Half a Man Part 9

American Negroes have become familiar with racial lines, but the foreigner of African descent, a visitor to the city, meets with rebuffs that fill him with surprise as well as rage. Haytians and South Americans, men of continental education and wide culture, have been ordered away as "n.i.g.g.e.rs" from restaurant doors, and at the box office of the theatre refused an orchestra seat. English Negroes from the West Indies, men and women of character and means, learn that New York is a spot to be avoided, and cross the ocean when they wish to taste of city life. In short, the stranger of Negro descent, if he be rash of temper, hurls anathemas at the villainously mannered Americans; or, if he be good-natured, shrugs his shoulders and counts New York a provincial settlement of four million people.

Northern Negroes believe this discrimination in public places against the black man to be increasing in New York. One, who came here fifteen years ago, tells of the simple and adequate test by which he learned that he had reached the northern city. Born in South Carolina, as he attained manhood he desired larger self-expression, broader human relations--he wanted "to be free," as he again and again expressed it.

So leaving the cotton fields he started one morning to walk to New York.

After a number of days he entered a large city and, uncertain in his geography, decided that this was his journey's end. "I'll be free here,"

he thought, and opening the door of a brightly lighted restaurant started to walk in. The white men at the tables looked up in astonishment, and the proprietor, laying his hand on the youth's shoulder, invited him, in strong southern accent, to go into the kitchen. "I reckon I'm not North yet," the Negro said, smiling a bright, boyish smile. Interested in his visitor's appearance, the proprietor took him into another room, gave him a good supper, and talked with him far into the night, urging the advantages of his staying in the South.

But the youth shook his head, and the next morning trudged on. At length he reached a rushing city, tumultuous with humanity, and entering an eating-house was served a meal. To him it was almost a sacrament. He belonged not to a race but to humanity. He tasted the freedom of pa.s.sing unnoticed. But it is doubtful if the same restaurant would serve him today.

Color lines, on these matters of entertainment as on others, are not hard and fast. A few hotels, chiefly those frequented by Latin people, receive colored guests; and while the foreign Negro meets with rudeness, he is rebuffed less than the native. "I can't get into that place as a southern darky," a black man laughingly says, pointing to a fashionable restaurant, "I'll be the Prince of Abyssinia." But as Prince or American his status is shifting and uncertain; here, preeminently, he is half a man.

Discrimination against any man because of his color is contrary to the law of the state. After the fifteenth amendment became a law, New York pa.s.sed a civil rights bill, which as it stands, re-enacted in 1909, is very explicit. All persons within the jurisdiction of the state are ent.i.tled to the accommodation of hotels, restaurants, theatres, music halls, barbers' shops, and any person refusing such accommodation is subject to civil and penal action. The offence may be punished by fine or imprisonment or both.[8]

In 1888, the attempt to exclude three colored men from a skating-rink at Binghamton, N. Y., led to a suit against the owner of the rink, and his conviction. The case[9] reached the Court of Appeals, where the const.i.tutionality of the civil rights bill was upheld. "It is evident,"

said Justice Andrews in his decision, "that to exclude colored people from places of public resort on account of their race is to fix upon them a brand of inferiority, and tends to fix their position as a servile and dependent people."

But despite the law and precedent, the civil rights bill is violated in New York. Occasionally colored men bring suit, but the magistrate dismisses the complaint. Usually the evidence is declared insufficient.

A case of a colored man refused orchestra seats at a theatre is dismissed on the ground that not the proprietor but his employees turned the man away. A keeper of an ice-cream parlor, wishing to prevent the colored man from patronizing him, charges a Negro a dollar for a ten-cent plate. The customer pays the dollar, keeps the check, and brings the case to court. Ice-cream parlors are then declared not to come under the list of places of public entertainment and amus.e.m.e.nt. A bootblack refuses to polish the shoes of a Negro, and the court decides that a bootblack-stand is not a place of public accommodation, and refusal to shine the shoes of a colored man does not subject its proprietor to the penalties imposed by the law.[10] This last case was carried to the Court of Appeals, and the adverse judgment has led many of the thoughtful colored men of the city to doubt the value of attempting to push a civil rights suit. Litigation is expensive, and money spent in any personal rights case that attacks private business, whether the plaintiff be white or colored, is usually wasted. The civil rights law is on the books, and the psychological moment may arrive to insist successfully on its enforcement.

