Following the Color Line Part 17

It is difficult to realise the significance of these ma.s.ses 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 lat.i.tudes 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 pa.s.sed unnoticed, but with increasing numbers (especially of the lower sort of Negroes and black Negroes), accompanied by compet.i.tion 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 antic.i.p.ated.

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 cla.s.ses 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 cla.s.s 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 ill.u.s.tration 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 sh.o.r.es--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 a.s.sisted 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 compet.i.tive struggle to which men of the working cla.s.s are subjected in the highly developed industrial system of the North.

_Sufferings of the Northern Negro_

In the South the great ma.s.s 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 a.s.sociation 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 cla.s.s 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 cla.s.s. 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 cla.s.s 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 const.i.tute over half the total deaths from that cause in the city of Indianapolis, whereas, in proportion to Negro population, they should const.i.tute 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 pa.s.sed 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 lat.i.tudes. 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 att.i.tude of the best cla.s.s of white men and the lower cla.s.s.

_How Northerners Regard the Negro_