A Social History of the American Negro Part 21

Tanner, who was winning laurels in Paris. At the same time a beautiful singer, Mme. Sissieretta Jones, on the concert stage was giving new proof of the possibilities of the Negro as an artist in song. In the previous decade Mme. Marie Selika, a cultured vocalist of the first rank, had delighted audiences in both America and Europe, and in 1887 had appeared Flora Batson, a ballad singer whose work at its best was of the sort that sends an audience into the wildest enthusiasm. In 1894, moreover, Harry T. Burleigh, competing against sixty candidates, became baritone soloist at St. Georges's Episcopal Church, New York, and just a few years later he was to be employed also at Temple Emanu-El, the Fifth Avenue Jewish synagogue. From abroad also came word of a brilliant musician, Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, who by his "Hiawatha's Wedding-Feast"

in 1898 leaped into the rank of the foremost living English composers.

On the more popular stage appeared light musical comedy, intermediate between the old Negro minstrelsy and a genuine Negro drama, the representative companies becoming within the next few years those of Cole and Johnson, and Williams and Walker.

Especially outstanding in the course of the decade, however, was the work of the Negro soldier in the Spanish-American War. There were at the time four regiments of colored regulars in the Army of the United States, the Twenty-fourth Infantry, the Twenty-fifth Infantry, the Ninth Cavalry, and the Tenth Cavalry. When the war broke out President McKinley sent to Congress a message recommending the enlistment of more regiments of Negroes. Congress failed to act; nevertheless colored troops enlisted in the volunteer service in Ma.s.sachusetts, Indiana, Illinois, Kansas, Ohio, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Virginia. The Eighth Illinois was officered throughout by Negroes, J.R. Marshall commanding; and Major Charles E. Young, a West Point graduate, was in charge of the Ohio battalion. The very first regiment ordered to the front when the war broke out was the Twenty-fourth Infantry; and Negro troops were conspicuous in the fighting around Santiago. They figured in a brilliant charge at Las Quasimas on June 24, and in an attack on July 1 upon a garrison at El Caney (a position of importance for securing possession of a line of hills along the San Juan River, a mile and a half from Santiago) the First Volunteer Cavalry (Colonel Roosevelt's "Rough Riders") was practically saved from annihilation by the gallant work of the men of the Tenth Cavalry. Fully as patriotic, though in another way, was a deed of the Twenty-fourth Infantry. Learning that General Miles desired a regiment for the cleaning of a yellow fever hospital and the nursing of some victims of the disease, the Twenty-fourth volunteered its services and by one day's work so cleared away the rubbish and cleaned the camp that the number of cases was greatly reduced. Said the _Review of Reviews_ in editorial comment:[1]

"One of the most gratifying incidents of the Spanish War has been the enthusiasm that the colored regiments of the regular army have aroused throughout the whole country. Their fighting at Santiago was magnificent. The Negro soldiers showed excellent discipline, the highest qualities of personal bravery, very superior physical endurance, unfailing good temper, and the most generous disposition toward all comrades in arms, whether white or black. Roosevelt's Rough Riders have come back singing the praises of the colored troops. There is not a dissenting voice in the chorus of praise.... Men who can fight for their country as did these colored troops ought to have their full share of grat.i.tude and honor."

[Footnote 1: October, 1898, p. 387.]

4. _Mob Violence; Election Troubles; The Atlanta Ma.s.sacre_

After two or three years of comparative quiet--but only _comparative_ quiet--mob violence burst forth about the turn of the century with redoubled intensity. In a large way this was simply a result of the campaigns for disfranchis.e.m.e.nt that in some of the Southern states were just now getting under way; but charges of a.s.sault and questions of labor also played a part. In some places people who were innocent of any charge whatever were attacked, and so many were killed that sometimes it seemed that the law had broken down altogether. Not the least interesting development of these troublous years was that in some cases as never before Negroes began to fight with their backs to the wall, and thus at the very close of the century--at the end of a bitter decade and the beginning of one still more bitter--a new factor entered into the problem, one that was destined more and more to demand consideration.

On one Sunday toward the close of October, 1898, the country recorded two race wars, one lynching, two murders, one of which was expected to lead to a lynching, with a total of ten Negroes killed and four wounded and four white men killed and seven wounded. The most serious outbreak was in the state of Mississippi, and it is worthy of note that in not one single case was there any question of rape.

November was made red by election troubles in both North and South Carolina. In the latter state, at Phoenix, in Greenwood County, on November 8 and for some days thereafter, the Tolberts, a well-known family of white Republicans, were attacked by mobs and barely escaped alive. R.R. Tolbert was a candidate for Congress and also chairman of the Republican state committee. John R. Tolbert, his father, collector of the port of Charleston, had come home to vote and was at one of the polling-places in the county. Thomas Tolbert at Phoenix was taking the affidavits of the Negroes who were not permitted to vote for his brother in order that later there might be ground on which to contest the election. While thus engaged he was attacked by Etheridge, the Democratic manager of another precinct. The Negroes came to Tolbert's defense, and in the fight that followed Etheridge was killed and Tolbert wounded. John Tolbert, coming up, was filled with buckshot, and a younger member of the family was also hurt. The Negroes were at length overpowered and the Tolberts forced to flee. All told it appears that two white men and about twelve Negroes lost their lives in connection with the trouble, six of the latter being lynched on account of the death of Etheridge.