If there is an increase in discrimination against the Negro in New York solely because of his color, it is a serious matter to the city as well as to the race. Every community has its social conscience built up of slowly acc.u.mulated experiences, and it cannot without disaster lose its ideal of justice or generosity. New York has never been tender to its people, but it has a rough hospitality, what Stevenson describes as "uncivil kindness," and welcomes new-comers with a friendly shove, bidding them become good Americans. After the war, the Negro entered more than formerly into this general welcome. He was unnoticed, allowed to go his way without questioning word or stare, the position which every right-minded man and woman desires. But today New York has become conscious that he is dark-skinned, and her att.i.tude affects her growing children. "I never noticed colored people," an old abolitionist said to me, "I never realized there were white and black until, when a boy of twelve, I entered a church and found Negroes occupying seats alone in the gallery." As New York returns to the gallery seats, her boys and girls return to consciousness of color and, from fisticuffs at school, move on to the race riots upon the streets with bullets among the stones.

The munic.i.p.ality, as we have seen, treats the Negro on the whole with justice; its standard is higher than the standard of the average citizen. It cherishes the ideal of democracy, and strives for impartiality toward its many nationalities and races. And the New York Negro in his turn does not allow his liberties to be tampered with without protest. But the New York citizen can hardly be described as friendly to the Negro. What catholicity he has is negative. He fails to give the black man a hearty welcome. "Do you know where I stayed the four weeks of my first trip abroad?" a colored clergyman once asked me.

I refused to make a guess. "Well," he said a little shamefacedly, "it was in Paris. Paris may be a wicked city--any city has wickedness if you want to look for it--but I found it a place of kindliness and good-will.

Every one seemed glad to be courteous, to a.s.sist me in my stumbling French, to show me the way on omnibus or boat, or through the difficult streets. It was so different from America; I was never wanted in the southern city of my youth. In Paris I was welcome."

"How is it in New York?" I asked.

"In New York?" He stopped to consider. "In New York I am tolerated."

FOOTNOTES:

[1] The total number of munic.i.p.al employees is 55,006--Negro employees, 511--Percentage of Negro to whole, 0.9.

[2] "Story of the Riot," published by Citizens Protective League.

[3] New York _Age_, July 27, 1905.

[4] New York _Tribune_, July 24, 1905.

[5] A southern student says, "The Negro in Richmond is arrested for small offences and fined in the city courts. He is treated with considerable roughness and harshness in his punishment for these offences. It looks as though he were being imposed upon as an individual of the lower strata of society. But the Negro responds so impulsively to what appeals, that constant fear, dread, and impressiveness of the police act well as resistants to temptations."

[6] Ray Stannard Baker, "Following the Color Line," p. 269.

[7] The following story of Athens, Georgia, told by a Northerner teaching in the South, ill.u.s.trates this point. "The city of Athens was planning to inaugurate a public school system, and also wished to 'go dry.' It made a proposal to the colored voters promising that if their combined vote would carry the city, two schools should be built, of equal size and similar structure for each race. I visited Athens shortly after the two buildings were built, and I found two beautiful brick buildings very similar in all their appointments. At an interval of several years I again visited the little city and again spent an hour in the same brick school-house of the colored folk.

"At my third visit, I found my colored friends occupying a wooden structure on the edge of the city, and not only inconveniently located, but much less of a building than the one hitherto occupied. Upon inquiry I found that in the growth of the school population of the whites, it was cheaper to seize the building formerly occupied by the colored children, and to build for them a cheap wooden structure on the outskirts of the town.

"The colored school was still occupying this inadequate building at my visit this last September, 1909. A second wooden structure has been added to the colored equipment on the east side of the town."

This story of the Athenians well ill.u.s.trates what will be done when the Negro counts for something politically, and also what may be undone if his value as a political a.s.set is reduced.

[8] Civil Rights Law, State of New York. Chapter 14 of the Laws of 1909, being Chapter 6 of the Consolidated Laws.

"Article 4.--Equal rights in places of public amus.e.m.e.nt.

"Section 40.--All persons within the jurisdiction of this state shall be ent.i.tled to the full and equal accommodations, advantages, facilities, and privileges of inns, restaurants, hotels, eating houses, bath houses, barber shops, theatres, music halls, public conveyances on land and water, and all other places of public accommodation or amus.e.m.e.nt, subject only to the conditions and limitations, established by the law and applicable alike to all citizens.

