Chapter XV: "the Vale of Tears," 1890-1910 (1)

1. _Current Opinion and Tendencies_

In the two decades that we are now to consider we find the working out of all the large forces mentioned in our last chapter. After a generation of striving the white South was once more thoroughly in control, and the new program well under way. Predictions for both a broader outlook for the section as a whole and greater care for the Negro's moral and intellectual advancement were destined not to be fulfilled; and the period became one of bitter social and economic antagonism.

All of this was primarily due to the one great fallacy on which the prosperity of the New South was built, and that was that the labor of the Negro existed only for the good of the white man. To this one source may be traced most of the ills borne by both white man and Negro during the period. If the Negro's labor was to be exploited, it was necessary that he be without the protection of political power and that he be denied justice in court. If he was to be reduced to a peon, certainly socially he must be given a peon's place. Accordingly there developed everywhere--in schools, in places of public accommodation, in the facilities of city life--the idea of inferior service for Negroes; and an unenlightened prison system flourished in all its hideousness. Furthermore, as a result of the vicious economic system, arose the sinister form of the Negro criminal. Here again the South begged the question, representative writers lamenting the passing of the dear dead days of slavery, and pointing cynically to the effects of freedom on the Negro. They failed to remember in the case of the Negro criminal that from childhood to manhood--in education, in economic chance, in legal power--they had by their own system deprived a human being of every privilege that was due him, ruining him body and soul; and then they stood aghast at the thing their hands had made. More than that, they blamed the race itself for the character that now sometimes appeared, and called upon thrifty, aspiring Negroes to find the criminal and give him up to the law. Thrifty, aspiring Negroes wondered what was the business of the police.

It was this pitiful failure to get down to fundamentals that characterized the period and that made life all the more hard for those Negroes who strove to advance. Every effort was made to brutalize a man, and then he was blamed for not being a St. Bernard. Fortunately before the period was over there arose not only clear-thinking men of the race but also a few white men who realized that such a social order could not last forever.

Early in the nineties, however, the pendulum had swung fully backward, and the years from 1890 to 1895 were in some ways the darkest that the race has experienced since emancipation. When in 1892 Cleveland was elected for a second term and the Democrats were once more in power, it seemed to the Southern rural Negro that the conditions of slavery had all but come again. More and more the South formulated its creed; it glorified the old aristocracy that had flourished and departed, and definitely it began to ask the North if it had not been right after all. It followed of course that if the Old South had the real key to the problem, the proper place of the Negro was that of a slave.

Within two or three years there were so many important articles on the Negro in prominent magazines and these were by such representative men that taken together they formed a symposium. In December, 1891, James Bryce wrote in the _North American Review_, pointing out that the situation in the South was a standing breach of the Constitution, that it suspended the growth of political parties and accustomed the section to fraudulent evasions, and he emphasized education as a possible remedy; he had quite made up his mind that the Negro had little or no place in politics. In January, 1892, a distinguished classical scholar, Basil L. Gildersleeve, turned aside from linguistics to write in the _Atlantic_ "The Creed of the Old South," which article he afterwards published as a special brochure, saying that it had been more widely read than anything else he had ever written. In April, Thomas Nelson Page in the _North American_ contended that in spite of the $5,000,000 spent on the education of the Negro in Virginia between 1870 and 1890 the race had retrograded or not greatly improved, and in fact that the Negro "did not possess the qualities to raise himself above slavery." Later in the same year he published _The Old South_. In the same month Frederick L. Hoffman, writing in the _Arena_, contended that in view of its mortality statistics the Negro race would soon die out.[1] Also in April, 1892, Henry Watterson wrote of the Negro in the _Chautauquan_, recalling the facts that the era of political turmoil had been succeeded by one of reaction and violence, and that by one of exhaustion and peace; but with all his insight he ventured no constructive suggestion, thinking it best for everybody "simply to be quiet for a time." Early in 1893 John C. Wycliffe, a prominent lawyer of New Orleans, writing in the _Forum_, voiced the desires of many in asking for a repeal of the Fifteenth Amendment; and in October, Bishop Atticus G. Haygood, writing in the same periodical of a recent and notorious lynching, said, "It was horrible to torture the guilty wretch; the burning was an act of insanity. But had the dismembered form of his victim been the dishonored body of my baby, I might also have gone into an insanity that might have ended never." Again and again was there the lament that the Negroes of forty years after were both morally and intellectually inferior to their antebellum ancestors; and if college professors and lawyers and ministers of the Gospel wrote in this fashion one could not wonder that the politician made capital of choice propaganda.

[Footnote 1: In 1896 this paper entered into an elaborate study, _Race Traits and Tendencies of the American Negro_, a publication of the American Economic Association. In this Hoffman contended at length that the race was not only not holding its own in population, but that it was also astonishingly criminal and was steadily losing economically. His work was critically studied and its fallacies exposed in the _Nation_, April 1, 1897.]

