Chapter XV: "the Vale of Tears," 1890-1910 (2)

Throughout the summer the heated campaign of Hoke Smith for the governorship capitalized the gathering sentiment for the disfranchisement of the Negro in the state and at length raised the race issue to such a high pitch that it leaped into flame. The feeling was intensified by the report of assaults and attempted assaults by Negroes, particularly as these were detailed and magnified or even invented by an evening paper, the _Atlanta News_, against which the Fulton County Grand Jury afterwards brought in an indictment as largely responsible for the riot, and which was forced to suspend publication when the business men of the city withdrew their support. Just how much foundation there was to the rumors may be seen from the following report of the investigator: "Three, charged to white men, attracted comparatively little attention in the newspapers, although one, the offense of a man named Turnadge, was shocking in its details. Of twelve such charges against Negroes in the six months preceding the riot, two were cases of rape, horrible in their details, three were aggravated attempts at rape, three may have been attempts, three were pure cases of fright on the part of white women, and in one the white woman, first asserting that a Negro had assaulted her, finally confessed attempted suicide."[1] On Friday, September 21, while a Negro was on trial, the father of the girl concerned asked the recorder for permission to deal with the Negro with his own hand, and an outbreak was barely averted in the open court. On Saturday evening, however, some elements in the city and from neighboring towns, heated by liquor and newspaper extras, became openly riotous and until midnight defied all law and authority. Negroes were assaulted wherever they appeared, for the most part being found unsuspecting, as in the case of those who happened to be going home from work and were on street cars passing through the heart of the city. In one barber shop two workers were beaten to death and their bodies mangled. A lame bootblack, innocent and industrious, was dragged from his work and kicked and beaten to death. Another young Negro was stabbed with jack-knives. Altogether very nearly a score of persons lost their lives and two or three times as many were injured. After some time Governor Terrell mobilized the militia, but the crowd did not take this move seriously, and the real feeling of the Mayor, who turned on the hose of the fire department, was shown by his statement that just so long as the Negroes committed certain crimes just so long would they be unceremoniously dealt with. Sunday dawned upon a city of astounded white people and outraged and sullen Negroes. Throughout Monday and Tuesday the tension continued, the Negroes endeavoring to defend themselves as well as they could. On Monday night the union of some citizens with policemen who were advancing in a suburb in which most of the homes were those of Negroes, resulted in the death of James Heard, an officer, and in the wounding of some of those who accompanied him. More Negroes were also killed, and a white woman to whose front porch two men were chased died of fright at seeing them shot to death. It was the disposition, however, on the part of the Negroes to make armed resistance that really put an end to the massacre. Now followed a procedure that is best described in the words of the prominent apologist for such outbreaks. Said A.J. McKelway: "Tuesday every house in the town (i.e., the suburb referred to above) was entered by the soldiers, and some two hundred and fifty Negroes temporarily held, while the search was proceeding and inquiries being made. They were all disarmed, and those with concealed weapons, or under suspicion of having been in the party firing on the police, were sent to jail."[2] It is thus evident that in this case, as in many others, the Negroes who had suffered most, not the white men who killed a score of them, were disarmed, and that for the time being their terrified women and children were left defenseless. McKelway also says in this general connection: "Any Southern man would protect an innocent Negro who appealed to him for help, with his own life if necessary." This sounds like chivalry, but it is really the survival of the old slavery attitude that begs the whole question. The Negro does not feel that he should ask any other man to protect him. He has quite made up his mind that he will defend his own home himself. He stands as a man before the bar, and the one thing he wants to know is if the law and the courts of America are able to give him justice--simple justice, nothing more.

[Footnote 1: R.S. Baker: _Following the Colour Line_, 3.]

[Footnote 2: _Outlook_, November 3, 1906, p. 561.]

5. _The Question of Labor_

From time to time, in connection with cases of violence, we have referred to the matter of labor. Riots such as we have described are primarily social in character, the call of race invariably being the final appeal. The economic motive has accompanied this, however, and has been found to be of increasing importance. Says DuBois: "The fatal campaign in Georgia which culminated in the Atlanta Massacre 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."[1] The question was indeed constantly recurrent, but even by the end of the period policies had not yet been definitely decided upon, and for the time being there were frequent armed clashes between the Negro and the white laborer. Both capital and common sense were making it clear, however, that the Negro was undoubtedly a labor asset and would have to be given place accordingly.

[Footnote 1: _The Negro in the South_, 115.]

