroes, lynched because their identity was mistaken. It
+is probable that lynching in the South would immediately be wiped out, if
+it were not for the question of rape. You will hear the problem put by
+thinking Southerners very much in this fashion:
+
+"We must stop mob-law; every month we recognise that fact more clearly.
+But can we stop mob-law unless we go to the heart of the matter and stop
+lynching for rape? Is there not a way of changing our methods of legal
+procedure so that the offender in this crime can be punished without
+subjecting the victim to the horrible publicity of the courts?"
+
+
+_Governor Cunningham--A Real Leader_
+
+But I have wandered from my story. In Acting-Governor Cunningham, the
+people of Alabama had a leader who was not afraid to handle a dangerous
+subject like lynching. He sent a court of inquiry to Huntsville, which
+found the local military company "worthless and inefficient," because it
+had failed to protect the jail. Immediately, upon the receipt of this
+report, the Governor dismissed the Huntsville company from the service,
+every man in it. Quite a contrast from the action at Statesboro! The
+Governor then went a step further: he ordered the impeachment of the
+sheriff. A little later Federal Judge Jones took up the case, charged his
+jury vigorously, and some of the mob rioters were indicted in the federal
+courts.
+
+Governor Cunningham took a bold stand against mob-law everywhere and
+anywhere in the state:
+
+"I am opposed to mob-law," he said, "of whatsoever kind, for any and all
+causes. If lynching is to be justified or extenuated for any crime, be it
+ever so serious, it will lead to the same method of punishment for other
+crimes of a less degree of depravity, and through the operation of the
+process of evolution, will enlarge more and more the field of operation
+for this form of lawlessness."
+
+It means something also when citizens, in support of their institutions
+and out of love of their city, rise above politics. Judge Speake had been
+nominated by the Democrats to succeed himself. A Democratic nomination in
+Alabama means election. After his vigorous campaign against the lynchers,
+he became exceedingly unpopular among the majority of the people. They
+resolved to defeat him. A committee waited on Shelby Pleasants, a
+prominent Republican lawyer, and asked him to run against Judge Speake,
+assuring him a certain election.
+
+"I will not be a mob's candidate," he said. "I indorse every action of
+Judge Speake."
+
+The committee approached several other lawyers, but not one of them would
+run against the judge, and the Republican newspaper of the town came out
+strongly in support of Judge Speake, even publishing his name at the head
+of its editorial columns. Before he could be elected, however, a decision
+of the State Supreme Court, unconnected in any way with the lynching,
+followed like fate, and deprived Madison County of his services. He was
+now a private citizen, and even if he had come up for nomination to any
+political office, he would undoubtedly have been defeated. The New South
+is not yet strong enough to defy the Old South politically.
+
+
+_Influences Tending to Prevent Future Lynchings in the South_
+
+The influences against lynching in the South are constantly growing
+stronger. With most (not all) of the newspapers, the preachers and the
+best citizens united against it, the outlook is full of hope. And rural
+free delivery and country telephones, spreading in every direction, are
+inestimable influences in the quickening of public opinion. Better roads
+are being built, the country is settling up with white people, schools are
+improving and the population generally, after a series of profitable
+cotton crops, is highly prosperous--all influences working toward the
+solution of this problem.
+
+When I went South I shared the impression of many Northerners that the
+South was lawless and did not care--an impression that arises from the
+wide publication of the horrible details of every lynching that occurs,
+and the utter silence regarding those deep, quiet, and yet powerful moral
+and industrial forces which are at the work of rejuvenation beneath the
+surface--an account of which I have given. I came away from the South
+deeply impressed with two things:
+
+That the South is making fully as good progress in overcoming its peculiar
+forms of lawlessness as the North is making in overcoming _its_ peculiar
+forms.
+
+
+II.--LYNCHING IN THE NORTH
+
+Having looked, into two Southern lynching towns, let us now see what a
+Northern lynching is like. The comparison is highly interesting and
+illuminating.
+
+Springfield, O., is one of the most prosperous of the smaller cities of
+the state. It is a beautiful town having, in 1904, some 41,000 people. It
+has fine streets, fine buildings, busy factories, churches, an imposing
+library. Some of the older families have resided there for nearly a
+century. It is the seat of government of one of the most fertile and
+attractive counties in the state: an altogether progressive, enlightened
+city. Of its population in 1904 over 6,000 were Negroes (about
+one-seventh), a considerable proportion of whom are recent settlers. Large
+numbers of Negroes, as I have shown in former chapters, have been
+migrating from the South, and crowding into Northern towns located along
+the Ohio or in those portions of Indiana, Illinois, Ohio, Pennsylvania,
+Kansas, and other states, which border on the Old South. Many of the
+Negroes in Springfield came from Kentucky. We discover in these Northern
+towns exactly as in the South, the two classes of Negroes: the steady,
+resident class, more or less known to the whites, and a restless,
+unstable, ignorant class, coming to one neighbourhood to-day to help build
+a bridge, and going elsewhere to-morrow to dig a canal. For years no such
+thing as race prejudice existed in Springfield; but with the growth of
+Negro population it increased with rapidity. For instance, a druggist in
+Springfield refused to sell soda-water to a Negro college professor, the
+typesetters in a publishing house compelled the discharge of Negro
+workmen, a Negro physician visited the high-school, found the half-dozen
+Negro pupils sitting by themselves and, angrily charging discrimination,
+ordered his child to sit among the white children. This feeling of race
+repulsion was especially noticeable between the working class of white men
+and the Negroes who come more or less into industrial competition with
+them. The use of Negroes for breaking strikes in the coalfields and
+elsewhere has been a fertile source of discord, kindling the fire of race
+prejudice in places where it never before existed.
+
+
+_How the Negroes Sold Their Votes_
+
+In Springfield there were about 1,500 Negro voters, many of whom were
+bought at every election. The Democrats and the Republicans were so evenly
+divided that the city administration was Democratic and the county
+administration Republican. The venal Negro vote went to the highest
+bidder, carried the elections, and, with the whiskey influence, governed
+the town. Springfield, enlightened, educated, progressive, highly
+American, had 145 saloons--or one to every 285 people. Before the
+lynching, nine of these were Negro saloons--some of them indescribably
+vile. A row of houses along the railroad tracks, not three blocks from the
+heart of the city, was known as the Levee. It was a Negro row composed of
+saloons and disorderly houses, where the lowest of the low, Negro men and
+both Negro and white women, made a general rendezvous. Just back of it was
+one of the foremost Catholic churches in town; hardly a block away were
+the post-office, the public library, and the foremost club of the city,
+and within three or four hundred yards were the back doors of some of the
+city's most aristocratic residences. For years, the ineffective good
+citizen had protested against these abominable resorts, but when the
+Republicans wanted to win they needed the votes from these places, and
+when the Democrats wanted to win _they_ needed them. Burnett, the
+Democratic boss, said in a tone of real injury to a gentleman--a
+Democrat--who protested against the protection of the Levee:
+
+"Don't you want the party to win? We've got to have those sixty or eighty
+votes from Hurley"--Hurley being the notorious Negro proprietor of a dive
+called the Honky Tonk.
+
+
+_Corrupt Politics and the Negro Question_
+
+So these vile places remained open, protected by the police, breeding
+crime, and encouraging arrogance, idleness, and vice among the Negroes.
+
+And yet one will hear good citizens of Springfield complaining that the
+Negroes make themselves conspicuous and obnoxious at primaries and
+elections, standing around, waiting, and refusing to vote until they
+receive money in hand.
+
+"To my mind," one of these citizens said to me, "the conspicuousness of
+the Negro at elections is one of the chief causes of race prejudice."
+
+But who is to blame? The Negro who accepts the bribe, or the white
+politician who is eager to give it, or the white business man who,
+desiring special privileges, stands behind the white politician, or the
+ordinary citizen who doesn't care? Talk with these politicians on the one
+hand, and the impractical reformers on the other, and they will tell you
+in all seriousness of the sins of the South in disfranchising the Negro.
+
+"Every Negro in Springfield," I was told, "exercises his right to vote."
+
+If you were to tell these men that the Negroes of Springfield are
+disfranchised as absolutely as they are anywhere in the South, they would
+stare at you in amazement. But a purchased voter is a disfranchised voter.
+The Negroes have no more real voice in the government of Springfield than
+they have in the government of Savannah or New Orleans. In the South the
+Negro has been disfranchised by law or by intimidation: in the North by
+cash. Which is worse?
+
+
+_Story of the Crime that Led to the Lynching_
+
+A few months before the lynching a Negro named Dixon arrived in
+Springfield from Kentucky. He was one of the illiterate, idle, floating
+sort. He had with him a woman not his wife, with whom he quarrelled. He
+was arrested and brought into court.
+
+I am profoundly conscious of the seriousness of any charge which touches
+upon our courts, the last resort of justice, and yet it was a matter of
+common report that "justice was easy" in Clark County, that laws were not
+enforced, that criminals were allowed to escape on suspended sentence. I
+heard this talk everywhere, often coupled with personal accusations
+against the judges, but I could not discover that the judges were more
+remiss than other officials. They were afflicted with no other disease.
+
+Even in a serious sociological study of Clark County by Professor E. S.
+Tood, I find this statement:
+
+     In Springfield, one of the chief faults of the municipal system has
+     been and is the laxity and discrimination in the enforcement of the
+     law. Many of the municipal ordinances have been shelved for years.
+     The saloon closing ordinances are enforced intermittently, as are
+     those concerning gambling.
+
+When the Negro Dixon was brought into court he was convicted and let out
+on suspended sentence. He got drunk immediately and was again arrested,
+this time serving several weeks in jail. The moment he was free he began
+quarrelling with his "wife," in a house directly across the street from
+police headquarters. An officer named Collis tried to make peace and Dixon
+deliberately shot him through the stomach, also wounding the woman.
+
+This was on Sunday. Dixon was immediately placed in the county jail.
+Collis died the next morning.
+
+
+_Human Life Cheap in Clark County_
+
+I have called attention to the fact that the lynching town nearly always
+has a previous bad record of homicide. Disregard for the sacredness of
+human life seems to be in the air of these places. Springfield was no
+exception. Between January 1, 1902, and March 7, 1904, the day of the
+lynching, a little more than two years, no fewer than ten homicides were
+committed in the city of Springfield. White men committed five of these
+crimes and Negroes five. Three of the cases were decided within a short
+time before the lynching and the punishment administered was widely
+criticised. Bishop, a coloured man who had killed a coloured man, was
+fined $200 and sentenced to six months in the workhouse. This was for
+_killing a man_. O'Brien, a white man, who killed a white man, got one
+year in the penitentiary. And only a week before the lynching,
+Schocknessy, a white man who killed a white man, but who had influential
+political friends, went scott-free!
+
+On the morning after the Collis murder, the _Daily Sun_ published a list
+of the recent homicides in Springfield in big type on its first page and
+asked editorially:
+
+"What are you going to do about it?"
+
+It then answered its own question:
+
+"Nothing."
+
+The following morning, after the lynching, the same paper printed in its
+headlines:
+
+     AWFUL REBUKE TO THE COURTS
+
+     _They Have Temporised With the Criminal Classes Until Patience was
+     Exhausted_
+
+I cite these facts to show the underlying conditions in Springfield; a
+soil richly prepared for an outbreak of mob law--with corrupt politics,
+vile saloons, the law paralysed by non-enforcement against vice, a large
+venal Negro vote, lax courts of justice.
+
+
+_Gathering of the Lynching Mob_
+
+Well, on Monday afternoon the mob began to gather. At first it was an
+absurd, ineffectual crowd, made up largely of lawless boys of sixteen to
+twenty--a pronounced feature of every mob--with a wide fringe of more
+respectable citizens, their hands in their pockets and no convictions in
+their souls, looking on curiously, helplessly. They gathered hooting
+around the jail, cowardly, at first, as all mobs are, but growing bolder
+as darkness came on and no move was made to check them. The murder of
+Collis was not a horrible, soul-rending crime like that at Statesboro,
+Ga.; these men in the mob were not personal friends of the murdered man;
+it was a mob from the back rooms of the swarming saloons of Springfield;
+and it included also the sort of idle boys "who hang around cigar stores,"
+as one observer told me. The newspaper reports are fond of describing
+lynching mobs as "made up of the foremost citizens of the town." In few
+cases that I know of, either South or North, except in back country
+neighbourhoods, has a mob been made up of what may be called the best
+citizens; but the best citizens have often stood afar off "decrying the
+mob"--as a Springfield man told me--and letting it go on. A mob is the
+method by which good citizens turn over the law and the government to the
+criminal or irresponsible classes.
+
+And no official in direct authority in Springfield that evening,
+apparently, had so much as an ounce of grit within him. The sheriff came
+out and made a weak speech in which he said he "didn't want to hurt
+anybody." They threw stones at him and broke his windows. The chief of
+police sent eighteen men to the jail but did not go near himself. All of
+these policemen undoubtedly sympathised with the mob in its efforts to get
+at the slayer of their brother officer; at least, they did nothing
+effective to prevent the lynching. An appeal was made to the Mayor to
+order out the engine companies that water might be turned on the mob. He
+said he didn't like to; _the hose might be cut_. The local militia company
+was called to its barracks, but the officer in charge hesitated,
+vacillated, doubted his authority, and objected finally because he had no
+ammunition _except_ Krag-Jorgenson cartridges, which, if fired into a mob,
+would kill too many people! The soldiers did not stir that night from the
+safe and comfortable precincts of their armoury.
+
+A sort of dry rot, a moral paralysis, seems to strike the administrators
+of law in a town like Springfield. What can be expected of officers who
+are not accustomed to enforce the law, or of a people not accustomed to
+obey it--or who make reservations and exceptions when they do enforce it
+or obey it?
+
+
+_Threats to Lynch the Judges_
+
+When the sheriff made his speech to the mob, urging them to let the law
+take its course they jeered him. The law! When, in the past, had the law
+taken its proper course in Clark County? Some one shouted, referring to
+Dixon:
+
+"He'll only get fined for shooting in the city limits."
+
+"He'll get ten days in jail and suspended sentence."
+
+Then there were voices:
+
+"Let's go hang Mower and Miller"--the two judges.
+
+This threat indeed, was frequently repeated both on the night of the
+lynching and on the day following.
+
+So the mob came finally, and cracked the door of the jail with a railroad
+rail. This jail is said to be the strongest in Ohio, and having seen it, I
+can well believe that the report is true. But steel bars have never yet
+kept out a mob; it takes something a good deal stronger: human courage
+backed up by the consciousness of being right.
+
+They murdered the Negro in cold blood in the jail doorway; then they
+dragged him to the principal business street and hung him to a
+telegraph-pole, afterward riddling his lifeless body with revolver shots.
+
+
+_Lesson of a Hanging Negro_
+
+That was the end of that! Mob justice administered! And there the Negro
+hung until daylight the next morning--an unspeakably grizzly, dangling
+horror, advertising the shame of the town. His head was shockingly crooked
+to one side, his ragged clothing, cut for souvenirs, exposed in places his
+bare body: he dripped blood. And, with the crowds of men both here and at
+the morgue where the body was publicly exhibited, came young boys in
+knickerbockers, and little girls and women by scores, horrified but
+curious. They came even with baby carriages! Men made jokes: "A dead
+nigger is a good nigger." And the purblind, dollars-and-cents man, most
+despicable of all, was congratulating the public:
+
+"It'll save the county a lot of money!"
+
+Significant lessons, these, for the young!
+
+But the mob wasn't through with its work. Easy people imagine that, having
+hanged a Negro, the mob goes quietly about its business; but that is never
+the way of the mob. Once released, the spirit of anarchy spreads and
+spreads, not subsiding until it has accomplished its full measure of evil.
+
+
+_Mob Burning of Negro Saloons_
+
+All the following day a rumbling, angry crowd filled the streets of
+Springfield, threatening to burn out the notorious Levee, threatening
+Judges Mower and Miller, threatening the "niggers." The local troops--to
+say nothing of the police force--which might easily have broken up the
+mob, remained sedulously in their armouries, vacillating, doubtful of
+authority, knowing that there were threats to burn and destroy, and making
+not one move toward the protection of the public. One of the captains was
+even permitted to go to a neighbouring city to a dance! At the very same
+time the panic-stricken officials were summoning troops from other towns.
+So night came on, the mob gathered around the notorious dives, some one
+touched a match, and the places of crime suddenly disgorged their foul
+inhabitants. Black and white, they came pouring out and vanished into the
+darkness where they belonged--from whence they did not return. Eight
+buildings went up in smoke, the fire department
+deliberating--intentionally, it is said--until the flames could not be
+controlled. The troops, almost driven out by the county prosecutor,
+McGrew, appeared after the mob had completed its work.
+
+Good work, badly done, a living demonstration of the inevitability of
+law--if not orderly, decent law, then of mob-law.
+
+For days following the troops filled Springfield, costing the state large
+sums of money, costing the county large sums of money. They chiefly
+guarded the public fountain; the mob had gone home--until next time.
+
+
+_Efforts to Punish the Mob_
+
+What happened after that? A perfunctory court-martial, that did absolutely
+nothing. A grand jury of really good citizens that sat for weeks, off and
+on; and like the mountain that was in travail and brought forth a mouse,
+they indicted two boys and two men out of all that mob, not for murder,
+but for "breaking into jail." And, curiously enough, it developed--how do
+such things develop?--that every man on the grand jury was a Republican,
+chosen by Republican county officers, and in their report they severely
+censured the police force (Democratic), and the mayor (Democratic), and
+had not one word of disapproval for the sheriff (Republican). Curiously
+enough, also, the public did not become enthusiastic over the report of
+that grand jury.
+
+But the worst feature of all in this Springfield lynching was the apathy
+of the public. No one really seemed to care. A "nigger" had been hanged:
+what of it? But the law itself had been lynched. What of that? I had just
+come from the South, where I had found the people of several lynching
+towns in a state of deep excitement--moral excitement if you like,
+thinking about this problem, quarrelling about it, expelling men from the
+church, impeaching sheriffs, dishonourably discharging whole militia
+companies. Here in Springfield, I found cold apathy, except for a few fine
+citizens, one of whom, City Solicitor Stewart L. Tatum, promptly offered
+his services to the sheriff and assisted in a vain effort to remove the
+Negro in a closed carriage and afterward at the risk of personal assault
+earnestly attempted to defeat the purposes of the mob. Another of these
+citizens, the Rev. Father Cogan, pleaded with the mob on the second night
+of the rioting at risk to himself; another withdrew from the militia
+company because it had not done its duty. And afterward the city officials
+were stirred by the faintest of faint spasms of righteousness: some of the
+Negro saloons were closed up, but within a month, the most notorious of
+all the dive-keepers, Hurley, the Negro political boss, was permitted to
+open an establishment--through the medium of a brother-in-law!
+
+If there ever was an example of good citizenship lying flat on its back
+with political corruption squatting on its neck, Springfield furnished an
+example of that condition. There was no reconstructive movement, no rising
+and organisation of the better sort of citizens. Negro dives gradually
+reopened, the same corrupt politics continued: and the result was logical
+and inevitable. About two years later, in February, 1906, another race
+riot broke out in Springfield--worse in some ways than the first. On
+February 26th, Martin M. Davis, a white brakeman, was shot in the railroad
+yards near a row of notorious Negro houses, by Edward Dean, a coloured
+man. The Negro was at once removed from the city and a mob which had
+gathered in anticipation of another lynching, when it was cheated of its
+victim, set fire to a number of houses in the Negro settlement. The
+militia was at once called out, but the following night the mob gathered
+as before and visiting the Negro settlement, tried to set fire to other
+buildings.
+
+It is significant that on the very night that this riot occurred the city
+council had under consideration an ordinance prohibiting the use of
+screens or other obstructions to the view of the interior of saloons after
+closing hours on week days or during Sundays. A committee of the council,
+favourable to the saloon interests, had recommended that the ordinance be
+not acted upon by council but referred to the people at a distant
+election, a proposition wholly illegal. While Stewart L. Tatum the city
+solicitor to whom I have already referred, argued to the council the
+illegality of the proposal made by the committee the noise of the mob
+reached the council chamber and the friends of the ordinance seized the
+opportunity to adjourn and delay action that would evidently result in the
+defeat of the ordinance.
+
+Finally, as a result of both these riots, the city was mildly stirred; a
+Civic League was formed by prominent citizens and the _attack on property_
+vigorously deprecated; the passage of the screen ordinance was recommended
+and at the next meeting of the council this ordinance, which had been
+vetoed by the mayor of the previous administration and had excited
+considerable public interest during a period of two years, was passed and
+has proved of great assistance to the police department in controlling the
+low saloons where the riot spirit is bred.
+
+I turn with pleasure from the story of this lynching to another Northern
+town, where I found as satisfying an example of how to deal with a mob as
+this country has known.
+
+In Springfield we had an exhibition of nearly complete supineness and
+apathy before the mob; in Statesboro, Ga., we discovered a decided
+law-and-order element, not strong enough, however, to do much; in
+Huntsville, Ala., we had a tremendous moral awakening. In Danville, Ill.,
+we find an example of law vindicated, magnificently and completely,
+through the heroism of a single man, backed up later by wholesome public
+opinion.
+
+
+_Character of Danville, Ill._
+
+Danville presented many of the characteristics of Springfield, O. It had a
+growing Negro population and there had been an awakening race prejudice
+between the white workingmen and the Negroes, especially in the
+neighbouring coal mines.
+
+As in other places where lynchings have occurred, I found that Vermilion
+County, of which Danville is the seat, had also a heavy record of homicide
+and other crime. They counted there on a homicide every sixty days; at the
+term of court preceding the lynching seven murder trials were on the
+docket; and in all its history the county never had had a legal hanging,
+though it had suffered two lynchings. The criminal record of Vermilion
+County was exceeded at that time only by Cook County (Chicago), and St.
+Clair County (East St. Louis), where the horrible lynching of a Negro
+schoolmaster took place (at Belleville) in the preceding summer.
+
+
+_Story of a Starved Negro_
+
+The crime which caused the rioting was committed by the familiar vagrant
+Negro from the South--in this case a Kentucky Negro named Wilson--a
+miserable, illiterate, half-starved creature who had been following a
+circus. He had begged along the road in Indiana and no one would feed him.
+He came across the line into Illinois, found a farmhouse door open, saw
+food on the table, and darted in to steal it. As he was leaving, the woman
+of the house appeared. In an animal-like panic, the Negro darted for the
+door, knocking the woman down as he escaped. Immediately the cry went up
+that there had been an attempted criminal assault, but the sheriff told me
+that the woman never made any such charge and the Negro bore all the
+evidence of the truthfulness of the assertion that he was starving; he was
+so emaciated with hunger that even after his arrest the sheriff dared not
+allow him a full meal.
+
+
+_Hot Weather and Mobs_
+
+But it was enough to stir up the mob spirit. It was Saturday night, July
+25th, and the usual crowd from all over the county had gathered in the
+town. Among the crowd were many coal miners, who had just been paid off
+and were drinking. As in Springfield, the town had a very large number of
+saloons, ninety-one within a radius of five miles, to a population of
+some 25,000. Most Northern towns are far worse in this respect than the
+average Southern town. It was a hot night; mobs work best in hot weather.
+Statistics, indeed, show that the great majority of lynchings take place
+in the summer, particularly in July and August.
+
+It was known that the sheriff had brought his Negro prisoner to the jail,
+and the crime was widely discussed. The whole city was a sort of human
+tinder-box, ready to flare up at a spark of violence.
+
+Well, the spark came--in a saloon. Metcalf, a Negro, had words with a
+well-known white butcher named Henry Gatterman. Both had been drinking.
+The Negro drew a revolver and shot Gatterman dead. Instantly the city was
+in a furor of excitement. The police appeared and arrested Metcalf, and
+got him finally with great difficulty to the police station, where he was
+locked up. A mob formed instantly. It was led, at first, by a crowd of
+lawless boys from sixteen to eighteen years old. Rapidly gathering
+strength, it rushed into the city hall, and although the mayor, the chief
+of police, and nearly the entire police force were present, they got the
+Negro out and hanged him to a telegraph-pole in the main street of the
+town, afterward shooting his body full of holes.
+
+Intoxicated by their swift success and, mob-like, growing in recklessness
+and bloodthirstiness, they now turned upon the jail determined to lynch
+the Negro Wilson. It was a much uglier mob than any I have hitherto
+described; it was a drunken mob, and it had already tasted blood. It
+swarmed around the jail, yelling, shooting, and breaking the windows with
+stones.
+
+
+_A "Strict" Sheriff_
+
+Sheriff Hardy H. Whitlock of Vermilion County had never been looked upon
+as an especially remarkable man--except, as I was told everywhere, he had
+a record as _a strict sheriff_, as a man who did his best to enforce the
+law in times of peace. He and the state's attorney were so industrious
+that they caught and punished four times as many criminals in proportion
+to population as were convicted in Chicago. The sheriff was a big, solid,
+deliberate man with gray eyes. He was born in Tennessee. His father was an
+itinerant Presbyterian preacher, always poor, doing good for everybody
+but himself, and stern in his conceptions of right and wrong. His mother,
+as the sheriff related, made him obey the law with peach-tree switches.
+His history was the commonest of the common; not much education, had to
+make his living, worked in a livery stable. He was faithful at that,
+temperate, friendly. They elected him constable, an office that he held
+for seven years. He was faithful at that. They elected him sheriff of the
+county. He went at the new task as he had at all his other work, with no
+especial brilliancy, but steadily doing his duty, catching criminals. He
+found a great deal to learn and he learned. The extradition laws of the
+states troubled him when he wanted to bring prisoners home. There was no
+compilation of the laws on the subject. Here was work to be done. Although
+no lawyer, he went at it laboriously and compiled a book of five hundred
+pages, containing all the extradition laws of the country, and had it
+published at his own expense.
+
+
+_Defending a Jail With a Riot-gun_
+
+And when the crisis came that night with the mob howling around his jail,
+Hardy Whitlock had become so accustomed to doing his duty that he didn't
+know how to do anything else. Here was the jail to be protected: he
+intended to protect it. He sent for no troops--there was no time
+anyhow--nor for the police. He had a couple of deputies and his wife.
+Though the mob was breaking the windows of the house and the children were
+there, his wife said:
+
+"Give me a gun, Hardy, and I'll stay by you."
+
+The sheriff went out on the porch, unarmed, in his shirt-sleeves, and made
+them a little speech. They yelled at him, threw stones, fired revolvers.
+They brought a railroad rail to break in the door. He went out among them,
+called them Bill, and Jim, and Dick, and persuaded them to put it down;
+but others took it up willingly.
