Half a Man Part 1

Half a Man.

by Mary White Ovington and Franz Boas.

FOREWORD

Miss Ovington's description of the status of the Negro in New York City is based on a most painstaking inquiry into his social and economic conditions, and brings out in the most forceful way the difficulties under which the race is laboring, even in the large cosmopolitan population of New York. It is a refutation of the claims that the Negro has equal opportunity with the whites, and that his failure to advance more rapidly than he has, is due to innate inability.

Many students of anthropology recognize that no proof can be given of any material inferiority of the Negro race; that without doubt the bulk of the individuals composing the race are equal in mental apt.i.tude to the bulk of our own people; that, although their hereditary apt.i.tudes may lie in slightly different directions, it is very improbable that the majority of individuals composing the white race should possess greater ability than the Negro race.

The anthropological argument is invariably met by the objection that the achievements of the two races are unequal, while their opportunities are the same. Every demonstration of the inequality of opportunity will therefore help to dissipate prejudices that prevent the best possible development of a large number of our citizens.

The Negro of our times carries even more heavily the burden of his racial descent than did the Jew of an earlier period; and the intellectual and moral qualities required to insure success to the Negro are infinitely greater than those demanded from the white, and will be the greater, the stricter the segregation of the Negro community.

The strong development of racial consciousness, which has been increasing during the last century and is just beginning to show the first signs of waning, is the gravest obstacle to the progress of the Negro race, as it is an obstacle to the progress of all strongly individualized social groups. The simple presentation of observations, like those given by Miss Ovington, may help us to overcome more quickly that self-centred att.i.tude which can see progress only in the domination of a single type.

This investigation was carried on by Miss Ovington under the auspices of the Greenwich House Committee on Social Investigations, of which she was a Fellow.[1]

FRANZ BOAS.

FOOTNOTE:

[1] The Greenwich House Committee on Social Investigations is composed of Edwin R. A. Seligman, Chairman, Franz Boas, Edward T. Devine, Livingston Farrand, Franklin H. Giddings, Henry R. Seager, Vladimir G.

Simkhovitch, Secretary.

Miss Ovington's is the second publication of the Committee, the first being Mrs. Louise Bolard More's "Wage-Earners' Budgets," published by Henry Holt & Co.

INTRODUCTION

Six years ago I met a young colored man, a college student recently returned from Germany where he had been engaged in graduate work. He was born, he told me, in one of the Gulf States, and I questioned him as to whether he intended going back to the South to teach. His answer was in the negative. "My father has attained success in his native state," he said, "but when I ceased to be a boy, he advised me to live in the North where my manhood would be respected. He himself cannot continually endure the position in which he is placed, and in the summer he comes North to be a man. No," correcting himself, "to be half a man. A Negro is wholly a man only in Europe."

Half a man! During the six years that I have been in touch with the problem of the Negro in New York this characterization has grown in significance to me. I have endeavored to know the life of the Negro as I know the life of the white American, and I have learned that while New York at times gives full recognition to his manhood, again, its race prejudice arrests his development as certainly as severe poverty arrests the development of the tenement child. Perhaps a study of this shifting att.i.tude on the part of the dominant race, and of the Negro's reaction under it, may not be unimportant; for the color question cannot be ignored in America, nor should the position taken by her largest city be overlooked. And those who love their fellows may be glad, among New York's four millions--its Slavs and Italians, its Russians and Asiatics--to meet these dark people who speak our language and who for many generations have made this country their home.

CHAPTER I

"UP FROM SLAVERY"

The status of the Negro in New Amsterdam, a slave in a pioneer community, differed fundamentally from his position today in New York.

His history from the seventeenth to the twentieth century contains many exciting incidents, but those only need be considered here that show a progress or a r.e.t.a.r.dation in his attainment to manhood. What were his struggles in the past to secure his rights as a man?

Slavery in the early days of the colonies was more brutal than at the time of final emanc.i.p.ation. Savages recently arrived from Africa lacked the docility of blacks reared in bondage, and burning and torturing, as well as whipping, were recognized modes of punishment. Masters looked upon their Negroes, bought at the Wall Street market from among the cargo of a recently arrived slaver, with some suspicion and fear. Nor were their apprehensions entirely without reason. In 1712 some of the discontented among the New York slaves met in an orchard in Maiden Lane and set fire to an outhouse. Defending themselves against the citizens who ran to put out the flames, they fired, killing nine men and wounding six. Retribution soon followed. They were pursued when they attempted flight, captured and executed--some hanged, some burned at the stake, some left suspended in chains to starve to death.

