The Cracker in the Caribbean
“Meanwhile the feet of civilized slayers have woven across the fair face of the earth a crimson mesh of murder and rapine. The smoke of blazing villages ascends in lurid holocaust to the bloody god of battles from the altar of human hate in the obscene temple of race prejudice.”
These words, which we wrote in 1912, come back to our mind eight years later with no abatement of the awful horror which they express. And what gives a special point to them at this moment is the bloody rape of the republics of Hayti and Santo Domingo which is being perpetrated by the bayonets of American sailors and marines, with the silent and shameful acquiescence of 12,000,000 American Negroes too cowardly to lift a voice in effective protest or too ignorant of political affairs to know what is taking place. What boots it that we strike heroic attitudes and talk grandiloquently of Ethiopia stretching forth her hands when we Africans of the dispersion can let the land of L’Ouverture lie like a fallen flower beneath the feet of swine?
The facts of the present situation in that hapless land are given in the current issue of The Nation (a white American weekly). Taken together with the accounts which we have printed from time to time, it tells a tale of shuddering horror in comparison with which the Putumayo pales into insignificance and the Congo atrocities of Belgium are tame. The two West Indian republics have been murderously assaulted; their citizens have been shot down by armed ruffians, bombed by aeroplanes, hunted into concentration camps and there starved to death. In their own land their civil liberties have been taken away, their governments have been blackjacked and their property stolen. And all this by the “cracker” statesmanship of “the South,” without one word of protest from that defunct department, the Congress of the United States!
The Constitution of the United States says that the power to declare war shall belong exclusively to the Congress of the United States. But the Congress of the United States has been shamelessly ignored. In furtherance of the God-given “cracker” mandate to “keep the nigger in his place,” a mere Secretary of the Navy has assumed over the head of Congress the right to conquer and annex two nations and to establish on their shores the “cracker-democracy” of his native Carolina slave-runs.
It is high time that the Negro people of the United States call the hand of Josephus Daniels by appealing to the Legislature of the United States to resume its political functions, investigate this high-handed outrage and impeach the Secretary of the Navy of high crimes and misdemeanors against the peace and good name of the United States. The ordinary excuse of cowards will not obtain in this case. We would not be violating any law—wartime or other—but, on the contrary, we should be striving to put an end to a flagrant violation of the Constitution itself on the part of a high officer, who took an oath to maintain, support and defend it. This is our right and our duty. Irishmen, on behalf of Ireland, sell the bonds of an Irish loan to free Ireland from the tyranny of Britain—with whom we are on friendly terms—on the very steps of New York’s City Hall, while we black people are not manly enough to get up even a petition on behalf of our brothers in Hayti.
Out upon such crawling cowardice! Rouse, ye slaves, and show that the spirit of liberty is not quite dead among you! You who elected “delegates” to go to a Peace Conference to which you had neither passport nor invitation, on behalf of bleeding Africa, get together and present a monster petition to the American Congress, over which you have some control. Remember that George the Third engaged in a contest with these colonies because he had trouble at home. He could not defeat the Pitts, Burkes and Foxes at home, and wanted to win prestige from the colonials. Had he succeeded in setting his foot on their necks he would have returned home with increased prestige and power to bend the free spirits of
England to his will. Pitt knew this, and so did Fox and Burke. That is why they took the side of their distant cousins against the British king. And the British liberals of today thank their memories for it. If the “crackers” of the South can fasten their yoke on the necks of our brothers overseas, then God help us Negroes in America in the years to come!
If we were now appealing directly to the white men of America we might dwell upon the moral aspects of the question. But we must leave that to others. Yet we cannot do so without recalling the words of a great poet:
“But man, proud man,
Drest in a little brief authority,
Most ignorant of what he’s most assured—
His glassy essence—like an angry ape,
Plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven
As make the angels weep.”
And we draw some slight consolation from the fact that, even if he should escape impeachment, Josephus Daniels must surrender up his “brief authority” in another twelvemonth.
But we who are still free in a measure must not wait twelve months to act. We could not do that and preserve our racial self-respect. For—
“Whether conscious or unconscious, yet Humanity’s vast frame
Through its ocean-sundered fibres feels the gush of joy or shame;
In the gain or loss of one race all the rest have equal claim.”