+
+"Are you going to open the door?" they yelled.
+
+"No!" said the sheriff.
+
+Then he went in and got his riot-gun, well loaded with duck-shot. He was
+one man against two thousand. They began battering on the iron door,
+yelling and shooting. It was not an especially strong door, and it began
+to give at the bottom, and finally bent inward enough to admit a man's
+body. The crucial moment had come: and the sheriff was there to meet it.
+He stuck his riot-gun out of the opening and began firing. The mob fell
+back but came charging forward again, wild with passion. The sheriff fired
+again, seven times in all, and one of his deputies opened with a revolver.
+For a time pandemonium reigned; they attempted the house entrance of the
+jail; the sheriff was there also with his riot-gun; they threatened
+dynamite and fire. They cut down the Negro, Metcalf, brought him in front
+of the jail, piled straw on the body and attempted to burn it. Part of the
+time they were incited to greater violence by a woman who stood in a
+waggon-box across the street. So they raged all night, firing at the jail,
+but not daring to come too near the man with the riot-gun.
+
+"On Sunday," the sheriff told me, "I realised I was up against it. I knew
+the tough element in town had it in for me."
+
+
+_How a Real Sheriff Punished a Mob_
+
+They even threatened him on the street. A large number of men had been
+wounded by the firing, some dangerously, though no one, fortunately, was
+killed. The sheriff stood alone in the town. A lesser man might still have
+failed ignominiously. But Whitlock went about the nearest duty: punishing
+the rioters. He had warrants issued and arrested every man he could find
+who was streaked or speckled with shot--indubitable evidence of his
+presence in the mob at the jail door. Many fled the city, but he got
+twenty or thirty.
+
+Vermilion County also had a prosecuting attorney who knew his duty--J. W.
+Keeslar. Judge Thompson called a grand jury, Attorney Keeslar pushed the
+cases with great vigour, and this was the result: thirteen men and one
+woman (the disorderly woman of the waggon-box) were sent to the
+penitentiary, eight others were heavily fined. At the same time the Negro,
+Wilson, came up for trial, pleaded guilty, and was legally punished by a
+term in the penitentiary.
+
+
+[Illustration: CHARLES W. CHESNUTT
+
+The well-known novelist, author of "The Colonel's Dream," "The House
+Behind the Cedars," "The Conjure Woman," etc. Mr. Chesnutt is a lawyer in
+Cleveland, Ohio.
+
+Photograph by Edmondson]
+
+
+And the people came strongly to the support of their officers. Hardy
+Whitlock became one of the most popular men in the county. Keeslar, coming
+up for reelection the following fall, with mob-law for the essential
+issue, was returned to his office with an overwhelming majority. The
+sheriff told me that, in his opinion, the success of the officers in
+convicting the lynchers was due largely to a thoroughly awakened public
+opinion, the strong attitude of the newspapers, especially those of
+Chicago, the help of the governor, and the feeling, somehow, that the best
+sentiment of the county was behind them.
+
+
+_Conclusions Regarding Lynching in This Country_
+
+And finally, we may, perhaps venture upon a few general conclusions.
+
+Lynching in this country is peculiarly the white man's burden. The white
+man has taken all the responsibility of government; he really governs in
+the North as well as in the South, in the North disfranchising the Negro
+with cash, in the South by law or by intimidation. All the machinery of
+justice is in his hands. How keen is the need, then, of calmness and
+strict justice in dealing with the Negro! Nothing more surely tends to
+bring the white man down to the lowest level of the criminal Negro than
+yielding to those blind instincts of savagery which find expression in the
+mob. The man who joins a mob, by his very acts, puts himself on a level
+with the Negro criminal: both have given way wholly to brute passion. For,
+if civilisation means anything, it means self-restraint; casting away
+self-restraint the white man becomes as savage as the criminal Negro.
+
+If the white man sets an example of non-obedience to law, of
+non-enforcement of law, and of unequal justice, what can be expected of
+the Negro? A criminal father is a poor preacher of homilies to a wayward
+son. The Negro sees a man, white or black, commit murder and go free, over
+and over again in all these lynching counties. Why should he fear to
+murder? Every passion of the white man is reflected and emphasised in the
+criminal Negro.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+AN OSTRACISED RACE IN FERMENT
+
+THE CONFLICT OF NEGRO PARTIES AND NEGRO LEADERS OVER METHODS OF DEALING
+WITH THEIR OWN PROBLEM
+
+
+One of the things that has interested me most of all in studying Negro
+communities, especially in the North, has been to find them so torn by
+cliques and divided by such wide differences of opinion.
+
+No other element of our population presents a similar condition; the
+Italians, the Jews, the Germans and especially the Chinese and Japanese
+are held together not only by a different language, but by ingrained and
+ancient national habits. They group themselves naturally. But the Negro is
+an American in language and customs; he knows no other traditions and he
+has no other conscious history; a large proportion, indeed, possess
+varying degrees of white American blood (restless blood!) and yet the
+Negro is not accepted as an American. Instead of losing himself gradually
+in the dominant race, as the Germans, Irish, and Italians are doing,
+adding those traits or qualities with which Time fashions and modifies
+this human mosaic called the American nation, the Negro is set apart as a
+peculiar people.
+
+With every Negro, then, an essential question is: "How shall I meet this
+attempt to put me off by myself?"
+
+That question in one form or another--politically, industrially,
+socially--is being met daily, almost hourly, by every Negro in this
+country. It colours his very life.
+
+"You don't know, and you can't know," a Negro said to me, "what it is to
+be a problem, to understand that everyone is watching you and studying
+you, to have your mind constantly on your own actions. It has made us
+think and talk about ourselves more than other people do. It has made us
+self-conscious and sensitive."
+
+It is scarcely surprising, then, that upon such a vital question there
+should be wide differences of opinion among Negroes. As a matter of fact,
+there are almost innumerable points of view and suggested modes of
+conduct, but they all group themselves into two great parties which are
+growing more distinct in outline and purpose every day. Both parties exist
+in every part of the country, but it is in the North that the struggle
+between them is most evident. I have found a sharper feeling and a
+bitterer discussion of race relationships among the Negroes of the North
+than among those of the South. If you want to hear the race question
+discussed with fire and fervour, go to Boston!
+
+For two hundred and fifty years the Negro had no thought, no leadership,
+no parties; then suddenly he was set free, and became, so far as law could
+make him, an integral and indistinguishable part of the American people.
+But it was only in a few places in the North and among comparatively few
+individuals that he ever approximately reached the position of a free
+citizen, that he ever really enjoyed the rights granted to him under the
+law. In the South he was never free politically, socially, and
+industrially, in the sense that the white man is free, and is not so
+to-day.
+
+But in Boston, and in other Northern cities in lesser degree, a group of
+Negroes reached essentially equal citizenship. A few families trace their
+lineage back to the very beginnings of civilisation in this country,
+others were freemen long before the war, a few had revolutionary war
+records of which their descendants are intensely and justly proud. Some of
+the families have far more white blood than black; though the census shows
+that only about 40 per cent. of the Negroes of Boston are mulattoes, the
+real proportion is undoubtedly very much higher.
+
+In abolition times these Negroes were much regarded. Many of them attained
+and kept a certain real position among the whites; they were even accorded
+unusual opportunities and favours. They found such a place as an educated
+Negro might find to-day (or at least as he found a few years ago) in
+Germany. In some instances they became wealthy. At a time when the North
+was passionately concerned in the abolition of slavery the colour of his
+skin sometimes gave the Negro special advantages, even honours.
+
+For years after the war this condition continued; then a stream of
+immigration of Southern Negroes began to appear, at first a mere rivulet,
+but latterly increasing in volume, until to-day all of our Northern cities
+have swarming coloured colonies. Owing to the increase of the Negro
+population and for other causes which I have already mentioned, sentiment
+in the North toward the Negro has been undergoing a swift change.
+
+
+_How Colour Lines Are Drawn_
+
+Now the tragedy of the Negro is the colour of his skin: he is easily
+recognisable. The human tendency is to class people together by outward
+appearances. When the line began to be drawn it was drawn not alone
+against the unworthy Negro, but against the Negro. It was not so much
+drawn by the highly intelligent white man as by the white man. And the
+white man alone has not drawn it, but the Negroes themselves are drawing
+it--and more and more every day. So we draw the line in this country
+against the Chinese, the Japanese, and in some measure against the Jews
+(and they help to draw it). So we speak with disparagement of "dagoes" and
+"square heads." Right or wrong, these lines, in our present state of
+civilisation, are drawn. They are here; they must be noted and dealt with.
+
+What was the result? The Northern Negro who has been enjoying the free
+life of Boston and Philadelphia has protested passionately against the
+drawing of a colour line: he wishes to be looked upon, and not at all
+unnaturally, for he possesses human ambitions and desires, solely for his
+worth as a man, not as a Negro.
+
+In Philadelphia I heard of the old Philadelphia Negroes, in Indianapolis
+of the old Indianapolis families, in Boston a sharp distinction was drawn
+between the "Boston Negroes" and the recent Southern importation. Even in
+Chicago, where there is nothing old, I found the same spirit.
+
+In short, it is the protest against separation, against being deprived of
+the advantages and opportunities of a free life. In the South the most
+intelligent and best educated Negroes are, generally speaking, the leaders
+of their race, but in Northern cities some of the ablest Negroes will have
+nothing to do with the masses of their own people or with racial
+movements; they hold themselves aloof, asserting that there is no
+colour line, and if there is, there should not be. Their associations and
+their business are largely with white people and they cling passionately
+to the fuller life.
+
+
+[Illustration: DR. BOOKER T. WASHINGTON
+
+Photograph by Dimock]
+
+
+"When I am sick," one of them said to me, "I don't go to a Negro doctor,
+but to a doctor. Colour has nothing to do with it."
+
+In the South the same general setting apart of Negroes as Negroes is going
+on, of course, on an immeasurably wider scale. By disfranchisement they
+are being separated politically, the Jim Crow laws set them apart socially
+and physically, the hostility of white labour in some callings pushes them
+aside in the industrial activities. But the South presents no such
+striking contrasts as the North, because no Southern Negroes were ever
+really accorded a high degree of citizenship.
+
+
+_Two Great Negro Parties_
+
+Now, the Negroes of the country are meeting the growing discrimination
+against them in two ways, out of which have grown the two great parties to
+which I have referred. One party has sprung, naturally, from the thought
+of the Northern Negro and is a product of the freedom which the Northern
+Negro has enjoyed; although, of course, it finds many followers in the
+South.
+
+The other is the natural product of the far different conditions in the
+South, where the Negro cannot speak his mind, where he has never realised
+any large degree of free citizenship. Both are led by able men, and both
+are backed by newspapers and magazines. It has come, indeed, to the point
+where most Negroes of any intelligence at all have taken their place on
+one side or the other.
+
+The second-named party, which may best, perhaps, be considered first, is
+made up of the great mass of the coloured people both South and North; its
+undisputed leader is Booker T. Washington.
+
+
+_The Rise of Booker T. Washington_
+
+Nothing has been more remarkable in the recent history of the Negro than
+Washington's rise to influence as a leader, and the spread of his ideals
+of education and progress. It is noteworthy that he was born in the South,
+a slave, that he knew intimately the common struggling life of his people
+and the attitude of the white race toward them. He worked his way to
+education in Southern schools and was graduated at Hampton--a story which
+he tells best himself in his book, "Up From Slavery." He was and is
+Southern in feeling and point of view. When he began to think how he could
+best help his people the same question came to him that comes to every
+Negro:
+
+"What shall we do about this discrimination and separation?"
+
+And his was the type of character which answered, "Make the best of it;
+overcome it with self-development."
+
+The very essence of his doctrine is this:
+
+"Get yourself right, and the world will be all right."
+
+His whole work and his life have said to the white man:
+
+"You've set us apart. You don't want us. All right; we'll be apart. We can
+succeed as Negroes."
+
+It is the doctrine of the opportunist and optimist: peculiarly, indeed,
+the doctrine of the man of the soil, who has come up fighting, dealing
+with the world, not as he would like to have it, but as it overtakes him.
+Many great leaders have been like that: Lincoln was one. They have the
+simplicity and patience of the soil, and the immense courage and faith. To
+prevent being crushed by circumstances they develop humour; they laugh off
+their troubles. Washington has all of these qualities of the common life:
+he possesses in high degree what some one has called "great commonness."
+And finally he has a simple faith in humanity, and in the just purposes of
+the Creator of humanity.
+
+Being a hopeful opportunist Washington takes the Negro as he finds him,
+often ignorant, weak, timid, surrounded by hostile forces, and tells him
+to go to work at anything, anywhere, but go to work, learn how to work
+better, save money, have a better home, raise a better family.
+
+
+_What Washington Teaches the Negro_
+
+The central idea of his doctrine, indeed, is work. He teaches that if the
+Negro wins by real worth a strong economic position in the country, other
+rights and privileges will come to him naturally. He should get his
+rights, not by gift of the white man, but by earning them himself.
+
+"I noticed," he says, "when I first went to Tuskegee to start the Tuskegee
+Normal and Industrial Institute, that some of the white people about there
+looked rather doubtfully at me. I thought I could get their influence by
+telling them how much algebra and history and science and all those things
+I had in my head, but they treated me about the same as they did before.
+They didn't seem to care about the algebra, history, and science that were
+in my head only. Those people never even began to have confidence in me
+until we commenced to build a large three-story brick building; and then
+another and another, until now we have eighty-six buildings which have
+been erected largely by the labour of our students, and to-day we have the
+respect and confidence of all the white people in that section.
+
+"There is an unmistakable influence that comes over a white man when he
+sees a black man living in a two-story brick house that has been paid
+for."
+
+In another place he has given his ideas of what education should be:
+
+"How I wish that, from the most cultured and highly endowed university in
+the great North to the humblest log cabin schoolhouse in Alabama, we could
+burn, as it were, into the hearts and heads of all that usefulness, that
+service to our brother is the supreme end of education."
+
+It is, indeed, to the teaching of service in the highest sense that
+Washington's life has been devoted. While he urges every Negro to reach as
+high a place as he can, he believes that the great masses of the Negroes
+are best fitted to-day for manual labour; his doctrine is that they should
+be taught to do that labour better: that when the foundations have been
+laid in sound industry and in business enterprise, the higher callings and
+honours will come of themselves.
+
+His emphasis is rather upon duties than upon rights. He does not advise
+the Negro to surrender a single right: on the other hand, he urges his
+people to use fully every right they have or can get--for example, to vote
+wherever possible, and vote thoughtfully. But he believes that some of the
+rights given the Negro have been lost because the Negro had neither the
+wisdom nor the strength to use them properly.
+
+
+_Washington's Influence on His People_
+
+I have not said much thus far in these articles about Booker T.
+Washington, but as I have been travelling over this country, South and
+North, studying Negro communities, I have found the mark of him everywhere
+in happier human lives. Wherever I found a prosperous Negro enterprise, a
+thriving business place, a good home, there I was almost sure to find
+Booker T. Washington's picture over the fireplace or a little framed motto
+expressing his gospel of work and service. I have heard bitter things said
+about Mr. Washington by both coloured people and white. I have waited and
+investigated many of these stories, and I am telling here what I have seen
+and known of his influence among thousands of common, struggling human
+beings. Many highly educated Negroes, especially, in the North, dislike
+him and oppose him, but he has brought new hope and given new courage to
+the masses of his race. He has given them a working plan of life. And is
+there a higher test of usefulness? Measured by any standard, white or
+black, Washington must be regarded to-day as one of the great men of this
+country: and in the future he will be so honoured.
+
+
+_Dr. Du Bois and the Negro_
+
+The party led by Washington is made up of the masses of the common people;
+the radical party, on the other hand, represents what may be called the
+intellectuals. The leading exponent of its point of view is unquestionably
+Professor W. E. B. Du Bois of Atlanta University--though, like all
+minority parties, it is torn with dissension and discontent. Dr. Du Bois
+was born in Massachusetts of a family that had no history of Southern
+slavery. He has a large intermixture of white blood. Broadly educated at
+Harvard and in the universities of Germany, he is to-day one of the able
+sociologists of this country. His economic studies of the Negro made for
+the United States Government and for the Atlanta University conference
+(which he organised) are works of sound scholarship and furnish the
+student with the best single source of accurate information regarding the
+Negro at present obtainable in this country. And no book gives a deeper
+insight into the inner life of the Negro, his struggles and his
+aspirations, than "The Souls of Black Folk."
+
+Dr. Du Bois has the temperament of the scholar and idealist--critical,
+sensitive, unhumorous, impatient, often covering its deep feeling with
+sarcasm and cynicism. When the question came to him:
+
+"What shall the Negro do about discrimination?" his answer was the exact
+reverse of Washington's: it was the voice of Massachusetts:
+
+"Do not submit! agitate, object, fight."
+
+Where Washington reaches the hearts of his people, Du Bois appeals to
+their heads. Du Bois is not a leader of men, as Washington is: he is
+rather a promulgator of ideas. While Washington is building a great
+educational institution and organising the practical activities of the
+race, Du Bois is the lonely critic holding up distant ideals. Where
+Washington cultivates friendly human relationships with the white people
+among whom the lot of the Negro is cast, Du Bois, sensitive to rebuffs,
+draws more and more away from white people.
+
+
+_A Negro Declaration of Independence_
+
+Several years ago Du Bois organised the Niagara movement for the purpose
+of protesting against the drawing of the colour line. It is important, not
+so much for the extent of its membership, which is small, but because it
+represents, genuinely, a more or less prevalent point of view among many
+coloured people.
+
+Its declaration of principles says:
+
+     We refuse to allow the impression to remain that the Negro-American
+     assents to inferiority, is submissive under oppression and apologetic
+     before insults. Through helplessness we may submit, but the voice of
+     protest of ten million Americans must never cease to assail the ears
+     of their fellows, so long as America is unjust.
+
+     Any discrimination based simply on race or colour is barbarous, we
+     care not how hallowed it be by custom, expediency, or prejudice.
+     Differences made on account of ignorance, immorality, or disease are
+     legitimate methods of fighting evil, and against them we have no word
+     of protest, but discriminations based simply and solely on physical
+     peculiarities, place of birth, colour of skin, are relics of that
+     unreasoning human savagery of which the world is, and ought to be,
+     thoroughly ashamed.
+
+The object of the movement is to protest against disfranchisement and Jim
+Crow laws and to demand equal rights of education, equal civil rights,
+equal economic opportunities, and justice in the courts. Taking the ballot
+from the Negro they declare to be only a step to economic slavery; that it
+leaves the Negro defenceless before his competitor--that the
+disfranchisement laws in the South are being followed by all manner of
+other discriminations which interfere with the progress of the Negro.
+
+"Persistent manly agitation is the way to liberty," says the declaration,
+"and toward this goal the Niagara movement has started."
+
+The annual meeting of the movement was held last August in Boston, the
+chief gathering being in Faneuil Hall. Every reference in the speeches to
+Garrison, Phillips, and Sumner was cheered to the echo. "It seemed," said
+one newspaper report, "like a revival of the old spirit of
+abolitionism--with the white man left out."
+
+Several organisations in the country, like the New England Suffrage
+League, the Equal Rights League of Georgia, and others, take much the same
+position as the Niagara movement.
+
+The party led by Dr. Du Bois is, in short, a party of protest which
+endeavours to prevent Negro separation and discrimination against Negroes
+by agitation and political influence.
+
+
+_Two Negro Parties Compared_
+
+These two points of view, of course, are not peculiar to Negroes; they
+divide all human thought. The opportunist and optimist on the one hand
+does his great work with the world as he finds it: he is resourceful,
+constructive, familiar. On the other hand, the idealist, the agitator, who
+is also a pessimist, performs the function of the critic, he sees the
+world as it should be and cries out to have it instantly changed.
+
+Thus with these two great Negro parties. Each is working for essentially
+the same end--better conditions of life for the Negro--each contains brave
+and honest men, and each is sure, humanly enough, that the other side is
+not only wrong, but venally wrong, whereas both parties are needed and
+both perform a useful function.
+
+
+[Illustration: DR. W. E. B. DU BOIS of Atlanta University
+
+Photograph by Purdy]
+
+
+The chief, and at present almost the only, newspaper exponent of the
+radical Negro point of view is the Boston _Guardian_, published by William
+Monroe Trotter. Mr. Trotter is a mulatto who was graduated a few years ago
+with high honours from Harvard. His wife, who is active with him in his
+work, has so little Negro blood that she would ordinarily pass for white.
+Mr. Trotter's father fought in the Civil War and rose to be a lieutenant
+in Colonel Hallowell's Massachusetts regiment. He was one of the leaders
+of the Negro soldiers who refused to accept $8 a month as servants when
+white soldiers received $13. He argued that if a Negro soldier stood up
+and stopped a bullet, he was as valuable to the country as the white
+soldier. Though his family suffered, he served without pay rather than
+accept the money. It was the uncompromising spirit of Garrison and
+Phillips.
+
+
+_A Negro Newspaper of Agitation_
+
+The _Guardian_ is as violent and bitter in some of its denunciations as
+the most reactionary white paper in the South. It would have the North
+take up arms again and punish the South for its position on the Negro
+question! It breathes the spirit of prejudice. Reading it sometimes, I am
+reminded of Senator Tillman's speeches. It answers the white publicity
+given in the South to black crime against white women by long accounts of
+similar crimes of white men. One of its chief points of conflict is the
+position of President Roosevelt regarding the Brownsville riot and the
+discharge of Negro soldiers; the attack on Roosevelt is unceasing, and in
+this viewpoint, at least, it is supported undoubtedly by no small
+proportion of the Negroes of the country. Another leading activity is its
+fight on Booker T. Washington and his work. Denouncing Washington as a
+"notorious and incorrigible Jim Crowist," it says that he "dares to assert
+that the best way to get rights is not to oppose their being taken away,
+but to get money." Two or three years ago, when Mr. Washington went to
+Boston to address a coloured audience in Zion Church, Mr. Trotter and his
+friends scattered cayenne pepper on the rostrum and created a disturbance
+which broke up the meeting. Mr. Trotter went to jail for the offence. From
+the _Guardian_ of September 2d I cut part of the leading editorial which
+will show its attitude:
+
+     PROPHET OF SLAVERY AND TRAITOR TO RACE
+
+     As another mark of the treacherous character of Booker Washington in
+     matters concerning the race, come his discordant notes in support of
+     Secretary Taft for President of the United States in spite of the
+     fact that every Negro organisation of any note devoted to the cause
+     of equal rights and justice have condemned President Roosevelt for
+     his unpardonable treatment of the soldiers of the 25th Infantry, U.
+     S. A., and Secretary Taft for his duplicity, and declared their
+     determination to seek the defeat of either if nominated for the
+     office of President of these United States, or anyone named by them
+     for said office. Booker Washington, ever concerned for his own
+     selfish ambitions, indifferent to the cries of the race so long as he
+     wins the approval of white men who do not believe in the Negro,
+     defies the absolutely unanimous call of all factions of the race for
+     Foraker. Leader of the self-seekers, he has persistently, but thank
+     heaven unsuccessfully, sought to entangle the whole race in the
+     meshes of subordination. Knowing the race could only be saved by
+     fighting cowardice, we have just as persistently resisted every
+     attempt he has made to plant his white flag on the domains of equal
+     manhood rights and our efforts have been rewarded by the universal
+     denunciation of his doctrines of submission and his utter elimination
+     as a possible leader of his race.
+
+Generally speaking, the radical party has fought every movement of any
+sort that tends to draw a colour line.
+
+
+_Boston Hotel for Coloured People_
+
+One of the enterprises of Boston which interested me deeply was a Negro
+hotel, the Astor House, which is operated by Negroes for Negro guests. It
+has 200 rooms, with a telephone in each room, a restaurant, and other
+accommodations. It struck me that it was a good example of Negro self-help
+that Negroes should be proud of. But upon mentioning it to a coloured man
+I met I found that he was violently opposed to it.
+
+"Why hotels for coloured men?" he asked. "I believe in hotels for men. The
+coloured man must not draw the line himself if he doesn't want the white
+man to do it. He must demand and insist constantly upon his rights as an
+American citizen."
+
+I found in Boston and in other Northern cities many Negroes who took this
+position. A white woman, who sought to establish a help and rescue mission
+for coloured girls similar to those conducted for the Jews, Italians, and
+other nationalities in other cities, was violently opposed, on the ground
+that it set up a precedent for discrimination. In the same way separate
+settlement work (though there is a separate settlement for Jews in Boston)
+and the proposed separate Y. M. C. A. have met with strong protests.
+Everything that tends to set the Negro off as a Negro, whether the white
+man does it or the Negro does it, is bitterly opposed by this party of
+coloured people.
+
+They fought the Jamestown Exposition because it had a Negro Building,
+which they called the "Jim Crow Annex," and they fought the National
+Christian Endeavour Convention because the leaders could not assure Negro
+delegates exactly equal facilities in the hotels and restaurants. Of
+course the denunciation of the white South is continuous and bitter. It is
+noteworthy, however, that even the leaders of the movement not only
+recognise and conduct separate newspapers and ask Negroes to support them,
+but that they urge Negroes to stand together politically.
+
+
+_Boston Negroes Seen by a New York Negro Newspaper_
+
+But the large proportion of coloured newspapers in the country, the
+strongest and ablest of which is perhaps the New York _Age_, are
+supporters of Washington and his ideals. The Boston correspondent of the
+_Age_ said recently:
+
+     It is unfortunate in Boston that we have a hall which we can get free
+     of charge: we refer to Faneuil Hall. They work Faneuil Hall for all
+     it is worth. Scarcely a month ever passes by that does not see a
+     crowd of Afro-Americans in Faneuil Hall throwing up their hats,
+     yelling and going into hysterics over some subject usually relating
+     to somebody a thousand miles away, never in relation to conditions
+     right at home. The better element of Negroes and the majority of our
+     white friends in this city have become disgusted over the policy that
+     is being pursued and has been pursued for several months in Boston.
+     Your correspondent can give you no better evidence of the disgust
+     than to state that a few days ago there was one of these hysterical
+     meetings held in Faneuil Hall and our people yelled and cried and
+     agitated for two hours and more. The next day not one of the leading
+     papers, such as the _Herald_ and the _Transcript_, had a single line
+     concerning this meeting. A few years ago had a meeting been held in
+     Faneuil Hall under the leadership of safe and conservative
+     Afro-Americans, both of these newspapers and papers of similar
+     character would have devoted from two to three columns to a
+     discussion of it. Now, in Boston, they let such meetings completely
+     alone.
+
+     If there ever was a place where the Negro seems to have more freedom
+     than he seems to know what to do with, it is in this city.