In North Carolina in 1894 the Republicans by combining with the Populists had secured control of the state legislature. In 1896 the Democrats were again outvoted, Governor Russell being elected by a plurality of 9000. A considerable number of local offices was in the hands of Negroes, who had the backing of the Governor, the legislature, and the Supreme Court as well. Before the November elections in 1898 the Democrats in Wilmington announced their determination to prevent Negroes from holding office in the city. Especially had they been made angry by an editorial in a local Negro paper, the _Record_, in which, under date August 18, the editor, Alex. L. Manly, starting with a reference to a speaker from Georgia, who at the Agricultural Society meeting at Tybee had advocated lynching as an extreme measure, said that she "lost sight of the basic principle of the religion of Christ in her plea for one cla.s.s of people as against another," and continued: "The papers are filled with reports of rapes of white women, and the subsequent lynching of the alleged rapists. The editors pour forth volleys of aspersions against all Negroes because of the few who may be guilty. If the papers and speakers of the other race would condemn the commission of crime because it is crime and not try to make it appear that the Negroes were the only criminals, they would find their strongest allies in the intelligent Negroes themselves, and together the whites and blacks would root the evil out of both races.... Our experience among poor white people in the country teaches us that the women of that race are not any more particular in the matter of clandestine meetings with colored men than are the white men with colored women. Meetings of this kind go on for some time until the woman's infatuation or the man's boldness brings attention to them and the man is lynched for rape." In reply to this the speaker quoted in a signed statement said: "When the Negro Manly attributed the crime of rape to intimacy between Negro men and white women of the South, the slanderer should be made to fear a lyncher's rope rather than occupy a place in New York newspapers"--a method of argument that was unfortunately all too common in the South. As election day approached the Democrats sought generally to intimidate the Negroes, the streets and roads being patrolled by men wearing red shirts.

Election day, however, pa.s.sed without any disturbance; but on the next day there was a ma.s.s meeting of white citizens, at which there were adopted resolutions to employ white labor instead of Negro, to banish the editor of the _Record_, and to send away from the city the printing-press in the office of that paper; and a committee of twenty-five was appointed to see that these resolutions were carried into effect within twenty-four hours. In the course of the terrible day that followed the printing office was destroyed, several white Republicans were driven from the city, and nine Negroes were killed at once, though no one could say with accuracy just how many more lost their lives or were seriously wounded before the trouble was over.

Charles W. Chesnutt, in _The Marrow of Tradition_, has given a faithful portrayal of these disgraceful events, the Wellington of the story being Wilmington. Perhaps the best commentary on those who thus sought power was afforded by their apologist, a Presbyterian minister and editor, A.J. McKelway, who on this occasion and others wrote articles in the _Independent_ and the _Outlook_ justifying the proceedings. Said he: "It is difficult to speak of the Red Shirts without a smile. They victimized the Negroes with a huge practical joke.... A dozen men would meet at a crossroad, on horseback, clad in red shirts or calico, flannel or silk, according to the taste of the owner and the enthusiasm of his womankind.

They would gallop through the country, and the Negro would quietly make up his mind that his interest in political affairs was not a large one, anyhow. It would be wise not to vote, and wiser not to register to prevent being dragooned into voting on election day." It thus appears that the forcible seizure of the political rights of people, the killing and wounding of many, and the compelling of scores to leave their homes amount in the end to not more than a "practical joke."

One part of the new program was the most intense opposition to Federal Negro appointees anywhere in the South. On the morning of February 22, 1898, Frazer B. Baker, the colored postmaster at Lake City, S.C., awoke to find his house in flames. Attempting to escape, he and his baby boy were shot and killed and their bodies consumed in the burning house.

His wife and the other children were wounded but escaped. The Postmaster-General was quite disposed to see that justice was done in this case; but the men charged with the crime gave the most trivial alibis, and on Sat.u.r.day, April 22, 1899, the jury in the United States Circuit Court at Charleston reported its failure to agree on a verdict.

Three years later the whole problem was presented strongly to President Roosevelt. When Mrs. Minne c.o.x, who was serving efficiently as postmistress at Indianola, Miss., was forced to resign because of threats, he closed the office; and when there was protest against the appointment of Dr. William D. Crum as collector of the port of Charleston, he said, "I do not intend to appoint any unfit man to office. So far as I legitimately can, I shall always endeavor to pay regard to the wishes and feelings of the people of each locality; but I can not consent to take the position that the door of hope--the door of opportunity--is to be shut upon any man, no matter how worthy, purely upon the grounds of race or color. Such an att.i.tude would, according to my convictions, be fundamentally wrong." These memorable words, coming in a day of compromise and expediency in high places, greatly cheered the heart of the race. Just the year before, the importance of the incident of Booker T. Washington's taking lunch with President Roosevelt was rather unnecessarily magnified by the South into all sorts of discussion of social equality.