In March, 1895, there were bloody riots in New Orleans, these growing out of the fact that white laborers who were beginning to be organized objected to the employment Of Negro workers by the shipowners for the unloading of vessels. When the trouble was at its height volley after volley was poured upon the Negroes, and in turn two white men were killed and several wounded. The commercial bodies of the city met, blamed the Governor and the Mayor for the series of outbreaks, and demanded that the outrages cease. Said they: "Forbearance has ceased to be a virtue. We can no longer treat with men who, with arms in their hands, are shooting down an inoffensive people because they will not think and act with them. For these reasons we say to these people that, cost what it may, we are determined that the commerce of this city must and shall be protected; that every man who desires to perform honest labor must and shall be permitted to do so regardless of race, color, or previous condition." About August I of this same year, 1895, there were sharp conflicts between the white and the black miners at Birmingham, a number being killed on both sides before military authority could intervene. Three years later, moreover, the invasion of the North by Negro labor had begun, and about November 17, 1898, there was serious trouble in the mines at Pana and Virden, Illinois. In the same month the convention of railroad brotherhoods in Norfolk expressed strong hostility to Negro labor, Grand Master Frank P. Sargent of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen saying that one of the chief purposes of the meeting of the brotherhoods was "to begin a campaign in advocacy of white supremacy in the railway service." This November, it will be recalled, was the fateful month of the election riots in North and South Carolina. _The People_, the Socialist-Labor publication, commenting upon a Negro indignation meeting at Cooper Union and upon the problem in general, said that the Negro was essentially a wage-slave, that it was the capitalism of the North and not humanity that in the first place had demanded the freedom of the slave, that in the new day capital demanded the subjugation of the working class--Negro or otherwise; and it blamed the Negroes for not seeing the real issues at stake. It continued with emphasis: "It is not the _Negro_ that was massacred in the Carolinas; it was Carolina _workingmen_, Carolina _wage-slaves_ who happened to be colored men. Not as Negroes must the race rise;... it is as _workingmen_, as a branch of the _working class_, that the Negro must denounce the Carolina felonies. Only by touching that chord can he denounce to a purpose, because only then does he place himself upon that elevation that will enable him to perceive the source of the specific wrong complained of now." This point of view was destined more and more to stimulate those interested in the problem, whether they accepted it in its entirety or not. Another opinion, very different and also important, was that given in 1899 by the editor of _Dixie_, a magazine published in Atlanta and devoted to Southern industrial interests. Said he: "The manufacturing center of the United States will one day be located in the South; and this will come about, strange as it may seem, for the reason that the Negro is a fixture here.... Organized labor, as it exists to-day, is a menace to industry. The Negro stands as a permanent and positive barrier against labor organization in the South.... So the Negro, all unwittingly, is playing an important part in the drama of Southern industrial development. His good nature defies the Socialist." At the time this opinion seemed plausible, and yet the very next two decades were to raise the question if it was not founded on fallacious assumptions.

The real climax of labor trouble as of mob violence within the period came in Georgia and in Atlanta, a city that now assumed outstanding importance as a battleground of the problems of the New South. In April, 1909, it happened that ten white workers on the Georgia Railroad who had been placed on the "extra list" were replaced by Negroes at lower wages. Against this there was violent protest all along the route. A little more than a month later the white Firemen's Union started a strike that was intended to be the beginning of an effort to drive all Negro firemen from Southern roads, and it was soon apparent that the real contest was one occasioned by the progress in the South of organized labor on the one hand and the progress of the Negro in efficiency on the other. The essential motives that entered into the struggle were in fact the same as those that characterized the trouble in New Orleans in 1895. Said E.A. Ball, second vice-president of the Firemen's Union, in an address to the public: "It will be up to you to determine whether the white firemen now employed on the Georgia Railroad shall be accorded rights and privileges over the Negro, or whether he shall be placed on the same equality with the Negro. Also, it will be for you to determine whether or not white firemen, supporting families in and around Atlanta on a pay of $1.75 a day, shall be compelled to vacate their positions in Atlanta joint terminals for Negroes, who are willing to do the same work for $1.25." Some papers, like the Augusta _Herald_, said that it was a mistaken policy to give preference to Negroes when white men would ultimately have to be put in charge of trains and engines; but others, like the Baltimore _News_, said, "If the Negro can be driven from one skilled employment, he can be driven from another; but a country that tries to do it is flying in the face of every economic law, and must feel the evil effects of its policy if it could be carried out." At any rate feeling ran very high; for a whole week about June I there were very few trains between Atlanta and Augusta, and there were some acts of violence; but in the face of the capital at stake and the fundamental issues involved it was simply impossible for the railroad to give way. The matter was at length referred to a board of arbitration which decided that the Georgia Railroad was still to employ Negroes whenever they were found qualified and that they were to receive the same wages as white workers. Some thought that this decision would ultimately tell against the Negro, but such was not the immediate effect at least, and to all intents and purposes the white firemen had lost in the strike. The whole matter was in fact fundamentally one of the most pathetic that we have had to record. Humble white workers, desirous of improving the economic condition of themselves and their families, instead of assuming a statesmanlike and truly patriotic attitude toward their problem, turned aside into the wilderness of racial hatred and were lost.