+
+In spite of the agitation against drawing the colour line by the radical
+party, however, the separation is still going on. And it is not merely
+the demand of the white man that the Negro step aside by himself, for the
+Negro himself is drawing the colour line, and drawing it with as much
+enthusiasm as the white man. A genuine race-spirit or race-consciousness
+is developing. Negroes are meeting prejudice with self-development.
+
+It is a significant thing to find that many Negroes who a few years ago
+called themselves "Afro-Americans," or "Coloured Americans," and who
+winced at the name Negro, now use Negro as the race name with pride. While
+in Indianapolis I went to a Negro church to hear a speech by W. T. Vernon,
+one of the leading coloured men of the country, who was appointed Register
+of the United States Treasury by President Roosevelt. On the walls of the
+church hung the pictures of coloured men who had accomplished something
+for their race, and the essence of the speaker's address was an appeal to
+racial pride and the demand that the race stand up for itself, encourage
+Negro business and patronise Negro industry. All of which, surely, is
+significant.
+
+
+_How Negroes Themselves Draw the Colour Line_
+
+The pressure for separation among the Negroes themselves is growing
+rapidly stronger. Where there are mixed schools in the North there is
+often pressure by Negroes for separate schools. The Philadelphia
+_Courant_, a Negro newspaper, in objecting to this new feeling, says:
+
+     Public sentiment, so far as the white people are concerned, does not
+     object to the mixed school system in vogue in our city half as much
+     as the Afro-American people seem to be doing themselves. We find them
+     the chief objectors.
+
+One reason why the South to-day has a better development of Negro
+enterprise, one reason why Booker T. Washington believes that the South is
+a better place for the Negro than the North, and advises him to remain
+there, is this more advanced racial spirit. Prejudice there, being
+sharper, has forced the Negro back upon his own resources.
+
+Dr. Frissell of Hampton is always talking to his students of the
+"advantages of disadvantages."
+
+I was much struck with the remark of a Negro business man I met in
+Indianapolis:
+
+"The trouble here is," he said, "that there is not enough prejudice
+against us."
+
+"How is that?" I inquired.
+
+"Well, you see we are still clinging too much to the skirts of the white
+man. When you hate us more it will drive us together and make us support
+coloured enterprises."
+
+When in Chicago I heard of an interesting illustration of this idea. With
+the increasing number of Negro students prejudice has increased in the
+Chicago medical schools, until recently some of them have, by agreement,
+been closed to coloured graduate students. Concerning this condition, the
+Chicago _Conservator_, a Negro newspaper, says: "The cause of this
+extraordinary announcement is that the Southern students object to the
+presence of Negroes in the classes. Now it is up to the Negro doctors of
+the country to meet this insult by establishing a post-graduate school of
+their own. They can do it if they have the manhood, self-respect, and
+push. Let Doctors Hall, Williams, Boyd and others get busy."
+
+To this the New York _Age_ adds:
+
+"Yes; let us have a school of that sort of our own."
+
+And this is no idle suggestion. Few people have any conception of the
+growing progress of Negroes in the medical profession. In August, 1907,
+the Coloured National Medical Association held its ninth annual session at
+Baltimore. Over three hundred delegates and members were in attendance
+from thirty different states. Graduates were there not only from Harvard,
+Yale, and other white colleges, but from coloured medical schools like
+Meharry and Howard University. Negro hospitals have been opened and are
+well supported in several cities.
+
+
+_National Negro Business League_
+
+All over the country the Negro is organised in business leagues and these
+leagues have formed a National Business League which met last August in
+Topeka, Kansas. I can do no better in interpreting the spirit of this
+work, which is indeed the practical spirit of the Southern party, than in
+quoting briefly from the address of Booker T. Washington, who is the
+president of the league:
+
+     Despite much talk, the Negro is not discouraged, but is going
+     forward. The race owns to-day an acreage equal to the combined
+     acreage of Holland and Belgium. The Negro owns more land, more
+     houses, more stores, more banks, than has ever been true in his
+     history. We are learning that no race can occupy a soil unless it
+     gets as much out of it as any other race gets out of it. Soil,
+     sunshine, rain, and the laws of trade have no regard for race or
+     colour. We are learning that we must be builders if we would succeed.
+     As we learn this lesson we shall find help at the South and at the
+     North. We must not be content to be tolerated in communities, we must
+     make ourselves needed. The law that governs the universe knows no
+     race or colour. The force of nature will respond as readily to the
+     hand of the Chinaman, the Italian, or the Negro as to any other race.
+     Man may discriminate, but nature and the laws that control the
+     affairs of men will not and cannot. Nature does not hide her wealth
+     from a black hand.
+
+All along the line one finds this spirit of hopeful progress. A vivid
+picture of conditions, showing frankly both the weakness and strength of
+the Negro, is given by a coloured correspondent of the Indianapolis
+_Freeman_. He begins by telling of the organisation at Carbondale, Ill.,
+of a joint stock company composed of thirty-nine coloured men to operate a
+dry goods store. The correspondent writes:
+
+     The question is, "Will the coloured people support this enterprise
+     with their patronage?" It is a general cry all over the country that
+     coloured people pass by the doors of our merchants and trade with any
+     other concerns--Jews, Dagoes, Polacks, and what not. This is a very
+     unfortunate fact which stands before us as a living shame. The very
+     people who preach "race union, race support, race enterprise," are
+     often the first to pass our own mercantile establishments by. The
+     only places where coloured men can prosper in business are where our
+     people are driven out of other people's places of business and
+     actually forced to patronise our own. A certain cigar manufacturer in
+     St. Louis, a first-class business man, putting out the very best
+     classes of cigars, said, a few days ago, that some of the hardest
+     work he ever did was to get a few of our own dealers to handle his
+     goods. If but one-third of the stores and stands that sell cigars and
+     tobacco in St. Louis alone would buy their goods of him he could in a
+     few more years employ one or two dozen more men and women in his
+     factory. A dry goods company in the same city is suffering from the
+     same trouble. Our people will condescend to look in, but more often
+     their purchases are made at a neighbouring Jew store. There are also
+     in that neighbourhood several first-class, up-to-date, clean and
+     tasty-looking coloured restaurants: but twice as many Negroes take
+     their meals at the cheap-John, filthy, fourth-class chop counters run
+     by other people near by. But, after all, my people are doing better
+     in these matters than they did some time past. It was a most pleasant
+     surprise to learn, the other day, that the coloured undertakers in
+     St. Louis do every dollar's worth of business for our people in that
+     line. This information was given by a reliable white undertaker and
+     substantiated by the coloured undertakers. The white man was asked
+     what he thought of it. He said he thought it was a remarkable
+     illustration of the loyalty of the Negro to his own people and that
+     they should be commended for it. And then there are two sides to
+     every question. It is too often true that our people run their
+     business on a low order--noisy, uncleanly, questionable, dive-like
+     concerns--therefore do not deserve the patronage of decent people.
+     Too many of our men do not know anything about business. They don't
+     believe in investing their money in advertising their business in
+     good first-class periodicals. We must not expect everybody to know
+     where we are or what we have to sell unless we advertise. Many of our
+     nickels would find their way to the cash drawer of a coloured man if
+     we just knew where to find the store, restaurant or hotel.
+
+
+_Remarkable Development of Negroes_
+
+It is not short of astonishing, indeed, to discover how far the Negro has
+been able to develop in the forty-odd years since slavery a distinct race
+spirit and position. It is pretty well known that he has been going into
+business, that he is acquiring much land, that he has many professional
+men, that he worships in his own churches and has many schools which he
+conducts--but in other lines of activity he is also getting a foothold.
+Just as an illustration: I was surprised at finding so many Negro theatres
+in the country--theatres not only owned or operated by Negroes, but
+presenting plays written and acted by Negroes. I saw a fine new Negro
+theatre in New Orleans; I visited a smaller coloured theatre in Jackson,
+Miss., and in Chicago the Pekin Theatre is an enterprise wholly conducted
+by Negroes. Williams and Walker, Negro comedians, have long amused large
+audiences, both white and coloured. Their latest production, "Bandanna
+Land," written and produced wholly by Negroes, is not only funny, but
+clean.
+
+Many other illustrations could be given to show how the Negro is
+developing in one way or another--but especially along racial lines. The
+extensive organisation of Negro lodges of Elks and Masons and other secret
+orders, many of them with clubhouses, might be mentioned. Attention might
+be called to the almost innumerable insurance societies and companies
+maintained by Negroes, the largest of which, the True Reformers, of
+Richmond, has over 50,000 members, and to the growth of Negro newspapers
+and magazines (there are now over two hundred in the country), but enough
+has been said, perhaps, to make the point that there has been a real
+development of a Negro spirit and self-consciousness. Of course these
+signal successes loom large among the ten million of the country and yet
+they show the possibilities: there is this hopeful side of Negro
+conditions in this country as well as the dark and evil aspects of which
+we hear all too much.
+
+Out of this ferment of racial self-consciousness and readjustment has
+grown, as I have shown, the two great Negro parties. Between them and
+within them lie the destinies of the race in this country, and to no small
+extent also the destiny of the dominant white race. It is, therefore, of
+the highest importance for white men to understand the real tendencies of
+thought and organisation among these ten million Americans. For here is
+vigour and ability, and whatever may be the white man's attitude toward
+the Negro, the contempt of mere ignorance of what the Negro is doing is
+not only short-sighted but positively foolish. Only by a complete
+understanding can the white man who has assumed the entire responsibility
+of government in this country meet the crises, like that of the Atlanta
+riot, which are constantly arising between the races.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+THE NEGRO IN POLITICS
+
+
+The discussion of the Negro in politics will of necessity deal chiefly
+with conditions in the South; for it is there, and there only, that the
+Negro is, at the present time, a great political problem. Negroes in the
+North are indeed beginning to play a conscious part in politics; but they
+are only one element among many. They take their place with the "Irish
+vote," the "German vote," the "Polish vote," the "labour vote," each of
+which must be courted or placated by the politicians. I have looked into
+Negro political conditions in several cities, notably Indianapolis and
+Philadelphia, and I cannot see that they are in any marked way different
+from the condition of any other class of our population which through
+ignorance, or fear, or ambition, votes more or less _en masse_. Many
+Negroes do not vote at all; some are as conscientious and incorruptible as
+any white citizen; but a large proportion, ignorant and short-sighted, are
+disfranchised by the use of money in one form or another at every
+election. One of the broadest observers in Indianapolis said to me:
+
+"The Negro voters are no worse and no better than our foreign voting
+population."
+
+Mayor Tom Johnson, himself Southern by birth, writes me regarding the
+Negro vote of Cleveland:
+
+"I do not believe there is any larger percentage of unintelligent or
+dishonest votes among the coloured voters than among the white voters in
+the same walks of life."
+
+
+_Negro a National Problem_
+
+I wish here to emphasise again the fact that the Negro is not a sectional
+but a _national_ problem. Anything that affects the South favourably or
+unfavourably reacts upon the whole country. And the same latent race
+feeling exists in the North that exists in the South (for it is human,
+not Southern). The North, indeed, as I have shown in previous chapters,
+confronted with a large influx of Negroes, is coming more and more to
+understand and sympathise with the heart-breaking problems which beset the
+South. Nothing short of the patient cooeperation of the entire country,
+North and South, white and black, will ever solve the race question.
+
+In this country, as elsewhere, political thought divides itself into two
+opposing forces, two great parties or points of view.
+
+Whatever their momentary names have been, whether Federalist, Democratic,
+Whig, Republican, Populist, or Socialist, one of these parties has been an
+Aristocratic or conservative party, the other a democratic or progressive
+party. The political struggle in this country (and the world over) has
+been between the aristocratic idea that a few men (or one man) should
+control the country and supervise the division of labour and the products
+of labour and the democratic idea that more people should have a hand in
+it.
+
+The abolition of slavery in the South was an incident in this struggle.
+Slavery was not abolished because the North agitated, or because John
+Brown raided or Mrs. Stowe wrote a book, or for any other sentimental or
+superficial reason, but because it was undemocratic.
+
+
+_What Slavery Did_
+
+This is what slavery did: It enabled a comparatively few men (only about
+one in ten of the white men of the South was a slave-owner or
+slave-renter) to control eleven states of the Union, to monopolise
+learning, to hold all the political offices, to own most of the good land
+and nearly all of the wealth. Not only did it keep the Negro in slavery,
+but nine-tenths of the white people (the so-called "poor whites," whom
+even the Negroes despised) were hardly more than peasants or serfs. It was
+in many ways a charming aristocracy, but it was doomed from the beginning.
+If there had been no North, slavery in the South would have disappeared
+just as inevitably. It was the restless yeast of democracy, spreading
+abroad upon the earth (in Europe as well as America) that killed slavery
+and liberated both Negro and poor white men.
+
+Revolutions such as the Civil War change names: they do not at once change
+human relationships. Mankind is reconstructed not by proclamations or
+legislation or military occupation, but by time, growth, education,
+religion, thought.
+
+When the South got on its feet again after Reconstruction and took account
+of itself, what did it find? It found 4,000,000 ignorant Negroes changed
+in name from "slave" to "freeman," but not changed in nature. It found the
+poor whites still poor whites; and the aristocrats, although they had lost
+both property and position, were still aristocrats. For values, after all,
+are not outward, but inward: not material, but spiritual. It was as
+impossible for the Negro at that time to be less than a slave as it was
+for the aristocrat to be less than an aristocrat. And this is what so many
+legal-minded men will not or cannot see.
+
+What happened?
+
+Exactly what might have been predicted. Southern society had been turned
+wrong side up by force, and it righted itself again by force. The Ku Klux
+Klan, the Patrollers, the Bloody Shirt movement, were the agencies
+(violent and cruel indeed, but inevitable) which readjusted the
+relationships, put the aristocrats on top, the poor whites in the middle,
+and the Negroes at the bottom. In short, society instinctively reverted to
+its old human relationships. I once saw a man shot through the body in a
+street riot. Mortally wounded, he stumbled and rolled over in the dust,
+but sprung up again as though uninjured and ran a hundred yards before he
+finally fell dead. Thus the Old South, though mortally wounded, sprung up
+and ran again.
+
+
+_The Struggle in South Carolina_
+
+The political reactions after Reconstruction varied, of course, in the
+different states, being most violent in states like South Carolina, where
+the old aristocratic regime was most firmly entrenched, and least violent
+in North Carolina, which has always been the most democratic of Southern
+states.
+
+In South Carolina then, for example, the aristocrats in 1875 returned to
+political supremacy.
+
+General Wade Hampton, who represented all that was highest in the old
+regime, became governor of the state. A similar tendency developed, of
+course, in the other Southern states, and a notable group of statesmen
+(and they _were_ statesmen) appeared in politics--Hill and Gordon of
+Georgia, Lamar and George of Mississippi, Butler of South Carolina, Morgan
+of Alabama, all aristocrats of the old school.
+
+Apparently the ancient order was restored; apparently the wounded man ran
+as well as ever. But the Old South, after all, had received its mortal
+wound. There _had_ been a revolution; society _had_ been overturned. The
+institution on which it had reared its ancient splendour was gone: for the
+aristocrat no longer enjoyed the special privilege, the enormous economic
+advantage of _owning_ his labourers. He was reduced to an economic
+equality with other white men, and even with the Negro, either of whom
+could _hire_ labour as easily and cheaply as he could. And the baronial
+plantation which had been the mark of his grandeur before the war was now
+the millstone of his doom.
+
+Special privilege, always the bulwark of aristocracy, being thus removed,
+the germ of democracy began to work among the poor whites. The
+disappearance of competitive slave labour made them unexpectedly
+prosperous; it secured a more equable division of wealth. With prosperity
+came more book-reading, more schooling, a greater _feeling_ of
+independence. And this feeling animated the poor white with a new sense of
+freedom and power.
+
+Enter now, when the time was fully ripe for a leader, the rude man of the
+people.
+
+How often he appears in the pages of history, the sure product of
+revolutions, bursting upward like some devastating force, not at all
+silken-handed or subtle-minded, but crude, virile, direct, truthful.
+
+
+_Tillman, the Prophet_
+
+So Tillman came in South Carolina. I can see him as he rode to the
+farmers' fairs and court days in the middle eighties, a sallow-faced,
+shaggy-haired man with one gleaming, restless, angry eye. He had been long
+preparing in silence for his task--struggling upward in the
+poverty-stricken days of the war and through the Reconstruction, without
+schooling, or chance of schooling, but endowed with a virile-mindedness
+which fed eagerly upon certain fermentative books of an inherited library.
+Lying on his back in the evening on the porch of his farmhouse, he read
+Carlyle's "French Revolution" and Gibbon's "Rome." He had in him, indeed,
+the veritable spirit of the revolutionist: in the days of the Patrollers,
+he, too, had ridden and hunted Negroes. He had seen the aristocracy come
+again into power; he had heard the whisperings of discontent among the
+poor whites. And at fairs and on court days in the eighties I hear him
+screaming his speeches of defiance, raucous, immoderate, denouncing all
+gentlemen, denouncing government by gentlemen, demanding that government
+be restored to the "plain people!" On one of the transparencies of those
+days he himself had printed the words (strange reminder of the Commune!):
+
+"Awake! arise! or be forever fallen."
+
+He spoke not only to the farmers, but he flung defiance at the aristocrats
+in the heart of the aristocracy. At Charleston, one of the proudest of
+Southern cities, he said:
+
+"Men of Charleston, I have always heard that you were the most
+self-idolatrous people that ever lived; but I want to say to you that the
+sun does not rise in the Cooper and set in the Ashley. It shines all over
+the state.... If the tales that have been told me or the reports which
+have come to me are one-tenth true, you are the most arrant set of cowards
+God ever made."
+
+And everywhere he went he closed his speeches with this appeal:
+
+"Organise, organise, organise. With organisation you will become free once
+more. Without it, you will remain slaves."
+
+Once, upon an historic occasion on the floor of the United States Senate,
+Tillman paused in the heat of a debate to explain (not to excuse) his
+fiery utterances.
+
+"I am a rude man," he said, "and don't care."
+
+That is Tillman. They tried to keep him and his followers out of the
+political conventions; but he would not be kept out, nor kept down. Years
+later he himself expressed the spirit of revolt in the United States
+Senate. Zach McGhee tells how he had been making one of his fierce
+attacks, an ebullition in general against things as they are. A senator
+arose to snuff him out in the genial senatorial way.
+
+"I would like to ask, Mr. President, what is before the Senate?"
+
+"_I_ am before the Senate," screamed Tillman.
+
+In 1890 Tillman was elected governor of South Carolina: the poor white, at
+last, was in power.
+
+The same change was going on all over the South. In Mississippi the rise
+of the people (no longer poor) was represented by Vardaman, in Arkansas by
+Jeff Davis, and Georgia and Alabama have experienced the same overturn in
+a more complicated form. It has become a matter of pride to many of the
+new leaders of the "plain people" that they do not belong to the "old
+families" or to the "aristocracy." Governor Comer told me that he was a
+"doodle-blower"--a name applied to the poor white dwellers on the sand
+hills of Alabama. Governor Swanson of Virginia is proud of the fact that
+he is the first governor of the state wholly educated in the public
+schools and colleges. Call these men demagogues if you will, and some of
+them certainly are open to the charge of appealing to the prejudices and
+passions of the people, they yet represent a genuine movement for a more
+democratic government in the South.
+
+The old aristocrats gibe at the new leaders even to the point of bitter
+hatred (in South Carolina at least one murder has grown out of the
+hostility of the factions); they see (how acutely!) the blunders of
+untrained administrators, their pride in their states is rubbed blood-raw
+by the unblushing crudities of the Tillmans, the Vardamans, the Jeff
+Davises. Go South and talk with any of these men of the ancient order and
+you will come away feeling that conditions in the South are without hope.
+
+
+_"High Men" of the Old South_
+
+And those old aristocrats had their virtues. One loves to hear the names
+still applied at Richmond, Montgomery, Macon, and Charleston to the men of
+the old type, by other men of the old type. How often I have heard the
+terms a "high man," an "incorruptible man." Beautiful names! For there was
+a personal honour, a personal devotion to public duties among many of
+these ante-bellum slave-owners that made them indeed "high men."
+
+When they were in power their reign was usually skilful and honest: the
+reign of a beneficent oligarchy. But it was selfish: it reigned for
+itself--with nine-tenths of the people serfs or slaves. Its luxuries, its
+culture, its gentleness, like that of all aristocracies, was enjoyed at
+the fearful cost of poverty, ignorance, and slavery of millions of human
+beings. It had no sympathy, therefore it perished from off the earth.
+
+The new men of the Tillman type made glaring, even violent mistakes, but
+for the most part honest mistakes; they saw clearly what they wanted: they
+wanted more power in the hands of the people, more democracy, and they
+went crudely at the work of getting it. In spite of the bitterness against
+Vardaman among some of the best people of Mississippi I heard no one
+accuse him of corruption in any department of his administration. On the
+whole, they said he had directed the business of the state with judgment.
+And Tillman, in spite of the dire predictions of the aristocrats, did not
+ruin the state. Quite to the contrary, he performed a notable service in
+extending popular education, establishing an agricultural college,
+regulating the liquor traffic (even though the system he established has
+since degenerated). Never before, indeed, has South Carolina, and the
+South generally, been more prosperous than it has since these men went
+into power, never has wealth increased so rapidly, never has education
+been so general nor the percentage of illiteracy so low. The "highest
+citizen" may not be so high (if it can be called high) in luxury and
+culture as he was before the war, but the average citizen is decidedly
+higher.
+
+Having thus acquired a proper historical perspective, we may now consider
+the part which the Negro has played in the politics of the South. Where
+does _he_ come in?
+
+
+_Where the Negro Comes In_
+
+Though it may seem a sweeping generalisation, it is none the less
+literally true that up to the present time the Negro's real influence in
+politics in the South has been almost negligible. He has been an _issue_,
+but not an _actor_ in politics. In the ante-bellum slavery agitation no
+Negroes appeared; they were an inert lump of humanity possessing no power
+of inner direction; the leaders on both sides were white men. The Negroes
+did not even follow poor old John Brown. And since the war, as I have
+shown, the struggle has been between the aristocrats and the poor whites.
+They have talked _about_ the Negro, but they have not let _him_ talk. Even
+in Reconstruction times, and I am not forgetting exceptional Negroes like
+Bruce, Revels, Pinchback, and others, the Negro was in politics by virtue
+of the power of the North. As a class, the Negroes were not self-directed
+but used by Northern carpetbaggers and political Southerners who took most
+of the offices and nearly all of the stealings.
+
+In short, the Negro in times past has never been in politics in the South
+in any positive sense. And that is not in the least surprising. Coming out
+of slavery, the Negro had no power of intelligent self-direction,
+practically no leaders who knew anything. He was still a slave in
+everything except name, and slaves have never yet ruled, or helped rule.
+
+The XV Amendment to the Constitution could not really enfranchise the
+Negro slaves. Men must enfranchise themselves.
+
+And this political equality by decree, not by growth and development,
+caused many of the woes of Reconstruction.
+
+Two distinct impulses mark the effort of the South to disfranchise the
+Negro. The first was the blind revolt of Reconstruction times, in which
+force and fraud were frankly and openly applied. The effort to eliminate
+the Negro brought the white people together in one dominant party and the
+"Solid South" was born. For years this method sufficed; but in the
+meantime the Negro was getting a little education, acquiring
+self-consciousness, and developing leaders of more or less ability. It
+became necessary, therefore, both because the Negro was becoming more
+restive, less easily controlled by force, and because the awakening white
+man disliked and feared the basis of fraud on which his elections rested,
+to establish legal sanction for disfranchisement, to define the political
+status of the Negro by law.
+
+Now, the truth is that the mass of Southerners have _never believed that
+the Negro has or should have any political rights_. The South as a whole
+does not now approve and never has approved of the voting Negro. A few
+Negroes vote everywhere, "but not enough," as a Southerner said to me, "to
+do any hurt."
+
+The South, then, has been placed in the position of _providing by law for
+something that it did not really believe in_.
+
+
+[Illustration: COLONEL JAMES LEWIS United States Receiver at New Orleans]
+
+[Illustration: W. T. VERNON Register of the United States Treasury
+
+Photograph by G. V. Buck]
+
+[Illustration: RALPH W. TYLER An auditor of the Government at Washington]
+
+
+
+It was prophesied that when the Negro was disfranchised by law and
+"eliminated from politics" the South would immediately stop discussing the
+Negro question and divide politically along new lines. But this has not
+happened. Though disfranchisement laws have been in force in Mississippi
+for years there is less division in the white party of that state than
+ever before.
+
+Why is this so? Because the Negro, through gradual education and the
+acquisition of property, is becoming more and more a real as well as a
+potential factor in politics. For he is just beginning to be _really_
+free. And the South has not yet decided how to deal with a Negro who owns
+property and is self-respecting and intelligent and who demands rights.
+The South is suspicious of this new Negro: it dreads him; and the
+politicians in power are quick to play upon this sentiment in order that
+the South may remain solid and the present political leadership remain
+undisturbed.
+
+For the South, however much it may talk of the ignorant masses of Negroes,
+does not really fear them; it wants to keep them, and keep them ignorant.
+It loves the ignorant, submissive old Negroes, the "mammies" and "uncles";
+it wants Negroes who, as one Southerner put it to me, "will do the dirty
+work and not fuss about it." It wants Negroes who are really inferior and
+who _feel_ inferior. The Negro that the South fears and dislikes is the
+educated, property-owning Negro who is beginning to demand rights, to take
+his place among men as a citizen. This is not an unsupported statement of
+mine, but has been expressed over and over again by speakers and writers
+in every part of the South. I have before me a letter from Charles P.
+Lane, editor of the Huntsville (Alabama) _Daily Tribune_, written to
+Governor Comer. It was published in the Atlanta _Constitution_. The writer
+is arguing that the Negro disfranchisement laws in Alabama are too
+lenient, that they permit too many Negroes to vote. He says:
+
+     We thought then (in 1901, when the new Alabama Constitution
+     disfranchising the Negro was under discussion), as we do now, that
+     the menace to peace, the danger to society and white supremacy was
+     not in the illiterate Negro, but in the upper branches of Negro
+     society, the educated, the man who, after ascertaining his political
+     rights, forced the way to assert them.
+
+He continues:
+
+     We, the Southern people, entertain no prejudice toward the ignorant
+     per se inoffensive Negro. It is because we know him and for him we
+     entertain a compassion. But our blood boils when the educated Negro
+     asserts himself politically. We regard each assertion as an
+     unfriendly encroachment upon our native superior rights, and a
+     dare-devil menace to our control of the affairs of the state.