Perhaps it was the memory of this small revolt that caused the people of New York in 1741 to lay the blame for a series of conflagrations upon their slaves. Nine fires that seemed to be incendiary came one upon another, and a robbery was committed. To escape death herself, a worthless white servant girl gave testimony against the Negroes who frequented a tavern where she was employed, declaring that a plot had been conceived whereby the slaves would kill all the white men and take control of the city. New York was aflame with fear, and evidence that at another time would have been rejected, was listened to by the judges with grave attention. The slaves were allowed no defence, and before the city had recovered from its fright, it had burned fourteen Negroes, hanged eighteen, and transported seventy-one.[1]

Historians today think that the slaves were in no way concerned in this so-called "plot." The two thousand blacks in the city might have done much mischief to the ten thousand whites, but their servile condition made an organized movement among them impossible. We may infer, however, from the fear which they provoked, that they were not all docile servants. In a letter written at the port of New York in 1756, an English naval officer says of the city, "The laborious people in general are Guinea Negroes who lie under particular restraints from the attempts they have made to ma.s.sacre the inhabitants for their liberty."[2]

Janvier in his "Old New York" thinks, "that the alarm bred by the so-called Negro plot of 1741 was most effective in checking the growth of slavery in that city." Probably the restlessness of the slaves, their efforts toward manhood, in a community where there was little economic justification for slavery, contributed to the movement for emanc.i.p.ation that began in 1777.

Emanc.i.p.ation came gradually to the New York Negro. Gouverneur Morris at the state const.i.tutional convention of 1776-1777 recommended that "the future legislature of the state of New York take the most effectual measures consistent with the public safety and the private property of individuals for abolishing domestic slavery within the same, so that in future ages every human being who breathes the air of this state shall enjoy the privileges of a freeman." The postponement of action to a future legislature was keenly regretted by John Jay, who was absent from the convention when the slavery question arose, but who had hoped that New York might be a leader in emanc.i.p.ation. The state's initial measure for abolishing slavery was in 1785, when it prohibited the sale of slaves in New York. This was followed in 1799 by an act giving freedom to the children of slaves, and in 1817 by a further act providing for the abolition of slavery throughout the state in 1827. This law went into effect July 4, 1827, the emanc.i.p.ation day of the Negroes in New York.

With gradual emanc.i.p.ation and the cessation of the sale of slaves, the Negroes numerically became unimportant in the city. In 1800 they const.i.tuted ten and a half per cent of the population. Half a century later, while they had doubled their numbers, the immense influx of foreign immigrants brought their proportion down to two and seven-tenths per cent. In 1850 and 1860 their positive as well as their relative number decreased, and it was not until twenty years ago that they began to show some gain. The last census returns of 1900 give Greater New York (including Brooklyn) 60,666 Negroes in a population of 3,437,202, one and eight-tenths per cent. It seems probable that the census of 1910 will show a large positive and a slight relative Negro increase.[3]

The relative decrease in the number of Negroes did not, however, produce a decrease in the agitation upon their presence and position in the city. Their political status was a subject for heated discussion even before their complete emanc.i.p.ation. The first state const.i.tution, drafted in 1777, was without color discrimination, since it based the suffrage upon a property qualification requiring voters for governor and senators to be freeholders owning property worth 100. A Negro with such a holding was a phenomenon, a curiosity. But by 1821, when the framing of the second const.i.tution was in progress, Negroes of some education were an appreciable element in the population, and with them ignorant, recently emanc.i.p.ated slaves. Should they be admitted to the full manhood suffrage contemplated for the whites? Those who favored the new democratic movement were doubtful of its applicability to colored people. Livingston, a champion of universal white manhood suffrage, was against giving the black man the vote. On the other hand, the conservative Chancellor Kent, apprehending in the new const.i.tution "a disposition to encroach on private rights,--to disturb chartered privileges and to weaken, degrade, and overawe the administration of justice," would yet have made no color discrimination, and Peter A. Jay, who did not believe in universal white manhood suffrage, urged that colored men, natives of the country, should derive from its inst.i.tutions the same privileges as white persons. The second const.i.tution when adopted enfranchised practically all white men, but gave the Negroes a property qualification of $250. The issue of the revolution, however, was not far from men's thoughts, and "taxation without representation"

was not permitted; for while no colored man might vote without a freehold estate valued at 250 dollars, _no person of color was subject to direct taxation unless he should be possessed of such real estate_.

