The N tee + Fax aces Ameri Ca | Second Edition a With New For re a "HERBERT J. SELIGMANN EV 61.046 “R FLOAR ct LIBRARY =e WAR 22 1972° i“ BINDERS SLIPSBURG, Fy Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2022 with funding from Princeton Theological Seminary Library https://archive.org/details/negrofacesamericOOseli_0 THE NEG RO. FACES AMERICA By, Uf HERBERT J. SELIGMANN Formerly Me aig of the ie ae ffs of The New York Even and The New Repu blip Press or CLARENCE 8S. NATHAN. Inc, NEW YORK Ture Negro Faces AmmriIca Copyright 1920, by Herbert J. Seligmann Printed in the United States of America First printing, 1920 Second printing, 1924 Press of Clarence S. Nathan, Inc.. New York CONTENTS Tue Burnp Spor Way Race Riots? THE Sourn’s Conor PsycHosis . ANTHROPOLOGY AND Myta . Certain Errects or War . Tue Scapegoat or Crry Po.urrics . THe Necro In INDUSTRY THe AmMeErIcan ConGco “SocraL EQuaLity” AND SEX . Top New Necro. ....- - APPENDIX Goo} 5 cc ui cmisiel st atheetc ts pan» tem ey i : oh a | » on) ; Bea he 4a 1 tee I at EL Ue ED Vee : UE Poe? Sarg? hs s my] > Fe a ot ie y, TUB ae! bet 4 LiF ng 7" i " ; ati i . thee he, Te as Sh is Thies Whe d ‘en C42) eee hc. i bi, i> A ean } HA a nye ay a Hs t ¥ i ; 4 ‘ \ ' ' < ' ' ety ‘ : , ApS v ) 4,' et i { ‘ i P ia ‘ rl u ky ~ , i ‘ f Fs 4 Ah i hey t i i4 ‘ » \ t * car ats j i" { , inf are 1 is , ve ie ’ 4 fj - ’, P fi! wig od ‘ it yeas 7 Lele \ FOREWORD TO THE SECOND EDITION Deprive the Negro of his political rights and he establishes his citizenship in the republic of arts and letters. The last three years have produced an increasing volume of literature written by Negroes and by white men about the Negro. It is the national ferment rising to conscious expres- sion. Among novels of white authors we have had “Black and White” by H. A. Shands, an admir- able picture of the destructive effect of race hatred upon a white community in Texas; and “Birth- right” by T. S. Stribling, “‘Nigger’’ by Clement Wood, and “Holiday” by Waldo Frank. Jean Toomer’s “‘Cane,” a lyric, vivid presentation of moments in a young colored man’s experience, is one of the distinguished American books of 1923. There are besides, from colored authors, Miss Jessie Fauset’s recently published ““There Is Con- fusion,’ and Walter White’s “Fire in the Flint” announced for fall publication. it is an activity with parallels in French colonial literature, of which “Batouala” was a pioneer work. On the stage, too, the Negro has made himself felt, whether as the subject of dramas by Eugene O’Neill and others, or in the success of “Shuffle FOREWORD TO THE SECOND EDITION Along,”’ a musical comedy which, though bur- dened with white musical show conventions, dis- closed a brilliant vivacity on the stage to which New York was quick to respond. In these years the Negro tenor, Roland Hayes, has achieved an assured position as a singer of this country; and in April of 1924 Marion Anderson, contralto, and a colored baritone, Julius Bledsoe, made their debut in New York. Amongst critical literature by Negroes there have appeared «a number of important books, among them James Weldon Johnson’s “Anthology of American Negro Poetry,” with its stimulating introduction on the creative genius of the Negro; Carter G. Woodson’s ““The Negro In Our His- tory,’ and Benjamin Brawley’s “Social History of the American Negro.” Collections of Negro spirituals and plantation songs, among them Talley’s “Negro Folk Rhymes,’ have been numer- ous. The serious studies, on the problem of race relations, include the Chicago commission’s ex- haustive study of the Chicago race riot of 1919, and Frank Tannenbaum’s “Darker Phases of the South.” In the field of science, finally, the preeminence of a Negro was recognized last year, when Dr. George Washington Carver of Tuskegee, an ex- slave, was awarded the Spingarn Medal for his extraordinary discoveries in agricultural chemis- try, studies made in the South, adapting southern products, the sweet potato, peanut, etc., to many new uses; besides increasing soil fertility. FOREWORD TO THE SECOND EDITION In many forms, it seems, the Negro is establish- ing himself. ‘The continuance of the northward migration of colored people has justified the con- tention that race adjustments are not a sectional but a national concern. | This is reflected in the Negro’s new political emancipation from tradi- tional party allegiance. The diffusion of the Negro throughout the land, reinforces the inevit- able conclusion drawn from his emergence as sub- ject of art, as artist and scientist; that he is an American by every right. Journalists of the Madison Grant-Lothrop Stoddard stripe, who feed the fires of race and sectarian prejudice with spurious doctrines of race superiority—whether “Nordic” or other—are confronted with the plain facts of what the Negro has accomplished and is achieving. The problem and the Negro’s accomplishment are affecting not only this country but Europeans, as witness Mr. F. L. Schoell’s “‘La question des noirs aux Etats-Unis,” published in Paris. Well may European powers with colonial ‘possessions watch the American Negro closely—as Dr. Du Bois told us recently they were doing—for the Negro is proving that he must be reckoned with in any coming civilization. So far as the presentation in this book is con- cerned, the picture has not changed considerably. The migration northward, it is true, and the ac- tivities of the Commission on Interracial Cooper- ation, have somewhat improved conditions in southern states. Groups of white women increas- FOREWORD TO THE SECOND EDITION ingly have spoken out in condemnation of lynching as a “protection to white womanhood.” Debates in the House of Representatives during the effort to enact the Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill into law, made the Congress for a time a forum whence the facts were trumpeted to the people of the country. But the rigid white caste dominance of the South with its attendant brutalities is still unbroken; and the South continues not only to violate the federal Constitution but to boast of it. There are still peonage, lynching, disfranchisement, and denial of educational opportunity to colored child- ren, to soil our record. One triumph has occurred since I wrote the chapter entitled “‘The American Congo.” The supreme courts of the United States and of Ar- kansas have brought about the release of the 12 colored farmers sentenced to death in connection with the peonage riots of 1919—and with the liberation of scores of Negroes sentenced to long prison terms the terrorism described in that chapter has been dealt a blow before the nation and the world. The history of that victorious legal battle, lasting more than four years, is to be had in the annual reports of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, to whose labors the results are due. HY Foca May, 1924. FOREWORD I sHouLD apologize for so impressionistic a study as this of American color problems, if apologies were in order. But social science, such as it is, has evaded the subject. Much of what has been offered to lay readers calls to mind the acrid comment of Mr. Van Wyck Brooks that “‘to be a prophet in America it is not enough to be totally uninformed; one must also have a bland smile.” I should like to banish the bland smile from dis- cussion of American color problems and to chal- lenge the shabby indifference with which the wrongs of colored people in the United States are greeted. With this humane intent my expositions and my interpretations are perhaps complicated. If the result be a clearer field than has existed here- tofore for research and social invention, I shall consider the polemic elements in a work, which should have been undertaken by a trained sociolo- gist, to have been not wholly unjustified. In ex- tenuation for having written I have no plea except that of my observations, which must be judged FOREWORD accurate or inaccurate on their merits. For much of the material which made those observations possible I am indebted to the officers and to members of the staff of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. H. J. S. May 22, 1920. INTRODUCTION THE uniqueness and pathos of the Negro prob- lem in the United States rest in the fact that so few Americans recognize it as a problem. The average attitude is that a pretty good job is being made of a very trying situation; as to the occasion- al suggestion of possible tragic developments in the future, unless the whole matter is definitely taken in hand, a flippant and naive remark as to the valor of American manhood is usually deemed sufficient. Among the more serious agencies at work, aiming at a more enlightened attitude toward the race problem, may be mentioned the intensely race-conscious activity of DuBois and the broader and less emotionalized activity, on a national basis, of Spingarn. ‘To these must now be added the name of Mr. Herbert J. Seligmann, the young author of this volume. In close touch with the scientific and social facts, the author reviews the conclusions of an- thropologists with reference to alleged racial differences in capacity, analyzes the social and psychological factors at work in different parts of the country where the race question is acute, lays bare the sinister influence of selfish and callous individuals on whom must in large meas- INTRODUCTION ure rest the responsibility for the more tragic aspects of the Negro situation, and by his sym- pathetic and obviously open-minded attitude toward the future almost succeeds in creating a definitely optimistic mood. | It is to be hoped that this will not be the last of the author’s contributions, and that he will before long have the opportunity to deal with ever-increasing technical skill, with the several special aspects of the Negro problem which have long been awaiting an enthusiastic, able, and courageous protagonist. A. A. GOLDENWEISER. The New School for Social Research, New YorK. THE NEGRO FACES AMERICA a BY sO ¢ Wyte) yy ie. oe ’ ty ‘ i yi (4 4 i hs P yeh 4 Wt i} ti: yy 8 Mei iy det ? al ae ta ey Lette fe al. f 4! y, THE NEGRO FACES AMERICA I THE BLIND SPOT NTO the nerve fiber of the United States are woven strands which bind Negro and white Americans. The Civil War lacerated the nation’s nervous system. Slight occasion only is needed in order to recall suffering and hatred to memories still fiercely active. The condition of public feeling with regard to race is one of disease. The past lives on uncon- quered and poisons the present. Slavery is legally abolished, but neither white men nor Negro men are free of a constant preoccupa- tion with color. It is still possible to divide public opinion in the United States with re- gard to race problems on the artificial basis of geography, and this division is reinforced by tradition. A vast discussion goes on, punctu- ated by race riots and lynchings, thunderous with invective, in which the conversational 1 1 THE NEGRO FACES AMERICA tone of the scientist is almost inaudible. Many of the disputants’ feelings, passionately in- tense, colored with every sort of gossip, ru- mor, and half-truth, never find their way to frank expression in words. ‘The emotions that have been at one time or another fanned into flame as between white man and Negro; con- flicts over field, shop, and factory; pride of race and assertions of human prerogatives; the rights of man and the defense of womanhood; education, political contest, the home, public travel, have all become involved. Last of all, the emergence of the United States from her “splendid isolation” through war into the desolation of a crumbling world has been ac- companied by new and ominous twinges in the nerves of race relations. It would be difficult, if not impossible, to point to a single political or social problem of importance in the United States which does not debouch upon race and what by common consent is known as “the” race problem. School, home, factory, mine, farm, the polling-booth, the railway, are all made its vehicles. Every manifestation of the so- cial will hesitates at the inevitable race considerations. This welter has been lumped into a “prob- g THE BLIND SPOT lem”? whose symbol is black. Those who wear the burnished livery of the sun have been dehumanized and made into problems also—from twelve million to fifteen million problems, children in the cradle, school boys and girls,men and women. Negro Americans, on the other hand, fiercely resent being looked upon as a problem. They feel themselves to be a challenge that may well become retribu- tion. The challenge of the race problem con- fronts all Americans, white and black, North and South. Few Southerners but have learned the history of New England merchant cap- tains’ adventures in rum and slaves on the west coast of Africa or have forgotten the memorable carrying trade. The Negro is constantly reminded that what he does or fails to do is visited upon his race, and that he is his colored brother’s keeper. ‘The white man of the North, who might be inclined to lull himself into forgetfulness, wakes at the sound of shooting down his streets. He has heard echoes of race and the race problem in the speeches of United States Senators dis- cussing the League of Nations. Any one even slightly informed of American institutions, traditions, politics, art, society, has known that all the nation has been in the same boat 3 THE NEGRO FACES AMERICA with regard to the race problem. The United States has at various times been known abroad as the nation of jazz. It is not only the antagonisms of race that make the land con- scious of itself; its arts and its amusements have begun to feed this consciousness. In no activity is art so near to amusement and amusement so near art as in the peculiar rhythms of American Negro song. Unfortu- nately, before it was realized that Americans cannot afford to be cosmopolitan when they speak of commerce, and parochial when they think and speak of race, race relations had to be made into melodrama. In a world com- posed for the most part of colored races, fully embarked on new adventures toward au- tonomy, Americans had to be reminded not only by a great northward migration of colored people during the war, but by race riots, chiefly in 1919, that new movements and aspirations were stirring on their own con- tinent. It was blood-letting in the streets of American cities that accomplished anxious heart-searchings that were long overdue. A first step in an attempt upon the hates, distrusts, and preconceptions clustered about race 1s to separate and examine them. There is, in fact, no race problem in the United 4 THE BLIND SPOT States. There are a thousand problems with which race is more or less connected, fre- quently deliberately connected for an ulterior motive, in the absence of organic connection between race distinctions and the subject at issue. ‘To take these thousand problems of education, politics, industry, and lump them is to give over to emotion what should be the province of study and social invention. The process is best illustrated by two questions: ‘Do you want your daughter to marry a nigger?” is a Southern summation of and for white men. That is a reduction of the race problem to what many conceive to be its lowest and most fundamental terms. “Shall I be set apart like a leper, insulted, denied justice, and lynched because I am accused of wanting to marry the white man’s daughter?” retorts the Negro. “And shall the white man have children by my daughter and be pro- hibited by law from marrying her?” To leave race relations at this point is to create an impasse. There is no answer to either of the questions. If every time the Negro de- mands better housing and schooling for his children, justice in the courts, equal oppor- tunity for employment, he is to be denied them on the ground that it means race amal- 5 THE NEGRO FACES AMERICA gamation, there is nothing for it but to leave the issue to arms and to maintain a white army sufficient to keep the subject race in subjection. Fortunately there is much evi- dence that race problems are not merely biological, that they are susceptible to social invention and intelligent manipulation. Such evidence was presented as perhaps never be- fore in the race riots that occurred in the United States during and immediately after the end of the World War. If white Americans are minded to accept the evidence so crudely offered, they may be in a position to absorb consciously, as they have not done, the cultural contributions of their colored neighbors. Colored Americans may then be liberated from the pressure which no one realizes better than their own leaders is cramping their efforts, making them provincial and yet critically aloof, bitterly conscious of themselves as a hostile group in an ill-ordered community. Granted that there are distrusts and hostilities that come of superficial differences between men, like color, or like follicular structure of the hair differen- tiating kinky from straight, it is a savage thing for white men who call themselves civil- ized to let such primitive impulses determine 6 THE BLIND SPOT their conduct. Yet the history of race rela- tions in the United States, a history only as yet included in larger and more diffuse stud- ies, or suggested in biographies, essays, and memoirs, will show: the dominance of these primitive impulses in an attack upon the nation’s deepest-rooted and most pressing difficulties. To those who insist that racial antipathies must be allowed to determine race relations there are two replies: First, that to do so brings, as it has brought, violence. Second, that there is overwhelming evidence to show that race antipathy is not even skin deep. The decrease in illicit sex relations between white and colored people of the South, where intermarriage is illegal, is due not to instinctive aversion, but to the pressure of public opinion. When it used to be regarded as an enter- taining foible for white men of prominence | to maintain colored families without benefit of clergy, the practice was fairly common. Now that exposure of such relationships would ruin any aspirant’s political and social career, white men are more wary and illicit relationships of the sort are said to be de- creasing in number. A dangerous error of persons who insist on the validity of “racial | 7 THE NEGRO FACES AMERICA antipathy” is to assume that the exceptional conditions which prevail in the United States are typical. But nowhere else have economic considerations and race relations been joined as issues In armed conflict as in the Civil War. Of Latin America, Professor Shepherd tells us that “properly speaking there is no race question . . . because from the colonial period onward the ethnical elements have tended to become merged into a new divi- sion of mankind.” ! In the circumstances It is incumbent on the upholders of racial antipa- thy’s function in a democracy to show that it is operative and effective. Much of the bitterness that has befogged discussion of race problems has proceeded from observations honestly made in past years, but since discredited by anthropolo- gists. Many passionate Unionists, during the Civil War even, were convinced of an essential “‘racial inferiority’? of the Negro, and allowed their beliefs, on which investiga- tion has thrown new light, to erect obstacles to Negro participation in the state and in society. No less a contributor to our knowl- edge than Louis Agassiz wrote in 1863 that 1 William R. Shepherd, Latin America, p. 123. New York: Henry Holt & Co. 8 THE BLIND SPOT on Egyptian monuments “the Negroes are so represented as to show that in natural propensities and mental abilities they were pretty much what we find them at the present day — indolent, playful, sensual, imitative, subservient, good-natured, versatile, unsteady in their purpose, devoted, and affectionate. . . While Egypt and Carthage grew into powerful empires and attained a high degree of civilization; while in Babylon, Syria, and Greece were developed the highest culture of antiquity, the Negro race groped in bar- barism and never originated a regular organi- zation among themselves.” ‘The conclusions of Agassiz left him unprepared “to state what political privileges they are fit to enjoy now; though I have no hesitation in saying that they should be equal to other men before the law.” ! But since 1863 the sciences of men have become distrustful of “‘natural propensities”’; and even of races which have been most carefully studied anthropologists hesitate to say what are their racial characteristics. Furthermore, modern anthropology does not credit white men with having changed racially, 1 James Ford Rhodes, History of the United States, Vol. VI, Chap. XXXI, letter from Agassiz to Dr. Samuel G. Howe. 1863. Pp. 37.38. ; 9 THE NEGRO FACES AMERICA in so far as their natural propensities are concerned, since the Egyptian artificers made the monuments to which Agassiz refers. It would be as fair to deduce the disposition of present-day white men from monuments contemporaneous with those erected by the Pharaohs as to attach significance to the characters of ancient sculptured Negro faces. Comment of which that of Agassiz 1s typical still passes current, however, and is given the force of dogma by those predisposed to it. Many of the dogmas about the Negro which find astonishingly wide acceptance are of such general and inclusive nature that they can be immediately disposed of. For example, the one which has it that the Negro is by nature indolent and lacking in per- sistence, because he comes of a savage race and savages have those characteristics, is not borne out by observation. Savages of many tribes in various parts of the world display extraordinary pertinacity. With inferior im- plements they laboriously achieve results which the white man would hesitate to attempt because of the sustained and arduous labor involved. To cut down a tree with stone hatchets and then to make a canoe from the trunk by burning out the core is no task 10 THE BLIND SPOT for the indolent or the man of unsteady purpose. All of the beliefs held about the Negro by white men, more or less misinformed, constitute one of the main problems of race in the United States. It is a problem inten- sified rather than lessened by such means of communication as the press. Whether or not the Negro is what his bitterest enemy says of him hardly matters. If any body of public opinion can be organized upon mis- statements as a foundation, all public dis- cussion will be colored by the most obvious fabrications and absurdities. There is the utmost hesitance, for example, to trace to its lair the gossip from Civil War days which still lives on. The nation is expected, when enforcement of the Fifteenth Amendment to the United States Constitu- tion is suggested, to thrill with horror at the mere thought of “Negro domination” in the South. If Negroes were conceived to be human beings like many another human bemg, educable and educated, adapted to the processes of American government and appreciative that liberty for oneself implies liberty for others, Negro domination would have no immense terrors. But paint the Negro’s portrait as of a sullen black brute, 1 THE NEGRO FACES AMERICA criminal when he has opportunity to be, intent upon debasing the limpid intellectuality of the superior race by admixing his own base blood, desirous chiefly of dining with the white man and of marrying his daughter, incapable of intellectual development after he has reached the age of fourteen years, then you have laid the basis for assertions like that of Senator John Sharpe Williams, that race transcends the Constitution; and for sympathetic response to the statement that, come what will, no Negro will ever vote in a state like South Carolina, where in 1910 there were 835,843 Negroes and 679,161 white men. Of misinformation and terror it is difficult to say which has played the greater part in preventing a decent adjust- ment of the Negro’s claims to the ballot and to other prerogatives of citizenship. It is possible to take any group of a race, as 1s frequently done in the case of Negroes, and point to its members as uneducated, vagrant, unfit for civic responsibilities. But to erect the ignorance of men, to whom their state has denied education, into a threat of domination by the ignorant and the brutal is as fantastic as to say that ignorance is proof of the uselessness of education. Such 12 THE BLIND SPOT absurdities would hardly be the province of serious discussion of race relations if they did not frequently even yet form the body of discussion in many parts of the United States. Much water has run under many bridges since President Andrew Johnson and a Con- gress he antagonized bungled the matter of readjusting the seceded Southern states to the Union. But the South to-day still feeds upon the stories of carpet-bagger dominion, the “black and tan”’ Constitutional Convention of Mis- sissipp1 with its extravagance, and the finan- cial orgies of Louisiana and South Carolina legislatures. Historians of the first rank, even, have not escaped the tendency to touch lightly the pride and the humiliation of men who found their former slaves not only no longer their possessions—an economic loss— but were expected to tolerate disfranchise- ment while those abhorred men voted. The present generation is in danger of hardening reticence into doctrine, of making monuments of past sorrows and humiliations which bar the way to effective discussion and progress. If, as is asserted, carpet-bag rule and the participation of uneducated Negroes in state government resulted in tragic waste and 18 THE NEGRO FACES AMERICA terrible conditions of social disorganization, it must still be borne in mind that men blame what they oppose for all their mis- fortunes rather than trace those misfortunes dispassionately to their source. With all the suffering and the losses imposed upon the South—as upon any region in which war is waged—the offer of Congress to the Southern states, “compared with the settlement of any other notable civil war by a complete victor,’ as James Ford Rhodes points out, was “magnanimous in a high degree. It involved no executions, no confiscation of property, no imprisonments. . .. It vouch- safed to the Southern states the management of their own local affairs subject to the recog- nition of the civil rights of the Negroes, to the Freedmen’s Bureau limited in time, and to a temporary military occupation.” His- tory is irrelevant except as it continues to live on in the present. And Rhodes’s char- acterization of the attitude of the former slaveholders toward the Negro is significant in this discussion. Pointing out that the slaveholder did not hate the Negro, he continues, ““They did not believe that he could rise in the scale of civilization, nor did they wish him to rise, and they were indignant 14 THE BLIND SPOT at the mention of a possible political or social equality.” This attitude was made effective, according to the report which Carl Schurz sent the President. Of the people of the South, he said, that “while accepting the ‘abolition of slavery,’ they think that some species of serfdom, peonage, or other form of compulsory labor is not slavery and may be introduced without a violation of their pledge. Although formally admitting Negro testimony, they think that Negro testimony will be taken practically for what they themselves consider it ‘worth.’”