The Negro in Chicago: A Study of Race Relations and a Race Riot

by Chicago Commission on Race Relations

A. OPINIONS OF WHITES AND NEGROES

I. BELIEFS CONCERNING NEGROES

Literature concerning Negroes has been written chiefly by southern students facing the problem in its most intense form and usually meeting the most backward of Negroes. Negro habits have been objectively explained and standards of judgment upon the entire group have usually been deduced therefrom. This constitutes the bulk of serious literature on the subject of the Negro; it is generally used in research into the problem.

In the North as in the South the assumptions regarding the Negro have their basis in similar sources. The beliefs, in general, are the same, though held by individuals in varying degrees. Though northerners do not believe so firmly and with such emotional intensity all that southerners believe about Negroes, yet they share these beliefs in proportion as they have been influenced or informed by southerners. It may happen, for example, that in a small northern town with but a handful of Negroes there is no discernible distinction in the treatment accorded them. The growth of the colony, however, can bring to the surface at first almost undiscernible shades of the usual beliefs, and finally the identical beliefs entertained by other communities.

There is, for example, no section of the country in which it is not generally believed by whites that Negroes are instinctively criminal in inclination. Some believe that they are criminal by nature and explain it as a result of heredity; some feel that it is a combination of heredity and environment; while others may feel that this inclination is due to environment alone. How, indeed, may the belief be avoided? Crime figures on Negroes are consistently unfavorable to any other conclusion. Students have gone so far as to accept without question these figures and proceed to explain that criminal tendency scientifically. This is also true as to low mentality, sexual immorality, and a long list of other supposed racial defects.

Below are presented some of the more important beliefs among whites about Negroes that have become crystallized by years of unchallenged assumption. They divide themselves into two general classes: (1) Primary beliefs, or fundamental and firmly established convictions which have, all around, the deepest effect on the attitude of whites toward Negroes. These are usually presented as revealed by statistics, authorities, and research. (2) Secondary beliefs, or the lighter modifications and variants of the supposed attributes of Negroes included in the more important assumptions.

1. PRIMARY BELIEFS

Mentality.—The chief of these is that the mind of the Negro is distinctly and distinctively inferior to that of the white race, and so are all resulting functionings of his mind.

This view is held by some to be due to a difference in species, by others to more recent emergence from primitive life, and by others to be due to backwardness in ascending the scale of civilization. For this reason it is variously assumed as a corollary that the mind of the Negro cannot be improved above a given level or beyond a given age; that his education should be adapted to his capacities, that is, he should mainly be taught to use his hands. Thus a teacher in one of the elementary schools of Chicago finds that "colored children are restive and incapable of abstract thought; they must be constantly fed with novel interests and given things to do with their hands." Accordingly they are given handicraft instead of arithmetic, and singing instead of grammar.

In seeking the opinion of white trades unionists on the admission of Negroes to unions in Chicago, the Commission encountered in perhaps the harshest form the conviction that Negroes were inherently unable to perform tasks that white men did as a matter of course. A member of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers felt that no Negro had, or could ever acquire, intelligence enough to run an engine. Employers frequently expressed the belief that Negroes are incapable of performing tasks which require sustained mental application. This view of their mental weakness appeared in the following statement made before the Commission by a school principal concerning her experience with Negro children:

So far as books are concerned there are set types of learning which they take with great difficulty. Last Friday a colored boy came to me and said, "I want to go back to the first grade." We have gotten him in the third grade. He came to me and cried—a great big boy—because he said the work was much too hard for him, and he didn't want to study. His teacher was cross with him and insisted he must get to work. It is an exception to have a boy so frank. But I don't think the instance is far from the truth. I have never had a white child complain that he was graded too high and wanted to be put down. Sometimes when they come in, they say to me: "I went to school in the South, and I am in high fifth grade." "How long were you in school in the South?" "Three sessions." Two months, and they are in high fifth grade! I put them into the first or second grade. Sometimes I can't fit them into the smaller grades, and sometimes they resent it, but when they get into the actual school work and find they can't do it, they can't complain. I should say therefore that there is a certain amount of mental backwardness found in colored children not found in whites.

A teacher in a Chicago public school said: "I believe like Dr. Bruner [director of Special School, Board of Education] that when a Negro boy grows a mustache his brain stops working."

A teacher in Moseley School said: "The great physical development of the colored person takes away from the mental, while with the whites the reverse is true. There is proof for this in the last chapter of Ecclesiastes."

Morality.—Another of these primary beliefs is that Negroes are not yet capable of exercising the social restraints which are common to the more civilized white persons. Sometimes it is said that they are unmoral rather than immoral. This view, while charitably explaining supposed innate defects of character, places them outside the circle of normal members of society. Thus the assistant principal of a Chicago high school attended by Negroes said:

When it comes to morality, I say colored children are unmoral. They have no more moral sense than a very young white child. Along sex lines they don't know that this is wrong and that is wrong—that wrong sense isn't a part of them. Of course we say they are immoral and a white child doing the same thing under the same circumstances would be. The colored and white children here don't get mixed up in immorality; they are too well segregated. Not that we segregate them: the whites keep away from the colored.

This belief appears in statements that there is no family life among Negroes and but little respect, even in Chicago, for the ordinary decencies; when serious students of society speak of the promiscuity of colored women and men in sexual as well as social relations; and when social institutions assume the impossibility of locating the real father of children in a Negro family. Much public emphasis is given to the subject of venereal disease among Negroes, and certain deductions regarding this incidence of disease have resulted from comparative statistics.

Criminality.—The assumption back of most discussions of Negro crime is that there is a constitutional character weakness in Negroes and a consequent predisposition to sexual crimes, petty stealing, and crimes of violence. Sexual crimes are alleged and frequently urged in justification of lynching. Popular judgment takes stealing lightly, because Negroes evidence a marked immaturity and childishness in it. It is supposed that they appropriate little things and do not commit larger thefts. Crimes of violence are thought to be characteristic of Negroes because crimes involving deliberation and planning require more brains than Negroes possess.

The president of a branch of the Illinois Federation of Women's Clubs thus explained the decision of that organization not to discuss the Negro question in its meetings:

Most of the presidents expressed themselves as against discussion of the Negro question because as women's names come out as being against the Negroes these women and others of the club would have to live in fear of Negro men. A woman must be careful not to put herself in a position of causing them to have a grudge against her, as you know a white woman has to fear a colored man.

A resident in an exclusively white residential district said:

Mother, sister, and I lived here alone and we had a car which we kept in a garage in the back yard. Whenever we came in at night we never used the back door, but always went around front. Several times in walking up the back steps to the porch we had been frightened by colored men sitting on the steps or lying on the porch, and so we couldn't use that way into the house.

Another white woman, in the course of a discussion of housing indicated this fear of Negro men:

When we came here this was a nice neighborhood. After some years a colored family moved in, then two or three more, and more and more, until you see what we have here now. I tell you the white people right on this street have to be afraid for their lives.

Another, living on Langley Avenue, near Forty-third Street, said:

I don't hold any conversations with Negroes. It's better to be on the safe side when you've got grown-up daughters. I worry a good deal about my two daughters as they go and come from work, but they've never had anything happen.

The principal of a Chicago public school was questioned by a visitor concerning the attitude of white parents toward the association of their children with Negro pupils in that school. "The white parents are cautious about stirring up trouble," he said, "for they know the emotional tendency of the colored to knife and kill."

Petty thefts by Negroes, especially of food, are regarded as annoying evils most easily dealt with by a sort of half-serious firmness. A white resident of a district largely inhabited by Negroes said:

A white neighbor keeps chickens in her back yard. She gets the burglar alarm from the hen house sometimes twice in a week, and the running thief is always colored.... The colored buy whatever they want; they'll spend their last cent and not worry about the next day. If they want a chicken for dinner and it's $1 a pound, they buy it or steal it.

Physical unattractiveness.—Objections to contact are often attributed to physical laws which, it is said, make the sight or other sensory impression of the Negro unbearably repulsive. This attitude is found in protests against indiscriminate seating arrangements in street cars. The word "black" has long been associated with evil and ugliness, and it is not always a simple task to disassociate the idea from impressions given by a black man. Not merely is the color regarded as repulsive, but it is the further belief that Negroes have a peculiar and disagreeable body odor. A Christian Science practitioner in Chicago, giving her opinion of Negroes, had an idea that they carried a "musky odor," and were therefore to be avoided. A student at the University of Chicago and a resident of Hyde Park, talking with an investigator, said: "It is conceded that the Negro in Chicago must have some place to live, but to permit promiscuous distribution through scattered sections of the city would tend to increase the difficulties rather than mitigate them, partly because a white man would shrink from having a Negro live near him."

In the spring of 1919 there appeared in one of the Chicago daily papers a series of articles on the Negro question. In describing the relations between Negroes and whites in Chicago, the writer said:

A second phase of the situation, and the one that causes more inutile railing than any other, is the crowding into the street cars of colored people. Well, they must ride on street cars, if only for the reason that most of them live remote from their work. Even the North State Street line, that used to be considered the special conveyance for "the quality," has come to be known as the "African Central." If you can't stomach it, you'll have to walk. They won't.

Living in neighborhoods infrequently visited by Negroes and where, as a general rule, their occupancy is effectively discouraged, some white residents occasionally express objections as based on a "natural physical opposition." Following is a typical statement:

I came here six years ago and there was a very noisy set of white people living in the apartment house back of mine. Four years ago the landlord put them all out and rented to colored families. We were all up in arms then; but say, I never had nicer, more quiet, and respectable neighbors. Their children all behave well, and we can't kick. But at the same time, black people aren't what one would pick out to have around—I guess it's just because they are black.

Emotionality.—This is commonly regarded as explaining features of conduct in Negroes, some of which are beautiful in their expression while others are ugly and dangerous. The supposed Negro gift of song is thus an accepted attribute of his emotional nature. So with his religious inclination. This same emotionalism is believed to lead him to drink and is frequently made to account for "his quick, uncalculated crimes of violence." The natural expression of Negro religious fervor is supposed to be noisy and frenzied. This view of the Chicago Tribune's special writer is, roughly speaking, the view of thousands of Chicagoans:

I passed grand old stone churches, once the pride of rich and powerful white congregations, whither I used to be sent as a reporter not so many years ago, to hear some of the premier pulpiteers of this town. They are colored people's churches now, and beneath the arches, where a sedate gospel once was expounded you hear today the jubilant yell of the dusky brother who has found grace....

The service was, indeed, an incident in a three weeks' series of revival meetings they have been holding at Olivet. The principal performer was the Rev. S. E. J. Watson, a revivalist from Topeka, a big man—mulatto, I should say, or perhaps quadroon—with a powerful voice, a masterly platform style, and enormous ardor. He spoke fluently, used no notes, and demonstrated a free, wide skill in homely imagery, which, however, included no slang nor vulgarities, but was racy of the plantation and the cabin kitchen. His picture of God "opening the front door of this good old world every morning to let in the sun" was one of the most gorgeous flights in primitive poetry I ever heard, and his narrative, accompanied by the most vivid pantomime, of the Roman soldiers lifting up the cross after they had nailed Jesus to it was hardly less than terrifying—it certainly was terrific—in its sweep of passion and its reality of detail.

And so he wrought them to a high emotional state. Many were crying. Then came the direct personal appeal to "the unsaved," the threat of the everlasting fire, and the "lifting up" again and again of the thought of the all-forgiving, all-saving Jesus. The soft crying became heavy, convulsive sobbing. One by one the unsaved who made the surrender to whatever it was that had been holding them back, were led to the seats near the pulpit. Those who did not surrender promptly were evidently in terrible stress, or thought they were. They emitted shrieks that, truly, made my heart stand still, and I would have trembled for the sanity of the poor creatures except that I observed from the corner of my eye that the "saved" in the assemblage took the shrieks with perfect equanimity.

2. SECONDARY BELIEFS

In addition to the primary beliefs there are others supposedly not so serious or significant in their effects. These are usually modifications of primary beliefs, and are accepted as a consequence of frequent and almost unvaried repetition. In this manner these secondary beliefs have edged their way into the popular mind.

George Jean Nathan and H. L. Mencken in a recent volume, The American Credo, point out fairly striking instances of this tendency of the American mind. They have compiled a series of 435 commonly accepted beliefs covering a wide range. Among these 435 listed American beliefs there are some very real ones which involve and include the following popular notions about Negroes:

1. That a Negro's vote may always be readily bought for a dollar.

2. That every colored cook has a lover who never works and that she feeds him by stealing the best part of every dish she cooks.

3. That every Negro who went to France with the army has a liaison with a white woman and won't look at a colored woman any more.

4. That all male Negroes can sing.

5. That if one hits a Negro on the head with a cobblestone the cobblestone will break.

6. That all Negroes born south of the Potomac can play the banjo and are excellent dancers.

7. That whenever a Negro is educated he refuses to work and becomes a criminal.

8. That every Negro servant girl spends at least half of her wages on preparations for taking the kink out of her hair.

9. That all Negro prize fighters marry white women and then afterwards beat them.

10. That all Negroes who show any intelligence are two-thirds white and the sons of U.S. Senators.

11. That the minute a Negro gets eight dollars he goes to a dentist and has one of his front teeth filled with gold.

12. That a Negro ball always ends up in a grand free-for-all fight in which several Negroes are mortally slashed with razors.

The most usual of these secondary beliefs which figure in the experience of Negroes and whites in Chicago are apparently of southern origin. This is due, not so much to any deliberate effort of southerners to infiltrate them into northern race relations, as that northerners largely regard as authoritative the experience of the South which holds almost nine-tenths of the total Negro population.

Some of the secondary beliefs are:

1. That Negroes are lazy; that they are indisposed to, though not incapable of, sustained physical exertion.

2. That they are happy-go-lucky; that their improvidence is demonstrated in their extravagance, and that their reckless disregard for their welfare is shown in a lack of foresight for the essentials of well-being. It is asserted that they do not purchase homes and do not save their money; that they spend lavishly for clothes to the neglect of home comforts and the demands even of their health; that they work by the day, and before the week is ended confuse bookkeeping by demanding their pay.

3. That they are boisterous. Hilarity in public places and especially in their own gatherings is thought to be common. They are considered as rude and coarse in public conveyances and are believed to jostle white passengers sometimes without thought and sometimes out of pure maliciousness.

4. That they are bumptious; that when a Negro is placed in a position of unaccustomed authority relative to his group he has an unduly exaggerated sense of his own importance and makes himself unbearable.

5. That they are overassertive; that constant harping on constitutional rights is a habit of Negroes, especially of the newer generation; that in their demands for equal rights and privileges they are egged on by agitators of their own race and are overinsistent in their demands; that they resent imaginary insults and are generally supersensitive.

6. That they are lacking in civic consciousness. Absence of community pride and disregard for community welfare are alleged to be the common failing of Negroes. It is pointed out that the "Black Belt" has been allowed to run down and become the most unattractive spot in the city. To this fact is attributed the tolerance of vice within this region. Negroes generally, it is still believed, can be bought in elections with money and whiskey. They are charged with having no pride in the beauty of the city, and with making it unbeautiful by personal and group habits.

7. That they usually carry razors. Whenever a newspaper reporter is in doubt he gives a razor as the weapon used. Some time ago a woman was found murdered in a town near Chicago. She had been slashed with a razor, and the broken blade was left beside her body. The murder was particularly atrocious, and the murderer left no other clew. Several Negroes were arrested on suspicion but were released when a white youth confessed the crime.

A Negro lawyer said:

During the riot a Negro was arrested for having a razor in his pocket. I was his attorney, and the evidence showed that he always shaved at work. After having shaved at this particular time, he put his razor in his pocket and forgot it. He started home and was accosted by two officers, who searched him and found the razor. The judge heard the evidence and then whispered to me that he was going to give the fellow ten days because "you know your people do carry razors." He asked me if I thought it all right and I said that I did not.

8. That they habitually "shoot craps." The Negro's supposed fondness for gambling is a phase of the belief concerning his improvidence. It is not unusual for whites, in conversation with any Negro whom they do not know well, when they wish merely to be friendly, to refer to dice. Employers frequently say that Negroes never keep money because as soon as it is earned it is thrown away on gambling with dice. The state's attorney believed that the riot of July, 1919, began over a beach craps game.

Negroes are believed to be flashy in dress, loving brilliant and gaudy colors, especially vivid red. Again, they are believed by white unionists to be natural strike breakers with deliberate intentions to undermine white living standards. Similarly they are believed to be fond of gin. Pauperism among them is believed to be unduly high, and they are thought to have no home life.

II. BACKGROUND OF PREVAILING BELIEFS CONCERNING NEGROES

Lying back of the current opinions about Negroes is a chain of circumstances involving the history of divers racial groups over hundreds of years. Slavery placed a stamp upon Negroes which it will require many more years to erase. Probably there would have been no doubt at all in the minds of Americans that essential inequalities existed between white and Negro had not their emancipation developed numerous unsuspected qualities. Thomas Jefferson is responsible for the observation that "a Negro could scarcely be found who was capable of tracing and comprehending the investigations of Euclid." John C. Calhoun asserted that if a Negro could be found capable of giving the syntax of a Greek verb he would be disposed to call him human. The Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution fixed the Negro's status by law, and as soon afterward as his broader contacts with American institutions provided an outlet for more human participation, serious questions concerning his fitness for citizenship were put. The first studies that followed have been accepted for many years as the standard of judgment.

Mentality.—Regarding Negro mentality, Dr. Jeffries Wyman, anatomist of Harvard University, about 1870, said: "It cannot be denied that the Negro and ourang do afford the point where man and the brute, when the totality of their organization is considered, most nearly approach each other."

As a corollary he adds:

The Negro may be a man and a worker in some secondary sense; he is not a man and a brother in the same full sense in which every Western Aryan is a man and a brother. To me the Negro is repulsive.

The Negro is not yet a man and he is not yet a brother to the white. It will take generations, no man can say how many, to bring him to the level of supreme Caucasian man. He will have to reduce the facial angle and he will have to have a more spacious cranium before he can come into brotherhood with the more advanced species of mankind.

Professor A. H. Keane, author of Man Past and Present, at least gave some sanction to the disposition to regard the Negro and Caucasian races as having nothing in common. To quote from his book, published in 1890:

No historic or scientific reason can be alleged why these races, black or white, should be grouped together under one appellation if by such name it is meant to convey the idea that the human type can have any sanguinary affiliation. In the Negro groups it is absolutely shown that certain African races, whether born in Africa or America, give an internal capacity almost identical of 83 cubic inches. It is demonstrated through monumental, cranial and other testimonials, that the various types of mankind have ever been permanent; have been independent of all physical influences for thousands of years.

Dr. J. C. Nott, scientist and author of Types of Mankind said:

It is mind and mind alone which constitutes the proudest prerogative of man, whose excellence should be measured by his intelligence and virtue. The Negro and other unintellectual types have been shown in another chapter to possess heads much smaller, by actual measurement in cubic inches, than the white races; and although metaphysicians may dispute about causes which have debased their intellects and precluded their expansion, it cannot be denied that these dark races are, in this particular, greatly inferior to the others of fairer complexion.

This school of anthropology very clearly belongs to the period of slavery when it was necessary to rationalize the wishes of persons who, in order to treat Negroes as if they were mentally different, had first to convince, then justify, themselves in so doing.

Following them was another type of scientific writers who, while assuming that Negroes possessed brains, denied that they were like those of white persons or ever could be.

G. Stanley Hall thought that the Negro's development came to at least partial standstill at puberty. E. B. Tylor, author of Anthropology, assumed, from the accounts of European teachers who had taught children of the "lower" races, that after the age of twelve the colored children fell off and were left behind by the white children. Odum thought that the Negro child's mental development ended at the age of thirteen. None of these opinions, however, was the result of experimentation. A. T. Smith, author of A Study of Race Psychology, is responsible for the association and memory study of what he called a "typical" Negro boy of sixteen years. He discovered that "the Negro child is psychologically different from the white child, superior in automatic power but decidedly inferior in the power of abstraction, judgment and analysis." A. McDonald, author of Colored Children—A Psycho-physical Study, gave physical and mental tests in 1899 to ninety-one Negro children and concluded that dulness in colored children sets in between thirteen and sixteen. M. J. Mayo, author of The Mental Capacity of the American Negro, in 1913 studied 150 white and 150 colored high-school pupils in the schools of New York, and found the efficiency of colored pupils 76 per cent of that of the white. His selection included a large number of emigrants from the South, which, he explained, would increase the quality of the colored group, since only the more ambitious Negroes would seek to better their conditions by moving North. No account was taken of the defective school system of the South. Phillips made a study of retardation in the schools of Philadelphia and concluded that the course of study was not suited to Negroes, since colored children showed a greater degree of retardation than the whites.

Charles Carroll's book on the Negro points out by texts drawn from the Bible that the Negro is a beast created with an articulate tongue and hands in order that he may serve his white master. To bear out this theory Carroll's book says that man has been created in the image of God, but since, as everyone knows, God is not a Negro, it follows that the Negro is not in the image of God; therefore he is not a man.

There is a plain explanation of the origin of these beliefs. The science of anthropology itself has remarkably advanced during the past fifty years. When Negroes emerged from slavery, illiterate and unaccustomed to freedom, it was natural that their condition should be accepted as evidence that they could neither learn nor absorb the standards of the civilization around them. But although their illiteracy, for example, has decreased from 98 to 27 per cent, the original beliefs persist.

Morality.—The reputation of Negroes for immorality is based largely on southern authority and is historically explained by reference to slavery, in which state immorality is asserted to have been common between the master and the woman slave. There are many authorities on this character trait. Perhaps the most pretentious study on this subject is by Howard O. Odum in "Studies in History, Economics and Public Law," Columbia University, 1910. It is called A Study in Race Traits, Tendencies and Prospects. Writing of immorality among Negroes, Odum says:

It has generally been assumed that the Negro is differentiated by a distinct sexual development. It is affirmed that the sex development crowds out the mental growth. It is affirmed that the period of puberty in boys and girls is marked by special manifestations of wildness and uncontrol. It is true, too, that the practices of the Negroes leave little energy for moral and mental regeneration. Their lives are filled with that which is carnal; their thoughts are most filthy and their morals are generally beyond description. Again, physical developments from childhood are precocious and the sex life begins at a ridiculously early period. But granting these truths, it is doubtful if there is sufficient evidence to warrant such a conclusion. The Negro reveals a strong physical nature; the sex impulse is naturally predominant. But its manifestations are probably no more violent and powerful than are the expressions of other feelings already suggested. The Negro's sensuous enjoyment of eating and drinking and sleeping, relatively speaking, are no less marked than his sexual propensities. Likewise lack of control and extreme manifestations characterize the discharge of other impulses. It is true, again, that the part played by sexual life among the Negroes is large for a people; but to state that the Negro is inherently differentiated and hindered by a sexual development out of proportion to other physical qualities is quite a different proposition. But whether the question here raised is answered in the affirmative or not, it still remains that in the practical life of the Negro his better impulses are warped and hindered by his unreasonable abuse of sexual license. And it is safe to suggest that the Negro need hope for little development of his best qualities until he has learned to regulate and control his animal impulses.

Statistics on illegitimate births and abortions are frequently quoted as evidence of Negro immorality. It is further asserted, with rarely an attempt at correction, that these immoral tendencies are responsible for rape and attempted rape of white women.

Tradition maintains that it is a part of Negro nature to desire a white woman and similarly a part of his nature to be lacking in those restraints and inhibitions which might control this desire. C. H. McCord, author of The American Negro as a Dependent, Defective, and Delinquent, said: "The average Negro is a child in every essential element of character, exhibiting those characteristics that indicate a tendency to lawless impulse and weak inhibition."

Numerous magazine articles and written studies in the South on this subject have given weight to this belief through sheer repetition. It is now not necessary to prove assertions or present an array of instances; they are taken for granted. Allusions to the "well-known immoral character" of the Negro or his instinctive tendency to commit sex crimes appear to carry as strong an impress of certainty as proved conclusions.

