CHAPTER XVI
At Birmingham, Alabama, President Harding spoke on the Negro question, October 25, 1921. Elected president by the greatest majority which had ever placed a president in power, his remarks, if not very profoundly wise, were unquestionably bravely frank. His position was that unless there should “be recognition of the absolute divergence in things social and racial,” there might be “occasion for great and permanent differentiation.” To quote him in such passages as most clearly and unequivocally expressed his views, he will be found to have said:
Men of different races may well stand uncompromisingly against any suggestion of social equality. Indeed it would be helpful to have the word equality eliminated from this consideration, to have it accepted on both sides that this is not a question of social equality but a question of recognizing a fundamental, eternal and inescapable difference. We shall have made real progress when we develop an attitude in the public and community thought of both races which recognizes the difference.[369]
To this he added, as if replying to some unexpressed utterance, altho’ he was the sole speaker:
I would accept that a black man cannot be a white man and that he does not need and should not aspire to be as much like a white man as possible in order to accomplish the best that is possible for him.[370]
In these two utterances President Harding put himself in accord with Abraham Lincoln and in opposition to Theodore Roosevelt’s dinner to Booker Washington, and, from this, he drew near to what is supposed to be the teaching of Booker Washington:
“I would say let the black man vote when he is fit to vote.... I have no sympathy with the half baked altruism that would overstock us with doctors and lawyers of whatever color and leave us in need of people fit and willing to do the manual work of a work-a-day world.”[371]
From these generalizations, after quoting from F. D. Lugard a paragraph which even a Philadelphia lawyer would be puzzled to unravel, in which it is declared that while there shall be equality in the paths of knowledge and culture and equal admiration and opportunity, yet each must pursue his own inherited traditions, and while agreeing to be spiritually equal diverge physically and materially, the President reached the piece-de-resistance of his discourse:
“It is probable that as a nation we have come to the end of the period of very rapid increase in our population. Restricted immigration will reduce the rate of increase and force us back upon our older population to find people to do the simpler physically harder manual tasks. This will require some difficult adjustments. In anticipation of such a condition the South may well recognize that the North and West are likely to continue their drains upon its colored population, and that if the South wishes to keep its fields producing and its industry still expanding it will have to compete for the services of the colored man.”[372]
To this, the most important part of the President’s remarks, while complimenting the tone and spirit of the whole, the same paper in which Carlyle McKinley in 1889 sought to reveal to the South its true policy, thus replied:
“The South would be glad to see a considerable part of the negro population in this section find homes in other sections.”[373]
The comment of that Northern publication which had, as has been shown, most intelligently discussed the migration of the Negroes from the South to the North and West in 1916, was to the effect that while the President’s scheme had much to recommend it as far as the spirit was concerned, yet—
“The South knows as President Harding ought to know that you can’t draw a sharp line between politics and social life. The offices of a State are in most parts of America positions of social leadership. With complete political equality the State of Mississippi might easily elect a Negro as governor. Would such a result be accepted by Mississippi as devoid of social significance? The race problem unfortunately is not one that admits of easy general solutions.”[374]
The President’s speech appeared about the time at which Dr. DuBois returned from the second of the Pan-African congresses in Europe, which he had been mainly instrumental in convening and at which there were Negroes and mulattoes from West and South Africa, British Guiana, Grenada, Jamaica, Nigeria and the Gold Coast; Indians from India and East Africa; colored men from London; and twenty-five American Negroes. There were meetings at London, Brussels and Paris.
The London congress over which presided a distinguished English administrator, later Secretary of State for India, Sir Sidney Olivier, was mild, the chairman making no attempt to control the findings. But at Brussels, where—
“the black Senegalese, Blaise Diagne, French Deputy and High Commissioner of African troops—”[375]
presided—
DuBois says—
“We sensed the fear about us in a war land with nerves still taut.”[376]
It seems Oswald Garrison Villard, with that refreshing conceit which tempts him to discuss any subject whether he knows anything about it or not, had been ignorantly denouncing conscription, imposed on French Negroes.
