The Negro and the nation

by Hubert H. Harrison

II—Economic

Political rights are the only sure protection and guarantee of economic rights. Every fool knows this. And yet, here in America to-day we have people who tell Negroes that they ought not to agitate for the ballot so long as they still have a chance to get work in the south. And Negro leaders, hired by white capitalists who want cheap labor-power, still continue to mislead both their own and other people. The following facts will demonstrate the economic insecurity of the Negro in the South.

Up to a few years ago systematic peonage was wide-spread in the South. Now, peonage is slavery unsanctioned by law. In its essence it is more degrading than mere chattel slavery. Any one who doubts this may look to modern Mexico for proofs. This peonage in the South had reduced many black men to slavery. And it isn’t stamped out yet. It was on January 3, 1911, that the Supreme Court, in the case of Alonzo Bailey, declared unconstitutional the Alabama peonage law, which had been upheld by the state Supreme Bench. About the same time W. S. Harlan, a nephew of the late Justice Harlan of the United States Supreme Court, and manager of a great lumber and turpentine trust, doing business in Florida and Alabama, was sentenced to eighteen months’ imprisonment and fined $5,000 for peonage. He has since been pardoned and had his fine remitted by President Taft.

One of the forms of this second slavery is the proprietary system, according to which the Negro laborer or tenant farmer must get his supply at the proprietor’s store—and he gets it on credit. The accounts are cooked so that the Negro is always in debt to the modern slave-holder. Some of them spend a life-time working out an original debt of five or ten dollars.

But peonage isn’t all. The professional southerner is always declaring that whatever else the south may not do for the Negro it supplies him with work. It does—when he works for some one else. When he works for himself it is very often different. For instance, there was the Georgia Railroad strike of May, 1909. The Negro firemen were getting from fifty cents to a dollar a day less than the white firemen, they had to do menial work, and could not be promoted to be engineers. They could be promoted, however, to the best runs by the rule of seniority. But the white firemen, who had fixed the economic status of the black firemen, objected to even this. They went on strike and published a ukase to the people of the state in which they said: “The white people of this state refuse to accept social equality.”

On the eighth of March, 1911, the firemen of the Cincinnati, New Orleans & Texas Pacific Railroad did the same thing. In the attacks made on the trains by them and their sympathizers many Negro firemen were killed. Occurrences of this sort are increasing in frequency and they have a certain tragic significance. It means that the Negro, stripped of the ballot’s protection, holds the right to earn his bread at the mere sufferance of the whites. It means that no black man shall hold a job that any white man wants. And that, not in the South alone. There is the case of the Pavers’ Union of New York City. The colored pavers, during the panic of 1907, got behind in their dues. The usual period granted expired on Friday. On Monday they sent in their dues in full to the national organization. The treasurer refused to receive the dues and at once got out an injunction against them. This injunction estopped them from appealing to the National Executive Committee or to the national convention. They are still fighting the case.

In January 1911 the several walking delegates of the Painters’ Plumbers’, Masons,’ Carpenters’, Steam Fitters’, Plasterers’ and Tinsmiths’ Unions compelled the Thompson & Starrett Construction Co., the second largest firm of contractors in New York, to get rid of the colored cold painters who were engaged on the annex to Stearns’ department store. They would not admit them to membership in the union; they merely declared that colored men would not be allowed to do this work. And these are the same men who denounce Negro strike-breakers. They want them out of the unions and also want them to fight for the unions. Presumably they would have them eating air-balls in the meanwhile.

In February 1911 the New York Cab Company was dropping its Negro cab drivers, because, it said, its patrons demanded it. In November 1911 the white chauffeurs of New York were trying to terrorize the colored chauffeurs by a system of sabotage in the garage, because they, too, believed that these jobs were white men’s jobs.

It is but a short step from the denial of the right to work to the denial of the right to own. In fact, the two are often linked together, as in the next ease. In the latter part of 1910, land speculators in Hominy Okla., sold some land for cotton farms to Negroes. The Negroes paid for this land, took possession, and were getting along splendidly when—“the local whites protested.” “Night-riders (i. e., Ku Klux) around Hominy, several days before, served notice that all Negroes must leave the town at once, and to emphasize the warning they exploded dynamite in the neighborhood of Negro houses.” So the Negroes fled, fearing for their lives. At Baxterville, Miss., the same thing happened in March 1912. In November 1910, a colored man named Matthew Anderson in Kansas City was having a fine $5,000 house built. But the jealousy of the white neighbors prevented its completion. It was blown up by dynamite when it had been almost finished. In Warrenton, Ga., notice was sent to three colored men and one widow, who had prospered greatly in business, to the effect that they must leave immediately because the white people of Warrenton “were not a-goin’ to stand for rich niggers.” One of them has been forced to sell out his business at a loss. Another never answers a knock and never leaves his house by the front door. All through these things Mr. Washington told his race that if it would work hard, get property and be useful to a community it would not need to strive for a share in the government!