?! The so-called “Black Codes” would have perpetuated what the moral judgment of the nation and the decision of arms had condemned. By act of the Mis- sissippi legislature of 1865 a poll tax of one dollar was imposed upon Negroes between the ages of eighteen and sixty. “Failure to pay the tax,” says Garner, “was to be deemed prima facie evidence of vagrancy, and it was made the duty of the sheriff to arrest the offender and hire him out for the amount of the tax plus the costs. .. . Civil officers were required to arrest freedmen who should run away from their contracts and carry them 1 James Ford Rhodes, History of the United States, Vol. V, Chap. XXX, p. 553. 15 THE NEGRO FACES AMERICA back to the place of employment.’ ! The Black Codes, says Mr. Paul Leland Haworth, ““were in part an honest effort to meet a difficult situation, but the old slavery attitude toward the Negro peered through most of them and gave proof that their framers did not yet realize that the old order had passed away.’ ? That old orders do not speedily pass away has been almost too often demon- strated, especially when the old order is so inwoven in current thought and utterance that its influence is to most persons imper- ceptible. To an extent that few Americans realize the old order persists. It is justified on the ground of a variety of necessities, and draws into its entanglements human and political relations of every sort. It can stand against law and legislation better than against pitiless statement and publication of fact. If the Black Codes throw light on the opposition to the Negro’s economic advance- ment which persists to this day, present talk of Negro domination is illumined by the report of the joint committee of Congress 1James Wilford Garner, Reconstruction in Mississippi, 1901. New York: Macmillan Company. Pp. 114, 115. 2 Paul Leland Haworth, Reconstruction and Union, 1865-1912, New York: Henry Holt & Co. P. 16. 16 THE BLIND SPOT into the activities of the Ku-Klux Klan. There is a wide divergence of opinion as to the justification for the outrages which were visited upon Unionists and Negro Republicans in the South. Justification is sought in the dangers from criminal vagrants, and the Ku-Klux bands who spread terror are com- pared with the posse comitatus of the West which rid the surrounding country of horse- thieves and gamblers. But the divergence of opinion extends even to Southerners. With- out imputing exclusively political motives to the white brotherhood, it is still possible to question the necessity for what was done, to inquire if fear rather than fact was not its motive impulse. Gen. J. B. Gordon, who commanded the left wing of Lee’s army at the surrender, was asked by the joint committee: ““Have the Negroes, as a general thing, behaved well since the war?” His reply was, “They have behaved so well that the remark is not uncommon in Georgia that no race on earth, relieved from servitude under such circumstances as they were, would have behaved so well.”’ ! | 1 Report of the Joint Select Committee to Inquire into the Condi- tion of Affairs in the late Insurrectionary States, 1872, Vol. I, p. 53. Washington: Government Printing Office. 2 17 THE NEGRO FACES AMERICA The faith which Negro slaves kept with their masters absent in the war, caring for white families, guarding white women and children, is proverbial. Under the circum- stances, the actions of the white South during Reconstruction are referable rather to emotion than to situations requiring drastic response. “The excuse that the whites were goaded into such outrages by the evils of Negro domination,” says Doctor Haworth of the Ku-Klux, “‘is true only in part, for the Klans displayed notable activity in opposing the new state constitutions and in the election of state officers before the blacks were yet in power.” ! “The five and a half million whites,” says Rhodes, “who were legislating for three and a half million blacks were under the influence of ‘the black terror’ which was not known and therefore not appreciated at the North. Many of the laws were neither right nor far- sighted, but they were natural.’ And then, as if to clinch the efficacy of the “‘terror” motive, he adds, “‘The enactments the least liberal as to civil rights and the most rigorous as to punishment of misdemeanors and crimes were those of South Carolina, Mississippi, and 1Op.cit., pp. 44, 45. 18 THE BLIND SPOT Louisiana, in which states the proportion of Negroes to white men was the largest.” ! Situations change, but the style of argumenta- tion on the race question seems forever to continue unchanged. In fifty-four years Ne- groes in the United States demonstrated that not only could they acquire the funda- mentals of education necessary to partici- pation in the processes of democratic govern- ment, but they have made progress that would be considered extraordinary when meas- ured by any standards. Against the initial opposition and disbelief expressed in the Black Codes and subsequent disfranchisement in the Southern states; against the repression most violently imposed by the Ku-Klux and still a part of the code of many white Americans, they have with relentless deter- mination built business enterprise, gone to the land and made it yield to them, fought their way by sheer work and talent into the closed ranks of the professions, furnished to the United States government district attorneys, consular and diplomatic officers, and against most determined opposition, military leaders and soldiers. In the commerce between cult- ured representatives of the Negro and white 1 Op. cit., Vol. V, Chap. XXX, p. 568. 19 THE NEGRO FACES AMERICA races, where the Negro is freed from the attitude of defense and awkward apprehen- sion, and the white man has progressed beyond the savage canon which says that strangers are enemies, a reciprocity becomes possible that has a slight zest of adventure and chal- lenges perception. From the point of view of such friendships, which the Southern code would bar, distinctions of color are as extrane- ous as those of nationality. It is at once tragic and laughable that the meanest white man whose universe is bounded by his local newspaper and his own hates should take precedence over the colored student and artist; 1t 1s one of those ironies of which the world is prodigal that by a rigid dogma enforced with all the conviction of inquisi- tion, bounds should be set to the work of the scientist, that people should be misinformed, hates perpetuated and introduced in new fields, creative spirits checked and frustrated. As the emphasis of the modern state shifts and inclines from political achievement to the task of freemg men from the imposition of the deadening task and the drudgery of overwork, there come to mind words spoken by Governor Humphreys of Mississippi in his inaugural of 1865: 20 THE BLIND SPOT “The Negro, he said, was free, whether the people liked it or not, but freedom did not make him a citizen or entitle him to political or social equality with white men.” ! In those places where the Negro has achieved political equality with white men, that free- dom still does not give him industrial equality. The Negro student of law, the university graduate, too often is free to vote in the same booth with the white man, but must seek employment as a Pullman porter. Of the denial of opportunity in the North which still prevails there is a survey in Miss Mary White Ovington’s Half a Man. Complications of political problems by passions rooted in race and sex are carried over into industry and for a time will make social organizations more difficult. Ii the prejudice ‘against the Negro’s voting and holding office is a matter of balance of power, the excuse being his alleged unfitness, the prejudice against him in industry will have to be met by extraordinary proof. Unfortunately, the problem of the Negro’s participation in political and civil life has seldom received precise formulation. It is admitted, though not universally, that he 1Garner. Op. cit., p. 111. 21 THE NEGRO FACES AMERICA should be the equal of the white man before the law. The mequality here is in part a corollary of the development of law and legal procedure as instruments of class. In part it is due to a habit of mind so inured to prej- udice that injustice and discrimination be- come routine. The demands of the political state differ from the demand of blind justice whose unseeing gaze supposedly rests neither on dark skin nor meager purse. But the political state and democracy especially are entitled to no further questions than: Can you read and write? Are you capable of un- derstanding the issues upon which, as an elec- tor, you will be required to pass? With these questions the peculiar biological disposition of the Negro has nothing to do. Granted that he might in his own environment, played upon by streams of culture—the arts, literature, political thought—evolve a civilization different from the one in which he is placed. The question re- mains: Can and does the colored citizen of the United States conform to the minimum require- ments of political democracy? If he can and does meet the test, which in effect asks him if he is a human being, by what justification is he deprived of his prerogative? To state the question is to answer it. Politics has no 22 THE BLIND SPOT concern, under the theory which is supposed to dominafe American procedure, with ques- tions properly referable to anthropologists. Those questions, be it said, involve measure- ments and observations more delicate than would be conceded by the persons who invoke the questions. In the play of political life, which has consisted in endeavoring to make recalcitrant fact fit the mold of men’s desire, the colored United States citizen has been the victim of extraneous issues, created and constantly invoked by those who in effect want to divorce the practice of American government from the affirmations upon which, presumptively, it rests. Such discussion seems academic when it is opposed to the brute realities with which American public opinion is faced. Colored citizens of the United States are still pub- licly burned alive at the stake. Much edi- torial discussion states rather than implies that colored people are less than beasts of the field. Many a Mississippian will affirm, as the Jackson, Mississippi, Daily News did on June 20, 1919, “‘that the door of hope is forever closed to the Negro, in so far as partic- ipation in politics is concerned, and there is no appeal from that decree.”’ 23 THE NEGRO FACES AMERICA That remark was accompanied by a thinly veiled threat against a propaganda conducted by the “Lincoln League of America”: “If this propaganda is to embrace the desire to vote, then it had better be located north of the Ohio River. It will not be safe in Mem- phis and its issuance of propaganda will be short-lived.” Propaganda embracing ‘“‘the desire to vote” unsafe south of the Ohio River? The question is one which, if pursued, would throw much light on tolerance south of the Ohio River, and the effect of that peculiar sort of tolerance on the right to hold opinions and express them elsewhere in the United States. It will be observed that the discrimination is categorical—color divides the country. It is an unfortunate division to perpetuate in political and social life. All human values are put in the scales that are tipped against the Negro. It is almost a commonplace of civilized dogma that the brutal man hurts himself more deeply than he does the object of his brutality. Yet this observation, typical of civilization, seems to have little practical effect on the conduct of many white Americans toward the Negro. Lynching, the public murder, 24 THE BLIND SPOT often with unspeakable mutilations and tort- ure, of colored men will be spoken of as though it occurred only in rural communities where social organization approximates that of frontiers throughout the world. But from this point of view a large portion of the United States still consists of frontier; its civilization is in the making. The country enjoyed the spectacle in July, 1919, of a Governor of Mississippi hesitating to prevent what was announced in glaring newspaper head-lines would be a burning at stake, on the ground that an overwhelming public sentiment in his state made him powerless. It matters little that the Negro was accused of “‘the one crime,” rape. Even if, as one colored news- paper affirmed was the case, the victim had been guilty of attracting the regard of, and not of assaulting, a white woman, the penalty would still have been death. For with the rope, the torch, the pistol, that Negro is answered who so much as gives occasion for believing he has said an intimate word to a white woman. The attitude which prompts a spirited defense of such barbarity will have to be removed from the United States before this country can pretend to civilization. One effective means of removing it 1s to show it 25 THE NEGRO FACES AMERICA as a corollary of class exploitation of the Negro. Garner! tells of the emigration which was urged by Confederate leaders, among them Gen. Sterling Price, who wrote from Mexico in December, 1865, “I pray to God that my fears for the future of the South may never be realized, but when the right is given to the Negro to bring suit, testify before the courts, and vote in elections, you all had better be in Mexico.” The objection is to the Negro’s being accorded “political and civil rights.” ‘“As soon as it became evident,” says Garner, “that free Negro labor could be made profitable, and that the admission of the Negro to the witness-stand and the jury- box would not be accompanied by the terrible results predicted, the emigration movement died out entirely.” If there was reason for saying that the emigration movement was a “delusion gotten up for the benefit of speculators,” fortified by a fear that free Negro labor could not be made “profitable,” there is every reason now for believing that race antagonisms are fo- mented by those who exploit the Negro. 10p. cit., p. 134. 26 THE BLIND SPOT > “The refusal of the legislature,” says Gar- ner, “to accord the Negro civil and political rights was, of course, due to prejudices and traditions which constituted a part of the very fabric of Southern society, and the sud- den banishment of which was not an easy task.” Any society which profits from the labor of its members, denies them social privileges like education, proper sanitation, and decent housing, and denies civil prerogatives such as legal redress, may be said to be founded upon exploitation of those individuals. The reports of the Commissioner of Education and the mortality rates for Negroes are a commentary on the attention given the race as a group in the Southern states. To allow any man to work and produce and not to accord him the benefits and the protection of the society which he makes possible is a crude form of exploitation which, as regards the Negro, is still the rule rather than the exception. W. D. Weatherford! has made quite clear the realization of a few progressive Southern white men that “if the Negro race is dying 1W. D. Weatherford, Present Forces in Negro Progress, 1912, pp. 73-74. New York: Association Press. 27 THE NEGRO FACES AMERICA rapidly, the white man is responsible. I mean,” he explains, emphatically, “in the country we give him so little training in the laws of hygiene that he does not know the art of self-preservation. I mean that we allow city landlords to build abominable huts in which the Negro has to live. We allow the streets in the section where he lives— even though within the city limits—to go without drainage, sewerage, paving, or even garbage service. We allow practices which no self-respecting community ought to allow, and all these things result in indifference, immorality, physical inability, and death for the Negro—and we are his murderers... . The truth is that in our day the criminal most to be feared is not the red-handed mur- derer or the pad-footed robber, but the men who, clothed in all their high respectability, sit in their fine offices and smile, while poor devils all around them are dying for want of protection from the greed of the money shark, the lust of the landlord, and the chicanery of the cheap politician.” The exploitation of the Negro in the United States is a procedure in which Northern and Southern white men have been jointly con- cerned. Every time a colored man is lynched 28 THE BLIND SPOT or burned at stake, the entire nation partic- ipates through the press. Its indifference is in reality active tolerance. “‘Only a Negro,”’ when it is applied to lynching, deadens spon- taneous protest when the landlord terrorizes the Negro farm tenant or drives Negro labor, or when the white labor-unionist discrimi- nates against the colored workman. ‘Only a Negro” becomes the excuse, the justifica- tion for every sort of injustice and oppression. Undertaken by individuals and groups of the community for their own gains, the ex- ploitation is justified socially, tolerated by the community and the state, erected finally into a dogma which, when it is not upheld and defended, becomes a commonplace. Where there is not actual slavery in the form of terrorism, social discrimination, and absence of the flimsiest pretense at justice, it is poten- tial in the indifference which prevails with regard to those practices. Freedom consists not in a law abolishing slavery. It consists in passionate and determined affirmation of the value of human lives as against the dis- position to exploit human beings. It is as absurd to justify wretched housing for the Negro by saying that better housing means race amalgamation as it is to repeat the 29 THE NEGRO FACES AMERICA unverified and unverifiable gossip about “‘race inferiority’? which was used to oppose the abolition of slavery in Civil War days. Any group which desires material advantage from the exploitation of another group always takes pains to characterize its victims as inferior. There have been times when Eng- lishmen were as assured of the inferiority of the Irish, as many a white man now is about the “nigger.”” The Turk is doubtless con- vinced of the inferiority of the Armenian; the Magyar and the Czech, the Rumanian and the Magyar, the Polish noble and the Jew, all furnish examples of oppres- sion justified by spurious “‘inferiorities.”’ Under cover of these appeals to contempt and passion the human relations which make civilization possible are _ ruthlessly violated. The United States has been paying the price for its misinformation about race rela- tions and its indifference to the administra- tion of those relations. It is not race riot so much as the spirit which is given rein and perpetuated in mob violence that is destruc- tive of civilization. For every riot which has occurred in consequence of the fomenting of race hatred half a dozen have smoldered, 30 THE BLIND SPOT ready to burst into conflagrations that would have consumed hundreds of lives. Many American cities have had all the elements provocative of race riot except the accident that brings about armed conflict. North and South may be divided by a difference in the intensity of feeling on race matters of their white and colored citizens, not by the incidence of riot. It is asserted on the one hand that what creates race problems in the South is the Negro’s absolute inferiority; on the other that race problems arise not by reason of the Negro’s inherent character, but only where he is numerous. In fact, economic conditions play their part, and the consequence of eco- nomic conflict is to attach to racial distinction what does not properly belong to it. Thus, Phillips quotes John Adams as having written in 1795: “Argument might have [had] some weight in the abolition of slavery in Massachusetts, but the real cause was the multiplication of laboring white people, who would no longer * suffer the rich to employ these sable rivals so much to their injury... . If the gentlemen had been permitted by law to hold slaves, the common white people would have put 31 if ¥ é nese THE NEGRO FACES AMERICA the Negroes to death, and their masters, too, perhaps.” ! The issue in Massachusetts, if we are to accept John Adams’s statement, was not the rights of man or any ethical consideration, nor was it the inferiority or superiority of the black workman, his physical or other char- acteristics. It was, just as it was during the steel strike late in 1919, a question of the use by employers of one group of working- people to undercut the wages of another group. Disturbances such as occurred at the steel-plants were called race riots because the participants happened to differ in color. This, as will be developed in subsequent chapters, has often been the case. The ex- pression of industrial, social, political conflict in “race riot” is only a crude demonstration of the fact that race hatred is a convenient and much-abused term used to describe desires far less unconscious and less defensible than race hatred is supposed to be. What the course will be of race relations in the United States it would be hazardous to venture to predict. It can be said only that the information upon which most per- ‘Ulrich Bonnell Phillips, American Negro Slavery, 1918. New York: D. Appleton & Co., p. 119. 32 THE BLIND SPOT sons form their judgments is inaccurate; that the forces which make for improved race relations have for the most part derived their support from a small number of individ- uals; and that almost every national social power, from the. press to the United States army, including such agents of the state as the Department of Justice, the House of Representatives, and the Senate, contrives increasingly to becloud the issues under- lying race conflict and to embitter feeling. On the other hand, the Negro’s new impor- tance to Northern industry, even as a weapon against white labor-unionism, will force white unionists, once they realize the folly of per- petuating the Negro workers’ enmity, to accept him as one of themselves. In that event race relations will more obviously go into the phase of class conflict, in which economic position rather than race will de- termine men’s attitudes. Meanwhile the point at which to arrest wasteful, violence- breeding conceptions is in childhood. To children prejudices are foreign and _ alien until they absorb them from parent or teacher. If ostracism were as swift and as certain for the white man who says what is demonstrably false about the Negro as for 3 33 THE NEGRO FACES AMERICA the man who upholds the Negro’s claims to citizenship, the vexing and vexed “‘race problem” would soon cease to complicate every plan and activity of United States citizens. inl WHY RACE RIOTS? PERSPECTIVE of recent American history reveals armed conflicts between white men and black, like beacon fires, serv- ing as illuminants and as warnings. The summer and early fall of 1919 especially were distinguished by outbreaks which seemed to many a portent of race war to come. In June bloody conflict raged in Longview, Texas, bursts of fire spat from houses in which colored men defended themselves from a white mob—only to have the houses later burned to the ground. In the same month the national capital became for three days the stamping-ground of rioters who were massed and did their will in the streets about the government buildings. The Negro resi- dence district was made a zone which white men entered at their peril. Chicago, Knox- ville, Omaha, Charleston, Elaine—the roster of names Is monotonously long; the casualty 35 THE NEGRO FACES AMERICA lists startling. Each disaster in which hate found a vent and more hate was born came upon all the country, except the community which suffered, as a strange and _ terrible phenomenon—so terrible a commentary on our civilization as to be forgotten almost as soon as it was past. Vaguely, it was attributed to Negro criminality, the quick spread of a brawl, or to “race hatred.” Southern editors jibed at Northern cities, and the North became aware of a “national problem.’ Awareness of that problem was intensified not so much by reason of the persons who died or were maimed as by the hatred displayed. It overran civil govern- ment and released primitive impulses in acts more bestial than the best or worst of savagery. Cynics as to democratic processes remark by way of comment that in the cycle of his- tory the crowd that howled down the streets of Rome under the late emperors is akin to to-day’s mob—that empire let blood in the circus, and now democracy turns its streets into a Colosseum. It is an easy way of dis- posing of the race question to tell the indi- vidual that the kingdom of God is within him and that governments are only protean mobs. In its counsel of despair, it parallels 36 WHY RACE RIOTS? the assertion of the amateur biologist who insists that Negro and white can never live peaceably side by side. Race relations must continue a hopeless problem, is the argument, for there is an “instinct” of race hatred; when a man’s color or physiognomy is exceed- ing strange to you, you must necessarily hate him. The instinct is asserted to be a counterpart to the tendency of races to pro- tect their “racial integrity.”’ In so far as American race riots are concerned, the ‘“‘in- stinct”’ of race hatred can be shown to be a fiction. The evidence from the race riots themselves, which have been caused by every sort of industrial and political conflict utterly unconnected with race relations, is borne out by the testimony of anthropologists, especially and chiefly Franz Boas. Race riots, it will be shown, are attributable to nothing so simple as an instinct or a tendency. It is true that the passion which fighting-men feel is individual, but the deter- minants of that passion are environmental and social and are subject to control. The South, which created additional problems for the War Department by reason of its hostility to the presence and the training of Negro troops, held it against French 37 THE NEGRO FACES AMERICA people that they welcomed those troops. That is a commentary on the relation of environment to the “instinct” of race hatred. What is summarized as an instinct is rather a complex of the forces at work in the nation. Few aspects of American life, industrial, political, social, but are in some way contrib- utory to the spirit which finds its release in mob clashes. Sometimes, lurking behind the name of race riot is discovered the plot- ting and counter-plotting of factions in a city government; almost always the evil spirit of propaganda; frequently, a contest between organized labor and employer; again, the activities of real-estate speculators. If government in this country is not to be rele- gated to hazardous intervals between mob impacts, the stimulants of race riots deserve examination and analysis. The background for race riots is furnished by what might be called the “color psychosis” of the South. It is in the South that the problem of the adjustment of white and Negro populations has been rooted, and the South suffers from a chronic illness that is the consequence of the attitude of most Southern white men toward the Negro. “Ts the Negro out of politics in the South?” 38 WHY RACE RIOTS? asked Dr. W. E. B. DuBois some years ago. ‘Has there been a single Southern campaign in the last twenty years in which the Negro has not figured as the prime issue?” The penalty for the social and political disabilities imposed upon the Negro has been that he is constantly in the minds of white people. From contempt, with its admixture of self- reproach, to hostility is a short step and an easy one. Hence the apprehension with which the white South looked upon the induction of Negroes into the army; hence, in the past, the quick resort to the rope, the pistol, the torch. That the South is a “‘white man’s country” is a dogma affirmed in practice not only oratorically and by editors, but with bullets and whip. It is expressed in lynch- ings and beatings, until the spirit of the Negro begins to change and he buys arms to defend himself. Then you have Long- view, with white men dead and Negro resi- dences burned. The Southern dogma colors the opinions of the rest of the country. Negroes’ houses were bombed in Chicago before the race riots of July, 1919. It is true that the influx of Negroes had caused real-estate values at first to become depreciated. But the bomb- 39 THE NEGRO FACES AMERICA ings would never have taken place if the Negro himself, as a human being, had not been depreciated in the esteem of his neighbors by a hostile propaganda. Mr. Carl Sand- burg! remarked that the Chicago police were inclined to believe the bombings the result rather of the “‘clash between two real-estate interests’” than of ‘“‘race feeling.” If the diagnosis was correct it stands as another demonstration of the play of other motives on the relations of the races. That the traditional attitude of the South has not been without effect was demonstrated in the Washington riots and in Omaha, where the mob outburst was not properly a race riot at all. In Washington, a propaganda con- ducted by several powerful newspapers, play- ing upon the sex antagonism of white men for black and accusing Negroes of assaults upon white women, inflamed hoodlums. In Omaha a similar propaganda undertaken from polit- ical motives brought about the lynching of a Negro suspect, the wrecking of the court- house, and an attempt upon the life of the mayor. The propaganda of a particular Western newspaper was credited by the chief Carl Sandburg, The Chicago Race Riots, 1919. New York Harcourt, Brace & Howe. 40 WHY RACE RIOTS? of police, the Omaha Ministerial Union, and indirectly by Maj.-Gen. Leonard Wood with contributing to, if not causing, the riot; and it was established in court that the man- aging editor of that newspaper had been born and bred in the South. Reports of both Washington and Omaha riots sent to Northern newspapers assumed acquiescence in the Southern doctrine that the Negro is a rapist. Given the background of belief and superstition about the Negro which emanates from the South, it is not difficult to foment antagonisms. | Of the Chicago riot which followed hard upon Washington, no one even hinted that assaults by Negroes were a cause. As Mr. Sandburg pointed out, a multiplicity of ele- ments brought about the tension which burst into violent conflict. But the main deter- minants here were (1) encroachments of mi- grant Negroes from the South upon white residence districts; (2) antagonism to non- union Negro workmen in the stockyards; (3) hostility arising from the part played by the Negro vote in electing an unpopular city administration. No insignificant part in fo- menting race hatred in Chicago was played by the Kenwood and Hyde Park Property 41 THE NEGRO FACES AMERICA Owners’ Association. Months, even, after the riots, in which thirty-eight persons were killed, this association was sending out appeals to “every white person, property-owner in Hyde Park” to “protect your property.” “Shall we sacrifice our property for a third of its value and run like rats from a burning ship,” said a notice, “or shall we put up a united front and keep Hyde Park desirable for ourselves?” And a letter sent out at the same time said, “We are a red-blood organization who say openly, we won't be driven out.” It is worthy of mention here that of two white men arrested in Chicago charged with bombing houses of Negroes and granted several extensions in court, one was a clerk in a real-estate concern. So obviously a cause of the Chicago violence was the antagonism to the expansion of the Negro residence district by migrants from the South, that the coroner proposed volun- tary segregation of the races in his report on the riots. Although municipal politics played their part in Chicago, the Omaha riot was most definitely and clearly inspired by antagonists of the city administration. Months before the lynching of William Brown, the local 42 WHY RACE RIOTS? branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People publicly called attention to the danger of the cam- paign conducted by this Western newspaper under its Southern editor. Every possible change was rung upon police inefficiency, and a main item in the campaign were alarmist reports of unpunished attacks of Negroes upon white women. The chief of police of Omaha, in a public statement, spoke of the ‘direct cause of riot” as being “‘the crystal- lization of mob spirit by vicious, unprincipled, and false newspaper criticisms of the police department.” He added that the lynching party which stormed the jail “was quickly joined by a large number of local gamblers, bootleggers, auto thieves, and other criminals, brought to the scene of the riot in taxis, furnished with liquor, and urged to acts of lawlessness of every description by the ‘gang,’ in hope that the present city administration (note that they tried to hang the mayor) might be overthrown and handed over to their organization.” “If the police administration is impotent to do its work,” he asks later, ‘““why have those who live on the vices of unfortunate women been so active in opposing the police department?” 43 THE NEGRO FACES AMERICA Major-General Wood, who was put in command of the federal troops called to Omaha, remarked, pointedly: “One of the first steps toward the preservation of law and order should be the suppression of a rotten press, where there is one. I am strong for the freedom of the press where it is honest and fearless, gives facts and not lies. Free speech, yes, but not free treason.”’ And on another occasion General Wood said, “‘With the ex- ception of a few men and one paper, you have a good city.” | Into the question whether the Omaha police department was or was not inefficient it is not at present necessary to go further than to say that the Omaha grand jury com- mented adversely on the conduct of the police forces during the strike. In any case, at the bottom of the Omaha lynching and of the riot which was diverted into attacks on unoffending colored men going about their business in the streets, was an embittered political controversy, having no connection with race and race hatred. Race hatred supplied the pretext upon which the political contest was brought violently to a focus. The part played by the Western newspaper and the Southern newspapers in fanning pas- 44 WHY RACE RIOTS? sion to a dangerous point recalls Atlanta, and the newspaper which, according to Prof. Albert Bushnell Hart, “by its lurid state- ment of facts, large admixture of lies, and use of ferocious head-lines, was one of the chief agents in bringing about the Atlanta riots of 190774 Once conceded that the Negro may be a decisive element in local politics—Chicago’s second ward, chiefly colored, having deter- mined the election of Mayor Thompson— it is obvious that feeling with regard to the Negro will be played upon by the press. Unfortunately, even the routine of the press associations and of the important dailies gives an alarmist tinge to news accounts concerning the Negro. It is a commonplace that his crimes and not his achievements are reported. Dean Pickens, of Morgan Col- lege, has made the point that if the complexion of red-haired men were invariably mentioned in head-lines in connection with crimes they committed, small boys would run from the red-haired as though from a nightmare. The presumption in the white press is almost invariably against the Negro. When feeling becomes tense, as it was in Washington or 1 Albert Bushnell Hart, The Southern South, p. 70. 45. THE NEGRO FACES AMERICA Chicago, even a slight exaggeration in the re- ports of crimes committed by Negroes, an increased emphasis upon the race of the offender, at once attracts attention. A de- liberate newspaper campaign to discredit the Negro cannot, under the circumstances, fail of dangerous success. Every such campaign is caught up and finds its echo in the colored and the white press throughout the country. What is known as “‘tension’”’—a state of the public mind among colored and white people distinctly perceptible, but not easily described—increased at the time of the riots in other cities than the riot centers. If there had been a disposition to bring about a clash between colored and white people, in New York City, let us say, the best time for the attempt would have been immediately after the Chicago troubles, early in August, 1919. A third determinant of race riots, besides political intrigue and the allied arts of the press, is the conflict between white union labor and unorganized Negroes. This was made clear in Chicago also, where the return of Negro workers to the stockyards had to be delayed after the riots had been stilled, because of the hostility of white workers. In fact, for months after the riots small 46 WHY RACE RIOTS? racial disturbances did occur. Officers of the Stockyards Labor Council have denied har- boring hostility to the Negro as Negro, and said they objected only to the presence of non-union men, Negro or white. In point of fact, the Negro has been and still is distrust- ful of unions. Too often he has had to go on strike only to find, when the time of settlement came, that the position he had left at the behest of his white comrades was filled by a white unionist. Throughout the South few Negroes are organized, and the Negro migrant carried his distrust of unions north with him. The entrance of some 50,000 Negroes into Chicago industry, then, was of itself enough to create tension. A careful estimate by the National League on Urban Conditions Among Negroes of the number placed there since the migration gave 40,000 men and 12,000 women. Thus, in the fall of 1919 the stockyards were employing some 8,000 Negroes; the Corn Products Refining Company had increased the number of the Negro employees from 30 to 800 in a year, and various foundries and car companies each employed from 200 to 500 Negroes. Numbers of establishments, accord- ing to the Urban League, endeavored to 47 THE NEGRO FACES AMERICA maintain a ratio among their employees of three whites to one Negro, whereas the ratio of Negroes to the population was as one to thirty. In consequence many of those estab- lishments ran foul of white unions and the Negro became a victim of the resulting hostility. During the steel strike numbers of Negroes were “‘imported,” as immigrants used to be induced to come to our industrial centers to underbid union labor. In Pitts- burgh it was estimated that 12,000 Negroes had been added to the labor supply. A story is told of the introduction of Negroes during the steel strike in one plant where they had not previously manned _blast-fur- naces. Confronted with the danger that the fires would go out, an officer of the company went to a Negro boarding-house and asked for twenty-five volunteers who thought they could operate the furnaces. He obtained the men, who were concealed in an engine-tender and driven to the mill. They kept the blast- furnaces going. Had the union enlisted their loyalty as the company was able to, the Negroes could not have been made an instru- ment for strike-breaking. For the Negro is no more a strike-breaker by nature than is the Czecho-Slovak or the Ukrainian. 48 WHY RACE RIOTS? Of late, as the industrial struggle has cen- tered not so much about wages as about the right to organize and the maintenance of the closed shop, inducements offered to Negroes have often become such as to make them con- tent to forgo the advantages of unionization. This condition played its part in Chicago and was accountable for the fury of the Irish- American stockyard workers adjacent to Chi- eago’s “black belt.” In this respect the Chicago riots resembled in type the East St. Louis massacre of 1917. Here, where six thousand Negroes were driven from their homes, and several hundred were hanged, shot, burned, or beaten, the importation by packing companies and other establishments of Negro strike-breakers directly contributed to the disaster. At the end of May, 1917, something over a month before the holocaust burst upon East St. Louis, six hundred union men, including striking employees of the Aluminum Ore Company, marched to the city hall to appeal against the importation of more Negroes, and these men were advised by the leaders, according to a correspondent of The St. Louis Globe-Democrat, “that in ease the authorities took no action they should resort to mob law.” The call to a 4 49 THE NEGRO FACES AMERICA meeting sent out by the Central Trades and Labor Union had spoken of the “influx of undesirable Negroes”? and had said, “‘ These men are being used to the detriment of our white citizens by some of the capitalists and a few of the real-estate owners.” Of the sickening horrors that occurred during the massacres of East St. Louis it is unnecessary to speak, except to point out that the display of hatred and passion had its root in an industrial problem. A very different set of industrial cireum- stances brought about the riots in Phillips County, Arkansas, in which some five white men and upward of twenty-five (some say more than one hundred) Negroes were killed. The Phillips County riots were widely heralded as the result of a “plot”? on the part of Negroes to “‘massacre whites”? and take over their land. Leadership in the “‘ Negro insur- rection”? was variously attributed to Robert Hill, a Negro, to O. 5S. Bratton, a white man arrested on a charge of murder and _ subse- quently released on his own recognizance under a purely formal indictment for “bar- ratry’’ or fomenting litigation, and to “‘The Progressive Farmers and Household Union of America,” an organization of Negro farmers of 50 WHY RACE RIOTS? Philltps County, Arkansas. Alarmist reports that fifty thousand rounds of ammunition had been found at a Negro school were later, less conspicuously, corrected when the principal explained they had been sent there for the military training of the students and had no connection whatever with the “insurrection.” Investigation disclosed that the price of cotton and the farm-tenant system characteristic not only of Phillips County, Arkansas, but of the entire Southern cotton belt, had played an important part in the Phillips County trou- bles. The conduct of the proceedings against the accused Negro farm tenants bore out charges of oppression. Although feeling in Phillips County was such that no fair trial could possibly have been held there, they were tried and convicted by a jury from which Negroes had been excluded. A dozen Negroes were sentenced to be electrocuted and more than sixty to terms of from one to twenty-one years in prison. As against these sentences it will be recalled that many more Negroes, at least five Negroes for every white man, had been killed in the riots. The situation was given an entirely different color from the atmosphere of “‘massacre”’ and “insurrection” created by the press when U. S. Bratton, 51 THE NEGRO FACES AMERICA white native of Arkansas and member of a law firm of Little Rock, published his state- ment. He asserted that settlements, state- ments of their accounts, had been denied to the Negro tenants, who invariably found themselves in debt to their landlords at the end of the year; that a debt system, amount- ing virtually to peonage, had led the Negroes to organize and employ a lawyer to obtain legal redress; and that the riots as well as the court proceedings were designed to ter- rorize the Negro farm tenants out of asking for what was their due. Mr. Bratton had been an Assistant United States Attorney and had vigorously prosecuted cases of peonage in that part of the state of Arkansas. ‘This summary of the clashes about Elaine, Arkansas, 1s necessarily brief. It will be amplified later. But the bare facts suffi- ciently indicate that despite all romantic accounts of “‘Negro Paul Reveres” and their “night riding’”—an absurdity to any one who knows the conditions in Arkansas and in the cotton-raising South—the price of cotton, land tenure, the system of plantation stores—all played their part in bringing on the Arkansas riots. It will be seen that ett social. and 52 WHY RACE RIOTS? economic motives were operative in Chicago, Omaha, East St. Louis, Arkansas, Washing- ton. It is to be assumed that riots so varied in their character suggest the variety of motive that plays about race antagonism. And yet the thought that arises, frequently unspoken, to people’s minds in connection with race disturbances is sex. The riots in Washington were universally attributed to “many attacks upon white women” by Negroes; the victim of the Omaha mob, which then tried to hang the mayor, was a Negro accused of assault upon a white woman; the storming of the jail in Knoxville, pre- ceding as it did general pillage and hood- lumism, had for its pretext the determination to lynch Maurice Mays, a Negro accused of assault. Of all preconceptions the one which fastens sexual crime to Negroes and unfail- ingly reverts to it in time of race conflict is most difficult to dispose of. The ground of misinformation is so firmly laid by a press whose campaign is based upon it that there is no hope of reaching newspaper readers with the facts. In effect, the mob spirit. excited by news of sexual crime differs in no essential from the mobbism which finds ex- pression in public hangings and burnings 53 THE NEGRO FACES AMERICA at stake in the Southern states. The public attitude toward race conflicts is deeply affected by the constant assertions of Southerners that lynching occurs for “one crime and one crime only”; so much so that it is found expedient, where a Negro man and a white woman have transgressed the Southern code, and the Negro has paid for it with his life, to accuse the Negro of having committed assault. The fact remains that, despite the propaganda which justifies mob murder of Negroes on the ground of the protection of white womanhood, sex antagonism was not the occasion of most of the race riots in this country. Sex jealousy has been used and exploited to foment hatred. Individual mob- bists have undoubtedly been moved by the passion of sex jealousy fostered not only by the newspapers, but by the utterances of Senators and Representatives in the national Capitol. To that extent the motives of the individual and of groups of the population may be roused, stimulated, used in the plans and purposes of political or business or labor leaders. It is hardly necessary to advert to the type of agitation conducted by a well- known Southern ex-Senator. Professor Hart has spoken of the “genius of Benjamin R. 54 WHY RACE RIOTS? Tillman in discovering that there are more voters of the lower class than of the upper, and that he who can get the lower class to vote together may always be re-elected.” Although, Professor Hart added, Tillman came of a respectable middle-class family, yet it was his part “to show himself the coarsest and most vituperative of poor whites.” It is a type of leadership still prevalent, still vocal in the Senate and House of Repre- sentatives, still effective in newspaper offices and from the platform in inflaming men to the point where mob conflict between the races becomes possible. Its theme is often social equality, and great pains are taken to confuse the public mind by identifying social equality with race mixture. If the white man is deluded by the talk about sex and Negro criminality, the Negro is not. Especially clear is the Negro bour- geoisie, a group unknown to most white peo- ple because it is part of what Doctor DuBois has called the “‘group economy” of race in this country. “It consists,” said Doctor DuBois, “of a co-operative arrangement of industry and service in a group which tends to make the group a closed economic circle, largely independent of surrounding whites. 55 THE NEGRO FACES AMERICA ... The Negro lawyer serves almost exclu- sively colored clientage, so that his existence is half forgotten by the white world.” A rough measure of the present power and importance of the Negro bourgeoisie is in the scope of its financial enterprises, its life- insurance companies, banking institutions, lodges, farms, residences, oil-wells. There is not space to speak of Negro colleges and schools, of the achievements of Negro lawyers and physicians and dentists, many of whom enjoy the best white patronage. The exist- ence of the Negro bourgeoisie, however, should be borne in mind as a determinant of the changed status of the Negro in the United States and of the Negro’s changed attitude toward race conflict. With the ex- ception of Arkansas, where the rural Negro was more or less at the mercy of the better armed and better organized white man, recent race riots have not been massacres. The Negro has shot to kill, to defend himself, and in a number of cases it was this cir- cumstance as much as the activity of local police or the intervention of troops which put an end to disorder. It would be exaggeration to ascribe to the — war the development of the “new Negro.” 