With infinitely superior political acumen the London congress under the leadership of DuBois, or certainly with his approval, claimed the right to bear it equally with white Frenchmen, as long as France recognized racial equality; but when DuBois at Brussels, after a few days of harmless palaver—
“rose the last afternoon and read in French and English the resolutions of London—”[377]
there was some stir. This is the scene, as depicted by DuBois:
“Diagne, the Senegales Frenchman who presided was beside himself with excitement after the resolutions were read; as under secretary of the French government; as ranking Negro of greater France, and perhaps as a successful investor in French Colonial enterprises he was undoubtedly in a difficult position. Possibly he was bound by actual promises to France and Belgium. His French was almost too swift for my ears, but his meaning was clear; he felt that the cause of the black man had been compromised by black American radicals; he especially denounced our demand for ‘the restoration of the ancient common ownership of the land in Africa’ as rank communism.”[378]
Dr. DuBois does not explain wherein it was not; but contents himself with declaring that Diagne used his power as chairman and prevented a vote, the question being referred to the French congress. Later in conversation with DuBois, Diagne declared that he had “only sought to prevent the assassination of a race.”
In his final analysis of the congress at Paris, DuBois says:
“France recognizes Negro equality, not only in theory but in practice, she has for the most part enfranchised her civilized Negro citizens. But what she recognizes is the equal right of her citizens black and white to exploit by modern industrial methods her laboring classes black and white; and the crying danger to black France is that its educated and voting leaders will join in the industrial robbery of Africa, rather than lead its masses to education and culture.”[379]
DuBois thought Diagne and Candace, while unwavering defenders of racial opportunity, education for and the franchise for the civilized, “curiously timid” when the industrial problems of Africa “were” approached. Well so was the Negro, Martin R. Delany, candidate for lieutenant governor of South Carolina in 1874. He had had advantages for studying the African problems which Dr. DuBois had possibly not enjoyed to the same degree. Delany in his younger days had been an African explorer and, even if he had not penetrated very deeply into “The Dark Continent,” had seen the African Negro in his lair. He and his younger co-laborer for reform in South Carolina, William Hannibal Thomas, ex-Union soldier from Ohio, as has been narrated, supported the candidacy of Judge Green for governor of South Carolina, in 1874, against the brilliant white Carpet-Bagger Daniel H. Chamberlain and his lieutenant, the even less reputable black Carpet-Bagger, R. B. Elliott. But while Thomas accepted Chamberlain, in 1876, as a changed man, with regard to Chamberlain’s accompaniment, Delany, who had been in South Carolina since 1865, eleven years to Thomas’s three, was still “curiously timid.”
DuBois later enlarged his experience by a trip to Africa and, before that, possibly may have been moved by the work of a French Negro scholar who had made some mark in the literary world and occasioned some stir in French colonial politics, just after the Pan-African congress. But upon his return from these in 1921 DuBois at once addressed himself to the consideration of President Harding’s Birmingham speech.
With a curious sympathy for the man, Harding, and a display of rank ingratitude to that white leader who had dared to do more for the Negro, than Harding thought became a white man, DuBois declared:
“The President made a braver, clearer utterance than Theodore Roosevelt ever dared to make or than William H. Taft or William McKinley ever dreamed of....
Mr. Harding meant that the American Negro must acknowledge that it was wrong and a disgrace for Booker T. Washington to dine with President Roosevelt.”[380]
Although thus praising the President and with a wholly gratuitous sneer at the dead Roosevelt who had dared the “disgrace” and suffered for it, the Doctor asserted Harding’s “braver clearer utterance” was “an inconceivably dangerous and undemocratic demand,” which he disposes of with one sweep of his pen, which not only wiped out Harding’s speech; but also brushed away the basis upon which John Stuart Mill erected his political economy, to wit—“the first impulse of mankind is to follow and obey, servitude rather than freedom is their natural state.”
Not so in the view of Dr. DuBois:
“No system of social uplift which begins by denying the manhood of a man can end by giving him a free ballot, a real education and a just wage.”[381]
In reply to this it may be said, that when the Negroes are thoroughly diffused throughout the United States, they are apt to get as free a ballot as the whites and proportionately the same education; but when all who labor, white or black, get a just wage, the millennium will have arrived and the capitalistic lion will be lying down with the horny headed laboring lamb.
It cannot be denied, however, that Dr. DuBois stirred up some comment with his congresses and those who believe in the exhortation—“let there be light” will be interested in the French and German utterances thereon.