In this chorus of dispraise truth struggled for a hearing, but then as now traveled more slowly than error. In the _North American_ for July, 1892, Frederick Douglass wrote vigorously of "Lynch Law in the South." In the same month George W. Cable answered affirmatively and with emphasis the question, "Does the Negro pay for his education?" He showed that in Georgia in 1889-90 the colored schools did not really cost the white citizens a cent, and that in the other Southern states the Negro was also contributing his full share to the maintenance of the schools. In June of the same year William T. Harris, Commissioner of Education, wrote in truly statesmanlike fashion in the _Atlantic_ of "The Education of the Negro." Said he: "With the colored people all educated in schools and become a reading people interested in the daily newspaper; with all forms of industrial training accessible to them, and the opportunity so improved that every form of mechanical and manufacturing skill has its quota of colored working men and women; with a colored ministry educated in a Christian theology interpreted in a missionary spirit, and finding its auxiliaries in modern science and modern literature; with these educational essentials the Negro problem for the South will be solved without recourse to violent measures of any kind, whether migration, or disfranchisement, or ostracism." In December, 1893, Walter H. Page, writing in the _Forum_ of lynching under the title, "The Last Hold of the Southern Bully," said that "the great danger is not in the first violation of law, nor in the crime itself, but in the danger that Southern public sentiment under the stress of this phase of the race problem will lose the true perspective of civilization"; and L.E. Bleckley, Chief Justice of Georgia, spoke in similar vein. On the whole, however, the country, while occasionally indignant at some atrocity, had quite decided not to touch the Negro question for a while; and when in the spring of 1892 some representative Negroes protested without avail to President Harrison against the work of mobs, the _Review of Reviews_ but voiced the drift of current opinion when it said: "As for the colored men themselves, their wisest course would be to cultivate the best possible relations with the most upright and intelligent of their white neighbors, and for some time to come to forget all about politics and to strive mightily for industrial and educational progress."[1]

[Footnote 1: June, 1892, p. 526.]

It is not strange that under the circumstances we have now to record such discrimination, crime, and mob violence as can hardly be paralleled in the whole of American history. The Negro was already down; he was now to be trampled upon. When in the spring of 1892 some members of the race in the lowlands of Mississippi lost all they had by the floods and the Federal Government was disposed to send relief, the state government protested against such action on the ground that it would keep the Negroes from accepting the terms offered by the white planters. In Louisiana in 1895 a Negro presiding elder reported to the _Southwestern Christian Advocate_ that he had lost a membership of a hundred souls, the people being compelled to leave their crops and move away within ten days.

In 1891 the jail at Omaha was entered and a Negro taken out and hanged to a lamp-post. On February 27, 1892, at Jackson, La., where there was a pound party for the minister at the Negro Baptist church, a crowd of white men gathered, shooting revolvers and halting the Negroes as they passed. Most of the people were allowed to go on, but after a while the sport became furious and two men were fatally shot. About the same time, and in the same state, at Rayville, a Negro girl of fifteen was taken from a jail by a mob and hanged to a tree. In Texarkana, Ark., a Negro who had outraged a farmer's wife was captured and burned alive, the injured woman herself being compelled to light the fire. Just a few days later, in March, a constable in Memphis in attempting to arrest a Negro was killed. Numerous arrests followed, and at night a mob went to the jail, gained easy access, and, having seized three well-known Negroes who were thought to have been leaders in the killing, lynched them, the whole proceeding being such a flagrant violation of law that it has not yet been forgotten by the older Negro citizens of this important city. On February 1, 1893, at Paris, Texas, after one of the most brutal crimes occurred one of the most horrible lynchings on record. Henry Smith, the Negro, who seems to have harbored a resentment against a policeman of the town because of ill-treatment that he had received, seized the officer's three-year-old child, outraged her, and then tore her body to pieces. He was tortured by the child's father, her uncles, and her fifteen-year-old brother, his eyes being put out with hot irons before he was burned. His stepson, who had refused to tell where he could be found, was hanged and his body riddled with bullets. Thus the lynchings went on, the victims sometimes being guilty of the gravest crimes, but often also perfectly innocent people. In February, 1893, the average was very nearly one a day. At the same time injuries inflicted on the Negro were commonly disregarded altogether. Thus at Dickson, Tenn., a young white man lost forty dollars. A fortune-teller told him that the money had been taken by a woman and gave a description that seemed to fit a young colored woman who had worked in the home of a relative. Half a dozen men then went to the home of the young woman and outraged her, her mother, and also another woman who was in the house. At the very close of 1894, in Brooks County, Ga., after a Negro named Pike had killed a white man with whom he had a quarrel, seven Negroes were lynched after the real murderer had escaped. Any relative or other Negro who, questioned, refused to tell of the whereabouts of Pike, whether he knew of the same or not, was shot in his tracks, one man being shot before he had chance to say anything at all. Meanwhile the White Caps or "Regulators" took charge of the neighboring counties, terrifying the Negroes everywhere; and in the trials that resulted the state courts broke down altogether, one judge in despair giving up the holding of court as useless.

