A Social History of the American Negro Part 22

On the whole, then, the mulatto has placed himself squarely on the side of the difficulties, aspirations, and achievements of the Negro people and it is simply an accident and not inherent quality that accounts for the fact that he has been so prominent in the leadership of the race.

The final refutation of defamation, however, is to be found in the actual achievement of members of the race themselves. The progress in spite of handicaps continued to be amazing. Said the New York _Sun_ early in 1907 (copied by the _Times_) of "Negroes Who Have Made Good": "Junius C. Groves of Kansas produces 75,000 bushels of potatoes every year, the world's record. Alfred Smith received the blue ribbon at the World's Fair and first prize in England for his Oklahoma-raised cotton.

Some of the thirty-five patented devices of Granville T. Woods, the electrician, form part of the systems of the New York elevated railways and the Bell Telephone Company. W. Sidney Pittman drew the design of the Collis P. Huntington memorial building, the largest and finest at Tuskegee. Daniel H. Williams, M.D., of Chicago, was the first surgeon to sew up and heal a wounded human heart. Mary Church Terrell addressed in three languages at Berlin recently the International a.s.sociation for the Advancement of Women. Edward H. Morris won his suit between Cook County and the city of Chicago, and has a law practice worth $20,000 a year."

In one department of effort, that of sport, the Negro was especially prominent. In pugilism, a diversion that has always been noteworthy for its popular appeal, Peter Jackson was well known as a contemporary of John L. Sullivan. George Dixon was, with the exception of one year, either bantamweight or featherweight champion for the whole of the period from 1890 to 1900; and Joe Gans was lightweight champion from 1902 to 1908. Joe Walcott was welterweight champion from 1901 to 1904, and was succeeded by Dixie Kid, who held his place from 1904 to 1908. In 1908, to the chagrin of thousands and with a victory that occasioned a score of racial conflicts throughout the South and West and that resulted in several deaths, Jack Johnson became the heavyweight champion of America, a position that he was destined to hold for seven years. In professional baseball the Negro was proscribed, though occasionally a member of the race played on teams of the second group. Of semi-professional teams the American Giants and the Leland Giants of Chicago, and the Lincoln Giants of New York, were popular favorites, and frequently numbered on their rolls players of the first order of ability. In intercollegiate baseball W.C. Matthews of Harvard was outstanding for several years about 1904. In intercollegiate football Lewis at Harvard in the earlier nineties and Bullock at Dartmouth a decade later were unusually prominent, while Marshall of Minnesota in 1905 became an All-American end. Pollard of Brown, a half-back, in 1916, and Robeson of Rutgers, an end, in 1918, also won All-American honors.

About the turn of the century Major Taylor was a champion bicycle rider, and John B. Taylor of Pennsylvania was an intercollegiate champion in track athletics. Similarly fifteen years later Binga Dismond of Howard and Chicago, Sol Butler of Dubuque, and Howard P. Drew of Southern California were destined to win national and even international honors in track work. Drew broke numerous records as a runner and Butler was the winner in the broad jump at the Inter-Allied Games in the Pershing Stadium in Paris. In 1920 E. Gourdin of Harvard came prominently forward as one of the best track athletes that inst.i.tution had ever had.

In the face, then, of the Negro's unquestionable physical ability and prowess the supreme criticism that he was called on to face within the period was all the more hard to bear. In all nations and in all ages courage under fire as a soldier has been regarded as the sterling test of manhood, and by this standard we have seen that in war the Negro had more than vindicated himself. His very honor as a soldier was now to be attacked.

In August, 1906, Companies B, C, and D of the Twenty-fifth Regiment, United States Infantry, were stationed at Fort Brown, Brownsville, Texas, where they were forced to exercise very great self-restraint in the face of daily insults from the citizens. On the night of the 13th occurred a riot in which one citizen of the town was killed, another wounded, and the chief of police injured. The people of the town accused the soldiers of causing the riot and demanded their removal.