+
+     In this are we not speaking the truth? Does not every Southern
+     Caucasian "to the manor born" bear witness to this version? Hence we
+     present that the way to dampen racial prejudice, avert the impending
+     horrors, is to emasculate the Negro politically by repealing the XV
+     Amendment of the Constitution of the United States.
+
+I use this statement of Mr. Lane's not because it represents the broadest
+and freest thought in the South, for it does not, but because it
+undoubtedly states frankly and clearly the point of view of the _majority_
+of Southern people. It is the point of view which, talked all over Georgia
+last year, helped to elect Hoke Smith governor of the state, as it has
+elected other governors. Hoke Smith's argument was essentially this:
+
+
+_Hoke Smith's Views_
+
+The uneducated Negro is a good Negro; "he is contented to occupy the
+natural status of his race, the position of inferiority." The educated and
+intelligent Negro, who wants to vote, is a disturbing and threatening
+influence. We don't want him down here; let him go North.
+
+This feeling regarding the educated Negro, who, as Mr. Lane says,
+"ascertains his rights and forces his way to assert them," is the basic
+fact in Southern politics. It is what keeps the white people welded
+together in a single party; it is what sternly checks revolts and
+discourages independence.
+
+Keeping this fact in mind, let us look more intimately into Southern
+conditions.
+
+Following ordinary usage I have spoken of the Solid South. As a matter of
+fact the South is not solid, nor is there a single party. The very
+existence of one strong party presupposes another, potentially as strong.
+In the South to-day there are, as inevitably as human nature, two parties
+and two political points of view. And one is aristocratic and the other is
+democratic.
+
+It is noteworthy in the pages of history that parties which were once
+democratic become in time aristocratic. We are accustomed for example, to
+look back upon Magna Charta as a mighty instrument of democracy; which it
+was; but it was not democracy according to our understanding of the word.
+It merely substituted a baronial oligarchy for the divine-right rule of
+one man, King John. It did not touch the downtrodden slaves, serfs and
+peasants of England. And yet that struggle of the barons was of profound
+moment in history, for it started the spirit of democracy on its way
+downward, it was the seed from which sprung English constitutionalism,
+which finally flowered in the American republic.
+
+Tillman, as I have shown, wrung democracy from the old slave-owning
+oligarchy. He conquered: he established a democracy in South Carolina
+which included poor whites as well as aristocrats. But Tillman in his
+fiery pleas for the rights of men no more considered the Negro than the
+old barons considered the serfs of their day in the struggle against King
+John. It was and is incomprehensible to him that the Negro "has any rights
+which the white man is bound to respect."
+
+In short we have in the South the familiar and ancient division of social
+forces, but instead of two white parties, we now see a white aristocratic
+party, which seeks to control the government, monopolise learning, and
+supervise the division of labour and the products of labour, struggling
+with a democratic party consisting of a few white and many coloured
+people, which clamours for a part in the government. That, in plain words,
+is the true situation in the South to-day.
+
+
+_Has the Spirit of Democracy Crossed the Colour Line?_
+
+For democracy is like this: once its ferment begins to work in a nation it
+does not stop until it reaches and animates the uttermost man. Though
+Tillman's hatred and contempt of the Negro who has aspirations is without
+bounds, the spirit which he voiced in his wild campaigns does not stop at
+the colour line. Movements are so much greater than men, often going so
+much further than men intend. A prophet who stands out for truth as
+Tillman did cannot, having uttered it, thereafter limit it nor recall it.
+As I have been travelling about the country, how often I have heard the
+same animating whisper from the Negroes that Tillman heard in older days
+among the poor whites:
+
+"We are free; we are free."
+
+Yes, Tillman and Vardaman are right; education, newspapers, books,
+commercial prosperity, are working in the Negro too; he, too, has the
+world-old disease of restlessness, ambition, hope. And many a Negro leader
+and many a Negro organisation--and that is what is causing the turmoil in
+the South, the fear of the white aristocracy--are voicing the equivalent
+of Tillman's bold words:
+
+"Awake! arise! or be forever fallen."
+
+Now we may talk all we like about the situation, we may say that the Negro
+is wrong in entertaining such ambitions, that his hopes can never be
+gratified, that he is doomed forever to menial and inferior
+occupations--the plain fact remains (as Tillman himself testifies), that
+the democratic spirit _has_ crossed the colour line irrespective of laws
+and conventions, that the Negro is restless with the ambition to rise, to
+enjoy all that is best, finest, most complete in this world. How humanly
+the ancient struggle between aristocracy seeking to maintain its
+"superiority" and democracy fighting for "equality" is repeating itself!
+And this struggle in the South is complicated, deeply and variously, by
+the fact that the lower people are black and of a different race. They
+wear on their faces the badge of their position.
+
+What is being done about it?
+
+As every student of history is well aware, no aristocracy ever lets go
+until it is compelled to. How bitterly King John fought his barons; how
+bitterly the South Carolina gentlemen fought the rude Tillman! Having
+control of the government, the newspapers, the political parties, the
+schools, an aristocracy surrounds and fortifies itself with every possible
+safeguard. It maintains itself at any cost. And that is both human and
+natural; that is what is happening in the South to-day. Exactly the same
+conflict occurred before the war when the old slave-owning aristocracy
+(which everyone now acknowledges to have been wrong) was defending itself
+and the institution upon which its existence depended. The old
+slave-owning aristocrats believed that they were made of finer clay than
+the "poor whites," that their rule was peculiarly beneficent, that if
+anything should happen to depose them the country would go to ruin and
+destruction. It was the old, old conviction, common to kings and
+oligarchies, that they were possessed of a divine right, a special and
+perpetual franchise from God.
+
+
+_The White South Defends Itself_
+
+The present white aristocratic party in the South is defending itself
+exactly after the manner of all aristocracies.
+
+In the first place, having control of the government it has entrenched
+itself with laws. The moment, for example, that the Negro began to develop
+any real intelligence and leadership, the disfranchisement process was
+instituted. Laws were so worded that every possible white man be admitted
+to the franchise and every possible Negro (regardless of his intelligence)
+be excluded. These laws now exist in nearly all the Southern states.
+Although the XV Amendment to the Federal Constitution declares that the
+right to vote shall not be "denied or abridged ... on account of race or
+colour or previous condition of servitude," the South, in defence of its
+white aristocracy, has practically nullified this amendment. Governor Hoke
+Smith of Georgia, for example, said (June 9, 1906):
+
+     Legislation can be passed which will ... not interfere with the right
+     of any white man to vote, and get rid of 95 per cent. of the Negro
+     voters.
+
+Not only do the enacted laws disfranchise all possible Negroes, but many
+other Negroes who have enough property or education to qualify, are
+further disfranchised by the dishonest administration of those laws. For
+the machinery of government, being wholly in white hands, the registers
+and judges of election have power to keep out any Negro, however fit he
+may be. I know personally of many instances in which educated and
+well-to-do Negroes have been refused the right to register where ignorant
+white men were readily admitted.
+
+The law, after all, in this matter, plays very little figure. The white
+majority has determined to control the government utterly and to give the
+Negro, whether educated or not, no political influence. That is the plain
+truth of the matter. Listen to Hoke Smith in his campaign pledge of last
+year:
+
+"I favour, and if elected will urge with all my power, the elimination of
+the Negro from politics."
+
+Let us also quote the plain-speaking Vardaman in his address of April,
+1907, at Poplarville, Miss.:
+
+     How is the white man going to control the government? The way we do
+     it is to pass laws to fit the white man and make the other people
+     (Negroes) come to them.... If it is necessary every Negro in the
+     state will be lynched; it will be done to maintain white
+     supremacy.... The XV Amendment ought to be wiped out. We all agree on
+     that. Then why don't we do it?
+
+It may be argued that this violent expression does not represent the best
+sentiment of the South. It does not; and yet Vardaman, Tillman, Jeff
+Davis, Hoke Smith, and others of the type are _elected_, the _majority_ in
+their states support them. And I am talking here of politics, which deals
+with majorities. In a following chapter I shall hope to deal with the
+reconstructive and progressive minority in the South as it expresses
+itself especially in the more democratic border states like North
+Carolina.
+
+Thus the spirit of democracy has really escaped among the coloured people
+and it is running abroad like a prairie fire. Tillman, the prophet, sees
+it:
+
+"Every man," he says, "who can look before his nose can see that with
+Negroes constantly going to school, the increasing number of people who
+can read and write among the coloured race ... will in time encroach upon
+our white men."
+
+
+_Demand Repeal of XV Amendment_
+
+In order, then, to prevent the Negro getting into politics, the Tillmans,
+Vardamans, and others declare that the South must strike at the foundation
+of his political liberty: the XV Amendment must be repealed. In short, the
+moment the Negro meets one test of citizenship, these political leaders
+advance a more difficult one: now proposing to take away entirely every
+hope of ultimate citizenship. In the recent campaign for the United States
+senatorship in Mississippi, Vardaman and John Sharp Williams were quite in
+accord on this point, though they disagreed on methods of accomplishing
+the purpose. When the political liberty of the Negro has thus been finally
+removed, the South, say these men, will again have two parties, and will
+be able to take the place it should occupy in the counsels of the nation.
+
+Take the next point in the logic of the political leaders. It is a fact
+of common knowledge in history that aristocracies cannot long survive when
+free education is permitted among all classes of people. Education is more
+potent against oligarchies and aristocracies than dynamite bombs. Every
+aristocracy that has survived has had to monopolise learning more or less
+completely--else it went to the wall. It is not surprising that there
+should have been no effective public-school system in the South before the
+war where the poor whites could get an education, or that the teaching of
+Negroes was in many states a crime punishable by law. Education enables
+the Negro, as Mr. Lane says, to "ascertain his rights and force his way to
+assert them." Therefore to prevent his ascertaining his rights he must not
+be educated. The undivided supremacy of the white party, it is clearly
+discerned, is bound up with Negro ignorance. Therefore we have seen and
+are now seeing in certain parts of the South continuous agitation against
+the education of Negroes. That is one reason for the feeling in the South
+against "Northern philanthropy" which is contributing money to support
+Negro schools and colleges.
+
+"What the North is sending South is not money," says Vardaman, "but
+dynamite; this education is ruining our Negroes. They're demanding
+equality."
+
+
+_A Southern View of Negro Education_
+
+When I was in Montgomery, Ala., a letter was published in one of the
+newspapers from Alexander Troy, a well-known lawyer. It did not express
+the view of the most thoughtful men of that city, but I am convinced that
+it represented with directness and force the belief of a large proportion
+of the white people of Alabama. The letter says:
+
+     All the millions which have been spent by the state since the war in
+     Negro education ... have been worse than wasted. Should anyone ask
+     "Has not Booker Washington's school been of benefit to the Negro?"
+     the so-called philanthropists of the North would say "yes," but a
+     hundred thousand white people of Alabama would say "no."... Ask any
+     gentleman from the country what he thinks of the matter, and a very
+     large majority of them will tell you that they never saw a Negro
+     benefited by education, but hundreds ruined. He ceases to be a hewer
+     of wood and a drawer of water....
+
+     Exclude the air and a man will die, keep away the moisture and the
+     flower will wither. Stop the appropriations for Negro education, by
+     amendment to the Constitution if necessary, and the school-house in
+     which it is taught will decay. Not only that, but the Negro will
+     take the place the Creator intended he should take in the economy of
+     the world--a dutiful, faithful, and law-abiding servant.
+
+These are Mr. Troy's words and they found reflection in the discussions of
+the Alabama legislature then in session. A compulsory education bill had
+been introduced; the problem was to pass a law that would apply to white
+people, not to Negroes. In this connection I heard a significant
+discussion in the state senate. I use the report of it, for accuracy, as
+given the next morning in the _Advertiser_:
+
+     Senator Thomas said ... he would oppose any bills that would compel
+     Negroes to educate their children, for it had come to his knowledge
+     that Negroes would give the clothing off their backs to send their
+     children to school, while too often the white man, secure in his
+     supremacy, would be indifferent to his duty.
+
+     At this point Senator Lusk arose excitedly to his feet and said:
+
+     "Does the Senator from Barbour mean to say that the Negro race is
+     more ambitious and has more aspirations than the white race?"
+
+     "The question of the gentleman ... is an insult to the senate of
+     Alabama," replied Senator Thomas deliberately. "It is an insult to
+     the great Caucasian race, the father of all the arts and sciences, to
+     compare it to that black and kinky race which lived in a state of
+     black and ignorant savagery until the white race seized it and lifted
+     it to its present position."
+
+The result of this feeling against Negro education has shown itself in an
+actual reduction of Negro schooling in many localities, especially in
+Louisiana, and little recent progress anywhere else, compared with the
+rapid educational development among the whites, except through the work of
+the Negroes themselves, or by Northern initiative.
+
+In cutting off an $8,000 appropriation for Alcorn College (coloured)
+Governor Vardaman, as a member of the board of trustees, said:
+
+"I am not anxious even to see the Negro turned into a skilled mechanic.
+God Almighty intended him to till the soil under the direction of the
+white man and that is what we are going to teach him down there at Alcorn
+College."
+
+Without arguing the rights or wrongs or necessities of their position, I
+have thus endeavoured to set down the purposes of the present political
+leadership in the South.
+
+
+_Economic Cause for White Supremacy_
+
+Now the chief object of any aristocracy, the reason why it wishes to
+monopolise government and learning, is because it wishes to supervise the
+division of labour and the products of labour. That is the bottom fact.
+
+In slavery times, of course, the white man supervised labour absolutely
+and took _all_ the profits. In some cases to-day, by a system of peonage,
+he still controls the labourer and takes all the profits. But as the Negro
+has grown in education and property he not only wishes to supervise his
+own labour, but demands a larger share in the returns of labour. He is no
+longer willing to be an abject "hewer of wood and a drawer of water" as he
+was in slavery times; he has an ambition to own his own farm, do his own
+business, employ his own professional men, and so on. He will not "keep
+his place" as a servant. And that is the basis of all the trouble.
+
+Many of the utterances of white political leaders resolve themselves into
+a statement of this position.
+
+At the American Bankers' Association last fall Governor Swanson of
+Virginia said:
+
+"At last the offices, the business houses, and the financial institutions
+are all in the hands of intelligent Anglo-Saxons, and with God's help and
+our own good right hand we will hold him (the Negro) where he is."
+
+In other words, the white man will by force hold all political, business
+and financial positions; he will be boss, and the Negro must do the menial
+work; he must be a servant.
+
+Hoke Smith says in his speech (the italics are mine):
+
+"Those Negroes who are contented to occupy the natural status of their
+race, the position of inferiority, _all competition being eliminated
+between the whites and the blacks_, will be treated with greater
+kindness."
+
+In other words, if the Negro will be contented to keep himself inferior
+and not compete with the white man, everything will be all right. And
+thus, curiously enough, while Hoke Smith in his campaign was thundering
+against railroad corporations for destroying competition, while he was
+glorifying the principle of "free and unrestricted trade," he was
+advocating the formation of a monopoly of all white men by the elimination
+of the competition of all coloured men.
+
+Indeed, we find sporadic attempts to pass laws to compel the Negro to
+engage only in certain sorts of menial work. In Texas not long ago a bill
+was introduced in the legislature "to confine coloured labour to the farm
+whenever it was found in city and town communities to be competing with
+white labour." In the last session of the Arkansas legislature Senator
+McKnight introduced a bill providing that Negroes be forbidden "from
+waiting on white persons in hotels, restaurants, or becoming barbers, or
+porters on trains, and to prevent any white man from working for any
+Negro."
+
+In a number of towns respectable, educated, and prosperous Negro doctors,
+grocers, and others have been forcibly driven out. I visited Monroe, La.,
+where two Negro doctors had been forced to leave town because they were
+taking the practice of white physicians. In the same town a Negro grocer
+was burned out, because he was encroaching on the trade of white grocers.
+
+Neither of the laws above referred to, of course, was passed; and the
+instances of violence I have given are sporadic and unusual. For the South
+has not followed the dominant political leaders to the extremes of their
+logic. Human nature never, finally, goes to extremes: it is forever
+compromising, never wholly logical. While perhaps a large proportion of
+Southerners would agree perfectly with Hoke Smith or Tillman in his
+_theory_ of a complete supremacy of all white men in all respects, as a
+matter of fact nearly every white Southerner is encouraging some practical
+exception which quite overturns the theory. Tens of thousands of white
+Southerners swear by Booker T. Washington, and though doubtful about Negro
+education, the South is expending millions of dollars every year on
+coloured schools. Vardaman, declaiming violently against Negro colleges,
+has actually, in specific instances, given them help and encouragement. I
+told how he had cut off an $8,000 appropriation from Alcorn College
+because he did not believe in Negro education: but he turned around and
+gave Alcorn College $14,000 for a new lighting system, _because he had
+come in personal contact with the Negro president of Alcorn College, and
+liked him_.
+
+And though the politicians may talk about complete Negro disfranchisement,
+the Negro has nowhere been completely disfranchised: a few Negroes vote in
+every part of the South.
+
+I once heard a Southerner argue for an hour against the participation of
+the Negro in politics, and then ten minutes later tell me with pride of a
+certain Negro banker in his city whom we both knew.
+
+"Dr. ----'s all right," he said. "He's a sensible Negro. I went with him
+myself when he registered. He ought to vote."
+
+So personal relationships, the solving touch of human nature, play havoc
+with political theories and generalities. Mankind develops not by rules
+but by exceptions to rules. While the white aristocracy has indeed
+succeeded in controlling local government in the South almost completely,
+it has not been able to dominate the federal political organisations,
+which include many Negroes. And though often opposing education for the
+Negro, the aristocracy has not, after all, monopolised education; and the
+Negro, in spite of Jim Crow laws and occasional violence, has actually
+been pushing ahead, getting a foothold in landownership, entering the
+professions, even competing in some lines of business with white men. So
+democracy, though black, is encroaching in the world-old way on
+aristocracy; how far Negroes can go toward real democratic citizenship in
+the various lines--industrial, political, social--no man knows. We can see
+the fight; we do not know how the spoils of war will finally be divided.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+THE BLACK MAN'S SILENT POWER
+
+HOW THE DOMINANCE OF THE IDEA OF THE NEGRO STIFLES FREEDOM OF THOUGHT AND
+SPEECH IN SOUTHERN POLITICS
+
+
+At present the point of view of a large proportion of Southern white
+people on the Negro question is adequately expressed by such men as
+Tillman, Jeff Davis, and Hoke Smith. They are the political leaders. Their
+policies are, in general, the policies adopted; they are the men elected
+to office. Even in the border states, where the coloured population is not
+so dense as in the black belt, the attitude of the politicians is much the
+same as it is in the black belt. So far as the Negro question is
+concerned, Governor Swanson of Virginia stands on practically the same
+platform as Tillman and Hoke Smith--though he has not found it necessary
+to express his views as vigorously. And the position of the black-belt
+states in regard to the disfranchisement of the Negro and the extension of
+"Jim Crow" laws is being accepted by the border state of Maryland and the
+Western state of Oklahoma.
+
+But there also exists, and particularly in Virginia, North Carolina,
+Tennessee, and Georgia, a vigorous minority point of view, which I have
+referred to in a former chapter as the "broadest and freest thought of the
+South." Although it has not yet attained political position, it is a party
+of ideas, force, convictions, with a definite constructive programme. To
+this constructive point of view I have been able, thus far, to refer only
+incidentally.
+
+In the present chapter I wish to consider some of the effects upon
+Southern life of the domination of the Negro as a political issue, and the
+result of the continued supremacy of leaders like Tillman.
+
+
+
+[Illustration: J. POPE BROWN of Pulaski County, Georgia]
+
+[Illustration: EX-GOVERNOR JAMES K. VARDAMAN of Mississippi]
+
+[Illustration: SENATOR JEFF DAVIS of Arkansas
+
+Photograph by Harris-Ewing]
+
+[Illustration: GOVERNOR HOKE SMITH of Georgia
+
+Copyright, 1906, by Hallen Studios]
+
+[Illustration: SENATOR B. R. TILLMAN of South Carolina
+
+Photograph by F. B. Johnston]
+
+[Illustration: EX-GOVERNOR W. J. NORTHEN of Georgia]
+
+
+In the next chapter, under the title "The New Southern Statesmanship," I
+shall outline the programme and recount the activities of the new Southern
+leaders.
+
+
+_The Most Sinister Form of Negro Domination_
+
+Travelling in the South one hears much of the "threat of Negro
+domination," by which is generally meant political control by Negro voters
+or the election of Negro officeholders. But there already exists a far
+more real and sinister form of Negro domination. For the Negro still
+dominates the _thought_ of the South. For over eighty years, until quite
+recently, few great or serious issues have occupied the attention of the
+South save those growing out of slavery and the Negro problem. Though the
+very existence of our nation is due largely to the courage, wisdom, and
+political genius of Southern statesmanship--to Washington, Jefferson,
+Marshall, Patrick Henry, and their compatriots--the South, since the
+enunciation of the Monroe doctrine in 1823, has played practically no
+constructive part in national affairs. As Professor Mitchell of Richmond
+well points out, the great, vitalising influences which swept over the
+entire civilised world during the first half of the nineteenth century,
+the liberalising, nationalising, industrialising influences, left the
+South untouched. For it was chained in common slavery with the Negro.
+Instead of expanding with the new thought, it clung to slavery in
+opposition to the liberal tendency of the age, it insisted upon states'
+rights in opposition to nationality, it contented itself with agriculture
+alone, instead of embracing the rising industrialism. "It was an
+instance," as Professor Mitchell says, "of arrested development."
+
+Dr. John E. White of Atlanta has ably expressed the ethical result upon a
+people of confining their thought to a single selfish interest:
+
+"As long as we struggled for that which was good for everybody
+everywhere," he says, "we moved with Providence and the South led the van.
+There were great human concerns in the building up of the Republic. The
+whole world was interested in it. It was a work ennobling to a people--the
+inspiration of a great national usefulness. The disaster began when the
+South began to think only for and of itself--began to have only one
+problem."
+
+Thus the South, owing to the presence of the Negro, dropped behind in the
+progress of the world. And while the new and vitalising world influences
+are now spreading abroad throughout the South, manifesting themselves in
+factories, mines, mills, better schools, and more railroads, the old, ugly
+Negro problem still shackles political thought and cripples freedom of
+action. In other words, the South is being rapidly industrialised, but not
+so rapidly liberalised and nationalised, though these developments are
+certainly following.
+
+
+_Exploiting Negro Prejudice_
+
+The cause of this dominance of thought by the Negro lies chiefly with a
+certain group of politicians whose interest it is to maintain their party
+control and to keep the South solid. And they do this by harping
+perpetually on the Negro problem. I observed, wherever I went in the South
+and found busy and prosperous industries, that the Negro problem was
+little discussed. One manufacturer in New Orleans said to me, when I asked
+him about the Negro question:
+
+"Why, I'm so busy I never think about it."
+
+And that is the attitude of the progressive, constructive Southerner: he
+is impatient with the talk about the Negro and the Negro problem. He wants
+to forget it.
+
+But there remains a body of men in the South who, not prosperous in other
+industries, still make the Negro a sort of industry: they live by
+exploiting Negro prejudice. They prevent the expression of new ideas and
+force a great people to confine its political genius to a worn-out issue.
+
+
+_Roosevelt Democrats Down South_
+
+Talking with all classes of white men in the South, I was amazed to
+discover how many of them had ceased to be Democrats (in the party sense)
+at all, and were followers in their beliefs of Roosevelt and the
+Republican party. Many of them told me that they wished they could break
+away and express themselves openly and freely, but they did not dare. A
+considerable number have ventured to vote the Republican ticket in
+national elections (especially on the free-silver issue), but few indeed
+have had the courage to declare their independence in state or local
+affairs. For the instant a rift appears in the harmony of the white party
+(and that is a better name for it than Democratic) the leaders talk Negro,
+and the would-be independents are driven back into the fold. Over and over
+again leaders with new issues have endeavoured to get a hearing. A number
+of years ago the Populist movement spread widely throughout the South. Tom
+Watson of Georgia, Kolb of Alabama, Butler of North Carolina, led revolts
+against the old Democratic party. By fusion with the Republicans the
+Populists carried North Carolina. But the old political leaders
+immediately raised the Negro issue, declared that the Populists were
+encouraging the Negro vote, and defeated the insurgents, driving most of
+their leaders into political obscurity. Now, I am not arguing that
+Populism was an ideal movement, nor that its leaders were ideal men; I am
+merely trying to show the cost of independence in the South. A number of
+years ago Emory Speer, of Georgia, now Federal Judge, ran for Congress on
+an independent ticket. His platform was "The Union and the Constitution, a
+free ballot and a fair count." The inevitable Negro issue was raised
+against him, it was insisted that there must be no division among white
+people lest the Negro secure the balance of political power, and Speer was
+finally defeated. He became a Republican and has since had no influence in
+state politics.
+
+Upon this point an able Southern writer, Professor Edwin Mims of Trinity
+College, N. C., has said:
+
+"The independents in the South have to face the same state of affairs that
+the independents of the North did in the '80's--all the better traditions
+connected with one party, and most of the respectable people belonging to
+the same party. Just as George William Curtis and his followers were
+accused of being Democrats in disguise and of being traitors to the 'grand
+old party' that had saved the Union and freed the slaves, and deserters to
+a party of Copperheads, so the Southern independent is said to be a
+Republican in disguise, and is told of the awful crimes of the
+Reconstruction era. When all other arguments have failed, there is the
+inevitable appeal to the threatened domination of an inferior race which
+is not now even a remote possibility."
+
+As a result of this domination of a worn-out issue, political contests in
+the South have ordinarily concerned themselves not with stimulating public
+questions, but with the personal qualifications of the candidates. The
+South has not dared to face real problems lest the white party be split
+and the Negro voter somehow slip into influence. A campaign was fought
+last year in Mississippi. Of course the candidates all belonged to the
+white party; all therefore subscribed to identically the same
+platform--which had been prepared by the party leaders--so that the only
+issue was the personality of the candidates. Let me quote from the
+Mississippi correspondent of the New Orleans _Times-Democrat_, April 29,
+1907:
+
+     The only "issue" ... is the personality of the candidate himself. The
+     voter may take the speeches of each candidate and analyse them from
+     start to finish, and he will fail to find where there is any
+     difference of opinion between the candidates on any of the live
+     questions of the day which are likely to affect Mississippi. He must,
+     therefore, turn from the speeches to the candidate himself for an
+     "issue" and must take his choice of the several candidates as men,
+     and decide which of them will do most good to the state and be the
+     safest man to entrust with the helm.