This review naturally prompts reflection as to the whole function of the Negro laborer in the South. In the first place, what is he worth, and especially what is he worth in honest Southern opinion? It was said after the Civil War that he would not work except under compulsion; just how had he come to be regarded in the industry of the New South? In 1894 a number of large employers were asked about this point. 50 per cent said that in skilled labor they considered the Negro inferior to the white worker, 46 per cent said that he was fairly equal, and 4 per cent said that, all things considered, he was superior. As to common labor 54 per cent said that he was equal, 29 per cent superior, and 17 per cent inferior to the white worker. At the time it appeared that wages paid Negroes averaged 80 per cent of those paid white men. A similar investigation by the Chattanooga _Tradesman_ in 1902 brought forth five hundred replies. These were summarized as follows: "We find the Negro more useful and skilled in the cotton-seed oil-mills, the lumber-mills, the foundries, brick kilns, mines, and blast-furnaces. He is superior to white labor and possibly superior to any other labor in these establishments, but not in the capacity of skillful and ingenious artisans." In this opinion, it is to be remembered, the Negro was subjected to a severe test in which nothing whatever was given to him, and at least it appears that in many lines of labor he is not less than indispensable to the progress of the South. The question then arises: Just what is the relation that he is finally to sustain to other workingmen? It would seem that white worker and black worker would long ago have realized their identity of interest and have come together. The unions, however, have been slow to admit Negroes and give them the same footing and backing as white men. Under the circumstances accordingly there remained nothing else for the Negro to do except to work wherever his services were desired and on the best terms that he was able to obtain.

6. _Defamation: Brownsville_

Crime demands justification, and it is not surprising that after such violence as that which we have described, and after several states had passed disfranchising acts, there appeared in the first years of the new century several publications especially defamatory of the race. Some books unfortunately descended to a coarseness in vilification such as had not been reached since the Civil War. From a Bible House in St. Louis in 1902 came _The Negro a Beast, or In the Image of God_, a book that was destined to have an enormous circulation among the white people of the poorer class in the South, and that of course promoted the mob spirit.[1] Contemporary and of the same general tenor were R.W. Shufeldt's _The Negro_ and W.B. Smith's _The Color Line_, while a member of the race itself, William Hannibal Thomas, published a book, _The American Negro_, that was without either faith or ideal and as a denunciation of the Negro in America unparalleled in its vindictiveness and exaggeration.[2]

[Footnote 1: Its fundamental assumptions were ably refuted by Edward Atkinson in the _North American Review_, August, 1905.]

[Footnote 2: It was reviewed in the _Dial_, April 16, 1901, by W.E.B. DuBois, who said in part: "Mr. Thomas's book is a sinister symptom--a growth and development under American conditions of life which illustrates peculiarly the anomalous position of black men, and the terrific stress under which they struggle. And the struggle and the fight of human beings against hard conditions of life always tends to develop the criminal or the hypocrite, the cynic or the radical. Wherever among a hard-pressed people these types begin to appear, it is a visible sign of a burden that is threatening to overtax their strength, and the foreshadowing of the age of revolt."]

In January, 1904, the new governor of Mississippi, J.K. Vardaman, in his inaugural address went to the extreme of voicing the opinion of those who were now contending that the education of the Negro was only complicating the problem and intensifying its dangerous features. Said he of the Negro people: "As a race, they are deteriorating morally every day. Time has demonstrated that they are more criminal as freemen than as slaves; that they are increasing in criminality with frightful rapidity, being one-third more criminal in 1890 than in 1880." A few weeks later Bishop Brown of Arkansas in a widely quoted address contended that the Southern Negro was going backward both morally and intellectually and could never be expected to take a helpful part in the Government; and he also justified lynching. In the same year one of the more advanced thinkers of the South, Edgar Gardner Murphy, in _Problems of the Present South_ was not yet quite willing to receive the Negro on the basis of citizenship; and Thomas Nelson Page, who had belittled the Negro in such a collection of stories as _In Ole Virginia_ and in such a novel as _Red Rock_[1] formally stated his theories in _The Negro: The Southerner's Problem_. The worst, however--if there could be a worst in such an array--was yet to appear. In 1905 Thomas Dixon added to a series of high-keyed novels _The Clansman_, a glorification of the KuKlux Klan that gave a malignant portrayal of the Negro and that was of such a quality as to arouse the most intense prejudice and hatred. Within a few months the work was put on the stage and again and again it threw audiences into the wildest excitement. The production was to some extent held to blame for the Atlanta Massacre. In several cities it was proscribed. In Philadelphia on October 23, 1906, after the Negro people had made an unavailing protest, three thousand of them made a demonstration before the Walnut Street theater where the performance was given, while the conduct of some within the playhouse almost precipitated a riot; and in this city the play was suppressed the next day. Throughout the South, however, and sometimes elsewhere it continued to do its deadly work, and it was later to furnish the basis of "The Birth of a Nation," an elaborate motion picture of the same general tendency.