Meanwhile discrimination of all sorts went forward. On May 29, 1895, moved by the situation at the Orange Park Academy, the state of Florida approved "An Act to Prohibit White and Colored Youth from being Taught in the same Schools." Said one section: "It shall be a penal offense for any individual body of inhabitants, corporation, or association to conduct within this State any school of any grade, public, private, or parochial, wherein white persons and Negroes shall be instructed or boarded within the same building, or taught in the same class or at the same time by the same teacher." Religious organizations were not to be left behind in such action; and when before the meeting of the Baptist Young People's Union in Baltimore a letter was sent to the secretary of the organization and the editor of the _Baptist Union_, in behalf of the Negroes, who the year before had not been well treated at Toronto, he sent back an evasive answer, saying that the policy of his society was to encourage local unions to affiliate with their own churches.

More grave than anything else was the formal denial of the Negro's political rights. As we have seen, South Carolina in 1895 followed Mississippi in the disfranchising program and within the next fifteen years most of the other Southern states did likewise. With the Negro thus deprived of any genuine political voice, all sorts of social and economic injustice found greater license.

2. _Industrial Education: Booker T. Washington_

Such were the tendencies of life in the South as affecting the Negro thirty years after emancipation. In September, 1895, a rising educator of the race attracted national attention by a remarkable speech that he made at the Cotton States Exposition in Atlanta. Said Booker T. Washington: "To those of my race who depend on bettering their condition in a foreign land, or who underestimate the importance of cultivating friendly relations with the Southern white man who is their next door neighbor, I would say, 'Cast down your bucket where you are'--cast it down in making friends in every manly way of the people of all races by whom we are surrounded.... To those of the white race who look to the incoming of those of foreign birth and strange tongue and habits for the prosperity of the South, were I permitted I would repeat what I say to my own race, 'Cast down your bucket where you are.' Cast it down among 8,000,000 Negroes whose habits you know, whose fidelity and love you have tested in days when to have proved treacherous meant the ruin of your fire-sides.... In all things that are purely social we can be as separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress."

The message that Dr. Washington thus enunciated he had already given in substance the previous spring in an address at Fisk University, and even before then his work at Tuskegee Institute had attracted attention.[1] The Atlanta Exposition simply gave him the great occasion that he needed; and he was now to proclaim the new word throughout the length and breadth of the land. Among the hundreds of addresses that he afterwards delivered, especially important were those at Harvard University in 1896, at the Chicago Peace Jubilee in 1898, and before the National Education Association in St. Louis in 1904. Again and again in these speeches one comes upon such striking sentences as the following: "Freedom can never be given. It must be purchased."[2] "The race, like the individual, that makes itself indispensable, has solved most of its problems."[3] "As a race there are two things we must learn to do--one is to put brains into the common occupations of life, and the other is to dignify common labor."[4] "Ignorant and inexperienced, it is not strange that in the first years of our new life we began at the top instead of at the bottom; that a seat in Congress or the State Legislature was worth more than real estate or industrial skill."[5] "The opportunity to earn a dollar in a factory just now is worth infinitely more than the opportunity to spend a dollar in an opera house."[6] "One of the most vital questions that touch our American life is how to bring the strong, wealthy, and learned into helpful contact with the poorest, most ignorant, and humblest, and at the same time make the one appreciate the vitalizing, strengthening influence of the other."[7] "There is no defense or security for any of us except in the highest intelligence and development of all."[8]

[Footnote 1: See article by Albert Shaw, "Negro Progress on the Tuskegee Plan," in _Review of Reviews_, April, 1894.]

[Footnote 2,3: Speech before N.E.A., in St. Louis, June 30, 1904.]

[Footnote 4: Speech at Fisk University, 1805.]

[Footnote 5,6,8: Speech at Atlanta Exposition, September 18, 1895.]

[Footnote 7: Speech at Harvard University, June 24, 1896.]

The time was ripe for a new leader. Frederick Douglass had died in February, 1895. In his later years he had more than once lost hold on the heart of his people, as when he opposed the Negro Exodus or seemed not fully in sympathy with the religious convictions of those who looked to him. At his passing, however, the race remembered only his early service and his old magnificence, and to a striving people his death seemed to make still darker the gathering gloom. Coming when he did, Booker T. Washington was thoroughly in line with the materialism of his age; he answered both an economic and an educational crisis. He also satisfied the South of the new day by what he had to say about social equality.