+
+
+_Negro Holds Democratic Party Together_
+
+I am speaking here, of course, of the Negro as a dominant issue, the
+essential element which holds the Democratic party together and without
+which other policies could not be carried or candidates elected. Vigorous
+divisions on other issues have taken place locally within the lines of the
+Democratic party, especially during the last two or three years. The
+railroad and trust questions have been prominently before the people in
+most of the Southern states. During his long campaign for governor Hoke
+Smith talked railroads and railroad influence in politics constantly, but
+in order to be elected he raised the Negro question and talked it
+vigorously, especially in all of his country addresses. It is also highly
+significant that the South should have taken so strong a lead in the
+prohibition movement, although even this question has been more or less
+connected with the Negro problem, the argument being that the South must
+forbid the liquor traffic because of its influence on the Negro. No states
+in the Union, indeed, have been more radical in dealing with the trust
+question than Texas and Arkansas; and Alabama, Georgia, and North Carolina
+have been the scenes of some of the hottest fights in the country on the
+railroad question. All this goes to show that, once freed from the incubus
+of the Negro on Southern thought, the South would instantly become a great
+factor in national questions. And being almost exclusively American in its
+population, with few rich men and ideals of life not yet so subservient to
+the dollar as those of the North, it would become a powerful factor in the
+progressive and constructive movements of the country. The influence of a
+single bold man like Tillman in the Senate has been notable. In the future
+the country has much to look for from the idealism of Southern
+statesmanship.
+
+
+_Stifling Free Speech_
+
+But the unfortunate result of the dominance of the single idea of the
+Negro upon politics has been to benumb the South intellectually; to stifle
+free thought and free speech. Let a man advance a new issue and if the
+party leaders do not favour it they have only to cry out "Negro," twisting
+the issue so as to emphasise its Negro side (and every question in the
+South has a Negro side), and the independent thinker is crushed. I once
+talked with the editor of a newspaper in the South who said to me, "such
+and such is my belief."
+
+"But," I said, "you take just the opposite position in your paper."
+
+"Yes--but I can't talk out; it would kill my business."
+
+This timorousness has touched not only politics, but has reached the
+schools and the churches--and still shackles the freest speech. George W.
+Cable, the novelist, was practically forced to leave the South because he
+advocated the "continual and diligent elevation of that lower man which
+human society is constantly precipitating," because he advocated justice
+for the Negro.
+
+Professor Andrew Slade was compelled to resign from Emory College in
+Georgia because he published an article in the _Atlantic Monthly_ taking a
+point of view not supported by the majority in Southern sentiment!
+Professor John Spencer Bassett was saved from a forced resignation from
+Trinity College in North Carolina for a similar offence after a lively
+fight in the Board of Trustees which left Trinity with the reputation of
+being one of the freest institutions in the South.
+
+The situation in the South has made people afraid of the truth. Political
+oratory, particularly, often gets away entirely from the wholesome and
+regenerative world of actual facts. I quoted in the last chapter from a
+speech of Governor Swanson of Virginia, in which he said: "The business
+houses and financial institutions are in the hands of intelligent
+Anglo-Saxons, and with God's help and our own good right hand we will hold
+him (the Negro) where he is."
+
+
+_Negro's Progress in Richmond_
+
+What a curious thing oratory is! Right in Governor Swanson's own city of
+Richmond there are four banks owned and operated by Negroes; one of the
+Negro bankers sat in the convention to which Governor Swanson was at that
+moment speaking. There is a Negro insurance company, "The True Reformers,"
+in which I saw eighty Negro clerks and stenographers at work. It has a
+surplus of $300,000, with a business in thirty states. Negroes also own
+and operate in Richmond four clothing stores, five drug stores, many
+grocery stores (some very small, of course), two hotels, four livery
+stables, five printing establishments, eight fraternal insurance
+companies, seven meat markets, fifty eating-places, and many other sorts
+of business enterprises, small, of course, but growing rapidly. In
+Richmond also, there are ten Negro lawyers, fifteen physicians, three
+dentists, two photographers, eighty-five school teachers, forty-six Negro
+churches.
+
+
+_Southerners Who See the Danger_
+
+When I make the assertion regarding "free speech" and the fear of truth in
+the South, I am making no statement which has not been far more forcibly
+put by thoughtful and fearless Southerners who see and dread this sinister
+tendency.
+
+The late Chancellor Hill, of the University of Georgia, spoke of the
+"deadly paralysis of intellect caused by the enforced uniformity of
+thought within the lines of one party." He said:
+
+"Before the war the South was in opposition to the rest of civilisation
+on the question of slavery. It defended itself: its thinking, its
+political science, even its religion was not directed toward a search for
+truth, but it was concentrated on the defence of a civil and political
+order of things. These conditions made impossible a vigorous intellectual
+life."
+
+William Preston Few, dean of Trinity College, North Carolina, writes
+(_South Atlantic Quarterly_, January, 1905):
+
+"This prevalent lack of first hand thinking and of courage to speak out
+has brought about an unfortunate scarcity of intellectual honesty."
+
+An excellent illustration of this condition grew out of the statement of
+Dr. Edwin A. Alderman, president of the University of Virginia, at a
+dinner a year or so ago, in which he compared the recent political
+leadership of the South somewhat unfavourably with the statesmanship of
+the Old South. Upon hearing of this remark Senator Bailey of Texas angrily
+resigned from the alumni committee of the University. Chancellor Hill
+said, concerning the incident:
+
+"The question whether Dr. Alderman was right or wrong becomes
+insignificant beside the larger question whether Senator Bailey was right
+or wrong in his method of dealing with a difference of opinion. And this
+leads to the question: Have we freedom of opinion in the South? Must every
+man who thinks above a whisper do so at the peril of his reputation and
+his influence, or at the deadlier risk of having an injury inflicted upon
+the institution which he represents?"
+
+In giving so much space to the words and position of Vardaman, Tillman,
+Hoke Smith, and others, I have not yet sufficiently emphasised the work
+and influence of the thoughtful and constructive men of the South. But it
+must be borne in mind that I am writing of politics, of majorities: and
+politicians of the Tillman type are still the political forces in the
+South. They are in control: they are elected. Yet there is the growing
+class of new statesmen whose work I shall recount in the next chapter.
+
+
+_Whites Disfranchised as Well as Blacks_
+
+But the limitation of intellectual freedom has not been the only result of
+the political dominance of the Negro issue. It is curious to observe that
+when one class of men in any society is forced downward politically,
+another is forced up: for so mankind keeps its balances and averages. A
+significant phase of the movement in the South to eliminate the Negro is
+the sure return to government by a white aristocracy. For disfranchisement
+of the Negro has also served to disfranchise a very large proportion of
+the white people as well. In every Southern state where Negro
+disfranchisement has been forced, the white vote also has been steadily
+dwindling. To-day in Alabama not half the white males of voting age are
+qualified voters. In Mississippi the proportion is still lower.
+
+In the last Presidential election the state of Mississippi was carried by
+Parker with a total vote of only 58,383, out of a total of 349,177
+citizens (both white and coloured) of voting age. Only one-third of the
+white men voted. It has been found, indeed, in several counties in
+Mississippi, that while the number of white eligibles has been decreasing,
+the number of Negroes on the registration lists has been increasing. In
+the city of Jackson, Miss., last year, 1,200 voters were registered out of
+a population of 32,000 people.
+
+To show the dwindling process, take the single country of Tallapoosa in
+Alabama. The last census shows 4,203 whites and 2,036 blacks of voting
+age, 6,259 in all. After the adoption of the new constitution
+disfranchising the Negro in 1901, the total registration was 4,008. Last
+fall, although the important question of prohibition had arisen and an
+especial effort was made to get voters out, an investigation showed there
+were only 1,700 qualified voters in the country.
+
+This astonishing condition is due primarily to the fact that there is no
+vital party division on new issues in the South; but it is also due to the
+franchise tests, which, having been made severe to keep the Negro out,
+operate also to disfranchise hundreds of thousands of poor and ignorant
+white men. I spent much time talking with white workingmen, both in the
+cities and in the country. I asked them why so many workingmen and farmers
+did not vote. Here is one comprehensive reply of a labour leader:
+
+"What's the use? We have to pay two dollars a year poll-tax, and pay it
+nearly a year before election. And why vote? There are no real issues at
+stake. An election is merely a personal quarrel in the clique of men who
+control the Democratic party. Why should we pay two dollars a year and go
+to the bother of satisfying the personal ambition of some man we are not
+interested in?"
+
+
+_A White Oligarchy_
+
+So the white vote is dwindling; the political power is being gathered into
+the hands of fewer and fewer men. And there is actually springing up a
+large class of non-voting white men not unlike the powerless "poor whites"
+of ante-bellum times. The white politicians, indeed, in some places do not
+encourage the poorer white men to qualify, for the fewer voters, the more
+certain their control.
+
+Of course the chief fights in Mississippi and elsewhere are not at the
+elections, but in the Democratic (white) primaries; but this fact only
+accentuates the point I wish to make: the limitation of political
+independence of action. Such conditions are deeply concerning the
+thoughtful men of the South; but while they think, few dare to brave
+political extinction by speaking out. One would think that the Republican
+party, which ostensibly stands for the opposition in the South, would cry
+out about conditions. But it does not. The fact is, the Republican party,
+as now constituted in the South, is even a more restricted white oligarchy
+than the Democratic party. In nearly all parts of the South, indeed, it is
+a close corporation which controls or seeks to control all the federal
+offices. Speak out? Of course not. It, too, is attempting to eliminate the
+Negro (in some places it calls itself "lily white"), and it works not
+inharmoniously with the Democratic politicians. For the Republican machine
+in the South really has no quarrel with the Democratic machine; it takes
+the federal offices which the Democrats cannot get, and the Democrats take
+local offices which the Republicans know they cannot get.
+
+
+_The South a Weapon in National Conventions_
+
+The Republican Presidents at Washington have, unfortunately, played into
+the hands of the Southern office-holding machine. Why? Partly because
+Republicans are few in the South and partly because a solid Republican
+delegation from the South, easily handled and controlled and favouring
+the administration, is a powerful weapon in national conventions. McKinley
+played almost absolutely into the hands of this Southern Republican
+machine, and Hanna operated it. Indeed, McKinley's nomination was probably
+due to the skill with which Hanna marshaled this solid phalanx of Southern
+delegates. Roosevelt has made a number of first-class appointments outside
+of the machine, even appointing a few Democrats of the high type of Judge
+Jones of Alabama.
+
+Over and over in this book I have spoken of the Negro as a national, not a
+Southern issue; and in politics this is peculiarly true. Though having few
+Republicans, the South, through its office-holding Republican delegations,
+has largely influenced the choice of more than one Republican president.
+The "Solid South" is as useful to the Republican party as to the
+Democratic party. Why the certainty expressed by Republican politicians of
+the nomination of Taft? Because the national organisation felt sure it
+could control the Southern delegations. It counted on the "Solid South."
+
+Thus in a very real sense the government of this entire nation turns upon
+the despised black man--whether he votes or not!
+
+
+_The Negro's Political Power in the North_
+
+In another way the Southern attitude toward the Negro affects the nation.
+Owing to disfranchisement and "Jim Crow" laws, thousands of Negroes have
+moved northward and settled in the great cities, until to-day Negro
+voters, though they may not (as has been claimed) hold the balance of
+power, yet wield a great influence in the politics of at least four
+states--Indiana, Ohio, New Jersey, and Rhode Island--and are also
+considerable factors in the political destiny of Illinois, Pennsylvania,
+New York, and Delaware. The potential influence of the Negro voter in the
+North is excellently illustrated in the recent campaign for the Republican
+nomination to the Presidency, especially in the fight in Ohio between
+Foraker and Taft and in the eagerness displayed by Taft to placate the
+Negro vote.
+
+In still another way the Negro affects the entire nation. Through its
+attitude of exclusion the South exercises an influence on national
+legislation out of all proportion to its voting population. Though nearly
+all Negroes are disfranchised, as well as a large number of white voters,
+all these disfranchised voters are counted in the allotment of Congressmen
+to Southern states.
+
+Out of this has grown a curious condition. In 1904 Alabama, Arkansas,
+Georgia, and Mississippi, which have thirty-five members in Congress, cast
+413,516 votes, while Massachusetts alone, with only fourteen Congressmen,
+cast 445,098 votes.
+
+Here, for example, is the record of South Carolina:
+
+  Total population of voting age, both white and coloured (1900)   283,325
+  Total white voting population                                    130,375
+  Total actual vote in 1902 for Congressmen                         32,185
+  Total Democratic vote which elected seven Congressmen             29,343
+
+Thus in South Carolina in 1902 an average of about 4,600 voters voted at
+the election for each Congressman (in 1904, a Presidential year, the
+average was about 8,100) while in New York State over 40,000 votes are
+cast in each Congressional district and in Pennsylvania about 38,000.
+
+Now, I am not here criticising this condition; I am merely endeavouring to
+set down the facts as I find them. My purpose is to illustrate the
+profound and far-reaching effects of the Negro issue upon the nation. And
+is it not curious, when all is said, to observe how this rejected black
+man, whom the South has attempted to eliminate utterly from politics, has
+been for years changing and warping the entire government of this nation
+in the most fundamental ways! Did he not cause a civil war, the results of
+which still curse the country? And though excluded in large measure from
+the polls, does he not in reality cast his mighty vote for Presidents,
+Congressmen, Governors?
+
+Often, looking out across the South, it appears to the observer that the
+Negro has a more far-reaching and real influence on our national life for
+being excluded from the polls than he would have if he were frankly and
+justly admitted to the franchise on the same basis as white men.
+
+All the real thinkers and statesmen of the South have looked and longed
+for the hour when the South, free of this dominance of an ugly issue,
+should again take its great place in national affairs. In 1875, at the
+close of Reconstruction, Senator Lamar of Mississippi predicted in a
+speech at Jackson that the South, having eliminated the Negro from
+politics, would now divide on new economic issues and become politically
+healthy. But that has not happened; less division on real issues probably
+exists in Mississippi to-day than in 1875. Why? Is it not possible that
+the manner of the elimination of the Negro from politics is wrong? Has it
+occurred to leaders and statesmen that Negroes who are qualified can be
+eliminated _into_ politics; that the present method in reality makes the
+Negro a more dangerous political factor than he would be if he were
+allowed to vote regularly and quietly?
+
+
+_Southerners Who Are Speaking Out_
+
+In spite of the domination of both parties in the South by narrowing
+groups of leaders there are not wanting men to fight for a new alignment.
+On the Republican side one of these men is Joseph C. Manning, of Alexander
+City, Ala., who publishes a paper called the _Southern American_. He has
+shown how white men are being disfranchised as well as Negroes, how the
+South is controlled by a "Bourbon oligarchy" in the Democratic party and a
+"federal-for-revenue" Republican party--as he calls them. His paper
+appears every week with his denunciations in big letters, urging the
+Republican party to reform and become a party of truth and progress.
+
+He says:
+
+     THE RALLYING CRY
+
+     The great body of the people of the white South, the masses of the
+     white people of Alabama, are to-day suppressed by the strategy of a
+     political autocracy dominating under the guise and pretence of a
+     democracy.
+
+     Why not throw off the yoke and get in the fight?
+
+     Rise up above this petty delegate getting, patronage manipulating,
+     state chairman squabbling, until this small politics shall become
+     lost in the great and the supreme issue.
+
+     Stop this "lily-white" nonsense. Quit being sidetracked by this
+     Bourbon wail of Negro. Recognise this vital force of the immovable
+     truth that an injustice to one American citizen will react upon all.
+     You can't have one law for the white man and another for the Negro in
+     our form of government. You know that those who have the most talked
+     of suppressing blacks have really suppressed you, white Republicans,
+     and the most of the Southern whites.
+
+     The outcry of Negro and social equality and the like is the very
+     essence of political moonshine.
+
+A number of men inside the Democratic party are not afraid to speak out.
+Ex-Congressman Fleming of Georgia said in a notable address at Athens,
+Ga.:
+
+"Those whose stock in trade is 'hating the nigger' may easily gain some
+temporary advantage for themselves in our white primaries, where it
+requires no courage, either physical or moral, to strike those who have no
+power to strike back--not even with a paper ballot. But these men will
+achieve nothing permanent for the good of the state or of the nation by
+stirring up race passion and prejudice. Injustice and persecution will not
+solve any of the problems of the ages. God did not so ordain his universe.
+
+"Justly proud of our race, we refuse to amalgamate with the Negro, but the
+Negro is an American citizen, and is protected as such by guarantees of
+the Constitution that are as irrepealable almost as the Bill of Rights
+itself. Nor, if such a thing as repealing these guarantees were possible,
+would it be wise for the South. Suppose we admit the oft-reiterated
+proposition that no two races so distinct as the Caucasian and the Negro
+can live together on terms of perfect equality; yet it is equally true
+that without some access to the ballot, present or prospective, some
+participation in the government, no inferior race in an elective republic
+could long protect itself against reduction to slavery in many of its
+substantial forms--and God knows the South wants no more of that curse."
+
+Men of the type of Mr. Fleming are far in the minority in the South; they
+are so few as yet as to count, politically speaking, for little or
+nothing. But the fact that they are there, that they are not afraid to
+speak out, even though it ruins them politically, is significant and
+hopeful.
+
+
+_Ante-bellum Aggression_
+
+Now it is this way with a party having only one issue: when attacked, it
+can only become more and more violent and vociferous upon that issue. And
+this is what we discover in the South: an increasing bitterness of leaders
+like Tillman and Vardaman, for they know that their own existence and that
+of the party which they represent depends upon keeping the Negro issue
+prominent. The very fact that they are violent is significant: it shows
+that they recognise powerful and growing new elements in the South, which,
+though not yet apparent politically, are getting hold of the people.
+
+In other words, the present group of autocratic leaders is seeking at any
+length to defend itself. And its work is not only defensive, it is also
+offensive. It must be. The institution of slavery might have lasted many
+years longer if the Southern leaders had been content with the slave
+territory they already held. But they were not so content. They tried to
+extend slavery to the new territories of the Union, and it was this
+aggression that was the chief immediate cause of the Civil War. It was the
+struggle over Missouri and Kansas, and the policy of the country regarding
+the new West, whether it should be admitted slave or free, which
+precipitated hostilities.
+
+"Continual aggression," John Hay once said, "is the necessity of a false
+position." The ante-bellum Southern leaders saw that they must either
+extend their institution or else face its ultimate extinction.
+
+At the present time we have a repetition of the ante-bellum aggression. As
+it happened then, we have speakers like Tillman and others coming North
+urging the validity of the Southern treatment of the Negro. Writers like
+Thomas Dixon rekindle old fires of hatred. At the same moment that Tillman
+is abusing the North for its interest in Southern education, he himself is
+speaking from Northern platforms to make sentiment for the Southern
+position. So we have the extension of disfranchisement and "Jim Crow" laws
+to the new Western state of Oklahoma and the agitation for
+disfranchisement in Maryland. So we have the advancing demand by
+Southerners in Congress for the repeal of the XV Amendment. And just
+recently Congressman Heflin of Alabama has introduced a bill seeking to
+provide for "Jim Crow" distinctions upon the street-cars of Washington.
+How all this recalls the efforts of the ante-bellum Southern Congressmen
+to force the United States Government to take the Southern position on the
+slavery question!
+
+
+_Fighting to Put the Negro Down_
+
+I have recently read some of the voluminous discussions upon the subject
+of slavery which took place before the Civil War, and I have been
+astonished to find the arguments of the Southern political leaders of
+to-day almost identical in substance (though changed somewhat in form)
+with the reasoning of the old slave-owning class. One hears the same
+arguments regarding the physiological and ethnological inferiority of all
+coloured men to all white men: the argument that "one drop of Negro blood
+makes a Negro," and even that the Negro is not a human being at all, but a
+beast.
+
+I have before me a book recently published by a Bible house (of all
+places!) in St. Louis and widely circulated in the South. It is entitled
+"Is the Negro a Beast?" and it goes on to prove by Biblical quotation that
+he has no soul! Being a beast, it becomes a small matter to kill him.
+
+One also hears the argument now, as in slavery times, of the divine right
+of the white man to rule the Negro. "God intended the white man to rule,"
+says Vardaman, "and the Negro to be a humble servant." And finally there
+is the frank argument of physical force; that the white man, being strong,
+will and must rule the Negro.
+
+Hoke Smith to-day is supporting much the same position that Robert Toombs
+held before the war. Of course Hoke Smith has receded from the belief in
+the chattel slavery of the Negro for which Toombs contended; but in many
+other respects he evidently believes that the Negro should be reduced (as
+Ex-Congressman Fleming of Georgia says in the quotation given above) "to
+slavery in many of its substantial forms." In order to validate its
+position and keep its place (and make the Negro keep his) the white
+aristocracy has been forced to defend the doctrine of all monarchies and
+aristocracies--the inequality of men in all respects. Hoke Smith states
+the fundamental assumption thus plainly in his address (June 9, 1906):
+
+"I believe the wise course is to plant ourselves squarely upon the
+proposition in Georgia that the Negro is in no respect the equal of the
+white man, and that he cannot in the future in this state occupy a
+position of equality."
+
+
+_Both the South and the North Undemocratic_
+
+Thus I have attempted to present the political situation in the South and
+the reasoning which underlies it. It possesses a large significance for
+the entire country.
+
+Here is the fact: the war and the emancipation proclamation did not make
+the South completely democratic; it merely cut away one bulwark of
+aristocracy--slavery. The South is still dominated by the aristocratic
+idea, and more or less frankly so. The South has admitted only grudgingly,
+and not yet fully, the "poor white" man to democratic political
+fellowship. There are, as I have shown, hundreds of thousands of
+disfranchised white Americans in the South. Moreover many white leaders
+look askance on the new Italian immigrants, though they, too, are white
+men. The extreme point of view in regard to the foreigner was expressed in
+a speech by the Hon. Jeff Truly, candidate for governor of Mississippi, at
+Magnolia in that state on March 18, 1907:
+
+"I am opposed to any inferior race. The Italian immigration scheme does
+not settle the labour question; Italians are a threat and a danger to our
+racial, industrial, and commercial supremacy. Mississippi needs no such
+immigration. Leave your lands to your own children. As governor of the
+state, I promise that not one dollar of the state shall be spent for the
+immigration of any such."
+
+As for the Negro, of course, the South has never believed in a democracy
+which really includes him.
+
+But neither does the North. When we get right down to it, the controlling
+white men in the North do not believe in an inclusive democracy much more
+than the South. I have talked with many Northerners who go South, and it
+is astonishing to see how quickly most of them adopt the Southern point of
+view. For it is the doctrine which many of them, down in their hearts,
+really believe.
+
+In reality the North also has an aristocratic government, an oligarchy
+based upon wealth and property, which dominates politics and governs the
+country more or less completely. Roosevelt has been fighting some of the
+more boisterous aspects of the rule of this oligarchy--and has showed the
+country how powerful it is!
+
+
+_The Underman Fighting All Over the World_
+
+It is curious, indeed, when one's attention is awakened to the facts, how
+strong the parallel is between the South and the North. I mean here a
+parallel not in laws or even in customs, but in spirit, in the living
+reality which lies down deep under institutions, which is, after all, the
+only thing that really counts.
+
+The cause of all the trouble in the North is similar to what it is in the
+South: the underman will not keep his place. He is restless, ambitious, he
+wants civil, political, and industrial equality. Thus we see the growth of
+labour organisations, and the spread of populists and socialists, who
+demand new rights and a greater share in the products of labour. They will
+not, as Hoke Smith says of the Negroes, "content themselves with the place
+of inferiority." The essential feature of the history of the last five
+years in this country, and it will go down in history as the beginning of
+great things, has been the vague, crudely powerful effort of the underman
+(half his strength wasted because he is blind) to limit in some degree the
+power of this moneyed aristocracy. Such is the meaning of the demand for
+trust and railroad legislation, such the significance of the insurance
+investigation, such the effort to curb the power of men like Rockefeller,
+Harriman, Morgan.
+
+So the North, in spirit, also disfranchises its lower class. It does it by
+the purchase at elections in one form or another of its "poor whites" and
+its Negroes. What else is the meaning of Tammany Hall and the boss and
+machine system in other cities? Tammany Hall is our method of
+disfranchisement: it is our cunning machine for nullifying the fourteenth
+and fifteenth amendments. While the South is disfranchising by
+legislation, the North is doing it by cash.
+
+
+_The Question We Are Coming To_
+
+I have spoken of the lack of free speech in the South; but that is not
+peculiar to the South. Though there is undoubtedly a far greater
+intellectual freedom to-day in the North than in the South, yet the North
+has disciplined more than one professor for his utterances on the trust or
+railroad questions. South or North, it is dangerous to attack the
+entrenched privilege of those in control.
+
+We criticise the frankness of Vardaman in advocating different standards
+of justice for white men and Negroes, but do we not have the same custom
+in the North? How extremely difficult it is sometimes to get a rich
+criminal into jail in the North!
+
+In short, we are coming again face to face in this country with the same
+tremendous (even revolutionary) question which presents itself in every
+crisis of the world's history:
+
+"What is democracy? What does democracy include? Does democracy really
+include Negroes as well as white men? Does it include Russian Jews,
+Italians, Japanese? Does it include Rockefeller and the Slavonian
+street-sweeper? And Tillman and the Negro farmhand?"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+THE NEW SOUTHERN STATESMANSHIP
+
+"Democracy is the progress of all through all, under the leadership of
+the best and the wisest."--_Mazzini._
+
+
+In former chapters I have had much to tell that was unpleasant and perhaps
+discouraging; but it had to be told, for it is there, and must be honestly
+met and reckoned with.
+
+But the chief pleasure of the present task has been the opportunity it has
+given me to meet the working idealists of the South, and to see the
+courageous and unselfish way in which they are meeting the obstacles which
+confront them. If any man would brighten his faith in human nature, if he
+would attain a deeper and truer grasp upon the best things of life, let
+him attend one of the educational rallies of Virginia, North Carolina,
+Tennessee, Georgia, or Texas, and hear the talks of Dr. S. C. Mitchell,
+President Alderman, J. Y. Joyner, P. P. Claxton, Chancellor Barrow,
+President Houston, and others; or let him spend a few days at Hampton with
+Dr. Frissell, or at Tuskegee with Dr. Washington, or at Calhoun with Miss
+Thorne. Coming away from a meeting one night at Tuskegee after there had
+been speaking in the chapel by both white and coloured men, I could not
+help saying to myself:
+
+"The Negro problem is not unsolvable; it is being solved, here and now, as
+fast as any human problem can be solved."