[Footnote 1: For a general treatment of the matter of the Negro as dealt with in American Literature, especially fiction, note "The Negro in American Fiction," in the _Dial_, May 11, 1916, a paper included in _The Negro in Literature and Art_. The thesis there is that imaginative treatment of the Negro is still governed by outworn antebellum types, or that in the search for burlesque some types of young and uncultured Negroes of the present day are deliberately overdrawn, but that there is not an honest or a serious facing of the characters and the situations in the life of the Negro people in the United States to-day. Since the paper first appeared it has received much further point; witness the stories by E.K. Means and Octavius Roy Cohen.]

Still another line of attack was now to attempt to deprive the Negro of any credit for initiative or for any independent achievement whatsoever. In May, 1903, Alfred H. Stone contributed to the _Atlantic_ a paper, "The Mulatto in the Negro Problem," which contended at the same time that whatever meritorious work the race had accomplished was due to the infusion of white blood and that it was the mulatto that was constantly poisoning the mind of the Negro with "radical teachings and destructive doctrines." These points found frequent iteration throughout the period, and years afterwards, in 1917, the first found formal statement in the _American Journal of Sociology_ in an article by Edward Byron Reuter, "The Superiority of the Mulatto," which the next year was elaborated into a volume, _The Mulatto in the United States_. To argue the superiority of the mulatto of course is simply to argue once more the inferiority of the Negro to the white man.

All of this dispraise together presented a formidable case and one from which the race suffered immeasurably; nor was it entirely offset in the same years by the appearance even of DuBois's remarkable book, _The Souls of Black Folk_, or by the several uplift publications of Booker T. Washington. In passing we wish to refer to three points: (1) The effect of education on the Negro; (2) the matter of the Negro criminal (and of mortality), and (3) the quality and function of the mulatto.

Education could certainly not be blamed for the difficulties of the problem in the new day until it had been properly tried. In no one of the Southern states within the period did the Negro child receive a fair chance. He was frequently subjected to inferior teaching, dilapidated accommodations, and short terms. In the representative city of Atlanta in 1903 the white school population numbered 14,465 and the colored 8,118. The Negroes, however, while numbering 35 per cent of the whole, received but 12 per cent of the school funds. The average white teacher received $745 a year, and the Negro teacher $450. In the great reduction of the percentage of illiteracy in the race from 70 in 1880 to 30.4 in 1910 the missionary colleges--those of the American Missionary Association, the American Baptist Home Mission Society, and the Freedmen's Aid Society--played a much larger part than they are ordinarily given credit for; and it is a very, very rare occurrence that a graduate of one of the institutions sustained by these agencies, or even one who has attended them for any length of time, has to be summoned before the courts. Their influence has most decidedly been on the side of law and order. Undoubtedly some of those who have gone forth from these schools have not been very practical, and some have not gained a very firm sense of relative values in life--it would be a miracle if all had; but as a group the young people who have attended the colleges have most abundantly justified the expenditures made in their behalf, expenditures for which their respective states were not responsible but of which they reaped the benefit. From one standpoint, however, the so-called higher education did most undoubtedly complicate the problem. Those critics of the race who felt that the only function of Negroes in life was that of hewers of wood and drawers of water quite fully realized that Negroes who had been to college did not care to work longer as field laborers. Some were to prove scientific students of agriculture, but as a group they were out of the class of peons. In this they were just like white people and all other people. No one who has once seen the light chooses to live always on the plane of the "man with the hoe." Nor need it be thought that these students are unduly crowding into professional pursuits. While, for instance, the number of Negro physicians and dentists has greatly increased within recent years, the number would still have to be four or five times as great to sustain to the total Negro population the same proportion as that borne by the whole number of white physicians and dentists to the total white population.