56 WHY RACE RIOTS? Fifty years of such progress as has been accomplished by the Negro race in this country were bound to produce more and more individuals who would bitterly resent the disabilities imposed on them merely and only on the pretext of the color of their skins and by reason of the blind prejudices of white men. Knowing, as Negroes bitterly have come to know, that vengeance is visited upon those of their race who advance ma- terially, that it is not the Negro servant, but the Negro landowner, teacher, physician, who bears the brunt of race prejudice, that, in short, it 1s class and not race prejudice, that poisons race relations, Negroes were bound to develop race consciousness. This development went hand in hand with the economic “group economy” which Doctor DuBois has described. If the white press omits essential interpretations of race phenom- ena, the Negro press of this country does not. White men were amazed in Civil War times at the rapid dissemination of news by the “grapevine” system of communication among Negroes. Now, even where colored men are terrorized out of distributing or buying their newspapers and magazines, such as The Chicago Defender, with its large circulation, The Crisis, 57 THE NEGRO FACES AMERICA The Messenger, The New York Age, news spreads from those who do succeed in obtain- ing and reading these and many other publica- tions of the race. The function of the war, of the better jobs, higher cotton prices, and opportunity in the North which it brought, was not to create Negro leaders, business men, a class of intelligent and responsible citizens. They had come into being before the war. They represented all the social stratification of a highly developed capitalist state with their own means of communica- tion, of finance, and instruments of industry. What the war taught Negroes anew was that they must stand together on the basis of color. That the hard reminders had had their effect was demonstrated in the race clashes of 1919. Substantial Negroes, who had hoped to keep aloof from the inevitable clashes of hoodlums, found themselves forced to buy rifles and ammunition. They found themselves victimized by the reports given currency by politicians like Vardaman, that **Frenchwomen-ruined niggers’? were coming back to this country from France to make trouble and to disturb the supremacy of the white race. More than one such Negro, with business responsibilities and a family 58 WHY RACE RIOTS? that would have disposed him to peace, had peace been possible, had to consider fighting for his manhood, not with the ballot, but with the gun. That Negroes were insulted for no other reason than that they wore the uniform of the United States army, when on the one hand they were being taught to value democracy, and on the other hand were being taught to fight, could not fail to have its effect upon the attitude of the Negro toward the white mob. In effect, race riots represent a repudiation of civilization on the part of the group which initiates and tolerates them, as_ preferable to the tolerance on terms of equality of another group in that civilization. So long as the relations of Negro and white man in this country are conceived in the terms of the black man’s encroachment upon the white man’s sexual preserve there will be embittered hostility between the races. When the term “‘social equality” is divested of its special significance and is used literally to mean equal treatment for human _ beings on the basis of their common humanity, a long step will have been taken toward the elimination of the rope, the torch, and the gun from American government. When that 59 THE NEGRO FACES AMERICA new use of the term “social equality” has been initiated, it will be understood that, as Mr. Walter Lippmann has put it, we can give the Negro complete access to all the machinery of our common civilization and “allow him to live so that no Negro need dream of a white heaven and of bleached angels.” For the present, race riots and armed watching and waiting between the colored and white men in American cities show the soft and the rotten spots in our civilization. They show a press undisciplined to any sense of social responsibility; freedom not for the social inventor, but for the exploiter who plays his own tunes on passion; dark centers of poverty and crime which become the source of disorder that involves the best of both races in hostility and embittered misunder- standing. The way out is not to disarm the Negro and subject him to terrorism. That makes jailers and tyrants of white Americans. “‘ They won't sell us arms, but I notice they still sell us kerosene,’ was the remark of one colored man. To allow a race to advance economi- cally and socially, even against such obstacles as have confronted the Negro, and to tell 60 WHY RACE RIOTS? him to remain a hewer of wood and a drawer of water is not only to run counter to the American tradition, but it is to set one’s face toward achieving the impossible. Race riots have shown, as no other phenom- enon of race relations in the United States, the complexity and variety of problems that confront democracy. More and more it is coming to be realized that the Negro is demanding a new orientation in the United States. The road to that orientation lies through education, improved housing and sanitation, increased opportunity. To per- mit the manifestation on the part of white men of distaste or hostility to a colored skin to determine the approach to race relations, or to permit an embittered assertion of class superiority, with skin pigmentation as its distinguishing mark, is to court the anarchy and the savagery that prevail when dark men gather armed in their districts to repel the white mob and white mobs wander the streets, beating to insensibility or death any colored man who chances to be in their way. More than any agency in the country the press can contribute to the elimination of race riots. For the present, local government is ineffective to prevent armed clashes. Usu- 61 THE NEGRO FACES AMERICA ally, when that stage has been reached, the — assistance of the federal government and the intervention of either state or federal troops has to be invoked. Race riots are the con- fession of democracy’s failure to deal with one of the main problems of the modern world—‘‘the color line,” the relation of men of widely different races. Ultimately the prob- lem must be attacked and solved within nations. For no nation is a homogeneous racial entity. The discipline of tolerance will be found a necessary step in the mainte- nance of international relations. To permit the enmities of the races of the world to be embodied in miniature within the boundaries of the United States is to allow a menace to grow of the ruin of civilization as we con- celve it. It should be said of the present tension, with its outbursts of race conflicts, that it presents encouraging aspects. The Negro has a stake in American civilization and he is willing to fight for it. Of the quality of life and of freedom the hard lesson is being learned more deeply by the Negro than by any class in America. Truly for many Negroes life and freedom are a daily conquest. The patience and determination and courage which 62 WHY RACE RIOTS? go into the struggle are values that no nation can afford to spurn. Something of respect for an adversary who stands his ground is admixed with the shame and regret of white communities, like Washington, which have tolerated riot. If the result of race riots is, as some observers profess to see it, a new standing and a new recognition of the Negro, as well as a new realization and race pride on the part of Negroes themselves, the price of lives lost and suffering will not have been exacted altogether in vain. Il THE SOUTHS COLOR PSYCHOSIS AD Europeans and to many Northerners the attitude of the Southerner toward the Negro is a feast of unreason. Why will a Southerner of caste refer affectionately to the colored mammy who rocked him to sleep on her bosom, who told him the stories that colored the dawning of the world upon his mind? Why will the same gentleman regard it as an insult to be asked to ride in a Pullman car with that mammy’s son? Why must the colored boy, who has played with little white children, pass them in the street later with scarcely a nod of recognition from them? Why is it possible, at the mere mention of “social equality”’ of the races, to rouse such fury among Southern white people that many a colored man has paid with his life the unsupported accusation of having “‘preached”’ that equality? To attempt to answer these and similar questions offhand is to disregard 64 THE SOUTH’S COLOR. PSYCHOSIS the simple fact that a set of beliefs, which are emotionally unified and harmonized in the person who holds them, often seem extrav- -agantly incompatible and illogical to the critical observer. Unfortunately for the South, as well as for the nation, the conse- quence of the typical attitude toward race relations is not merely an effect of illogicality upon the observer. The effect is the con- tinuance in the South of a state of feeling closely akin to the hysteria which swept the rest of the nation in the time of the World War. The Southern white man puts certain questions beyond the bounds of discussion. If they are pressed he will fight rather than argue. What to many educated and culti- vated persons of the North seems arguable and debatable, subject to critical examina- tion and referable to scientific observation, to the Southern white man is as sacred as religious dogma and is defended as passion- ately. In matters of social and political con- cern, then, many Southern white men, not excluding Senators and editors of the most powerful newspapers, act upon beliefs as rigid and apparently unalterable as those which animated the hunters of schismatics 5) 65 THE NEGRO FACES AMERICA and heretics in the early Christian Church and during the Middle Ages. To such minds any attempt to swerve or convince them is a sort of treason; differences of opinion, like differences in faith, are subject to the arbitra- ment of force. The state of mind, common as it is to all classes, with whatever exceptions every class affords, determines, within the limits of the federal constitution, the laws of Southern states, the enforcement of those laws, and all the subtleties of human relations which are not reflected in court cases. The result is not a stable human society, but a balance of power. Where men may not pub- licly express dissent unless in fear of ostracism, where social standing and, in many communi- ties, tolerable existence depend upon very definitely prescribed orthodoxy, it is not assent, but power that determines the continuance of a social and industrial system based on that orthodoxy. The question of the Negro’s status in the South is quite generally disposed of by the assertion that the South is a “‘white man’s country” and must remain so. The position cannot be justified on grounds of any general political or social principles ap- plicable to human beings in general, without either specifically excepting the Negro as a 66 THE SOUTH’S COLOR PSYCHOSIS class from the application of those prin- ciples or declaring that he is not a human being. In practice both expedients are re- sorted to. But the Negro, where he acquires economic power, farms, Liberty bonds, oil-wells, thea- ters, education, medical and legal training, constantly narrows the field which may be interposed between himself and common humanity. It is very difficult to show that the man is not a human being who can ad- minister a three-thousand-acre farm; who can represent the United States as consul— with diplomatic responsibilities—in Latin America; who can perform difficult and delicate surgical operations; who writes poetry and music, conducts banks and life-insurance companies. When this denial of power be- comes a reductio ad absurdum on the basis of any test of ability or aptitude which may be advanced, the recourse is always to some- thing inherent in color. Every successful colored man, then, becomes living disproof of the 100-per-cent. Southerner’s theorem. The symptoms of the South’s state of mind are forms of repression which the North would resort to only under the threat of war and toward enemies or those believed to be 67 THE NEGRO FACES AMERICA sympathizing with and aiding the enemy.! There is no crime so heinous that it puts the offender in civilized communities outside the field of court procedure. In almost all coun- tries pretending to civilization the accused is entitled, as a matter of course, to trial to determine if he be guilty or not. That is not the case in many portions of the South. Public men, where they do not participate in the mob murder without trial of colored men, frequently condone or approve it. It is not uncommon for a newspaper editorial to urge that the exponent of an unpopular doctrine be “‘lynched.”’ Where else than in the Southern states of the United States would it be possible to remove a man from a railway train and beat him within an inch of his life because, being colored, he had dared to purchase Pullman accommodations for his two daughters, on their journey to a Southern university of standing? To all questions that may be raised as to the pro- priety of using force and threats of it in administering race relations, the reply is that by that means they are “‘settled.”’ The 1 This statement becomes theoretical since the hysterical outburst of radical baiting'and hunting of “Reds” which took place in Northern cities late in 1919 and early in 1920. 68 THE SOUTH’S COLOR PSYCHOSIS answer leaves much to be desired. The “settlement” is accompanied by serious dis- advantages. Uneasy lies the Southerner’s head whose ascendancy, like the king’s, de- pends upon repression. He is tied to a slavery worse almost than physical enslave- ment. His thoughts and preoccupations are chained to color and the problems race relations occasion. In commenting upon the riots at Vicksburg in 1874, Garner speaks of “the dread of Negro insurrection, which has at one time or another darkened every hearthstone in the South”’; rumors of upris- ing, massacre, plotting by Negroes, appeared in many newspapers during 1919, created intense anxiety, and provoked violent counter- measures. Agrarian and almost entirely eco- nomic as the origin of the disturbances in Arkansas proved to have been, the newspapers not only of the South, but throughout the nation, reflected the fear of revolt, massacre, and uprising which is never blotted entirely out of the mind of the white citizens of the South. Something more than analogy 1s possible between what the nation had to believe of the individual German when it was fighting Germany and what the South habitually 69 THE NEGRO FACES AMERICA believes of the Negro. It is difficult to generate enough enthusiasm to fight a man unless you hate him; and it is difficult to hate him unless you believe him better, in some respects, than yourself and are jealous, or conceive him utterly unworthy of human consideration, a beast, degenerate, criminal. In neither case are you in a position to discuss any questions which may be raised as to your relations to the individual. He is enemy, and hate or contempt is justified in wreaking itself upon him and upon his protagonists. Many Southerners protest they have intense and sympathetic affection for individual Negroes such as is not found elsewhere in the United States. That may or may not be true of certain individuals. But let the Negro insist, not upon affectionate condescen- sion, but upon his full prerogatives as a man and a citizen of the United States, and his most devoted Southern friends will relegate him to the position the “Hun” occupied during the war. That this condition of the public mind is due not to something inherent in race there are numerous indications. “No people,” says Bryce, ““was ever prouder than the Romans, nor with better reason. Yet, though in the : 70 THE SOUTH’S COLOR PSYCHOSIS fullness of their strength they held them- selves called by Fate to rule the world, they showed little contempt for their provincial subjects and no racial aversion.”’! In the ancient world, dark skin, as Bryce points out, excited little or no repulsion. His valuable survey suggests to him “that down till the days of the French Revolution there had been very little in any country, or at any time, of self-conscious racial feeling.” In those countries where race hatred has been thought to be most active as a motive, Bryce has shown the play of other forces: in Hun- gary and Transylvania it was “‘not till some time after the Napoleonic wars” that there began to be “talk of antagonism between Magyars, whether nobles or peasants, and the subject Slavs or Rumans.”’ It is never- theless a matter of record that the Magyar conceived the Slovaks as being not human. In Bohemia the quarrels of Czechs with the smaller German element “‘were not purely racial, but complicated with the religious disputes of the Hussites and the orthodox Catholics, and with scholastic disputes be- tween the Nominalists (mostly Germans) 1 Viscount Bryce, “Race Sentiment as a Factor in History.’ A lecture delivered before the University of London, February 22, 1915. 71 THE NEGRO FACES AMERICA and the Realist party, which embraced the bulk of Czech teachers and students.” As regards Ireland, “‘the sentiment of a separate Irish nationality seems to date from the strife, first over land and then over religion also, which began in the time of Elizabeth.” Yet although national feeling, ““even in the days of the United Irishmen and the rebellion of 1798 . . . was not distinctively racial,” it was treated as such by those Englishmen who proved that the Irish were inferior. Even to-day in the Western Hemisphere the very Negro who, it is believed by so many white Americans, occasions insurmountable obstacles to the maintenance of civilization, is absorbed and assimilated. In Brazil, whose Negro population is most numerous of the Latin-American republics, there is no race feeling against intermarriage. Persons of mixed blood are considered white and augment the white population. “‘The result is so far satisfactory,” says Bryce, “‘that there is little or no class friction. The white man does not lynch or maltreat the Negro; indeed, I have never heard of a lynching anywhere in South America except occasionally as part of a political convulsion. The Negro is not accused of insolence and does not seem to 72 THE SOUTH’S COLOR PSYCHOSIS develop any more criminality than naturally belongs to any ignorant population with loose notions of morality and property.” ! Three conclusions are suggested by Bryce from his South American observations, of which two are especially pertinent: The first that a race, the result of fusion of two parent stocks, is not necessarily inferior to the stronger parent or superior to the weaker; the second that “‘race repugnance is no such constant and permanent factor in human affairs as members of the Teutonic peoples are apt to assume. Instead of being, as we Teutons suppose, the rule in this matter, we are rather the exception,” and history as well as observation of our world seems to suggest “that since the phenomenon is not of the essence of human nature, it may not be always so strong among the Teutonic peoples as it is to-day.” The exceptional phenomenon, then, which invidiously distinguishes white Americans from Mohammedans, Chinese, the Latin races, is referable to something not essentially different from Jewish pride. If the Jew was born to teach, the Anglo-Saxon was born to rule. 1 James Bryce, South America, 1912. New York: The Macmillan Company. P. 480. 73 THE NEGRO FACES AMERICA On the blood of the Jew a religious inheritance had set a high price; on the blood of the Anglo-Saxon a political tradition of far more recent date, due in large measure to Norman heritage. Every race so distinguished, not biologically, but by its own cult of superiority, by its traditions and its self-interpretation, becomes to that degree an only child of God, spoiled and hated. Science has not meant the extinction of God; but it has sounded the doom of tribal and racial gods. And in science’s twilight of the gods lurks the promise of a brighter dawn in which races will be valued not by any scale of superior or inferior, quantitatively, but as different colors in civ- ilization, qualitatively different. If the effect of the Southerner’s assumptions is to make him believe the Negro to be racially inferior, he must resent proof to the contrary. It is proper for an inferior race to serve, to hew wood and draw water, to pick cotton, to work the farm. It is a reversal of the divine plan for the inferior to aspire to the seats of the mighty, to want to become postmasters in Southern towns, or aldermen. The divine plan is, like most plans, subject to interpreta- tion. It precludes voting for Negroes south of the Ohio River in the opinion of some. But 74 THE SOUTH’S COLOR PSYCHOSIS Atlanta, Georgia, is south of the Ohio River and Negroes of Atlanta vote for President of the United States. In 1919 the Negroes of Atlanta defeated at the polls a proposal to issue bonds because the white citizens had not agreed to equitable expenditure of the proceeds on Negro schools. This was also contrary to the divine plan. The insistence on divine plan, on dogma, always implies a process of rationalization. The believer maintains his point of view with desperate insistence, not by accumulating facts and reasoning from them. That process, the result of idle curiosity and dispassionate investigation, deals death to dogma. But rationalization is the process of interpreting the facts with reference to beliefs arrived at before the facts are examined. That is what poisons race relations in the South and in a measure affects the thinking of all Americans on the subject. The dogmatist on the sub- ject of race inferiority not only resists rea- soning, he resists fact. ‘The despised literary gentlemen of the North, sometimes known as ‘“nigger-lovers,” discuss the undebatable, or, as a Negro preacher once put it, unscrew the inscrutable. What are typical Southern attitudes toward 75 THE NEGRO FACES AMERICA the race question? ‘There are many, and a statement of each would be emphatically repu- diated by a large part of the population to which it was attributed. The cultivated Southern gentleman of the middle-class family which knows Negroes chiefly as house servants, as tradesmen, or even as artisans would dis- sent from the expressions used by the poor white. Historically the relations between the Negro and the ruling classes of the South have often been closer than those between the Southerner of lineage and culture and the poor white. In fact, the colored man, by the account of one of his own spokesmen, who acted as Speaker of the Mississippi legislature during Reconstruction days, preferred the aristocrat of the past. Even during slavery days their relations had been cordial and friendly. Women of the best white families had taught and cared for slaves, had con- ducted religious services, and had maintained personal relations which were regarded as their duty and were their pride. Where the white aristocrat had sometimes harbored a tolerance which came of affectionate con- descension and was reinforced by a realization of the material advantages of the enforced associations, the poor white felt antipathy 76 uaa ee Ee rl eee THE SOUTH’S COLOR PSYCHOSIS and jealousy. The Negro, in his eyes, was an instrument of oppression, a competitor in the industrial market, whose function it was to undercut the white artisan’s wages and to degrade him. It was not long after the introduction of slaves before plantation- owners learned that Negro slaves could be used as carpenters, shoemakers, plasterers, painters, blacksmiths, drivers of teams. “Al- though the slaves were not responsible for this condition,” says Lynch, “‘the fact that they were there and were thus utilized created a feeling of bitterness and antipathy on the part of the laboring whites which could not be easily wiped out.” ! The growth of large plantations, the relega- tion of the poor white to less fertile areas, the same conditions which have always mili- tated against immigration of foreigners to the South on any appreciable scale, have con- trived to keep this animosity alive. The poor white had this much compensation, however: ‘‘A white man was always a white man,’ as Prof. Albert Bushnell Hart points out, “‘and as long as slavery endured, the poorest and most ignorant of the white race 1 John R. Lynch, The Facts of Reconstruction, 1915. New York: Neale Publishing Co. P. 108. V7 THE NEGRO FACES AMERICA could always feel that he had something to look down upon, that he belonged to the lords of the soil. In the war he was blindly and unconsciously fighting for the caste of white men, and could not be brought to realize that slavery helped to keep him where he was, without education for his children, without opportunities for employment, without that ambition for white paint and green blinds which has done so much to raise the Northern settler.” ! The Civil War has been aptly called a rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight. The motives, then, for antagonism between poor white and Negro have been among the most powerful common to human beings— jealousy and pride. In industry the white artisan hated the Negro as a favored com- petitor. This hatred was bound to find ex- pression in the fields in which the white man was favored—the political and social. It was a form of compensation that, poor as the white might be, he was yet kin with the owner and master of slaves, could afford to despise and insult the black man. Strange as it may seem, on the ground that they were extrav- agantly administered and meant heavy taxa- 1 The Southern South, p. 40. 