The story of his work reads like a romance, and he himself has told it better than any one else ever can. He did not claim the credit for the original idea of industrial education; that he gave to General Armstrong, and it was at Hampton that he himself had been nurtured. What was needed, however, was for some one to take the Hampton idea down to the cotton belt, interpret the lesson for the men and women digging in the ground, and generally to put the race in line with the country's industrial development. This was what Booker T. Washington undertook to do.

He reached Tuskegee early in June, 1881. July 4 was the date set for the opening of the school in the little shanty and church which had been secured for its accommodation. On the morning of this day thirty students reported for admission. The greater number were school-teachers and some were nearly forty years of age. Just about three months after the opening of the school there was offered for sale an old and abandoned plantation a mile from Tuskegee on which the mansion had been burned. All told the place seemed to be just the location needed to make the work effective and permanent. The price asked was five hundred dollars, the owner requiring the immediate payment of two hundred and fifty dollars, the remaining two hundred and fifty to be paid within a year. In his difficulty Mr. Washington wrote to General J.F.B. Marshall, treasurer of Hampton Institute, placing the matter before him and asking for the loan of two hundred and fifty dollars. General Marshall replied that he had no authority to lend money belonging to Hampton Institute, but that he would gladly advance the amount needed from his personal funds. Toward the paying of this sum the assisting teacher, Olivia A. Davidson (afterwards Mrs. Washington), helped heroically. Her first effort was made by holding festivals and suppers, but she also canvassed the families in the town of Tuskegee, and the white people as well as the Negroes helped her. "It was often pathetic," said the principal, "to note the gifts of the older colored people, many of whom had spent their best days in slavery. Sometimes they would give five cents, sometimes twenty-five cents. Sometimes the contribution was a quilt, or a quantity of sugarcane. I recall one old colored woman, who was about seventy years of age, who came to see me when we were raising money to pay for the farm. She hobbled into the room where I was, leaning on a cane. She was clad in rags, but they were clean. She said, 'Mr. Washington, God knows I spent de bes' days of my life in slavery. God knows I's ignorant an' poor; but I knows what you an' Miss Davidson is tryin' to do. I knows you is tryin' to make better men an' better women for de colored race. I ain't got no money, but I wants you to take dese six eggs, what I's been savin' up, an' I wants you to put dese six eggs into de eddication of dese boys an' gals.' Since the work at Tuskegee started," added the speaker, "it has been my privilege to receive many gifts for the benefit of the institution, but never any, I think, that touched me as deeply as this one."

It was early in the history of the school that Mr. Washington conceived the idea of extension work. The Tuskegee Conferences began in February, 1892. To the first meeting came five hundred men, mainly farmers, and many woman. Outstanding was the discussion of the actual terms on which most of the men were living from year to year. A mortgage was given on the cotton crop before it was planted, and to the mortgage was attached a note which waived all right to exemptions under the constitution and laws of the state of Alabama or of any other state to which the tenant might move. Said one: "The mortgage ties you tighter than any rope and a waive note is a consuming fire." Said another: "The waive note is good for twenty years and when you sign one you must either pay out or die out." Another: "When you sign a waive note you just cross your hands behind you and go to the merchant and say, 'Here, tie me and take all I've got.'" All agreed that the people mortgaged more than was necessary, to buy sewing machines (which sometimes were not used), expensive clocks, great family Bibles, or other things easily dispensed with. Said one man: "My people want all they can get on credit, not thinking of the day of settlement. We must learn to bore with a small augur first. The black man totes a heavy bundle, and when he puts it down there is a plow, a hoe, and ignorance."

It was to people such as these that Booker T. Washington brought hope, and serving them he passed on to fame. Within a few years schools on the plan of Tuskegee began to spring up all over the South, at Denmark, at Snow Hill, at Utica, and elsewhere. In 1900 the National Negro Business League began its sessions, giving great impetus to the establishment of banks, stores, and industrial enterprises throughout the country, and especially in the South. Much of this progress would certainly have been realized if the Business League had never been organized; but every one granted that in all the development the genius of the leader at Tuskegee was the chief force. About his greatness and his very definite contribution there could be no question.

3. _Individual Achievement: The Spanish-American War_

It happened that just at the time that Booker T. Washington was advancing to great distinction, three or four other individuals were reflecting special credit on the race. One of these was a young scholar, W.E. Burghardt DuBois, who after a college career at Fisk continued his studies at Harvard and Berlin and finally took the Ph.D. degree at Harvard in 1895. There had been sound scholars in the race before DuBois, but generally these had rested on attainment in the languages or mathematics, and most frequently they had expressed themselves in rather philosophical disquisition. Here, however, was a thorough student of economics, and one who was able to attack the problems of his people and meet opponents on the basis of modern science. He was destined to do great good, and the race was proud of him.

