CHAPTER XV
In the year immediately following the end of the great World War armed clashes between whites and Negroes in the United States occurred in the great cities of the North and West, Washington, Chicago and Omaha and also in the State of Arkansas. These race riots drew comment from whites and Negroes. Prior to these riots in the time of peace, there had been others during the World War at Chester and Philadelphia, in the State of Pennsylvania and one in Illinois at East St. Louis. Both Dr. DuBois, the president of “The National Association for the Advancement of the Colored People,” and the colored minister Wright, whose article on Negro migration has been alluded to, gave advice. It is interesting to compare their utterances. The communication of the minister is first cited.
“To my dear Brethren and Friends:
Permit me to say this word to you in this time of most serious anxiety. You have read of the riots in St. Louis, Philadelphia, and Chester, Pennsylvania during the Great World War and in Washington and Chicago since the close. When the facts have been finally sifted, they have always shown that the colored people did not start these riots. They were started by whites in every instance. If there are to be riots in the future I want to say to my people let it be as it has been in the past, that you shall not be the instigators of them. It is to the everlasting disgrace of these Northern cities as it has been of certain Southern cities, that these riots have been started by whites, and that white policemen who should be the first to uphold the law have, in nearly every instance assisted the mobs. Now is the time for all of us to keep our wits: to do nothing wrong, which may be any excuse for riot. Let men and women go about their work quietly, attending to their business. Keep away from saloons and places where there is gambling. More trouble starts in these places than anywhere else. Avoid arguments. Make no boasts. Make no threats. Attack no man nor woman without due provocation, and under no circumstances hurt a child. Don’t tell anybody what the Negroes are going to do to the whites. For we do not want war; we want peace. Our safety is in peace. Don’t loaf in the streets; do not needlessly encounter gangs of white boys. A gang of boys from 15 to 20 years is generally irresponsible. A gang of white toughs will delight to ‘jump’ a lone Negro, especially if they number eight or a dozen and believe the Negro is unarmed; and it is foolish to give them the chance. In trading as nearly as possible get the right change before paying your bill; know what you want, where you can trade with your own people, where you are not liable to get into a dispute. Don’t go to white theatres, white ice cream places, white banks or white stores, where you can find colored to serve you just as well. In other words don’t spend your hard earned money where you are in danger of being beaten up. Don’t carry concealed weapons—its against the law. Now I am not urging cowardice. I am urging common sense. I am urging law and order. Protect your home, protect your wife and children, with your life, if necessary. If a man crosses your threshold after you or your family, the law allows you to protect your home even if you have to kill the intruder. Obey the law but do not go hunting for trouble. Avoid it. Do not be afraid or lose heart because of these riots. They are merely symptoms of the protest of your entrance into a higher sphere of American citizenship. They are the dark hours before morning which have always come just before the burst of a new civic light. Some people see this light and they provoke these riots endeavoring to stop it from coming. But God is working. Things will be better for the Negro. We want full citizenship ballot, equal school facilities and everything else. We fought for them. We will have them; we must not yield. The greater part of the best thinking white people, North and South know we are entitled to all we ask. They know we will get it. In their hearts they are for us though they may fear the lower elements who are trying to stir up trouble to keep us from getting our rights. But they will fail just as they failed to keep us from our freedom. God is with us. They cannot defeat God. So I say to you stand aside, stand prepared, provoke no riot; just let God do his work. He may permit a few riots just to force the Negroes closer together. He lets the hoodlums kill a few in order to teach the many that WE MUST GET TOGETHER. But he does not mean that we shall be defeated—if we trust him. Let us learn the lesson He is teaching us. Remember a riot may break out in any place. Let pastors caution peace, prayer and preparedness. Let us provoke no trouble. Let us urge our congregations to keep level heads and do nothing that is unlawful.