Other supposed social characteristics.—Discussions of each of the characteristics mentioned and many others are found in the literature on the subject. It will suffice here to give selections typical of the trend of descriptions to indicate the manner in which the picture of the Negro in practically every phase of his life has been set. Of his industrial habits Odum, in the social study of the Negro, says:

In any discussion of the economic situation this (the question of the efficiency of Negro labor) is an important consideration. A portion of the Negroes wander about and seek to get a living as best they can without working for it; they must necessarily live at the expense of the other Negroes and the whites. The number of vagrants in every community is surprisingly large. They are naturally divided into several groups; those who never work but wander from place to place, never fixed and without a home, stealing, begging, and obtaining a living from any source possible. Such men never work except when forced to do so in little jobs or on the streets or in the chain gang.

Of the Negro's social affairs he says:

The description of one of these [Negro] dances would be repulsive. The Negroes have "good times" on such occasions and will go a long distance to attend. The whole trend of the dance is toward physical excitation; they are without order and the influence is totally bad.

Of the condition of the Negro's home:

It will be seen that there is little orderly home life among the Negroes. Health conditions and daily habits are no better than the arrangement of the house. Sometimes an entire family consisting of father, mother, large and small children occupy the same rooms. Nor do they ventilate, and especially when any of the inmates are sick they are loath to let in the fresh air. Physicians testify that three or four often sleep in a bed together; they do not change clothing before going to bed in many cases, and often go for many days without a change of garments. It has been suggested that the personal habits of the Negroes are filthy; such is the case. Filth and uncleanness are everywhere predominant.

Of his religion:

In spite of pretentions and superficiality, there is nothing so real to the Negro as his religion, although it is a different "reality" from what we commonly expect in religion. The Negro is more excitable in his nature, and yields more readily to excitement than does the white man. The more a thing excites him, the more reality it has for him....

The criminal instinct appears to overbalance any consciousness which makes for righteousness, and the Negro has little serene consciousness of a clean record; he is ready to rush at any surprising or suspicious turn of affairs. The Negro does not value his word of honor; he apparently cannot always tell the truth. Only about one in every ten will keep an important engagement made in seriousness.

The Negro's conception of heaven and hell, God and the devil are very distinct. Heaven is an eternal resting-place where he shall occupy the best place. He sings of his heavenly home in striking contrast to his earthly abode. Perhaps for the reason that the Negroes have little satisfactory home life, they expect to have a perfect home in the next life.

Of his finer emotions:

While it is doubtful if there is enough evidence to warrant a full statement concerning the affections of the Negroes, it is apparently based on the gregarious impulse and upon a passive sympathy rather than upon individual emotions intellectually developed. The emotion is rarely of long duration.... The Negro mother rarely mourns for her wandering child, or sits up at night waiting for his return or thinking of him. The father shows little care except that of losing a laborer from his work.... The Negro has no loved ones. Numbers were asked for the names of those whom they considered friends or whom they loved or those who loved them. The question was put in various ways with different subjects, but the returns were the same.... But as a rule the Negro is without friendship among his own people.

It may help to comprehend the range of conclusions found in the literature on the subject of Negro traits of character to note the array of descriptive adjectives employed, thus: sensual, lazy, unobservant, shiftless, unresentful, emotional, shallow, patient, amiable, gregarious, expressive, appropriative, childish, religious, unmoral, immoral, ignorant, mentally inferior, criminal, excitable, imitative, repulsive, poetic, irresponsible, filthy, unintellectual, bumptious, overassertive, superficial, indecent, dependent, untruthful, musical, ungrateful, loyal, sporty, provincial, anthropomorphic, savage, brutish, happy-go-lucky, careless, plastic, docile, apish, inferior, cheerful.

Much might be said of influences which have operated to counteract the opinion-making literature as to the utterly hopeless condition of Negroes. The object of this study, however, is not to attack these conclusions, but merely to cite them as indicating how certain attitudes detrimental to racial friendliness and understanding have had their rise.

In academic circles the more balanced opinions of anthropologists are gaining some headway. Franz Boaz, probably the foremost anthropologist in the United States, in The Mind of Primitive Man, maintains:

Our considerations make it probable that the wide differences between the manifestations of the human mind in various stages of culture may be due almost entirely to the form of individual experience, which is determined by the geographical and social environment of the individual. It would seem that, in different races, the organization of the mind is on the whole alike, and that the variations of mind found in different races do not exceed, perhaps not even reach, the amount of normal individual variation in each race. It has been indicated that, notwithstanding this similarity in the form of individual mental processes, the expression of mental activity of a community tends to show a characteristic historical development.

This author in an article in the Nation for December, 1920, comments thus on Lothrop Stoddard's book, The Rising Tide of Color:

Mr. Stoddard's book is one of the long series of publications devoted to the self-admiration of the white race, which begins with Gobineau and comes down to us through Chamberlain and, with increasingly passionate appeal, through Madison Grant to Mr. Stoddard. The newer books of this type try to bolster up their unscientific theories by an amateurish appeal to misunderstood discoveries relating to heredity and give in this manner a scientific guise to their dogmatic statements which misleads the public. For this reason the books must be characterized as vicious propaganda, and gain an attention not warranted by an intrinsic merit in their learning or their logic.

Each race is exceedingly variable in all of its features, and we find in the white race, as well as in all other races, all grades of intellectual capacity, from the imbecile to the man of high intellectual power. It is true that intellectual power is hereditary in the individual, and that the healthy, the physically and mentally developed individuals of a race, if they marry among themselves, are liable to have offspring of a similar excellence; but it is equally true that the inferior individuals in a race will also have inferior offspring. If, therefore, it were entirely a question of eugenic development of humanity, then the aid of the eugenist would be to suppress not the gifted strains of other races, but rather the inferior strains of our own race. A selection of the intelligent, energetic and highly endowed individuals from all over the world would not by any means leave the white race as the only survivors, but would leave an assembly of individuals who would probably represent all the different races of man now in existence.

Jean Finot, in Race Prejudice, says:

When we go through the list of external differences which appear to divide men, we find literally nothing which can authorize their division into superior and inferior beings, into masters and pariahs. If this division exists in our thought, it only came there as the result of inexact observations and false opinions drawn from them.

The science of inequality is emphatically a science of white people. It is they who have invented it and set it going, who have maintained, cherished, and propagated it, thanks to their observations and their deductions. Deeming themselves greater than men of other colours, they have elevated into superior qualities all the traits which are peculiar to themselves, commencing with the whiteness of the skin and the pliancy of the hair. But nothing proves that these vaunted traits are traits of real superiority.

W. I. Thomas, in Sex and Society, concludes his discussion of relative mentality with this statement:

The real variable is the individual, not the race. In the beginning—perhaps as the result of a mutation or series of mutations—a type of brain developed which has remained relatively fixed in all times and among all races. This brain will never have any faculty in addition to what it now possesses, because as a type of structure it is as fixed as the species itself, and is indeed a mark of species. It is not apparent that we are greatly in need of another faculty, or that we could make use of it even if by a chance mutation it should emerge, since with the power of abstraction we are able to do any class of work we know anything about.

III. TYPES OF SENTIMENTS AND ATTITUDES

In the South the relations between the white and Negro races are determined by custom as well as law, which, however, permit the close personal relationships of family servants. In the North, when these relations become more impersonal and contacts are widened through change of occupation from domestic service to industry, these close personal ties are weakened. There is no established rule of conduct binding on whites and Negroes in their relations with each other; and although traditional beliefs may influence present relations in the North, they do not always dominate them. So it happens that there are to be found shades of opinion concerning Negroes varying from deliberate indifference to vituperative abuse of Negroes, whatever the subject, depending on one's beliefs about them. The selections of sentiment which follow are examples collected at random over the city—through interviews and discussions, from group publications, speeches and reports. They illustrate the real sentiments that white persons express when brought into contact with Negroes, or when their opinions are solicited.

1. THE EMOTIONAL BACKGROUND

Hostile sentiment.—The refusal of Policeman Callahan to arrest Stauber, a white youth accused of throwing stones which resulted in the drowning of Eugene Williams, is regarded as the significant incident precipitating the riot of 1919 (see [p. 4]). Callahan was dismissed from the force, but reinstated. One year later, when questioned by an investigator for the Commission, he gave his racial philosophy freely in the following remarks:

So far as I can learn the black people have since history began despised the white people and have always fought them.... It wouldn't take much to start another riot, and most of the white people of this district are resolved to make a clean-up this time.... If a Negro should say one word back to me or should say a word to a white woman in the park, there is a crowd of young men of the district, mostly ex-service men, who would procure arms and fight shoulder to shoulder with me if trouble should come from the incident.

The following is from a letter written by a white employee of Albert Pick & Company:

Negroes in street cars refuse to double up with others of their race, but seem to delight in sitting beside some dainty white girl.

The Thirty-fifth Street cars are crowded by low-grade "plantation niggers" who crowd on at Ashland Avenue via windows and doors, then awkwardly step and fall over passengers; it is maddening. About this time girls from Albert Pick & Company, the Magnus Company, and the tailoring establishments are crowded together breast to breast with Negroes. Often he falls asleep and leans on his white seatmate's shoulder.

Laws should be urged preventing intermarriage.

Assaults upon white women are frequent, but hushed up by fear of newspaper publicity, and the Negro is thus encouraged in his felony.

In cases where a white girl is involved in an assault case by a colored man, the white woman should be shielded, and her name withheld from the newspapers and public, before and after the trial. This will prevent race riots.

A movement is now afoot to declare a silent boycott against employers of colored help.

A physician living on Oakwood Boulevard said: "The increasing amount generally of sex immorality is being contributed to by mixing Negroes and whites in schools and parks."

A teacher in the Felsenthal School said:

The colored people are coming from the South all the time, for political purposes. It's propaganda for the colored man to sit down by the white woman, and not to double up to make room for the whites. Their papers tell them to do it. I was the only white person in an empty car one day and a colored man came in and took the seat beside me.

Fear.—From White Americans circulated in Chicago:

In the United States Negroes not only vote and hold office, but the Negro vote is the deciding factor in the national elections, and also in many of the northern cities, and they trade their vote for jobs and offices and other privileges. The Negroes control the great city of Philadelphia, and the press said the Negro delegates at the Republican Convention in Chicago openly offered to sell their support to the presidential candidate who would pay the most money. Just think this thing over, you sovereign United States citizens: the Negroes control the elections, and thus your law-makers, judges, and officials; and the Negroes have so much pull and confidence, that they not only defend their political rights, but they start riots and race wars, and openly threaten that they are going to make the white folks stand around.

Fear and pity.—A resident in the 6600 block on Langley Avenue said:

A colored family lives next door north of me, and you'll be surprised when I tell you that I haven't been able to open my bedroom window on that side to air that room for three years. I couldn't think of unlocking the windows because their window is so near somebody could easily step across into this house. It's awful to have to live in such fear of your life.

When asked if she considered her neighbors so dangerous as that, she said:

Well, no, the woman seems pretty nice. I see her out in the back yard occasionally and bid her the time of day out of charity. You can't help but pity them, so I am charitable and speak. Where the danger really is, is that you never know who's in their house; they bring such trash to the neighborhood, even if they are good and decent. How do I know what kind of people this woman next door associates with? There's awful-looking people sit on the front porch sometimes. Why, I couldn't sit on my porch on the hottest day because I'd be afraid they would come out any minute. And what white person will sit on a porch next door to a porch with black ones on it? Not me, anyhow, nor you either I hope.

Hostile but resigned.—A resident near Dorchester Avenue and Sixtieth Street said:

I have nothing against the black man as a black man. He comes into my place of business (drug-store) and I sell him. Not many come in, as there aren't a lot of colored people around Sixty-third and Woodlawn or Dorchester. But I don't want to live with niggers any more than you or any other white person does. People who say, "I like the colored people and don't see why others can't get along with them" don't talk practical common sense. Theoretically all this talk is all right, but you get a white man of this sort to come right down and live with a nigger and he won't do it.

Niggers are different from whites and always will be, and that is why white people don't want them around. But the only thing we can do, it seems to me, is make the best of it and live peaceably with them. The North can never do what the South does—down there it is pure autocracy. I might say like Russia. That might have worked here in the North from the start, but can't be started now, and we wouldn't want such autocracy anyway. They are citizens, and it is up to us to teach them to be good ones. How it can be done I don't know—it will have to come slow, and no one can give a solution offhand. Everybody says, "We don't want the niggers with us." Well, here they are, and we can't do anything. Must let them live where they want to and go to school where they want to, and we don't want to force their right away.

It is not uncommon to find in some circles and with many individuals a resolute indisposition to discuss any phase of the Negro problem. Convictions regarding the race are so firmly set and hostile that no argument or appeal to fair-mindedness can alter their position.

"Eye Witness," a special writer for the Chicago Tribune, encountered this state of mind in interviewing whites and Negroes for a series of articles on the Negro question which appeared in the Tribune in May, 1919. He characterized it as insensate and dangerous. His own statement, published May 4, 1919, said:

Among men like publicists and administrators of large affairs, who, when they discuss the problems and troubles of their race, are wont to speak in a rational, or at least mannerly way, there was often an unfeeling kind of don't-give-a-damn cry when they talked on this subject that made one wonder how they had managed so well in maintaining a human and successful relationship with their white associates in business and with their employees.

I heard more, far more, insensate language from the lips of white men than of black men throughout the series of interviews. The horrible part of that, to me, was that when a white employer more or less accountable for the well-being of colored workmen, or a publicist entrusted with a pen that forms and directs opinions, had railed about "these damn niggers" they appeared to think they had said something rather gallant and decisive, for they would smile fatuously and expect acquiescence.

And more terrible than the language was the insensate state of mind such language betrayed. The only way one could avoid the suspicion that one was listening to a potential lunatic or a desperately stupid person without a human or a community sense, was to allow much for the vehemence of the American tongue and to concede that these men don't mean one-tenth of what they say. If they did they would be fomenters of race wars.

2. SENTIMENTAL RELATIONSHIPS

Sentiment for the "old family servants."—A white physician born in the South said:

My father owned slaves. He looked out for them; told them what to do. He loved them and they loved him. I was brought up during and after the war. I had a "black mammy" and she was devoted to me and I to her; and I played with Negro children. In a way I'm fond of the Negro; I understand him and he understands me; but the bond between us is not as close as it was between my father and his slaves. On the other hand, my children have grown up without black playmates and without a "black mammy." The attitude of my children is less sympathetic toward the Negroes than my own. They don't know each other.

Paternal relationship.—In testimony before the Commission a witness said:

The prejudice against the colored people in the South isn't as strong in some instances as it is in the North. It's a queer thing, but the white man in the South, and the white woman, too, has a sort of paternal feeling that he must look after him and that the colored man's interests are better in his hands than if he is left to drift for himself. I don't state that as an actual fact, but I believe it is true. That is their point of view. They don't hate the colored man. They don't dislike him, but I should say this, that they won't take him into their homes. They don't dislike him, provided he keeps his place. I believe the white people of the South think more of the Negro than the white people of the North.

3. ABSTRACT JUSTICE

A trained nurse of Woodlawn said:

I meet colored people only on the cars. There are none anywhere around here, I believe. I don't know how I would feel if they came to Woodlawn to live. But they must live, and I hear their quarters are getting too small. It seems that Chicago ought to let them live somewhere. Some people treat Negroes terrible and I think that is all wrong. Why can't we act respectably toward colored people on the cars and treat them nice on the street? We surely don't want to be like the people in the South who make colored persons get off the walk when they come along. But I see white people here almost that bad—can't see a black man live.

The pastor of a church in Woodlawn said:

I have come to no final conclusion as to the best policy to pursue in the adjustment of the race problem. I am thinking about it a great deal and am deeply concerned over the whole matter. In the present state of popular mind, there is no doubt but property values are depreciated by the presence of Negro tenants or property owners in residential sections. However, if everyone felt as I do, it would not be so. I mean, provided that the same general social standards were observed by all nationalities in the city. It would be very fine, it seems to me, to maintain certain standards in each neighborhood. Why not bring pressure to bear on white landlords and make them keep their property up to a given average standard in the community, that only such a class of people will rent or buy as are already there? I am very anxious that the Negro shall be treated fairly. I do not want him to feel that I have stood in the way of his opportunities and his rights.

A professor at the University of Chicago said:

The final solution, it seems to me, must come as a result of honest and successful efforts for mutual understanding between the races. There must be apparent on the part of the white race an attempt to treat the Negro with justice, and I feel sure that he will respond. I do not think the black race, as a race, desires intermarriage more than the white race, yet the assertion to the contrary is much overworked by the white opposition in these neighborhoods.

A minister said:

All I want for the Negro is justice—then I think the economic laws will settle this problem. Let the people interested try justice; they will find it will solve the race problem faster than any other course, just as it will solve any other problem. Treat the bad Negro just as rough as you treat the bad white man, but acclaim the good Negro after the same manner of your acclamation of the good white man.

4. SENTIMENTS STRONGER THAN RACE PREJUDICE

Class kinship stronger than race.—A Swedish employee in a department store said:

We have quite a number of Negro neighbors where I live, and several black men work with me, and I want to say I think they are just as good as anybody. There are classes of people in every race, and of course there is a rough element among the blacks. Some highbrows try to make out that they are representative, but I think opposition to the Negro in Chicago comes from the "swell" class. I do not have any different feeling for them than for the same kind of people in any other race. I think race relations will get better in Chicago. The workingman has learned that the Negro will treat him right when he is treated right, and as soon as the other folks find that out, things will be all right.

The secretary of the Cook County Labor Party said:

I have thought about this problem a good deal, and I think you will find it is the so-called middle class that is making all the trouble. The laboring-man does not care who his neighbor is, so long as he is a good neighbor. I think you can trace most of the racial activities to jealousy on the part of a certain class of American citizens who are not any too wealthy and feel constrained to maintain a sort of fictitious position in life at the expense of anybody, in this case the Negroes. You will find that the very well-to-do are not nearly so much aroused over the problem.

A Japanese said:

I think it is simply a matter of race prejudice, which of course means first of all that the color is not acceptable, while, in the second place, they were imported to the United States as slaves, and thus it always occurs in the American mind that they are a lower class of people. Furthermore, as they were slaves and the American does not like them, they don't have equal opportunities to educate themselves up to such a degree which means no more than environment. In the last place, they want to keep away from them. I think it might be said that they are willing to receive lower wages, which tends to lower the wage system; thus the American worker suffers a good deal. In the whole process the Negroes have been kept out of social and political activities that would have given them a chance to develop. Allow them to have these activities in the future and they will make more rapid progress than they have even in the past.

General historical comparisons.—A Jewish resident of the West Side said:

I believe that the segregation movement is wrong because it is unjust and because it is devoid of any principle whatever. It has not risen out of the consideration of the needs of the colored people, nor out of consideration of real advantages that the whites might thereby gain. What is back of race prejudice? Nothing more than the spirit of superiority and selfishness which moves the aristocrats to move out of a neighborhood as soon as a few common people move in. This is here too prevalent. The segregation movement has its parallel in history. Who does not remember the old Jewish Ghetto of Amsterdam, Frankfort, etc., or the Pale of Russia? What has this segregation done for the Jews? It curtailed their rise, depriving them of an opportunity to develop, and I foresee the same result in the new segregation movement, and therefore deem it a great public evil and moral issue.

5. TRADITIONAL SOUTHERN BACKGROUND

A window dresser said:

I am from the South, and I am used to seeing the Negro kept in his place. I would colonize them, every one of them, and make them stay where they are put. I would colonize them in Africa if I had to do it. There's where they came from and there's where they belong. Of course, some few northern folks say that they were taken away against their own wills, but I say they ought to go back against their own wills.

The woman manager of a tailor shop, Fifty-fifth Street, said: "I am a southerner, and I feel the way they all do about it. I guess you know what I mean. I think the nigger should stay in his place."

6. GROUP SENTIMENTS

Fear of social censure.—A property owner at Langley Avenue and Fifty-fifth Street said:

"I am not proud to be living on the same street with Negroes, so I never tell my friends—they would say: 'You must move out.'"

George L. Giles Post of the American Legion is a Negro post with headquarters at the South Side Branch of the Community Service. Invitations to a musicale and dramatic entertainment for the benefit of ex-service men were sent to all the local posts by the Community Service. It was responded to by the adjutant of George L. Giles Post, who received a reply from the executive secretary saying:

I am quite sure you will understand that our sending one to the George L. Giles Post was a slip. Will you kindly let me know if there are other Posts of colored men in the city?

Similar recognition of the force of public opinion may be found in industry. The manager of a large industrial plant, speaking of Negro workmen, said: "I have a feeling that white workers would object to Negroes in any position but that of common laborers, although I have no basis for this opinion." Another said: "I have heard whites remark that they wouldn't want to work here if many colored were employed but none left on that account."

7. ATTITUDES DETERMINED BY CONTACTS

No contacts but a hostile attitude.—A resident at Drexel Avenue and Sixty-fifth Street said:

I don't see many niggers around here; most of them are west of Cottage Grove Avenue. I never had any dealings with them, so can't tell you anything much. I know I don't want niggers living next door to me, but I can't tell you why. Do you want them next-door neighbors to you? There are some living down in the next block—two families of them—between Sixty-fourth and Sixty-fifth, and I guess they are pretty wild, but I have never seen them. It's just what people tell me. I never had any dealings with them.

Generalization from a particular experience.—A teacher in the Wendell Phillips High School said:

You can't trust the best of them. The minute you have your back turned something disappears. They are the worst bunch of little thieves I ever struck. A few weeks ago I had a colored girl helping me fix costumes in my little office. During the hour she was in there I was absent about five minutes. She had hardly got out of the building before I discovered that a dollar had disappeared out of my purse. I questioned her for thirty minutes next morning, but not a word of confession. Another time I had small change in the top drawer of my desk. While I was teaching a class, two girls slipped into the office and helped themselves to half of it. I surprised them when I unexpectedly entered the office to get something. Everything here that isn't tied or watched walks off. It didn't used to be this way before the colored came in so thick; then I never locked my office, and now I have everything under lock.

The proprietor of a woman's dress shop on Sixty-third Street said:

Little of my trade is colored, possibly 2 per cent. We do not cater to colored trade. We do not want it. If colored people come in, we will sell them if they buy quick and get out. Our trade does not care to deal where colored people are also accommodated.... You will find it pretty hard to be neutral in Chicago. The more I know of niggers, the more I am convinced that there is no good nigger but a dead one. I had a colored helper who wanted tips every time he was asked to render services outside of his recognized regular duties. I gave him a good salary, $18 per week, and yet he was never satisfied, and one day he got hold of the keys to the cash drawer and ran away with $300.

Exaggerated notion of prosperity.—A physician said:

I think that the solution of the race problem can come only by recognition by white men of the Negroes' potential equality. They are only fifty years out of slavery, and in that fifty years they have progressed faster than the white race has done in a hundred years. The Negro man of forty today is less advanced than the white man of forty, but I expect his son to be almost on a par with our sons, and his grandson will be every whit as good. The husband of the colored woman who has been getting our dinners for us for a number of years is making more killing steers for Armour than I am. He makes $16 a day. They have $12,000 worth of Liberty bonds. They are sending all of their relatives through high school and declare they will put them through the University of Chicago. In fact we are compelling the Negro to get an education, and he cannot help but progress. Colonizing the Negro is merely making him bitter and postponing the day of settlement. Presently we shall have with us under such a régime a race of comparative equals very much disgruntled by the unfair treatment accorded them. I think you will find that practically all the professional men in this building, at least a very large percentage of them, think as I do on this subject.

Contact with servants.—A resident of Woodlawn said:

Practically my only contact with Negroes is with servants and laundresses. I have had colored women working for me for many years, and the majority of them I could not trust outside my sight. By that I don't mean they would steal—they just weren't dependable. It is all wrong for colored children and white children to be in school together. There should be separate schools, because the two races of children are as different in everything as in their color.

The interviewing of hundreds of white persons, members of practically every social class, reveals little information regarding the sources of their beliefs about Negroes. Some think them instinctive; some hold that their opinions are a result of observation; some, who make discernible effort to stem the current of prejudiced views and remain fair, have read the books of Negroes. But by far the greater number either admit or otherwise give evidence of having absorbed their views from tradition.