In 1896 also an authentic young poet who had wrestled with poverty and doubt at last gained a hearing. After completing the course at a high school in Dayton, Paul Laurence Dunbar ran an elevator for four dollars a week, and then he peddled from door to door two little volumes of verse that had been privately printed. William Dean Howells at length gave him a helping hand, and Dodd, Mead & Co. published _Lyrics of Lowly Life_. Dunbar wrote both in classic English and in the dialect that voiced the humor and the pathos of the life of those for whom he spoke. What was not at the time especially observed was that in numerous poems he suggested the discontent with the age in which he lived and thus struck what later years were to prove an important keynote. After he had waited and struggled so long, his success was so great that it became a vogue, and imitators sprang up everywhere. He touched the heart of his people and the race loved him.

By 1896 also word began to come of a Negro American painter, Henry O. Tanner, who was winning laurels in Paris. At the same time a beautiful singer, Mme. Sissieretta Jones, on the concert stage was giving new proof of the possibilities of the Negro as an artist in song. In the previous decade Mme. Marie Selika, a cultured vocalist of the first rank, had delighted audiences in both America and Europe, and in 1887 had appeared Flora Batson, a ballad singer whose work at its best was of the sort that sends an audience into the wildest enthusiasm. In 1894, moreover, Harry T. Burleigh, competing against sixty candidates, became baritone soloist at St. Georges's Episcopal Church, New York, and just a few years later he was to be employed also at Temple Emanu-El, the Fifth Avenue Jewish synagogue. From abroad also came word of a brilliant musician, Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, who by his "Hiawatha's Wedding-Feast" in 1898 leaped into the rank of the foremost living English composers. On the more popular stage appeared light musical comedy, intermediate between the old Negro minstrelsy and a genuine Negro drama, the representative companies becoming within the next few years those of Cole and Johnson, and Williams and Walker.

Especially outstanding in the course of the decade, however, was the work of the Negro soldier in the Spanish-American War. There were at the time four regiments of colored regulars in the Army of the United States, the Twenty-fourth Infantry, the Twenty-fifth Infantry, the Ninth Cavalry, and the Tenth Cavalry. When the war broke out President McKinley sent to Congress a message recommending the enlistment of more regiments of Negroes. Congress failed to act; nevertheless colored troops enlisted in the volunteer service in Massachusetts, Indiana, Illinois, Kansas, Ohio, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Virginia. The Eighth Illinois was officered throughout by Negroes, J.R. Marshall commanding; and Major Charles E. Young, a West Point graduate, was in charge of the Ohio battalion. The very first regiment ordered to the front when the war broke out was the Twenty-fourth Infantry; and Negro troops were conspicuous in the fighting around Santiago. They figured in a brilliant charge at Las Quasimas on June 24, and in an attack on July 1 upon a garrison at El Caney (a position of importance for securing possession of a line of hills along the San Juan River, a mile and a half from Santiago) the First Volunteer Cavalry (Colonel Roosevelt's "Rough Riders") was practically saved from annihilation by the gallant work of the men of the Tenth Cavalry. Fully as patriotic, though in another way, was a deed of the Twenty-fourth Infantry. Learning that General Miles desired a regiment for the cleaning of a yellow fever hospital and the nursing of some victims of the disease, the Twenty-fourth volunteered its services and by one day's work so cleared away the rubbish and cleaned the camp that the number of cases was greatly reduced. Said the _Review of Reviews_ in editorial comment:[1] "One of the most gratifying incidents of the Spanish War has been the enthusiasm that the colored regiments of the regular army have aroused throughout the whole country. Their fighting at Santiago was magnificent. The Negro soldiers showed excellent discipline, the highest qualities of personal bravery, very superior physical endurance, unfailing good temper, and the most generous disposition toward all comrades in arms, whether white or black. Roosevelt's Rough Riders have come back singing the praises of the colored troops. There is not a dissenting voice in the chorus of praise.... Men who can fight for their country as did these colored troops ought to have their full share of gratitude and honor."

[Footnote 1: October, 1898, p. 387.]

4. _Mob Violence; Election Troubles; The Atlanta Massacre_

After two or three years of comparative quiet--but only _comparative_ quiet--mob violence burst forth about the turn of the century with redoubled intensity. In a large way this was simply a result of the campaigns for disfranchisement that in some of the Southern states were just now getting under way; but charges of assault and questions of labor also played a part. In some places people who were innocent of any charge whatever were attacked, and so many were killed that sometimes it seemed that the law had broken down altogether. Not the least interesting development of these troublous years was that in some cases as never before Negroes began to fight with their backs to the wall, and thus at the very close of the century--at the end of a bitter decade and the beginning of one still more bitter--a new factor entered into the problem, one that was destined more and more to demand consideration.

On one Sunday toward the close of October, 1898, the country recorded two race wars, one lynching, two murders, one of which was expected to lead to a lynching, with a total of ten Negroes killed and four wounded and four white men killed and seven wounded. The most serious outbreak was in the state of Mississippi, and it is worthy of note that in not one single case was there any question of rape.