On Tuesday, January 24, 1899, a fire in the center of the town of Palmetto, Ga., destroyed a hotel, two stores, and a storehouse, on which property there was little insurance. The next Sat.u.r.day there was another fire and this destroyed a considerable part of the town. For some weeks there was no clue as to the origin of these fires; but about the middle of March something overheard by a white citizen led to the implicating of nine Negroes. These men were arrested and confined for the night of March 15 in a warehouse to await trial the next morning, a dummy guard of six men being placed before the door. About midnight a mob came, pushed open the door, and fired two volleys at the Negroes, killing four immediately and fatally wounding four more. The circ.u.mstances of this atrocious crime oppressed the Negro people of the state as few things had done since the Civil War. That it did no good was evident, for in its underlying psychology it was closely a.s.sociated with a double crime that was now to be committed. In April, Sam Hose, a Negro who had brooded on the happenings at Palmetto, not many miles from the scene killed a farmer, Alfred Cranford, who had been a leader of the mob, and outraged his wife. For two weeks he was hunted like an animal, the white people of the state meanwhile being almost unnerved and the Negroes sickened by the pursuit. At last, however, he was found, and on Sunday, April 23, at Newnan, Ga., he was burned, his execution being accompanied by unspeakable mutilation; and on the same day Lige Strickland, a Negro preacher whom Hose had accused of complicity in his crime, was hanged near Palmetto. The nation stood aghast, for the recent events in Georgia had shaken the very foundations of American civilization. Said the _Charleston News and Courier_: "The chains which bound the citizen, Sam Hose, to the stake at Newnan mean more for us and for his race than the chains or bonds of slavery, which they supplanted. The flames that lit the scene of his torture shed their baleful light throughout every corner of our land, and exposed a state of things, actual and potential, among us that should rouse the dullest mind to a sharp sense of our true condition, and of our unchanged and unchangeable relations to the whole race whom the tortured wretch represented."

Violence breeds violence, and two or three outstanding events are yet to be recorded. On August 23, 1899, at Darien, Ga., hundreds of Negroes, who for days had been aroused by rumors of a threatened lynching, a.s.sembled at the ringing of the bell of a church opposite the jail and by their presence prevented the removal of a prisoner. They were later tried for insurrection and twenty-one sent to the convict farms for a year. The general circ.u.mstances of the uprising excited great interest throughout the country. In May, 1900, in Augusta, Ga., an unfortunate street car incident resulted in the death of the aggressor, a young white man named Whitney, and in the lynching of the colored man, Wilson, who killed him. In this instance the victim was tortured and mutilated, parts of his body and of the rope by which he was hanged being pa.s.sed around as souvenirs. A Negro organization at length recovered the body, and so great was the excitement at the funeral that the coffin was not allowed to be opened. Two months later, in New Orleans, there was a most extraordinary occurrence, the same being important because the leading figure was very frankly regarded by the Negroes as a hero and his fight in his own defense a sign that the men of the race would not always be shot down without some effort to protect themselves.

One night in July, an hour before midnight, two Negroes Robert Charles and Leonard Pierce, who had recently come into the city from Mississippi and whose movements had interested the police, were found by three officers on the front steps of a house in Dryades Street. Being questioned they replied that they had been in the town two or three days and had secured work. In the course of the questioning the larger of the Negroes, Charles, rose to his feet; he was seized by one of the officers, Mora, who began to use his billet; and in the struggle that resulted Charles escaped and Mora was wounded in each hand and the hip.

Charles now took refuge in a small house on Fourth Street, and when he was surrounded, with deadly aim he shot and instantly killed the first two officers who appeared.[1] The other men advancing, retreated and waited until daylight for reenforcement, and Charles himself withdrew to other quarters, and for some days his whereabouts were unknown. With the new day, however, the city was wild with excitement and thousands of men joined in the search, the newspapers all the while stirring the crowd to greater fury. Mobs rushed up and down the streets a.s.saulting Negroes wherever they could be found, no effort to check them being made by the police. On the second night a crowd of nearly a thousand was addressed at the Lee Monument by a man from Kenner, a town a few miles above the city. Said he: "Gentlemen, I am from Kenner, and I have come down here to-night to a.s.sist you in teaching the blacks a lesson. I have killed a Negro before and in revenge of the wrong wrought upon you and yours I am willing to kill again. The only way you can teach these n.i.g.g.e.rs a lesson and put them in their place is to go out and lynch a few of them as an object lesson. String up a few of them. That is the only thing to do--kill them, string them up, lynch them. I will lead you. On to the parish prison and lynch Pierce." The mob now rushed to the prison, stores and p.a.w.nshops being plundered on the way. Within the next few hours a Negro was taken from a street car on Ca.n.a.l Street, killed, and his body thrown into the gutter. An old man of seventy going to work in the morning was fatally shot. On Rousseau Street the mob fired into a little cabin; the inmates were asleep and an old woman was killed in bed. Another old woman who looked out from her home was beaten into insensibility. A man sitting at his door was shot, beaten, and left for dead. Such were the scenes that were enacted almost hourly from Monday until Friday evening. One night the excellent school building given by Thomy Lafon, a member of the race and a philanthropist, was burned.

[Footnote 1: From this time forth the wildest rumors were afloat and the number of men that Charles had killed was greatly exaggerated. Some reports said scores or even hundreds, and it is quite possible that any figures given herewith are an understatement.]

About three o'clock on Friday afternoon Charles was found to be in a two-story house at the corner of Saratoga and Clio Streets. Two officers, Porteus and Lally, entered a lower room. The first fell dead at the first shot, and the second was mortally wounded by the next. A third, Bloomfield, waiting with gun in hand, was wounded at the first shot and killed at the second. The crowd retreated, but bullets rained upon the house, Charles all the while keeping watch in every direction from four different windows. Every now and then he thrust his rifle through one of the shattered windowpanes and fired, working with incredible rapidity. He succeeded in killing two more of his a.s.sailants and wounding two. At last he realized that the house was on fire, and knowing that the end had come he rushed forth upon his foes, fired one shot more and fell dead. He had killed eight men and mortally wounded two or three more. His body was mutilated. In his room there was afterwards found a copy of a religious publication, and it was known that he had resented disfranchis.e.m.e.nt in Louisiana and had distributed pamphlets to further a colonization scheme. No incriminating evidence, however, was found.