Brigadier-General E.A. Garlington, Inspector General, was sent to find the guilty men, and, failing in his mission, he recommended dishonorable discharge for the regiment. On this recommendation President Roosevelt on November 9 dismissed "without honor" the entire battalion, disqualifying its members for service thereafter in either the military or the civil employ of the United States. When Congress met in December Senator J.B. Foraker of Ohio placed himself at the head of the critics of the President's action, and in a ringing speech said of the discharged men that "they asked no favors because they were Negroes, but only justice because they were men." On January 22 the Senate authorized a general investigation of the whole matter, a special message from the President on the 14th having revoked the civil disability of the discharged soldiers. The case was finally disposed of by a congressional act approved March 3, 1909, which appointed a court of inquiry before which any discharged man who wished to reenlist had the burden of establishing his innocence--a procedure which clearly violated the fundamental principle in law that a man is to be accounted innocent until he is proved guilty.

In connection with the dishonored soldier of Brownsville, and indeed with reference to the Negro throughout the period, we recall Edwin Markham's poem, "Dreyfus,"[1] written for a far different occasion but with fundamental principles of justice that are eternal:

[Footnote 1: It is here quoted with the permission of the author and in the form in which it originally appeared in _McClure's Magazine_, September, 1899.]

I

A man stood stained; France was one Alp of hate, Pressing upon him with the whole world's weight; In all the circle of the ancient sun There was no voice to speak for him--not one; In all the world of men there was no sound But of a sword flung broken to the ground.

h.e.l.l laughed its little hour; and then behold How one by one the guarded gates unfold!

Swiftly a sword by Unseen Forces hurled, And now a man rising against the world!

II

Oh, import deep as life is, deep as time!

There is a Something sacred and sublime Moving behind the worlds, beyond our ken, Weighing the stars, weighing the deeds of men.

Take heart, O soul of sorrow, and be strong!

There is one greater than the whole world's wrong.

Be hushed before the high Benignant Power That moves wool-shod through sepulcher and tower!

No truth so low but He will give it crown; No wrong so high but He will hurl it down.

O men that forge the fetter, it is vain; There is a Still Hand stronger than your chain.

'Tis no avail to bargain, sneer, and nod, And shrug the shoulder for reply to G.o.d.

7. The Dawn of a To-morrow

The bitter period that we have been considering was not wholly without its bright features, and with the new century new voices began to be articulate. In May, 1900, there was in Montgomery a conference in which Southern men undertook as never before to make a study of their problems. That some who came had yet no real conception of the task and its difficulties may be seen from the suggestion of one man that the Negroes be deported to the West or to the islands of the sea. Several men advocated the repeal of the Fifteenth Amendment. The position outstanding for its statesmanship was that of ex-Governor William A.

McCorkle of West Virginia, who a.s.serted that the right of franchise was the vital and underlying principle of the life of the people of the United States and must not be violated, that the remedy for present conditions was an "honest and inflexible educational and property basis, administered fairly for black and white," and finally that the Negro Problem was not a local problem but one to be settled by the hearty cooperation of all of the people of the United States.

Meanwhile the Southern Educational Congress continued its sittings from year to year, and about 1901 there developed new and great interest in education, the Southern Education Board acting in close cooperation with the General Education Board, the medium of the philanthropy of John D.

Rockefeller, and frequently also with the Peabody and Slater funds.[1]

In 1907 came the announcement of the Jeanes Fund, established by Anna T.

Jeanes, a Quaker of Philadelphia, for the education of the Negro in the rural districts of the South; and in 1911 that of the Phelps-Stokes Fund, established by Caroline Phelps-Stokes with emphasis on the education of the Negro in Africa and America. More and more these agencies were to work in harmony and cooperation with the officials in the different states concerned. In 1900 J.L.M. Curry, a Southern man of great breadth of culture, was still in charge of the Peabody and Slater funds, but he was soon to pa.s.s from the scene and in the work now to be done were prominent Robert C. Ogden, Hollis B. Frissell, Wallace b.u.t.trick, George Foster Peabody, and James H. Dillard.

[Footnote 1: In 1867 George Peabody, an American merchant and patriot, established the Peabody Educational Fund for the purpose of promoting "intellectual, moral, and industrial education in the most dest.i.tute portion of the Southern states." The John F. Slater Fund was established in 1882 especially for the encouragement of the industrial education of Negroes.]