November was made red by election troubles in both North and South Carolina. In the latter state, at Phoenix, in Greenwood County, on November 8 and for some days thereafter, the Tolberts, a well-known family of white Republicans, were attacked by mobs and barely escaped alive. R.R. Tolbert was a candidate for Congress and also chairman of the Republican state committee. John R. Tolbert, his father, collector of the port of Charleston, had come home to vote and was at one of the polling-places in the county. Thomas Tolbert at Phoenix was taking the affidavits of the Negroes who were not permitted to vote for his brother in order that later there might be ground on which to contest the election. While thus engaged he was attacked by Etheridge, the Democratic manager of another precinct. The Negroes came to Tolbert's defense, and in the fight that followed Etheridge was killed and Tolbert wounded. John Tolbert, coming up, was filled with buckshot, and a younger member of the family was also hurt. The Negroes were at length overpowered and the Tolberts forced to flee. All told it appears that two white men and about twelve Negroes lost their lives in connection with the trouble, six of the latter being lynched on account of the death of Etheridge.

In North Carolina in 1894 the Republicans by combining with the Populists had secured control of the state legislature. In 1896 the Democrats were again outvoted, Governor Russell being elected by a plurality of 9000. A considerable number of local offices was in the hands of Negroes, who had the backing of the Governor, the legislature, and the Supreme Court as well. Before the November elections in 1898 the Democrats in Wilmington announced their determination to prevent Negroes from holding office in the city. Especially had they been made angry by an editorial in a local Negro paper, the _Record_, in which, under date August 18, the editor, Alex. L. Manly, starting with a reference to a speaker from Georgia, who at the Agricultural Society meeting at Tybee had advocated lynching as an extreme measure, said that she "lost sight of the basic principle of the religion of Christ in her plea for one class of people as against another," and continued: "The papers are filled with reports of rapes of white women, and the subsequent lynching of the alleged rapists. The editors pour forth volleys of aspersions against all Negroes because of the few who may be guilty. If the papers and speakers of the other race would condemn the commission of crime because it is crime and not try to make it appear that the Negroes were the only criminals, they would find their strongest allies in the intelligent Negroes themselves, and together the whites and blacks would root the evil out of both races.... Our experience among poor white people in the country teaches us that the women of that race are not any more particular in the matter of clandestine meetings with colored men than are the white men with colored women. Meetings of this kind go on for some time until the woman's infatuation or the man's boldness brings attention to them and the man is lynched for rape." In reply to this the speaker quoted in a signed statement said: "When the Negro Manly attributed the crime of rape to intimacy between Negro men and white women of the South, the slanderer should be made to fear a lyncher's rope rather than occupy a place in New York newspapers"--a method of argument that was unfortunately all too common in the South. As election day approached the Democrats sought generally to intimidate the Negroes, the streets and roads being patrolled by men wearing red shirts. Election day, however, passed without any disturbance; but on the next day there was a mass meeting of white citizens, at which there were adopted resolutions to employ white labor instead of Negro, to banish the editor of the _Record_, and to send away from the city the printing-press in the office of that paper; and a committee of twenty-five was appointed to see that these resolutions were carried into effect within twenty-four hours. In the course of the terrible day that followed the printing office was destroyed, several white Republicans were driven from the city, and nine Negroes were killed at once, though no one could say with accuracy just how many more lost their lives or were seriously wounded before the trouble was over.

Charles W. Chesnutt, in _The Marrow of Tradition_, has given a faithful portrayal of these disgraceful events, the Wellington of the story being Wilmington. Perhaps the best commentary on those who thus sought power was afforded by their apologist, a Presbyterian minister and editor, A.J. McKelway, who on this occasion and others wrote articles in the _Independent_ and the _Outlook_ justifying the proceedings. Said he: "It is difficult to speak of the Red Shirts without a smile. They victimized the Negroes with a huge practical joke.... A dozen men would meet at a crossroad, on horseback, clad in red shirts or calico, flannel or silk, according to the taste of the owner and the enthusiasm of his womankind. They would gallop through the country, and the Negro would quietly make up his mind that his interest in political affairs was not a large one, anyhow. It would be wise not to vote, and wiser not to register to prevent being dragooned into voting on election day." It thus appears that the forcible seizure of the political rights of people, the killing and wounding of many, and the compelling of scores to leave their homes amount in the end to not more than a "practical joke."