In 1846 a third const.i.tutional convention was held, and the same matter came up for debate. John L. Russell of St. Lawrence declared that "the Almighty had created the black man inferior to the white man," while Daniel S. Waterbury of Delaware County believed that "the argument that because a race of men is marked by a peculiarity of color and crooked hair they are not endowed with a mind equal to another cla.s.s who have other peculiarities is unworthy of men of sense." John H. Hunt of New York City proclaimed that "We want no masters, least of all no Negro masters.... Negroes are aliens." And he predicted that the practical effect of their admission to the suffrage would be their exclusion from Manhattan Island. A delegation of colored men appeared at Albany before the suffrage committee, but their arguments and those of their friends produced no effect. The new const.i.tution contained the same Negro property qualification, and it was not until 1874, after the pa.s.sage of the fifteenth amendment to the Const.i.tution of the United States, that legislation placed the Negro voter of New York upon the same footing as the white.[4]

Had New York sincerely desired to keep the Negro in an inferior position, it could have accomplished this by refusing him an education.

This it never did, though it suffered much tribulation regarding the place and manner of his instruction. Before the establishment of a public school system, the Manumission society, an a.s.sociation composed largely of Friends, though including in its membership John Jay, De Witt Clinton, and Alexander Hamilton, undertook the education of the Negro.

In 1787 it opened a school for Africans on Cliff Street. One of the early teachers was Charles C. Andrews, whose little book on "The African Free Schools," published in 1830, shows a kindly tolerance for the black race. "As a result of forty years' experience," he writes, "the idea respecting the capacity of the African race to receive a respectable and even a liberal education has not been visionary." And he recites the names of some of his pupils: "Rev. Theodore S. Wright, graduate of Princeton Theological Seminary; John B. Russworm, graduate of Bowdoin; Edward Jones, graduate of Amherst; William Brown and William G. Smith, students of the medical department, Columbia College: all of them persons of color." Describing an annual exhibition of his school on May 12, 1824, he quotes from the _Commercial Advertiser_ of the same date: "We never beheld a white school, of the same age (of and under the age of fifteen), in which, without exception, there was more order and neatness of dress and cleanliness of person. And the exercises were performed with a degree of promptness and accuracy which was surprising."

In 1834 the public school a.s.sociation took over the schools of the Manumission society, but before this time the Negroes had begun to a.s.sert themselves regarding the method and place of instruction for their children. They clamored for colored teachers and succeeded in displacing Charles Andrews himself. In 1838, at their desire, the word African was changed to colored in describing the race; but of chief importance to their educational future, they began a protest, only to end in 1900, against segregation.

Removed from the care of the Manumission society, the colored schools deteriorated. Their grade was reduced,[5] and owing to the growth of the city, their attendance was very irregular, the severe winter weather often keeping children who lived at a distance at home. A Brooklyn man tells me that, when a boy, he used to walk from his home at East New York to Fulton Ferry, pa.s.sing inferior Brooklyn colored schools, and after crossing the river, on up to Mulberry Street to be instructed by the popular colored teacher, John Peterson. Here he received a good education; but few boys would have endured a daily trip of fourteen miles. Increasingly parents, if the colored school of their neighborhood was not of the best, sent their boys and girls to be instructed with the white boys and girls of their district.

The state law declared that any city or incorporated village might establish separate schools for the instruction of African youths, provided the facilities were equal to those of white schools, and when, in 1862, a colored parent brought a case against the city for forcing her child to go to a colored school, the case was lost.[6] Nevertheless, during the nineteenth century Negroes in some numbers attended white schools in both Brooklyn and New York, and Negro parents continued in their quiet but persistent efforts against segregation. Then again, New York grew too rapidly to segregate any race. The Negro boys and girls were scattered through many districts, and the attendance at colored schools fell off; in 1879 it was less than in 1878, and in 1880 less than in 1879; so that the Board of Education in 1883 decided to disestablish three colored schools.