Yours in Christian bonds,
R. R. Wright, Jr.
Editor of the Christian Recorder.”[364]
The appeal of DuBois is more dramatic:
“Brothers we are on the Great Deep. We have cast off on the vast voyage which will lead to Freedom or Death. For three centuries we have suffered and cowered. No race ever gave Passive Resistance and Submission to Evil longer, more piteous trial. Today we raise the terrible weapon of Self Defense. When the murderer comes he shall no longer strike us in the back. When the armed lynchers gather, we too must gather armed. When the mob moves we propose to meet it with bricks and clubs and guns. But we must tread here with solemn caution. We must never let justifiable self defense against individuals become blind and lawless offense against all white folk. We must not seek reform by violence. We must not seek vengeance. Vengeance is Mine saith the Lord; or to put it otherwise—only infinite Justice and Knowledge can assign blame in this poor world and we ourselves are sinful men, struggling desperately with our own crime and ignorance. We must defend ourselves, our homes, our wives and children against the lawless without stint or hesitation; but we must carefully and scrupulously avoid on our own part bitter and unjustifiable aggression against anybody. The line is difficult to draw. In the South the Police and Public Opinion back the mob and the least resistance on the part of the innocent black victim is nearly always construed as a lawless attack on society and government. In the North the Police and the Public will dodge and falter, but in the end they will back the Right when the truth is made clear to them. But whether the line between just resistance and angry retaliation is hard or easy, we must draw it carefully, not in wild resentment, but in grim and sober consideration; and when back of the impregnable fortress of the Divine Right of Self Defense, which is sanctioned by every law of God and man, in every land, civilized or uncivilized, we must take our unfaltering stand. Honor, endless and undying Honor, to every man, black or white, who in Houston, East St. Louis, Washington and Chicago gave his life for Civilization and Order. If the United States is to be a Land of Law, we would live humbly and peaceably in it—working, singing, learning and dreaming to make it and ourselves nobler and better; if it is to be a Land of Mobs and Lynchers, we might as well die today as tomorrow.
‘And how can a man die better
Than facing fearful odds
For the ashes of his fathers
And the temples of his Gods?’
The Crisis (New York) September.”[365]
In a consideration of these two utterances, if it be conceded that in point of literary excellence, DuBois’s appeal is superior, yet that does not establish that in his call he better plays the part of leader than the Negro minister, first quoted, whose exhortation to his race, unlike that of DuBois, is in no way overstrained, nor pitched too high for the humblest, if possessed of rudimentary intelligence, to grasp. The detailed instructions in Wright’s publication, simple as they are, contain wisdom, the wisdom which crieth out in the streets from of old; while if the comparison instituted, by DuBois between the Northern and the Southern whites, in respect to the police and public opinion in the two sections, is true, it is passing strange, that unlike the Negro minister, he is not found advising the migration from the worse to the better section, as far as the needs of his race are concerned. If in the North, even if justice moves limpingly as he describes; yet according to him justice does move. And for the poor and oppressed what gain can out-weigh justice? But there is a graver comparison to be instituted between these calls. DuBois in his publication exclaims:
“Honor, endless and undying Honor, to every man, black or white who in Houston, East St. Louis, Washington and Chicago gave his life for Civilization and Order.”
Now whatever wrongs or supposed wrongs the Negro soldiery suffered in Houston, can it be reasonably contended that they, armed by the Federal Government and enlisting to be under its orders, in breaking away from the control of their superior officers and with weapons put in their hands for other purposes, in any way assisted civilization and order by precipitating themselves upon the white population in an attempt to shoot up the city? If he does so claim then he is worse than the Negro soldiery who so acted, or those Negroes and whites, no matter who they were, who criticised Roosevelt’s action in the Brownsville matter. No matter to what lofty station Roosevelt’s critics may have been advanced; no matter what service they may claim to have rendered peace and civilization, their weakness in that first instance induced the graver breach, for which, under President Wilson, as commander-in-chief, the Negro soldiery were courtmartialed and punished for their excesses at Houston. Yet while the perusal of DuBois’s call, as above, does not convey a positive stand for or against the Negro soldiery and is open to the criticism which appears in Pickens’s book:
“Till this day the Negro is seldom frank to the white man. He says what he does not mean; he means what he does not say,”—
apparently his view changed. As editor of The Crisis, Dr. DuBois upon the occasion of the Chicago riots as above noted honored every man, black or white, who, in either Houston or Chicago, gave his life for civilization and order; later he expressed the following, which is nothing more nor less than a justification of the behavior of the Negro soldiery at Houston:
“Six years ago December 11, at 7:17 in the morning, thirteen American Negro soldiers were murdered on the scaffold by the American government to satisfy the blood-lust of Texas, on account of the Houston riot.”[366]
Now, how does this exhibit this extremely gifted man, as a leader of his race? In the roar and blaze of the Chicago riot, in 1919 he was for “Honor, endless and undying Honor to every man black or white in Houston ... who gave his life for civilization and order”; but by the end of 1920, the executed Negro soldiers had become martyrs, murdered by the government.