The subjects of the criminality and the mortality of the race are in their ultimate reaches closely related, both being mainly due, as we have suggested, to the conditions under which Negroes have been forced to live. In the country districts, until 1900 at least, there was little provision for improvements in methods of cooking or in sanitation, while in cities the effects of inferior housing, poor and unlighted streets, and of the segregation of vice in Negro neighborhoods could not be otherwise than obvious. Thus it happened in such a year as 1898 that in Baltimore the Negro death rate was somewhat more and in Nashville just a little less than twice that of the white people. Legal procedure, moreover, emphasized a vicious circle; living conditions sent the Negroes to the courts in increasing numbers, and the courts sent them still farther down in the scale. There were undoubtedly some Negro thieves, some Negro murderers, and some Negroes who were incontinent; no race has yet appeared on the face of the earth that did not contain members having such propensities, and all such people should be dealt with justly by law. Our present contention is that throughout the period of which we are now speaking the dominant social system was not only such as to accentuate criminal elements but also such as even sought to discourage aspiring men. A few illustrations, drawn from widely different phases of life, must suffice. In the spring of 1903, and again in 1904, Jackson W. Giles, of Montgomery County, Alabama, contended before the Supreme Court of the United States that he and other Negroes in his county were wrongfully excluded from the franchise by the new Alabama constitution. Twice was his case thrown out on technicalities, the first time it was said because he was petitioning for the right to vote under a constitution whose validity he denied, and the second time because the Federal right that he claimed had not been passed on in the state court from whose decision he appealed. Thus the supreme tribunal in the United States evaded at the time any formal judgment as to the real validity of the new suffrage provisions. In 1903, moreover, in Alabama, Negroes charged with petty offenses and sometimes with no offense at all were still sent to convict farms or turned over to contractors. They were sometimes compelled to work as peons for a length of time; and they were flogged, starved, hunted with bloodhounds, and sold from one contractor to another in direct violation of law. One Joseph Patterson borrowed $1 on a Saturday, promising to pay the amount on the following Tuesday morning. He did not get to town at the appointed time, and he was arrested and carried before a justice of the peace, who found him guilty of obtaining money under false pretenses. No time whatever was given to the Negro to get witnesses or a lawyer, or to get money with which to pay his fine and the costs of court. He was sold for $25 to a man named Hardy, who worked him for a year and then sold him for $40 to another man named Pace. Patterson tried to escape, but was recaptured and given a sentence of six months more. He was then required to serve for an additional year to pay a doctor's bill. When the case at last attracted attention, it appeared that for $1 borrowed in 1903 he was not finally to be released before 1906. Another case of interest and importance was set in New York. In the spring of 1909 a pullman porter was arrested on the charge of stealing a card-case containing $20. The next day he was discharged as innocent. He then entered against his accuser a suit for $10,000 damages. The jury awarded him $2,500, which amount the court reduced to $300, Justice P.H. Dugro saying that a Negro when falsely imprisoned did not suffer the same amount of injury that a white man would suffer--an opinion which the New York _Age_ very naturally characterized as "one of the basest and most offensive ever handed down by a New York judge."

In the history of the question of the mulatto two facts are outstanding. One is that before the Civil War, as was very natural under the circumstances, mulattoes became free much faster than pure Negroes; thus the census of 1850 showed that 581 of every 1000 free Negroes were mulattoes and only 83 of every 1000 slaves. Since the Civil War, moreover, the mulatto element has rapidly increased, advancing from 11.2 per cent of the Negro population in 1850 to 20.9 per cent in 1910, or from 126 to 264 per 1000. On the whole question of the function of this mixed element the elaborate study, that of Reuter, is immediately thrown out of court by its lack of accuracy. The fundamental facts on which it rests its case are not always true, and if premises are false conclusions are worthless. No work on the Negro that calls Toussaint L'Ouverture and Sojourner Truth mulattoes and that will not give the race credit for several well-known pure Negroes of the present day, can long command the attention of scholars. This whole argument on the mulatto goes back to the fallacy of degrading human beings by slavery for two hundred years and then arguing that they have not the capacity or the inclination to rise. In a country predominantly white the quadroon has frequently been given some advantage that his black friend did not have, from the time that one was a house-servant and the other a field-hand; but no scientific test has ever demonstrated that the black boy is intellectually inferior to the fair one. In America, however, it is the fashion to place upon the Negro any blame or deficiency and to claim for the white race any merit that an individual may show. Furthermore--and this is a point not often remarked in discussions of the problem--the element of genius that distinguishes the Negro artist of mixed blood is most frequently one characteristically Negro rather than Anglo-Saxon. Much has been made of the fact that within the society of the race itself there have been lines of cleavage, a comparatively few people, very fair in color, sometimes drawing off to themselves. This is a fact, and it is simply one more heritage from slavery, most tenacious in some conservative cities along the coast. Even there, however, old lines are vanishing and the fusion of different groups within the race rapidly going forward. Undoubtedly there has been some snobbery, as there always is, and a few quadroons and octoroons have crossed the color line and been lost to the race; but these cases are after all comparatively few in number, and the younger generation is more and more emphasizing the ideals of racial solidarity. In the future there may continue to be lines of cleavage in society within the race, but the standards governing these will primarily be character and merit. On the whole, then, the mulatto has placed himself squarely on the side of the difficulties, aspirations, and achievements of the Negro people and it is simply an accident and not inherent quality that accounts for the fact that he has been so prominent in the leadership of the race.