In the same memorable year, 1900, on the night of Wednesday, August 15, there were serious riots in the city of New York. On the preceding Sunday a policeman named Thorpe in attempting to arrest a colored woman was stabbed by a Negro, Arthur Harris, so fatally that he died on Monday. On Wednesday evening Negroes were dragged from the street cars and beaten, and by midnight there were thousands of rioters between 25th and 35th Streets. On the next night the trouble was resumed. These events were followed almost immediately by riots in Akron, Ohio. On the last Sunday in October, 1901, while some Negroes were holding their usual fall camp-meeting in a grove in Washington Parish, Louisiana, they were attacked, and a number of people, not less than ten and perhaps several more, were killed; and hundreds of men, women, and children felt forced to move away from the vicinity. In the first week of March, 1904, there was in Mississippi a lynching that exceeded even others of the period in its horror and that became notorious for its use of a corkscrew. A white planter of Doddsville was murdered, and a Negro, Luther Holbert, was charged with the crime. Holbert fled, and his innocent wife went with him. Further report we read in the Democratic _Evening Post_ of Vicksburg as follows: "When the two Negroes were captured, they were tied to trees, and while the funeral pyres were being prepared they were forced to suffer the most fiendish tortures.

The blacks were forced to hold out their hands while one finger at a time was chopped off. The fingers were distributed as souvenirs. The ears of the murderers were cut off. Holbert was beaten severely, his skull was fractured, and one of his eyes, knocked out with a stick, hung by a shred from the socket.... The most excruciating form of punishment consisted in the use of a large corkscrew in the hands of some of the mob. This instrument was bored into the flesh of the man and the woman, in the arms, legs, and body, and then pulled out, the spirals tearing out big pieces of raw, quivering flesh every time it was withdrawn."

In the summer of this same year Georgia was once more the scene of a horrible lynching, two Negroes, Paul Reed and Will Cato--because of the murder of the Hodges family six miles from the town on July 20--being burned at the stake at Statesville under unusually depressing circ.u.mstances. In August, 1908, there were in Springfield, Illinois, race riots of such a serious nature that a force of six thousand soldiers was required to quell them. These riots were significant not only because of the att.i.tude of Northern laborers toward Negro compet.i.tion, but also because of the indiscriminate killing of Negroes by people in the North, this indicating a genuine nationalization of the Negro Problem. The real climax of violence within the period, however, was the Atlanta Ma.s.sacre of Sat.u.r.day, September 22, 1906.

Throughout the summer the heated campaign of Hoke Smith for the governorship capitalized the gathering sentiment for the disfranchis.e.m.e.nt of the Negro in the state and at length raised the race issue to such a high pitch that it leaped into flame. The feeling was intensified by the report of a.s.saults and attempted a.s.saults by Negroes, particularly as these were detailed and magnified or even invented by an evening paper, the _Atlanta News_, against which the Fulton County Grand Jury afterwards brought in an indictment as largely responsible for the riot, and which was forced to suspend publication when the business men of the city withdrew their support. Just how much foundation there was to the rumors may be seen from the following report of the investigator: "Three, charged to white men, attracted comparatively little attention in the newspapers, although one, the offense of a 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 white women, and in one the white woman, first a.s.serting that a Negro had a.s.saulted her, finally confessed attempted suicide."[1] On Friday, September 21, while a Negro was on trial, the father of the girl concerned asked the recorder for permission to deal with the Negro with his own hand, and an outbreak was barely averted in the open court.

On Sat.u.r.day evening, however, some elements in the city and from neighboring towns, heated by liquor and newspaper extras, became openly riotous and until midnight defied all law and authority. Negroes were a.s.saulted wherever they appeared, for the most part being found unsuspecting, as in the case of those who happened to be going home from work and were on street cars pa.s.sing through the heart of the city.

In one barber shop two workers were beaten to death and their bodies mangled. A lame bootblack, innocent and industrious, was dragged from his work and kicked and beaten to death. Another young Negro was stabbed with jack-knives. Altogether very nearly a score of persons lost their lives and two or three times as many were injured. After some time Governor Terrell mobilized the militia, but the crowd did not take this move seriously, and the real feeling of the Mayor, who turned on the hose of the fire department, was shown by his statement that just so long as the Negroes committed certain crimes just so long would they be unceremoniously dealt with. Sunday dawned upon a city of astounded white people and outraged and sullen Negroes. Throughout Monday and Tuesday the tension continued, the Negroes endeavoring to defend themselves as well as they could. On Monday night the union of some citizens with policemen who were advancing in a suburb in which most of the homes were those of Negroes, resulted in the death of James Heard, an officer, and in the wounding of some of those who accompanied him. More Negroes were also killed, and a white woman to whose front porch two men were chased died of fright at seeing them shot to death. It was the disposition, however, on the part of the Negroes to make armed resistance that really put an end to the ma.s.sacre. Now followed a procedure that is best described in the words of the prominent apologist for such outbreaks.