But this involved another factor. If the colored schools were disestablished, what would become of the colored teachers? The Negroes met this issue by delaying disestablishment for a year, while the teachers went about among the parents of the ward, making friends and urging that children, _white or colored_, be sent to their schools.

Numbers of new pupils of both races were brought in within the year, and at the end of the time, after a hearing before the governor, then Grover Cleveland, a bill was pa.s.sed prohibiting the abolition of two of the three colored schools, but also making them open to all children regardless of color.[7]

Occasionally a colored girl graduated from the normal college of the city, but if there was no vacancy for her in the four colored schools she received no appointment. In 1896, however, a normal graduate, Miss S. E. Frazier, insisted upon her right to be appointed as teacher in any school in which there was a vacancy. She visited the ward trustees and the members of the Board of Education, and represented to them the injustice done her and her race in refusing her the chance to prove her ability as a teacher in the first school that should need a normal graduate. She was finally appointed to a position in a white school. Her success with her pupils was immediate, and since then the question of race or color has not been considered in the appointment of teachers in New York.

Until 1900, the state law permitted the establishment of separate colored schools. In that year, however, on the initiative of Theodore Roosevelt, then governor, the legislature pa.s.sed a bill providing that no person should be refused admission or be excluded from any public school in the state on account of race or color.[8] This closed the question of compulsory segregation in the state, though before this it had ceased in New York. Public education was thus democratized for the New York Negroes, their persistent efforts bringing at the end complete success.

While the colored people in New York started with segregated schools and attained to mixed schools, the movement in the churches was the reverse.

At first the Negroes were attendants of white churches, sitting in the gallery or on the rear seats, and waiting until the white people were through before partaking of the communion; but as their number increased they chafed under their position. Why should they be placed apart to hear the doctrine of Christ, and why, too, should they not have full opportunity to preach that doctrine? The desire for self-expression was perhaps the greatest factor in leading them to separate from the white church. In 1796 about thirty Negroes, under the leadership of James Varick,[9] withdrew from the John Street Methodist Episcopal Church, and formed the first colored church of New York. Varick had been denied a license to preach, but now as pastor of his own people, he was recognized by the whites and helped by some of them. He was the founder of the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church.

The Abyssinian Baptist Church was organized in 1800 by a few colored members who withdrew from the First Baptist Church, then in Gold Street, to establish themselves on Worth Street,[10] and in 1818 the colored Episcopalians organized St. Philip's Church. In 1820 one of their race, Peter Williams, for six years deacon, became their preacher.

Another prominent church was the colored Congregational, situated, in 1854, on Sixth Street; and it was the determined effort of its woman organist to reach the church in time to perform her part in the Sunday morning service that led to an important Negro advance in citizenship.

In the middle of the last century the right of the Negro to ride in car or omnibus depended on the sufferance of driver, conductor, and pa.s.senger. Sometimes a car stopped at a Negro's signal, again the driver whipped up his horses, while the conductor yelled to the "n.i.g.g.e.r" to wait for the next car. Entrance might always be effected if in the company of a white person, and the small child of a kindly white household would be delegated to accompany the homeward bound black visitor into her car where, after a few minutes, conductor and pa.s.sengers having become accustomed to her presence, the young protector might slip away. Such a situation was very galling to the self-respecting negro.

In July, 1854, Elizabeth Jennings, a colored school-teacher and organist at the Congregational Church, attempted to board a Third Avenue car at Pearl and Chatham Streets. She was hurrying to reach the church to perform her part in the service. The conductor stopped, but as Miss Jennings mounted the platform, he told her that she must wait for the next car, which was reserved for her people. "I have no people," Miss Jennings said. "I wish to go to church as I have for six months past, and I do not wish to be detained." The altercation continued until the car behind came up, and the driver there declaring that he had less room than the car in front, the woman was grudgingly allowed to enter the car. "Remember," the conductor said, "if any pa.s.senger objects, you shall go out, whether or no, or I'll put you out."

"I am a respectable person, born and brought up in New York," said Miss Jennings, "and I was never insulted so before."

This again aroused the conductor. "I was born in Ireland," he said, "and you've got to get out of this car."