+
+Men may be found straining their vision to see some distant and complex
+solution to the question (have we not heard talk of deportation,
+extermination, amalgamation, segregation, and the like?) when the real
+solution is under their very eyes, going forward naturally and simply.
+
+It is this quiet, constructive movement among the white people in the
+South which I wish to consider here.
+
+In a former chapter I showed how the Negroes of the country are divided
+into two parties or points of view, the greater led by Booker T.
+Washington, the lesser by W. E. B. DuBois. Washington's party is the party
+of the opportunist and optimist, which deals with the world as it is: it
+is a constructive, practical, cheerful party. It emphasises duties rather
+than rights. Dr. DuBois's party, on the other hand, represents the
+critical point of view. It is idealistic and pessimistic: a party of
+agitation, emphasising rights rather than duties.
+
+But these two points of view are by no means peculiar to Negroes: they
+divide all human thought; and the action and reaction between them is the
+mode of human progress.
+
+
+_Division of White Leadership in the South_
+
+White leadership in the South, then, is divided along similar lines with
+Negro leadership--a party of rights and a party of duties. But with this
+wide difference: among the Negroes as I showed, the party of agitation and
+criticism led by DuBois is far inferior both numerically and in influence
+to the party of opportunity and duties led by Washington. For the Negroes
+have been forced to concede the futility of trying to progress by
+political action and legislation, by rights specified but not earned.
+Washington's preaching has been:
+
+"Stop thinking about your rights and get down to work. Get yourself right
+and the world will be all right."
+
+But among the white people of the South the party of agitation and the
+emphasis of rights rather than duties is still far in the ascendency. Led
+by such men as Tillman, Vardaman, Jeff Davis, Hoke Smith, and others, it
+controls, for the present, the policies of the entire South. It has much
+to say of the rights of the white man, very little about his duties. It
+is, indeed, doing for the whites by agitation and legislation (often a
+kind of force) exactly what Dr. DuBois would like to do for the Negro, if
+he could.
+
+"Agitate, object, fight," say both Tillman and DuBois.
+
+"Work," says Washington.
+
+Now, the same logic of circumstances which produced Booker T. Washington
+and his significant movement among the Negroes has produced a group of new
+and highly able white leaders. These new leaders saw that agitation
+(while most necessary in its place) would not, after all, build up the
+South; they saw that although the sort of leader typified by Tillman and
+Vardaman was passing laws and winning elections, he was not, after all,
+getting anywhere; that race feeling was growing more bitter, often to the
+injury of Southern prosperty; that progress is not built upon stump
+speeches. The answer to all this was plain enough.
+
+"Let us stop talking, forget the race problem, and get to work. It does
+not matter where we take hold, but let us go to work."
+
+And the doctrine of work in the South has become a great propaganda,
+almost, indeed, a passion. It has found expression in a remarkable growth
+of industrial activities, cotton-mills, coal-mines, iron and steel
+industries; in new methods of farming; in spreading railroads. But more
+than all else, perhaps, it has developed a new enthusiasm for education,
+not only for education of the old classical sort, but for industrial and
+agricultural education--the training of workers. All this, indeed,
+represents the rebound from years of agitation in which the Negro has been
+"cussed and discussed," as one Southerner put it to me, beyond the limit
+of endurance. Wherever I went in the South among the new industrial and
+educational leaders I found an active distaste for the discussion of the
+Negro problem. These men were too busy with fine new enterprises to be
+bothered with ancient and unprofitable issues.
+
+
+_New Prescriptions for Solving the Negro Problem_
+
+When I asked Professor Dillard of New Orleans how he thought the Negro
+question should be treated, he replied:
+
+"With silence."
+
+"My prescription," says President Alderman in his address on "Southern
+Idealism," "is 'silence and slow time,' faith in the South, and wise
+training for both white and black."
+
+Edgar Gardner Murphy of Alabama, himself one of the new leaders, has thus
+outlined the position of the rising Southern leadership:
+
+"The South is growing weary of extremists and of sensational
+problem-solvers.... Our coming leadership will have a sense of proportion
+which will involve a steady refusal to be stampeded by antique nightmares
+and ethnological melodrama. It will possess an increasing passion for
+getting hold of the real things in a real world. And it will ... deal with
+one task at a time. It will subordinate paper schemes of distant
+amelioration to duties that will help right now."
+
+Emphasis here is laid upon "real things in a real world" and "duties that
+will help right now"; and that is the voice everywhere of the new
+statesmanship.
+
+But let us be clear upon one point at the start. The platforms of these
+parties are matters of emphasis. One emphasises rights; the other
+emphasises duties. I have no doubt that Booker T. Washington believes as
+firmly in the rights of the Negro as any leader of his race; he has merely
+ceased to emphasise these rights by agitation until his people have gained
+more education and more property, until by honest achievement they are
+prepared to exercise their rights with intelligence.
+
+In the same way, the views of many of the new Southern white leaders of
+whom I shall speak in this article have not radically changed, so far as
+the Negro is concerned; some of them, I have found, do not differ from
+Tillman upon essential points; but, like Washington, they have decided not
+to emphasise controversial matters, and go to work and develop the South,
+and the people of the South, for the good of the whole country. If the
+test has to come in the long run between white men and coloured men, as it
+will have to come and is coming all the time, they want it to be an honest
+test of efficiency. The fittest here, too, will survive (there is no
+escaping the great law!), but these new thinkers wish the test of fitness
+to be, not mere physical force, not mere brute power, whether expressed in
+lynching or politics, but the higher test of real capacity. They have
+supreme confidence that the white man is superior on his merits in any
+contest; and Washington, on his side, is willing to (indeed, he must) take
+up the gauntlet thus thrown down.
+
+
+[Illustration: JAMES H. DILLARD of New Orleans, President Jeanes Fund
+Board.
+
+Photograph by Hitchler]
+
+[Illustration: EDWIN A. ALDERMAN President of the University of Virginia.
+
+Photograph by Pach Bros.]
+
+[Illustration: A. M. SOULE President Georgia State College of
+Agriculture.]
+
+[Illustration: D. F. HOUSTON President of the University of Texas.
+
+Photograph by The Elliotts]
+
+[Illustration: GEORGE FOSTER PEABODY of New York, member of the Southern
+Education and Jeanes Fund Boards.
+
+Photograph by Pach Bros.]
+
+[Illustration: P. P. CLAXTON of the University of Tennessee, leader of the
+educational campaign in Tennessee.
+
+Photograph by Knafft & Bro.]
+
+
+The condition in the South may be likened to a battle in which the
+contestants, weary of profitless and wordy warfare, are turning homeward
+to gather up new ammunition. Each side is passionately getting
+education, acquiring land, developing wealth and industry, preparing for
+the struggles of the future. And it is a fine and wholesome tendency. In a
+large sense, indeed, this movement typifies the progressive thought of the
+entire country for it means a sincere attempt to change the plane of
+battle (for battle there must be) from one of crude, primitive force,
+whether physical, political, or, indeed, industrial, to one of
+intellectual efficiency or usefulness to society.
+
+And these working idealists of both races understand one another better
+than most people think. Dr. Mitchell and President Alderman understand
+Booker T. Washington, and he understands them. This is not saying that
+they agree. But agreement upon every abstract principle is not necessary
+where both parties are hard at work at practical, definite, and immediate
+tasks.
+
+
+_Self-Criticism in the South_
+
+The new Southern statesmanship began (as all new movements begin) with
+self-criticism. Henry W. Grady, a real statesman, by criticising the old
+order of things, announced the beginning of the "New South"--an active,
+working, hopeful South.
+
+He saw the faults of the old exclusive agricultural life and the danger of
+low-class, uneducated labour, and he urged industrial development and a
+better school system. R. H. Edmonds of Baltimore, through the
+_Manufacturers' Record_, and many other able business leaders have done
+much to bring about the new industrial order: the day of new railroads,
+cotton-mills, and coal-mines; the day of cities.
+
+But it is in the educational field that the development of the new
+statesmanship has been most remarkable. Although it was unfortunate in one
+way that so much of the political leadership of the South should have
+fallen to men of the type of Vardaman, Jeff Davis, and Heflin, it is
+highly fortunate in another way. For it has driven the broadest and ablest
+minds in the South to seek expression in other lines of activity, in
+industry and in the church, but particularly in educational leadership. It
+is not without profound significance that the great American, General
+Lee, turned his attention and gave his highest energies after Appomattox,
+not to politics, but to education. The South to-day has a group of
+schoolmen who are leaders of extraordinary force and courage. The ministry
+has also attained an influence in the South which it does not possess in
+most parts of the North. The influence of Bishop Galloway of Mississippi,
+Dr. John E. White and Dr. C. B. Wilmer of Atlanta, and many others has
+been notable.
+
+For many years after the war the South was passive with exhaustion. Young
+men, who were not afraid, had to grow up to the task of reconstruction.
+And no one who has not traced the history of the South since the war can
+form any conception of the magnitude of that task. It was essentially the
+building of a new civilisation. The leaders were compelled not only to
+face abject poverty, but they have had to deal constantly with the problem
+of a labouring class just released from slavery. At every turn, in
+politics, in industry, in education, they were confronted with the Negro
+and the problem of what to do with him. Where one school-house would do in
+the North, they were compelled to build two school-houses, one for white
+children, one for black. It took from twenty-five to forty years of hard
+work after the war before the valuation of wealth in the South had again
+reached the figures of 1860. The valuations in the year 1890 for several
+of the states were less than in 1860. South Carolina in 1900--forty years
+after the beginning of the war--had only just caught up with the record of
+1860. Since 1890, however, the increase everywhere has been swift and
+sure.
+
+
+_Courage and Vision of New Leaders_
+
+Well, it required courage and vision in the earlier days to go before a
+poverty-stricken people, who had not yet enough means for living
+comfortably, and to demand of them that they build up and support two
+systems of education in the South. And yet that was exactly the task of
+the educational pioneers. Statesmanship, as I have said, begins with
+self-criticism. While the mere politician is flattering his followers and
+confirming them in their errors, the true statesman is criticising them
+and spurring them to new beliefs and stronger activities. While the
+politician is pleading rights, the statesman also dares to emphasise
+duties. While the politicians in the South (not all, but many of them)
+have been harping on race prejudice and getting themselves elected to
+office by reviving ancient hatred, these new statesmen have been facing
+courageously forward, telling the people boldly of the conditions of
+illiteracy which surround them, and demanding that schools be built and
+every child, white and black, be educated. In many cases they have had to
+overcome a settled prejudice against education, especially education of
+Negroes; and after that was overcome they have had to build up a sense of
+social responsibility for universal education before they could count on
+getting the money they needed for their work.
+
+After the war the North, in one form or another, poured much money into
+the South for teaching the Negroes; lesser sums, like those coming from
+the Peabody fund, were contributed toward white schools. But in the long
+run there can be no real education which is not self-education; outside
+influences may help (or indeed hurt), but until a state--like a man--is
+inspired with a desire for education and a willingness to make sacrifices
+to get it, the people will not become enlightened.
+
+In the middle eighties the fire of this inspiration began to blaze up in
+many parts of the South. Various combustible elements were present: a
+sense of the appalling condition of illiteracy existing in the South; a
+pride and independence of character which was hurt by the gifts of money
+from the North; a feeling that the Negroes in some instances were getting
+better educational opportunities than the white children; and, finally,
+the splendid idealism of young men who saw clearly that the only sure
+foundation for democracy is universal education.
+
+
+_Inspiration of Democracy in North Carolina_
+
+Not unnaturally the movement found its earliest expression in North
+Carolina, which has been the most instinctively democratic of Southern
+states. From the beginning of the country North Carolina, with its
+population of Scotch-Presbyterians and Quakers, has been inspired with a
+peculiar spirit of independence. When I was in Charlotte I went to see the
+monument which commemorates the Mecklenburg Declaration of Independence:
+the work of a group of stout-hearted citizens who decided, before the
+country at large was ready for it, to declare their independence of
+British rule. North Carolina was among the last of the Southern states to
+secede from the Union, and its treatment of its Negroes all along has been
+singularly liberal. For example, in several Southern states little or no
+provision is made for the Negro defective classes, but at Raleigh I
+visited a large asylum for Negro deaf, dumb, and blind which is conducted
+according to the most improved methods. And to-day North Carolina is freer
+politically, the state is nearer a new and healthy party alignment, than
+any other Southern state except Tennessee and possibly Kentucky.
+
+Such a soil was fertile for new ideas and new movements. In 1885 two young
+men, Charles D. McIver and Edwin A. Alderman, now president of the
+University of Virginia, began a series of educational campaigns under the
+supervision of the state. They spoke in every county, rousing the people
+to build better school-houses and to send legislators to Raleigh who
+should be more liberal in educational appropriations. In many cases their
+rallies were comparable with the most enthusiastic political
+meetings--only no one was asking to be elected to office, and the only
+object was public service. As Alderman has said:
+
+"It was an effort to move the centre of gravity from the court-house to
+the school-house."
+
+And it really moved; the state took fire and has been afire ever since.
+Governor Aycock made the educational movement a part of his campaign;
+Governor Glenn has been hardly less enthusiastic; and the development of
+the school system has been little short of amazing. When I was in Raleigh
+last spring J. Y. Joyner, State Superintendent of Schools, who was also
+one of the pioneer campaigners, told me that a new school-house was being
+built for every day in the year, and new school libraries established at
+the same rate. Between 1900 and 1906 the total amount of money expended
+for schools in North Carolina more than doubled, and while the school
+population in the same years had increased only 6 per cent., the daily
+attendance had increased 28 per cent.
+
+
+_North Carolina Compared with Massachusetts_
+
+To give a graphic idea of the progress in education, I can do no better
+than to show the increase in public expenditures since 1872:
+
+  1872 Total school expenditures    $   42,856
+  1880 Total school expenditures       349,831
+  1890 Total school expenditures       787,145
+  1900 Total school expenditures     1,091,610
+  1906 Total school expenditures     2,291,053
+
+I have looked into the statistics and I find that North Carolina spends
+more per hundred dollars of taxable property for school purposes than
+Massachusetts, which is perhaps the leading American state in educational
+expenditures. In 1906 North Carolina raised $.40 on every one hundred
+dollars, while Massachusetts raised $.387. But this does not mean, of
+course, that North Carolina has reached the standard of Massachusetts; it
+only shows how the people, though not rich, have been willing to tax
+themselves. And they have only just begun; the rate of illiteracy of the
+state, as in all the South, is still excessive among both white and
+coloured people. According to the last census, North Carolina has more
+illiterate white people than any other state in the Union, a condition
+due, of course, to its large population of mountaineers. While the
+progress already made is notable the leaders still have a stupendous task
+before them. At the present time, although taxing itself more per hundred
+dollars' worth of property than Massachusetts, North Carolina pays only
+$2.63 each year for the education of each child, whereas Massachusetts
+expends $24.89--nearly ten times as much.
+
+I do not wish to over-emphasise the work in North Carolina; I am merely
+using conditions there as a convenient illustration of what is going on in
+greater or less degree all over the South. One of the group of early
+enthusiasts in North Carolina was P. P. Claxton, who is now in charge of
+the educational campaign in Tennessee. With President Dabney, formerly of
+the University of Tennessee and State Superintendent Mynders, Mr. Claxton
+has conducted a state-wide campaign for education. Every available
+occasion has been utilised: picnics, court-days, Decoration Days: and
+often the audiences have been larger and more enthusiastic than political
+rallies. Indeed, the meetings have been carried on much like a political
+campaign. At one time over one hundred speakers were in the field. Every
+county in the state was stumped, and in two years it was estimated that
+over half of the entire population of the state actually attended the
+meetings. Labour unions and women's clubs were stirred to activity,
+resolutions were passed, politicians were called upon to declare
+themselves, and teachers' organisations were formed. The result was most
+notable. In 1902 the state expended $1,800,000 for educational purposes;
+in 1908--six years later--the total will exceed $4,000,000.
+
+A similar campaign has been going on in Virginia, under the auspices of
+the Cooeperative Educational Association, in which the leaders have been
+Dr. S. C. Mitchell, Professor Bruce Payne, President Alderman, and others.
+In this work Ex-Governor Montague has also been a force for good, both
+while he was governor and since, and Governor Swanson at present is
+actively interested. Local leagues were formed in every part of the state
+to the number of 324. Negroes have also organised along the same line and
+now have ten local associations in five counties.
+
+
+_How the South Is Taxing Itself_
+
+One of the most striking features of the movement has been the development
+of the system of local taxation for school purposes--which is a long step
+in the direction of democracy. In the past the people have looked more or
+less to some outside source for help--to state or national funds, or the
+private gifts of philanthropists, or they have depended upon private
+schools--but now they are voting to take the burden themselves. In other
+words, with the building up of a popular school system, supported by local
+taxation, education in the South is becoming, for the first time,
+democratic. It would be difficult to overestimate the importance of this
+movement in stimulating the local pride and self-reliance of the people,
+or in inspiring each community with educational enthusiasm.
+
+Another development of profound influence has been going on in the South.
+As I have already pointed out, the so-called "Northern philanthropist" has
+long been interested in Southern education, especially Negro education.
+For years his activities awakened, and indeed still awaken, a good deal of
+hostility in some parts of the South. Many Southerners have felt that the
+Northerners, however good their intentions, did not understand Southern
+conditions, and that some of the money was expended in a way that did not
+help the cause of progress in the South.
+
+
+_South and North Work Together_
+
+But both the Northerners (whatever their mistakes in method may have been)
+and the new Southern leaders were intensely and sincerely interested in
+the same thing: namely, better education and better conditions in the
+South. It was natural that these two groups of earnest and reasonable men
+should finally come together in a spirit of cooeperation; and this is,
+indeed, what has happened. Out of a series of quiet conferences held in
+the South grew what has been called the "Ogden movement" and the Southern
+Education Board. This organisation was made up of three different classes
+of men: first, a group of the Southern leaders of whom I have
+spoken--Mitchell, Alderman, Dabney, Curry, Houston, Hill, McIver, Claxton,
+Edgar Gardner Murphy, Sydney J. Bowie, and Henry E. Fries; second,
+Southern men who, living in the North, were yet deeply interested in the
+progress of the South--men like Walter H. Page, George Foster Peabody, and
+Frank R. Chambers; and, finally, the Northerners--Robert C. Ogden, who was
+president of the board, William H. Baldwin, H. H. Hanna, Dr. Wallace
+Buttrick, Albert Shaw, and Dr. G. S. Dickerman.
+
+One of the inspirers of the movement, also a member of the board, was Dr.
+H. B. Frissell, who followed General Armstrong as principal of Hampton
+Institute.
+
+Each year conferences have been held in the South, a feature of which has
+been the "Ogden Special"--a special train from the North bringing Northern
+citizens to Southern institutions and encouraging a more intimate
+acquaintanceship on both sides. No one influence has been more potent
+than this in developing a spirit of nationalisation in the Southern
+educational movement.
+
+So far in this chapter I have had very little to say about the Negro, and
+especially Negro education. It is important to know the view of the new
+leadership on this question. I have shown in previous articles that the
+majority view in the South was more or less hostile to the education of
+the Negro, or, at least, to his education beyond the bare rudiments.
+
+The new leaders have recognised this feeling, and while without exception
+they believe that the Negro must be educated and most of them have said so
+openly, the general policy has been to emphasise white education and unite
+the people on that.
+
+"In education," one of the leaders said to me, "it doesn't matter much
+where we begin. If we can arouse the spirit of the school, the people are
+going to see that it is as important to the state to have a trained Negro
+as it is to have a trained white man."
+
+One of the troubles in the South, one of the reasons for the prejudice
+against education, and particularly Negro education, has arisen from the
+fact that what has been called education was not really education at all.
+In the first place many of the schools have been so poor and the teachers
+so inefficient that the "education" acquired was next to worthless. There
+was not enough of it, nor was it of a kind to give the Negro any real hold
+upon life, and it often hurt him far more than it helped. Much of the
+prejudice in the South against Negro education is unquestionably due to
+the wretched school system, which in many places has not really educated
+anybody. But, deeper than all this, the old conception in the South of a
+school was for a long time the old aristocratic conception--what some one
+has called "useless culture"--of educating a class of men, not to work,
+but to despise work. That idea of education has wrought much evil,
+especially among the Negroes. It has taught both white and coloured men,
+not the doctrine of service, which is necessary to democracy, but it has
+given them a desire for artificial superiority, which is the
+characteristic of aristocracies. It has made the Negro "uppish" and
+"bumptious"; it has caused some white men to argue their superiority when
+they had no basis of accomplishment or usefulness to make them really
+superior.
+
+
+_The Inspiration of Hampton Institute_
+
+But when the idea of education began to be democratic, when men began to
+think more of their duties than of their rights, a wholly new sort of
+school appeared; and it appeared first among the Negroes. The country has
+not yet begun to realise the debt of gratitude which it owes to the
+promoters of Hampton Institute--to the genius of General Armstrong, its
+founder and to the organising ability of Dr. H. B. Frissell who followed
+him. These men will be more highly honoured a hundred years from now than
+they are to-day, for Americans will then appreciate more fully their
+service to the democracy.
+
+The "Hampton idea" is the teaching of work--of service, of humility, of
+duties to God and to man. It is in the highest sense the democratic idea
+in education. And it has come, as most great movements have come, from the
+needs and the struggles of those who are downtrodden and outcast. And how
+wonderfully the idea has spread! Out of Hampton sprung Tuskegee and
+Calhoun and Kowaliga and scores of other Negro schools, until to-day
+nearly all Negro institutions for higher training in the South have
+industrial or agricultural departments.
+
+The best Southern white people were and are friendly to schools of this
+new type. They thought at first that Hampton and Tuskegee were going to
+train servants in the old personal sense of servants who become only
+cooks, butlers, and farmers, and many still have that aristocratic
+conception of service. But the "Hampton idea" of servants is a much
+greater one, for it is the democratic idea of training men who will serve
+their own people and thereby serve the country. Men who graduate from
+Hampton and Tuskegee become leaders of their race. They buy and cultivate
+land, they set up business establishments--in short, they become producers
+and state-builders in the largest sense.
+
+
+_New World Idea of Education_
+
+The idea of Hampton is the new world idea of education, and white people
+in the South (and in the North as well) are now applying it everywhere in
+their educational movements. Agricultural and industrial schools for white
+boys and girls are spreading throughout the South: schools to teach work,
+just as Hampton teaches it. Only last year the state of Georgia provided
+for eleven new agricultural schools in various parts of the state, and
+there is already talk in the South, as in the North, of agricultural
+training in high schools. These men, white and black, who are educated for
+democratic service will in time become masters of the state.
+
+The new leaders, then, of whom I have spoken, do not oppose Negro
+education: they favour it and will go forward steadily with the task of
+bring it about. So far, the Negro public schools have felt little of the
+new impulse; in some states and localities, as I have shown in other
+chapters, the Negro schools have actually retrograded, where the white
+schools have been improving rapidly. But that is the continuing influence
+of the old leadership; the new men have not yet come fully into their own.
+
+I could quote indefinitely from the real statesmen of the South regarding
+Negro education, but I have too little space. Senator Lamar of Mississippi
+once said:
+
+"The problem of race, in a large part, is a problem of illiteracy. Most of
+the evils which have grown up out of the problem have arisen from a
+condition of ignorance, prejudice and superstition. Remove these and the
+simpler elements of the question will come into play.... I will go with
+those who will go furthest in this matter."
+
+No higher note has been struck in educational ideals than in the
+Declaration of Principles adopted last winter (1907) at the meeting of the
+Southern Educational Association at Lexington, Ky., an exclusively
+Southern gathering of white men and women. Their resolutions, which for
+lack of space cannot be here printed in full, should be read by every man
+and woman in the country who is interested in the future of democratic
+institutions. I copy here only a few of the declarations:
+
+     1. All children, regardless of race, creed, sex, or the social
+     station or economic condition of their parents, have equal right to,
+     and should have equal opportunity for, such education as will develop
+     to the fullest possible degree all that is best in their individual
+     natures, and fit them for the duties of life and citizenship in the
+     age and community in which they live.
+
+     2. To secure this right and provide this opportunity to all children
+     is the first and highest duty of the modern democratic state, and the
+     highest economic wisdom of an industrial age and community. Without
+     universal education of the best and highest type, there can be no
+     real democracy, either political or social; nor can agriculture,
+     manufactures, or commerce ever attain their highest development.
+
+     3. Education in all grades and in all legitimate directions, being
+     for the public good, the public should bear the burden of it. The
+     most just taxes levied by the state, or with the authority of the
+     state, by any smaller political division, are those levied for the
+     support of education. No expenditures can possibly produce greater
+     returns and none should be more liberal.
+
+
+_The New South on Negro Education_
+
+Concerning Negro education, I am publishing the resolutions in full,
+because they voice the present thought of the best leadership in the
+South:
+
+     1. We endorse the accepted policy of the states of the South in
+     providing educational facilities for the youth of the Negro race,
+     believing that whatever the ultimate solution of this grievous
+     problem may be, education must be an important factor in that
+     solution.
+
+     2. We believe that the education of the Negro in the elementary
+     branches of education should be made thorough, and should include
+     specific instruction in hygiene and home sanitation, for the better
+     protection of both races.
+
+     3. We believe that in the secondary education of Negro youth emphasis
+     should be placed upon agriculture and the industrial occupations,
+     including nurse training, domestic science, and home economics.
+
+     4. We believe that for practical, economical and psychological
+     reasons Negro teachers should be provided for Negro schools.
+
+     5. We advise instruction in normal schools and normal institutions by
+     white teachers, whenever possible, and closer supervision of courses
+     of study and methods of teaching in Negro normal schools by the State
+     Department of Education.
+
+     6. We recommend that in urban and rural Negro schools there should be
+     closer and more thorough supervision, not only by city and county
+     superintendents, but also by directors of music, drawing, manual
+     training, and other special topics.
+
+     7. We urge upon school authorities everywhere the importance of
+     adequate buildings, comfortable seating, and sanitary accommodations
+     for Negro youth.
+
+     8. We deplore the isolation of many Negro schools, established
+     through motives of philanthropy, from the life and the sympathies of
+     the communities in which they are located. We recommend the
+     supervision of all such schools by the state, and urge that their
+     work and their methods be adjusted to the civilisation in which they
+     exist, in order that the maximum good of the race and of the
+     community may be thereby attained.
+
+     9. On account of economic and psychological differences in the two
+     races, we believe that there should be a difference in courses of
+     study and methods of teaching, and that there should be such an
+     adjustment of school curricula as shall meet the evident needs of
+     Negro youth.