Information by word of mouth, unquestioned statements, uncorrected accounts, all continue to add credence to any current interpretation of an act involving Negroes. The fault lies for the most part at the information source. Fairly to judge the Negro group, or any member thereof, there should be some unquestioned basis of fact, yet the assumption is common that almost any Negro can be judged by what has been observed in the conduct of the family cook or chauffeur, who no more represents the whole or the majority of Negroes than a white cook or chauffeur can be said to represent the whole or the majority of the white race.

IV. SELF-ANALYSIS BY FIFTEEN WHITE CITIZENS

To secure definite information upon this background twenty representative white persons were selected at random, and eighteen carefully prepared suggestive questions were put to each of them. The purpose was to draw out the raw material of their unqualified opinions on the question of the Negro, and to ascertain as far as possible the background in their early experiences. The questions were suggestive in order to compel a disclosure of mental attitudes. The only qualification in the selection of persons was their probable capacity for self-analysis and a willingness to answer. The length and difficulty of the questions put made it necessary to limit the selection of persons to a few, who in appreciation of the inquiry, could and would give it a careful study. Fifteen of these persons entered into the spirit of the inquiry and submitted the results of their self-scrutiny.

These fifteen include business and professional men and women, none of whom, however, is actively associated with racial movements. They represent probably a fair sample of sentiment and at the same time ability to analyze accurately their own feelings and opinions.

The questions put were as follows:

1. Have you formed definite opinions about Negroes? Briefly, what are they?

2. Do Negroes in your opinion possess distinguishing traits of mentality or character?

3. As well as you can remember, on what facts, authorities, information, sources, do you base your opinions?

4. What incidents or experiences involving Negroes either in Chicago or elsewhere stand out in your memory?

5. As a child, did you have contacts of any kind with Negroes?

6. Can you recall any early prohibitions of association by word or printed warnings of any sort, implied prohibitions in institutional or social arrangements?

7. When were you first conscious of a racial difference?

8. Whom of your friends, acquaintances, favorite authors, scholars, etc., do you regard as best fitted to speak with authority on the question?

9. Do you ever inquire for information on this subject? Whom do you ask? What Negroes do you know whom you would consider leaders among colored people in Chicago? in the United States?

10. Did you ever read a Negro periodical? What did you think of it?

11. What subjects of discussion most frequently lead to the Negro?

12. In what circles is this subject most frequently discussed?

13. If it were in your power to make whatever social adjustment you deemed wise, what disposition would you make of the Negro population?

14. If Negroes obstinately objected to your plan and you still had power, what would you do?

15. What do you think of the following propositions:

a) When you educate Negroes you increase their demands. Either their education should be curtailed or modified or their demands granted.

b) Prejudice has its principal basis in fear.

c) Isolating groups favors the unhampered development of special group prejudices. Do prejudices form a background of conflicts? The greater the isolation, the greater the prejudices and, as would naturally follow, the greater the chances of conflict.

d) A minority of the population should not expect complete justice at the hands of an overwhelming majority.

Their answers are given separately. The letters used to designate the different persons are arbitrary.

A—

I have rather definite opinions of Negroes. As a class they cannot be depended upon. They are shiftless and really must be treated like children. I make allowance for the fact that they have not the years of education back of them.

My opinions are based on visits made to the South and on information obtained from relatives who live in the South as well as from the colored help we have had. As a child my contact with Negroes began with our Negro house servants, and my first consciousness of a racial difference came while visiting relatives in the South. I know but two persons who might speak with authority on the race question. They are Edgar A. Bancroft and Miss Mary McDowell. It is very seldom that I inquire for information on this subject. People whom I know are not interested in the problem.

The only Negroes whom I know are my present colored help and those who have worked for me. I don't know whom to consider leaders among the colored people either in Chicago or in the United States. Concerning the Negro periodicals, I have occasionally read copies of one of their newspapers which bore out my opinion of their simple minds. Discussion of domestic help and of newspaper articles about Negroes and sociological conditions most frequently lead to the discussion of the Negro in my circle. If it were in my power to do so, I would segregate Negroes as to living quarters and do all possible to help them educate and help themselves.

Concerning proposition (a) I agree that if you educate Negroes, you increase their demands, but I also believe that as they become educated, greater demands will arise in their own groups.

In my opinion prejudice has its principal basis in the fact that one can't depend upon Negroes.

I do not believe that it is necessarily true that a minority of the population should not expect complete justice at the hands of the majority if the proper appeal is made.

B—

I have more or less definite opinions about Negroes. I believe that as a race they are entitled to more leniency and consideration than we would give to adult whites because as a race they are not as mature as whites. I think it is unfortunate that we have such a race question to deal with, but we ought to meet it squarely and insist that under the law Negroes are entitled to equal protection and equal consideration. I do not believe in any attempt at social equality because the antipathy between whites and Negroes is so acute that such attempt would not only break down itself but it would lead to serious race difficulties. I think the Negro race has as much right to protect its race purity as the white race. I believe Negro women are entitled to the same protection from white men that we demand on behalf of white women against black men. I believe Negroes should have decent housing conditions, proper social outlets and opportunities to earn a living at the same wages paid white men for the same class and character of work. They should share equally in the benefits of government, with particular reference to schools, bathing-beaches, playgrounds, parks, etc. They should be protected against exploitation by employers, property owners, merchants, etc.

I do think Negroes possess distinguishing traits of both mentality and character. For many years now I have come into more or less personal contact with Negroes. I have been in contact with them in public schools, in colleges, in politics and in civic work. I cannot say that any particular incidents or experiences stand out in my memory.

My opinions are based upon my personal observation, personal contacts with Negroes and discussions with other white persons having independent contacts. As a child I had practically no real contact of any kind with Negroes. I don't recall now any Negro children in any of my primary grades, and while there were Negroes in my native city, they were few and in a neighborhood far removed from my own home. I imagine that I was first conscious of a racial difference when I first saw a Negro.

I don't recall any early prohibition against association with Negroes although I do recall clearly that the attitude of my family and associates, generally, was not one of approval. Negroes were regarded as an inferior race, and I think as a child I gathered the impression that contact with them was to be avoided. My feeling is that if in normal circumstances I had been thrown into more or less contact with Negroes, prohibition against association, except where absolutely necessary, would have been forthcoming.

I have never formally asked for information on the subject, but I have discussed the matter with a good many people and have given thought to it. I know a good many Negroes, not only in Chicago but outside, but I don't know many of them intimately. Among the leaders of the Negroes in Chicago are Dr. Bentley, Dr. George C. Hall, Edward H. Morris, Edward H. Wright, Louis B. Anderson, Oscar De Priest. In the United States, since the death of Booker T. Washington, I imagine that two of the outstanding men are Mr. Moton and Professor Du Bois.

I am a subscriber to the Crisis. In general my feeling is that the tendency of this periodical is to stimulate and foster race feeling among the Negroes. I don't say this critically. It may be the best thing to do, considering all the circumstances, and anything that will make for growth in self-respect, character and initiative on the part of the Negroes is to be commended even if, at the same time, race spirit is fostered and developed.

Generally speaking, I find that discussion most frequently leads to the Negroes when there are questions of lynching, race riots, crimes or disturbances in which Negroes are involved. It also comes up in connection with public schools, churches, parks and public transportation systems. I had it arise recently in connection with the Naval Academy at Annapolis. My experience is that this subject is most frequently discussed among those interested in social problems.

I used to think that the Negro question might be best solved if the Negroes would be colonized in some favorable spot in Africa under an American protectorate until they were capable of self-government. I realize, however, that no such scheme ought to be attempted if the Negroes obstinately objected, and in that event I would see to it, if I had the power, that they were protected from exploitation, were given a square deal and had the equal protection of the laws. They should have schools adequate to their needs and average living conditions.

I believe the Negro race should be educated, but I believe at the same time that the most solid foundation for the race is education in accordance with the ideas of the late Booker T. Washington as I understand those ideas. While I think this type of education will mean more for the race in the long run I believe at the same time that individual Negroes should have an opportunity fully to develop individual capacities.

I think there is an element of fear in the prejudice of Negroes, but I don't think this is the chief element. I think the real basis for this prejudice is a racial antipathy that is instinctive and fundamental in the white race. I imagine that in individual cases where this prejudice does not exist it is not because it was not there originally, but because it has been overcome by reason and education. It isn't unlikely that this prejudice is in the main grounded upon an instinct in the white race to keep its strain pure and strong.

It seems to me that it isn't isolation so much as it is contact that favors the development of race prejudice. If the Negroes had never been brought out of Africa, we wouldn't feel the prejudice that we do. Or, if they were restricted to one or two southern states, prejudice in other parts of the country would rapidly disappear. A community that has no Negro problem is relatively free from prejudice. It is when the two races come into contact that prejudices run riot and race conflicts result. My own opinion is that if you should scatter the Negro population throughout Chicago and its suburbs and put one or two Negro families in every block, race prejudice would increase enormously.

A minority of the population will not get complete justice at the hands of an overwhelming majority. But this is true of all minorities, whether racial, political, or religious. All we can do is to keep working for an approximation to ideal justice. A minority has the right to demand, and a majority should be willing to grant, substantial justice and that is all that can be expected in the present state of civilization.

C—

My opinion is that we must cling to the ideal of Lincoln—the right of every human being to equality in the real sense of the term. I have found, however, that Negroes are dull and sensitive. These opinions are based upon observation at Tuskegee and in this school—[the Lewis Institute]. Among my outstanding experiences is a visit made to Tuskegee and meeting Booker T. Washington. The visit showed great hope for the Negro. As a child I had no contact aside from living in the same city with them.

It has always been considered unwise in the circles in which I moved for whites and blacks to associate socially. I first became conscious of a race difference when a very small child—about three years of age.

Booker T. Washington, Cable, Dunbar, southerners and northerners who have traveled in the South are probably best fitted to speak for Negroes. I do inquire of both Negroes and whites for information. The only Negroes I know are working people. Robert Jackson, alderman, and Ed. Green, lawyer. Booker T. Washington's successor. I have read one Negro paper. It was insistent in a very fair way on the political rights of the Negro. Good. Lynchings, lying, stealing, and the attacking of little girls are the subject of discussion that most frequently lead to the Negro, and these occur principally among men who have seen Negroes socially and women who have hired them.

As a solution I would colonize them in Africa, and if they objected I would use all peaceable means to force them to go.

Regarding the propositions: Their education should be increased and the demands produced by education met.

Prejudice has its basis in race repulsion. Unless the isolation is African colonization, there will be group prejudices.

Every man or group should demand and get complete justice.

D—

I assume that it is a fact recognized by science that Negroes are so different from whites that the two races cannot be amalgamated. This fact interposes a barrier to social relationships. I share in the general dislike of Negroes as neighbors or traveling companions on the street cars. The white race is responsible for the existence of the Negro problem in America, and must submit patiently to the penalty for many years to come. Lincoln's second inaugural is the best expression of this thought. The Negro race is extraordinarily docile and easy to handle. If surrounded by good living conditions and given a proper education they would be good citizens. The progress of their race since slavery, considering their many handicaps, has been very creditable. The prejudice against them is probably the most deep-seated of all American prejudices, and must be reckoned with as one of the great factors in the problem.

In my opinion they are characterized by distinctly inferior mentality, deficient moral sense, shiftlessness, good nature, and a happy disposition. I have in mind no special facts, authorities or sources of information on which I base my opinions. I do, however, recognize the bearing of Christianity on the problem, and find it impossible to formulate a viewpoint which I can reconcile with the demands of Christianity.

We had a Negro family chauffeur some years ago who misconducted himself so seriously as to have caused a very considerable increase in the family prejudice against the race. If he had been an Irish man our prejudice against him would not have extended to his race. As a child I had no contacts with Negroes, excepting one or two fellow-pupils in public schools of whom I saw very little, and a few servants in the neighborhood who were of the old-fashioned type, of pleasant memory.

I can recall no early prohibitions of association with Negroes. There were so few in my neighborhood that they constituted no real problem. As to implied prohibitions, I suppose I understood at a very early age the existing social difference, although I remember no instances of this.

I cannot remember when I first became conscious of a racial difference, but I assume it was at a very early age.

I do not know that I can cite any friends, acquaintances, favorite authors or scholars well fitted to speak with authority on the question. Lincoln's views always seemed true to me, while I have not been so favorably impressed by southern writers. Every southerner I have ever met, no matter how reasonable on other subjects, seemed to be incapable of looking at this question with an open mind. His confidence that he knew all about the Negro and the problem seemed absolute, and therefore he was not in position to learn. I occasionally inquire for information on this subject. Naturally most of the men of whom I have made inquiries have been white, as I come in contact with very few Negroes. I have, however, talked with Negroes who have expressed their willingness to be segregated if the segregation was complete enough to rid their district of all whites, and give them fair living conditions. I cannot say that I know any Negroes, although there are a few with whom I have sufficient acquaintance to talk with them occasionally. As to their leaders in Chicago, I have assumed that their political leaders and their ministers were their leaders, the ministers having a larger place of leadership than ministers among white people. I used to come in contact occasionally with colored lawyers who were capable men, and I believe leaders of their race, and I understand that there is a colored physician, whose name I cannot recall, who is the real leader of the best Negroes in Chicago. Nationally I could not name any since the death of Booker Washington, whom I very much admired, excepting Du Bois whom I have heard speak, and with whose views I do not sympathize. I do not remember ever reading a Negro periodical.

As I live on the South Side the subject of discussion most frequently leading to the Negro is their encroachment on white residence districts. Two years ago my church was given up to a colored congregation, and the church into which we were transferred is seriously threatened by the same invasion. Property interests in a large part of the South Side bring up the question, as does the unpleasantness of meeting them on the street cars. I do not hear serious constructive discussion in any circle. The invasion is deplored in all circles, social, business, church and others.

I would not undertake to make any social adjustment on my present information, except segregation of the Negroes in a part of the South Side, and this only if it had the approval of their own leaders. I do not approve of "Jim Crow" street cars for Chicago, although I would not insist on their abandonment in southern cities where they are already used, and I would not favor any radical change if the better Negroes obstinately objected.

I believe in educating Negroes, even though I am not sure to what it will lead. I hope that as the race progresses the prejudice against it will be modified. Still this prejudice is so very great that I think it would be foolish for the Negroes ever to seek a high station through demands. Probably many of their demands should be granted, but they will make greater progress by reckoning with the prejudice, and continuing their present conciliatory attitude.

I do not believe that prejudice is based on fear. There is, of course, a well-founded fear of many individual Negroes, but I do not believe that the white race is conscious of any fear of the Negro race as such. I think the prejudice is based on the relative inferiority of the Negro race.

As a general proposition this is doubtless true that isolation fosters prejudice. As applied to Negroes, however, it is doubtful whether it would produce more conflict than the present system. I would feel more hopeful of the overcoming of the prejudice through more intimate contact with Negroes if the difference between Negroes and white men were not so fundamental.

As an abstract proposition the despotism of a majority cannot be justified. I would say it is a very bad doctrine to spread among a majority, but has in it a certain amount of practical truth which the minority would do well to bear in mind.

E—

Negroes do possess distinguishing traits of mentality and character. My opinions are based upon my personal observation.

As I knew the Negro in the South he was inclined to be indolent, shiftless and lacking in a high sense of honesty, though religious. His disposition is a happy one, and often his good will is shown in many ways of gratitude and faithfulness. These traits I have seen expressed in service as servants, in the cotton fields, in their homes, and on town streets. In Chicago, when the Negro has long been a resident here, having larger advantages in education and employment, I find the colored man honest in business and other transactions, diligent at work, and inoffensive, but firmly standing for his citizenship rights, and wanting to live peaceably. My Chicago experience has been principally as a physician visiting in Negro homes.

When a boy I worked in the cotton fields with Negroes, and I attended some of their religious meetings for the sake of amusement. It was a social law in the South that we must not eat at the same table with Negroes, and we were not to sit with colored people when riding on street cars or on trains. However, if a Negro was driver of a horse and buggy, the most beautiful and refined woman might sit on the same seat with the colored driver. White people visiting a colored church were given seats to themselves, usually front seats. Colored children could not attend white schools. At the age of six when I first saw Negroes, I became conscious of a race difference.

I regard Rev. John R. Hayworth as fitted to advise on the question. I have sought information from about twenty-five Negroes when in their midst as their physician. I am acquainted with at least a dozen Negro families but can give the names of only three. I consider Alderman De Priest, Mr. Lucas and Colonel Jackson leading colored men; Dr. George Hall is also well known. I have never read a Negro periodical.

In Chicago the subject of undesirable neighbors leads to the discussion of Negroes in our neighborhood improvement clubs.

Believing that both black and white people prefer to live separately, I would make agreeable provision for separate locations in which each might live and in so doing abide by the wish of the majority and enforce its dictates.

The Negro should be given the advantage of education, culture and good employment. We should expect to grant him better living conditions on account of such advantages.

Prejudice against the Negro has its principal basis in not understanding him, as well as fear and an inborn dislike for people of another race.

There never seemed to be any conflicts in the South because the whites and blacks occupied separate parts of towns. Colored people in the South seem to prefer to live in communities to themselves, because a bond of sympathy holds them together.

It is better for a minority to bear an injustice than for an overwhelming majority to bear an injustice.

F—

Negroes should have the same rights as we.

I know of no distinguishing traits.

My opinion is based largely on reading, as I never lived in the South. I had no early contacts. There were few Negroes near, and none in my schools. As authorities I would mention Professor Du Bois, Fannie B. Williams, Professor Graham Taylor. I know an able colored woman, a member of the Chicago Woman's Club and women who have worked in our home.

Occasionally I read a Negro periodical.

The discussion of lynchings and riots at home and church lead most frequently to the Negro.

Our schools, trades and professions should be opened to Negroes and they be permitted to take care of themselves. Let them follow their own bent so long as it injures no one else.

Of course, when you educate Negroes you increase their demands. Grant their demands.

Egotism and the jealousy that we whites are better are the basis of prejudice.

It is true that a minority has no right to expect complete justice from the majority, if Negroes reason from experience; but the colored race probably has idealists who hope for better future treatment.

G—

The trouble is with the whites; selfishness and pride have caused the situation and the regulation of the Negro according to faulty concepts of right will always fail. The Stock Yards riots gave proof of equality in passion, cowardliness, and unfairness between blacks and whites.

Negroes lag in evolution through hinderment. They may put reason above emotion as they develop mentally, as do cultured whites, but a better evolution may bring trained intuition from crude emotion.

My opinions are based upon short trips South, residence in Louisville and northern contacts, plus general reading.

My only contacts are on the streets.

Children's talk and the term "Nigger" just called my attention to a race difference.

I know a few highly educated Negro pastors. I never read Negro papers. The subject of interracial marriage leads to the discussion of the Negro.

As a solution they should be distributed without boundaries, among whites, as to residence, occupation and society. They would not object; it is what they fight for—equality.

Negro faults are the result of retarded mental growth. Why further retard them? The problem ceases to be as their mental level rises. Prejudice is the result of selfishness in whites. Your third proposition is absolutely true.

Injustice to the minority by the majority is unconstitutional, un-Christian and unwise.

H—

My opinion is that the Negro is entitled to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness as well as the white. The very fact that his skin is differently colored than mine is no reason why he should not be free to develop himself mentally, morally, and physically the same as I do. Observation is basis of my opinion. No contacts or warnings as a child. No friends particularly familiar with question.

I have given this matter some little consideration, and have discussed it with some Negroes as well as many white men. It is my opinion that the consensus of opinion among Negroes to whom I have talked is that they have no particular desire to mix socially with the white man, but that they do feel they should be given opportunity for development along those lines for which they are best fitted. I am not acquainted particularly with any of the leaders in this movement anywhere.

I read no Negro periodical. Racial equality is the subject that leads to the Negro.

In all circles where general subjects are usually discussed the question of the Negro arises.

Until the white man is ready to give the Negro a square deal, I would suggest that he be segregated, and given every opportunity for development possible under such segregation. If they objected I would insist upon majority rule.

Nothing is gained by keeping the Negro ignorant, any more than would be gained by keeping the white man ignorant. Education of all of our races will bring about the world's salvation.

Prejudice among white women has its basis in fear but not particularly among men. This is partly due to the publicity given to all acts against women by Negroes, in my judgment.

The history of the world has proved that most of the races on earth tend to group themselves, which is the natural thing, because of the community of interest.

Until the Golden Rule is accepted unanimously majority rule will continue to be the human law and under our present world political arrangements, it seems to be about as fair as any arrangement could be.

I—

The Negro seems to me to be evolutionally handicapped, but possesses the qualities of children—imitativeness, affection, loyalty, receptiveness, lack of responsibility, carelessness, improvidence. They also seem to me to lack racial pride, for which their history in this country may well account. There are fine Negroes and those who are as worthless as "poor white trash." To judge them all by either the best or the worst would be manifestly unfair. I feel that they have, as a race, never had a fair chance for their finest development.

I have lived among them and practiced medicine in their families for ten years.

The most tender, loving service, beyond monetary recompense, of one Negro woman who worked in my family for ten years. Her intimate, gentle, faithful services to members of my family in health and sickness will always endear her to us and make us more conscious of the possibilities of members of that race.

The community in which I was raised had so few Negroes that there was no occasion for contacts or prohibitions to association. I suppose as a boy I first became conscious of race difference.

I have discussed this question with intelligent Negroes, have heard some fine sermons by Negro preachers, and am somewhat familiar with the writings of Booker T. Washington and Du Bois.

I do not read their periodicals.

Mention of the servant cited in a foregoing question, newspaper accounts of lynchings, house-bombings most frequently lead to discussion of Negroes among our personal friends.

I feel that Negroes would be happier if segregated in neighborhoods which allowed contact with the dominant race. I feel that they are as unhappy to be isolated among whites as the whites would be to be isolated among Negroes. I feel they should have the right to live under decent conditions, with those things which make life livable and enjoyable. Probably part of my unwillingness to have them for neighbors lies in the fear of undesirable neighbors (bad citizens), in the fear of property depreciation which would follow, and because of the lack of interests in common that make for neighborly intercourse. I suppose I am as inconsistent as others in this, for in my heart I have no prejudice of which I am aware, yet I believe I am infected with the universal indefinite prejudice, if I could but analyze it thoroughly.

Their education should not be curtailed, but enlarged. Their demands should be granted if not incompatible with the common good.

It is probably true that prejudice is based on fear, a result of the abuse of female slaves by the whites in slavery time, and the resultant desire on the part of a few Negroes engendered during the reconstruction period by the carpet-baggers, to have social equality. I have discussed this subject of "social equality" with intelligent, fine Negroes, and believe they meant what they said when they assured me that among decent Negroes there is no more desire for this than there is among the white people. I feel that it is a bugaboo, useful in increasing fear and prejudice against the Negro.

By segregation, I did not mean isolation, but the natural grouping together of Negroes under wholesome conditions, but which permitted their contact through employment, through meetings for the common good, with the dominant race.

Even a minority has the right to expect and demand justice in opportunity to develop industrial, social and spiritual growth. I recognize that education of both whites and blacks is necessary to overcome fear and prejudice and make this possible.

J—

My opinion, which is still open to conviction, is that the Negro race overlaps the white race throughout the bulk of the frequency curves of distribution of intelligence of the two races; but the average of the Negro race is probably lower than that of the white race, and among the extreme varieties the Negroes probably go lower and the whites higher than the similar varieties of the other race. This refers to distribution of inherent capacity. But I believe that many of them are modifiable and differ only in their average distribution from similar qualities in whites. Also that certain distinguishing traits may be so adjusted to the circumstances under which Negroes are educated and employed as to be distinctly advantageous, both to themselves and to society.

Aside from my conversation with southerners, I have made a special study of the Negro problem in connection with my undergraduate work, and again at the University of Pennsylvania. I am familiar with a number of worth-while sources which can be listed on request. I lived for four winters in St. Louis, where I saw a great many Negroes, but knew none. Some excitement was caused there by an instructor inviting a mulatto school principal to address our sociology class. There was no protest here in Evanston. I also passed through the South, and stopped twice at New Orleans.