The final refutation of defamation, however, is to be found in the actual achievement of members of the race themselves. The progress in spite of handicaps continued to be amazing. Said the New York _Sun_ early in 1907 (copied by the _Times_) of "Negroes Who Have Made Good": "Junius C. Groves of Kansas produces 75,000 bushels of potatoes every year, the world's record. Alfred Smith received the blue ribbon at the World's Fair and first prize in England for his Oklahoma-raised cotton. Some of the thirty-five patented devices of Granville T. Woods, the electrician, form part of the systems of the New York elevated railways and the Bell Telephone Company. W. Sidney Pittman drew the design of the Collis P. Huntington memorial building, the largest and finest at Tuskegee. Daniel H. Williams, M.D., of Chicago, was the first surgeon to sew up and heal a wounded human heart. Mary Church Terrell addressed in three languages at Berlin recently the International Association for the Advancement of Women. Edward H. Morris won his suit between Cook County and the city of Chicago, and has a law practice worth $20,000 a year."

In one department of effort, that of sport, the Negro was especially prominent. In pugilism, a diversion that has always been noteworthy for its popular appeal, Peter Jackson was well known as a contemporary of John L. Sullivan. George Dixon was, with the exception of one year, either bantamweight or featherweight champion for the whole of the period from 1890 to 1900; and Joe Gans was lightweight champion from 1902 to 1908. Joe Walcott was welterweight champion from 1901 to 1904, and was succeeded by Dixie Kid, who held his place from 1904 to 1908. In 1908, to the chagrin of thousands and with a victory that occasioned a score of racial conflicts throughout the South and West and that resulted in several deaths, Jack Johnson became the heavyweight champion of America, a position that he was destined to hold for seven years. In professional baseball the Negro was proscribed, though occasionally a member of the race played on teams of the second group. Of semi-professional teams the American Giants and the Leland Giants of Chicago, and the Lincoln Giants of New York, were popular favorites, and frequently numbered on their rolls players of the first order of ability. In intercollegiate baseball W.C. Matthews of Harvard was outstanding for several years about 1904. In intercollegiate football Lewis at Harvard in the earlier nineties and Bullock at Dartmouth a decade later were unusually prominent, while Marshall of Minnesota in 1905 became an All-American end. Pollard of Brown, a half-back, in 1916, and Robeson of Rutgers, an end, in 1918, also won All-American honors. About the turn of the century Major Taylor was a champion bicycle rider, and John B. Taylor of Pennsylvania was an intercollegiate champion in track athletics. Similarly fifteen years later Binga Dismond of Howard and Chicago, Sol Butler of Dubuque, and Howard P. Drew of Southern California were destined to win national and even international honors in track work. Drew broke numerous records as a runner and Butler was the winner in the broad jump at the Inter-Allied Games in the Pershing Stadium in Paris. In 1920 E. Gourdin of Harvard came prominently forward as one of the best track athletes that institution had ever had.

In the face, then, of the Negro's unquestionable physical ability and prowess the supreme criticism that he was called on to face within the period was all the more hard to bear. In all nations and in all ages courage under fire as a soldier has been regarded as the sterling test of manhood, and by this standard we have seen that in war the Negro had more than vindicated himself. His very honor as a soldier was now to be attacked.

In August, 1906, Companies B, C, and D of the Twenty-fifth Regiment, United States Infantry, were stationed at Fort Brown, Brownsville, Texas, where they were forced to exercise very great self-restraint in the face of daily insults from the citizens. On the night of the 13th occurred a riot in which one citizen of the town was killed, another wounded, and the chief of police injured. The people of the town accused the soldiers of causing the riot and demanded their removal. Brigadier-General E.A. Garlington, Inspector General, was sent to find the guilty men, and, failing in his mission, he recommended dishonorable discharge for the regiment. On this recommendation President Roosevelt on November 9 dismissed "without honor" the entire battalion, disqualifying its members for service thereafter in either the military or the civil employ of the United States. When Congress met in December Senator J.B. Foraker of Ohio placed himself at the head of the critics of the President's action, and in a ringing speech said of the discharged men that "they asked no favors because they were Negroes, but only justice because they were men." On January 22 the Senate authorized a general investigation of the whole matter, a special message from the President on the 14th having revoked the civil disability of the discharged soldiers. The case was finally disposed of by a congressional act approved March 3, 1909, which appointed a court of inquiry before which any discharged man who wished to reënlist had the burden of establishing his innocence--a procedure which clearly violated the fundamental principle in law that a man is to be accounted innocent until he is proved guilty.

In connection with the dishonored soldier of Brownsville, and indeed with reference to the Negro throughout the period, we recall Edwin Markham's poem, "Dreyfus,"[1] written for a far different occasion but with fundamental principles of justice that are eternal:

[Footnote 1: It is here quoted with the permission of the author and in the form in which it originally appeared in _McClure's Magazine_, September, 1899.]