+
+     10. We insist upon such an equitable distribution of the school funds
+     that all the youth of the Negro race shall have at least an
+     opportunity to receive the elementary education provided by the
+     state, and in the administration of state laws, and in the execution
+     of this educational policy, we urge patience, toleration, and
+     justice.
+
+     (Signed) G. R. GLENN, P. P. CLAXTON, J. H. PHILLIPS, C. B. GIBSON,
+     R. N. ROARK, J. H. VAN SICKLE,
+
+     _Committee_.
+
+In this connection also let me call attention to the reports of J. Y.
+Joyner, Superintendent of Education, and Charles L. Coon of North
+Carolina, for a broad view of Negro education.
+
+I have already shown how the South and the North came together in
+educational relationships in the Southern Education Board. I have pointed
+it out as a tendency toward nationalisation in educational interests. But
+the Southern Education Board, while it contained both Northern and
+Southern white men, was primarily interested in white education and
+contained no Negro members. At the time the board was organised, an active
+interest in the Negro would have defeated, in part at least, its declared
+purpose.
+
+
+[Illustration: S. C. MITCHELL of Richmond College; President of the
+Cooeperative Education Association of Virginia.]
+
+[Illustration: JUDGE EMORY SPEER of Georgia. After two terms in Congress
+he was appointed to the Federal bench.
+
+Photograph by Curtiss Studio]
+
+[Illustration: EDGAR GARDNER MURPHY of Alabama, member Southern Education
+Board; author "Problems of the Present South."
+
+Photograph by Sol. Young]
+
+[Illustration: DR. H. B. FRISSELL Principal Hampton Institute and member
+of Southern Education and Jeanes Fund Boards.
+
+Photograph by Rockwood]
+
+[Illustration: R. C. OGDEN of New York, President of the Southern
+Education Board.
+
+Copyright, 1907, by Pach Bros.]
+
+[Illustration: J. Y. JOYNER Superintendent of Public Instruction of North
+Carolina.
+
+Photograph by Wharton & Tyree]
+
+
+_The South, the North, and the Negro at Last Work Together_
+
+Since that time another highly significant movement has arisen. In 1907
+Miss Jeanes, a wealthy Quakeress of Philadelphia, gave $1,000,000 for the
+encouragement of Negro primary education. She placed it in the hands of
+Dr. H. B. Frissell of Hampton and Dr. Booker T. Washington of Tuskegee. In
+the organisation of the board for the control of this fund and its work, a
+further step forward in nationalisation and, indeed, in the direction of
+democracy, was made. It marks a new development in the cooeperation of all
+the forces for good in the solution of this difficult national problem.
+The membership of the board includes not only Southern and Northern white
+men, but also several leading Negroes. The president and general director
+is a Southern white man, coming of an old family, James H. Dillard, dean
+of Tulane University of New Orleans. It will be of interest to publish
+here a full list of the members, because they represent, in more ways
+than one, the new leadership not only in the South, but in the nation:
+
+Southern white men:
+
+  James H. Dillard, President.
+  David C. Barrow, chancellor University of Georgia.
+  Belton Gilreath, manufacturer and mine-owner, Alabama.
+  Dr. S. C. Mitchell, of Richmond College, Richmond, Va.
+
+Northern white men:
+
+  Robert C. Ogden, of New York.
+  Andrew Carnegie, of New York.
+  Talcott Williams, of Philadelphia.
+  George McAneny, president of the City Club of New York.
+  William H. Taft, of Ohio.
+
+To these must be added:
+
+     Dr. H. B. Frissell, of Hampton Institute, a Northerner, whose work
+     and residence has long been in the South.
+
+     George Foster Peabody, treasurer, a Georgian, trustee of the
+     University of Georgia, who resides in the North.
+
+     Walter H. Page, the editor of the _World's Work_, a North Carolinian
+     who has long lived in the North.
+
+Negro membership:
+
+  Booker T. Washington.
+  Bishop Abraham Grant, of Kan.
+  R. R. Moton, of Hampton Institute, secretary of the board.
+  J. C. Napier, a banker of Nashville, Tenn.
+  R. D. Smith, a farmer of Paris, Tex.
+
+In a true sense the Southern Education Board and the Jeanes Fund Board
+represent organisations of working idealists. Such cooeperation as this,
+between reasonable, broad-minded, and unselfish men of the entire country,
+is, at the present moment, the real solution of our problems. It is the
+solution of the Negro problem--all the solution there ever will be. For
+there is no finality in human endeavour: there is only activity; and when
+that activity is informed with the truth and inspired with faith and
+courage, it is not otherwise than success, for it is the best that human
+nature at any given time can do.
+
+In making this statement, I do not, of course wish to infer that
+conditions are as good as can be expected, and that nothing remains to be
+done. As a matter of fact, the struggle is just beginning; as I have shown
+in previous chapters, all the forces of entrenched prejudice and ignorance
+are against the movement, the political leaders who still dominate the
+South are as hostile as they dare to be. The task is, indeed, too big for
+the South alone, or the North alone, or the white man alone: it will
+require all the strength and courage the nation possesses.
+
+
+_Universities Feel the New Impulse_
+
+Besides the campaign for better common schools, the educational revival
+has also renewed and revivified all the higher institutions of learning in
+the South. The state universities, especially, have been making
+extraordinary progress. I shall not soon forget my visit to the University
+of Georgia, at Athens, nor the impression I received while there of strong
+men at work, not merely erecting buildings of mortar and brick, but
+establishing a new sort of university system, which shall unify and direct
+to one common end all of the educational activities of the state:
+beginning with the common school and reaching upward to the university
+itself; including the agricultural and industrial schools, and even the
+Negro college of agriculture. The University of Georgia is one of the
+oldest state colleges in America, and the ambition of its leaders is to
+make it one of the greatest. Mr. Hodgson drove me around the campus, which
+has recently been extended until it contains nearly 1,000 acres. He showed
+me where the new buildings are to be, the drives and the bridges. Much of
+it is yet a vision of the future, but it is the sort of vision that comes
+true. I spent a day with President Soule of the Agricultural College, on
+his special educational train, which covered a considerable part of the
+state of Georgia, stopping at scores of towns where the speakers appeared
+before great audiences of farmers and made practical addresses on cotton
+and corn and cattle-raising, and on education generally. And everywhere
+the practical work of these public educators was greeted with enthusiasm.
+
+I heard from Professor Stewart of his work in organising rural high
+schools, in encouraging local taxation, and in bringing the work of the
+public schools into closer correlation with that of the university.
+
+Seeing the educational work of states like Georgia, North Carolina,
+Virginia, and others, one cannot but feel that the time is coming shortly
+when the North will be going South for new ideas and new inspiration in
+education.
+
+In a brief review like this, I have been able, of course, to give only the
+barest outline of a very great work, and I have mentioned only a few among
+hundreds of leaders; the work I have described is only illustrative of
+what is going on in greater or less degree everywhere in the South.
+
+Many important developments have come from these campaigns for education.
+The actual building of new school-houses and the expenditure of more money
+for the struggle with illiteracy is only one of many results. For the
+crusade for education, supplemented by the new industrial impulse in the
+South, has awakened a new spirit of self-help. The success with which the
+public was aroused in the educational campaign has inspired leaders in all
+lines of activity with new courage and faith. It is a spirit of
+youthfulness which is not afraid to attempt anything.
+
+Much printers' ink has been expended in trying to account for the spread
+of the anti-saloon movement throughout the South. But there is nothing
+strange about it: it is, indeed, only another manifestation of the new
+Southern spirit, the desire to get things right in the South. And this
+movement will further stir men's minds, develop self-criticism, and reveal
+to the people their power of concerted action whether the politicians are
+with them or not. It is, indeed, significant that the women of the South,
+perhaps for the first time, have become a powerful influence in public
+affairs. Their organisations have helped, in some instances led, in both
+the educational and the anti-saloon movement. No leaders in the Virginia
+educational movement have been more useful than Mrs. L. R. Dashiell and
+Mrs. B. B. Munford of Richmond.
+
+Practically all the progress of the South, both industrial and
+educational, has been made by non-political movements and non-political
+leaders--often in opposition to the political leaders. Indeed, nearly
+every one of the hopeful movements of the South has had to capture some
+entrenched stronghold of the old political captains. In several states,
+for example, the school systems a few years ago were crippled by political
+domination and nepotism. Superintendents, principals, and teachers were
+frequently appointed not for their ability, but because they were good
+members of the party or because they were related to politicians.
+
+
+_New Statesmen Against Old Politicians_
+
+In Alabama I found prominent men attacking the fee system of payment of
+lesser magistrates. The evil in this system lies in the encouragement it
+gives to trivial litigation and the arrest of citizens for petty offences.
+Let me give a single example. A Negro had another Negro arrested for
+"'sault and battery." Both appeared in court. The accused Negro was tried,
+and finally sent to the chain-gang. The justice suggested to the convicted
+man that if he wanted satisfaction he should turn around and have his
+accuser arrested; which he did, promptly accusing him of "'busive
+language." Another trial was held; and in the end both Negroes found
+themselves side by side in the chain-gang; the magistrate, the constable,
+the sheriff, had all drawn liberal fees, and the private contractor who
+hired the chain-gang, and who also "stood in" with the politicians, had
+obtained another cheap labourer for his work. It is a vicious circle,
+which has enabled the politicians and their backers to profit at every
+turn from the weakness and evil of both Negro and low-class white man.
+
+In attacking the fee system and the old, evil chain-gang system as the new
+leaders are doing in many parts of the South, in closing the saloons
+(always a bulwark of low politics), in building up a new school system
+free from selfish control, the new leaders are striking squarely at the
+roots of the old political aristocracy, undermining it and cutting it
+away. It is sure to fall; and in its place the South will rear a splendid
+new leadership of constructive ability and unselfish patriotism. There
+will be a division on matters of vital concern, and a turning from ancient
+and worn-out issues to new interests and activities. When that time comes
+the whole nation will again profit by the genius of Southern statesmanship
+and we shall again have Southern Presidents.
+
+Already the old type of politician sees the handwriting of fate. He knows
+not which way to turn. At one moment he harps more fiercely and bitterly
+than ever before on the issue which has maintained him so long in power,
+the Negro; and at the next moment he seizes frantically on some one of the
+new issues--education, prohibition, anti-railroad--hoping thereby to
+maintain himself and his old party control. But he cannot do it; every
+force in the South is already making for new things, for more democracy,
+for more nationalisation.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV
+
+WHAT TO DO ABOUT THE NEGRO--A FEW CONCLUSIONS
+
+
+The deeper one delves into the problem of race, the humbler he becomes
+concerning his own views. Studying a black man, he discovers that he must
+study human nature. The best he can do, then, is to present his latest and
+clearest thought, knowing that newer light and deeper knowledge may modify
+his conclusions. It is out of such expressions of individual thought (no
+one man has or can have all the truth) and the kindly discussion which
+follows it (and why shouldn't it be kindly?) that arises finally that
+power of social action which we call public opinion. Together--not
+otherwise--we may approach the truth.
+
+The world to-day is just beginning to meet new phases of the problem of
+race difference. Improved transportation and communication are yearly
+making the earth smaller. As Americans we are being brought every year
+into closer contact with black and yellow people. We are already disturbed
+not only by a Negro race problem, but on our Pacific coast and in Hawaii
+we have a Japanese and Chinese problem. In the Philippine Islands we have
+a tangle of race problems in comparison with which our Southern situation
+seems simple. Other nations are facing complexities equally various and
+difficult. England's problems in both South Africa and India are largely
+racial. The great issue in Australia, where Chinese labour has become a
+political question, is expressed in the campaign slogan: "A white
+Australia."
+
+
+_What Is the Race Problem?_
+
+Essentially, then, what is the race problem?
+
+The race problem is the problem of living with human beings who are not
+like us, whether they are, in our estimation, our "superiors" or
+"inferiors," whether they have kinky hair or pigtails, whether they are
+slant-eyed, hook-nosed, or thick-lipped. In its essence it is the same
+problem, magnified, which besets every neighbourhood, even every family.
+
+In our own country we have 10,000,000 Negroes distributed among 75,000,000
+white people. They did not come here to invade us, or because they wanted
+to come. We brought them by force, and at a fearful and cruel sacrifice of
+life. We brought them, not to do them good, but selfishly, that they might
+be compelled to do the hard work and let us live lazily, eat richly, sleep
+softly. We treated them as beasts of burden. I say "we," for the North
+owned slaves, too, at first, and emancipated them (by selling them to the
+South) because it did not pay to keep them. Nor was the anti-slavery
+sentiment peculiar to the North; voices were raised against the
+institution of slavery by many Southern statesmen from Jefferson down--men
+who knew by familiar observation of the evil of slavery, especially for
+the white man.
+
+
+_Differences Between Southern and Northern Attitudes Toward the Race
+Problem_
+
+But differences are apparent in the outlook of the South and North which
+must be pointed out before we can arrive at any general conclusions. By
+understanding the reasons for race feeling we shall be the better able to
+judge of the remedies proposed.
+
+In the first place, the South is still clouded with bitter memories of the
+war, and especially of the Reconstruction period. The North cannot
+understand how deep and real this feeling is, how it has been warped into
+the souls of even the third generation. The North, victorious, forgot; but
+the South, broken and defeated, remembered. Until I had been a good while
+in the South and talked with many people I had no idea what a social
+cataclysm like the Civil War really meant to those who are defeated, how
+long it echoes in the hearts of men and women. The Negro has indeed
+suffered--suffered on his way upward; but the white man, with his higher
+cultivation, his keener sensibilities, his memories of a departed glory,
+has suffered far more. I have tried, as I have listened to the stories of
+struggle which only the South knows, to put myself in the place of these
+Anglo-Saxon men and women, and I think I can understand a little at least
+of what it must have meant to meet defeat, loss of relatives and friends,
+grinding poverty, the chaos of reconstruction--and after all that to have,
+always at elbow-touch, the unconscious cause of all their trouble, the
+millions of inert, largely helpless Negroes who, imbued with a sharp sense
+of their rights, are attaining only slowly a corresponding appreciation of
+their duties and responsibilities.
+
+The ruin of the war left the South poor, and it has provided itself slowly
+with educational advantages. It is a long step behind the North in the
+average of education among white people not less than coloured. But more
+than all else, perhaps, the South is in the throes of vast economic
+changes. It is in the transition stage between the old wasteful,
+semi-feudal civilisation and the sharp new city and industrial life. It is
+suffering the common pains of readjustment; and, being hurt, it is not
+wholly conscious of the real reason.
+
+For example, many of the troubles between the races attributed to the
+perversity of the Negro are often only the common difficulties which arise
+out of the relationship of employer and employee. In other words,
+difficulties in the South are often attributed to the race problem which
+in the North we know as the labour problem. For the South even yet has not
+fully established itself on the wage system. Payment of Negroes in the
+country is still often a matter of old clothes, baskets from the white
+man's kitchen or store, with occasionally a little money, which is often
+looked upon as an indulgence rather than a right. No race ever yet has
+sprung directly from slavery into the freedom of a full-fledged wage
+system, no matter what the laws were. It is not insignificant of progress
+that the "basket habit" is coming to be looked upon as thievery, organised
+charity in the cities is taking the place of indiscriminate personal
+gifts, wages are more regularly paid and measure more accurately the value
+of the service rendered.
+
+But the relationships between the races still smack in no small degree,
+especially in matters of social contact (which are always the last to
+change), of the old feudal character; they are personal and sentimental.
+They express themselves in the personal liking for the old "mammies," in
+the personal contempt for the "smart Negro."
+
+A large part of the South still believes that the Negro was created to
+serve the white man, and for no other purpose. This is especially the
+belief in the conservative country districts.
+
+"If these Negroes become doctors and merchants or buy their own farms," a
+Southern woman said to me as a clinching argument against Negro education,
+"what shall we do for servants?"
+
+Another reason for the feeling in the South against the Negro is that the
+South has never had any other labouring class of people (to speak of) with
+which to compare the Negro. All the employers have been white; most of the
+workers have been black. The North, on the other hand, has had a constant
+procession of ignorant working people of various sorts. The North is
+familiar with the progress of alien people, wherein the workingman of
+to-day becomes the employer of to-morrow--which has not happened in the
+South.
+
+
+_Confusion of Labour and Race Problems_
+
+An illustration of the confusion between the race problem and the labour
+problem is presented in certain Southern neighbourhoods by the influx of
+European immigrants. Because the Italian does the work of the Negro, a
+tendency exists to treat him like a Negro. In Louisiana on the sugar
+plantations Italian white women sometimes work under Negro foremen and no
+objection is made. A movement is actually under way in Mississippi to keep
+the children of Italian immigrants out of the white schools. In not a few
+instances white workmen have been held in peonage like Negroes; several
+such cases are now pending in the courts. Here is a dispatch showing how
+new Italian immigrants were treated in one part of Mississippi--only the
+Italians, unlike the Negroes, have an active government behind them:
+
+     MOBILE, ALA., October 3.--The Italian Government has taken notice of
+     the situation at Sumrall, Miss., where the native whites are
+     endeavouring to keep Italian children out of the schools and where a
+     leader of the Italians was taken to the woods and whipped.
+
+     The Italian Consul at New Orleans, Count G. Morroni, reached Mobile
+     this afternoon and began an investigation of the situation. He to-day
+     heard the story of Frank Seaglioni, the leader of the Italian colony
+     at Sumrall, who was a few days ago decoyed from his home at night
+     with a bogus message from New Orleans and unmercifully whipped by a
+     mob of white men.
+
+A decided tendency also exists to charge up to the Negro, because he is a
+Negro, all the crimes which are commonly committed by any ignorant,
+neglected, poverty-stricken people. Only last summer we had in New York
+what the newspaper reporters called a "crime wave." The crime in that case
+was what is designated in the South as the "usual crime" (offences against
+women) for which Negroes are lynched. But in New York not a Negro was
+implicated.
+
+I was struck while in Philadelphia by a presentment of a grand jury in
+Judge Kinsey's court upon the subject of a "crime wave" which read thus:
+
+     In closing our duties as jurymen, we wish to call to the attention of
+     this court the large proportion of cases presented to us for action
+     wherein the offences were charged to either persons of foreign birth
+     or those of the coloured race, and we feel that some measures should
+     be taken to the end that our city should be relieved of both the
+     burden of the undesirable alien and the irresponsible coloured
+     person.
+
+Here, it will be seen, the "undesirable alien" and "irresponsible coloured
+person" are classed together, although it is significant of the greater
+prejudice against the coloured man that the newspaper report of the action
+of the grand jury should be headed "Negro Crime Abnormal," without
+referring to the alien at all. When I inquired at the prosecutor's office
+about the presentiment, I was told:
+
+"Oh, the dagoes are just as bad as the Negroes."
+
+And both are bad, not because they are Negroes or Italians, but because
+they are ignorant, neglected, poverty-stricken.
+
+Thus in the dust and confusion of the vast readjustments now going on in
+the South, the discomfort of which both races feel but neither quite
+understands, we have the white man blindly blaming the Negro and the Negro
+blindly hating the white. When they both understand that many of the
+troubles they are having are only the common gall-spots of the new
+industrial harness there will be a better living together.
+
+I do not wish to imply, of course, that an industrial age or the wage
+system furnishes an ideal condition for race relationships; for in the
+North the Negro's struggle for survival in the competitive field is
+accompanied, as I have shown elsewhere, by the severest suffering. The
+condition of Negroes in Indianapolis, New York, and Philadelphia is in
+some ways worse than it is anywhere in the South. But, say what we will,
+the wage system is one step upward from the old feudalism. The Negro is
+treated less like a slave and more like a man in the North. It is for this
+reason that Negroes, no matter what their difficulties of making a living
+in the North, rarely wish to go back to the South. And as the South
+develops industrially it will approximate more nearly to Northern
+conditions. In Southern cities to-day, because of industrial development,
+the Negro is treated more like a man than he is in the country; and this
+is one reason why Negroes crowd into the cities and can rarely be
+persuaded to go back into the country--unless they can own their own land.
+
+But the South is rapidly shaking off the remnants of the old feudalism.
+Development of mines and forests, the extension of manufacturing, the
+introduction of European immigrants, the inflow of white Northerners,
+better schools, more railroads and telephones, are all helping to bring
+the South up to the economic standard of the North. There will be a
+further break-up of baronial tenant farming, the plantation store will
+disappear, the ruinous credit system will be abolished, and there will be
+a widespread appearance of independent farm-owners, both white and black.
+This will all tend to remove the personal and sentimental attitude of the
+old Southern life; the Negro will of necessity be judged more and more as
+a man, not as a slave or dependent. In short, the country, South and
+North, will become economically more homogeneous.
+
+But even when the South reaches the industrial development of the North
+the Negro problem will not be solved; it is certainly not solved in New
+York or Philadelphia, where industrial development has reached its highest
+form. The prejudice in those cities, as I have shown, has been growing
+more intense as Negro population increased. What, then, will happen?
+
+
+_Two Elements in Every Race Problem_
+
+Two elements appear in every race problem: the first, race prejudice--the
+repulsion of the unlike; second, economic or competitive jealousy. Both
+operate, for example, in the case of the Irishman or Italian, but with the
+Negro and Chinaman race prejudice is greater because the difference is
+greater. The difficulty of the Negro in this country is the colour of his
+skin, the symbol of his difference. In China the difficulty of the white
+trader is his whiteness, his difference. Race lines, in short, are drawn
+by white men, not because the other race is inferior (the Japanese and
+Chinese are in many ways our superiors), nor because of criminality
+(certain classes of foreigners are more criminal in our large cities than
+the Negroes), nor because of laziness, but because of discernible physical
+differences--black skin, almond eyes, pigtails, hook noses, a peculiar
+bodily odour, or small stature. That dislike of a different people is more
+or less instinctive in all men.
+
+A tendency has existed on the part of Northern students who have no
+first-hand knowledge of the masses of Negroes to underestimate the force
+of race repulsion; on the other hand, the Southern student who is
+confronted with the Negroes themselves is likely to overestimate racial
+repulsion and underestimate economic competition as a cause of the
+difficulty. The profoundest question, indeed, is to decide how much of the
+so-called problem is due to race repulsion and how much to economic
+competition.
+
+This leads us to the most sinister phase of the race problem. As I have
+shown, we have the two elements of conflict: instinctive race repulsion
+and competitive jealousy. What is easier for the race in power, the white
+race in this country (the yellow race in Asia) than to play upon race
+instinct in order to serve selfish ends? How shrewdly the labour union,
+whether in San Francisco or Atlanta, seizes upon that race hatred to keep
+the black or yellow man out of the union and thereby control all the work
+for its members! Race prejudice played upon becomes a tool in clinching
+the power of the labour monopoly.
+
+How the politician in the South excites race hatred in order that he may
+be elected to office! Vardaman governed because he could make men hate one
+another more bitterly than his opponent. The Rev. Thomas Dixon has
+appealed in his books and plays to the same passion.
+
+In several places in this country Negroes have been driven out by
+mobs--not because they were criminal, or because they were bad citizens,
+but because they were going into the grocery and drug business, they were
+becoming doctors, dentists, and the like, and taking away the trade of
+their white competitors. So the stores and restaurants of highly
+efficient Japanese were wrecked in San Francisco.
+
+What is easier or cruder to use as a weapon for crushing a rival than the
+instinctive dislike of man for man? And that usage is not peculiar to the
+white man. In Africa the black man wastes no time with the
+different-looking white man; he kills him, if he dares, on the spot. And
+how ably the Chinaman has employed the instinctive hatred of his
+countrymen for "foreign devils" in order to fight American trade and
+traders! We hate the Chinaman and drive him out, and he hates us and
+drives us out.
+
+
+_Chief Danger of Race Prejudice_
+
+And this is one of the dangers of the race problem in this country--the
+fostering of such an instinct to make money or to get political office.
+Such a basis of personal prosperty is all the more dangerous because the
+white man is in undisputed power in this country; the Negro has no great
+navy behind him; he is like a child in the house of a harsh parent. All
+that stands between him and destruction is the ethical sense of the white
+man. Will the white man's sense of justice and virtue be robust enough to
+cause him to withhold the hand of unlimited power? Will he see, as Booker
+T. Washington says, that if he keeps the Negro in the gutter he must stay
+there with him? The white man and his civilisation, not alone the Negro,
+will rise or fall by that ethical test.
+
+The Negro, on his part, as I have shown repeatedly in former chapters,
+employs the same methods as the white man, for Negro nature is not
+different from human nature. He argues: "The white man hates you; hate
+him. Trade with Negro storekeepers; employ Negro doctors; don't go to
+white dentists and lawyers."
+
+Out of this condition proceed two tendencies. The first is the natural
+result of mutual fear and suspicion, and that is, a rapid flying apart of
+the races. All through my former chapters I have been showing how the
+Negroes are being segregated. So are the Chinese segregated, and the
+blacks in South Africa, and certain classes in India. Parts of the South
+are growing blacker. Negroes crowd into "coloured quarters" in the
+cities. More and more they are becoming a people wholly apart--separate in
+their churches, separate in their schools, separate in cars, conveyances,
+hotels, restaurants, with separate professional men. In short, we discover
+tendencies in this country toward the development of a caste system.
+
+Now, one of the most striking facts in our recent history is the progress
+of the former slave. And this finds its world parallel in the progress of
+people whom the vainglorious Anglo-Saxon once despised: the Japanese,
+Chinese, and East Indians. In forty years the Negro has advanced a
+distance that would have been surprising in almost any race. In the bare
+accomplishments--area of land owned, crops raised, professional men
+supported, business enterprises conducted, books and poetry written, music
+composed, pictures painted--the slaves of forty years ago have made the
+most astonishing progress. This leads to the second tendency, which
+proceeds slowly out of the growing conviction that hatred and suspicion
+and fear as motives in either national or individual progress will not
+work; that there must be some other way for different people to work side
+by side in peace and justice. And thus we discover a tendency toward a
+friendly living together under the new relationship, in which the Negro is
+not a slave or a dependent, but a man and a citizen. Booker T. Washington
+preaches the gospel of this new life. And gradually as race prejudice
+becomes inconvenient, threatens financial adversity, ruffles the smooth
+current of comfortable daily existence, the impulse grows to set it aside.
+Men don't keep on fighting when it is no longer profitable to fight.
+
+And thus, side by side, these two impulses exist--the one pointing toward
+the development of a hard caste system which would ultimately petrify our
+civilisation as it has petrified that of India; and the other looking to a
+reasonable, kindly, and honourable working together of the races.
+
+
+_What Are the Remedies for the Evil Conditions?_
+
+So much for conditions; what of remedies?