But in justice to this most excitable man, it must be admitted that there can be found whites of cultivation and intellect just as wild. Take the case of Dr. H. J. Seligman.
With all the insufferable conceit of a certain class of white, he appropriates the work of Negroes, (easily recognized by those who have heard their most intelligent speakers), denatures it of the humor which makes its appeal and presents it to the public, as his own indictment of the South. “The Southern dogma colors the rest of the country,” he says. Yet he admits—“In so far as the South is concerned, conditions improve as the Negro moves out.” Another writer, Stephen Graham, starts his book with crediting to the Negro slaves emancipated in 1863 the “twelve millions out of a total of a hundred millions of all races blending in America.”[367] As the census postdating his book gives only 10,389,328 Negroes for 1920, and as in all reason nearly two millions of these may be argued to be the progeny of the free persons of color of 1860, the contribution to the race from the class of colored person invariably ignored by English and Northern writers must approach almost a third. But that is not sensational. So journeying through Virginia, Tennessee, Alabama, Georgia, Florida, Louisiana and Mississippi, visiting Negroes, accepting their hospitality and practicing social equality, Graham most inconsiderately denounces their smell and, because he failed to reach and establish any spiritual touch, in his attempt to address them, stupidly decides there was none to be attained. Expressing the belief that the Negroes of New York and Chicago were firmer in flesh and will than those in the South and yield more hope for the race in the light of the extra prosperity and happiness of the Northern Negroes, he nevertheless crawls back to the feet of Northern prejudice with the declaration against the migration of the Negroes from the South to the North and the consequent even distribution over the whole of the country, because it would take “hundreds of years to even them out” and “they would probably crowd more and more into the large cities and be as much involved in evil conditions, as they were in the South.” Can it be possible that there are nothing but evil conditions in the great cities of the North and West? Is it not the belief of the Northern authorities, that what the Negro needs is education? What education is equal to residence in these great pulses of our civilization? Has not Mr. Graham, himself attested “the extra prosperity and happiness of the Northern Negroes?” Why then attempt to throw doubts on the benefits to the Negro from diffusion? It might as well be faced without any more squirming. It is inevitable. By the law of compensation, that section of our great country, which for a hundred years or more has represented to the admiring world all the virtue, intelligence and civilization of the United States, especially in its treatment of the colored race will have to endeavor to live up to its reputation. The aspiring Negro is not going to be denied that contact with the most advanced civilization of this country, which those who freed him owe to him. If he crowds into the great cities, it is because there he finds its most advertised display, and so the most active and energetic push into it with some contempt for their feeble self elected leaders, who have preached against or kept quiet concerning it.
For three decades prior to the war between the States, the Southern States of the Union had made railroad development secondary to the Negro question. Constituting as they did in area at that time fully one-half of the States; peopled with 3,575,634 whites and 2,176,127 Negroes, they had been led to base their civilization on the substratum of an inferior race, putting that wild conception even above the Federal Union, that great experiment in government, which they had been most instrumental in framing. After their overthrow, Reconstruction raised the spectre of the Negro outstripping the whites in the South and almost assuredly in the lower South. And what establishes the wonderful clearness of the vision of the Negro, William Hannibal Thomas, was his ability, two years before the overthrow of Reconstruction, to see through the mists of 1874, which so completely shrouded the vision of Judge Albion Tourgee as late as 1888 in his “Appeal to Caesar.”
For Thomas realized, from the outset, that the Negro majority of South Carolina could not last.
In the hundred years which have elapsed since 1820, the proportion of the Negro population to the whites in the United States, as a whole, has dropped from 19 per cent to 9.9 per cent, the whites rising from 81 per cent to 90.1 per cent. With regard to the Negro population in the Southern States as compared with the rest of the United States, the proportion in the South has dropped from 92.5 per cent to 84.2 per cent, the percentage of the rest of the United States rising from 8 per cent to 15.98 per cent. But while it is treated as a movement of one hundred years, as far as the South is concerned, on account of the unknown accretions prior to 1860 through the illicit slave trade and the magnetic attraction of Reconstruction, it could be more accurately represented as a movement of forty years.