The Paris Temps, generally considered the organ of the French government, editorializes in these words:
“It is the claims of the wiser group which must be studied.... The road will be long for Negroes in the League of Nations toward the liberation modest though it is, whose program they have elaborated in their Congress. But there is nothing to keep us French from putting into immediate practice some articles at least of this program to start with.”[382]
This is a world wide echo of Hayne’s Speech on the floor of the United States Senate just about a century earlier. It is also to some extent an endorsement of Diagne, whom DuBois had criticised as “curiously timid.” The portrait of the remarkable Senegalese who played such an Ajax to DuBois’s ambitious Hector does not appear; but an entire front page of The Crisis is given to Maran, the Black Thersites of the race.
If DuBois would accept Diagne as the leader of the Negro people some results might come; but the Negro in DuBois will scarcely permit this. He might accept the far less able white, Oswald Garrison Villard. But no Negro.
The German comment on the congress is less cautious than the French but points in the same direction:
“The Congress was called by Dr. Burghardt DuBois, an American mulatto who has been prominent in his native country for many years as a race agitator. Its purpose was to draw together all Negro organizations throughout the world. The agenda included: the segregation of the colored races; the race problem in England, America and South Africa; and a future programme....
The attendance at London and Brussels was very small, but some four hundred delegates from every portion of the world participated in the proceedings at Paris.... At the London session the radical ideas of DuBois, which approached those of Garvey were in the ascendant and force was preached as a possible alternative to attain the ends which the Negroes have in view.... At Brussels, Deputy Diagne, a member of the French Parliament from Senegal, presided. When he saw that radical ideas were likely to prevail there also, he arbitrarily terminated the session. At Paris the programme was cut and dried.... The newspapers gave full and sympathetic reports of the sessions. France by this stroke of diplomacy attained her purpose. Under the skilful leadership of the French deputy Diagne, the Congress adopted a more moderate programme of evolution instead of revolution, culminating in a platform demanding equality of all civilized men without distinction of race; a systematic plan for educating the colored races; liberty for the natives to retain their own religion and manners; restoration of native titles to their former lands and to its produce; the establishment of an international institute to study and record the development of the black race; the protection of the black race by the League of Nations; and the creation of a separate section in the International Labor Bureau to deal with Negro labor.”[383]
In this report it is claimed both the United States and England are handled harshly, while France is praised. It seems Sir Harry Johnston is, to some degree, in accord with this praise of France, at the expense of his own country, his opinion being:
“All in all, I am of the opinion that the French nation since 1871 has dealt with the Negro problem in Africa and in tropical America more wisely, prudently and successfully than we English have done.”[384]
It is this very fluent gifted linguist, in all probability, who is responsible for the picturesque conclusion:
“Finally it is perfectly certain that the race question is the rock upon which the British Empire will be wrecked or the corner stone upon which the greatest political structure in the history of the world will be erected.”[385]
But if from a representative of Imperial Germany, the only country which ever enacted as a part of its organic law the principle of Nullification, it surpasses in grandiosity and positiveness of statement the dictum of Calhoun in 1837:
“We have for the last 12 years been going through a great and dangerous juncture. The passage is almost made and, if no new cause of difficulty should intervene, it will be successfully made. I, at present, see none but the abolition question, which however, I fear is destined to shake the country to its centre.... For the first time the bold ground has been taken that slaves have a right to petition Congress ... itself emancipation.... Our fate as a people is bound up in the question. If we yield, we will be extirpated; but if we successfully resist, we will be the greatest and most flourishing people of modern time. It is the best substratum of population in the world and one on which great and flourishing Commonwealths may be most easily and safely reared.”[386]
We of the South know, we did not successfully resist emancipation; were not extirpated; but do form part of “the greatest and most flourishing people of modern time.” We must realize that, no matter what was the price paid for it, emancipation was salvation for the South. It was a deliverance from the “body of death,” Reviewing our history, we find that in the same year that Calhoun, the greatest disruptive force in our politics, pronounced the dictum last quoted, a comparatively young and unknown politician, destined to be the greatest cementing force of the Union, declared—
“That the institution of slavery is founded on both injustice and bad policy; but that the promulgation of abolition doctrines tends rather to promote than to abate its evils.”[387]
In discussing this utterance of Lincoln, his latest biographer, Mr. Stephenson, who declares it reveals the dawn of his intellect, beautifully pictures how—
“arise the two ideas, the faith in a mighty governing power; the equal faith that it should use its might with infinite tenderness; that it should be slow to compel results.”[388]
Going back ten years before the dawn of Lincoln’s intellect, and four prior to the declaration that the Negro question was, as he, Calhoun, saw it an African slave substratum on which great and flourishing commonwealths could be most easily and safely reared, Hayne, on the floor of the United States Senate, voiced in his own words, Lincoln’s subsequently sponsored thought.