Said A.J. McKelway: "Tuesday every house in the town (i.e., the suburb referred to above) was entered by the soldiers, and some two hundred and fifty Negroes temporarily held, while the search was proceeding and inquiries being made. They were all disarmed, and those with concealed weapons, or under suspicion of having been in the party firing on the police, were sent to jail."[2] It is thus evident that in this case, as in many others, the Negroes who had suffered most, not the white men who killed a score of them, were disarmed, and that for the time being their terrified women and children were left defenseless. McKelway also says in this general connection: "Any Southern man would protect an innocent Negro who appealed to him for help, with his own life if necessary."

This sounds like chivalry, but it is really the survival of the old slavery att.i.tude that begs the whole question. The Negro does not feel that he should ask any other man to protect him. He has quite made up his mind that he will defend his own home himself. He stands as a man before the bar, and the one thing he wants to know is if the law and the courts of America are able to give him justice--simple justice, nothing more.

[Footnote 1: R.S. Baker: _Following the Colour Line_, 3.]

[Footnote 2: _Outlook_, November 3, 1906, p. 561.]

5. _The Question of Labor_

From time to time, in connection with cases of violence, we have referred to the matter of labor. Riots such as we have described are primarily social in character, the call of race invariably being the final appeal. The economic motive has accompanied this, however, and has been found to be of increasing importance. Says DuBois: "The fatal campaign in Georgia which culminated in the Atlanta Ma.s.sacre was an attempt, fathered by conscienceless politicians, to arouse the prejudices of the rank and file of white laborers and farmers against the growing compet.i.tion of black men, so that black men by law could be forced back to subserviency and serfdom."[1] The question was indeed constantly recurrent, but even by the end of the period policies had not yet been definitely decided upon, and for the time being there were frequent armed clashes between the Negro and the white laborer. Both capital and common sense were making it clear, however, that the Negro was undoubtedly a labor a.s.set and would have to be given place accordingly.

[Footnote 1: _The Negro in the South_, 115.]

In March, 1895, there were b.l.o.o.d.y riots in New Orleans, these growing out of the fact that white laborers who were beginning to be organized objected to the employment Of Negro workers by the shipowners for the unloading of vessels. When the trouble was at its height volley after volley was poured upon the Negroes, and in turn two white men were killed and several wounded. The commercial bodies of the city met, blamed the Governor and the Mayor for the series of outbreaks, and demanded that the outrages cease. Said they: "Forbearance has ceased to be a virtue. We can no longer treat with men who, with arms in their hands, are shooting down an inoffensive people because they will not think and act with them. For these reasons we say to these people that, cost what it may, we are determined that the commerce of this city must and shall be protected; that every man who desires to perform honest labor must and shall be permitted to do so regardless of race, color, or previous condition." About August I of this same year, 1895, there were sharp conflicts between the white and the black miners at Birmingham, a number being killed on both sides before military authority could intervene. Three years later, moreover, the invasion of the North by Negro labor had begun, and about November 17, 1898, there was serious trouble in the mines at Pana and Virden, Illinois. In the same month the convention of railroad brotherhoods in Norfolk expressed strong hostility to Negro labor, Grand Master Frank P. Sargent of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen saying that one of the chief purposes of the meeting of the brotherhoods was "to begin a campaign in advocacy of white supremacy in the railway service." This November, it will be recalled, was the fateful month of the election riots in North and South Carolina. _The People_, the Socialist-Labor publication, commenting upon a Negro indignation meeting at Cooper Union and upon the problem in general, said that the Negro was essentially a wage-slave, that it was the capitalism of the North and not humanity that in the first place had demanded the freedom of the slave, that in the new day capital demanded the subjugation of the working cla.s.s--Negro or otherwise; and it blamed the Negroes for not seeing the real issues at stake. It continued with emphasis: "It is not the _Negro_ that was ma.s.sacred in the Carolinas; it was Carolina _workingmen_, Carolina _wage-slaves_ who happened to be colored men. Not as Negroes must the race rise;... it is as _workingmen_, as a branch of the _working cla.s.s_, that the Negro must denounce the Carolina felonies. Only by touching that chord can he denounce to a purpose, because only then does he place himself upon that elevation that will enable him to perceive the source of the specific wrong complained of now." This point of view was destined more and more to stimulate those interested in the problem, whether they accepted it in its entirety or not. Another opinion, very different and also important, was that given in 1899 by the editor of _Dixie_, a magazine published in Atlanta and devoted to Southern industrial interests. Said he: "The manufacturing center of the United States will one day be located in the South; and this will come about, strange as it may seem, for the reason that the Negro is a fixture here.... Organized labor, as it exists to-day, is a menace to industry. The Negro stands as a permanent and positive barrier against labor organization in the South.... So the Negro, all unwittingly, is playing an important part in the drama of Southern industrial development. His good nature defies the Socialist." At the time this opinion seemed plausible, and yet the very next two decades were to raise the question if it was not founded on fallacious a.s.sumptions.

The real climax of labor trouble as of mob violence within the period came in Georgia and in Atlanta, a city that now a.s.sumed outstanding importance as a battleground of the problems of the New South. In April, 1909, it happened that ten white workers on the Georgia Railroad who had been placed on the "extra list" were replaced by Negroes at lower wages.