78 THE SOUTH’S COLOR PSYCHOSIS tion—surely no sore burden on the poor whites as a class—the introduction of public schools during Reconstruction days met with the most determined opposition, even from the poor whites themselves, whose status the schools might have been expected to im- prove. Fifty or sixty years is a short space in which to change feelings so deeply ingrained as hatred for black men on the part of poor whites. Even yet it is operative and plays its part in preventing absorption of colored workmen in white unions, introducing new industrial problems and the hates and dis- trusts consequent upon mutual exclusiveness. The white man’s feelings of superiority are still played upon for political profit and are linked, by processes which might be examined in detail, to the most powerful of man’s impulses and emotions—those related to sex. “The last fatal campaign in Georgia which culminated in the Atlanta massacre,” says Doctor DuBois, “was an attempt, fathered by conscienceless politicians, to arouse the prejudices of the rank and file of white laborers and farmers against the growing competition of black men, so that black men by law could be forced back to subserviency and serfdom. It succeeded so well that smoldering hate 79 THE NEGRO FACES AMERICA burst into flaming murder before the politi- cians could curb it.” In the South, the chivalresque notions of human intercourse, with their picturesqueness and their disadvantages, survived longer than elsewhere in the United States. The beauties of the old régime are sometimes overdrawn, just as the historian of the court functions of the time of Louis XIV often forgets to describe the odors which, in the absence of sanitation, almost caused the stoutest ambassadors and perfumed, bewigged, buckled, and laced gentle- men to faint. Like any civilization whose eyes are blinded to the substructure of misery and desolation upon which it rests, its charms are canonized. The divine right of kings has never been affirmed with more certitude than the right of the white aristocrat of the South to rule and to profit from the enforced servitude of the black man. The chivalresque tradition which was exemplified in the ideal animating the aristocratic South no less than in the romances of medieval Europe em- phasized not inquiry, service, labor such as is the badge of distinction among scientists. It rewarded personal prowess, sportsmanship, courtesy, and, in matters intellectual, con- formity. Properly cultivated, the chivalresque 80 THE SOUTH’S COLOR PSYCHOSIS tradition has much to give to this country, perhaps through such Southern gentlemen as preserve appreciation of values less tem- poral than those measurable by the dollar or by popular acclaim. But on the relations of the races the effect of the chivalresque traditions was almost uniformly bad. It led men to assert as permanent and immutable a system whose consequences they did not stop to examine. It transmuted to romance, faith, nobility, and a whole dictionary of appealing terms attitudes grounded in base pecuniary considerations. Toward any in- vestigation into its own foundations it per- petuated an attitude of condemnation as toward sacrilege. ‘““Nothing was so prejudicial to slavery,” says Professor Hart, “as the attempt to silence the Northern abolitionists; for a social system that was too fragile to be dis- cussed was doomed to be broken.” It is too often assumed that the Civil War broke that system. It survives still, subject to a subtler process of disintegration than war, leaving its last records not only in memoirs and mellow reminiscences, but in blood, violence, terror, and hatred. Many Southern white men of the laboring classes 6 81 THE NEGRO FACES AMERICA deplore the industrial policy of divide et impera, which is used to exploit both them and colored men. So do many Southern white men of the possessing and industrial classes deplore the exploitation of the Negro politically and industrially. The attitude of these dissenters, however, is not typical of preponderant groups; and it is not vocal. An iron con- formity is still clamped upon the South and holds to its standards him who would remain a part of its political, social, and industrial activities. Before the Civil War white aristocrats were never put in any position in which they might be forced into competition with the Negro. Manual labor finds no place in a chivalresque tradition. It was the part of the white man to administer, to superintend, to plan. Further, manual labor was made a social criterion which even now, in more advanced civilizations, except in the case of the sculptor, painter, musician, and crafts- man, divides the “upper” from the “lower” classes. To a degree the distinction survives in that the prejudice against the colored man is now directed against those who “rise” above the socially inferior laboring class. This social prejudice plays easily into the 82 THE SOUTH’S COLOR PSYCHOSIS industrial need for a large supply of cheap labor. “In the last analysis,’ remarks Professor Hart, “most of the objections to Negro education come down to the assertion that it puts the race above the calling whereunto God hath appointed it. The argument goes back to the unconscious presumption that the Negro was created to work the white man’s field, and that even a little knowledge makes him ambitious to do something else.” There is even yet a large body of opinion in the South which would deny the Negro education, not only because ignorance makes him a source of exploitable labor, but because it debars him from participation in_ the prerogative of the superior race—ruling by political processes. When it was undreamed of that colored men might vote, participation was not a class distinction. As soon as the vote and office-holding became an_ issue, it became as sacred as a dogma that the Negro was unfit politically, as that industrially he was unfit for anything but the rougher and more arduous kinds of labor. But the economic advance of the Negro, the growth of a Negro bourgeoisie, has threatened these assumptions. With wealth and the advan- 83 b THE NEGRO FACES AMERICA tages that wealth brings at his command, many a Negro threatens the white man’s complacence. It is against the advancing, prosperous colored man, therefore, that fury is frequently directed. If a Negro, outside of the few large Southern cities, presumes to dress well, he is known as a “dude nigger.” Many a Negro in large Southern cities, even, is confronted daily with signs informing him that dogs and Negroes are not permitted in the public parks, thus making it clear that, whatever his competency, education, and sensibilities, racial barriers are immutable. “The whole South,’ remarks Professor Hart, “‘is full of evidence not so much that the whites think the Negroes inferior, as that they think it necessary to fix upon him some public evidence of inferiority, lest mistakes be made.” “Tt not infrequently happens,” says the Department of Labor’s report on Negro Migration in 1916-17, “that the Negro who obviously makes money and gets out of debt is dismissed from the plantation, a common expression being that as soon as a Negro begins to make money he is no longer of any account.” The evidence as to the humiliations to 84 THE SOUTH’S COLOR PSYCHOSIS which Negroes are subject in large cities of the South is so voluminous that it is hardly necessary to adduce it here. The quality of treatment accorded respectable colored people, however, is suggested in another pas- sage from the Labor Department’s report: “Most of the larger Southern cities not only exclude Negroes from their fine parks, but make little or no provisions for the recreation of the colored people. Harassing, humiliat- ing ‘Jim-Crow’ regulations surround Negroes on every hand and invite unnecessarily severe and annoying treatment from the public and even from public servants. To avoid trouble, interference, and even injury, Negroes must practise eternal vigilance in the streets and on common carriers. The possibilities of trouble are greatly increased if the colored men are accompanied by their wives, daugh- ters, or sweethearts. For then they are more likely to resent violently any rough treatment or abuse, and insulting language, whether addressed directly to them or to the women. Colored women understand this so well that they frequently take up their own defense rather than expose their male friends to the danger of protecting them.” It will be appreciated to what extent 85 THE NEGRO FACES AMERICA absolutist distinctions are made on the basis of color, fortified by traditional, mdustrial, and political considerations, when it is remem- bered that the chivalresque culture demands the protection of womanhood from violence, from insult, even, at the cost of life itself. Subject to forces of attrition, the white man’s scheme of the South constitutes: a closed system, intolerable to the manhood and womanhood—provided manhood and woman- hood be conceded to them—of any individuals of whatever race who are subjected to it. Fortified as it is by dogma, exempt from examination or discussion, the imposition of it remains, as has been stated, a matter of force majeure. The nation is no longer divided against itself to the extent that it was before the Civil War. But the South is divided against itself to an extent known only to Southerners, especially Southern colored people. The World War, which might have been expected to override waves of dissent, to engulf in an emotional flood of national sentiment all but irreconcilable dif- ferences, intensified the strains and stresses which race feeling has imposed upon the social structure of the Southern states. The War Department encountered fierce resistance to 86 THE SOUTH’S COLOR PSYCHOSIS the quartering of colored troops in Southern communities, in fact to the enlistment and training of colored men; although the draft boards, from which colored men were excluded, discriminated in the matter of exemptions and certifications against Negroes. The net effect upon white Americans of the service of Negroes in the armies of the United States was a dangerous increase in bitterness and resentment, a determination to “show the nigger’? when he returned from service that the equality to some extent imposed by the United States government in its military arm was not to affect political or social relations when the emergency had passed. A balance in any such social system is pos- sible only when the victims of that system are thoroughly cowed. Meanwhile that bal- ance is represented by peculiar phrases and attitudes not common to the rest of the country. Thus to be “‘radical’’ elsewhere than in the South has signified general politi- cal liberalism of a sort more or less extreme. In the South to be radical has meant to most people an intolerable attitude on race relations, to wit, a tendency to espouse the cause of the “nigger.” The word “radical” took on its significance in Civil] War and Reconstruction 87 THE NEGRO FACES AMERICA days. Because the board of trustees of a Mississippi educational institution included ‘‘carpet-baggers”’ and native Republicans, The Jackson Clarion voiced its abhorrence in these terms: “The people have revolted at the thought of placing their sons under radical patronage, when the country abounds with schools uncor- rupted by radical influences.” ! Times have changed. Republicans else- where may be reactionary, stand-pat, conser- vative, or any shade between; but in many communities of the South to vote Republican is to “vote nigger’ and be a dangerous or contemptible “radical,” unworthy of asso- ciation with decent people. It will readily be seen that thereby certain bounds are set to that flexibility of political discussion which is supposed to be characteristic of so experi- mental and undogmatic a form of government as democracy. Only the most thundering acceptance of current claptrap about Negro inferiority, the most obvious pandering to prejudice, hatred, and apprehension, will meet the public mind dominated by such obsessions as have been suggested. When the balance of that system is disturbed, because it is sus- 1 Quoted by Garner, op. cit., footnote p. 368. 88 THE SOUTH’S COLOR PSYCHOSIS pected that victims may resist, political discussion enters a more violent phase, in which all white men become a tribe massed and gathered to fight for its very existence. There are, of course, those who stand above and aside from the battle. But they are not elected to the Senate or the House of Repre- sentatives; they write few editorials. Violence in the South is not only always imminent; it is actual. “‘Lawlessness,” says Professor Hart—and hundreds of other ob- servers will corroborate him—‘‘is the plague of the South. . . . The number of homicides and mob murders is not so serious as the continual appeals to violence by editors and public men who are accepted as leaders by a large minority and sometimes a majority of the white people.”” “The commonest form of terror,” he says later, “is lynching, a deliberate attempt to keep the race down by occasionally killing Negroes sometimes because they are dreadful criminals, fre- quently because they are bad, or loose- tongued, or influential, or are acquiring property, or otherwise irritate the whites.” Many a white Southerner will confess in casual conversation that he believes it neces- sary to “lynch a nigger” now and then in 89 THE NEGRO FACES AMERICA order that they may be kept in their place; and what that place is in the white South- erner’s estimation has been sufficiently indi- cated. Meanwhile the bonds of personal relationship which used to mitigate the hos- tility of races under slavery, when white aristocrat and colored people had points of contact, are steadily being dissolved. Testi- mony is almost unanimous to the effect that — i tt ee the gap between white people of standing — and Negroes is being widened. In Reconstruction days the white men and — women who came from New England to teach in Negro schools were unable to obtain board or lodging in the homes of Southern white people and often had to live with Negroes. ‘Living upon terms of social equal- ity with the Negroes was a grave offense in the eyes of the Southern white,” says Garner, “and was sure to cost the offender whatever respect the community might other- wise have entertained for him.” Of the teachers who were whipped and the schools burned, of the teacher who was charged by the Ku-Klux with “associating with Negroes in preference to the white race as God ordained,” the trace survives. Then it was deemed a disgrace for a woman to teach 90 THE SOUTH’S COLOR PSYCHOSIS in a Negro school. It is a practice scarcely more honored now than it was, although the insult which accompanied has to some degree fallen away. But the breach between white and colored people remains and widens. Of the colored man’s attitude toward the social system of the South, the white man who “knows the nigger’ is almost entirely ignorant. Few if any white men ever enter Negro homes; they do not attend Negro meetings or churches. They are not spoken to frankly, except by certain colored men who are terrorized or bribed into syco- phancy. Few Negroes trust the Southern white man; and although their commerce may be amiable and peaceable, it is seldom the white man knows what the Negro is thinking. But the Negro knows the white man’s thoughts. He knows because members of his race are in constant association with and attendance upon the whites; and, too, there are many Negroes of so light complexion that unless they are personally known they are indistinguishable from white men. That circumstance, in the event of tension and imminent violence, makes the maintenance of secrecy a matter of difficulty for the “superior” race. 91 THE NEGRO FACES AMERICA It will be noticed that the discussion of race relations at this point becomes a con- sideration of a potential state of war. That condition becomes more and more a menace as the Negro advances, as he decides that he will fight and die rather. than be lynched, Jim-Crowed, terrorized, browbeaten, and robbed. It was not until the migration reached its height and Southern plantations and farms were being seriously depleted of labor that a process of soul-searching began which found its echo even in editorials of the Negro’s bitterest antagonists among the press. Said The Daily News, of Jackson, Mississippi: “We allow petty officers of the law to harass and oppress our Negro labor, mulcting them of their wages, assessing stiff fines on trivial charges, and often they are convicted on charges which if preferred against a white man would result in prompt acquittal.” ! The Charlotte Observer remarked that “the real thing that started the exodus lies at the door of the farmer and is easily within his power to remedy. The Negro must be given better homes and better surroundings. Fifty years after the Civil War he should not be expected to be content with the same con- 1 Quoted in Negro Migration in 1916-17. U.S. Labor Department. 92 THE SOUTH’S COLOR PSYCHOSIS ditions which existed at the close of the Walone The white South’s first response to the migration was, as might have been expected, violent resentment. It is not much good being a superior race if the inferior race moves away. Doubtless the beginning of the north- ward movement was assisted by the ravages of the boll weevil in the Southwest. But the migration continued and grew and it was borne in upon the most unobservant that among the many motives which prompted Negroes to leave the South was a desire for educational opportunities for their children, for human and kindly intercourse, for citizenship and the vote. Blind as the nation had been to the failure of attempts to “settle”? problems of race relations by violence and terrorism, murder and lynching, mitigated if at all by condescension, it could not disregard the evidence presented by the northward migra- tion and by the imminence of armed violence in many Southern cities. When it is deemed necessary, in anticipation of the use of re- volvers and guns, to stop selling them to Negroes, although the sale to whites goes on unchecked, it would seem the part of wisdom 1 Quoted in Negro Migration in 1916-17. U.S. Labor Department. 93 THE NEGRO FACES AMERICA to delve into the resentment which turns finally for redress not to courts, but to desperate self-defense. Conditions such as_ prevailed in 1919 were doubtless in part due to that vague diffusion of discontent and assertions aftér the war known as “unrest.” But any such system as prevailed and as still prevails in the Southern states of the United States was bound to arrive at a point where read- justment, either by intelligent direction or in violent conflict, would be unavoidable. It may be thought that the characteriza- tion of relations between the races in the South bears unduly upon the shortcomings of the Southern white man. In point of fact, it would be difficult to exaggerate the ignorance and brutality characteristic of many rural communities. ‘There are, of course, vast num- bers of middle-class and cultivated people very much like similar populations elsewhere. But they are perforce silent and acquiescent in the system of thought which is formed, as I have suggested, by inheritance, by eco- nomic and political considerations, and is made effectual not by the people who deplore excesses, but by the many who are wanting in civilized inhibitions. Rarely, unless by such a catastrophe as the Atlanta riots, is 94 THE SOUTH’S COLOR PSYCHOSIS the better sentiment of citizens roused to the self-assertion which makes repetition of such horrors impossible. Even now there are persons who foresee progressive degeneration of good will among white and black men, not because elsewhere in the world there is lacking demonstration that a modus vivendi could be devised, but because most of the effective forces playing upon race relations at present, such as the press, public discussion, industrial policy, are contriving to intensify and make more malignant the disease of hatred and misunderstanding which afflicts those relations. “Tf the South would keep the Negro and have him satisfied,” says Mr. W. T. B. Williams in his report to the Labor Depart- ment, “she must give more constructive thought than has been her custom to the Negro and his welfare.” Decent wages, schools—‘‘miserable make- shifts,” The Jackson Daily News called the rural schools for Negro children—high schools, of which now there are almost none for Negro boys and girls; abatement of “Jim Crow” legislation and restrictions; safety from mob violence and lynching; “protection against constant irritation, insult, and abuse 95 THE NEGRO FACES AMERICA for no reason other than that he is a black man’’—these are among the prescriptions for more tolerable conditions in the Southern states. If it were not for the color of the victims, the nation would rise in anger and abhorrence and see to it that the conditions which now prevail were remedied. If it is found troublesome or even unprofitable to attempt a cure of such deep-seated malignancy as the ignorance and prejudice and _ self- seeking which controls the relations of the races in this country, it will in the long run be found more unprofitable and troublesome not to attempt-a cure. The South’s “color psychosis,” as I have called the instability and excitability of the public mind with reference to race, affects its entire life. It affects the choice of men to represent the South in the councils of the nation and thereby affects national policy for mternal and on foreign affairs. “The experiment,” said Nathaniel South- gate Shaler, “of combining in a democratic so- ciety, In somewhere near equal numbers, two such widely separated races as the Aryans and Negroes has never been essayed. . . . It may as well be confessed that a true democracy, social as well as political, is impossible in 96 THE SOUTH’S COLOR PSYCHOSIS such conditions, and that any adjustment which may be effected must have many of the qualities of an oligarchy.” 1 There is no objection to the frank recognition of such a proposition as Doctor Shaler put forward and to acquiescence in it. But to proclaim democracy; to shout freedom and equality, and actually to maintain that pseudo- democracy by oppression and terrorism which compares favorably with the best efforts of the Turk in Armenia; to divorce the lan- guage of the politician and statesman so completely from the terms of the life he represents that every intelligent and enlight- ened man must smile at his pronouncements; to make integrity impossible because the South and the nation cannot face the deep division within itseli—is to poison at their source the aspirations of the men whose faith looks forward to societies untainted by vio- lence. 7 1 The Neighbor, p. 180. IV ANTHROPOLOGY AND MYTH “J NEXORABLE doctrines on the inequality of human beings,’ says Jean Finot, adorned with a scientific veneer, are multi- plied to infinity. . . . Despotic, cruel, and full of confidence in their laws, the creators and partizans of all these doctrines do their best to impose them as dogmas of salvation and infallible guides for humanity.” ! The methods used to establish the inequalities of which M. Finot speaks are almost as various as the doctrines themselves. Some persons proceed from a dissected human brain and a set of scales to draw conclusions applicable to the politics of a fifth-rate village. Others, their senses sharpened to a degree which would make any dog envious, detect race by odor, as the hero of Shaw’s Pygmalion could detect nativity by accent. Given an absence of €6 1 Jean Finot, Race Prejudice, translated by Florence Wade-Evans, 1907. New York: E. P. Dutton Co. 98 ANTHROPOLOGY AND MYTH irony and self-criticism in a community as orthodox as the Southern states, the most extreme statements find adherents. Asser- tions which, isolated from their context of assumptions and passions, would be sharply challenged become commonplace. In any attempt upon race relations, then, before it is useful to suggest plans and procedure, it is necessary to clear away the intellectual rub- bish that prevents even formulation of the problems. Especially is this true of the relations of Negro and white in the United States; for mm no civilized community in the world are more amazing assumptions current and confident affirmations made with less solid knowledge to which to refer them. M. Finot himself speaks of the effect which the ideas of Gobineau exercised upon the philosophy of modern Germany. It was Gobineau, it will be recalled, who discovered that the best of civilization is due to the Germanic races, whose blood sustains modern society. He it was who as much as any one man popularized in Germany the notion of superior and inferior races. “It has been found,” remarks M. Finot, in comment, “‘that Gobinism displayed too much pessimism in the face of too little knowledge, and that even 99 THE NEGRO FACES AMERICA its ideas of barbarous and inferior peoples lacked clearness.” But the United States has its own Gobinism which takes over almost bodily his style of argumentation and the assertions made later, under the influence of Darwinism, by Lapouge. If universal his- tory becomes “reduced to the history of the variations of cerebral structures,’ many Americans would extend the process from history to prophecy and predict the future on the basis of cranial measurements. In this connection there is more than passing interest in M. Finot’s statement that for Gobineau “it is only a matter of bringing his contributions to the great struggle against equality and the emancipation of the prole- tariat.”” For the American Negro has been the proletarian par excellence, and the motives to keep him a proletarian have been strong. It is the evangelist, animated by religious fervor and race patriotism, that presents the extreme of opinion on race matters in this country. He is as devoted to racial purities and ascendancies as was ever an apologist of Teutonic hegemony. The evangelist’s state- ments, unlike the propositions hazarded by scientists, have the advantage of being true for all time. No apology is necessary, there- 100 ANTHROPOLOGY AND MYTH fore, for offermg mm evidence the remarkable information with which an American regaled the world so long ago as 1905 in The Color line, whose subtitle reads, “A Brief in Behalf of the Unborn.” The author, William Benjamin Smith, wrote from Tulane Uni- versity. It is safe to say that the beliefs and opinions he voiced at a time when the South was smarting under the sting of the invitation to dine extended by President Roosevelt to Booker T. Washington still pass current. What is the main issue for Mr. Smith? How does he attack the manifold questions of judicial procedure, office-holding, trade- unionism, municipal politics, housing? His answer is simple: The South “stands for blood, for the ‘continuous germ-plasma’ of the Caucasian race.’ ‘That Northerners and Europeans may choose their associates and such table company as they please is con- ceded. But “in the South the color Ime must be drawn firmly, unflinchingly—with- out deviation or interruption of any kind whatever.” There is a tu quoque for the Northern capitalists, who could hardly main- tain that their “ruling corporate powers” are even barely just “‘toward the poor and hum- ble, in the administration of the important 101 THE NEGRO FACES AMERICA industrial trusts which God has so wisely placed in their hands. They are giants, and it is in the nature of giants to press hard.” Comparatively, then, the South is sinless. On the merits of her own case the South “is entirely right in keeping open at all times, at all hazards, and at all sacrifices an impas- sable social chasm between black and white. This she must do in behalf of her blood, her essence, of the stock of her Caucasian race.” The alternative is mingling of the races. “It would make itself felt at first most strongly in the lower strata of the white population; but it would soon invade the middle and menace insidiously the very up- permost.... As arace, the Southern Caucasian would be irreversibly doomed.” Mr. Smith is so quotable that restraint is necessary in appro- priating his eloquence. ‘No other conceiv- able disaster,’ he says of race mixture, “that might befall the South could, for an instant, compare with such miscegenation within her borders. Flood and fire, fever and famine, and the sword—even ignorance, indolence, and carpet-baggery—she may endure and conquer while her blood remains pure; but once taint the wellspring of her life, and all is lost—even honor itself. It is this immediate 102 ANTHROPOLOGY AND MYTH jewel of her soul that the South watches with such a dragon eye, that she guards with more than vestal vigilance, with a circle of perpetual fire.’ As guardians of the South’s vestal fire, one is tempted to offer Mr. Smith volunteers from the three million to five million mulattoes of the United States. “It may not be that she is conscious of the immeasurable interests at stake or of the real grounds of her roused antagonism,” adds Mr. Smith, very truly; “but the instinct itself is none the less just and true and the natural bulwark of her life.’ Upon what is the justice of the South’s instinct, as formu- lated by Mr. Smith, based? Simply upon the proof “craniologically and by six thousand years of planet-wide experimentation”? that “the Negro is markedly inferior to the Cau- casian,’ and that “‘the commingling of inferior with superior must lower the higher.” Edu- cation and civilization are “‘weak and beggarly as over against the almightiness of heredity, the omniprepotence of the transmitted germ- plasma. Let this be amerced of its ancient rights, let it be shorn in some measure of its exceeding weight of ancestral glory, let it be soiled in its millennial purity and integrity, and nothing shall ever restore it; neither 103 THE NEGRO FACES AMERICA wealth, nor culture, nor science, nor art, nor morality, nor religion—not even Christianity itself. Here and there these may redeem some happy, spontaneous variation, some lucky freak of nature; but nothing more— they can never redeem the race. If this be not true, then history and biology are alike false; then Darwin and Spencer, Haeckel and Weismann, Mendel and Pearson, have lived and labored in vain.” What has any con- troversialist to offer against Mr. Smith who would bet the world’s history and science on the truth of his assertions, who asserts that a man “may sin against himself and others, and even against his God, but not against the germ-plasma of his kind’? For “if the best Negro in the land is the social equal of the best Caucasian, then it will be hard to prove that the lowest white is higher that the lowest black,’? and Darwin will have lived in vain. Lest it be thought that few will follow Mr. Smith, who, like Ibsen’s Brand, seeks “alles oder nichts’? among the inacces- sible pinnacles of absolutism, he assures the reader that he has “some acquaintance with some of the best elements of the Southern society, some of the best representatives in nearly all the walks of Southern life”; and 104 ANTHROPOLOGY AND MYTH those elements will never waver a_ hair’s- breadth from “uncompromising hostility to any and every form of social equality between the races.” Mr. Smith’s doctrine, then, is resolved into an. affirmation, for which he offers proofs, that the Negro is “inferior” biologically to such an extent that no education or civiliza- tion could bring him up to white men’s standards; that racial mixture would result in disastrous “mongrelization”’ of the “‘Cau- casian race,” and that an inevitable corollary of the abatement of rigid barriers against “social equality’ of the Negro and members of the “ Caucasian race”’ is this mongrelization. Therefore, let the Negro remain on the planta- tion and in “personal and occasional service . .. where his abilities may be most naturally and most profitably employed.” The Negro, like other “backward peoples,”’ has “‘neither part nor parcel in the future history of man.” Race transcends individual considerations. “There is a personal and even a social morality that may easily become racially immoral.” In the interests, therefore, of the purity of Caucasian germ-plasma, the Negro is to be denied the, for him, useless higher education, is to be used as a plantation laborer or ser- 105 : THE NEGRO FACES AMERICA vant, and to be allowed, at the convenience of nature, to become extinct. Even mem- bership in labor unions will never be accorded the “negroid,” and the plans of Booker Washington and “his Northern multimill- ionaire admirers” for making skilled laborers of the Negro cannot succeed in solving the race problem. Another Southerner, of a different stamp, who has accepted the postulate of modern anthropology that all races of men are kin, and therefore hesitates to ally himself with Mr. Smith and the angels, contributes first- hand description of the Negro pertinent to this discussion. The Negro, Mr. W. D. Weatherford! finds, is lacking in self-control. “To him the future has little meaning.” This lack is explained by the exigencies of the tropical climate under whose influence the race had dwelt. Likewise the native of the tropics is led into a form of sexual indulgence “which seems nothing less than terrible.’ “The next weakness of Negro character which stands out prominently is superstition.” Fear of angry spirits, “‘of the power of the fetish,’ have to a degree “become so deeply ingrained in the nature 1 Opus cit. 106 ANTHROPOLOGY AND MYTH of the Negro that the slaves and their de- scendants have never been able to shake themselves free from its terrible hold.” Hence the Negro’s conservatism. Cruelty to ani- mals and dependents is another character which Mr. Weatherford lists: “Some of the horrible practices of punishment in Africa would be unbelievable did not one have the thought of the Inquisition, St. Bartholomew, the French Revolution, ever staring him in the face.’ The portrait of the Negro is then still further elaborated with vanity and conceit, wordiness, and absence of the power of initiative. As against these shadows, Mr. Weatherford opposes the Negro’s fidelity. **In fact,’ he remarks, “if I must deal with a shiftless man, I believe I would take my chances on a trifling Negro rather than a triflmg white man. Not a few of the man- agers and owners of large plantations have expressed to me this same preference.” That fidelity which was supposed to be char- acteristic of the old-time Negro survives in the “new Negro.” “They may lie or steal in petty ways,” says Mr. Weatherford, “but even the poorest type of Negro rarely betrays a specific trust.” Add to these traits gratitude, generosity, the absence of 107 THE NEGRO FACES AMERICA malice or a revengeful spirit, kindliness, a sense of humor, religious sense, love of music, “souls responsive to the truest of musical rhythm.” “What if the race is not the most brilhiantly intellectual? What if they are lacking in self-mastery? What if there is often a lack of industry and thrift?—here is a catalogue of race traits enough to make any race happy, virtuous, useful, and even great.” Thus two Southerners. It will perhaps be advantageous to list the characteristics of the Negro as they are given by Messrs. Smith and Weatherford, and to add to them such as will be recognized as passing current. The list might read some- what as follows: Against 1, “Inferior” biologically as indicated by abnormal length of arm, progna- thism, brain weight and structure, eye coloration, flat nose, protruding lips, large zygmotic arches, size of face, thick cranium. weak lower limbs, skin col- or, “‘woolly” hair, thick epidermis, “‘rancid’”’ skin odor, cranial sutures. 2. “‘Inferior”’ culturally. 108 I Or P 09 OO = For . Faithful. . Kindly. . Generous. . Musical (rhythmically). . Grateful. . Religious. . Lacking in malice and venge- fulness. . Physically stronger than white. . More resistant to certain diseases and even immune to some. 3. Intellectual ANTHROPOLOGY AND MYTH Against development stops at puberty. 4, Immoral (sexually). 5. Uncontrolled as to appetites and subject to “primal emotions” such as fear, anger, jealousy, self-ex- altation, self-depreciation, sorrow. 6. Superstitious. 7. Cruel. 8. Conceited and wordy. 9. Shiftless and lazy. . Lacking in initiative. . Deficient in reasoning power and the “higher” intel- lectual processes. . Criminal. For 10. Adaptable to climate and culture. 11. Persistent, racially. There are in addition certain qualities commonly ascribed to the person of color possessing some admixture of white blood. Thus: Against 1. “Degenerate” and “inferior hybrids.” 2. Physically inferior, succumbs easily to disease: lung ca- pacity inferior, respira- tion rate unfavorable, never passes sixty years, _ “cachetic.” 3. Listless. 4. Criminal. 5. Short-lived. 6. Fails to propagate. 7..°*Scrofulous, consumptive.” For 1. Abler than the Negro of pure blood. 2. More intelligent than the Negro. 3. Sturdier physically than the Negro. 4. Furnishes leaders of the race. 109 THE NEGRO FACES AMERICA It will be noticed that many of the char- acters attributed to Negroes and to colored men with white ancestry are contradictory. The whole field of science, from biology and chemistry to anthropology and archeology, is involved in the discussion, to which the explorer, the historian, the psychologist, the violently partizan amateur contribute their beclouding pronouncements. The tendency among men of science is to narrow the dis- cussion from such all-inclusive terms as “‘racial inferiority’? to measurement of specific apti- tudes and characters. The characters of race and culture are so many and so com- plex that it Is assuming omniscience to pretend to sum up all available knowledge, and, having weighed and balanced, to give final judgment for or against a race. Modern anthropology takes the position, with respect to the Negro, as with other races, that no direct connection between physical characters and abilities or aptitudes has yet been estab- lished. Thus even the possession of large or small brains does not postulate genius or stupidity. The measurement of ability by intelligence tests is still in its infancy, a development of, at most, the last twenty years. Nearly if not all of the scientific 110 ANTHROPOLOGY AND MYTH experiment such as the measurement of intel- ligence of school-children, of Negro and white races, 1s subject to criticism of method, in that it has not been possible to isolate racial characters from influence of social environ- ment. In an account of one experimental study of white and colored children of Richmond and Newport News, Virginia, the author, George Oscar Furguson,! ably summarizes the conflicting views entertained by scientists the world over. “One would not be far wrong,’ he remarks, “‘in saying that all of the experimental work done on the psychology of the Negro prior to 1900 is of practically negative value.” And yet, on the basis of observations, often partial, more often un- critical and inaccurate, even scientists have dogmatized. Le Bon divided the races of man into four classes, of which the “‘superior,”’ as contrasted with “primitive,” “inferior,”’ and “average,” consisted in the “‘Indo-Euro- peans.” G. Stanley Hall has repeated the assertion that the Negro’s development is partially arrested at puberty. Bean, in his studies at Baltimore, came to the conclusion 1The Psychology of the Negro: An Experimental Study, Archives of Psychology, April, 1916. 111 THE NEGRO FACES AMERICA that not only the anterior association center of the Negro’s brain, but the whole frontal lobe, was smaller than the white man’s, whereas Mall three years later concluded that “with the present crude methods the statement that the Negro brain approaches the fetal or simian brain more than does the white is entirely unwarranted.” Mall, according to Furguson, “‘reviews the previous work done in this field, and comes to the final conclusion that there is no valid evidence to show significant brain differences from the point of view of race, sex, or genius.” From the point of view of the psychologist, Woodworth in 1910, reviewing the work of himself, Rivers, Bruner, Ranke, McDougall, and Myers, said of the status of race psychology: “One thing the psychologist can assert with no fear of error. Starting from the various mental processes which are recognized in his text-books, he can assert that each of these processes is within the capabilities of every group of mankind. . . . Statements to the contrary, denying to the savage powers of reasoning, or abstraction, or inhibition, or foresight, can be dismissed at once. If the savage differs in these respects from the civilized man, the difference is one of degree, 112 ANTHROPOLOGY AND MYTH and consistent with overlapping of savage and civilized individuals.”’ It is therefore hazardous, to say the least, in the present state of information about race and race characters, to assert that any race is inferior and “incapable” of any known state of culture. Furguson’s tests led him to conclude that “the average performance of the colored population of this country in such intellectual work as that represented by the tests of higher capacity appears to be only about three-fourths as efficient as the performance of whites of the same amount of training,’ and he indicated his belief that the difference is probably wider than the tests show. On the other hand, his tests did not show “the relative ability of colored and white persons in the intelligent handling of concrete materials.” But just what the tests do show is open to question. “It is always difficult to state just what mental function is experimented upon by a given test,” says Furguson. “The various traits so overlap and are so dependent upon one another in their action that no one trait can be completely isolated.”” Meanwhile, it can be said without fear of contradiction that there is no authentic corroboration for the 8 113 THE NEGRO FACES AMERICA following statements: (1) that the mulatto is less hardy than the “pure” Negro; (2) that any difference in brain structure between white and Negro has been indubitably estab- lished; (3) that the Negro’s mental growth “comes to a comparative standstill at adoles- cence”; (4) that the “relative merits” of pure Negroes and mulattoes have been defi- nitely made known. Although most of the writers who “have dealt with the problem of the relative mental ability of the white and the Negro take the view that the Negro is inferior,” yet, says Furguson later, “it is . probably true that there are more people who believe in racial mental equality than the reviews would indicate; equality is taken for granted, as in the greater part of our school system and in our political life. [?] . .. It may be said that the main conclusion one may draw from a study of the literature bearing upon the mental side of our race question is that we have taken a step toward its solution, but that the problem is still a problem.” Despite the doubts and the lacunze which modern science must confess to in its data on race, popular discussion, never especially responsive to subtleties, always seizes on 114 ANTHROPOLOGY AND MYTH extreme statements and makes general prin- ciples of them of universal application. In this feast of generalities, contradiction, en- throned as a sort of piratical goddess, sits and smiles evilly on folly. Thus the Negro, branded as lazy and shiftless, was credited by Shaler! with an ability to toil, “such, indeed, as has never elsewhere appeared in a primitive people.’ This same scientist, who asserts that in the Negro “the state-building capacities are lacking,” is flatly contradicted by the observations of anthropologists, sum- marized by Lowie to the effect that the Negroes of Africa “‘are conspicuous for their ability to form large and powerful political states. ... If we contrast Negro culture on the average not with the highest products of Dutch, Danish, or Swiss culture,” he con- tinues, ““but with the status of the illiterate peasant communities in not a few regions of Europe, the difference will hardly be so great as to suggest any far-reaching hereditary causes.” 2? Furthermore, Mr. Lowie suggests, the determination of racial potentialities by the psychologist does not solve the problems 1 Nathaniel Southgate Shaler, The Neighbor. p. 156. 2 Robert H. Lowie, Culture and Ethnology, 1917. New York: Douglas C. McMuririe. 115 THE NEGRO FACES AMERICA of culture: “‘Even if an ultimate investiga- tion should definitely fix the cultural limits to which a given race is hereditarily subject, such information could not solve the far more specific problem why the same people a few hundred years earlier were a horde of bar- barians and a few hundred years later formed a highly civilized community.” When the investigator has carefully accumulated and collated more facts than are available at present, his conclusions may become useful for American society. Meanwhile it is the sort of argumentation that appears in Mr. Smith’s book which, imperceptibly almost, influences discussion of the Negro and of race relations even in the North. One may smile at any one’s presuming to know what relative positions God has ordained for Negro and white man. But given a_ conviction on the part of one-third or one-half of the white group of a nation that a colored group is inferior; bolster that conviction with con- stant reference in the press to colored people as criminals; treat the Negro in public dis- cussion as an amalgam of joke and calamity— and no public will be disposed to analyze the social conditions which tend to make the Negro with whom they may come in contact 116 ANTHROPOLOGY AND MYTH what he is. Much of what might be called the pro-Negro side of race discussion has been in the nature of negative evidence. For example, it is trumpeted far and wide that the Negro is racially and by nature a criminal. Statistics of crime are adduced in proof. Then the social scientist investi- gates and discovers that a far larger per cent. of Negro mothers than white must leave their families during the daytime in order to earn money, thus contributing to juvenile delin- quency. He discovers that in Southern courts Negroes are convicted on evidence on which any white man would go scot-free. He finds that Negro vice, of which there is so much talk, is much more closely involved with the *‘superior race”’ than the reports of the news- papers would indicate. “‘The cry in the Southern newspapers against Negro dives,” remarks Professor Hart, “‘generally ignores the fact that many of them are carried on by white people, and others are partially supported by white custom.” ! As contrasted with the looseness and immorality commonly ascribed to the Negro, there are such observa- tions as those of Junod? of the elaborate 1 Albert Bushnell Hart, The Southern South. * Henri A. Junod, The Life of a South African Tribe. 117 THE NEGRO FACES AMERICA ceremonial and religious restrictions upon sexual indulgence which guide natives of Africa. But in the conditions of modern news service, misstatements always find their way to a larger public than do corrections, partly because they are more frequent and more emphatic, partly because they are considered to possess more “‘news value”’ and are therefore boldly displayed, partly because such misstatements reinforce popular preconceptions. To such an extent is public sentiment formed by obvious fabrications that even those men who would voice the Negro’s grievances must bow to prejudice. In November, 1919, for example, The Arkansas Gazette published a transcript of an address by the president of Hendrix Col- lege. The speaker, obviously animated by the disastrous riots which had occurred in Philips County in October, 1919, spoke of the necessity for examining the causes of discontent among Negroes, of establishing understanding and co-operation between lead- ers of both races. But he felt obliged to “sweeten”? his remarks to Southern white men by saying that “the Negro is a child race”’ and is “weak, docile, and is easily con- trolled.” He conceded that the Negro ‘‘has 118 ANTHROPOLOGY AND MYTH much of humanity in him—is good-natured and quick to forget wrongs.” The phrasing is the more significant in that it came from a man who realized the dangers created by the prevailing injustice to the Negro, and was eager to make his hearers realize those dangers also. Even cultivated Americans are too fre- quently unaware of the incertitudes of the scientist on questions involving race. But they are fed with certitudes, from the Southern press, of the “we know the nigger”’ type. Mr. Lowie has shown “how many factors have to be weighed in arriving at a fair estimate of racial capabilities, factors which are naively ignored in most popular discus- sions of the subject. We can, farther, say positively that whatever differences may exist have been grossly exaggerated.” The process of gross exaggeration is a norm of public dis- cussion of race relations. The mere fact of the mention of race in connection with crime, the repetition in head-lines of such epithets as “Negro Fiend,” “Negro Mur- derer,” the tacit assumptions underlying which have made it possible to associate race with fortuitous criminal acts, are a measure of the extent to which the South’s 119 THE NEGRO FACES AMERICA color psychosis is shared by and colors the thought of the nation. Crime, except in so far as it is analyzed into the conditions which have produced it, consists of a series of symptoms. To talk of any civilization in terms of the crimes committed by members of its society is to talk about a living organism in terms of the symptoms of its disease. From no other point of view is severer criticism of the American press possible than from that of a citizen who desires less embittered sus- picion and more understanding of Negro and white man for one another. Before the era of the World War the impress of such conformity of public opinion as prevails in the South was foreign to the rest of the nation. But even if there is not, as there was in Washington, in Omaha, and in Chicago, before the riots there, a deliberate press campaign to debase the Negro, continual and casual reporting of Negro criminality will have the same effect. Washington has long been a border on which Northern and Southern attitudes tow- ard race have met and been pressed in conflict. Technically the Northern attitude has prevailed, even under Democratic admin- istrations; attempts to enact street-car segre- 120 ANTHROPOLOGY AND MYTH gation and other Jim Crow ordinances for the District of Columbia failed. One such meas- ure was introduced at the very time of the riots. During the riots the Southern attitude prevailed. White men did try to show the Negro “his place.” The conflict between Northern and Southern points of view, re- peatedly checked as Jim Crow bills applying to the District of Columbia were defeated, then went over to the newspapers. The statistics of the Washington chief of police had little weight against the reports of: a crime wave and flaring head-lines announcing that another Negro brute had “attacked” a white woman. The condition of hysteria which the newspapers effected was, presum- ably, local to Washington. It was obvious a press campaign was under way. Anti- prohibitionists were triumphantly pointing to the “wave of crime” in support of their contentions. The commissioners of the Dis- trict of Columbia and the chief of police were involved in charges of poor administration. To any reader of newspapers to whom printed paper is not apocalyptic, ulterior motive was written over the face of the “crime wave” in which the newspapers were bathed. A critical attitude might have been expected of 121 THE NEGRO FACES AMERICA news-distributing agencies and of correspond- ents of powerful newspapers—that is, on the part of any one who had had no experience with news distribution. But the most inflam- mable misstatements were absorbed whole and were sent broadcast throughout the country. What was by admission of a com- missioner of the District of Columbia a series of attacks by white men upon Negroes was distorted by a New York Times head-line into ‘*“Negroes again riot in Washington, killing white men,’ by The New York World to “Three are killed as blacks renew riots in capital,” and by The New York Evening Tele- gram to “United States cavalry unable to quell Negroes.”’ The white mobs were beaten back by Negroes themselves. But white mobbism won its victory in the newspapers. To a Northern public, not consciously affected by the rigidity of Southern sentiment about race, there came, nevertheless, news reports of a sort which that Southern sentiment would have exacted. Similar conditions pre- vailed with regard to the riots in Arkansas, in Knoxville, in Omaha. At the Southern end of the telegraph wires which feed the country with its news are frequently men either attuned to conformity on race problems 122 ANTHROPOLOGY AND MYTH or forced into it in virtue of the necessity for continuing to live and to earn in a white Southern environment. To what an extent the South’s color psychosis afflicts the nation few Americans realize unless their attention is called to such an exceptional performance as that of The Chicago Daily News in directing Mr. Carl Sandburg to report on race relations there. His investigations of the effects of the mi- eration, real-estate ventures, industrial and labor conditions, the reflex of each lynching on the North, crime and politics, which The Daily News made available in a series of articles! should have commended itself as a matter of journalistic procedure to every Chicago editor at least. “Publication of the articles had proceeded two weeks,” says Mr. Sandburg, “and they were approaching the point where a program of constructive recom- mendations would have been proper, when the riots broke and as usual nearly everybody was more interested in the war than how it got loose.” But it was not until the war “got loose” that most editors took an effec- tive interest in race relations in Chicago, and ‘ Republished as The Chicago Race Riots, 1919. Harcourt, Brace, & Howe, New York. 123 THE NEGRO FACES AMERICA then in a number of cases they did so only to pour oil on the flames. The condition Mr. Sandburg describes is a characteristic one. No one is more interested in war, apparently, than American newspaper edi- tors, and no one 1s less interested than they in how it gets loose. The mixture of cynical indifference, ignorance, and falsity with which race relations are treated daily, extraneous circumstances like the crime of a degenerate are fastened to race and the connection riveted upon the public mind, is the most sweeping commentary possible on the Ameri- can approach to what is often called the nation’s tragedy. For the purpose of furnishing Americans with accurate information on race and race relations, modern science might almost as well not exist. “‘ Blind devotion to the dogma of the natural inferiority of the black race” has mdeed, as Mr. George Elliot Howard says, “cost the white race dearly. . . . In fact, for nearly a hundred years the intel- lectual energy of the South has been absorbed in the defense or protection of its cherished race dogma.” ! The process of transferring 1 “The Social Cost of Southern Race Prejudice,” American Journal of Sociology, March, 1917. 124 ANTHROPOLOGY AND MYTH this fruitless and uninformed conflict to the entire United States, goes relentlessly on. “That lust is a racial ‘instinct’ in the Negro,” continues Mr. Howard, “uncontrollable and ineradicable—is the sinister lesson taught by the novels, the dramas, the essays, the newspapers, and the political demagogues that have shaped public opinion in the South. The most suggestive epithets are devised to kindle the passions of the mob.” If the press is an effective means of creating hatred and distrust, the motion picture has been shown no less effective. Dominated by fear, with minds closed to one avenue at least, divided against itself, sterilized and made to that degree inflexible in thought, the white South is yet an integral part of the United States, tied to popular emotion by every means of communication and _ intercourse. It seems almost exaggeration to say that colored people know more about the facts of race and of race relations than do white Americans. Yet, in many instances that is true. For where the white press shirks re- sponsibility for presenting the analyses and then the obvious facts which would make race inequities glaringly clear, the colored press, sometimes with bitterness, takes up 125 THE NEGRO FACES AMERICA the burden. A white American desirous of a critical insight into the society in which he flatters himself he lives could not do better than read carefully a num- ber of race-consclous newspapers pub- lished for and by Negroes of the United States. Upon science, then, upon the carefully ascertained information essential to any com- munity’s progress, the South’s color psychosis lays obstructions and fetters. Such informa- tion, in the state of the Southern public mind and press, cannot penetrate the Southern states. On the other hand, current misin- formation and dogma, carried in every vehicle for creating and forming public opinion, emanates from the South to the rest of the country. Misinformation is the product not necessarily of the absence of means to truth, but of a closed mind. Upon the nation’s life the closed mind of the South in matters pertaining to race has had a poisonous effect. The distinction of North and South is neither made nor Is it perpetuated north of Mason and Dixon’s line. It has been made by the South in virtue of a Kultur which a thousand semi-literate Treitschkes have been _per- mitted to affirm from their editorial chairs, 126 ANTHROPOLOGY AND MYTH basing their ascendancy and that of their kind upon malignant and ignorant denun- ciation of the black man; upon _ hostility to the life of the modern world—scientific investigation. V CERTAIN EFFECTS OF WAR “ AGITATION of the Negro question became bad form in the North,” wrote Dr. Charles A. Beard, “‘except for quadrennial political purposes.” 