One part of the new program was the most intense opposition to Federal Negro appointees anywhere in the South. On the morning of February 22, 1898, Frazer B. Baker, the colored postmaster at Lake City, S.C., awoke to find his house in flames. Attempting to escape, he and his baby boy were shot and killed and their bodies consumed in the burning house. His wife and the other children were wounded but escaped. The Postmaster-General was quite disposed to see that justice was done in this case; but the men charged with the crime gave the most trivial alibis, and on Saturday, April 22, 1899, the jury in the United States Circuit Court at Charleston reported its failure to agree on a verdict. Three years later the whole problem was presented strongly to President Roosevelt. When Mrs. Minne Cox, who was serving efficiently as postmistress at Indianola, Miss., was forced to resign because of threats, he closed the office; and when there was protest against the appointment of Dr. William D. Crum as collector of the port of Charleston, he said, "I do not intend to appoint any unfit man to office. So far as I legitimately can, I shall always endeavor to pay regard to the wishes and feelings of the people of each locality; but I can not consent to take the position that the door of hope--the door of opportunity--is to be shut upon any man, no matter how worthy, purely upon the grounds of race or color. Such an attitude would, according to my convictions, be fundamentally wrong." These memorable words, coming in a day of compromise and expediency in high places, greatly cheered the heart of the race. Just the year before, the importance of the incident of Booker T. Washington's taking lunch with President Roosevelt was rather unnecessarily magnified by the South into all sorts of discussion of social equality.

On Tuesday, January 24, 1899, a fire in the center of the town of Palmetto, Ga., destroyed a hotel, two stores, and a storehouse, on which property there was little insurance. The next Saturday there was another fire and this destroyed a considerable part of the town. For some weeks there was no clue as to the origin of these fires; but about the middle of March something overheard by a white citizen led to the implicating of nine Negroes. These men were arrested and confined for the night of March 15 in a warehouse to await trial the next morning, a dummy guard of six men being placed before the door. About midnight a mob came, pushed open the door, and fired two volleys at the Negroes, killing four immediately and fatally wounding four more. The circumstances of this atrocious crime oppressed the Negro people of the state as few things had done since the Civil War. That it did no good was evident, for in its underlying psychology it was closely associated with a double crime that was now to be committed. In April, Sam Hose, a Negro who had brooded on the happenings at Palmetto, not many miles from the scene killed a farmer, Alfred Cranford, who had been a leader of the mob, and outraged his wife. For two weeks he was hunted like an animal, the white people of the state meanwhile being almost unnerved and the Negroes sickened by the pursuit. At last, however, he was found, and on Sunday, April 23, at Newnan, Ga., he was burned, his execution being accompanied by unspeakable mutilation; and on the same day Lige Strickland, a Negro preacher whom Hose had accused of complicity in his crime, was hanged near Palmetto. The nation stood aghast, for the recent events in Georgia had shaken the very foundations of American civilization. Said the _Charleston News and Courier_: "The chains which bound the citizen, Sam Hose, to the stake at Newnan mean more for us and for his race than the chains or bonds of slavery, which they supplanted. The flames that lit the scene of his torture shed their baleful light throughout every corner of our land, and exposed a state of things, actual and potential, among us that should rouse the dullest mind to a sharp sense of our true condition, and of our unchanged and unchangeable relations to the whole race whom the tortured wretch represented."

Violence breeds violence, and two or three outstanding events are yet to be recorded. On August 23, 1899, at Darien, Ga., hundreds of Negroes, who for days had been aroused by rumors of a threatened lynching, assembled at the ringing of the bell of a church opposite the jail and by their presence prevented the removal of a prisoner. They were later tried for insurrection and twenty-one sent to the convict farms for a year. The general circumstances of the uprising excited great interest throughout the country. In May, 1900, in Augusta, Ga., an unfortunate street car incident resulted in the death of the aggressor, a young white man named Whitney, and in the lynching of the colored man, Wilson, who killed him. In this instance the victim was tortured and mutilated, parts of his body and of the rope by which he was hanged being passed around as souvenirs. A Negro organization at length recovered the body, and so great was the excitement at the funeral that the coffin was not allowed to be opened. Two months later, in New Orleans, there was a most extraordinary occurrence, the same being important because the leading figure was very frankly regarded by the Negroes as a hero and his fight in his own defense a sign that the men of the race would not always be shot down without some effort to protect themselves.