Against this there was violent protest all along the route. A little more than a month later the white Firemen's Union started a strike that was intended to be the beginning of an effort to drive all Negro firemen from Southern roads, and it was soon apparent that the real contest was one occasioned by the progress in the South of organized labor on the one hand and the progress of the Negro in efficiency on the other. The essential motives that entered into the struggle were in fact the same as those that characterized the trouble in New Orleans in 1895. Said E.A. Ball, second vice-president of the Firemen's Union, in an address to the public: "It will be up to you to determine whether the white firemen now employed on the Georgia Railroad shall be accorded rights and privileges over the Negro, or whether he shall be placed on the same equality with the Negro. Also, it will be for you to determine whether or not white firemen, supporting families in and around Atlanta on a pay of $1.75 a day, shall be compelled to vacate their positions in Atlanta joint terminals for Negroes, who are willing to do the same work for $1.25." Some papers, like the Augusta _Herald_, said that it was a mistaken policy to give preference to Negroes when white men would ultimately have to be put in charge of trains and engines; but others, like the Baltimore _News_, said, "If the Negro can be driven from one skilled employment, he can be driven from another; but a country that tries to do it is flying in the face of every economic law, and must feel the evil effects of its policy if it could be carried out." At any rate feeling ran very high; for a whole week about June I there were very few trains between Atlanta and Augusta, and there were some acts of violence; but in the face of the capital at stake and the fundamental issues involved it was simply impossible for the railroad to give way.

The matter was at length referred to a board of arbitration which decided that the Georgia Railroad was still to employ Negroes whenever they were found qualified and that they were to receive the same wages as white workers. Some thought that this decision would ultimately tell against the Negro, but such was not the immediate effect at least, and to all intents and purposes the white firemen had lost in the strike.

The whole matter was in fact fundamentally one of the most pathetic that we have had to record. Humble white workers, desirous of improving the economic condition of themselves and their families, instead of a.s.suming a statesmanlike and truly patriotic att.i.tude toward their problem, turned aside into the wilderness of racial hatred and were lost.

This review naturally prompts reflection as to the whole function of the Negro laborer in the South. In the first place, what is he worth, and especially what is he worth in honest Southern opinion? It was said after the Civil War that he would not work except under compulsion; just how had he come to be regarded in the industry of the New South? In 1894 a number of large employers were asked about this point. 50 per cent said that in skilled labor they considered the Negro inferior to the white worker, 46 per cent said that he was fairly equal, and 4 per cent said that, all things considered, he was superior. As to common labor 54 per cent said that he was equal, 29 per cent superior, and 17 per cent inferior to the white worker. At the time it appeared that wages paid Negroes averaged 80 per cent of those paid white men. A similar investigation by the Chattanooga _Tradesman_ in 1902 brought forth five hundred replies. These were summarized as follows: "We find the Negro more useful and skilled in the cotton-seed oil-mills, the lumber-mills, the foundries, brick kilns, mines, and blast-furnaces. He is superior to white labor and possibly superior to any other labor in these establishments, but not in the capacity of skillful and ingenious artisans." In this opinion, it is to be remembered, the Negro was subjected to a severe test in which nothing whatever was given to him, and at least it appears that in many lines of labor he is not less than indispensable to the progress of the South. The question then arises: Just what is the relation that he is finally to sustain to other workingmen? It would seem that white worker and black worker would long ago have realized their ident.i.ty of interest and have come together. The unions, however, have been slow to admit Negroes and give them the same footing and backing as white men. Under the circ.u.mstances accordingly there remained nothing else for the Negro to do except to work wherever his services were desired and on the best terms that he was able to obtain.

6. _Defamation: Brownsville_

Crime demands justification, and it is not surprising that after such violence as that which we have described, and after several states had pa.s.sed disfranchising acts, there appeared in the first years of the new century several publications especially defamatory of the race. Some books unfortunately descended to a coa.r.s.eness in vilification such as had not been reached since the Civil War. From a Bible House in St.

Louis in 1902 came _The Negro a Beast, or In the Image of G.o.d_, a book that was destined to have an enormous circulation among the white people of the poorer cla.s.s in the South, and that of course promoted the mob spirit.[1] Contemporary and of the same general tenor were R.W.

Shufeldt's _The Negro_ and W.B. Smith's _The Color Line_, while a member of the race itself, William Hannibal Thomas, published a book, _The American Negro_, that was without either faith or ideal and as a denunciation of the Negro in America unparalleled in its vindictiveness and exaggeration.[2]

[Footnote 1: Its fundamental a.s.sumptions were ably refuted by Edward Atkinson in the _North American Review_, August, 1905.]

[Footnote 2: It was reviewed in the _Dial_, April 16, 1901, by W.E.B.

DuBois, who said in part: "Mr. Thomas's book is a sinister symptom--a growth and development under American conditions of life which ill.u.s.trates peculiarly the anomalous position of black men, and the terrific stress under which they struggle. And the struggle and the fight of human beings against hard conditions of life always tends to develop the criminal or the hypocrite, the cynic or the radical.

Wherever among a hard-pressed people these types begin to appear, it is a visible sign of a burden that is threatening to overtax their strength, and the foreshadowing of the age of revolt."]