As a child in Portland, Oregon, I had two Negro nurses. At the age of perhaps seven or eight years, one of my nurses returned for a visit, and I was teased by companions for kissing her. That was my first consciousness of a racial difference.

My authorities and sources of importance are the N.A.A.C.P., Urban League, the Race Relations Commission, and certain Negroes. I might also mention the two Spingarns and Mr. Roger Baldwin. I know C. S. Johnson, T. Arnold Hill and the colored members of the Commission, together with the union leaders whom I heard. W. E. B. Du Bois, Haynes, Dr. Roman, J. W. Johnson, T. A. Hill, I regard as leaders among the Negroes.

I read the Crisis, and occasional newspapers. The Crisis is good except the fiction; the newspapers are rather poor.

Race relations, mob action, venereal disease, and housing questions lead to discussion of the Negro.

As a solution I suggest equal facilities, spontaneous segregation, spontaneous co-operation in common interest, education in matters of sex. In this program there would be no compulsion involved—unless possibly upon the whites.

Their education should be modified and their demands granted so far as they can be harmonized with the general good.

The main question involved in prejudice seems to me whether it is an interest or an instinct. If it is an interest then changes in social organization may with comparative ease abate the fear and the prejudice. If it is an instinct then we can only deal with it by repression and sublimation of a more deeply psychological character.

I question whether the prejudice is greater the greater the isolation. The word isolation should be analyzed into physical or economic on the one hand, and psychological on the other.

Plato asked, "What is justice?" The answer can never be final, and one's concept of it is usually colored by interest. A sociological definition of justice is in terms of harmony or harmonization of interests. Complete harmony never does exist, else we should have no thought and no progress, but harmonization of interests can be a continuous process, and is not irreconcilable with the existence of minorities and majorities.

K—

I have formed no definite opinions about Negroes. I am inclined to the opinion that generally the balance is found on the side of the white races. In general I believe they possess distinguishing traits of mentality and character. I find it very difficult, however, to define my opinion regarding this.

When I was in high school in Petersburg, Illinois, from 1895 to 1898, the school had an attendance of about forty. There were two Negroes, a boy and a girl. The boy's name was John Gaddie. I have the impression now that they both acted as though they were out of place. I found John a likeable boy. I think all of the members of the school liked him. I particularly liked him, so paid considerable attention to him, to which John reacted in a decided manner. He never forgot it. I do not like to shake hands with Negroes. I avoid it whenever I can, but I never had any hesitancy in shaking hands with John. After finishing school, I went to college and John went to work. His work was some sort of manual labor. From time to time when I went back to Petersburg I saw John, always spoke to him, shook hands with him and talked to him. John appreciated this very much and acted as though he regarded it a condescension on my part. I am not aware that I feel toward any other Negro as I feel toward John Gaddie.

I was first conscious of a racial difference when I first knew the Negro, which was when I was about fifteen years of age. In the small town of Petersburg (about 3,000 inhabitants) the Negroes there, as here in Chicago, lived in a segregated district. There were no clashes between the Negro and the whites but the racial difference was obvious enough.

I know very few Negroes. I know too little to be in a position to consider anyone as a leader among the colored people in Chicago or the United States. I never read a Negro periodical. The subjects most frequently leading to the discussion of the Negro are riots, housing problems, certain industrial problems, and, here in Chicago, politics.

The fact that the Negroes obstinately objected quite logically would not interfere with making any adjustment which seemed "wise." The social adjustment which seemed "wise" would have to be based on the possibility of objection on the part of the Negro. If the leaders were obstinate, some other solution would have to be worked out, but if the leaders saw that it was wise and for the best interest of the masses I would insist that the plan be tried out.

I do not comprehend what is meant by "demand." It may mean ambition for social standing in the sense of intermingling with the whites. It may mean other things. No matter what it means, I am not impressed, if the statement is true, that it is any reason for not educating the Negro. I am not impressed that it becomes necessary either to curtail or modify the Negro's education or to grant their demands whatever they may be.

I do not think it true that prejudice has its basis in fear.

So far as I am familiar with it there is naturally a very high degree of segregation of the Negro as to living quarters everywhere. I am not aware that the segregation which we now find of habitation brings about the development of special group prejudices. Undoubtedly, if there are or were such prejudices they would form the background of conflicts. It doesn't seem to me to follow that the greater the isolation the greater the prejudice.

There never is complete justice; but if a minority may not expect justice at the hands of an overwhelming majority it can expect no justice at all. The justice, if it comes at all, will be at the hands of an overwhelming majority. Theoretically, in this country all are entitled to justice. I know no reason why this should not be true in a practical sense. Furthermore, I see no reason why a minority may not only expect but demand, at the hands of an overwhelming majority, justice. It seems to me that if the overwhelming majority hoped to prosper, it would see to it that justice was dispensed to the minority. I do not find myself ready to place the Negro on an equal basis with the white in every respect, that is, socially and otherwise. I do not regard the failure to so place the Negroes as injustice to them.

L—

In general, I like the Negro, but I lament his presence in this country in large numbers. I have never heard a solution of the Negro problem. Their distinguishing traits are ignorance, good nature, mental weakness, and physical strength.

I have never heard of good arguments for extensive isolation.

M—

I have a strong prejudice, but it is undefined. For instance, the hair of Negroes always holds a peculiar fascination, but under no consideration could I touch it, but there was always a great curiosity about it. I was undecided whether or not I should shake hands or in any way touch a colored skin, but I am quite sure I would never do it from choice. The everyday contacts on street cars are the only personal experiences I have had. The fascination of watching them is constant.

When I was about two years old a family moved into the village bringing with them an old colored nurse. She was too old to work, and my childish remembrance is that she always sat in the corner near the fireplace with a pipe in her mouth. I did not know that the Negro could do anything else.

When I was about five years old a Negro came to the village and opened a barber shop. I remember my father telling mother about the Negro and how he took the three small children down to see "Snowball" as a matter of curiosity. My reaction was that the Negro was not a person such as I was accustomed to seeing, although there was no feeling of classing him as an animal.

The third contact came when I was half-grown. My father was prominent in politics and on election day the table was kept set so that anyone sent from the polls could have a meal. By some chance a Negro was sent and ate. After he had gone I remember seeing my mother take the plate and other dishes out in the yard and scour them with brick dust, evidently with an idea that something had rubbed off.

My information is largely taken from the books of Booker T. Washington. I admired Dunbar's poems when they were current in the newspapers and magazines. I have not seen any of them for many years but remember vividly, "When the Bread Won't Raise." I was naturally familiar with Uncle Tom's Cabin, both as a book and a play in Civil War days. I do not consciously seek for information on the subject of Negroes and do not personally know any Negroes. Outside of the names which appear in the press I do not know of any Negro leaders and could not be sure of correct information as to those who are well known.

I have never seen a Negro periodical and have so rarely heard Negroes discussed that no conclusions can be given. The Negro is rarely a topic of conversation in my circle.

As a solution they might be nationalized if possible, somewhere and somehow, like the Japs. Liberia is a failure largely because of white leadership and policy. Some portion of the earth should be set aside where the Negroes can be a nation, perhaps in Africa. They have a right to work out their own problems in their own ways.

All Negroes should be educated as highly as possible. They have a right to it because they are Americans. If demands follow this education, it is right they should be granted.

There is no personal fear of Negroes as a basis of my prejudice.

I agree with the third proposition as to isolation.

Majority's injustice to minority is always true in politics, religion, everyday dealings. Is not peculiar to relations between white and colored.

N—

My views are more impressions than opinions. I have a distinct aversion to close association with Negroes generally. On the other hand I have a distinct liking for particular Negroes whom I have been thrown with. Aside from the more educated ones, they seem to me to be of a sluggish mentality and of somewhat low moral character. They seem to have more of the animal in them. I am not sure that this is not an impression rather than an opinion.

I have no basis for my views except my own experience and what I have read in papers and periodicals.

I had two Negro classmates in college; I saw a good deal of Negroes as a boy; and I have known Negroes, some well educated, since I came to Chicago from the law school.

Although my contacts were largely casual, I particularly remember one very old Negro man whom I regarded as a sort of patriarch and of whom I was a little bit afraid. Then I recall vividly my impression of the filth and sordidness of "darky-town" in the small city in which I lived as a boy. I was never forbidden, so far as I can remember, to associate with Negroes. In public school there was no separation of the races. As a small boy, it seems to me my playmates in school were partly Negroes. Of course the Negroes, as is usual, lived in a separate part of the city. I should say that this seemed to me then to be a natural and necessary arrangement. Negroes were black and we were white. That was about all there was to it.

Very early I became race conscious, I should say along about the fourth or fifth grade in school, perhaps even before.

I regard as authorities on the question teachers or officers of Fisk University, Tuskegee Institute, those who have to do with criminals; employers of Negroes; persons who have dealt with Negroes as a class as well as individually. Booker T. Washington's writings should be an authority.

I have made very few inquiries for information. I know few Negroes in Chicago. Those that I do know are of the better educated type. Some of them, I think, have been at Fisk University. I do not know the leaders in the city, nor do I know the leaders in the country; but I should say they are the heads of the great Negro universities and colleges, like Fisk, Tuskegee, Lincoln Institute. Booker Washington was, of course, a leader. I do not know who his successors are.

So far as I know, I have seen only one Negro periodical, some years ago. The article I read in it I happened to be interested in because I was dealing with the subject of it, and it was undoubtedly a prejudiced article founded on misinformation and a rather wilful disregard of facts. As I recall the paper as a whole its main motive and purpose was an apparent hatred of the white race. I realize that this is not enough to base an opinion on.

The discussion of labor, politics, especially questions connected with southern politics, almost any question relating to the South, education, home missions, living conditions, the servant problem, crime, most frequently lead to the Negro.

It would hardly be feasible to send Negroes out of the country as a whole; they are needed in the industrial world, and it would not be a Christian act to deport them. Nor does it seem right or practicable or just to segregate them entirely. They need education and the help that comes from association with those who are further along in the polite amenities. On the other hand, unless they are somewhat segregated racial troubles are sure to arise when a Negro tries to settle, say, in the same block with upper class whites. I am not sure that it might not be a good plan if one or two of the southern states could be turned over to the Negroes, but if this is done they should be allowed to govern themselves and should be protected from exploitation from unscrupulous whites.

It seems to me that race prejudice is not based principally on fear, but rather on a natural aversion or shrinking from a man of another color. It is almost as elemental as fear. We fear any uneducated, ignorant and brutal man, whether he be white, red, black or yellow. We have an aversion, as I have said, to close association with any man of another color, even though he be educated. I do not know whether this aversion is curable by any method or not.

I am inclined to agree with the third proposition, and I suppose the fourth proposition is regrettably true.

The outstanding feature in the answers to the queries: "Have you formed definite opinions about Negroes?" and "Do Negroes, in your opinion, possess distinguishing traits of mentality or character?" is the great variation in opinions. As a race they are "shiftless," "childish," "docile," "evolutionarily handicapped," "undependable," "some of them good," "they have as a mass a lower level of inherent capacity," "disliked in the mass," "liked as individuals," "entitled to the same leniency and consideration as whites," "entitled to the same rights as whites," "lacking in racial pride," "loyal," "imitative," "affectionate," "improvident."

The feelings toward Negroes are as varied. There is aversion to close association, a distinct dislike, a desire that Negroes should have equal rights and privileges, a desire that they should have the same rights, a feeling that Negroes have been mistreated and exploited, a feeling that selfishness and pride of white persons have caused the present racial situation, and a conviction that present behavior toward the Negro is faulty and wrong. Lincoln is twice mentioned but with different meanings. The trend of sentiment, while unfavorable toward Negroes, maintains some sort of ideal. Although childish, they "must be trained," "although we dislike their presence, we must submit to our penalty for years to come," etc. Some are not sure of their opinions. Some call them impressions or regret a lack of knowledge. A general summing up would show a desire to be fair in spite of unfavorable opinions.

The questions regarding the disposition they would make of Negroes if they could entirely control the situation were put to get views uninfluenced by considerations of present practicability. The play of circumstances, opinion, ethical considerations, and difficulties were excluded from consideration. The trend of replies was toward segregation, even to the extent of colonization in Africa. There were curious anomalies, like segregation without Jim Crow and segregation for the Negro's own happiness. Others would distribute them without boundaries throughout the social system. When segregation is generally mentioned it is conditioned on the consent of Negroes.

Interesting answers are made on propositions (a), (b), (c), and (d), covering education, prejudice, isolation, and justice. In spite of unforeseen danger, it is pretty generally agreed that Negroes should be educated, even though their demands are thus increased. There is less agreement on granting demands. The analysis of prejudice brought a wide variety of opinions. Repulsion, natural aversion, social equality and the sex complex, selfishness of whites, egotism and inborn dislike, as well as fear, are accredited as forming the basis of prejudice.

The problem of isolation was essentially a problem of segregation. Strange to say, although the trend of some was toward isolation, there was a majority belief that isolation would increase conflict and friction. The ethical problem developed in general the opinion that there does exist a disparity between what is and what should be.

The unwisdom of an unjust course of social conduct is recognized, but is for the most part held to be warranted by the peculiar difficulty of present relations. Here, probably as nowhere else, the problem was compared with other general problems not involving race.

The experiences on which opinions are based divide into definite classes:

1. Experiences in the South.

2. Experiences with individual Negro servants.

3. Experiences with individual Negroes of intelligence.

4. General observation.

The actual basis of opinions as stated by the persons themselves provides an interesting question.

The question concerning early childhood experiences was put to draw out, if possible, impressions unconsciously insinuated or consciously obtained but perhaps discounted and forgotten through subsequent years of intermittent relations. It was successful in bringing to light incidents of striking significance. The answers, indeed, show striking elements in the heritage of racial consciousness. Impressions gained in early life require many facts to unsettle or remove.

Most important in considering the trustworthiness of information sources are the replies to the question: "Whom of your friends, acquaintances, favorite authors, scholars, etc., do you regard best fitted to speak with authority on the question?" There are mentioned seven Negroes and ten white persons. Of the four local Negroes mentioned, two might be regarded as well informed; one has been out of public life for fifteen years, and the other, although by no means an authority, probably could provide interesting information. Of the Negro national figures, Washington, Du Bois, and Dunbar are mentioned, Washington three times, Dunbar and Du Bois once. Booker T. Washington died in 1915. Paul Laurence Dunbar, the poet, died in 1906. Practically all of the white persons mentioned have been at some time connected with movements to improve conditions among Negroes. George W. Cable wrote for the most part stories of the Creole South.

It is strange, though, that in answering the question, "Who are the Negro leaders?" so many gave the names of politicians, who are not the real leaders of Negroes. About half of those who answered had never read a Negro periodical, and half of those who had read them considered their influence pernicious.

V. PUBLIC OPINION AS EXPRESSED BY NEGROES

The practice of "keeping the Negro in his place" or any modification of it in northern communities has isolated Negroes from all other members of the community. Though in the midst of an advanced social system and surrounded by cultural influences, they have hardly been more than exposed to them. Of full and free participation they know little. The pressure of the dominant white group in practically every ordinary experience has kept the attention and interests of Negroes centered upon themselves, and made them race conscious. Their thinking on general questions is controlled by their race interests. The opinions of Negroes, therefore, are in large measure a negative product.

It is probably for this reason that most of their expressions of opinion take the form of protest. This same enforced self-interest warps these opinions, giving exaggerated values to the unconsidered views of the larger group, increasing sensitiveness to slights, and keeping Negroes forever on the defensive. Extreme expressions, unintelligible to those outside the Negro group, are a natural result of this isolation. The processes of thought by which these opinions are reached are, by virtue of this very isolation, concealed from outsiders. Negroes by their words alone may often be judged as radical, pernicious, or fanatic. Without the background of their experiences it is no more possible for their views to be completely understood than for Negroes to understand the confessed prejudices of white persons, or even their ordinary feelings toward Negroes.

Negroes know more of the habits of action and thought of the white group than white people know of similar habits in the Negro group. For Negroes read the whites' books and papers, hear them talk, and sometimes see them in the intimacy of their homes. But this one-sided and partial understanding serves only to make the behavior of the whites more keenly felt. Until these differences, long held as taboo, are thoroughly understood and calmly faced, there is small chance of satisfactory relations.

The opinions of Negroes on this question are as various as the white opinions of the Negro. Their response may reflect, the sentiment of the larger group; it may take a conciliatory turn, or, it may be exclusively self-centered in disregard, if indeed not in defiance, of the white group. The rapid growth of the Garvey movement[80] is a good example of this last type of opinion. There is harmony of opinion on ultimates, but on programs, processes, and methods there are differences among Negroes that reach the intensity of abusive conflicts.

No Negro is willing to admit that he belongs to a different and lower species, or that his race is constitutionally weak in character. All Negroes hope for an adjustment by virtue of which they will be freely granted the privileges of ordinary citizens. They are conscious, however, of an opposition in the traditions of the country and actually meet it daily. Conflict arises from opinions as to methods of combating and overcoming the opposition with the greatest gain and smallest loss to themselves.

Thus we come to hear of different schools of thought among Negroes. Booker T. Washington is contrasted with W. E. B. Du Bois, and Du Bois is contrasted with Owen, Peyton, and Colson, and they, in turn are contrasted with Garvey. Among individual Negroes opinion is determined by experience as well as tradition. The Negro house-servant does not feel toward white persons as does a Negro common laborer. The independent professional man holds an opinion essentially different from the social worker. Yet they are all governed by those trends of sentiment protective of the Negro group, and in crises either act upon them or suffer the group's censure.

An instance of the strength of Negro group opinion appeared in a tragic by-product of the Chicago riot. A Negro prominent in local political and social circles was sought out as a leader, and asked for an interview by a reporter of the Chicago Tribune during the riot. In the published interview he was reported as saying: "This is a white man's country, and Negroes had better behave or they will get what rights they have taken away." This aroused a solid Negro sentiment against him; his life was threatened; for several weeks he had to have police protection; he was finally ostracized; and in less than a year he died. His friends asserted that he was slanderously misquoted, and that his death was due largely to the resulting criticism.

The more balanced opinions may be found among Negroes who have developed a defensive philosophy. Race pride and racial solidarity have sprung from this necessity. The term radical is used to characterize Negroes whose views and preachments are in advocacy of changes which to the general white public appear undesirable. It will be observed that most of the so-called radicals are southern Negroes now living in the North. They know by experience the meaning of oppression. Contrasts with them are sharper and the desire for change is more insistent, because they can appreciate differences.

Frequently this "radicalism" is no more than a matter of interpretation by white persons and possibly an oversuspicion. For example, Attorney-General A. Mitchell Palmer, in his report on the investigations of his department, referred to the bitter protests of Negro publications against lynching and disfranchisement as radical and incendiary documents. This report is headed, "Radicalism and Sedition among the Negroes as Reflected in Their Publications." It reads in part as follows:

There can no longer be any question of a well-concerted movement among a certain class of Negro leaders of thought and action to constitute themselves a determined and persistent source of a radical opposition to the government, and to the established rule of law and order.

Among the more salient points to be noted in the present attitude of the Negro leaders are, first, the ill-governed reaction toward race rioting; second, the threat of retaliatory measures in connection with lynching; third, the more openly expressed demand for social equality, in which demand the sex problem is not infrequently included; fourth, the identification of the Negro with such radical organizations as the I.W.W. and an outspoken advocacy of the Bolsheviki or Soviet doctrines; fifth, the political stand assumed toward the present federal administration, the South in general, and incidentally, toward the peace treaty and the League of Nations. Underlying these more salient viewpoints is the increasingly emphasized feeling of a race consciousness in many of these publications always antagonistic to the white race and openly, defiantly assertive of its own equality and even superiority. When it is borne in mind that this boast finds its most frequent expression in the pages of those journals whose editors are men of education, and in at least one instance, by men holding degrees conferred by Harvard University, it may be seen that the boast is not to be dismissed lightly as the ignorant vaporing of untrained minds. Neither is the influence of the Negro press in general to be reckoned with lightly. The Negro World for October 18, 1919, states that "there are a dozen Negro papers with a circulation of over 20,000, and scores with smaller circulation. There are half a dozen magazines with a large circulation and other magazines with a smaller circulation, and there are easily over fifty writers who can write interesting editorials and special articles, written in fine, pure English, with a background of scholarship behind them." Notwithstanding the clumsiness of expression of this particular assertion, the claim is not an idle one. It may be added that in several instances the Negro magazines are expensive in manufacture, being on coated paper throughout, well-printed, and giving evidence of the possession of ample funds.

In all the discussions of the recent race riots there is reflected the note of pride that the Negro has found himself, that he has "fought back," that never again will he tamely submit to violence or intimidation. The sense of oppression finds increasingly bitter expression. Defiance and insolently race-centered condemnation of the white race is to be met with in every issue of the more radical publications, and this one in moderateness of denunciation carries its own threat. The Negro is "seeing red," and it is the prime object of the leading publications to induce a like quality of vision upon the part of their readers. A few of them deny this, notwithstanding the evidence of their work. Others of them openly admit the fact. The number of restrained and conservative publications is relatively negligible, and even some of these ... have indulged in most intemperate utterance, though it would be unfair not to state that certain papers—I can think of no magazines—maintain an attitude of well-balanced sanity....

The Messenger for October is significant for one thing above all others. In it for the first time a Negro publication comes out openly for sex equality.[81]

It is the sentiment briefly sketched in the foregoing pages that summons attention. What are Negroes actually thinking? How are they being affected by what the general public is thinking? What do they want? Against what are their protests directed? What kinds of group sentiments are being developed and how significant are they as to subsequent relations between the two groups?

This report merely sets out examples of those views in the hope of showing the beliefs that control the conduct of Negroes in Chicago.

1. RACE PROBLEMS

Criticism of Negro leaders.—A Negro attorney said:

I have read numerous articles written by prominent colored men on the subject of Negroes moving North, and I have heard many of them speak. But few of them, in my opinion, will bear rigid criticism. They are wanting in genuine expression of true conditions. Those writers and orators who have some personal motive for their expression do not necessarily speak with absolute frankness.

A Negro worker said:

Our leaders are not interested enough in the welfare of the race. As soon as they reach some little place of fame they try to get off to themselves.

Contacts as basis for respect.—A Negro professional man said:

When in school in Oberlin my professor in debating and oratory was so prejudiced that he would not let the other colored boy and me be on teams together. We asked him repeatedly, but he always refused. We decided to work on a debate for all there was in it and compel him to recognize the fact that we could measure up to the other members of the class. When we finished he praised our work in the highest terms. After that he began to take an interest in me and finally told me that he did not know anything about Negroes and just felt that there was nothing worth while in them. He tried to persuade me to teach, and when I left he gave me one of the best letters of recommendation that I have ever seen. That shows what contact can do.

Not a race problem.—A Negro business man said:

There is no race problem; if the white people would only do as they would be done by we would not have need of commissions to better conditions. This won't be done, but an easier plan is to enforce the law. The laws are good enough but they are not enforced. Riots grow out of hate, jealousy, envy, and prejudice. When a man becomes a contented citizen there will be little chance of causing him to fight anyone. Give us those things that are due us—law, protection, and equal rights—then we will become contented citizens.

For better race relations in Chicago.—A Negro alderman said:

1. Pass a vagrancy law that will take the idle, shiftless and intolerant hoodlum off the streets. Put the burden of proof on the one so arrested.

2. Close all vicious poolrooms and dens of vice, and permit no boy under nineteen years of age to enter poolrooms.

3. Forbid loitering on the street corners, especially transfer points.

4. Prohibit vicious and race-antagonizing campaign speeches on the streets of the city and in public halls. Races must not be arrayed against each other.

5. Make more rigid the habeas corpus act, tighten up on the parole and probation laws and enforcement of the truancy law.

6. Stop the newspapers from referring to the territory occupied by the colored people as the "Black Belt."

7. Inciting and inflammatory headlines in the newspapers must be stopped.

8. Open the gates of employment to all races in our public utilities, such as street-car and elevated-road service, Chicago Telephone Co. exchanges, Peoples Gas Light & Coke Co., and the Commonwealth Edison Co.