+
+I have heard the most extraordinary remedies proposed. Serious men
+actually talk of the deportation of the entire Negro population to
+Africa, not stopping to inquire whether we have any right to deport them,
+or calculating the economic revolution and bankruptcy which the
+deportation of the entire labouring class would cause in the South,
+without stopping to think that even if we could find a spot in the world
+for 10,000,000 Negroes, and they all wanted to go, that all the ships
+flying the American flag, if constantly employed, could probably not
+transport the natural increase of the Negro population, let alone the
+10,000,000 present inhabitants. I have heard talk of segregation in
+reservations, like the Indians--segregation out of existence! I have even
+heard unspeakable talk of the wholesale extinction of the race by
+preventing the breeding of children! All quack remedies and based upon
+hatred, not upon justice.
+
+There is no sudden or cut-and-dried solution of the Negro problem, or of
+any other problem. Men are forever demanding formulae which will enable
+them to progress without effort. They seek to do quickly by medication
+what can only be accomplished by deliberate hygiene. A problem that has
+been growing for two hundred and fifty years in America, and for thousands
+of years before that in Africa, warping the very lives of the people
+concerned, changing their currents of thought as well as their conduct,
+cannot be solved in forty years. Why expect it?
+
+And yet there are definite things that can be done which, while working no
+immediate miracles, will set our faces to the light and keep us trudging
+toward the true goal.
+
+Down at the bottom--it will seem trite, but it is eternally true--the
+cause of the race "problem" and most other social problems is simply lack
+of understanding and sympathy between man and man. And the remedy is
+equally simple--a gradual substitution of understanding and sympathy for
+blind repulsion and hatred.
+
+Consider, for example, the Atlanta riot. Increasing misunderstanding and
+hatred caused a dreadful explosion and bloodshed. What happened? Instantly
+the wisest white men in Atlanta invited the wisest coloured men to meet
+them. They got together: general explanations followed. They found that
+there had been error on both sides; they found that there were reasonable
+human beings on both sides. One of the leading white men said: "I did not
+know there were any such broad-minded Negroes in the South." In other
+words, they tried to understand and sympathise with one another. Over and
+over again men will be found hating Negroes, or Chinamen, or "dagoes," and
+yet liking some individual Negro, or Chinaman, or "dago." When they get
+acquainted they see that the Negro or Chinaman is a human being like
+themselves, full of faults, but not devoid of good qualities.
+
+As a fundamental proposition, then, it will be found that the solution of
+the Negro problem lies in treating the Negro more and more as a human
+being like ourselves. Treating the Negro as a human being, we must judge
+him, not by his colour, or by any other outward symbol, but upon his worth
+as a man. Nothing that fails of that full honesty and fairness of judgment
+in the smallest particular will suffice. We disgrace and injure ourselves
+more than we do the Negro when we are not willing to admit virtue or
+learning or power in another human being because his face happens to be
+yellow or black.
+
+Of the soundness of this fundamental standard of judgment there can be no
+doubt; the difficulty lies in applying it practically to society as it is
+to-day. In the suggestions which I offer here I am trying to do two
+things: to outline the present programme, and to keep open a clear view to
+the future goal.
+
+
+_Shall the Negro Vote?_
+
+Let us approach, then, without fear the first of the three groups of
+problems--political, industrial, and social--which confront us.
+
+Shall the Negro vote?
+
+Thousands of Negroes in this country are fully as well equipped, fully as
+patriotic, as the average white citizen. Moreover, they are as much
+concerned in the real welfare of the country. The principle that our
+forefathers fought for, "taxation only with representation," is as true
+to-day as it ever was.
+
+On the other hand, the vast majority of Negroes (and many foreigners and
+"poor whites") are still densely ignorant, and have little or no
+appreciation of the duties of citizenship. It seems right that they should
+be required to wait before being allowed to vote until they are prepared.
+A wise parent hedges his son about with restrictions; he does not
+authorise his signature at the bank or allow him to run a locomotive; and
+until he is twenty-one years old he is disfranchised and has no part in
+the government. But the parent restricts his son because it seems the
+wisest course for him, for the family, and for the state that he should
+grow to manhood before he is burdened with grave responsibilities. So the
+state limits suffrage; and rightly limits it, so long as it accompanies
+that limitation with a determined policy of education. But the suffrage
+law is so executed in the South to-day as to keep many capable Negroes
+from the exercise of their rights, to prevent recognition of honest merit,
+and it is executed unjustly as between white men and coloured. It is no
+condonement of the Southern position to say that the North also
+disfranchises a large part of the Negro vote by bribery, which it does; it
+is only saying that the North is also wrong.
+
+As for the agitation for the repeal of the Fifteenth Amendment to the
+Federal Constitution, which gives the right of suffrage to the coloured
+man, it must be met by every lover of justice and democracy with a face of
+adamant. If there were only one Negro in the country capable of
+citizenship, the way for him must, at least, be kept open. No doubt full
+suffrage was given to the mass of Negroes before they were prepared for
+it, while yet they were slaves in everything except bodily shackles, and
+the result during the Reconstruction period was disastrous. But the
+principle of a free franchise--fortunately, as I believe, for this
+country--has been forever established. If the white man is not willing to
+meet the Negro in any contest whatsoever without plugging the dice, then
+he is not the superior but the inferior of the Negro.
+
+
+_What Shall Be the Industrial Relation of the Races?_
+
+So much for the political relationships of the races. How about the
+industrial relationships?
+
+The same test of inherent worth must here also apply, and the question
+will not be settled until it does apply. A carpenter must be asked, not
+"What colour are you?" but "How cunningly and efficiently can you build a
+house?" Of all absurdities, the judgment of the skill of a surgeon by the
+kink of his hair will certainly one day be looked upon as the most absurd.
+The same observation applies broadly to the attempt to confine a whole
+people, regardless of their capabilities, to menial occupations because
+they are dark-coloured. No, the place of the Negro is the place he can
+fill most efficiently and the longer we attempt to draw artificial lines
+the longer we shall delay the solution of the race problem. On the other
+hand, the Negro must not clamour for places he cannot yet fill.
+
+"The trouble with the Negro," says Booker T. Washington, "is that he is
+all the time trying to get recognition, whereas what he should do is to
+get something to recognise."
+
+Negroes as a class are to-day far inferior in education, intelligence, and
+efficiency to the white people as a class. Here and there an able Negro
+will develop superior abilities; but the mass of Negroes for years to come
+must find their activities mostly in physical and more or less menial
+labour. Like any race, they must first prove themselves in these simple
+lines of work before they can expect larger opportunities.
+
+There must always be men like Dr. DuBois who agitate for rights; their
+service is an important one, but at the present time it would seem that
+the thing most needed was the teaching of such men as Dr. Washington,
+emphasising duties and responsibilities, urging the Negro to prepare
+himself for his rights.
+
+
+_Social Contact_
+
+We come now, having considered the political and industrial relationships
+of the races, to the most difficult and perplexing of all the phases of
+the Negro question--that of social contact. Political and industrial
+relationships are more or less outward, but social contact turns upon the
+delicate and deep questions of home life, personal inclinations, and of
+privileges rather than rights. It is always in the relationships of oldest
+developments, like those that cling around the home, that human nature is
+slowest to change. Indeed, much of the complexity of the Negro problem
+has arisen from a confusion in people's minds between rights and
+privileges.
+
+Everyone recalls the excitement caused--it became almost a national
+issue--when President Roosevelt invited Booker T. Washington to luncheon
+at the White House. Well, that feeling is deep in the South, as deep
+almost as human nature. Many Northern people who go South to live come to
+share it; indeed, it is the gravest question in ethics to decide at what
+point natural instincts should be curbed.
+
+Social contact is a privilege, not a right; it is not a subject for
+legislation or for any other sort of force. "Social questions," as Colonel
+Watterson of Kentucky says, "create their own laws and settle themselves.
+They cannot be forced." All such relationships will work themselves out
+gradually, naturally, quietly, in the long course of the years: and the
+less they are talked about the better.
+
+
+_Jim Crow Laws_
+
+As for the Jim Crow laws in the South, many of them, at least, are at
+present necessary to avoid the danger of clashes between the ignorant of
+both race. They are the inevitable scaffolding of progress. As a matter of
+fact, the Negro has profited in one way by such laws. For the white man
+has thus driven the Negroes together, forced ability to find its outlet in
+racial leadership, and by his severity produced a spirit of self-reliance
+which would not otherwise have existed. Dr. Frissell of Hampton is always
+talking to his students of the "advantages of disadvantages."
+
+As for laws against the intermarriage of the races, they do not prevent
+what they are designed to prevent: the mixing of white and coloured blood.
+In many parts of the South, despite the existence of such laws,
+miscegenation, though decreasing rapidly, still continues. On the other
+hand, in the North, where Negroes and whites may marry, there is actually
+very little marriage and practically no concubinage. The solution of this
+question, too, lies far more in education than in law. As a matter of
+fact, the more education both races receive, the less the amalgamation. In
+the South, as in the North, the present tendency of the educated and
+prosperous Negroes is to build up a society of their own, entirely apart
+from and independent of white people. As I have shown in a former chapter,
+a white woman in the North who marries a Negro is declassed--ostracised by
+both races. The danger of amalgamation lies with ignorant and vicious
+people, black or white, not with educated and sensitive people.
+
+As in the case of the Jim Crow laws, separate schools in the South are
+necessary, and in one way I believe them to be of great advantage to the
+Negroes themselves. In Northern cities like Indianapolis and New York,
+where there are no separation laws of any kind, separate schools have
+appeared, naturally and quietly, in districts where the Negro population
+is dense. That the pupils in each should be treated with exact justice in
+the matter of expenditures by the state is axiomatic. And the Negro boy
+should have the same unbounded opportunity for any sort of education he is
+capable of using as the white boy; nothing less will suffice.
+
+One influence at present growing rapidly will have its profound effect on
+the separation laws. Though a tendency exists toward local segregation of
+Negroes to which I have already referred, there is also a counter-tendency
+toward a scattering of Negroes throughout the entire country. The white
+population in the South, now 20,000,000 against 9,000,000 Negroes, is
+increasing much more rapidly than the Negro population. The death-rate of
+Negroes is exceedingly high; and the sharper the conditions of competition
+with white workers, the greater will probably be the limitation of
+increase of the more inefficient Negro population.
+
+As for the predictions of "amalgamation," "a mongrel people," "black
+domination," and other bogies of prophecy, we must not, as I see it, give
+them any weight whatsoever. We cannot regulate our short lives by the fear
+of something far in the future which will probably never happen at all.
+All we can do is to be right at this moment and let the future take care
+of itself; it will anyway. There is no other sane method of procedure.
+Much as we may desire it, the future arrangement of this universe is not
+in our hands. As to the matter of "superiority" or "inferiority," it is
+not a subject of argument at all; nor can we keep or attain "superiority"
+by laws or colour lines, or in any other way, except by being superior.
+If we are right, absolutely right, in the eternal principles, we can rest
+in peace that the matter of our superiority will take care of itself.
+
+
+_The Real Solution of the Negro Problem_
+
+I remember asking a wise Southern man I met what, in his opinion, was the
+chief factor in the solution of the Negro problem.
+
+"Time," he said, "and patience."
+
+But time must be occupied with discipline and education--more and more
+education, not less education, education that will teach first of all the
+dignity of service not only for Negroes but for white men. The white man,
+South and North, needs it quite as much as the coloured man. And this is
+exactly the programme of the new Southern statesmanship of which I spoke
+in a former chapter. These wise Southerners have resolved to forget the
+discouragements and complexities of the Negro problem, forget even their
+disagreements, and go to work on present problems: the development of
+education and industry.
+
+Whether we like it or not the whole nation (indeed, the whole world) is
+tied by unbreakable bonds to its Negroes, its Chinamen, its slum-dwellers,
+its thieves, its murderers, its prostitutes. We cannot elevate ourselves
+by driving them back either with hatred or violence or neglect; but only
+by bringing them forward: by service.
+
+For good comes to men, not as they work alone, but as they work together
+with that sympathy and understanding which is the only true Democracy. The
+Great Teacher never preached the flat equality of men, social or
+otherwise. He gave mankind a working principle by means of which, being so
+different, some white, some black, some yellow, some old, some young, some
+men, some women, some accomplished, some stupid--mankind could, after all,
+live together in harmony and develop itself to the utmost possibility. And
+that principle was the Golden Rule. It is the least sentimental, the most
+profoundly practical teaching known to men.
+
+
+
+
+INDEX
+
+
+
+
+INDEX
+
+
+  A
+
+  Alcorn College, 248.
+
+  Alderman, President Edwin A., 259, 271, 273, 278.
+
+  Amalgamation of Races, 153, 164, 171.
+
+  Amos, Moses, 42.
+
+  Atlanta, colour line in, 27.
+    riot, 3.
+
+  Atlanta University, 40, 49, 54, 92, 170.
+
+
+  B
+
+  Barrow, Chancellor D. C., 271, 287.
+
+  Bassett, Professor John Spencer, 257.
+
+  Black Belt, 67.
+
+  Boston, race prejudice in, 118.
+    prosperous Negroes in, 119.
+
+  Bowie, Sydney J., 281.
+
+  Boycott by Negroes, 34.
+
+  Bradley, Rev. H. S., quoted, 56.
+
+  Brittain, M. L., quoted, 37.
+
+  Brown, J. Pope, 68.
+
+  Broyles, Judge, 18, 45.
+
+  Bulkley, William L., quoted, 131, 142.
+
+  "Bumptiousness," 125.
+
+  Buttrick, Dr. Wallace, 281.
+
+
+  C
+
+  Cable, George W., 141.
+
+  Cable, George W., the novelist, 257.
+
+  Carnegie, Andrew, 35, 287.
+
+  Chain-gang, 50, 96, 98, 290.
+
+  Chambers, Frank R., 281.
+
+  Charities, attitude toward Negroes, 35, 114, 138.
+
+  Churches, Negro, 89, 168.
+
+  Civil Service, Negroes in, 146.
+
+  "Clansman, The," 4.
+
+  Clark University, 12.
+
+  Clark, Walter, President Mississippi Cotton Association, quoted, 104.
+
+  Claxton, P. P., 271, 279.
+
+  Cocaine, use of by Negroes, 46, 89, 104.
+
+  Colour line, drawn by Negroes, 226.
+
+  Concubinage, a case of, 48.
+
+  Convicts, Negro, make profits for Georgia, 50.
+
+  Cooper, W. G., report on Atlanta riot, 15.
+
+  Cotton mill workers, 53, 70.
+
+  Courts and the Negro, 45, 96, 141, 185, 205.
+
+  Credit system, influence on Negro, 105.
+
+  Crime against women, 5, 128, 296.
+    as incentive to riot, 3, 4, 46, 183, 193, 204.
+    condoned to keep Negro on farms, 98.
+    juvenile, 51, 141.
+
+  "Crossing the Line," 161.
+
+  Cunningham, Acting Governor, 199.
+
+  Currie, J. H., District Attorney, quoted, 167.
+
+
+  D
+
+  Danville, Ill., lynching, 212.
+
+  Davis, Jefferson, way with Negroes, 103, 275.
+
+  Davis, Senator Jeff, 112, 238, 252.
+
+  Death rate among Negroes, 115.
+
+  Dickerman, Dr. G. S., 281.
+
+  Dillard, Professor James H., 273, 286.
+
+  Dixon, Rev. Thomas, 111, 266, 298.
+
+  DuBois, Dr. W. E. B., 100, 156, 158, 173, 222, 272, 304.
+
+
+  E
+
+  Edmonds, R. H., 275.
+
+  Education, 65, 139.
+    Booker T. Washington on, 221.
+    in South, 271, 273.
+    Negro, 282.
+    "New South" on Negro, 285.
+
+
+  F
+
+  Farmer, Negro, 6, 100.
+    in the North, 109, 170.
+    organization among, 93.
+
+  Fear of Negroes, 8.
+    prevalence of, in the South, 7.
+
+  Few, Dean William Preston, 259.
+
+  Fifteenth Amendment, 245, 246.
+
+  Fisk University, 170.
+
+  Fleming, Ex-Congressman William H., 264.
+
+  Fraternal Orders, 231.
+
+  "Free Persons of Colour" 156.
+
+  Free Speech, 257.
+
+  Fries, Henry E., 281.
+
+  Frissell, Dr. H. B., of Hampton, 228, 271, 281, 286.
+
+  Furniss, Dr. S. A., quoted, 114.
+
+
+  G
+
+  Gaines, Bishop, J. W., 8.
+
+  Galloway, Bishop C. B., 276.
+
+  Gammon Theological Seminary, 12, 13.
+
+  George, P. S., letter, 69.
+
+  Gilreath, Belton, 287.
+
+  Grady, Henry W., 275.
+
+  Grant, Bishop Abram, 287.
+
+  Graves, John Temple, 72.
+
+
+  H
+
+  Hampton Institute, 170, 283.
+
+  Hampton, General Wade, 235.
+
+  Hanna, H. H., 281.
+
+  Harrah, Charles J., President Midvale Steel Company, quoted, 137.
+
+  Harvard University, colour line at, 123.
+
+  Hill, Walter B., Chancellor, 258.
+
+  Hopkins, Charles T., 18, 32, 49.
+
+  Houston, President D. F., 271.
+
+  Howell, Clark, Editor Atlanta _Constitution_, 24.
+
+  Huntsville, Alabama, lynching, 191.
+
+
+  I
+
+  Immigrants in the South, 28, 268, 295.
+    take Negroes' places, 59.
+
+  Intermarriage of races, 164, 171, 305.
+
+
+  J
+
+  Jeanes Fund, 286.
+
+  "Jim Crow," laws, 30, 112, 130, 151, 219, 224, 251, 252, 262, 266, 305.
+
+  Johnson, Mayor Tom, 233.
+
+  Joyner, J. Y., 271, 278, 286.
+
+
+  K
+
+  Ku Klux Klan, 4, 235.
+
+
+  L
+
+  Labour problems in North, 130.
+    in South, 57, 78, 83, 249, 294.
+
+  Labour unions, attitude toward Negroes, 135, 143, 160.
+
+  Lamar, Senator J. Q., 263, 284.
+
+  Landrum, Rev. W. W., 24.
+
+  Lane, Charles P., letter, 241.
+
+  Lawlessness, as incentive to riot, 4, 183, 193, 204.
+
+  Leaders of Negro race, 216.
+
+  Legislation against Negroes, 249.
+
+  Lynching, 175.
+
+
+  M
+
+  McAneny, George, 287.
+
+  McIver, Charles D., 278.
+
+  Manley, Charles quoted, 160.
+
+  Manning, Joseph C., 264.
+
+  Medicines, patent and the Negro, 62, 116.
+
+  Mertins, George Frederick, quoted, 85.
+
+  Miller, Professor Kelley, quoted, 130.
+
+  Millsaps, Major R. W., 102.
+
+  Mims, Professor Edwin, 255.
+
+  Miscegenation, 165, 305.
+
+  Mitchell, Professor S. C., 253, 271, 280, 281.
+
+  Mob, psychology of, 10, 184.
+
+  Mob, rule results of, 13.
+
+  Money, United States Senator, H. D., 171.
+
+  Moton, R. R., 287.
+
+  Mulattoes, 149.
+    leaders of the race, 173.
+
+  Murphy, Edgar Gardner, 273.
+
+
+  N
+
+  Napier, J. C., 287.
+
+  Negroes, boycott by, 34.
+    domination of, 252.
+    driven out, 71.
+    in Government service, 29.
+    in Northern cities, 113.
+    in street cars, 30.
+    labour unions, 135.
+    land ownership among, 91.
+    private schools, 53.
+    racial consciousness among, 38.
+    what they talk about, 26.
+    why they go to cities, 101.
+    with white blood, 149.
+    worthless, 60. (_See_ Vagrants)
+
+  Negro business enterprises, 39.
+    business league, 229.
+    dramatic efforts, 157, 231.
+    in Boston, 119, 145.
+    story of Negro druggist, 42.
+    story of successful farmer, 90.
+
+  Newspapers, influence of sensational, 9, 25.
+    Negro, 225.
+
+  Niagara Movement, 223.
+
+  Northen, Ex-Governor W. J., 24, 25, 65.
+
+
+  O
+
+  "Ogden Movement," 281.
+
+  Ogden, Robert C., 281, 287.
+
+  Organised Labour and the Negro, 135.
+
+  Orphans, Negro, 51.
+
+
+  P
+
+  Page, Walter H., 281, 287.
+
+  Parties among Negroes, 216.
+
+  Peabody, George Foster, 281, 287.
+
+  Penn, Dr. W. F., 19, 33.
+
+  Peonage, 96.
+
+  Politics, Negro in, 98, 160, 233, 252, 262.
+    and lynching, 203, 224.
+
+  Populism in South, 255.
+
+  Porters, Pullman, 144.
+
+  Prejudice, race, in North, 111, 117, 125, 133, 138.
+    in churches, 121.
+    Negro, 226.
+
+  Prejudice, race, and economic necessity, 81.
+    cases of, 55, 82.
+    superficial manifestations, 26, 296.
+
+  Prohibition movement, 256.
+
+  Psychology of the South, 37;
+    mob, 184.
+
+
+  R
+
+  Race, world problems of, 292.
+
+  Rape, investigation of cases, 5.
+    trial of Negro for, 22.
+    a northern case, 128.
+
+  Reconstruction, 235.
+
+  Rice, Dr. J. A., quoted, 165.
+
+  Rice, Rev. Theron H., quoted, 54.
+
+  Richardson, Congressman William, quoted, 192.
+
+  Riot, Atlanta, 3.
+
+  Riots, effect on crime, 22;
+    in Northern cities, 124, 126;
+    Wilmington, 160;
+    lynching riot at Danville, 211;
+    at Huntsville, Ala., 191;
+    at Springfield, O., 201;
+    at Statesboro, Ga., 186.
+
+
+  S
+
+  Saloons, 10, 18, 21, 25, 36, 46, 49, 88, 98, 104, 127, 207, 266,
+        289, 290.
+
+  Schools, appropriations for, 248.
+    in Atlanta, 53.
+    in bad neighbourhoods, 169.
+    in North, 132, 139.
+    industrial, 140, 143.
+    North Carolina, 279.
+    private for Negroes, 53.
+    retrogression of Negro, 284.
+    separate, 306.
+    why Negroes are not in, 52.
+
+  Secret Societies among Negroes, 231.
+
+  Segregation of races, 300;
+    natural going on, 70.
+
+  Settlement work among Negroes, 122, 126, 138.
+
+  Shaw, Albert, 281.
+
+  Sickness among Negroes, 116.
+
+  Slade, Professor Andrew, 257.
+
+  Slavery, evils of, 234.
+
+  Smith, Governor Hoke, 11, 242, 245, 249, 250, 252, 256, 267.
+
+  Smith, R. D., 287.
+
+  Social contact of races, 304.
+
+  Solution of race problems, 300.
+
+  Soule, President A. M., 288.
+
+  "Souls of Black Folk, The," 158.
+
+  South Carolina, political struggles in, 235.
+
+  Southern Education Board, 281, 286.
+
+  Speake, Judge Paul, 195.
+
+  Speer, Judge Emory, 255.
+
+  Springfield, O., lynching, 191.
+    and riot, 201.
+
+  Statesboro, Ga., lynching, 177.
+
+  Stewart, Professor J. B., 288.
+
+  Strikes and Negroes, 134.
+
+  Swanson, Governor Claude A., 249, 252, 258, 280.
+
+
+  T
+
+  Taft, William H., 287.
+
+  Tatum, Stewart L., 209.
+
+  Tenant System, 74, 87, 100.
+
+  Thomas, Judge William H., 96.
+
+  Tillman, Senator B. R., 111, 236, 246, 250, 252, 259, 265.
+
+  Trades, Negroes in, 135, 145.
+
+  Trinity College, 258.
+
+  Troy, Alexander, letter, 247.
+
+  Tuberculosis among Negroes, 114.
+
+  Tuskegee, 60, 170, 221, 283.
+
+
+  U
+
+  University of Georgia, 288.
+
+
+  V
+
+  Vagrants among Negroes, 57, 60, 81, 178, 211.
+
+  Vardaman, Governor J. K., 111, 238, 246, 265, 267, 275, 298.
+
+  Vernon, W. T., Register of Treasury, 228.
+
+  Vice among Negroes, 165, 169.
+
+  Vote, shall the Negro? 202.
+
+
+  W
+
+  Washington, Booker T., 33, 56, 64, 99, 156, 173, 219, 250, 271, 274,
+        286, 299, 300, 304.
+
+  Watterson, Henry, 305.
+
+  Weather and mobs, 211.
+
+  White, Rev. John E., 24, 253, 276.
+
+  Whitlock, Hardy H., sheriff, 212.
+
+  Wilberforce College, 170.
+
+  Williams, "Pegleg," 80.
+
+  Williams, Talcott, 287.
+
+  Wilmer, Rev. C. B., 24, 276.
+
+  Women, Negro, arrested in Atlanta, 46.
+    clubs, 143, 168.
+    morals of, 140, 169.
+
+  Wright, President R. R., 92.
+
+  Wright, Professor R. R., Jr., quoted, 124, 137, 142, 145.
+
+
+
+
+Footnotes:
+
+[1] Since these notes were made, in 1907, the prohibition movement has
+abolished all the saloons in Georgia.
+
+[2] Since the closing of the saloons on January 1, 1908, the number of
+arrests has largely decreased, but the observations here made still apply
+to a large number of Southern cities.
+
+
+
+
+Transcriber's Notes:
+
+Passages in italics are indicated by _italics_.
+
+Punctuation has been corrected without note.
+
+The following misprints have been addressed:
+  "he" corrected to "be" (page 5)
+  "Thelogical" corrected to "Theological" (page 13)
+  "take" corrected to "takes" (page 33)
+  "Childern" corrected to "Children" (page 52)
+  "on" corrected to "no" (page 57)
+  "o-morrow" corrected to "to-morrow" (page 60)
+  "negroes" corrected to "Negroes" (page 67)
+  "whould" corrected to "would" (page 85)
+  "wont" corrected to "won't" (page 98)
+  missing "and" added (page 188)
+  "typsetters" corrected to "typesetters" (page 202)
+  "be" corrected to "he" (page 204)
+  "weeks" corrected to "week" (page 210)
+  "anothern" corrected to "another" (page 210)
+  "hightly" corrected to "highly" (page 275)
+  "declaractions" corrected to "declarations" (page 284)
+  "familar" corrected to "familiar" (page 295)
+  "is" corrected to "it" (page 300)
+  "Govenor" corrected to "Governor" (Index)
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's Following the Color Line, by Ray Stannard Baker
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