In January, 1904, the new governor of Mississippi, J.K. Vardaman, in his inaugural address went to the extreme of voicing the opinion of those who were now contending that the education of the Negro was only complicating the problem and intensifying its dangerous features. Said he of the Negro people: "As a race, they are deteriorating morally every day. Time has demonstrated that they are more criminal as freemen than as slaves; that they are increasing in criminality with frightful rapidity, being one-third more criminal in 1890 than in 1880." A few weeks later Bishop Brown of Arkansas in a widely quoted address contended that the Southern Negro was going backward both morally and intellectually and could never be expected to take a helpful part in the Government; and he also justified lynching. In the same year one of the more advanced thinkers of the South, Edgar Gardner Murphy, in _Problems of the Present South_ was not yet quite willing to receive the Negro on the basis of citizenship; and Thomas Nelson Page, who had belittled the Negro in such a collection of stories as _In Ole Virginia_ and in such a novel as _Red Rock_[1] formally stated his theories in _The Negro: The Southerner's Problem_. The worst, however--if there could be a worst in such an array--was yet to appear. In 1905 Thomas Dixon added to a series of high-keyed novels _The Clansman_, a glorification of the KuKlux Klan that gave a malignant portrayal of the Negro and that was of such a quality as to arouse the most intense prejudice and hatred. Within a few months the work was put on the stage and again and again it threw audiences into the wildest excitement. The production was to some extent held to blame for the Atlanta Ma.s.sacre. In several cities it was proscribed. In Philadelphia on October 23, 1906, after the Negro people had made an unavailing protest, three thousand of them made a demonstration before the Walnut Street theater where the performance was given, while the conduct of some within the playhouse almost precipitated a riot; and in this city the play was suppressed the next day. Throughout the South, however, and sometimes elsewhere it continued to do its deadly work, and it was later to furnish the basis of "The Birth of a Nation," an elaborate motion picture of the same general tendency.

[Footnote 1: For a general treatment of the matter of the Negro as dealt with in American Literature, especially fiction, note "The Negro in American Fiction," in the _Dial_, May 11, 1916, a paper included in _The Negro in Literature and Art_. The thesis there is that imaginative treatment of the Negro is still governed by outworn antebellum types, or that in the search for burlesque some types of young and uncultured Negroes of the present day are deliberately overdrawn, but that there is not an honest or a serious facing of the characters and the situations in the life of the Negro people in the United States to-day. Since the paper first appeared it has received much further point; witness the stories by E.K. Means and Octavius Roy Cohen.]

Still another line of attack was now to attempt to deprive the Negro of any credit for initiative or for any independent achievement whatsoever.

In May, 1903, Alfred H. Stone contributed to the _Atlantic_ a paper, "The Mulatto in the Negro Problem," which contended at the same time that whatever meritorious work the race had accomplished was due to the infusion of white blood and that it was the mulatto that was constantly poisoning the mind of the Negro with "radical teachings and destructive doctrines." These points found frequent iteration throughout the period, and years afterwards, in 1917, the first found formal statement in the _American Journal of Sociology_ in an article by Edward Byron Reuter, "The Superiority of the Mulatto," which the next year was elaborated into a volume, _The Mulatto in the United States_. To argue the superiority of the mulatto of course is simply to argue once more the inferiority of the Negro to the white man.

All of this dispraise together presented a formidable case and one from which the race suffered immeasurably; nor was it entirely offset in the same years by the appearance even of DuBois's remarkable book, _The Souls of Black Folk_, or by the several uplift publications of Booker T.

Washington. In pa.s.sing we wish to refer to three points: (1) The effect of education on the Negro; (2) the matter of the Negro criminal (and of mortality), and (3) the quality and function of the mulatto.

Education could certainly not be blamed for the difficulties of the problem in the new day until it had been properly tried. In no one of the Southern states within the period did the Negro child receive a fair chance. He was frequently subjected to inferior teaching, dilapidated accommodations, and short terms. In the representative city of Atlanta in 1903 the white school population numbered 14,465 and the colored 8,118. The Negroes, however, while numbering 35 per cent of the whole, received but 12 per cent of the school funds. The average white teacher received $745 a year, and the Negro teacher $450. In the great reduction of the percentage of illiteracy in the race from 70 in 1880 to 30.4 in 1910 the missionary colleges--those of the American Missionary a.s.sociation, the American Baptist Home Mission Society, and the Freedmen's Aid Society--played a much larger part than they are ordinarily given credit for; and it is a very, very rare occurrence that a graduate of one of the inst.i.tutions sustained by these agencies, or even one who has attended them for any length of time, has to be summoned before the courts. Their influence has most decidedly been on the side of law and order. Undoubtedly some of those who have gone forth from these schools have not been very practical, and some have not gained a very firm sense of relative values in life--it would be a miracle if all had; but as a group the young people who have attended the colleges have most abundantly justified the expenditures made in their behalf, expenditures for which their respective states were not responsible but of which they reaped the benefit. From one standpoint, however, the so-called higher education did most undoubtedly complicate the problem. Those critics of the race who felt that the only function of Negroes in life was that of hewers of wood and drawers of water quite fully realized that Negroes who had been to college did not care to work longer as field laborers. Some were to prove scientific students of agriculture, but as a group they were out of the cla.s.s of peons. In this they were just like white people and all other people. No one who has once seen the light chooses to live always on the plane of the "man with the hoe." Nor need it be thought that these students are unduly crowding into professional pursuits. While, for instance, the number of Negro physicians and dentists has greatly increased within recent years, the number would still have to be four or five times as great to sustain to the total Negro population the same proportion as that borne by the whole number of white physicians and dentists to the total white population.