Along with the mob violence, moreover, that disgraced the opening years of the century was an increasing number of officers who were disposed to do their duty even under trying circ.u.mstances. Less than two months after his notorious inaugural Governor Vardaman of Mississippi interested the reading public by ordering out a company of militia when a lynching was practically announced to take place, and by boarding a special train to the scene to save the Negro. In this same state in 1909, when the legislature pa.s.sed a law levying a tax for the establishment of agricultural schools for white students, and levied this on the property of white people and Negroes alike, though only the white people were to have schools, a Jasper County Negro contested the matter before the Chancery Court, which declared the law unconst.i.tutional, and he was further supported by the Supreme Court of the state. Such a decision was inspiring, but it was not the rule, and already the problems of another decade were being foreshadowed. Already also under the stress of conditions in the South many Negroes were seeking a haven in the North. By 1900 there were as many Negroes in Pennsylvania as in Missouri, whereas twenty years before there had been twice as many in the latter state. There were in Ma.s.sachusetts more than in Delaware, whereas twenty years before Delaware had had 50 per cent more than Ma.s.sachusetts. Within twenty years Virginia gained 312,000 white people and only 29,000 Negroes, the latter having begun a steady movement to New York. North Carolina gained 400,000 white people and only 93,000 Negroes. South Carolina and Mississippi, however, were not yet affected in large measure by the movement.

The race indeed was beginning to be possessed by a new consciousness.

After 1895 Booker T. Washington was a very genuine leader. From the first, however, there was a distinct group of Negro men who honestly questioned the ultimate wisdom of the so-called Atlanta Compromise, and who felt that in seeming to be willing temporarily to accept proscription and to waive political rights Dr. Washington had given up too much. Sometimes also there was something in his ill.u.s.trations of the effects of current methods of education that provoked reply. Those who were of the opposition, however, were not at first united and constructive, and in their utterances they sometimes offended by harshness of tone. Dr. Washington himself said of the extremists in this group that they frequently understood theories but not things; that in college they gave little thought to preparing for any definite task in the world, but started out with the idea of preparing themselves to solve the race problem; and that many of them made a business of keeping the troubles, wrongs, and hardships of the Negro race before the public.[1] There was ample ground for this criticism. More and more, however, the opposition gained force; the _Guardian_, a weekly paper edited in Boston by Monroe Trotter, was particularly outspoken, and in Boston the real climax came in 1903 in an endeavor to break up a meeting at which Dr. Washington was to speak. Then, beginning in January, 1904, the _Voice of the Negro_, a magazine published in Atlanta for three years, definitely helped toward the cultivation of racial ideals.

Publication of the periodical became irregular after the Atlanta Ma.s.sacre, and it finally expired in 1907. Some of the articles dealt with older and more philosophical themes, but there were also bright and illuminating studies in education and other social topics, as well as a strong stand on political issues. The _Colored American_, published in Boston just a few years before the _Voice_ began to appear, also did inspiring work. Various local or state organizations, moreover, from time to time showed the virtue of cooperation; thus the Georgia Equal Rights Convention, a.s.sembled in Macon in February, 1906, at the call of William J. White, the veteran editor of the _Georgia Baptist_, brought together representative men from all over the state and considered such topics as the unequal division of school taxes, the deprivation of the jury rights of Negroes, the peonage system, and the penal system. In 1905 twenty-nine men of the race launched what was known as the Niagara Movement. The aims of this organization were freedom of speech and criticism, an unlettered and unsubsidized press, manhood suffrage, the abolition of all caste distinctions based simply on race and color, the recognition of the principle of human brotherhood as a practical present creed, the recognition of the highest and best training as the monopoly of no cla.s.s or race, a belief in the dignity of labor, and united effort to realize these ideals under wise and courageous leadership. The time was not yet quite propitious, and the Niagara Movement as such died after three or four years. Its principles lived on, however, and it greatly helped toward the formation of a stronger and more permanent organization.

[Footnote 1: See chapter "The Intellectuals," in _My Larger Education_.]