1! It is still bad form, despite the occasional resolutions offered in the Senate, to investigate over-representation of the South. The Negro, elevated to the vote and to political equality with whites, was dropped by the more “practical” Re- publicans after Reconstruction days, when the “‘cash nexus” of North with the South had been once more formed. Since the earliest days of American political life it has been bad form to agitate the Negro question. First, it pierced the glamour of religious and political idealism that was made to surround the nation’s beginnings. The integrity of American Revolution itself was qualified. “In Jefferson’s original draft of the great 1Charles A. Beard, Contemporary American History, p. 22. 128 CERTAIN EFFECTS OF WAR Declaration there was a paragraph indicting the king for having kept open the African slave trade against colonial efforts to close it,’ says Phillips, “‘and for having violated thereby the ‘most sacred rights of life and liberty of a distant people, who never offended him, captivating them into slavery in anoth- er hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither.’ This passage, according to Jefferson’s account, ‘was struck out in compliance to South Carolina and Georgia, who had never attempted to restrain the importation of slaves and who on the contrary still wished to continue it. Our Northern brethren also I believe,’ Jefferson continued, ‘felt a little tender under these cen- sures, for though their people have very few slaves themselves, yet they have been pretty considerable carriers of them to others.’” ! Before ever the Negro himself began to look about the American political scene and to criticize principles and professions the spirit was abroad among white Americans. But for the most part the anomaly was resolved by intensity rather of idealism than of criticism. The more vehemently Americanism, free- 1 Ulrich Bonnell Phillips, opus cit., p. 116. 9 129 THE NEGRO FACES AMERICA dom, and equality are affirmed publicly the less pressing does it seem to examine just what they practically and individually imply. There is room for a study of American idealism as it is rooted in race relations. If the Re- publican party has been dominated at various times by practical men who preferred a mixt- ure of ethical principles and industrial lavssez- faire, the Democratic party has been utterly tethered. Democrats might rejoice in Andrew Jacksonism, but liberalism in a modern sense was denied them; they could only chafe at the division with which even Woodrow Wilson’s reliance on the North for sentiment and on the South for votes menaced their party. The Civil War, which is commonly believed to have established the freedom of the American Negro, was, in this sense, merely another symbol of the struggle and division which was endemic before 1861, and still continues. It might be said that in the Civil War the armies of Lee had finally surrendered to Grant, but that the eventual victory had rested with the Confederacy, whose cast of mind, whose over-representation in the House of Representatives, have been almost unchal- Jenged in the nation. “‘Under the original Con- 130 CERTAIN EFFECTS OF WAR stitution of the United States,” says Doctor Beard, “only three-fifths of the slaves were counted in apportioning representatives among the states; under the Fourteenth Amendment all the Negroes were counted, thus enlarging the representation of the Southern states.” The Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitu- tion represented one of the idealist gestures which, at the time of the Declaration of Inde- pendence, Americans hesitated to make. With the American Negro free, a voter, and seemingly given a fair field of opportunity, race relations enjoyed a period of disregard. You cannot really confer freedom upon people who do not demand and make their own freedom, it was assumed, and the “real Negro question” was said to be: “Can the race demonstrate that capacity for sustained economic activity and permanent organization which has lifted the white masses from serfdom?” This is to make the “‘race question”’ again too preponderantly one of racial aptitude. Only by eventual alliance of the Negro with white labor, if that should come about, will the imadequacy of the statement be demonstrated. Participation of the United States in the World War changed the symbol. But the 131 THE NEGRO FACES AMERICA thing symbolized, the struggle within the nation, remained. It was an external enemy which the American armies went out to contend with. But the essential struggle of the war will be found to have been within the United States. The struggle consisted again in an effort to make American idealism ring true. Often to the Negro, the focus of this struggle, the American point of view was cynically represented. One group of Negro soldiers were frankly and _ brutally informed that they were going to fight for democracy in Europe. For every group who met the fact in a frank statement, dozens found reason to come to that conclusion. What the World War seems again to have emphasized and crystallized is the futility of applying the phrases of political idealism to a set of problems which, like those allied with race relations, demand varied and re- sourceful manipulation. The conflict over race relations is not set at rest by the unques- tioned prosperity and opportunity which the World War brought to many colored Ameri- cans. In a sense, that opportunity has only intensified the struggle. Probably, since the United States entered the war, more Ameri- cans could be found who are apprehensive 132 CERTAIN EFFECTS OF WAR of the future of race relations than there were before. Many colored citizens were sat- isfied with half-Americanism until hundred- per-cent. Americanism was blared and dinned into their ears. Under the circumstances it was expecting too much to believe they would cultivate deafness. Of the prosperity of families brought North and of the educa- tion of desire which comes with means to gratify wants, much may be ascribed to the war. But on the other hand, many Negroes say that their condition is, if anything, worse since the war. And progress which depends upon a shortage of labor and war wages is subject to fluctuation. Under the suggestive title, “Why Southern Negroes Don’t Go South,” Mr. T. Arnold Hull! of the Chicago Urban League summarized cer- tain of the World War’s effects upon Negroes. Queries sent to hundreds of Negroes living in the South elicited replies of this nature: “I fail to see any improvement”; “There _ has been no change for the better’’; “‘ Why, conditions are worse than ever.” One man wrote to The Chicago Defender saying: ““After twenty years of seeing my people lynched for any offense from spitting 1 The Survey, November 29, 1919. 133 THE NEGRO FACES AMERICA on the sidewalk to stealing a mule, I made up my mind that I would turn the prow of my ship toward the part of the country where the people at least made a pretense at being civilized. You may say for me, through your paper, that when a man’s home is sacred; when he can protect the virtue of his wife and daughter against the brutal lust of his alleged superiors; when he can sleep at night without the fear of being visited by the Ku-Klux Klan because of refusal to take off his hat while passing an overseer—then [ will be willing to return to Mississippi.” Both in the North and in the South each increase in prosperity of the Negro made feeling about race relations correspondingly tense. In the South, as always, the ten- sity manifested itself politically. Putting the Negro into the army was fiercely resented because it made the colored soldier an “equal” of the white. The bitterness had its reflex in rural districts, where white determination stiffened that that equality should not extend beyond the army. One consequence of this tension was a recrudescence of the Ku-Klux Klan, with aggressive announcements in the newspapers calling upon white men, in the 134 CERTAIN EFFECTS OF WAR familiar language of the night riders of old, to gather for the defense of womanhood and the Southland. But colored Americans were being taught that fighting was not a racial prerogative, even if voting was. Their in- struction was interrupted at times by a propaganda asserting that colored troops had failed and that France had requested their return to the United States because of sexual crimes. But the Secretary of War disposed of the propaganda by a vigorous statement proving its falsity; and Brigadier- General Sherburne on numerous occasions publicly praised the courage, the endurance, and the soldierly qualities the colored troops in his command had displayed under the most difficult circumstances. The propaganda, therefore, which became accepted gossip among many white men of the United States army, did not affect the Negro’s sense of his own fitness except to intensify his feeling of the injustice of the treatment given him. A significant item of his education in interna- tional affairs was the cordiality of French people and its effect among white people in his own land. Of the disabilities that were imposed upon the Negro in the army the list is a long and cruel one. How color prejudice 135 THE NEGRO FACES AMERICA worked against the success of the nation’s arms was indicated by Major J. E. Spingarn of the American Expeditionary Forces, who publicly accused Southern officers with trea- son, in that they preferred white ascendancy in the army to the measures necessary for efficiency and for victory. In a number of Southern states the quota of colored men drafted exceeded the white. Thus from Mis- sissippi 24,066 colored men, as against 21,182 white, joined the colors; in South Carolina 25,789 colored men, as against 19,909 white; in Florida 12,904 colored and 12,769 white; and in Alabama, Georgia, and Louisiana the quotas of colored and white men were very nearly equal. Despite the objections which the white South made to the enlistment and conscription of colored men, every means was used to exempt as few as possible from military service. In many sections, says a former special assistant to the Secretary of War, the Negro “contributed many more than his quota; and, in defiance of both the spirit and letter of the draft law, Negro married men with large families to support were impressed into military service regard- less of their protests and appeals, and their wives, children, and dependents suffered un- 136 CERTAIN EFFECTS OF WAR called-for hardships. Local draft boards, in almost every instance composed exclusively of white men, were in a position, if so inclined, to show favoritism to men of their own race; the official figures of the draft reveal the fact that in many sections of the country exemp- tions were granted white men who were single with practically no dependents, while Negroes were conscripted into service regardless of their urgent need in agriculture or the essential industries, and without considering their fam- ily relations or obligations.” ! The effect of excluding colored men from draft boards was made sufficiently clear in the first report of the Provost-Marshal-General, which showed that of every 100 colored citi- zens called, 36 were certified for service, and of every 100 white men called, only 25 were certified. Furthermore, of the registrants placed in Class I of the draft, colored men contributed 51.65 per cent. of their registrants as against 32.53 per cent. of the white. The Negro, Mr. Scott continues, “‘had practically no representation upon the draft boards which passed upon his appeals—an arrange- ment which was wholly at variance with the theory of American institutions.” 1 Emmett J. Scott, The American Negro in the World War, p. 428. 137 THE NEGRO FACES AMERICA The record of the injustice and brutality of which the Negro was made a victim in the United States army is too long even for summary treatment. Commanded as colored soldiers were, for the most part, by white officers and non-commissioned officers, mem- bers of their own race being with few excep- tions denied promotion, they were domineered over and insulted. Every sort of hardship was visited upon even the most capable of the comparatively few colored officers com- missioned. ‘The ranking colored officer of the United States army, who was _ subse- quently sent as military attaché to Liberia, spoke of the unremitting efforts that were made to discredit and humiliate the black officer before the world and before his men. In every way possible colored soldiers and their officers in France were discriminated against. Thus, General Erwin, commanding the 92d Division, is reported to have issued “Order No. 40,” that Negroes should not speak to Frenchwomen. “Carrying out this order,” says Mr. Scott, “the military police overseas undertook to arrest Negroes found talking to Frenchwomen, while the white pri- vates and officers were not molested. This led to a serious misunderstanding between 138 CERTAIN EFFECTS OF WAR the French and the Americans and to a number of brawls in which the white and black soldiers participated.” Propaganda by white Americans to dis- credit their colored brothers in arms even went to the length of a secret communication to French officers and civilians, issued from General Pershing’s headquarters, warning them against treating “the Negro with famil- larity and indulgence,” the French public not having become aware of the “‘menace of degeneracy”? which had created an impas- sable “gulf” in the United States between races. American opinion is represented as the being unanimous in regarding the black man “as an inferior being with whom relations of business or service only are possible.” The Negro’s vices, this astonishing document says, ‘‘are a constant menace to the American, who has to repress them sternly.” Warning is given against “‘the rise of any pronounced degree of intimacy between French officers and black officers. ... We must not eat with them, must not shake hands or seek to talk or meet with them outside of the requirements of military service.” Also, French people “must not commend too highly the black American troops, particu- 139 THE NEGRO FACES AMERICA larly in the presence of white Americans.” “French officers and French civilians,” says Mr. Scott, “as a rule, could not understand why the black soldiers should not be treated identically as white American soldiers; when French officers were alone with Negro officers the latter were treated with the utmost friendliness and consideration, and it was only when in the presence of American officers that they reluctantly observed the official order, inspired by race prejudice.’ Much matter has been published showing that white commanders made repeated and _ insistent requests that colored officers be removed. Colored soldiers had, like colored laborers in civil life, to do the hardest and most dis- agreeable work of the army. They were assigned to coaling and stevedore duty fre- quently under imputation of lack of courage or ability. One Negro officer, at the close of a letter setting forth the difficulties he had had to endure, remarked: “I am beginning to wonder whether it will ever be possible for me to see an American white without wishing that he were in his Satanic Majesty’s private domain. I must pray long and earnestly that hatred of my fellow-man be removed from my heart and 140 CERTAIN EFFECTS OF WAR that I can truthfully lay claim to being a Christian.” On the civilian Negro, as well as on the colored soldier, the requirements of war were frequently made to bear with exceptional rigor. A survey of compulsory work laws and their enforcement led the investigator to conclude that ““many employers of Negro labor in the South utilized the national emergency to force Negroes into a condition which bordered virtually on peonage... . No one,” he adds, “‘can tell how far the sys- tem extended, as most of the offenses occurred in the smaller towns and communities where Negroes dare not reveal the true conditions for fear of punishment, a fear which is well founded, | as the lynching record of 1918 will testify.” ! It would be idle to pretend that disillusion and bitterness did not follow in the wake of the military and civilian discrimination against the Negro. For the most part it was expressed in migration of colored people from the South. Unquestionably it found vent in the violence and the riots that made melodrama of race relations during the war, but especially in 1919. Never before to such an extent had the Negro fought back to 1 Walter F. White, The New Republic, March 1, 1919. 141 THE NEGRO FACES AMERICA repel white mobs as in Washington and Chicago. Hounded in the South, denied protection, whether from labor unions or from city officers in the North, the Negro armed himself. A condition for which white Americans were primarily to blame was laid at the door of the Negro. The most fantastic stories emanated from Washington, especially from Representative Byrnes of South Carolina and other Southern members of the House, later from the Department of Justice. The Lusk Investigating Committee of New York State made the alarming discovery that Socialists were actually trying to “convert” colored men to Socialism. Editorial comment of the less windy sort was represented by The Springfield Republican, which, adverting to the Lusk Committee’s discovery of the plan to “‘convert” Negroes, remarked: “If there was anything unlawful in such a pro- gram—assuming of course that no violence was to be preached—we fail to see it. But the Lusk Committee ‘expressed amazement,’ and Senator Lusk said that he regarded this evidence of a detailed plan for the spreading of ‘Bolshevist’ propaganda among Negroes in the South as the greatest menace the 142 . CERTAIN EFFECTS OF WAR evidence before the committee so far had disclosed. The grim irony of the situation is that the very first point in the plan was that ‘all acts of injustice to the Negro’ were to be condemned. Perhaps that is revolutionary! God save America if it is!” “Reds Try to Stir Negroes to Revolt” announced The New York Times in July, 1919, and a few days later, “‘Radicals Inciting Negro to Violence.” ‘“‘Negroes of World Prey to Agitators,” said a Times scarehead in August, and The New York Tribune an- nounced a few days later a “Plot to Stir Race Antagonism in United States Charged to Soviets.’ Officers of the Department of Justice were quoted as saying that “‘charges of an organized propaganda made in the House yesterday by Representative Byrnes, Democrat, of South Carolina, seemed to be well founded. . . . Agents of the Department of Justice are investigating. Facts thus far developed lead officials to believe that I. W. W. and Soviet influences were at the bottom of the recent race riots in Washington and Chicago.” “‘United States Reveals Sedition among Negro Masses,” said the caption of an article widely distributed over the country under the signature of David Lawrence, and 143 THE NEGRO FACES AMERICA: ‘Radicalism among Negroes Growing, United States Record Shows,’ announced The New York World in November of 1919. Despite the hysterical newsmongering imspired by Southern representatives, to which the Depart- ment of Justice was made a party, no connec- tion between Russian or any other Soviet and Negro citizens of the United States was ever publicly established. Not enough evidence was accumulated by the loquacious investiga- tors of the Department of Justice and their garrulous chief to procure the indictment of a single Negro of importance in the United States. They did succeed, however, in spread- ing a polsonous mass of misinformation and distrust. So persistent was the campaign of calumny that a group of colored editors were finally moved to appeal to the Attorney General to lay open before the country the basis for his insinuations or else to cease his propaganda. A letter from them to the Attorney General, widely published in the Negro press, stated that in the nation-wide campaign against “Reds and I. W. W. agitators”? not a single colored person of the United States had, to their knowledge, been arrested. Colored people, said the letter, would continue to demand every right of 144 CERTAIN EFFECTS OF WAR American citizenship under the Constitution. “These things colored people are agitating in the right way and with the proper spirit. There is an exceedingly small percentage of radical colored newspapers among us, and for that reason the colored press as a whole should not be labeled as radical, and should not be classified with the Reds and I. W. W.’s.” It will be remarked that the South’s color. psychosis became extended, during the war, throughout the nation, not in virtue of justifying fact, but chiefly through a press campaign initiated by a Southern member of the House of Representatives. The conserva- tive press treated the Negro very much as an alien enemy. His grievances were ignored. Numerous articles were published to establish how well the Negro was treated in Mississippi, _ how prosperous colored people were in Louis- jana, how the South wanted colored workers to return from the North. But the migration northward was continued at the very time these inspired stories were appearing in North- ern newspapers. Although intelligent white Americans did not take seriously the innuendoes published by the Attorney General and the Depart- ment of Justice, propaganda charging the 10 145 THE NEGRO FACES AMERICA Negro with “sedition” and “radicalism” was undoubtedly contributory to violent feel- ing and to conflict. The result was a pre- sumption against colored people in the United States most oppressive as always to the more prosperous and intelligent men and women. The report of the Department of Justice, which was transmitted to the Senate in November, 1919, included a number of pages devoted to Negro magazines and newspapers. Editorial utterances had become more acid and more incisive since the war. The At- torney General spoke of “‘sedition” and “‘radicalism,’’ but he failed to prosecute. In fact, Negro editors were guilty, not of sedition, but of indignation at brutalities and wrongs which the nation unprotesting had permitted to go on. The Attorney General found, what every student of race relations might have told him he would find, “the increasingly emphasized feeling of a race consciousness” among colored people. That the Attorney General characterized this race feeling as “openly, defiantly assertive of its own equal- ity” is a commentary on his state of mind rather than on the facts. Throughout the Negro press, as among orators and the masses of workmen and the bourgeoisie, realization 146 CERTAIN EFFECTS OF WAR had come that the “old Negro” was going never to return. Servility and submission to wrong had been proved experimentally to be poor policy. Those Negroes who followed the prescription which Booker Washington had offered—work and thrift as opposed to political and civil demands—found that their work and their merit, whether its measure was financial or social, availed them little. They found class discrimination increasing, and moderate and intelligent white men less than ever able, apparently, to check the lawlessness represented in lynching and intimi- dation of every sort. Colored men found that the “good nigger’ who bowed to white ascendancy and took orders uncomplainingly was eventually despoiled. The Negro who stood his ground and cleaved to his rights with his manhood and a rifle to defend him often won the respect if not the affection of his white neighbors. “Shoot Back to Stop Riots” is The Boston Herald's caption sum- marizing advice given to colored people by one of their leaders in November of 1919. It is the sort of advice with which they had been becoming increasingly familiar and had found in practice most effective. When the division brought about by the 147 THE NEGRO FACES AMERICA war became sharp, the occasional friend of the Negro, the Republican party, again began to withdraw. The Negro confronted the Democratic party which, no matter what liberal impulses it might derive from the North, would never help him in the South. The Southern Republican party was, as always, rent into two factions of which one was composed of “‘lily-white” Republicans who sought to curry favor with the white South by repudiating the Negro, and a lean faction which, in order to obtain offices under Republican National administrations, sought to maintain its influence over the colored voter. Politically, therefore, the Negro was without real friends. The period of the World War and 1919 especially, perhaps, became an era of change for colored Ameri- cans, who then came to realize as never before that only by themselves organizing, by defending themselves personally, politi- cally, and industrially, could their position in the United States be made _ tolerable. Colored workers, it will be shown in a later chapter, acted independently of white labor organizations and were mostly victims, partly players, in the contest between capital and labor. The character of riots changed in 148, CERTAIN EFFECTS OF WAR 1919. They were not massacres of colored people. White men died. In a number of cities in which riots had been planned, notably in Memphis, Tennessee, and in Montgomery, Alabama, they did not occur because it was generally known that colored men were