I

A man stood stained; France was one Alp of hate,
Pressing upon him with the whole world's weight;
In all the circle of the ancient sun
There was no voice to speak for him--not one;
In all the world of men there was no sound
But of a sword flung broken to the ground.

Hell laughed its little hour; and then behold
How one by one the guarded gates unfold!
Swiftly a sword by Unseen Forces hurled,
And now a man rising against the world!

II

Oh, import deep as life is, deep as time!
There is a Something sacred and sublime
Moving behind the worlds, beyond our ken,
Weighing the stars, weighing the deeds of men.

Take heart, O soul of sorrow, and be strong!
There is one greater than the whole world's wrong.
Be hushed before the high Benignant Power
That moves wool-shod through sepulcher and tower!
No truth so low but He will give it crown;
No wrong so high but He will hurl it down.
O men that forge the fetter, it is vain;
There is a Still Hand stronger than your chain.
'Tis no avail to bargain, sneer, and nod,
And shrug the shoulder for reply to God.

7. The Dawn of a To-morrow

The bitter period that we have been considering was not wholly without its bright features, and with the new century new voices began to be articulate. In May, 1900, there was in Montgomery a conference in which Southern men undertook as never before to make a study of their problems. That some who came had yet no real conception of the task and its difficulties may be seen from the suggestion of one man that the Negroes be deported to the West or to the islands of the sea. Several men advocated the repeal of the Fifteenth Amendment. The position outstanding for its statesmanship was that of ex-Governor William A. McCorkle of West Virginia, who asserted that the right of franchise was the vital and underlying principle of the life of the people of the United States and must not be violated, that the remedy for present conditions was an "honest and inflexible educational and property basis, administered fairly for black and white," and finally that the Negro Problem was not a local problem but one to be settled by the hearty coöperation of all of the people of the United States.

Meanwhile the Southern Educational Congress continued its sittings from year to year, and about 1901 there developed new and great interest in education, the Southern Education Board acting in close coöperation with the General Education Board, the medium of the philanthropy of John D. Rockefeller, and frequently also with the Peabody and Slater funds.[1] In 1907 came the announcement of the Jeanes Fund, established by Anna T. Jeanes, a Quaker of Philadelphia, for the education of the Negro in the rural districts of the South; and in 1911 that of the Phelps-Stokes Fund, established by Caroline Phelps-Stokes with emphasis on the education of the Negro in Africa and America. More and more these agencies were to work in harmony and coöperation with the officials in the different states concerned. In 1900 J.L.M. Curry, a Southern man of great breadth of culture, was still in charge of the Peabody and Slater funds, but he was soon to pass from the scene and in the work now to be done were prominent Robert C. Ogden, Hollis B. Frissell, Wallace Buttrick, George Foster Peabody, and James H. Dillard.

[Footnote 1: In 1867 George Peabody, an American merchant and patriot, established the Peabody Educational Fund for the purpose of promoting "intellectual, moral, and industrial education in the most destitute portion of the Southern states." The John F. Slater Fund was established in 1882 especially for the encouragement of the industrial education of Negroes.]

Along with the mob violence, moreover, that disgraced the opening years of the century was an increasing number of officers who were disposed to do their duty even under trying circumstances. Less than two months after his notorious inaugural Governor Vardaman of Mississippi interested the reading public by ordering out a company of militia when a lynching was practically announced to take place, and by boarding a special train to the scene to save the Negro. In this same state in 1909, when the legislature passed a law levying a tax for the establishment of agricultural schools for white students, and levied this on the property of white people and Negroes alike, though only the white people were to have schools, a Jasper County Negro contested the matter before the Chancery Court, which declared the law unconstitutional, and he was further supported by the Supreme Court of the state. Such a decision was inspiring, but it was not the rule, and already the problems of another decade were being foreshadowed. Already also under the stress of conditions in the South many Negroes were seeking a haven in the North. By 1900 there were as many Negroes in Pennsylvania as in Missouri, whereas twenty years before there had been twice as many in the latter state. There were in Massachusetts more than in Delaware, whereas twenty years before Delaware had had 50 per cent more than Massachusetts. Within twenty years Virginia gained 312,000 white people and only 29,000 Negroes, the latter having begun a steady movement to New York. North Carolina gained 400,000 white people and only 93,000 Negroes. South Carolina and Mississippi, however, were not yet affected in large measure by the movement.