The subjects of the criminality and the mortality of the race are in their ultimate reaches closely related, both being mainly due, as we have suggested, to the conditions under which Negroes have been forced to live. In the country districts, until 1900 at least, there was little provision for improvements in methods of cooking or in sanitation, while in cities the effects of inferior housing, poor and unlighted streets, and of the segregation of vice in Negro neighborhoods could not be otherwise than obvious. Thus it happened in such a year as 1898 that in Baltimore the Negro death rate was somewhat more and in Nashville just a little less than twice that of the white people. Legal procedure, moreover, emphasized a vicious circle; living conditions sent the Negroes to the courts in increasing numbers, and the courts sent them still farther down in the scale. There were undoubtedly some Negro thieves, some Negro murderers, and some Negroes who were incontinent; no race has yet appeared on the face of the earth that did not contain members having such propensities, and all such people should be dealt with justly by law. Our present contention is that throughout the period of which we are now speaking the dominant social system was not only such as to accentuate criminal elements but also such as even sought to discourage aspiring men. A few ill.u.s.trations, drawn from widely different phases of life, must suffice. In the spring of 1903, and again in 1904, Jackson W. Giles, of Montgomery County, Alabama, contended before the Supreme Court of the United States that he and other Negroes in his county were wrongfully excluded from the franchise by the new Alabama const.i.tution. Twice was his case thrown out on technicalities, the first time it was said because he was pet.i.tioning for the right to vote under a const.i.tution whose validity he denied, and the second time because the Federal right that he claimed had not been pa.s.sed on in the state court from whose decision he appealed. Thus the supreme tribunal in the United States evaded at the time any formal judgment as to the real validity of the new suffrage provisions. In 1903, moreover, in Alabama, Negroes charged with petty offenses and sometimes with no offense at all were still sent to convict farms or turned over to contractors. They were sometimes compelled to work as peons for a length of time; and they were flogged, starved, hunted with bloodhounds, and sold from one contractor to another in direct violation of law. One Joseph Patterson borrowed $1 on a Sat.u.r.day, promising to pay the amount on the following Tuesday morning. He did not get to town at the appointed time, and he was arrested and carried before a justice of the peace, who found him guilty of obtaining money under false pretenses. No time whatever was given to the Negro to get witnesses or a lawyer, or to get money with which to pay his fine and the costs of court. He was sold for $25 to a man named Hardy, who worked him for a year and then sold him for $40 to another man named Pace. Patterson tried to escape, but was recaptured and given a sentence of six months more. He was then required to serve for an additional year to pay a doctor's bill. When the case at last attracted attention, it appeared that for $1 borrowed in 1903 he was not finally to be released before 1906. Another case of interest and importance was set in New York. In the spring of 1909 a pullman porter was arrested on the charge of stealing a card-case containing $20. The next day he was discharged as innocent. He then entered against his accuser a suit for $10,000 damages. The jury awarded him $2,500, which amount the court reduced to $300, Justice P.H. Dugro saying that a Negro when falsely imprisoned did not suffer the same amount of injury that a white man would suffer--an opinion which the New York _Age_ very naturally characterized as "one of the basest and most offensive ever handed down by a New York judge."

In the history of the question of the mulatto two facts are outstanding.

One is that before the Civil War, as was very natural under the circ.u.mstances, mulattoes became free much faster than pure Negroes; thus the census of 1850 showed that 581 of every 1000 free Negroes were mulattoes and only 83 of every 1000 slaves. Since the Civil War, moreover, the mulatto element has rapidly increased, advancing from 11.2 per cent of the Negro population in 1850 to 20.9 per cent in 1910, or from 126 to 264 per 1000. On the whole question of the function of this mixed element the elaborate study, that of Reuter, is immediately thrown out of court by its lack of accuracy. The fundamental facts on which it rests its case are not always true, and if premises are false conclusions are worthless. No work on the Negro that calls Toussaint L'Ouverture and Sojourner Truth mulattoes and that will not give the race credit for several well-known pure Negroes of the present day, can long command the attention of scholars. This whole argument on the mulatto goes back to the fallacy of degrading human beings by slavery for two hundred years and then arguing that they have not the capacity or the inclination to rise. In a country predominantly white the quadroon has frequently been given some advantage that his black friend did not have, from the time that one was a house-servant and the other a field-hand; but no scientific test has ever demonstrated that the black boy is intellectually inferior to the fair one. In America, however, it is the fashion to place upon the Negro any blame or deficiency and to claim for the white race any merit that an individual may show.

Furthermore--and this is a point not often remarked in discussions of the problem--the element of genius that distinguishes the Negro artist of mixed blood is most frequently one characteristically Negro rather than Anglo-Saxon. Much has been made of the fact that within the society of the race itself there have been lines of cleavage, a comparatively few people, very fair in color, sometimes drawing off to themselves.

This is a fact, and it is simply one more heritage from slavery, most tenacious in some conservative cities along the coast. Even there, however, old lines are vanishing and the fusion of different groups within the race rapidly going forward. Undoubtedly there has been some sn.o.bbery, as there always is, and a few quadroons and octoroons have crossed the color line and been lost to the race; but these cases are after all comparatively few in number, and the younger generation is more and more emphasizing the ideals of racial solidarity. In the future there may continue to be lines of cleavage in society within the race, but the standards governing these will primarily be character and merit.