In 1909 a number of people who were interested in the general effect of the Negro Problem on democracy in America organized in New York the National a.s.sociation for the Advancement of Colored People.[1] It was felt that the situation had become so bad that the time had come for a simple declaration of human rights. In 1910 Moorfield Storey, a distinguished lawyer of Boston, became national president, and W.E.

Burghardt DuBois director of publicity and research, and editor of the _Crisis_, which periodical began publication in November of this year.

The organization was successful from the first, and local branches were formed all over the country, some years elapsing, however, before the South was penetrated. Said the Director: "Of two things we Negroes have dreamed for many years: An organization so effective and so powerful that when discrimination and injustice touched one Negro, it would touch 12,000,000. We have not got this yet, but we have taken a great step toward it. We have dreamed, too, of an organization that would work ceaselessly to make Americans know that the so-called 'Negro problem' is simply one phase of the vaster problem of democracy in America, and that those who wish freedom and justice for their country must wish it for every black citizen. This is the great and insistent message of the National a.s.sociation for the Advancement of Colored People."

[Footnote 1: For detailed statement of origin see pamphlet, "How the National a.s.sociation for the Advancement of Colored People Began," by Mary White Ovington, published by the a.s.sociation.]

This organization is outstanding as an effort in cooperation between the races for the improvement of the condition of the Negro. Of special interest along the line of economic betterment has been the National League on Urban Conditions among Negroes, now known as the National Urban League, which also has numerous branches with headquarters in New York and through whose offices thousands of Negroes have been placed in honorable employment. The National Urban League was also formally organized in 1910; it represented a merging of the different agencies working in New York City in behalf of the social betterment of the Negro population, especially of the National League for the Protection of Colored Women and of the Committee for Improving the Industrial Conditions among Negroes in New York, both of which agencies had been organized in 1906. As we shall see, the work of the League was to be greatly expanded within the next decade by the conditions brought about by the war; and under the direction of the executive secretary, Eugene Kinckle Jones, with the a.s.sistance of alert and patriotic officers, its work was to prove one of genuinely national service.

Interesting also was a new concern on the part of the young Southern college man about the problems at his door. Within just a few years after the close of the period now considered, Phelps-Stokes fellowships for the study of problems relating to the Negro were founded at the Universities of Virginia and Georgia; it was expected that similar fellowships would be founded in other inst.i.tutions; and there was interest in the annual meetings of the Southern Sociological Congress and the University Commission on Southern Race Questions.

Thus from one direction and another at length broke upon a "vale of tears" a new day of effort and of hope. For the real contest the forces were gathering. The next decade was to be one of unending bitterness and violence, but also one in which the Negro was to rise as never before to the dignity of self-reliant and courageous manhood.

CHAPTER XVI

THE NEGRO IN THE NEW AGE

1. _Character of the Period_

The decade 1910-1920, momentous in the history of the world, in the history of the Negro race in America must finally be regarded as the period of a great spiritual uprising against the proscription, the defamation, and the violence of the preceding twenty years. As never before the Negro began to realize that the ultimate burden of his salvation rested upon himself, and he learned to respect and to depend upon himself accordingly.

The decade naturally divides into two parts, that before and that after the beginning of the Great War in Europe. Even in the earlier years, however, the tendencies that later were dominant were beginning to be manifest. The greater part of the ten years was consumed by the two administrations of President Woodrow Wilson; and not only did the National Government in the course of these administrations discriminate openly against persons of Negro descent in the Federal service and fail to protect those who happened to live in the capital, but its policy also gave encouragement to outrage in places technically said to be beyond its jurisdiction. A great war was to give new occasion and new opportunity for discrimination, defamatory propaganda was to be circulated on a scale undreamed of before, and the close of the war was to witness attempts for a new reign of terror in the South. Even beyond the bounds of continental America the race was now to suffer by reason of the national policy, and the little republic of Hayti to lift its bleeding hands to the calm judgment of the world.

Both a cause and a result of the struggle through which the race was now to pa.s.s was its astonishing progress. The fiftieth anniversary of the Emanc.i.p.ation Proclamation--January 1, 1913--called to mind as did nothing else the proscription and the mistakes, but also the successes and the hopes of the Negro people in America. Throughout the South disfranchis.e.m.e.nt seemed almost complete; and yet, after many attempts, the movement finally failed in Maryland in 1911 and in Arkansas in 1912.