9. Better housing for the colored people and improvement of the district in which a vast majority of them reside by turning certain streets into boulevards, building small parks and playgrounds, and let the city or South Park Commissioners build a bathing-beach equal to any other for the benefit and comfort of all races along the water front, between Twenty-ninth and Thirty-ninth streets. This without lines or thought of segregation and for the benefit of a neglected part of our tax-paying community.

10. Apprehend and convict the bomb throwers by placing in command of our police-stations officers who will do their duty and place patrolmen on duty who will not sympathize with this lawless element of our citizenry. Greater still, insist that the state's attorney do his full duty in prosecuting the people who are responsible for inciting these criminal acts.

11. Safeguard the rights of all races in our public parks and on the public highways.

12. Give us a man's chance in the field of labor, and we will prove that we are no burden to any other race of people.

2. THE EMOTIONAL BACKGROUND

An old settler.—The sentiment presented below is probably the unpolished feeling of a Negro who was born in Chicago before the fire of 1871, and has lived here since. His grandfather owned the property where the post-office now stands. He was at one time a member of the Central Y.M.C.A. (white). For two and a half years he was assistant bookkeeper in a white bank in Memphis, Tennessee. He said:

Prejudice has been on the increase in Chicago since 1893. Southerners came to the World's Exposition and many of them remained. They brought their prejudices with them. On the cars they would order colored people to get up and give their seats to them. This resulted in fights, and when the cases were taken to court colored people won as many cases as whites. I took my grandmother to the fair and on the street car I had an altercation with a white southerner who called her "Auntie." He tried to hit me, and I got out my gun to shoot him. A Columbian guard and detective grabbed me. When the case was called I was discharged.

Hyde Park is a nest of prejudice. These southerners moved out there. Southern clubs are established throughout the country. They get northernized and want straight-haired mulatto maids for their mistresses and call them typists. The southern white boys get jobs on newspapers in the North and work for nothing in order that they may write articles and editorials against Negroes and spread the doctrine of the South.

A good many years ago colored people lived in good homes and the Irish lived in shanties. They used to call them "flannel mouth," "mick," and "shanty Irish." It used to be that only colored men of light complexion could secure jobs as porters on certain railroads. In 1908 the Archbishop of the Diocese of the Catholic Church issued an edict that white communicants should not worship at the Thirty-sixth and Dearborn streets church. The whites still go there, however. The very fact that the G.A.R. invited the Confederate veterans to march in the same parade on Memorial Day goes to show that prejudice against Negroes is increasing. They are combining. These southern societies in Chicago which foster race prejudice should be exposed.

Abyssinians.—During the summer of 1920 a group of self-styled "Abyssinians," in a spectacular demonstration,[82] killed two white men and seriously wounded two Negroes, one of whom was a policeman. Neither whites nor Negroes could give any further explanation of the affair than that it was an ignorant outburst of fanatics. Although the demonstration was announced as part of a membership drive in a "Back to Africa Movement," there was a definite racial sentiment in the appeals to unlettered Negroes. This sentiment was calculated to solidify the fanatic group, while, at the same time, by its anti-social dogma, it placed this group in opposition to the safety and well-being of the community. Meetings and speeches and anti-racial dogma, founded upon unusual interpretations of the Bible, gave their sentiments a religious fervor and a racial aim. Thus these sentiments grew, uncorrected by outsiders, and finally expressed themselves in criminal but significant conduct. The significance of these sentiments is apparent in the attitude of a sympathizer with the movement, expressed to one of the Commission's investigators several weeks before the outbreak made the movement unpopular. He is a shopkeeper, and most of his trade is among Negroes. His business with whites is wholly with wholesale dealers. In his treatment of those who came into his store during the interview he was rude and discourteous. He said:

I am a radical. I despise and hate the white man. They will always be against the Ethiopian. I do not want to be called Negro, colored, or "nigger." Either term is an insult to me or to you. Our rightful name is Ethiopian. White men stole the black man from Africa and counseled with each other as to what to do with him and what to call him, for when the Negro learned that he was the first civilized human on earth he would rise up and rebel against the white man. To keep him from doing this it was decided to call him Negro after the Niger River in Africa. This was to keep him from having that knowledge by the Bible, for his right name was Ethiopian. This was done so we could always be ruled by the white man. I will call your attention to the Bible. There is not one word of evil against the Children of Israel and Ethiopia written in it. Ethiopia came out of Israel and God said they are his people and he will be their God. He also says after the 300 years of punishment he will never go by [desert] Israel again and will be with him for ever and ever. We find by the Bible that he, the Ethiopian, is the only child of God.

The three hundred years of punishment are up, and this is the year of deliverance. It started in 1619 when we were stolen from Africa and made slaves. God is taking care of the black man. Some great destruction will take place, but God's chosen people will be all right. White passers-by from other neighborhoods are the only people who trouble us. They will call you insulting names or try to annoy you in a hundred little ways. The white people in the neighborhood are all right. Two white men ran down an old pet rooster of mine this morning. They were on a motor-cycle and picked him up, carried him off, paying no heed to me, as I ran two blocks after them.

Ready for trouble.—A Negro ex-soldier said:

I went to war, served eight months in France; I was married, but I didn't claim exemption. I wanted to go, but I might as well have stayed here for all the good it has done me.... No, that ain't so, I'm glad I went. I done my part and I'm going to fight right here till Uncle Sam does his. I can shoot as good as the next one, and nobody better start anything. I ain't looking for trouble, but if it comes my way I ain't dodging.

Agitation and discussion.—A Negro lawyer said:

Agitation by the press, both white and colored, does nothing but create dissension. The religious and political leaders have gone from one extreme to the other. Formerly the Negroes were cringing and ingratiating when dealing with the whites. Now they are trying to be radical in order to gain notoriety. There is nothing to be gained in either being servile or radical. I have had indignities heaped upon me by the white man. Why, my mother was ill when a white man in Georgia took every bit of our furniture from us, pulling the bed from under her. She screamed with pain each time they moved the bed, but they left her on the floor. I swore that I would kill that man and for many years held hatred against him. Now I know it is wrong and only hope that he has learned better.

A Negro and a mob.—How does a Negro feel when he is being hunted or chased by a mob? Few persons are able to analyze their emotions under such stress. It happens, however, that a Negro university student fell victim to the sportive brutality of a gang of white men in a clash in September, 1920, and after being chased and hunted for five hours and a half in an unfriendly neighborhood escaped uninjured. He recounted his experience in an effort at a purely objective study of his emotions.

While at work in a plant just outside Chicago he became ill and was forced to leave early. Unaware that a riot was in progress, he left a street car to transfer in a hostile neighborhood. As he neared the corner one of a group of about twenty young white men yelled: "There's a nigger! Let's get him!" He boarded a car to escape them. They pulled off the trolley and started into the car after him. His story follows:

The motorman opened the door, and before they knew it I jumped out and ran up Fifty-first Street as fast as my feet could carry me. Gaining about thirty yards on them was a decided advantage, for one of them saw me and with the shout "There he goes!" the gang started after me. One, two, three, blocks went past in rapid succession. They came on shouting, "Stop him! Stop him!" I ran on the sidewalk and someone tried to trip me, but fortunately I anticipated his intentions and jumped into the road. As I neared the next street intersection, a husky, fair-haired fellow weighing about 180 pounds came lunging at me. I have never thought so quickly in all my life as then, I believe. Three things flashed into my mind—to stop suddenly and let him pass me and then go on; to try to trip him by dropping in front of him; or to keep running and give him a good football straight arm. The first two I figured would stop me, and the gang would be that much nearer, so I decided to rely on the last. These thoughts flashed through my mind as I ran about ten steps. As we came together, I left my feet, and putting all my weight and strength into a lunge, shot my right hand at his chin. It landed squarely and by a half-turn the fair-haired would-be tackler went flying to the road on his face.

That was some satisfaction, but it took a lot of my strength, for by this time I was beginning to feel weak. But determination kept me at it, and I ran on. Then I came to a corner where a drug-store was open and a woman standing outside. I slowed down and asked her to let me go in there, that a gang was chasing me; but she said I would not be safe there, so I turned off Fifty-first Street and ran down the side street. Here the road had been freshly oiled and I nearly took a "header" as I stepped in the first pool, but fortunately no accident happened. My strength was fast failing; the suggestion came into my mind to stop and give up or try to fight it out with the two or three who were still chasing me, but this would never do, as the odds were too great, so I kept on. My legs began to wobble, my breath came harder, and my heart seemed to be pounding like a big pump, while the man nearest me began to creep up on me. It was then that an old athletic maxim came into my mind—"He's feeling as tired as you." Besides, I thought, perhaps he smokes and boozes and his wind is worse than mine. Often in the last hundred yards of a quarter-mile that thought of my opponent's condition had brought forth the last efforts necessary for the final spurt. There was more than a medal at stake this time, so I stuck, and in a few strides more they gave up the chase. One block further on, when I had made sure that no one was following me on the other side of the street, I slowed down to walk and regained my breath. Soon I found myself on Forty-sixth Street just west of Halsted where the street is blind, so I climbed up on the railroad tracks and walked along them. But I imagined that in crossing a lighted street I could be seen from below and got down off the tracks, intending to cross a field and take a chance on the street. But this had to be abandoned, for as I looked over the prospect from the shadow of a fence I saw an automobile held up at the point of a revolver in the hands of one member of a gang while they searched the car apparently looking for colored men.

This is no place for a minister's son, I thought, and crept back behind a fence and lay down among some weeds. Lying there as quietly as could be I reflected on how close I had come to a severe beating or the possible loss of my life. Fear, which had caused me to run, now gave place to anger, and a desire to fight, if I could fight with a square deal. I remembered that as I looked the gang over at Fifty-first and Ashland I figured I could handle any of them individually with the possible exception of two, but the whole gang of blood-thirsty hoodlums was too much. Anger gave place to hatred and a desire for revenge, and I thought if ever I caught a green-buttoned "Ragen's Colt" on the South Side east of State that one of us would get a licking. But reason showed me such would be folly and would only lead to reprisals and some other innocent individual getting a licking on my account. I knew all "Ragen's" were not rowdies, for I had met some who were pretty decent fellows, but some others—ye gods!

My problem was to get home and to avoid meeting hostile elements. Temporarily I was safe in hiding, but I could not stay there after daybreak. So I decided to wait a couple of hours and then try to pass through "No Man's Land"—Halsted to Wentworth. I figured the time to be about 11:30 and so decided to wait until 1:30 or 2:00 a.m., before coming out of cover. Shots rang out intermittently; the sky became illumined; the fire bells rang, and I imagined riot and arson held sway as of the previous year. It is remarkable how the imagination runs wild under such conditions.

Then the injustice of the whole thing overwhelmed me—emotions ran riot. Had the ten months I spent in France been all in vain? Were those little white crosses over the dead bodies of those dark-skinned boys lying in Flanders fields for naught? Was democracy merely a hollow sentiment? What had I done to deserve such treatment? I lay there experiencing all the emotions I imagined the innocent victim of a southern mob must feel when being hunted for some supposed crime. Was this what I had given up my Canadian citizenship for, to become an American citizen and soldier? Was the risk of life in a country where such hatred existed worth while? Must a Negro always suffer merely because of the color of his skin? "There's a Nigger; let's get him!" Those words rang in my ears—I shall never forget them.

Psychologists claim that it is in the face of overwhelming forces that man is prone to turn to the Supreme Being. I was no longer afraid, only filled with righteous indignation and a desire to get out of danger. But mingled emotions shook me, and a flood of tears burst forth. In the midst of it I found myself praying fervently to God against the injustice of it all, for strength and help to go through safely, and thanks for my deliverance from the gang which had chased me. Then relief came from all these pent-up feelings with the determination to get up and try to go through—and to fight, if necessary. I began to speculate on means. A freight train came along, and the impulse came to jump on it and ride out of town until the trouble was over, but the knowledge of only 15 cents carfare in my pocket compelled the rejection of this idea. I thought of phoning to a friend to come and get me in his car, but this was futile, for where could I find a phone and be safe in that neighborhood? Some clothes on a line in a yard across the field offered a disguise, but even dressed as a woman I'd need a hat, and that idea had to be abandoned. With resources at an end, I picked up four rocks for ammunition and started out.

For four blocks I glided from shadow to shadow, through alleys. A couple of dogs nearly "spilled the beans" when they barked just as an automobile came down the street. I dove for cover until the car had disappeared and then emerged. At Forty-ninth Street and Union Avenue I climbed up on the railroad tracks and cautiously walked along them in the darkness. All of a sudden a block ahead appeared what seemed to be about ten men standing on the tracks, so I dropped to the ground and made a pair of binoculars out of my hands. For what seemed like five minutes I watched these forms then decided they were uprights on a bridge and went on. Imagination and fear can play tricks, and this was one of them.

Finally I found myself at Thirty-seventh and Stewart streets, having been walking northeast instead of east as I thought. I climbed down to the street and walked through back lanes until I saw the Sox ball park. All was quiet, so I came out and crossed Wentworth Avenue. At State and Thirty-seventh I saw two colored fellows waiting for a car and ran up to them. Putting my hands on their shoulders I said, "Gee! I'm glad to see a dark skin." Then I related my experience. They assured me the "fun" was all over, and I was thankful. It was twenty-five minutes to four, just five and a half hours after I had started for home from work. A white man came along, and my first impulse was to jump on him and beat him up. But again reason told me he was not responsible for the actions of a gang of rowdies, and he was as innocent as I had been when set upon.

Is such an experience easily forgotten? Recent events would prove to the contrary. I vowed that morning never to let the sun set on me west of Wentworth Avenue, and never to go into that section unprotected, even in daytime. On a recent Sunday the papers came out with an "Extra" about 11:00 p.m., announcing a "Big South Side Fight." I went to the door and hailed a boy. Just then an automobile with men standing on the running-board came around the corner. The possibility of another riot flashed through my mind and without looking at the paper I snapped off the light, closed the door, and prepared for trouble if it came my way. But the "Fight" had been a gunman's war. This is just indicative of the caution such an experience develops. It is not a fear, but a wariness in uncertainty.

3. DEFENSIVE POLICIES

To stimulate group morale and solidify the sentiments of Negroes for unified opposition to what they regard as oppressive measures of white people, many tactics are employed. The most common of these is that of interpreting the aims and ambitions of Negroes to white persons and of defending themselves generally against criticism. A selection of types of this "defensive" sentiment is given.

A Negro attorney said:

The only way to gain favorable public opinion is to create favorable press notices. A certain amount of agitation is necessary on the part of colored papers to educate the race as to what it is entitled to. The American white race has been very successful in its propaganda that colored people are not entitled to certain things. This has caused many Negroes to believe that they are not as good as the white people.

The press can be a source of evil or of good. It depends upon the point of view. The difficulty lies in the fact that the white press has the wrong attitude, usually. A great deal of harm is done by paid workers who will give interviews that will sustain the viewpoint of the papers. Others desirous of newspaper notoriety are guilty of the same offense. Usually those interviewed are not capable of giving exact opinions and viewpoints. Those capable of doing justice to the situation are not sought by reporters. During the time when there is more calm and people are in a position to give thoughtful consideration to the question, no effort is made to find out the attitude of substantial citizens. If this were done the papers would get somewhere.

A letter from a Negro thanking the editor of a northern paper for a fair editorial said:

The colored citizens realize fully the extent to which propaganda is spread against them in the average newspaper under the guise of news, and when they find someone who knows that too, and who is strong enough to help, as is the —— [newspaper], they thank him with all the strength of their hearts, although their lips may remain mute.

Negro sentiment regarding racial news in the white press.—A Negro weekly paper said:

Whatever be the cause or the motive there is apparently a well organized plan to discredit the race in America and to bring estrangement between fellow Americans. A short-sighted ... press is contributing to this estrangement by playing upon the passions of the undiscriminating and thoughtlessly by its glaring and sensational headings, emphasizing rumours of alleged crimes by Negroes.

Flattery as a means of promoting tolerance.—A popular Negro orator said:

I think that the great trouble with us already is that we have allowed the white people to settle too many things for us. The nation gave you constitutional freedom, but no man can make you truly free except you yourself. The white man hates nothing worse than a coward, and the American white man is the most remarkable human being the world ever knew. He is God's superman. As white and black have one destiny beneath the Stars and Stripes, so have we the common duties of citizenship....

Woodrow Wilson is my leader. What he commands me to do I shall do. Where he commands me to go I shall go. I had naught of ill will toward Von Bernsdorf until Wilson pointed him out as a national menace. Whom Woodrow Wilson cannot receive into fellowship, I cannot receive.

A Negro resident of Chicago for fourteen years, formerly of Louisiana, said:

I went to Wilson's last inauguration in Washington and tried to talk to the President. I got in the gate, but the guard would not let me go farther without a pass. I went into every place that men were allowed to enter and found no "Jim-Crowing" in any public place. The nearest approach to it was in the printing department of the government. There were several colored girls all working at the same table. In other departments I had seen white and colored together. I went into every washroom on every floor of one building and must have washed my hands twenty times.

Negroes, real Americans.—A letter from a Negro workman to Governor Lowden said:

Why is it that intelligent colored people, the real Americans and the most humble and purest nation that ever trod the soil of America since they have been here—we have never thrown any bombs; we have never written a black-hand letter and what disgrace and shameful things we do it was learned to us by our foreparents' masters down south because they taught them to steal and murder and do all other most disgraceful things. We have never bombed any white people's homes, but I cannot see into it why it is that all nations such as the Polish, Japan, Chinaman, Mexican, German and Russ and now you see what they have done to this country; they have done everything to overthrow this Government and have got the I.W.W. and the Red. Where have we done such dirty deeds? We have enriched this soil of America with our blood in every war for this country and then cannot live where we want to as an American citizen. We even shed our blood in France to save someone else money and their homes, and the thanks we got when we come back was a big race riot which I do believe was started by southern white men to put a disgrace on the North because the North do not lynch and burn as they do. Of course I know you cannot do anything by yourself. But if you can get enough men who have got a backbone to protect the ones who have always protected them this outrage could be stopped. I read a piece in the Herald-Examiner that it would be a riot here; that has poisoned the minds of so many people. So now I hope you will try to stop such trouble.

Defensive philosophy; silence does not mean contentment.—A Negro educator said:

Many white men of high intellectual ability and keen discernment have mistaken the Negro silence for contentment, his facial expression for satisfaction at prevailing conditions, and his songs and jovial air for happiness. But not always so. These are his methods of bearing his troubles and keeping his soul sweet under seeming wrongs. In the absence of a spokesman or means of communication with the whites over imagined grievances, he has brightened his countenance, smiled and sung to give ease to his mind. In the midst of it all he is unable to harmonize the teachings of the Bible which the white Christian placed in his hands with the practices of daily life. He finds it difficult to harmonize the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man, and his faith is put to the test in that "Providence" which enslaved his ancestors, corrupted his blood and placed upon him stigmas more damaging than to be a leper or convict by making his color a badge of infamy and his preordained social position at the bottom of human society. So firmly has his status been fixed by this "Providence" that neither moral worth, fidelity to trust, love of home, loyalty to country or faith in God can raise him to human recognition.

Votes for Negroes.—The Crisis for January, 1921, said:

The astonishing thing about the Bourbon South is its intellectual bankruptcy when it comes to the Negro. It continually assumes that the Negro is a fool. Some Negroes are fools, but the proportion among them is steadily decreasing, while that among the Bourbons seems to increase. When the average white Southerner faces the problem of racial contact he has absolutely nothing to offer except what he offered in 1861, namely: the Will of God, Force and Bloodshed, and, "The best friend in the world to the Negro is the Southern white man—the only one who truly loves him." We quote from our ever-delightful friend, the editor of the Macon (Ga.) Telegraph.

The tragedy of the situation is that this man believes what he says. He knows absolutely just the "place" for which God made "niggers"; but to support this sincere belief he spreads falsehoods. He says that the woman suffrage party by its secret machinations "probably" caused the blood shed in the Florida elections! He threatens murder for black men who want to vote, and almost weeps over the misguided Negroes who have left the Empire State of lynching and gone to Chicago.

There seems to be in this man's mind absolutely no conception of the tremendous, increasing, unswerving development of the Negro. To him all aspiration, unrest, and complaints of black folk are conspiracies of whites. For the blacks he has no program, no vision, except that they stay where they have always been, growing more content with "Jim-Crow" cars, lynching and disfranchisement.

It is inconceivable to the mentality of this section of the white South that such a program is absolutely impossible. That if, in the end, the price we must pay for aspiration to modern manhood is death, and death in the most horrible form of public torture and burning like that in Florida, if to live we must die, then the South will have us to kill. Any man who does not prefer death to slavery is not worth freedom....

The black man must vote. Every Southerner with brains knows this. The Negro is awaiting his enfranchisement with greater patience than the South has any right to expect. But he will not wait forever. If he sees gathering signs of sanity—a willingness to let the intelligent and thrifty vote, an honest effort to establish law and order and overthrow the rule of the mob, a desire to substitute honest industrial conditions in place of the organized and entrenched theft of black wealth upon which southern industry is based today—such a program, tardy and slow and inadequate though it be, may count on the infinite patience and long suffering of Ethiopia.

4. RACE CONSCIOUSNESS

Ancient Order of Ethiopian Princes:[83]

To My Kinsmen.—In a broad sense, the words "Negro" and "Nigger" have no historical significance. They are used synonymously in the white man's dictionary. "Negro" is a pure Spanish word meaning "black." The word "Negro," therefore, may be descriptive of a race, but not the name of it. In reality "Negro" is an alias, or nickname applied to us originally, in much the same contemptuous spirit as the black boy is called "Rastus" or "Sambo."

The white man writes his history for us to study, makes his scenario with his heroes and heroines for us to admire, and supplies our newspapers. Through these instrumentalities he almost entirely controls our thought.

Remember that "a word is the sign of an idea." The kind of an "idea" that the "sign" stands for depends upon our teaching. If we associate a word, then, with a noble or degraded idea, we have been taught to do so.

You can easily prove this by experimenting with certain words for yourself. After repeating each word tell what your idea is and what you see: (1) Roman, (2) Paradise, (3) Statesmen, (4) General. Is the idea or picture you get degraded? No. The White Press, history, reel and teacher have taken care of that.

Now take the following words: (1) Lynched, (2) Jim Crow, (3) Disfranchised, (4) Negro.

What is the result? The words "Lynched," "Jim Crow," "Disfranchised," are the signs of degraded ideas. Moreover, "Negro" is very apt to creep into each one of the three mind pictures and conversely one of the three into the "Negro" mind picture.

Do you understand? Now why is that? That is what Ethiopic culture teaches, through the "Ancient Order of Ethiopian Princes."

If we believe that we come from nowhere and have no history but that of a slave, our substance will be the charity of our oppressors, and our future handicapped by doubts and fears.

Ancient history knows no "Negro," but ancient history does know Ethiopia and Ethiopians. Change a family's name and in a generation you cannot tell whether its foreparents were rogues or saints. It is the same with a race. You cannot trace your ancestors through the name "Negro."

Take away our birthright, our ancient honorable name, "Ethiopian" and you have stopped the very fountain of our inspiration. If we are "Negroes" we are by the same dictionary also, "Niggers." The moment we realize, however, that we are "Ethiopians," we can see the beams from the lamps of Ethiopian culture lighting a pathway down the shadowy ages, and the fires of ambition are rekindled in our hearts, because we know that we came from the builders of temples and founders of civilization.

Study this.

Contrasts of North and South.—An investigator's report on home conditions of retarded children said:

The mother is eager to learn, and constantly talks of wanting to attend night school if the opportunity ever offers itself. She is eager for her girl to complete her education and wants her to take a business course so she will be independent. "A white man can take everything from the colored man but his learning," Mrs. —— said repeatedly.

In coming to Chicago she wasn't sure what she would find, but she had heard that colored people had a show here. She brought her child here to give her one. Chicago seems like heaven to her now when she thinks of what she had been through in the South.

When the investigator asked her about the church to which she belonged she said: "Olivet. I goes every Sunday and Wednesday nights to prayer meeting just to thank God that he let me live to go to a place of worship like that, a place where my people worship and ain't pestered by the white men."