In the five great States of Kentucky, Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana, embracing an area of about 224,960 square miles of contiguous territory, the white population had risen from 4,112,564 in 1880, to 7,444,218 in 1920; while in the same period the Negro population had increased from 2,408,654 only to 3,223,791. But what is even more striking is the fact that in the last decade there has been an actual decrease of 143,288 in the Negro population of this Southern area.
At the same time in the five great States of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan and Wisconsin the Negro population has risen to 514,589, and to the East of the great Northwest, in the Middle States and New England 709,453 were found to be; while West of the Mississippi river, outside of the old South, into a region, which before the war between the States was prairie and almost unexplored mountain and desert, 314,879 Negroes have moved. Yet in the South they still constitute 26 per cent of the population to only 3 per cent outside, in the rest of the Union.
Mr. Graham’s impression, however, that it will “take hundreds of years to even them out” is a hasty and illconsidered judgment. Louisiana, which forty years ago had a colored majority of 28,707, had by the Census of 1920 a white majority of 396,360. Georgia had increased its white majority from 90,773 in 1880 to 482,749 in 1920; while the great cotton planting State of Alabama had raised its majority in the same period from 62,083 to 546,972. Considering what the Census figures show for Virginia, suffering as no State suffered from the war between the States, engaged in by her for no purpose of sustaining a black substratum for her civilization; but for a purpose identical with that which the civilized world acclaimed for Belgium and supporting the shock of war with a courage and devotion not surpassed by France in the Great War, she was shorn of about a third of her area and four-tenths of her white population, in utter defiance of the Constitution; but, now with a white majority which has risen from 57.5 per cent to 70.1 per cent, she is in a healthier condition than the portion which was carved out of her flank. The gain of North Carolina is even greater. Taking the whole South, we find, that from 1880 to 1920 the white population has increased from 12,309,087 to 25,016,579; while during the same period the colored has only risen from 6,013,215 to 8,801,753. It is true that by the Census of 1920 two Southern States, Mississippi and South Carolina still each had a colored majority; but one which had shrunk from 213,227 to only 46,181 in South Carolina and from 170,893 in Mississippi to 81,262; the percentage of whites in South Carolina being 48.6 per cent and in Mississippi 48.3 per cent.[368]
Until the Census of 1930 is published we shall not know positively; but in this, the fifth year since the last census, all available information seems to indicate that in both States the white minority has been converted into a white majority. By the census of the United States for 1920 in the 875,670 square miles which constitute the Southern States there were 25,016,579 whites and 8,801,753 colored inhabitants; while the remaining 2,150,600 square miles of the Union held 70,925,032 whites and 1,552,402 Negroes, with 109,966 under strictly Federal control at Washington. But again, North of the Northern line of the United States extends a region greater in area than the United States in which as indicated by the Canadian census of 1921 there are only 8,750,643 inhabitants. The door of opportunity therefore still remains open to the Negro in America and his inability to see this, throughout the fifty eight years of his freedom in which it has been accessible to him by foot, while handicapped by their ignorance of our wants, our customs and our language, the impoverished whites of Europe have crossed the three thousand miles of water which barred them, offers the most striking proof of the Negro’s lack of capacity to help himself.
Perhaps, in justice to the Negroes as a whole, it should be noted that in no race that has ever existed has it been easier to use the supposed leaders against the true interests of the masses, than is apparent in the history of the Negroes. Yet even these, as they now clash with each other, emit some sparks of political intelligence. Meanwhile the masses are growing more accustomed to judge for themselves. Northern environment has not been without its effect upon them. They are taking something from it and they are going to give something to it.
In the Northwest, in all probability, they are in the next decade apt to gather in such numbers, as to affect both the South and Canada, although in exactly opposite ways. To a considerable extent what The New Republic foresaw in 1916 is coming to pass; but in somewhat quicker movement than that paper anticipated. The last great effort to induce them to remain in the South their “natural home” has been made. It has utterly failed. They are steadily moving out and diffusion is proceeding without any of the ills so continuously alleged as inseparable with such a movement.
And now to this last effort, the comments upon it and what may be called the first Negro Crusade, we should pay some attention, and then close with an allusion to the most helpful discussion ever instituted concerning the Negro.