armed and were prepared to defend themselves. The change, for the most part industrial, which the war effected in the South was in many respects a revolution. It was hardly more difficult for the South to face political emancipation of the Negro than to contem- plate his industrial emancipation. Both were brought in view by war industry and war migration. That the war should at once make the Negro conscious of his prerogatives as a citizen, give him opportunity to earn _the gratitude of the nation, make for him preferred opportunities as a skilled workman, and enable him to leave the agricultural communities in which he was most con- sciencelessly exploited, was bitter. “One of the most serious of the long-stand- ing grievances of the Negro,” says the Labor Department’s report on the migration of 1916-17, “‘is the small pay he receives for his work in the South.” The South’s first response to the migration 149 THE NEGRO FACES AMERICA included attempts to stop it by heavily fining and imprisoning labor agents, by intimidation of Negro migrants at railway stations, forcing many a colored farm tenant to flee by night in order to come North. Gradually it was realized that the competition of Northern industry, with its comparatively lavish wages, would have to be met. It also came to be understood that Negroes would go where their children might have the advantages of schooling. It was found that the migration was least from the districts in which there was no lynching and mobbism, where Negroes were permitted to enjoy the products of their labor in peace. The elaborate propaganda, directed chiefly at Negro migrants in Chicago, describing the prosperity and contentment of colored people in Louisiana, Texas, and Mississippl, was a measure of this under- standing. As Mr. Hill has shown, all too frequently the news stories represented a desirable rather than an actual state of affairs. But a general realization by white men that the Negro must be satisfied in order to keep him on the land, that elements in that satis- faction are education for his children, human and decent treatment, and eventually even that most taboo instrument, the vote, is a 150 CERTAIN EFFECTS OF WAR long step toward progress in the administration of race relations. The war, which first gave the South opportunities to exploit Negro labor by enactment and enforcement of “‘ work or fight” laws, provided the Negro with opportunity for bringing his exploiters to their senses. If the war made the white South more than ever determined to show the Negro “his place” when he came home from the war and from “ Frenchwomen,”’ it made the Negro more politically self-conscious than ever before in his history in this country. He came to look critically upon his erstwhile friends, the Republicans. He began to break the mold of his former undeviating allegiance in order to listen to Socialist, class-conscious propa- ganda. He found himself spoken of as a race, treated as a political entity within the United States, and consequently he began to feel the intensified race consciousness of which the Attorney General made mention. The Negro citizen’s weapon against dis- crimination of every sort was his economic value. His departure became a grave menace to the welfare and even the solvency of many portions of the rural South. His arrival in the North increased the hostility of trade- 151 THE NEGRO FACES AMERICA union members, but caused the union execu- tives seriously to ponder the effect of excluding him. However he was treated, his strategic position was improved. That is not to be taken as a step in the harmonizing of race relations. Eventually it may mean that in the period of the war the problem of the liv- ing together in the same state of colored and white men was made immensely more urgent and more menacing. The Negro’s political education, given an enormous im- petus by his war experience, is being carried forward. Never before particularly concerned in the doctrine of class struggle, he is having it preached to him by his own newspapers and magazines which are quick to seize upon the economic motives of his detractors and exploiters. His own experience supplies many examples to supplement the arguments of his mentors. Any colored person of intelligence neces- sarily began to analyze his condition in times as disturbed and as disturbing as_ those during and immediately following the war. To both white men and colored men the war demonstrated that the Negro has an economic place in this country if he is allowed to occupy it; that his departure in large numbers from 152 CERTAIN EFFECTS OF WAR the land in the South means loss in values and in productivity; that he is adaptable to industry in the North; that he must be considered as an element in the industrial struggle of capital and labor; and that in many a Northern city and state class-con- scious or race-conscious appeals to groups of white men will be met with the ballot by large and increasingly well-organized groups of colored people, whose vigilant press keeps them informed of what affects their welfare. The foregoing summary, like all summaries, is over-simplified. It will be shown in subse- quent chapters that in many localities the Negro is still treated with greater disregard and brutality than in slavery days; that his oppression cries to all Americans for denuncia- tion and redress. But the way of hatred cannot stop the new emancipation which the war enormously accelerated. At most and at worst a policy of repression, misinformation, and exploitation can bring about irrecon- cilable conflict and tragedy for colored and white citizens who might otherwise become immensely useful to one another. The old anomalies persist. The United States is still in the position internationally of a kettle when it comes to calling pots black. The 153 THE NEGRO FACES AMERICA South still openly, boastingly even, dis- franchises colored citizens. And democracy is made in the eyes of the discerning to seem far more tentative in the face of race problems than its loudest protagonists would have it thought. VI THE SCAPEGOAT OF CITY POLITICS T is in the cities that race relations are most poisoned by rumor and myth. No group in the nation has paid a heavier toll to corrupt municipal politics than the Negro. He has paid it not only in bad _ housing, inferior schools, poor lighting, paving, and policing. He has, besides, been used as a tool in elections and as a lightning-rod to earry off angers for which he was not in the remotest degree responsible. During the period of acute change that accompanied and followed the migration northward, the use of the Negro politically and deliberate at- tempts to foment race riots of magnitude were established beyond doubt. Many ele- ments contributed to the disorders in Wash- ington, in Chicago, in Omaha, and in Knox- ville. To say they were due to any one cause would be to over-simplify. But that a major part was played by motives and con- 155 THE NEGRO FACES AMERICA tests outside the control of colored people is incontestable. In three of the four cities the riots were pre- ceded by a press campaign in which Negro criminality stared every newspaper reader in the eye, in the form of glaring head-lines announcing cases of assault and robbery. This was true of Washington, Chicago, and Omaha. In two of those cities, Washington and Omaha, bodies of colored people met and sent appeals to the newspapers to desist from their dangerous and inflammatory cam- paign. Omaha’s riot, in the course of which a colored man was without trial shot, hanged, and publicly roasted in a city street, the mayor hanged until he was nearly dead, the court-house gutted and burned and irreplace- able records destroyed, occurred on Septem- ber 28, 1919. On the 12th of April, six hundred members of the Omaha branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People had met at the Zion Baptist Chureh to protest careless remarks of the Omaha chief of police and the press campaign. The meeting deplored “published cases of criminal acts alleged to have been committed by colored men,” called attention to the emphasis which was put on the race of of- 156 THE SCAPEGOAT OF CITY POLITICS fenders, and urged “that the public press be called upon and requested to avoid creating a sentiment against the race by using in glaring and sensational head-lines expressions of special reference to the race.” The resolu- tions were sent to the chief of police of Omaha and to the principal newspapers. A similar appeal was sent to newspaper editors in Washington, District of Columbia. In Sep- tember the campaign which the press of Omaha had carried on despite all warnings bore fruit. “Jail Burns in Omaha as Riot Rages— City in Tumult, Police Helpless as Result of Attempt to Lynch Negro Who Attacked Girl—Mob Slashes Hose; Prisoners in Peril— One Man Killed and Two Wounded—Colored Men on Streets Are Beaten.” The captions on news stories sent broadcast over the nation told the story of what had happened on September 28th. “Race Riots in Washington Serious—Blacks Chased by Mobs Past White House—More Than One ~Hundred Badly Injured—Ambulances Busy All Night—Police Unequal to Situation— Marshall and Members of Congress Urge Use of Army to Restore Order.” This was the story which the captions had told of the 157 THE NEGRO FACES AMERICA National Capital on July 20th and 2\st. With minor variants, the stories were similar: a record of mobbism in the streets of American cities, houses burned, citizens done to death, the police helpless and troops enforcing order at the point of the bayonet. What the news stories did not tell, and never told, was what had occurred in the months and years pre- ceding to bring such conditions to pass. Reference was invariably made at the time of riots to the “increase in crime,” to “‘attacks upon women, murders, holdups, and _ rob- berries’? as being the cause of the disorder. Yet the records of the chief of police in Washington failed to show the “‘many assaults upon women” that the newspapers had been using to create a condition of hysteria. His statistics showed four assaults upon women in the District of Columbia in June and July, of which three were attributed to a suspect under arrest at the time of the riots. A typical example of the manner in which the Negro was victimized by the press of Washington occurred on August 15th, at a time when the memory of the July riots should have suggested caution. On its front page The Washington Post carried the caption: ‘Attacked by Negroes—Mrs. Minnie Frank- 158 THE SCAPEGOAT OF CITY POLITICS lin Injured at League Park Carnival—Two Assailants Get Away.” There followed ac- counts of headquarters detectives searching for “two young Negroes”’ who had “‘covered”’ the woman with a pistol during the attack. On the following day, inconspicuously, on an inside page, The Washington Post retracted its glaring assertions of the day before with: “Calls Assault a ‘Story’ —Mrs. Franklin’s Charge Against Two Negroes Dropped by Police.’ And it was developed that her narrative of the attack was a “fabrication.” But the effect of the glaring scarehead of the day before could not be nullified and no attempt was made by The Washington Post to nullify it. « Of the Omaha press campaign before the disorders, a report by the National Associa- tion for the Advancement of Colored People said: ““Every few days the papers head-line, “Negro Has Assaulted a White Woman.’ When investigated no truth is found in these state- ments. But raids follow and it keeps the branch busy seeing that the Negroes picked up in these raids are not treated unjustly. We have one case in particular in which we won a decided victory. A _ sixteen-year-old white girl claimed to have been assaulted 159 THE NEGRO FACES AMERICA by a Negro. For many weeks she refused to identify any of the Negroes brought before her. One day she saw on the street a man who fully answered the description of her assailant. She called the officer and had him arrested. Our committee happened to be in court on the day that he was brought in. The judge wanted to have his hearing right then without giving him a chance to prove his whereabouts on that date, but the lawyer insisted that he be given a chance. His trial was stayed one week. We sent telegrams to the men for whom he had worked and they answered as to his character; the foreman of the section gang with which he was working on the date of the alleged assault wired, proving an alibi, but the judge would not receive that as evidence. Then the fore- man came, bringing with him his time-books, which had been sent to Chicago and O.K.’d. By this means we proved the man innocent because he had been over a hundred miles away from the scene of the crime at the time it was said to have been committed.” Another report describes the occurrences which were magnified by the newspapers into “Negro Assaults upon White Women”: “In the case of a boy who was given ninety days,” 160° THE SCAPEGOAT OF CITY POLITICS says the secretary of the Omaha branch of the association, “‘I was in court at the time of the trial. The little girl says the boy went past her and pulled her dress and she ran. The boy was seventeen years old. That was criminal assault. “T have been at the trial of every case and the evidence 1s about as flimsy. One woman said that a Negro walked fast behind her. She called the police and he was charged with criminal assault. In the prison with the man who was lynched Sunday was a white man under bond for the same crime. If they were so eager to protect white woman- hood they should have completed their work by taking him.” These examples, which could be added to indefinitely, indicate the pro- cedure. The Negro was to be tarred with the odium which is his in the South. “Rapist” was to be fastened as a distinguishing char- acter to his color. Presumption so strong that it affected judges on the bench was created against accused Negroes. Not only was the Southern myth to take root in the North. It was so to affect race relations that colored people would be glad to return to the South whence they had come. Hence, after the Chicago riots the propaganda of uW 161 THE NEGRO FACES AMERICA improved conditions and prosperity in Lou- isiana and Mississippi. Hence the committees of white men to induce colored men to go South where they “belonged.” But it is the involvement of this propa- ganda in municipal politics that is to be shown. Nowhere was it clearer than in Omaha. As the presentation is one of fact, I make no apology for quoting at length and corroborating the report of a man long identi- fied with “‘reform” of Omaha’s city govern- ment. ‘There were many causes back of the riot in Omaha Sunday night, September 28th,” he says. “For forty years Omaha was ruled by a political criminal gang that was perhaps the most lawless of any city of its size in the civilized world. There had grown up during that period a powerful group that lived on the proceeds of organized vice and crime.” ‘The writer enumerates three hun- dred and eighty-four houses of prostitution, saloons, and pool halls, and includes in the group “organized bank robbers, organized highway robbers, and professional ‘con’ men and burglars’’—a list incredible to any one unfamiliar with the vagaries of American city government. This group decided in conference on the city officers to be elected, 162 THE SCAPEGOAT OF CITY POLITICS “and they would give the Boss for his service a certain sum of money and control of the vice interests, the police department, the police court, the juries, and then proceed to elect public officials.” This condition pre- vailed without interruption until 1908. In that year an eight-o’clock-closing law was enacted for saloons and subsequently a jury- commissioner law and_ election-machinery law, taking both out of control of the “‘vice ring.” State-wide prohibition was enacted in Nebraska in 1916. “In the spring of 1918, with the power of the vice ring thus weakened by the advances noted, the old political gang was almost destroyed. Thus we had elimi- nated the whisky interests . . . but we had not eliminated all of the gang. There was still left The Omaha .t which had been the mouthpiece of the vice ring....’ The remnants of former corrupt government com- bined “to destroy the present city adminis- tration and regain control of the police de- partment. . . . In order to accomplish this, the paper, assisted at times by the two other daily papers, began a campaign of slander and vituperation against the police department of the city of Omaha, and in 1 A newspaper, 163 THE NEGRO FACES AMERICA order to make it effective they chose a line of propaganda to the effect that Negro men were attacking white women, assaulting them with intent to commit rape and actually committing rape, with the connivance of the police department. They made a majority of the people of Omaha believe that all Negro men were disposed to commit the crime of rape on white women.” Attention of the mayor and the commissioner and chief of police was called to the association of lewd white women with colored men, and city officers were asked to get rid of both elements “for the safety of the colored people and the community.” Police raids stimulated the press campaign against the administration, and the impression was created that the police were invading private residences without warrant and were arresting law-abiding citi- zens. The difficulties of the administration were intensified by remnants in the police department of adherents of the old vice ring, who “were doing everything within their power to hamper and discredit the honest efforts of the present city adminis- tration to enforce the law.” The statement of Omaha’s chief of police as to the com- position of the mob, quoted in an earlier 164 THE SCAPEGOAT OF CITY POLITICS chapter, is borne out by this citizen, who says there was “in connection with the mob, fathered by these same influences, an organized gang determined to wreck the administration at any cost, and they deliberately organized a mob, furnished it with money and liquor, and the leaders of the old vice ring stood round in the mob urging the men to go in and assist in wrecking the court-house, lynch the Negro, and kill the mayor of the city, the commissioner of police, one of the police magistrates, and the morals squad, a group of detectives that had been relentless in enforcing the law against the criminal ele- ment.’ A police captain, the senior in the police department, who released fifty police officers on the afternoon of the riotous Sun- day and sent them to their homes, is described as “a member of the old criminal gang”’ who had “served as a personal bodyguard, with another crooked police officer, to the ‘boss’ of the underworld.” Some of the police officers were said to be in the mob encouraging attacks upon colored police offi- cers who were endeavoring to maintain order. “The only reason the commissioner of police escaped was because, at the suggestion of the mayor and others, he was sufficiently 165 THE NEGRO FACES AMERICA disguised in his appearance to get out of the jail without being killed by the mob.” The innocence is asserted of the Negro, William Brown, who was lynched, a contention which in view of his murder without trial can neither be established nor controverted. “There have been published in the daily papers since May 1, 1919, thirty-six dif- ferent cases of alleged attacks of colored men on white women,” the informant con- tinues, ‘““and wherever there was any reference to an attack on a woman by any man the in- ference was always there that the man com- mitting the assault was a Negro—that is to say, In no case was it ever stated where a white man had attacked a woman that the man making the attack was white.”” One such story was published in the inflamed state of the public mind immediately following the riot on October Ist. “Another Woman Is Victim of a Negro in Guarded Omaha,” announced a scarehead of The New York World on October 2d. In the course of the news account occurs the following paragraph: “General Wood issued a statement at mid- night in which he said Mrs. Wisner’s account of the attack was incomplete and in part indefinite. ‘There are some curious features 166 THE SCAPEGOAT OF CITY POLITICS to the case,’ he said, ‘Mrs. Wisner is unable to give any detailed account of what hap- pened; she is unable to say positively whether her assailant was a white man or a Negro, although she seems to think that he was a Negro.’”’ In the prevailing hysteria it would not be difficult to “‘seem to think” any assailant a Negro. The elements leading to the Omaha riot are summarized by the informant as being three: ‘(1) an element that wanted to lynch a Negro because it was led to believe by propaganda that the Negroes were really committing these offenses against white women and were being inadequately punished for their offenses; (2) there was a political mob bent upon wreaking vengeance by the killing of the city officials, and (3) still another mob bent upon destroying all organized government and property, public and private.” The foreman of Omaha’s grand jury, John W. Towle, substantiated in the main the statements of this citizen of Omaha. In submitting the jury’s report he asserted that a primary cause of the riot was “a con- certed effort on the part of certain citizens, officials, and part of the press to discredit the police force.” “‘It is a well-known fact,” 167 THE NEGRO FACES AMERICA said Mr. Towle’s letter, “that there are two factions in the city and county political life. Those who believe in enforcement of law and order now have the control of the city commission and the police force. The leaders of the opposition have very frankly stated that they are in favor of certain kinds of vice, limited to restricted areas; that instead of licensing or suppressing same it should be openly tolerated. This system was in force during the past administrations and is capable of most extensive commer- clalism.”” Mr. Towle then asserted, as a matter of common knowledge, that “‘at least one party on Saturday night previous” to the riot went about to pool-rooms announcing that an attack would be made on the court- house “for the purpose of lynching this colored man.’ Such reports, he said, “were current about the city and were known in certain official circles, and just why this prisoner was not moved to the state peni- tentiary or some other suitable place for safe- keeping has never been satisfactorily ex- plained, nor why these officials did not apprise Mayor Smith, Commissioner Ringer, and Chief Eberstein of their knowledge.” Further corroboration came from the County 168 THE SCAPEGOAT OF CITY POLITICS Attorney in Omaha, who, in a_ statement published by The Omaha Evening World- Herald of October Ist, lists in detail the “‘fake”’ stories used to discredit the police adminis- tration and to incite to riot. “One of the most popular of the fake stories that were used to incite the riot,” he said in the course of his statement, ““was that a colored man had attempted to assault a nine-year-old girl, was arrested, identified, and given ninety days in the county jail. The facts are that the little girl saw this Negro, and thought he was quickening his step toward her. She ran and told her mother. The Negro was arrested, but there was no evidence that he had even touched the girl or even run after her. . . . Still another story, positively false, was used in stirring up feeling that preceded the riot. It was said that a colored man was arrested for an assault upon a white woman, and that she identified him, but that he was later discharged. In this case her identification was very weak, and the prisoner established a positive alibi, bringing in from Iowa the white foreman of a road gang of the Illinois Central Railroad, who showed by his time-checks that the suspect was in Iowa on the day of the assault, and at 169 THE NEGRO FACES AMERICA work.” The County Attorney draws a proper conclusion, “This sort of propaganda must cease, because it is false and incites to riot.” The Governor of Nebraska made pub- lic acknowledgment of the dangerous propa- ganda when he remarked on September 30th that those ““who have most to do with the molding of public opinion have constantly engaged in petty kickerings and criticism of the local officials which could not result in any but an utter disrespect of the law” (New York Tribune, October 1st). It was important for citizens of Omaha, said the Governor, to “organize their minds to dis- courage the activities of those who are con- stantly attempting to bring reproach upon public officials.” Industrial conflict formed, as is usually the case, an element in the Omaha municipal complex. The president of the Nebraska State Federation of Labor blamed the im- portation from the South of non-union Negroes for the disorder. “Crimes against women form the basis,” he is quoted as saying (New York World, October 2d), “but the mob was given impetus by causes that are not apparent on the surface.” Among these causes he enumerates the attempt 170 THE SCAPEGOAT OF CITY POLITICS by the “great employers of labor, including the packers,’ to “break down the wages of white labor’? with imported Negro labor and the mayor’s use of Negro labor “to fight the cause of capital against the just cause of the workingmen.’’ ‘“‘ When the team- sters two months ago were on strike and were fighting for a living wage it was the mayor who put to work the ignorant Negroes of the South. He placed them on wagons. He used them as _ strike-breakers.”’ Even this laborite has been “‘stuffed’’ with stories of assaults by Negroes upon white women. But he makes it quite clear that the white workman of Omaha does not want black men used to hold down wages. “If brought North they (the Negroes) must not be brought to fight the battles of capitalism. Every packer, every large employer knows what I mean by that.” And of “the moment” when feeling in Omaha overflowed the shallow container called civilization, this laborite remarked: ‘‘Mayor Smith was regarded as an enemy. This feeling did not start the attempt to lynch him, but it helped to carry it along.” It will be seen that a detailed examination of the state of citizenship and city govern- 171 THE NEGRO FACES AMERICA ment in Omaha disintegrates “Negro Crime” as a cause of the riot of September, 1919. Properly, as The New York Evening Post remarked, the outburst could hardly be called a “race riot.” Yet that was its characteriza- tion in newspaper scareheads throughout the nation.