"Section 41.--Penalty for violation. Any person who shall violate any of the provisions of the foregoing section by denying to any citizen, except for reasons applicable alike to all citizens of every race, creed and color, and regardless of race, creed and color, the full enjoyment of any of the accommodations, advantages, facilities or privileges in said section enumerated, or by aiding or inciting such denial, shall, for every such offence, forfeit and pay a sum not less than one hundred dollars nor more than five hundred dollars to the person aggrieved thereby, to be recovered in a court of competent jurisdiction in the County where said offence was committed, and shall also, for every such offence, be deemed guilty of a misdemeanor, and upon conviction thereof shall be fined not less than one hundred dollars nor more than five hundred dollars, or shall be imprisoned not less than thirty days nor more than ninety days, or both such fine and imprisonment."

[9] People _vs._ King, 110 N. Y., 418, 1888.

[10] Burke _vs._ Bosso, 180 N. Y., 341, 1905.

CHAPTER IX

CONCLUSION

A new little boy came two years ago into our story-book world. When Miss North, taking Ezekiel by the hand, led him into her school-room,[1] we met a child full of what we call temperament; dreaming quaint stories, innocently friendly, anxious to please for affection's sake, in his queer, unconscious way something of a genius. We saw his big musing eyes looking out upon a world in which his teacher stood serene and reasoning, but a little cold like her name; his friend, Miss Jane, kind and very practical; his employer, Mr. Rankin, amused and contemptuous; all watching him with the impersonal interest with which one might view a new species in the animal world. For Ezekiel, unlike our other story-book boys, had a double being, he was first Ezekiel Jordan, a little black boy, and second, a Representative of the Negro Race.

Ezekiel was too young to understand his position, but the white world about him never forgot it. When he arrived late to school, he was a dilatory representative; when, obliging little soul, he promised three people to weed their gardens all the same afternoon, he was a prevaricating representative. He never happened to steal ice-cream from the hoky-poky man or to play hookey, but if he had, he would have been a thieving and lazy representative. Always he was something remote and overwhelming, not a natural growing boy.

Ezekiel's position is that of each Negro child and man and woman in the United States today. I think we have seen this as we have reviewed the position of the race in New York; indeed, the very fact of our attempting such a review is patent that we see and feel it. We white Americans do not generalize concerning ourselves, we individualize, leaving generalizations to the chance visitor, but we generalize continually concerning colored Americans; we cla.s.sify and measure and pa.s.s judgment, a little more with each succeeding year.

Now if we are going to do this, let us be fair; let us try as much as possible to dismiss prejudice, and to look at the Ezekiels entering our school of life, with the same impartiality and the same understanding sympathy with which we look upon our own race. And if we are to place them side by side with the whites, let us be impartial, not cheating them out of their hard-earned credits, or condemning them with undue severity. Let us try, if we can, to be just.

When we begin to make this effort to judge fairly our colored world, we need to remember especially two things: First, that we cannot yet measure with any accuracy the capability of the colored man in the United States, because he has not yet been given the opportunity to show his capability. If we deny full expression to a race, if we restrict its education, stifle its intellectual and aesthetic impulses, we make it impossible fairly to gauge its ability. Under these circ.u.mstances to measure its achievements with the more favored white race is unreasonable and unjust, as unreasonable as to measure against a man's a disfranchised woman's capabilities in directing the affairs of a state.[2]

The second thing is difficult for us to remember, difficult for us at first to believe; that we, dominant, ruling Americans, may not be the persons best fitted to judge the Negro. We feel confident that we are, since we have known him so long and are so familiar with his peculiarities; but in moments of earnest reflection may it not occur to us that we have not the desire or the imagination to enter into the life emotions of others? "We are the intellect and virtue of the airth, the cream of human natur', and the flower of moral force," Hannibal Chollup still says, and glowers at the stranger who dares to suggest a different standard from his own. Hannibal Chollup and his ilk are ill-fitted to measure the refinements of feeling, the differences in ideals among people.