One night in July, an hour before midnight, two Negroes Robert Charles and Leonard Pierce, who had recently come into the city from Mississippi and whose movements had interested the police, were found by three officers on the front steps of a house in Dryades Street. Being questioned they replied that they had been in the town two or three days and had secured work. In the course of the questioning the larger of the Negroes, Charles, rose to his feet; he was seized by one of the officers, Mora, who began to use his billet; and in the struggle that resulted Charles escaped and Mora was wounded in each hand and the hip. Charles now took refuge in a small house on Fourth Street, and when he was surrounded, with deadly aim he shot and instantly killed the first two officers who appeared.[1] The other men advancing, retreated and waited until daylight for reënforcement, and Charles himself withdrew to other quarters, and for some days his whereabouts were unknown. With the new day, however, the city was wild with excitement and thousands of men joined in the search, the newspapers all the while stirring the crowd to greater fury. Mobs rushed up and down the streets assaulting Negroes wherever they could be found, no effort to check them being made by the police. On the second night a crowd of nearly a thousand was addressed at the Lee Monument by a man from Kenner, a town a few miles above the city. Said he: "Gentlemen, I am from Kenner, and I have come down here to-night to assist you in teaching the blacks a lesson. I have killed a Negro before and in revenge of the wrong wrought upon you and yours I am willing to kill again. The only way you can teach these niggers a lesson and put them in their place is to go out and lynch a few of them as an object lesson. String up a few of them. That is the only thing to do--kill them, string them up, lynch them. I will lead you. On to the parish prison and lynch Pierce." The mob now rushed to the prison, stores and pawnshops being plundered on the way. Within the next few hours a Negro was taken from a street car on Canal Street, killed, and his body thrown into the gutter. An old man of seventy going to work in the morning was fatally shot. On Rousseau Street the mob fired into a little cabin; the inmates were asleep and an old woman was killed in bed. Another old woman who looked out from her home was beaten into insensibility. A man sitting at his door was shot, beaten, and left for dead. Such were the scenes that were enacted almost hourly from Monday until Friday evening. One night the excellent school building given by Thomy Lafon, a member of the race and a philanthropist, was burned.

[Footnote 1: From this time forth the wildest rumors were afloat and the number of men that Charles had killed was greatly exaggerated. Some reports said scores or even hundreds, and it is quite possible that any figures given herewith are an understatement.]

About three o'clock on Friday afternoon Charles was found to be in a two-story house at the corner of Saratoga and Clio Streets. Two officers, Porteus and Lally, entered a lower room. The first fell dead at the first shot, and the second was mortally wounded by the next. A third, Bloomfield, waiting with gun in hand, was wounded at the first shot and killed at the second. The crowd retreated, but bullets rained upon the house, Charles all the while keeping watch in every direction from four different windows. Every now and then he thrust his rifle through one of the shattered windowpanes and fired, working with incredible rapidity. He succeeded in killing two more of his assailants and wounding two. At last he realized that the house was on fire, and knowing that the end had come he rushed forth upon his foes, fired one shot more and fell dead. He had killed eight men and mortally wounded two or three more. His body was mutilated. In his room there was afterwards found a copy of a religious publication, and it was known that he had resented disfranchisement in Louisiana and had distributed pamphlets to further a colonization scheme. No incriminating evidence, however, was found.

In the same memorable year, 1900, on the night of Wednesday, August 15, there were serious riots in the city of New York. On the preceding Sunday a policeman named Thorpe in attempting to arrest a colored woman was stabbed by a Negro, Arthur Harris, so fatally that he died on Monday. On Wednesday evening Negroes were dragged from the street cars and beaten, and by midnight there were thousands of rioters between 25th and 35th Streets. On the next night the trouble was resumed. These events were followed almost immediately by riots in Akron, Ohio. On the last Sunday in October, 1901, while some Negroes were holding their usual fall camp-meeting in a grove in Washington Parish, Louisiana, they were attacked, and a number of people, not less than ten and perhaps several more, were killed; and hundreds of men, women, and children felt forced to move away from the vicinity. In the first week of March, 1904, there was in Mississippi a lynching that exceeded even others of the period in its horror and that became notorious for its use of a corkscrew. A white planter of Doddsville was murdered, and a Negro, Luther Holbert, was charged with the crime. Holbert fled, and his innocent wife went with him. Further report we read in the Democratic _Evening Post_ of Vicksburg as follows: "When the two Negroes were captured, they were tied to trees, and while the funeral pyres were being prepared they were forced to suffer the most fiendish tortures. The blacks were forced to hold out their hands while one finger at a time was chopped off. The fingers were distributed as souvenirs. The ears of the murderers were cut off. Holbert was beaten severely, his skull was fractured, and one of his eyes, knocked out with a stick, hung by a shred from the socket.... The most excruciating form of punishment consisted in the use of a large corkscrew in the hands of some of the mob. This instrument was bored into the flesh of the man and the woman, in the arms, legs, and body, and then pulled out, the spirals tearing out big pieces of raw, quivering flesh every time it was withdrawn." In the summer of this same year Georgia was once more the scene of a horrible lynching, two Negroes, Paul Reed and Will Cato--because of the murder of the Hodges family six miles from the town on July 20--being burned at the stake at Statesville under unusually depressing circumstances. In August, 1908, there were in Springfield, Illinois, race riots of such a serious nature that a force of six thousand soldiers was required to quell them. These riots were significant not only because of the attitude of Northern laborers toward Negro competition, but also because of the indiscriminate killing of Negroes by people in the North, this indicating a genuine nationalization of the Negro Problem. The real climax of violence within the period, however, was the Atlanta Massacre of Saturday, September 22, 1906.