The Chicago riot provoked probably the first full expressions of sentiment from Negroes in their own press. Underlying them are attitudes toward present race relations. There is a strong note of resentment, and the announcement of the birth of a "New Negro."

The war is credited with bringing about this change. More than 250,000 young Negroes, the pick of the race in health and intelligence, had returned to the United States, presumably with changed ideas, and perhaps with growing cynicism as to promises of fair treatment. Perhaps for the first time in American history the Negro group fought in the 1919 riot as a body against mob violence. The idea that these disorders are a result of active opposition to distasteful practices is prominent in practically every Negro discussion. "The Negro race is facing about" is a familiar statement. Said one Negro newspaper:

It is the utter ignoring of the Negro in the community life that is responsible for these outbreaks. The controlling whites were absolutely out of touch with the Negroes, and the races came together in a quarrel and there was no means by which the trouble could be settled.

A monthly magazine, the Favorite, said:

If the white man thinks that the rights, privileges and ordinary pursuits of the Negro can now be annulled at this stage of the world's affairs, he certainly has "another thought coming." This Washington revolt is only the "handwriting on the wall." Don't squeeze the Negro too hard; if you do you squeeze him to the bursting point. The young Negro of today is far different from his foreparents, and will not be content with anything less than a fair deal.

The New York American said:

The dangerous enemy of his race is the colored man that advocates force as a remedy. There is such a thing as being outnumbered beyond any hope.

A Negro newspaper replied:

There is such a thing, too, as a noble preference of death to a life of slavery. Do Hearst and Arthur Brisbane think the sentiment of "Give me Liberty or Give me Death" belongs exclusively to a white skin?

A poem in the Crusader and republished in the Messenger and several other periodicals, carries this same idea:

If We Must Die

If we must die, let it not be like hogs

Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot,

While around us bark the mad and hungry dogs

Making their mock at our accursed lot.

If we must die—oh, let us nobly die,

So that our precious blood may not be shed

In vain; then even the monsters we defy

Shall be constrained to honor us, though dead!

Oh, kinsmen! We must meet the common foe;

Though far outnumbered, let us still be brave,

And for their thousand blows deal one death-blow!

What though before us lies the open grave?

Like men we'll face the murderous, cowardly pack,

Pressed to the wall, dying, but—fighting back!

—Claude McKay

Defensive measures justified.—The general belief among Negroes is that resistance to violence is justified. Some view this display of counterviolence as simply defensive measures, some as retaliation, which in substance means the same.

The Washington Eagle, a Negro newspaper, commenting on the beginning of the Washington riot, said:

Notwithstanding the fact that these mobs, increasing in number and in violence each evening, were allowed to harass law-abiding colored citizens for three consecutive evenings, the colored citizens showed no signs of revenge or retaliation. But when the situation became so terrible that colored citizens could endure it no longer they rose up almost as one man, and, adhering to the first law of human nature, which says that self-preservation is the first law of nature, they armed themselves "to the teeth," to use the phrase of one of the local newspapers. It was only when they showed this disposition to fight back that the riot ceased.

The Messenger, a Negro magazine, said:

The world knows not that the new Negroes are determined to observe the primal law of self-preservation whenever civil laws break down; to assist the authorities to preserve order and prevent themselves and families from being murdered in cold blood. Surely, no one can easily object to this new and laudable determination.

Opinions of Negroes regarding the conduct of the police.—Negro condemnation of the police seems general. From a large selection of comments two are given. The Favorite said:

History proves that nearly all race riots are started by white policemen. East St. Louis, Houston and Washington, D.C., have had terrible cataclysms provoked by white bluecoats who in nine cases out of ten carry their prejudices with them whenever they enter black belts. Instead of acting in behalf of law and order white policemen usually act in behalf of some passion that tells them Negroes are convenient brutes. For the safety of the twenty-five thousand colored and ten thousand whites in the Second Ward of Chicago we ask that every white patrolman in the district be replaced by a colored bluecoat. Chicago must not be added to the list of American cities cut off from civilization by race riots, and it is up to Mayor William Hale Thompson and Chief Garrity to see that the honor of that city is preserved.

The Washington Eagle thought most of the trouble was due to the overbearing attitude of the police. It said:

Bishop Cottrell, wiring from Holly Springs, Miss., wants the President to call a conference of representatives of both races to consider the matter of mob law. We doubt if the President will take the trouble to do anything of the kind: while he is thinking it over the police in every place had better be instructed to have more respect for the rights and feelings of the Afro-American people. Most of the trouble is to be found in the insolent and overbearing attitude of the police.

Negro opinions regarding white newspapers.—It is asserted by numerous Negro papers that certain white papers spurred the rioters to greater lawlessness in the Washington outbreak, and in some cases settled the date and place of assembly for attacking parties. The Afro-American quoted from the Washington Post an excerpt headed "Mobilizing for Tonight," and reading:

It was learned that a mobilization of every available service man stationed in or near Washington or on leave here has been ordered for tomorrow evening near the Knights of Columbus hut on Pennsylvania Avenue, between Seventh and Eighth streets. The hour of assembly is 9 o'clock and the purpose is a "cleanup" that will cause the events of the last two evenings to pale into insignificance. Whether official cognizance of this assemblage and its intent will bring about its forestalling cannot be told.

The Afro-American added:

Commenting on this article Secretary Shillady of the National Association declares: "In view of the fact that the 'mobilization' announced by the Washington Post had not been ordered by any authority, military or civil, does not the passage show intent by the Washington Post to bring about such mobilization?"

Another Negro paper in Washington carried the criticism farther:

Editorials are supposed to concern those topics that are most important to the community in which they are written. No one can deny the importance of the race riots that disgraced the name of fair America's Capital during the present week; yet two of the leading daily papers of the city found everything to fill their editorial columns but the proper attempts to discourage mob violence and a disposition to place the blame where it justly belongs. The rioting, in itself, was a deplorable disgrace, but a greater disgrace is that the daily newspapers should have encouraged the rioting by the glaring, ugly headlines that they gave it, rather than discourage the riots in editorials.

The National Defender and Sun replied to an editorial of the Chicago Tribune:

In a recent edition of the Chicago Daily Tribune, which calls itself the world's greatest newspaper, in discussing the recent race riot in Chicago, it had this to say: "Can the two races continue to live in peace in Chicago without segregation? We have for some time criticized the South for its treatment of its black citizens. We believe since the race riot in Chicago that segregation, separate cars, will be the only cure to prevent race riots in the future." We are very much surprised at the statement of the Chicago Tribune. Does the world's greatest newspaper forget that Atlanta, Ga., Memphis, Tenn., Arkansas and Texas, had great race riots, and that all of the above-named states have their Jim Crow laws and segregated district?

The New York Age had this to say:

So much clamor and bad blood have been aroused by the repeated charge of assaults attempted upon women in the city of Washington, that more than ordinary significance attaches to a news item found tucked away in an inconspicuous position on an inside page of the Washington Times. It was headed: "Woman Now Denies She Was Attacked," and read as follows: "The case of an alleged attack on Mrs. Minnie Franklin, 1361 K. Street Southeast, by two Negroes near Fifteenth and H. Sts., Northeast, Thursday night, was closed last night when according to detectives, the woman said the story was a fabrication. Several headquarters detectives questioned the woman yesterday and then went over the ground where the alleged attack was supposed to have occurred, but could find no evidence of a struggle."

This reported case of "assault" had "scare" headlines at the time it was supposed to have occurred, and it looked as if the daily papers were trying to provoke another riot. Later, by the admission of the accuser, the police and the press, the charge was shown to be groundless. Time and again these charges of assaults have been shown to be "faked," and the most credulous should be brought to see the necessity of searching investigation before pronouncing the accused guilty. Hysteria, by newspaper suggestion, may be at the foundation of many a case of reported "assault."

Charges of southern propaganda in the North.—A wide distinction has been made by Negro observers between the Washington and Chicago riots, the former being called a typical southern, and the latter a typical northern, riot. Reasons for this are given in the different forms of incentive to rioting. The Washington reasons were largely sentimental and bore a striking resemblance to the Atlanta riot about 1906. Reports of attacks on white women, played up in the newspapers, were sufficient to set the current going. The sentiment of the South is said to have been behind this outbreak. Said the Chicago Defender:

It is easy to see that the southern white man is at the bottom of race riots in the northern cities to which we have migrated in recent years.... It is idle to suppose that the black man was the only migrator from the South; every northern community is practically overrun with southern whites of both sexes. In many of the northern cities a majority of the white women employed as clerks and saleswomen in department stores, telephone operators and other fields of industry are from the South. In every place where men are utilized, including public officials, judges and prosecuting attorneys, some of them are also from the South.

Remedies.—The Chicago Defender said:

To emphasize the fact that no self-respecting citizen had anything to do with the disgraceful affairs recently witnessed here and in Washington, thousands of circulars have been distributed by our people and to our people filled with good, wholesome advice as to being good, law-abiding citizens. Our only salvation lies in harmony, and both elements must come to understand that each is necessary to the other, and that with all pulling together, democracy for America will no longer be a theory, but a reality.

The foregoing examples of sentiment by no means cover the varieties of Negro opinion. They are merely illustrative of different types. The peculiarities of group behavior which appear to be the attributes of the Negro group would doubtless show themselves in any other groups similarly placed in the social scale. There would at the same time be no more likelihood of their being understood. Situations develop which appear to the uninitiated white observer strange and even dangerous. That they do represent very definite and calculated programs of action within certain circles of the Negro group may be illustrated by a few examples.

At a garment manufacturer's plant thirty colored girls were employed in a separate unit. When a white girl was employed, the colored girls walked out. They explained that when they first began work in a plant employing white girls a precedent for this action was given. If white girls were too proud to work with colored girls, then colored girls should be too proud to work with white girls. It required much effort on the part of the Urban League to correct their viewpoints.

A short time ago there was considerable agitation among certain groups of Negroes over the appointment of a Negro principal for one of the elementary schools. His appointment was strongly opposed by Negroes. Although this may have seemed inexplicable to white people, the action was not wholly illogical from the viewpoint of Negroes. The school in question, near the Negro residential area, had an attendance of about 70 per cent Negro children. Negroes reasoned thus: If a Negro principal were appointed the white teachers would eventually resign or for one reason or another be transferred; the white parents then would withdraw their children because there would be no white teachers, and so the first step would be accomplished toward segregation of Negroes in the public schools. It was segregation that was opposed, although the advancement of one of their number must be sacrificed.

Marcus Garvey, a West Indian Negro, with a remarkable genius for organization, four years ago began a venture on a commercial basis and developed it into a definite racial movement. He conceived the notion of establishing trade relations with Africa, and accordingly organized a steamship line. It was a large undertaking. There were few large Negro investors, and if money was to be raised it had to come in numerous small amounts rather than in a few large ones. Again, if commercial relations were to be established, there must be intelligent Negroes at the African end. The effort grew into another "Back to Africa" movement. To increase interest it was necessary to campaign actively, using appeals calculated to arouse the great mass of Negroes. This Garvey did with such success that his "Back to Africa" slogans created a far larger movement than his original commercial proposition. The Universal Negro Improvement Association attracted more interest and members. The Negro World, a newspaper with a constant and powerful appeal to racial pride, racial solidarity, and racial independence, is the organ of the movement. During the summer of 1920 a great convention was held. A provisional president of the Black Republic was elected, and was acclaimed the recognized leader of the black people of the world. The women were organized into "Black Cross" nurses and it was planned to establish a "Black House" in Washington. The movement has been widened to include the black peoples of the British colonies and Africa. An alliance of sympathy has been declared with peoples similarly disadvantaged. Thus Ireland's contention for home rule is supported, in spite of the supposed general hostility between the Negroes and the Irish in the United States. The movement is credited with 4,000,000 followers in different parts of the world.

VI. OPINIONS OF FIFTEEN NEGROES ON DEFINITE RACIAL PROBLEMS

What are Negroes thinking? Few white persons know the intimate reactions of Negroes to problems which they face daily. Yet it is obvious that the conduct of Negroes in practically every phase of life is determined by these very sentiments, which for the white world remain a closed book.

It was with this in mind that a series of questions was put to seventeen Negroes whose intelligence and public-mindedness qualified them for critical self-analysis as well as dispassionate examination of racial issues as they affect the minds, behavior, and policies of Negroes as a group. Ten of these Negroes lived in Chicago and represented an ordinary type of the intelligent Negro. Five of them lived outside of Chicago. Included in this latter number were two Negroes whose writings have been widely read and who may be said to exercise some influence over the thinking of Negroes.

The fifteen whose replies are presented here included business men, physicians, ministers, school teachers, lawyers, and social workers. Two were women.

ARE RACE RELATIONS IMPROVING?

Question: Putting aside for the moment the question of right and wrong and the iniquity of the causes back of present relations, do you believe that the relations are becoming better or worse, or are they at a standstill?

Answers:

1. Better, decidedly better. If it becomes unprofitable to lynch Negroes, or unprofitable to shoot them up in riots, they will probably more and more be let alone. The riots in Chicago and Washington mean that not only Negroes will lose their lives. They also indicate to me that the Negro feels that his back is more and more to the wall, and he is bestirring himself. So long as he is satisfied, his case is hopeless. When he begins to force respect he will usher in the dawn of a new day. Again there is an increasing number of evidences that white people are waking up to the conditions. Negroes feel that some of the "Study Groups" are ineffective, but the fact remains that at one time the race question was not deemed worthy of study except by Negroes. When all is said, I would rather be living in 1920 than in 1870.

2. The relations are becoming worse. Relatively speaking, race relations in America have not kept pace with progress in many fields along other lines. The great desideratum is that the Negro change his point of view.

3. The present relations between the races seem more tense than formerly. This is due to the fact that Negroes have developed within the past few years a greater race consciousness, a great race respect. The immigration from the South which permitted him to enter into the industrial life of the North with very few hindrances, to partake of its civic life without an ever-constant reminder of race, was one of the main factors in increasing race consciousness and race respect. Another factor was the treatment as equals and fellow human beings of the Negro soldiers by the French soldiery and people. These things have caused the Negro to demand the respect which he is entitled to as a man and the privileges due him as a citizen. The whites at the present time still object to giving him these. This causes friction. I believe, however, that it will be lessened as soon as the whites realize that these demands of the Negro will not be withdrawn but will continue to be made with greater insistence.

4. Better.

5. Much was gained through the war. However, at the present time things seem to be at a standstill.

6. Racial relations between all races were never more acute nor more keenly felt and resented than during the present day.

7. Conditions, I believe, are getting a little better.

8. I don't believe that consideration of right and wrong influences fundamental reactions. One's conception of advantage and disadvantage determines the character of every act. I believe that all social relations are in a state of flux and that with the improvement of mankind which is coming with the evolution of a sense of higher values there will be an improvement in human relationships.

9. Race relations on the whole are growing worse instead of better, and they are crystallizing in the wrong direction. The whites are adjusting their conscience to their conduct, and are consciously or unconsciously justifying violation of the Ten Commandments, the Golden Rule, the Sermon on the Mount, the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States at the behest of race prejudice.

10. They are becoming distinctly worse as each year solidifies the hatred and crystallizes the opinions of the whites which immediately subsequent to the Civil War were in a chaotic state.

11. The last year or so has shown that riots are more quickly started. In our opinion race relations are likely to get much worse, especially if the present flood of European immigration continues. But getting worse to become better is much like a boil which, after it gathers and breaks, leaves the body in a healthier condition. Negroes are becoming more and more determined to enjoy their constitutional rights.

12. I am in doubt.

13. I am an optimist. I believe relations are becoming better.

OPINIONS ON SOLUTION

Question: Do you believe that money and the acquisition of wealth make an appreciable difference in the degree of respect in which Negroes are held by their white neighbors, or in the treatment they receive?

Economic Progress[84]	1866	1919	Gain in Fifty-three Years
Homes owned	12,000	600,000	588,000
Farms operated	20,000	1,000,000	980,000
Businesses conducted	2,100	50,000	47,900
Value of church property	$1,500,000	$85,900,000	$84,400,000
Wealth accumulated	$20,000,000	$1,100,000,000	$1,080,000,000

Answers:

1. Yes, money and wealth are the root of all good and evil. In North Carolina, a rich Negro, McCary, who, it was alleged, had been caught in intimate relations with a leading white woman, was sued for money damages instead of being lynched. Money and wealth must be widely diffused enough to make an appreciable difference, however; isolated cases of wealth ordinarily engender friction and hatred.

2. No, because I personally know many who are highly respected and kindly treated in their communities though in very humble circumstances.

3. I believe that money or wealth causes more respect to be accorded within white people's hearts, but it is more likely to increase racial feeling than to lessen it. The element of jealousy among poorer whites probably gives rise to such statements as keeping the Negro in his place. The whites of better circumstances merely use these existing feelings to gain their own selfish ends.

4. Yes, and no. Money is power. The power over a man's subsistence is the power over his will. The individual who has money is sought because he is in a position to confer advantages. He is likewise hated because he can inflict pain. Were race prejudice logical and based upon reason and not hysteria, the procurement of money and the consequent demonstration of basic equality would improve conditions. However, the majority of persons do not think but are exploited. Religious dogmas and racial antipathies being useful adjuncts in the process are sufficient to outweigh material or rational considerations.

5. Absolutely.

6. The possession of money causes whites to accord the Negro more respect and better treatment if the particular Negro can intelligently handle his affluent situation so as to demand such.

7. I think that money and the acquisition of wealth make an appreciable difference in the degree of respect in which Negroes are held by their white neighbors; not that the prejudice against the race is reduced considerably or possibly to any extent, but because men worship dollars, and if they are possessed by Negroes, Negroes fall in for additional respect as the holders of wealth.

8. I believe that the acquisition of wealth causes marked increase in respect, provided that a fairly large group of Negroes in that community respectively are the possessors; but for merely one or two persons to acquire wealth in a community is not likely to inspire respect. It may cause its opposite. I assume, of course, that a fair intelligence was necessary to secure the wealth.

9. Intelligence and wealth are necessary to the self-respect of the Negro. I doubt not that in many instances they would increase racial friction for the time being; but the time must come and is now near at hand, when the white race must recognize that the whole is greater than any of its parts. A community like Chicago, for instance, cannot be intelligent if the Negro is ignorant; it cannot be competent if the Negro is inefficient; it cannot be virtuous if the Negro is vicious; it cannot be healthy if the Negro is diseased. Intelligence and wealth will not of themselves solve the race problem, but the problem cannot be solved without intelligence and wealth.

10. Money and wealth do make a difference in the amount of respect accorded to individuals, as they lessen the causes for class antagonism. The white man accords esteem to those who are able to secure good clothing, decent homes, education, and indulge in what are considered luxuries. These things, too, increase the respect the Negro has for himself and make him demand respect from others. The treatment accorded him is not likely to be changed as his advancement tends to increase hatred among the whites whom he rises above, and a desire not to treat him as an equal among those whose level he reaches.

11. Money, commerce, rule the world. The average white man is happiest when he sees the Negro down. But if the Negro has money he is willing to conceal his prejudice and trade with him. Money, in the possession of no matter whom, commands fear, which is the nearest most human beings get to having respect for others. While one rich Negro in a town, in most instances, would receive pretty much the same treatment as other Negroes, yet a hundred rich Negroes in that same town would certainly make a big difference. Apply this ratio to the nation. A rich Negro, even in Georgia or Mississippi, certainly has a far pleasanter lot than a poor white.

12. Yes.

13. Yes, it does for white people. To quote a friend, "It is easy for anybody to be respectful and courteous to a million dollars." This is especially true of Americans.

Educational Progress[85]	1866	1919	Gain in Fifty-three Years
Per cent literate	10	80	70
Colleges and normal schools	15	500	485
Students in public schools	100,000	1,800,000	1,700,000
Teachers in all schools	600	38,000	37,400
Property for higher education	$60,000	$22,000,000	$21,940,000
Annual expenditures for education	$700,000	$15,000,000	$14,300,000
Raised by Negroes	$80,000	$1,700,000	$1,620,000

Question: Do you believe that if Negroes were 100 per cent literate it would make any great difference in race relations? Are general and higher education likely to widen the breach between Negroes and white persons, increase intolerance, resentment, sensitiveness to insults, or can a quieted process of adjustment or complete fusion of interests be expected?

Answers:

1. Education will help decidedly, especially that kind of education which gives Negroes a command of some special accomplishment in any field of endeavor. Higher education will not in my opinion widen the breach if Negroes will consciously and deliberately set out to educate white people as to their ideals, ability and character, and at the same time labor to increase the spirit of self-help and self-confidence among their own group which will serve to decrease ignorance and irresponsibility among the less fortunate and untrained members of the race.

2. I conceive that literacy in itself is a cure for nothing except illiteracy. One-hundred-per-cent literate Negroes without proper use of their literacy may even make matters worse. General and higher education may be expected to make matters better only if there is general and higher education among whites and the education on both sides is of the right kind. In America, at present, education, where it touches race lines, appears to be more propaganda than education. It is reported that some histories of reconstruction taught to Negroes by the state in parts of the United States emphasize and detail their shortcomings and omit their virtues. Obviously such education is education for mistrust, unrest, conflict. It educates the races apart, and its logical consequence is conflict. I am ready to answer, then, that general and higher education which emphasizes likeness and passes over without undue attention unlikeness, education which aims to have men live in harmony and cooperation and does not aim to array classes against classes and races against races by omissions and emphasis, may be expected to better our race relations in the United States provided it finds lodgment in the school systems of both races.

3. If 10,000,000 literate Negroes were environed with 100,000,000 white men, the majority of whom were below their cultural level, the dominant minds among the whites would arouse ethnic antagonisms as an economic weapon to be used in promoting their selfish ends. I believe that there is not a single force, ethical, religious, or of any type, sufficiently powerful to cause an individual to forego what he believes to be his highest advantage, and the appeal to group instincts is the easiest method of securing mass action.

4. If Negroes were 100 per cent literate they would certainly be more sensitive to insults and more resentful. I should expect a great increase in racial differences, unless those Negroes imbibed a tendency to non-resistance. That, however, is far from likely. With universal literacy, a larger acquaintance with current events and conditions, Negroes could immeasurably improve their living conditions, but their contacts with the whites would be far more unpleasant.

5. One hundred per cent literacy among Negroes would make a huge difference. In the long run it would lessen the breach between Negroes and white persons, for Negroes would strive for equality. The most essential thing is to produce a change in the mental equipment of the Negro. The white man's mind will take care of itself. What is needed is a more balanced and equal meeting of the minds. But there would be bloodshed at the beginning.

6. Resentment and sensitiveness to insults will increase on the part of Negroes as they grow in intelligence, but as their spirits rebel more insistently and positively against insults, it cannot help but have its effect upon white men who ignorantly mistreat them, and if the respect growing out of love does not follow, the respect growing out of tolerance, as in the case of the Jews in America, will ensue and result in recognition of equal intelligence and culture.

7. Literacy must be 100 per cent on both sides to bring about a "complete fusion of interests" or a "quieted process of adjustment." Intelligent Negroes among uneducated whites would aggravate the situation.

8. If Negroes were 100 per cent literate they would command more respect, because men always command more respect when they are intelligent.

9. I believe in education first, last, and always as a leveller and as a bulwark of defense. There is no race prejudice among broadly cultured people. Art knows no such distinctions.

10. (a) Yes. (b) Not, if at the same time the education of the whites is broadened and made more general. (c) Better education of both races will facilitate a fusion of interests, beginning probably in economic relations.

11. It would make them much more bitter, for (a) the Negro would be more sensitive to injustice and have more of the combative spirit which literacy usually gives, and (b) whites would be more jealous and anxious to show the Negro his place. I believe that such an intensification of the struggle is desirable and necessary, as I don't believe that the brilliant ideas necessary for solution of the race problem can come other than as the children of the most intense and bitter racial conflict. Of course it would defeat its purpose if such a conflict were bloody, as then we would have a long period of the nauseating burden such as America suffers with today, viz.: the North attempting to reconcile the South.