In 1915, moreover, the disfranchising act of Oklahoma was declared unconst.i.tutional by the United States Supreme Court, and henceforth the Negro could feel that the highest legal authority was no longer on the side of those who sought to deprive him of all political voice. Eleven years before, the Court had taken refuge in technicalities. The year 1911 was also marked by the appointment of the first Negro policeman in New York, by the election of the first Negro legislator in Pennsylvania, and by the appointment of a man of the race, William H. Lewis, as a.s.sistant Attorney General of the United States; and several civil rights suits were won in Ma.s.sachusetts, New York, and New Jersey. Banks, insurance companies, and commercial and industrial enterprises were constantly being capitalized; churches erected more and more stately edifices; and fraternal organizations constantly increased in membership and wealth. By 1913 the Odd Fellows numbered very nearly half a million members and owned property worth two and a half million dollars; in 1920 the Dunbar Amus.e.m.e.nt Corporation of Philadelphia erected a theater costing $400,000; and the foremost business woman of the race in the decade, Mme. C.J. Walker, on the simple business of toilet articles and hair preparations built up an enterprise of national scope and conducted in accordance with the principles regularly governing great American commercial organizations. Fifty years after emanc.i.p.ation, moreover, very nearly one-fourth of all the Negroes in the Southern states were living in homes that they themselves owned; thus 430,449 of 1,917,391 houses occupied in these states were reported in 1910 as owned, and 314,340 were free of all enc.u.mbrance. The percentage of illiteracy decreased from 70 in 1880 to 30.4 in 1910, and movements were under way for the still more rapid spread of elementary knowledge. Excellent high schools, such as those in St. Louis, Washington, Kansas City (both cities of this name), Louisville, Baltimore, and other cities and towns in the border states and sometimes as far away as Texas, were setting a standard such as was in accord with the best in the country; and in one year, 1917, 455 young people of the race received the degree of bachelor of arts, while throughout the decade different ones received honors and took the highest graduate degrees at the foremost inst.i.tutions of learning in the country. Early in the decade the General Education Board began actively to a.s.sist in the work of the higher educational inst.i.tutions, and an outstanding gift was that of half a million dollars to Fisk University in 1920. Meanwhile, through the National Urban League and hundreds of local clubs and welfare organizations, social betterment went forward, much impetus being given to the work by the National a.s.sociation of Colored Women's Clubs organized in 1896.

Along with its progress, throughout the decade the race had to meet increasing bitterness and opposition, and this was intensified by the motion picture, "The Birth of a Nation," built on lines similar to those of _The Clansman_. Negro men standing high on civil service lists were sometimes set aside; in 1913 the white railway mail clerks of the South began an open campaign against Negroes in the service in direct violation of the rules; and a little later in the same year segregation in the different departments became notorious. In 1911 the American Bar a.s.sociation raised the question of the color-line; and efforts for the restriction of Negroes to certain neighborhoods in different prominent cities sometimes resulted in violence, as in the dynamiting of the homes of Negroes in Kansas City, Missouri, in 1911. When the Progressive party was organized in 1912 the Negro was given to understand that his support was not sought, and in 1911 a strike of firemen on the Queen and Crescent Railroad was in its main outlines similar to the trouble on the Georgia Railroad two years before. Meanwhile in the South the race received only 18 per cent of the total expenditures for education, although it const.i.tuted more than 30 per cent of the population.