This question of our fitness to sit in the judgment seat must come with grave insistence when we read carefully the literature published in this city of New York within the past two years. Our writers have a.s.sumed such pomposity, have so revelled in what Mr. Chesterton calls "the magnificent b.u.t.tering of one's self all over with the same stale b.u.t.ter; the big defiance of small enemies," as to make their conclusions ridiculous. Ezekiel entering their school is at once pushed to the bottom of the cla.s.s, while the white boy at the head, Hannibal Chollup's descendant, sings a jubilate of his own and b.u.t.ters himself so copiously as to be as shiny as his English cousin, Wackford Squeers. Then the writer, the judge, begins. Ezekiel is shown as the incorrigible boy of the school. He is a lazy, good-for-nothing vagabond. Favored with the chance to exercise his muscles twelve hours a day for a disinterested employer, he fails to appreciate his opportunity. He is diseased, degenerate. His sisters are without chast.i.ty, every one, polluting the good, pure white men about them. He is a rapist, and it is his criminal tendencies that are degrading America. The pale-faced ones of his family steal into white society, marry, and insinuate grasping, avaricious tendencies into the n.o.ble, generous men of white blood, causing them to cheat in business and to practise political corruption. In short there is nothing evil that Ezekiel is not at the bottom of. Sometimes, poor little chap, he tries to sniffle out a word, to say that his family is doing well, that he has an uncle who is buying a home, and a rich cousin in the undertaking business, but such extenuating circ.u.mstances receive scant attention, and we are not surprised to find, the cla.s.s dismissed, that Ezekiel and the millions whom he represents, are swiftly shuffled off the earth, victims of "disease, vice, and profound discouragement."

Now this is not an exaggerated picture of much that has recently been printed in newspaper and magazine, and does it not make us feel the paradox that if we are to judge the Negro fairly, we must not judge him at all, so little are we temperamentally capable of meeting the first requirement?

"My brother Saxons," says Matthew Arnold, "have a terrible way with them of wanting to improve everything but themselves off the face of the earth." And he adds, "I have no such pa.s.sion for finding nothing but myself everywhere." Among our American writers a few, like Arnold, do not care to find only themselves everywhere, and these have told us a different story of the American Negro. They are poets and writers of fiction, men and women who are happy in meeting and appreciating different types of human beings.[3] If these writers were to instruct us, they would say that we must individualize more when we think of the black people about us, must differentiate. That, too, we must remember that when we pa.s.s judgment, we need to know whether our own standard is the best, whether we may not have something to learn from the standards of others. Supposing Ezekiel is deliberate and slow to make changes or to take risks; are we who are "acceleration mad," who acquire heart disease hustling to catch trains, who mortgage our farms to buy automobiles, who seek continually new sensations, really better than he?

Is it not a matter of difference, just as we may each place in different order our desires, the one choosing struggle for power and the acc.u.mulation of wealth, the other preferring serenity and pleasure in the immediate present? And lastly, after having praised our own virtues and our own ideals, must we not beware that we do not blame the Negro when he adopts them, that we do not turn upon him and fiercely demand only servile virtues, the virtues that make him useful not to himself but to us?[4]

No one can talk for long of the Negro in America without propounding the all-embracing question, What will become of him, what will be the outcome of all this racial controversy? It is a daring person who attempts to answer. We, who have studied the Negro in New York, may perhaps venture to predict a little regarding his future in this city, his possible status in the later years of the century; whether he will lose in opportunity and social position, or whether he will advance in his struggle to be a man.

Looking upon the great population of the city, its varied races and nationalities, I confess that his outlook to me begins to be bright. New York is still to a quite remarkable extent dominated socially by its old American stock, its Dutch and Anglo-Saxon element. Few things strike the foreign visitor so forcibly as that despite its enormous European population, American society is h.o.m.ogeneous. But this is not likely to continue for very long. When the present demand for exhausting self-supporting work becomes less insistent, we shall feel in a deeper, more vital way the influence of our vast foreign life. With a million Jews and nearly a million Latin people, we cannot for long be held in the provincialism of to-day. I suspect that to many Europeans New York seems still a great overgrown village in "a nation of villagers,"

p.r.o.nouncing with narrow, dogmatic a.s.surance upon the deep unsolved problems of life. But in the future it may take on a larger, more cosmopolitan spirit. Its Italians may bring a finer feeling for beauty and wholesome gayety, its Jews may continue to add great intellectual achievements, and its people of African descent, perhaps always few in number, may show with happy spontaneity their best and highest gifts. If New York really becomes a cosmopolitan city, let us believe the Negro will bring to it his highest genius and will walk through it simply, quietly, unnoticed, a man among men.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Lucy Pratt, "Ezekiel."