12. Literacy will make a difference also in race relations. The difference will increase in degree as literacy advances beyond the mere ability to read and write to a wider participation in every field of educational or intellectual endeavor. As far as I have been able to observe, the breach between whites and Negroes is widened as Negroes advance in education and culture. The educated Negro rarely comes in contact with the white man as a menial or laborer—the only point of contact which the great majority of white people want. He will respect the Negro teacher, lawyer, doctor, or business man who knows his work thoroughly and can do as well as he. He is not likely, however, to find any reason to co-operate with this class of Negroes, and the Negroes do seek such co-operation.

13. (a) Yes. (b) In slavery times whites made it a crime to teach Negroes to read. That desire, in up-to-date garb, remains in the breast of most whites today. To many white persons a Negro of superior talent and refinement is a more detestable production than the most pronounced rogue. Most white persons, even of the best quality, are secretly displeased at a Negro of this type. They were brought up to regard Negroes as being below them, and the sight is a blow to their vanity. (c) A dollar talks much more sweetly than Emerson or Shakespeare and even Christ to most men, therefore a process of adjustment or complete fusion of interests will be effected chiefly through trade relationship, not esthetics.

Question: If unrestricted suffrage were given Negroes throughout the United States, would matters be helped?

Answers:

1. Equal suffrage between the races in some parts of the country would doubtless precipitate a temporary disturbance, but it is not thinkable that under democratic institutions any group or class can be permanently or for a long while refused equal participation in the government under which they live and by which they are controlled. Shall we do evil that good may come?

2. Every appreciable increase in power among Negroes will be met with jealousy and repression by the whites. Unrestricted suffrage does not mean much when people have guns at the polls and dare other people to vote. Its inception would mean acute racial trouble, I think, but if the Negroes used the same means and methods to register their vote as the whites do to keep them from registering it, and kept it up long enough, ultimately conditions would be very much improved where Negroes constitute about half the population of a unit.

3. Yes. Even though Negroes might not vote intelligently at the outset, they would tend to vote for their own welfare. The Negro does not feel wholeheartedly that he is a part of the American people. But with the vote he would be in a better position to work for common ends. Though voting for the capitalist parties would not mean much to the Negro, a vote for the money barons is better than no vote at all.

4. Unrestricted suffrage is a right as well as a privilege. It is essential for building up the sense of responsibility and loyalty among any group of people in a democracy founded on the ideals of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.

5. Yes, the ballot is a protection which the Negro now is intelligent enough to use and keep. In the present segregated condition of the Negro, the ballot has a genuine property value. Police protection, better lighted and better paved streets, I am convinced, must come to him through the ballot or else he does not get them.

6. Unrestricted Negro suffrage would help a great deal in securing for Negroes the things it is possible to secure through the use of the ballot. Political parties, as well as the Negro himself, would realize the power of Negro suffrage and would doubtless be inclined to cater to that vote. The exercise of such unlimited suffrage is likely to increase for a time the tenseness in race relations, as the whites would not readily give up the domination they have secured. The agitation in Ohio and in the Middle West over the exercise by the Negro of his suffrage shows how clearly the white man fears the power of the ballot when used by the Negro.

7. Other things remaining the same, it would not.

8. Not necessarily by that fact alone. The ultimate value of the right of suffrage is conditioned by the intelligence with which that right is used.

9. This goes without saying. In Chicago, Negroes exercise considerable influence in the city administration, because of their strong political power. The same is true of New York and Cleveland. Apply this to the nation.

10. Yes.

11. Yes, if we had a third party with racial cohesion.

12. Suffrage to be effective must be taken and not conferred. "Who would be free, himself must strike the blow." A man has no right that he can't protect and defend.

Question: How about religion as a solvent of racial difficulties and differences?

Religious Progress[86]	1866	1919	Gain in Fifty-three Years
Number of churches	700	43,000	42,300
Number of communicants	600,000	4,800,000	4,200,000
Number of Sunday schools	1,000	46,000	45,000
Sunday-school pupils	50,000	2,250,000	2,200,000

Answers:

1. Religion, if it ever becomes a vital force in the everyday affairs of people, will be one of the greatest forces in solving race difficulties. At the present time its influence is practically nil. The average church is still calling worn-out theology religion; those which have adopted a more modern and practical view of religion are too few to exert any influence in race problems.

2. Religion per se, to my mind, has failed, but Christianity, the spirit manifested by Jesus Christ in his life and which he commanded his followers to imitate, if adopted in its vital truth and simplicity by all professing Christians, could solve all the difficulties.

3. Religion might be helpful in solving racial difficulties if it were tried—but it has not been very largely tried yet.

4. Religion as a solvent of racial difficulties is necessary, but both groups will need to practice it to the same degree.

5. The religion of America, or of any other country, is merely an index to the national character. Religion expresses itself in the church, and the church is a capitalistic institution. Expressed religion in America, because its pecuniary existence largely depends upon the rank and file of the people who support it, will not rise above the prejudices and folkways of that rank and file. Religion will not solve many racial difficulties or differences.

6. Religion hardly touches the deeper motivations. It may regulate details, but usually the priest-craft succeeds by sophistry, emphasis or omission in avoiding certain fundamental issues in their religious exhortations. It often appears that the preacher is retained to idealize the crassness of the world, and unpleasant things are simply taboo. He must look to his salary.

7. It has no utility. It had no utility in the world war and so a fortiori could have no utility in our race problem where more bitter issues are involved.

8. Unfortunately religion has little sanction over the social conduct where interest and passions are involved. This was too sadly manifested in the world war. It is to be hoped, however, that there may arise a moral and spiritual renaissance under whose sanction religion may exercise controlling influence over the frictional relations among men.

9. Very much overestimated is religion as a solvent of racial differences. Neither Negroes nor whites have enough confidence in it to put it into practical application. No one thing will bring about the Negro's real emancipation. The fight must be carried on in every sphere where prejudice has vitiated relations.

10. Religion has failed to solve the racial difficulties and differences in America because its principles have never been practiced by the people. Religion has remained a beautiful theory. If the religious principles were practiced there would be no racial difficulties.

11. Utterly valueless. The average individual cannot think. He lives only in the concrete. Material advantages outweigh philosophical benefits. Deprive religion of the moving force of fear which its exponents engender, and it will entirely cease to be dynamic.

12. The religion of Christ will prove a solvent if men ever give it a trial.

13. Religion, in our opinion, has never settled any question. Nothing else contains so much the germs of strife. Mankind, throughout the ages, has never been able to agree on it. The history of Europe, Asia and Northern Africa is one long record of warring religions.

SOCIAL ADJUSTMENTS

Question: What are some of the most pronounced mental complexes experienced in adjusting your personal desires and expectations to the present social system?

Answers:

1. A constant haunting feeling when in the presence of white persons that they desire to shun me because of my color; that they are eager to use me to further their ends under the guise of piety or patronizing the "good-feeling-toward-your-people" attitude. I suffer from time to time an acute embarrassment because of uncouth conduct in the presence of white persons on the part of uncultured Negroes. Such conduct embarrasses me generally, but the presence of white persons who are supposed to be inimical seems to be the dominant element in the situation.

2. The most pronounced mental complex which I experience in adjusting my desires and expectations to the present social system is not the "inferiority complex" with which most Negroes are charged by the whites. I desire all that the social system affords; but as to expectation it is necessary for me to use auto-hypnotism to make myself expect it in order that I can present to the white man the front of optimism, the necessary air of expectancy to secure success. The shocks and disappointments which a Negro must constantly experience tend to get him in the attitude of expecting nothing.

3. I can't describe the mental complexes, but some are caused by situations such as these: I go to the library to get a book, and I am told that I must sit in a seat among dusty shelves of newspaper files at a table marked "For colored people"; in order to see a play I have to sit in the gallery. I submit to that and when I get to the theater, I am told that no seats are reserved for colored people. I go to a lecture by the Hon. Mr. So and So (white) and he discusses the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, creating much enthusiasm among the unthinking and some of the thinking. Then the next morning I take up the paper of which the same gentleman is the editor, and read a sneering editorial on the race question, and so on.

4. Personally, I am able to impersonalize my relation to the situation, and experience no mental perplexities. I try to preserve a rational attitude in an irrational environment and objectify cruelty, injustice and wrong. I know that I as an individual am not Jim Crowed, or disfranchised or socially isolated; it is the race to which I belong. My only perplexity is how to remove these racial, not personal, disqualifications.

5. Determination to fulfill my personal desires in spite of the present social system; a loss of respect for the white man's sense of justice.

6. The arrogance of the poor ignorant white man and the snobbishness of the middle class. This is the stumbling-block for the future of our race to overcome.

7. Trying to get white persons, as employers, etc., to accept me as a man first of all, then to judge me on my merits, irrespective of my color. Trying to attain to the same degree of success and liberty of any other man of my training and experience in spite of the world in which I live.

8. Amused and almost cynical tolerance. A desire to reap the greatest possible advantages from the system, without permitting my intelligence to admit that it is right because it is personally advantageous.

9. My desires are never adjusted to the present "social system"; they are constantly out of harmony with the practices of our so-called democracy, as these practices relate to the Negro.

10. If this question means what I think it does, space will not permit an intelligent answer.

11. A hyper-sensitiveness in regard to the subject Negro; a tendency to see racial antagonism as a motive of conduct in every act of white persons when perhaps it is sometimes absent; a hesitancy about entering public places or approaching individuals for fear of rebuff or insult; a withdrawal into a Negro world in which almost every thought and act are colored by a racial aspect before a humanitarian one, are some of the mental complexes experienced in a greater or less degree by almost every colored person.

Question: Do you believe that Negroes are prejudiced against white persons?

Answers:

1. Some are, but the prejudice is due to nurture rather than to nature.

2. Prejudice means pre-judgment. Negroes come into the world to find most white persons disliking them. They grow up in an atmosphere where they find whites ready to insult them because of the color Nature saw fit to give them. Therefore, knowledge, not prejudice, causes Negroes to dislike whites. Human beings, and even dumb animals, love only those who love them. The average Negro is, however, quick to drop this defensive attitude when he meets a fair-minded white person. Perhaps too easily, as he is often taken advantage of by shrewd whites disguised as friends.

3. I do not believe that Negroes are inherently prejudiced against the white race. Personally, I have absolutely no such prejudice. I do not believe that the white race is inherently prejudiced against the Negro, but that it is wholly a feeling stimulated by social opinion which can be modified and controlled. I put in evidence the facts: First, when social pressure is removed, white women marry Negro men, and white men marry Negro women. Second, the superior always shows prejudice against the inferior, whether superiority is claimed on basis of wealth, culture, birth, or position. The prejudices of inferior against superior is never so pronounced as that of superior against inferior. Natural antipathy is mutually reciprocal. Third, some white persons are less influenced by it than others. Fourth, race antagonism as such is scarcely discernible where Latin civilization and the Catholic religion are in control. Fifth, it does not exist in the Mohammedan dispensation. Sixth, the experience of thousands of Negro soldiers in France proves its comparative absence. Seventh, race prejudice seems to be principally the vice of the Teuton and the Anglo-Saxon, which must be subject to ultimate control. It will not be quite so strong among Germans as it was before the war.

4. I do not believe that Negroes as a race are prejudiced against white people, although I am conscious of an increasing prejudice against white people on the part of many individual Negroes, especially educated colored women who live in the South and resent keenly the indiscriminate approaches of white men.

5. Many Negroes are cynical of all the professions of white men. They often express their hatred of white people openly. I think, however, that feeling is more prevalent among the younger Negroes than among the older ones.

6. Many pretend to be. Most of them are not.

7. Yes, 98 per cent of them are.

8. Not as individuals. They are affected by the spirit of mass hostility to dissimilar masses based upon the desire to appropriate and retain advantages. Racial prejudices are the products of the will of dominant individuals evoking responses from weaker intelligences and serving the purpose of the dominating mind.

9. If so, to a very slight extent. What feeling most Negroes have is created almost solely to offset the prejudice and antagonism of the whites. The prejudice of the whites I might describe as primary; that of the colored, secondary.

10. Yes; too much so among some groups.

11. Negroes in most cases are very much prejudiced against whites.

12. Yes. The difference lies in the degree. Prejudice is artificial. It is learned. The white boy and girl have been "taught" more prejudice than the Negro. Negroes seldom teach prejudice outright. When they learn it, it is inescapable. America is a school, I fear, at present where even the most backward learns something of prejudice whether he will it or not.

13. I believe there is a strong prejudice against white persons. This antipathy is, I believe, not based on racial unlikeness, but on resentment because of cruel treatment as an inferior.

Question: Are you ever conscious of a feeling of racial inferiority or even the desire to compensate for a supposed inferiority?

Answers:

1. I attribute inferiority and superiority alike to individuals, not race. I have every confidence that my race is capable of producing as great men, and proportionately as many of them, as any other race under the sun. I trace to environment the responsibility for not releasing their energy upon constructive work, but concentrating it upon gaining a living or a chance to gain a living. Many times I feel the desire to compensate for a supposed inferiority, because I believe in nailing a lie wherever possible.

2. I never have a feeling of racial inferiority or a desire to compensate for a supposed inferiority (with reservations). I am usually cognizant of the fact that most white people consider the Negro an inferior. This often causes the bristles to rise on my back.

3. Personally, at no moment of our lives. The Negro is really superior in stamina. His race is progressing, while the whites appear to be standing still. The white race has had seven thousand years or more of education and civilization, yet in this prosperous republic today the average white person is comparatively poor and possesses little education. The Negro, in spite of the oppressive handicap due to color, is progressing along all lines, commercial, professional and artistic.

4. I am never conscious of racial inferiority, but I am a firm believer in the theory that any human being will be whatever his environment and his heredity will make of him, regardless of the color of his skin or the form of his skull. One in considering this point of view should be sure not to confuse the words "inferiority" and "inequality."

5. No.

6. I feel no desire to apologize to the world because I am a colored woman; I had to be of some race, and here I am.

7. No. I believe that accidents of environment determine relative positions.

8. Decidedly no! I believe absolutely in my own worth as a man and as a Negro and defer only to wider experience, knowledge, or skill, whether possessed by white persons or Negroes.

9. No!

10. No.

11. I never have a feeling of racial inferiority or a desire to compensate for a supposed inferiority.

12. Personally, I am absolutely unconscious of any feeling of racial inferiority. I recognize the control of social forces and influences which may seem too strong to be overcome at present. I simply suffer it to be so now.

13. I have never felt any racial inferiority, though always when thrown in school work or business with white people the desire to do my work as well or better than they is very strong. This desire comes primarily from a desire to show that the Negro is not inferior in his ability.

NEGRO PROBLEMS

Question: Do you believe that there should be recognized leaders of Negroes? Are there such persons whom you regard as qualified for leadership? Discuss their merits and demerits.

Answers:

1. As long as the dominant power treats with us as with Negroes rather than as with American citizens, there will be need of recognized leaders; but these leaders should be chosen by the Negroes themselves, not chosen and imposed by others.

2. Yes and no. Theoretically and ultimately, no. Practically and immediately, yes. In any clearly differentiated group the spokesman should come from and grow out of conditions within the group. In a community in which there were cultural and not ethnic divisions there would be no need for Negro leaders. What was good for the hive would be for the good of each bee. However, in a community in which color is a target, defensive alliances under the best possible leadership are a sine qua non. I am too close to the problem to have sufficient perspective to attempt the discussion of personalities.

3. Logically, no. Practically, under present conditions it is imperative to have Negro leaders. Where people do not read much, do not study much, they are incapable of doing much thinking. Better a bad leader under such circumstances than no leader at all. The very clashes between rival leaders with their several points of view force the rank and file to attend to conditions and compare conflicting views. This often marks the beginning of interests in striving to improve conditions. The merits of leaders are considered in another place.

4. I do not think that it will be possible, or advisable, to attempt to appoint or elect leaders for Negroes. Naturally men and women of exceptional powers will be recognized by those of less developed powers as leaders of thought in various connections in their several localities.

5. There should be no recognized leaders of Negroes except those who are selected from groups or bodies of Negroes—selected by them for a particular purpose or a particular cause. I do not believe in Negro leadership secured by members of the white race and then handed to our group as a leader without first having had the endorsement of the Negroes themselves.

6. Yes. Emmet Scott, Dr. Du Bois and Mr. Grimke. Mr. Scott has great executive ability. Dr. Du Bois is a great philosopher and an ardent race rights advocate. Mr. Grimke a scholar and wise counsellor. This combination as Leaders' Council would, in my opinion, conserve our best interests. Mr. Scott is too much of an opportunist for an ideal leader, Dr. Du Bois is too radical at times, Mr. Grimke is too much of an intellectual recluse.

7. There should be recognized leaders of Negroes, recognized by Negroes because of their merits in their particular fields of endeavor. There are Negroes qualified for such leadership today, but their affiliations with organizations largely or partly supported by philanthropic whites negative their usefulness.

8. I believe every community should develop its own leadership. A great deal of our present leadership is too largely clerical and political and therefore not free, broad, and independent. We need a leadership which is free, courageous, and which possesses a program and definite objective.

9. I do not approve self-appointed leadership or leadership bestowed by white friends because they can command funds. If there are to be leaders, they should be chosen by selection so that there can be "solemn referendum." With this qualification, there are a large number of Negroes whom I would vote for as leaders. The trouble now is that our so-called leaders are not responsible to those whom they are supposed to represent.

10. There should not be; as soon as one appears, destructive influences are brought to bear upon him both from within and without, making of him within a short period an extremely artificial and useless guide, but who is followed, nevertheless, by Negroes blindly to their own great injury.

11. I believe firmly in the capacity of the race for self-leadership. Any people can govern themselves better than an outsider is apt to govern them, unless the alien is willing to become naturalized in the group he aspires to lead. The white race at present is unable or unwilling to become naturalized in the Negro group.

12. The basis of Negro leadership should rest on the ability to develop within the masses a desire and the power to obtain better homes, education and their privileges as citizens without belittling themselves or adopting the toadying attitude. Any individual who is striving in a community to secure these things for his people should be considered a leader. The mere ability to write a book, edit a magazine, or publicly express the cause of the Negro is not a sufficient qualification for leadership even though it does bring national prominence.

13. (a) Under the circumstances, yes. (b) Useless to discuss this. People usually choose as their leaders those who express most strongly prevailing sentiments. (c) The followers are their own judges of merit and demerit.

Question: What, in your opinion, are some of the greatest mistakes of prominent Negroes in their policies or stand on racial issues?

Answers:

1. Most are honest, I think, but emphasize too much some one pet solution, such as "Get Property," "Industrial Education," etc. Many are insincere, using their influence to feather their own nests, letting the race go hang. An intolerance among Negroes themselves for those among their number who have different opinions as to the wisest courses in arriving at the better conditions which they equally are trying to bring about. Some characteristics possessed by most of the so-called leaders may be summed as follows:

Don't bother and leave all in the hands of God.

Overestimation of the Negroes' present attainments, eulogies instead of information.

Oratory of denunciation only, raising prejudice against whites but offering no course of action or thought leading to improvement either of Negroes personally or individually, or as a race.

A disinclination to tell the blunt truth when interracial conferences offer the opportunity for an exchange of views.

2. The greatest mistake that leaders usually make is that of failing to study the problems towards the solution of which they are working. They also are not willing to co-operate with leaders along other lines.

3. Selfishness and lack of moral backbone in the face of possible financial loss.

4. To accept that there is a purely racial psychology. And to think, act, or accept as a Negro and not as a man.

5. (a) Compromising attitude; (b) depending on support of white people financially and morally; (c) failure to co-operate freely with all cases among the Negroes themselves.

6. Lack of absolute frankness with white people about mind and feeling of Negroes; lack of absolute frankness with Negroes about their own shortcomings and failure. I believe that many men are overcoming this weakness.

7. Short-sightedness. They seem not to look ahead and see the consequence of their arrangements and concessions. Most of them, because of the manner of their selections, are unacquainted with history, sociology, etc. They see the present, not even the present generation. They fall into advices and concessions today which prove a noose tomorrow. There is lack of poise. Often they seem to know nothing of a means. There is no intermediate ground; it simply is or it is not. This absolutism inevitably leads to trouble. This of course does not apply to all of our leaders.

8. The greatest mistakes of prominent Negroes in their stands: A statesman is supposed to be the fusion of two necessary elements: (1) the theorist, such as we have in our college professors and most of our writers; and (2) the practical politician who can get things done. The main fault with most of our prominent Negroes in their policies and behavior is that they never accomplish this fusion; all fall very definitely into either group one or group two, and either group by itself is helpless.

9. The greatest mistake of prominent Negroes, in my judgment, is that they pay too great a deference to the attitude of the white race rather than to the inherent demands of humanity. Jesus refused to defer to the arrogance of Pilate, although he exercised the power of life or death.

10. Faulty perspective due to improper training; failure to grasp the economic significance of race prejudice; and a tendency to preach the doctrine of non-resistance when they get rich and fat. The younger crop of Negroes, armed with modern scientific education are remedying the first two. Time will show whether they will prove more unselfish.

DEFENSIVE PHILOSOPHY

Question: If it may be assumed that there are conditions which are intolerable, or, at least, a constant source of irritation to Negroes, it is to be expected that some defensive philosophy is necessary to give poise, dignity, and self-respect. What is your philosophy? What basic philosophical considerations, even if not crystallized into dogma, support your outlook on life, or that of Negroes of your acquaintance and general point of view?

Answers:

1. I believe racial solidarity, as I conceive it, to be the defensive philosophy of many Negroes. My own philosophy, if I have one, is summed up in the belief that potentially the Negro has the same qualities making for success and usefulness as any other group. All he needs is an even break. I believe in an offensive program to teach pride in their achievements and prepare themselves for keen, hard competition all along the line. I believe in attacking the indifference and ignorance of white people which is largely the basis of prejudice, by educating them to respect and believe in the self-defending, non-favor-asking, justice-demanding Negro.

2. My philosophy rests upon two propositions. The first is borrowed from the Latin "I am a man; nothing human is foreign to me." The second is: A man is entirely the product of his environment. (Heredity is the sum of our former environments.) Given, then, an essential equality in all men, temporary advantages are the results of environment. Self-preservation and its corollary, the desire for the preservation of species, are fundamental traits, and the Israelites, killing those who said Sibboleth and not Shibboleth, have their prototype in those who make non-conformity in hair, color, speech or culture, a crime and inferiority stamp. It seems rational to suppose, however, that man may evolve sufficient mentality, and far enough away from the brute, to make differences in culture and not physical characteristics the basis of distinctions. Until then the pursuit of pleasure and advantage is the proper aim of life.

3. The Negro maintains his self-respect and dignity in the face of intolerable conditions because of his natural optimism and his hope for and belief in the approach of a better day. I teach my children that they should not seek companionship with any other children who reluctantly associate with them, not that my children should consider themselves in any way inferior or unequal, but that they should be possessed of too much personal pride to wish association with those who would not be pleasant and agreeable.

4. My philosophy is a pessimistic one. There is often a sense of hopelessness. To live in the white group makes it incumbent on me to overcome many presumptions on their part. On the other hand, to create mutual understandability is a phase of aggressive conduct I follow. To conduct one's self in a more socially acceptable way, viz., to do a certain thing better than any member of the dominant group, is another excellent mode of enhancing social values. But the best way of all is to assume an offensive attack, and place the white group or individual on the defensive at all times. This can be accomplished only by a superior type of mind.

5. Never submit passively to unnecessary indignities. Keep alive the spirit of protest against all injustice from black or white. I am just as good or at least my right to decent treatment is as good as that of any other man. I am what I think and do, not what some other person does to me or thinks about me.

6. My experience with the segregation tendency has taught me to look down upon the system. It bristles with contradictions, being foolishly fastidious, fanatically unreasonable, and usually carried out by the uncultured element. Moreover, the promoters of the system are not ready to discuss the matter; it is simply taboo. The immoral forays of members of this super-sensitive "superior race" coupled with criminal economical advantages maintained by intimidation aside from being tragic lends a subtle hypocrisy which does not escape even the casual observer. Add to this the hysteria of the thing and you have a medley of the ludicrous hypocritical, illogical, and hysterical. Any man then who is honest and self-respecting easily comes to feel himself superior to the promoters of the institutions. One moves among these conditions with a feeling probably not unlike that of Socrates among the Athenians, although, if he chances to be a man of color, with far less freedom of conduct and speech.