The race indeed was beginning to be possessed by a new consciousness. After 1895 Booker T. Washington was a very genuine leader. From the first, however, there was a distinct group of Negro men who honestly questioned the ultimate wisdom of the so-called Atlanta Compromise, and who felt that in seeming to be willing temporarily to accept proscription and to waive political rights Dr. Washington had given up too much. Sometimes also there was something in his illustrations of the effects of current methods of education that provoked reply. Those who were of the opposition, however, were not at first united and constructive, and in their utterances they sometimes offended by harshness of tone. Dr. Washington himself said of the extremists in this group that they frequently understood theories but not things; that in college they gave little thought to preparing for any definite task in the world, but started out with the idea of preparing themselves to solve the race problem; and that many of them made a business of keeping the troubles, wrongs, and hardships of the Negro race before the public.[1] There was ample ground for this criticism. More and more, however, the opposition gained force; the _Guardian_, a weekly paper edited in Boston by Monroe Trotter, was particularly outspoken, and in Boston the real climax came in 1903 in an endeavor to break up a meeting at which Dr. Washington was to speak. Then, beginning in January, 1904, the _Voice of the Negro_, a magazine published in Atlanta for three years, definitely helped toward the cultivation of racial ideals. Publication of the periodical became irregular after the Atlanta Massacre, and it finally expired in 1907. Some of the articles dealt with older and more philosophical themes, but there were also bright and illuminating studies in education and other social topics, as well as a strong stand on political issues. The _Colored American_, published in Boston just a few years before the _Voice_ began to appear, also did inspiring work. Various local or state organizations, moreover, from time to time showed the virtue of coöperation; thus the Georgia Equal Rights Convention, assembled in Macon in February, 1906, at the call of William J. White, the veteran editor of the _Georgia Baptist_, brought together representative men from all over the state and considered such topics as the unequal division of school taxes, the deprivation of the jury rights of Negroes, the peonage system, and the penal system. In 1905 twenty-nine men of the race launched what was known as the Niagara Movement. The aims of this organization were freedom of speech and criticism, an unlettered and unsubsidized press, manhood suffrage, the abolition of all caste distinctions based simply on race and color, the recognition of the principle of human brotherhood as a practical present creed, the recognition of the highest and best training as the monopoly of no class or race, a belief in the dignity of labor, and united effort to realize these ideals under wise and courageous leadership. The time was not yet quite propitious, and the Niagara Movement as such died after three or four years. Its principles lived on, however, and it greatly helped toward the formation of a stronger and more permanent organization.

[Footnote 1: See chapter "The Intellectuals," in _My Larger Education_.]

In 1909 a number of people who were interested in the general effect of the Negro Problem on democracy in America organized in New York the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.[1] It was felt that the situation had become so bad that the time had come for a simple declaration of human rights. In 1910 Moorfield Storey, a distinguished lawyer of Boston, became national president, and W.E. Burghardt DuBois director of publicity and research, and editor of the _Crisis_, which periodical began publication in November of this year. The organization was successful from the first, and local branches were formed all over the country, some years elapsing, however, before the South was penetrated. Said the Director: "Of two things we Negroes have dreamed for many years: An organization so effective and so powerful that when discrimination and injustice touched one Negro, it would touch 12,000,000. We have not got this yet, but we have taken a great step toward it. We have dreamed, too, of an organization that would work ceaselessly to make Americans know that the so-called 'Negro problem' is simply one phase of the vaster problem of democracy in America, and that those who wish freedom and justice for their country must wish it for every black citizen. This is the great and insistent message of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People."

[Footnote 1: For detailed statement of origin see pamphlet, "How the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People Began," by Mary White Ovington, published by the Association.]

This organization is outstanding as an effort in coöperation between the races for the improvement of the condition of the Negro. Of special interest along the line of economic betterment has been the National League on Urban Conditions among Negroes, now known as the National Urban League, which also has numerous branches with headquarters in New York and through whose offices thousands of Negroes have been placed in honorable employment. The National Urban League was also formally organized in 1910; it represented a merging of the different agencies working in New York City in behalf of the social betterment of the Negro population, especially of the National League for the Protection of Colored Women and of the Committee for Improving the Industrial Conditions among Negroes in New York, both of which agencies had been organized in 1906. As we shall see, the work of the League was to be greatly expanded within the next decade by the conditions brought about by the war; and under the direction of the executive secretary, Eugene Kinckle Jones, with the assistance of alert and patriotic officers, its work was to prove one of genuinely national service.

Interesting also was a new concern on the part of the young Southern college man about the problems at his door. Within just a few years after the close of the period now considered, Phelps-Stokes fellowships for the study of problems relating to the Negro were founded at the Universities of Virginia and Georgia; it was expected that similar fellowships would be founded in other institutions; and there was interest in the annual meetings of the Southern Sociological Congress and the University Commission on Southern Race Questions.

Thus from one direction and another at length broke upon a "vale of tears" a new day of effort and of hope. For the real contest the forces were gathering. The next decade was to be one of unending bitterness and violence, but also one in which the Negro was to rise as never before to the dignity of self-reliant and courageous manhood.