Worse than anything else, however, was the matter of lynching. In each year the total number of victims of illegal execution continued to number three- or fourscore; but no one could ever be sure that every instance had been recorded. Between the opening of the decade and the time of the entrance of the United States into the war, five cases were attended by such unusual circ.u.mstances that the public could not soon forget them. At Coatesville, Pennsylvania, not far from Philadelphia, on August 12, 1911, a Negro laborer, Zach Walker, while drunk, fatally shot a night watchman. He was pursued and attempted suicide. Wounded, he was brought to town and placed in the hospital. From this place he was taken chained to his cot, dragged for some miles, and then tortured and burned to death in the presence of a great crowd of people, including many women, and his bones and the links of the chain which bound him distributed as souvenirs. At Monticello, Georgia, in January, 1915, when a Negro family resisted an officer who was making an arrest, the father, Dan Barbour, his young son, and his two daughters were all hanged to a tree and their bodies riddled with bullets. Before the close of the year there was serious trouble in the southwestern portion of the state, and behind this lay all the evils of the system of peonage in the black belt. Driven to desperation by the mistreatment accorded them in the raising of cotton, the Negroes at last killed an overseer who had whipped a Negro boy. A reign of terror was then inst.i.tuted; churches, society halls, and homes were burnt, and several individuals shot. On December 30 there was a wholesale lynching of six Negroes in Early County. Less than three weeks afterwards a sheriff who attempted to arrest some more Negroes and who was accompanied by a mob was killed.

Then (January 20, 1916) five Negroes who had been taken from the jail in Worth County were rushed in automobiles into Lee County adjoining, and hanged and shot. On May 15, 1916, at Waco, Texas, Jesse Washington, a sullen and overgrown boy of seventeen, who worked for a white farmer named Fryar at the town of Robinson, six miles away, and who one week before had criminally a.s.saulted and killed Mrs. Fryar, after unspeakable mutilation was burned in the heart of the town. A part of the torture consisted in stabbing with knives and the cutting off of the boy's fingers as he grabbed the chain by which he was bound. Finally, on October 21, 1916, Anthony Crawford, a Negro farmer of Abbeville, South Carolina, who owned four hundred and twenty-seven acres of the best cotton land in his county and who was reported to be worth $20,000, was lynched. He had come to town to the store of W.D. Barksdale to sell a load of cotton-seed, and the two men had quarreled about the price, although no blow was struck on either side. A little later, however, Crawford was arrested by a local policeman and a crowd of idlers from the public square rushed to give him a whipping for his "impudence." He promptly knocked down the ringleader with a hammer. The mob then set upon him, nearly killed him, and at length threw him into the jail. A few hours later, fearing that the sheriff would secretly remove the prisoner, it returned, dragged the wounded man forth, and then hanged and shot him, after which proceedings warning was sent to his family to leave the county by the middle of the next month.

It will be observed that in these five noteworthy occurrences, in only one case was there any question of criminal a.s.sault. On the other hand, in one case two young women were included among the victims; another was really a series of lynchings emphasizing the lot of some Negroes under a vicious economic system; and the last simply grew out of the jealousy and hatred aroused by a Negro of independent means who knew how to stand up for his rights.

Such was the progress, such also the violence that the Negro witnessed during the decade. Along with his problems at home he now began to have a new interest in those of his kin across the sea, and this feeling was intensified by the world war. It raises questions of such far-reaching importance, however, that it must receive separate and distinct treatment.

2. _Migration; East St. Louis_

Very soon after the beginning of the Great War in Europe there began what will ultimately be known as the most remarkable migratory movement in the history of the Negro in America. Migration had indeed at no time ceased since the great movement of 1879, but for the most part it had been merely personal and not in response to any great emergency. The sudden ceasing of the stream of immigration from Europe, however, created an unprecedented demand for labor in the great industrial centers of the North, and business men were not long in realizing the possibilities of a source that had as yet been used in only the slightest degree. Special agents undoubtedly worked in some measure; but the outstanding feature of the new migration was that it was primarily a ma.s.s movement and not one organized or encouraged by any special group of leaders. Labor was needed in railroad construction, in the steel mills, in the tobacco farms of Connecticut, and in the packing-houses, foundries, and automobile plants. In 1915 the New England tobacco growers hastily got together in New York two hundred girls; but these proved to be unsatisfactory, and it was realized that the labor supply would have to be more carefully supervised. In January, 1916, the management of the Continental Tobacco Corporation definitely decided on the policy of importing workers from the South, and within the next year not less than three thousand Negroes came to Hartford, several hundred being students from the schools and colleges who went North to work for the summer. In the same summer came also train-loads of Negroes from Jacksonville and other points to work for the Erie and Pennsylvania Railroads.