7. My philosophy would be that by our conduct as a group we will be able to disprove the principles upon which the white man's intolerance is based; we should assert our rights and use propaganda to change the white man's point of view civically, morally and in the economic world.

8. I am firmly convinced that a dignified friendly attitude towards the white race is the wisest course for the Negro: education, industry, and good manners will win for us more real tolerance and consideration than continued agitation and bitterness. Truth and justice will demand fair play in time, and sentiment must be molded by appeal to intelligence and finer sentiments through undisputable facts.

9. Cultivate a wholesome discontent with untoward conditions and use every lawful means to improve these conditions, so that it may not be said that we are satisfied with unjust discriminations. "The talent for misery is the fulcrum of progress."

SEGREGATION AND RACIAL SOLIDARITY

Question: What, to your mind, is the distinction, either in point of view or definite racial aim, between segregation and "racial solidarity"?

Answers:

1. Segregation implies coercion by the dominant group. Racial solidarity implies certain subjective tendencies of like-mindedness. Racial solidarity may be enhanced by segregation but it thrives best if its causes have their roots in the will to progress rather than the will to exist amidst oppression. Though segregation may aid the tendency toward racial solidarity, neither segregation nor racial solidarity are to be advised in a modern civilization. Racial solidarity for protective reasons with strong limitations (never legal) may be advisable today in America.

2. The definite racial aim of segregation is to prevent the contact of races physically; to prevent Negroes from living with the whites in their neighborhoods and vice versa; to keep themselves separate as a group, thus making segregation of schools and other institutions a natural sequence. Whereas, the aim of racial solidarity is to focus the financial, economic, political and social strength of the group for the purpose of meeting the attacks of the white race as well as for the solution of group problems; for example, solid financial strength would mean Negro business houses of every description, banks, etc.; it would mean that the race as a unit would withdraw its patronage and support from any institution or business that discriminated against members of their group; they would boycott as a unit any brand of goods made by a firm dealing unjustly with colored patrons, etc. It means that politically the group would throw its strength to the party whose principles are in harmony with the welfare of the Negro.

3. Segregation presupposes a force from without which seeks to compel those of the same race or nationality or religious belief to remain among themselves, separated from those of another group supposedly superior. Grouping together either for purposes of living or of religious worship or for other purposes, with the idea of developing a group or race consciousness and thus to develop "pride of race," presupposes a force from within—that is a conscious desire of the people themselves to develop the latent powers within their own group through intensive application.

4. Negroes tend to flock together as do members of other racial groups. I do not regard this as segregation. When an effort is made from without to group them together, which carries along with it restrictions of movement, residence or activity, we have segregation. Racial solidarity seems to me to be the conscious or unconscious reaction to segregation. It is a doctrine of revolt.

5. Segregation means to me regulation of racial contacts by law or force between white and colored people. Racial solidarity is a natural development of massing because of race congeniality.

6. Segregation and racial solidarity differ fundamentally and essentially in the motive prompting the individual act to be discussed. Segregation is the forcing apart of any group into a less favorable environment in order that advantage or position may accrue to those in authority. Race solidarity represents the active part in the same rôle, and is the effort of individuals to utilize similarity of aims or of situation as the basis of an offensive or defensive alliance.

7. Racial segregation is harmful as a social aim. Racial segregation is the result of the attempt of a more powerful group to impose its ideas of racial inferiority upon a weaker group. The weaker group in its attempt to defeat this program rightly adopts racial solidarity as a definite aim in order to strengthen itself both to resist discrimination which usually follows segregation and to attack the vicious and narrow-minded motives of proponents of racial segregation.

8. Voluntary segregation is a step, consciously or unconsciously taken, toward racial solidarity.

9. It seems to me that segregation and racial solidarity differ in that the latter is merely a mental attitude whereas the former, though it includes a certain mental attitude, is chiefly characterized by a sort of hysterical physical separation. Racial solidarity obviously can exist among groups separated by considerable distance, as among Jews. When the mental attitude is not, or is felt not to be, adequate to effect the desired separation among races, then a sort of hysteria ensues and separation is one of the forms in which this hysteria expresses itself. On the whole we may have reason to doubt its efficacy, for it bears a relation to race solidarity akin to that which legal restraint bears to moral restraint.

It seems probable that both racial solidarity and segregation aim at the same thing. Segregation, it seems to me, in the long run must prove a poor means to the end, and it would not require a very imaginative person to think that in its crass forms it may destroy the very end it aims to achieve by creating a prejudice of a violent and consuming sort.

10. The term "segregation" in current discussion connotes legal compulsion, whereas "racial solidarity" implies voluntary union of the colored group under the compulsion of internal feeling or social influences.

11. Segregation, either voluntary or forced, is purely an objective situation, a setting apart in a definite location from one's fellows. Racial solidarity is subjective and is the feeling of cohesion between persons of the same race. Segregation is undoubtedly a factor in intensifying this feeling of the consciousness of kind.

12. The distinction between segregation and "racial solidarity" is in a point of view, viz.: racial solidarity concerns the interior of the Negro, his psychosis, as to its inclusion of a cohesive spirit; segregation concerns the exterior of the Negro, is looking at the situation from the viewpoint of the whites and relates to the barriers opposed by the whites to his unlimited expansion. Voluntary segregation may seem to point to the mind and viewpoint of the Negro rather than the whites, but voluntary segregation does not become a practical problem until the whites attempt to use it as a precedent, in which case it becomes after all a matter of the viewpoint of the whites.

13. It would appear that there is a very fundamental difference between segregation and racial solidarity as the terms are now used in the United States relative to the Negro. By racial solidarity it is generally understood that there is some sort of a physical separation which has been decreed by a law, as for example: the various residential segregation laws enacted some years ago and the segregation laws relative to the separation of races in public conveyances, etc. Racial solidarity, it may be said, is largely volitional, whereas segregation, as the term now is generally used, has back of it an enacted law or the idea of having an enacted law.

A still more fundamental distinction is that racial solidarity does not turn upon the receiving of benefits from privileges or things that are for all the public; segregation, on the other hand, has to do almost exclusively with the restriction of privileges relating to the free use of things that are for all the public, as for example, the free use of public conveyances, public places, the establishing of residences, etc.

14. Segregation aims to herd Negroes together in order that they may be cheated of the rights of citizenship the more easily. Racial solidarity urges Negroes to get together in order that they may fight segregation the more effectively. "National solidarity" is, to our thinking, a far better weapon. Negroes should endeavor to find out those whites who are their friends and ask them to join in the fight for the enforcement of the Constitution.

Question: A large number of Negroes are in agreement on the matter of separate colored churches with colored pastors, and, more recently, colored bishops. Yet this is an argument used by many exponents of the segregation idea, both whole and partial, for other separate institutions. Candidly, what is your opinion on the subject?

Answers:

1. Separate churches, etc., are but a part of the system of segregation inherent in the social fabric of America. This question is therefore not fundamental or basic enough. As a matter of logic and sociological analysis, since I do not favor legal or customary segregation, I cannot favor separate churches, which are but a reflex of enforced segregation. Therefore I do not favor other separate institutions. Yet, I at all times favor free assemblage and organization whatever the social system is or may be. If separate institutions are "desired" by the group and this "want" is not cramped by such considerations as factors like American public opinion, then separate institutions are in order. The test is the free and unimpaired development of the group.

2. The "colored" church is itself an anomaly. The very idea is logically ridiculous. From the practical standpoint it is the result of the un-Christian attitude of churches which preceded it and largely brought it into being. If I had to join a church now, I hope I should decide according to the doctrines and tenets rather than according to the race of the pastor and communicants. If any consideration should guide me rather than the doctrines, it would be to go where I could do the most good.

3. The idea of using the fact of the Negro's preference for his own church, governed by its own ministry, as a reason for segregation not only is absurd but is a weak reason for the manifestation of race prejudice. That Negroes prefer to be together in religious worship is a well-established fact; that they wish their church to be governed by their own ministers and bishops is equally well established; that such desire is natural and human, one must admit; but that this perfectly normal desire should become a reason for forcing upon the Negro other separate institutions is not justifiable. There is a fine distinction between the performance of one's religious rites and the activities necessary to maintain and foster these (which becomes social in character), and the business arrangements of getting an education, being conveyed somewhere, buying a meal, or paying to hear a world-famed artist. The former is part of one's private life and as such is a matter of choice and should be confined to those who are closest to him by race and spiritual conception. The latter are affairs of business wherein one wishes something and pays for it; and as long as he has the necessary greenback, expects to be accorded the rights and courtesies given any citizen of the city or state. The French, the Italian, nearly every nationality, have their own churches, their own ministers, and worship in their own tongue. But no one ever hears anything about segregating the Frenchman or the Italian for that reason.

4. The latter plan, racial solidarity, is not at all inconsistent with the spirit of democracy even when it means the development of separate colored churches or the appointment of colored bishops for colored churches in the denominations where the color line is not so sharply drawn.

5. In my opinion, the Negroes as a whole are not in harmony and agreement on colored churches as such. It is a condition that has been pushed upon them; a means to the end. If Negroes were treated just as any other member of a white church, and given the same opportunity to advance to positions of honor within the church, ministers, priests, bishops, etc., regardless of color, there would be no Negro churches.

6. It is this universal spirit which causes Negroes to desire Negro churches and Negro bishops, because the dominant minds can more easily secure advantages when in an environment in which they conform to the majority pattern and are not parts of a clearly differentiated minority.

7. Separate colored churches in some degree are necessary in order to build up racial solidarity as described above. In other words, a strong defensive many times makes for an effective offensive.

8. Separate colored churches have never seemed to me to be necessary.

9. I am convinced that a limited race separation is not only desirable but unavoidable. There is a wide stretch of possibilities between absolute segregation and unlimited social communication. To argue that because Negroes have and want ministers and teachers of their own color, therefore they should want absolute segregation, strikes me as a bit absurd. There are at least two justifications: it may be thought that the Negro ministers and teachers understand our racial aspirations better and can better impart instructions leading to a realization of them.

10. Wherever Negroes find themselves segregated in schools and churches by choice or control, they should have teachers, preachers and overseers of their own race. Long distance leadership is neither desirable nor effective. This leadership will acquire requisite efficiency by survival of the fittest.

11. The motivation of any separate institutions should be the basis of its approval or disapproval. If Negroes of their own volition develop Negro churches, banks, clubs, stores or other organizations as a means of developing enterprise or initiative, or for providing better opportunities of work for young men and women of our race, I am in accord with such separation. If, however, such separation is forced on them especially in public places, such as hotels, restaurants, theaters and railroads, a separation which sets the Negro apart from the general public, I believe it should be condemned and fought against.

12. It is argued that if many of our leading Negroes agree upon the expediency of complete racial separation in church life, they are inconsistent in not applying it to all matters concerning the Negro. The answer to this is as follows: The highest end of the Negro is the same as that of the man of any other race, viz.: complete self-expression and development of his individuality; in deciding upon what he shall accept or reject in any case this must be his guiding principle; between being a nonentity in the "white" church and partially expressing himself in a Negro church, he naturally chooses the latter, choosing it not as the summun bonum, but solely as the lesser of two evils; between having the Negro officers in the world war and having Negro officers who are trained in a separate camp, he considers the latter less injurious. But give the Negro a choice between a separate church where only partial self-expression can be possible, and a "white" church which would give him full opportunity for individual expression, and he would not hesitate a moment in choosing such a "white" church.

13. Separate colored churches, colored pastors and colored bishops represent more or less a voluntary action of colored people and are indicative of racial solidarity in just the same way as Jewish churches having Jewish rabbis represent Jewish solidarity.

14. As a slave the Negro was welcome to worship at the white church. As a citizen he is not. The white church is a semi-public institution, being more social than religious in its tone. Since Negroes are not wanted, their only recourse is to have their own churches. And if their own churches, why a white pastor or bishop, when Negro preachers quite as competent can be found?

OPINION-MAKING

Question: On what instruments ordinarily responsible for the making of public opinion do you rely for your opinions? With what reservations do you accept what you read in the white press? To what degree are you influenced by the opinions of colored persons?

Answers:

1. Of course I read daily papers, magazines and books and attend lectures and seek every possible means to learn the trend of thought and philosophy of life as it develops throughout civilization. However, whenever the Negro question is treated, I always approach with suspicion the arguments presented by white people. I always read expressions forecasting the approach of democracy with the knowledge that but few white writers and speakers think of the colored races in their utterances. The colored newspapers are much more fair than the whites, but even they, at times, are inclined to bias.

2. Magazines, colored and white papers, public speakers. I accept with great reservation what I read in the white press. I am influenced to a small degree by the opinions of the colored papers.

3. The daily papers, the Nation, the New Republic, the Crisis, the Messenger, the Literary Digest, the Socialist Review, the colored papers, and other scattered organs from here, there and everywhere. The dependence I put upon these white papers is hard to state in words. If in a white paper I see something favorable to the Negro on a question of fact, I take it at face value. On questions of opinion, I draw my own conclusions from my own study and experience, wherever possible. Likewise in a colored paper I take at face value on a question of fact anything favorable to the white view. Otherwise I draw my own conclusions.

4. (a) Daily papers, lectures and magazines. (b) Always with reservations on any subject, especially on race records. (c) Not very much outside of a few good magazines.

5. Every article in white or Negro press is read with the idea that the bias of the writer must be discounted and that the conclusions cannot be accepted, but that one's conclusions must be made from the aggregate of the facts gleaned from every available source bearing upon the subject under discussion.

Leading New York newspapers: Herald, Times, World, Tribune, Call.

Leading American monthlies: World's Work, American, Metropolitan.

Leading American weeklies: Nation, New Republic, Freeman.

Leading American quarterlies: Yale Review, American Journal of Sociology, Non-Partisan Review.

Leading New York Negro weeklies: New York Age, Negro World.

Leading Negro monthlies: Messenger and Crisis.

I read all these papers with great reservations as to their truth and good judgment.

6. Newspapers, magazines, legislative action, personal contacts. The white press will always justify suspicion and the traditional grain of salt with reference to its news concerning Negroes. White news reporters know too few actual facts about Negroes and are too hemmed about by traditional prejudices to be reliable news gatherers in this field. Colored newspapers are, in my opinion, becoming increasingly more reliable in their expression of the thoughts and mind of Negroes, although many times they suffer from the same disease with reference to white people which besets white reporters.

7. History and observation. I habitually question unfavorable comment, because the prejudice and the training of the writers must be considered. Colored papers, unless paid to do otherwise, are more likely to exaggerate reports favorable to the Negro. Therefore some reservations must be made on account of the prejudice and the lack of training of many of the writers.

8. I believe that the information I get from the instruments ordinarily responsible for public opinion influences my opinion but little at any particular moment. I seem to have a theory of present-day tendencies in American institutions with reference to the Negro, and I accept items from these instruments merely as confirmations or negations of my opinions. Usually the negations are so few and far between that I can look upon them as sports or the "exception that proves the rule." Perhaps the Crisis figures most prominently in forming my opinion. At least when my opinion is formed, I am unable to account for it by any small number of books, or other publications. I read regularly the New York Age, the Negro World, and from time to time many other Negro newspapers; I read the Crisis, the Messenger, the Century, Review of Reviews, World's Work, Outlook, Independent, and various scientific articles bearing on the Negro and such reviews of an even larger number of articles as appear in the Psychological Bulletin and similar publications from time to time.

Nearly always when I read, the white press items concerning the Negro are looked upon as carefully selected and shaped for propaganda. By a careful and studied system of emphasis and omission such items can be made to prove most any point. There are exceptions, such as the Independent editorials, etc. Colored newspapers influence my opinion little directly. The items of real news are accepted at face value, there being no appeal, and these are referred to a more or less stable theory of the situation. The theory changes so gradually that I am unable to tell what items exert the greatest influence.

9. I read the dailies and the Crisis, Messenger and Amsterdam News. I accept what all of them say with great reservation, though I naturally give more credence to report of Negro topics in Negro papers than in white papers.

10. I regret to say that the Christian church and the religious press, which should be the chief reliance in shaping public opinion in the moral direction, are all but negligible factors. More race prejudice will be shown in Chicago in the churches on next Sunday morning than in the schools on the following Monday. Religion failing, the chief reliance for the present must be upon the secular agencies such as science, politics, trade, business and the public press and platform. The Negro himself must shape and direct righteous public opinion. Moral reform comes through the public, who feel the need of it. The Negro press is greatly hampered by restrictive and controlling influences, but on the whole it is, perhaps, the most righteous voice in America now crying in the wilderness.

11. I rely on books, magazines and newspapers for facts on which to base opinions. With the exception of a few weeklies, and a few radical newspapers and magazines, I believe the white press is hostile towards the Negro. Whatever I read concerning him, in the daily papers especially, I take with a grain of salt. In matters of race problems the Negro papers usually present the facts of the case fairly. I am inclined to accept their views about such matters. Their opinions about other phases of life, in which race is not predominant concern, I take also with a grain of salt or not at all.

12. Personally we rely on facts, not opinions. Hardly anything in the white press regarding Negroes is to be believed. It rarely, if ever, mentions good about Negroes. The white press is the chief instrument used for fostering the exploitations of Negroes. Most of the news is cooked and doctored to fan race hatred. A few white editors would perhaps write more fairly were they free. Personally very little. Nearly every Negro newspaper that we know, though, aims sincerely to benefit Negroes. While the judgment of the Negro editor is often at fault, his heart is honest. It is infinitely safer for Negroes to accept the judgment of a Negro editor than that of a white one.

Question: Specifically what constitutes the offensiveness in the manner in which the subject "Negro" is handled in some of the local white papers and what sensitive spots do these methods of handling touch?

Answers:

1. There is a suggestion of inferiority and degradation in the usual handling of the subject "Negro" by the local white papers; they generally use the subject in connection with something evil or unlovely; seldom discussed with credit or praise. This affects race honor, race pride, and race love.

2. Withholding the titles Miss and Mrs. from the names of colored women.

Crime headlines, parading Negro crime and criminals.

Printing misstatements of facts but not the denials of them.

Continual suggestions of "proper limitations upon Negro activity" along lines innocent where other races are concerned.

A patronizing attitude toward the Negro and his activities.

3. I detest the use of the word "Negro" as it is spelled with a small n. I shrink from the feminine "Negress." "A colored American" is not distasteful to me at any time.

4. The realization that an inferior man whose face is white can, by appealing to white racial consciousness, outstrip his superior by the utilization of mass cohesion. My feeling is one of thwarted ambition rather than offended sensibilities.

5. Spelling of "Negro" with a small n.

Negro caricatures—always a joke and easily handled.

The Negro as criminal is the general view.

Nothing said about the Negro on the progressive side.

Negro naturally inferior. I need only refer to the Harding episode.

6. The assumption that all Negroes are intellectually and morally inferior. The implication that certain crimes are peculiar to the Negro. The application of opprobrious epithets, so common in some papers. The statement that the race is satisfied with the treatment it receives in public places.

7. Undue prominence and emphasis upon the social aspect of news which is purely personal. Evident failure to obtain or give expression to the Negro point of view.

8. The tendency in my community to connect the Negro in public print with some offensive or boorish or irresponsibly humorous incident is the most annoying use of the word "Negro." By careful emphasis and omissions, the word "Negro" comes to be associated with irresponsible, apish, or silly conduct on the one hand or criminality on the other.

9. Among the other things I take offense at the way the local white papers cannot report crimes committed by Negroes without a big headline, often on the front page, stating that "Brutal Negro Commits Outrage"; I object to the use of the word "Negress," to spelling Negro with a small n; and particularly I object to the sins of omission of these newspapers in that they never attempt any news which may construct better relations, e.g., such as could be obtained if they secured on their reportorial staff an intelligent Negro who knew the needs and aspirations of his people. My sensitiveness upon this results from two things: (1) it wounds my self-respect, and (2) I hate to see race struggle consciously and effectively fomented by the powerful press.

10. The white race as a whole seems to disregard the just sensibilities of the Negro race, and does not scruple to use offensive terms and epithets which would be violently resented by any other group of American citizens. I have no objection to the term Negro used in a descriptive sense for the entire racial group.

11. The word Negro is still printed in many papers with a small n. A general attitude to ridicule Negroes is sometimes evident. Recently a baby contest was held in New York in which there were entered several Negro babes; some of them took prizes. One paper spoke of them as "dusky belles." Very often when a colored woman is mentioned in the papers it is written in this manner: "Katherine Jones, a negress." The recent discussion of Senator Harding's lineage showed that most of the papers considered it a "vile and contemptuous slander"; the possession of Negro blood seemed to be a polluting element which could only mean degradation.

12. The word Negro is wrong, altogether. Prejudice is the only reason for its use. Capitalizing might help, but does it modify the treatment?

The editor of the Crisis, whose opinions are read by millions of Negroes, was one of the five Negroes living outside of Chicago to whom the foregoing questions were put. He sensed in them an insidious attempt to make Negroes confess that they preferred ill treatment, riots, segregation by proscription, and Negro Ghettos. Acting upon this conviction, he warned the Negroes of the country to watch the white members of this Commission. The article is given as it appeared in the January 1921 issue of the Crisis:

Chicago

We would advise our Chicago friends to watch narrowly the work and forthcoming report of the Interracial Commission appointed by the Governor of Illinois after the late riot. The Commission consists of colored men who apparently have a much too complacent trust in their white friends; of white men who are too busy to know; and of enemies of the Negro race who under the guise of impartiality and good will are pushing insidiously but unswervingly a program of racial segregation. They have, for instance, sent a "questionnaire" to prominent colored men, consisting of fifteen questions, which with all their surface frankness and innocence seek to betray black folk by means of the logical dilemma of "segregation" and racial "solidarity." By subtle suggestion these queries say: If you believe in colored churches, why not in colored ghettos? Does not Negro advancement increase anti-Negro hatred? Are not Negroes prejudiced against whites? Are not the mistakes of Negro leaders manifest? And so on.

Indeed, if a professed enemy of black folk and their progress had set out to start a controversy so as to divide the Negroes and their friends in counsel and throw the whole burden of such hasty outbreaks of race hate as the East St. Louis, Washington, and Chicago riots upon them, he would have framed just such a questionnaire as has been sent out by this Commission.

The Crisis' view of the questions is presented in the following contrast:

The Questionnaire	The "Crisis" Version
What, to your mind, is thedistinction, either in point ofview or definite racial aim,between segregation and "racialsolidarity"? A large number of Negroes arein agreement in the matter ofseparate colored churches withcolored pastors, and, morerecently, colored bishops. Yetthis is an argument used bymany exponents of the segregationidea, both whole and partial, forother separate institutions.Candidly, what is your opinionon this subject?	If you believe in colored churches,why not in colored ghettos?
Do you believe that if Negroeswere 100 per cent literate itwould make any great differencein race relations? Are generaland higher education likely towiden the breach between Negroesand white persons, increaseintolerance, resentment,sensitiveness to insults, orcan a quieted process ofadjustment or complete fusionof interests be expected?	Does not Negro advancement increaseanti-Negro hatred?
Do you believe Negroes areprejudiced against white persons?	Are not Negroes prejudiced againstwhite persons?
Do you believe there should berecognized leaders of Negroes?Are there such persons whomyou regard as qualified forleadership? Discuss their meritsand demerits.	Are not the mistakes of Negroleaders manifest?
What in your opinion, are some ofthe greatest mistakes of prominentNegroes in their policies or standon racial issues?

At the time of this article the Commission had made no report of its findings whatever, and there was no possible basis for the accusation of bias. When a Negro living in Chicago explained that the questionnaire was prepared by a Negro member of the Commission's staff, the editor of the Crisis replied that "whoever framed the questionnaire of which I speak in the Crisis or advised its framing had a bias against Negroes. Of that I have not the slightest doubt, and what I was doing was simply to warn the public of this bias."

CHAPTER X
PUBLIC OPINION IN RACE RELATIONS—Continued
B. INSTRUMENTS OF OPINION MAKING