Harken to Hayne:
“Thus, Sir, it appears that the Almighty in the wise order of his providence has marked out the course of events, which will not only remove all danger, but gradually and effectually and in his own good time accomplish our deliverance from what gentleman are pleased to consider as the curse of the land.”[389]
In 1827, it is apparent that the Negro question was a different question than it later became to the South; and that the strengthening and possible spread of slavery was in some measure due to Calhoun’s devotion to it, over and above all other questions, even before Nullification, is evidenced by his letter to Maxcy in 1830:
“I consider the Tariff, but as the occasion rather than the real cause of the present unhappy state of things.”[390]
Strange to state, even at that early date, he writes of the South possibly being compelled to “rebel,” to preserve her “peculiar institution.”
Fortunately for the Lower South, Lincoln and not Seward was elected president in 1860; for had Seward been raised to that position of preeminence, in all human probability the seven States of South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas would have been allowed to secede and attempt the experiment of government involved therein, with a population of 2,619,116 whites, 36,861 free persons of color, many of whom were slave owners, and 2,312,372 Negro slaves.
That the colored population would have increased rapidly is a reasonable conclusion. Virginia, North Carolina, Kentucky, and Tennessee, in all probability, would have speedily divested themselves of a great proportion of the 1,324,166 slaves they held and, even if such Southern statesmen as Leonidas Washington Spratt had not been able to reopen the African slave trade, the smuggling in of slaves on a greater and greater increasing scale would have been a consequence. Slavery being the corner stone of the new political structure, it would have been natural that the view of Governor Seabrook, that slave holding Negroes should be admitted to the ballot, would have eventually prevailed. War might have come between the large and small sections of North America from some frontier incident concerning Arkansas, the Indian Territory or Mexico; but it could scarcely have been the pulverizing conflict which the Lower South sustained by the two and a half million additional whites of Virginia, North Carolina and Tennessee, maintained for four years of desperate struggle.
Each year that the conflict was delayed would have found the States which remained in the old Union stronger and whiter, sickling the seceded States with railroads and quite possibly drawing Canada into their orbit; for as Sir Charles Dilke has pointed out in his Problems of Greater Britain, published when the annexation of Canada was still a debatable question—
“a fact often overlooked in England is that hitherto the western centres of population of British North America have been more intimately connected with districts lying South of them across the American frontier than with places East and West of them, within the Canadian border.”[391]
The days of the “Little Englanders” were only then passing, when the colonies had almost been considered a nuisance.
But whether the region mapped out now as Winnipeg, Alberta and the other wheat areas of the Canadian West might have been attached to the great white Union in the sixties, if undisturbed by war and moving with continuingly accelerated industrial development or not, the Union would have become whiter, as the Lower South darkened; and Calhoun’s “substratum” theory would have there been tested to the fullest extent and risk.
From this Lincoln’s adroit political play induced the Lower South, by firing on the flag, to save itself, unknowingly. By the invasion of Virginia he forced that State, as well as North Carolina and Tennessee, into the Confederacy, against which, in 1862, he drew the weapon of emancipation without the least idea as to how deep it must cut. For it has proven to be a two edged sword.
Nothing more clearly reveals Lincoln’s ignorance of the inevitable consequences of emancipation, than his message to Congress in December, 1862:
“But it is dreaded that the freed people will swarm forth and cover the whole land. Are they not already in the land? Will liberation make them more numerous? Equally distributed among the whites of the whole country and there would be but one colored to seven whites. Could the one in any way disturb the seven?... But why should emancipation South send the free people North? People of any color seldom run unless there be something to run from. Heretofore to some extent they have fled North from bondage and destitution. But if gradual emancipation and deportation be adopted they will have neither to flee from.... And in any event cannot the North decide for itself whether to receive them?”[392]
If this was the Great Emancipator’s view of emancipation, what wonder that the “Southern color psychosis” should spread like measles, from contact alone.
The Congressional Reconstructionists thought that they had won in the war between the States what has since been styled euphoniously, “a sphere of influence,” a subject people to sell goods to. But the mass of Northern and Western whites, true Americans, sickened of the excesses of Congressional Reconstruction. The Federal troops were withdrawn on the order of a true patriot, Rutherford B. Hayes, President of the United States, and not of a section.
Chastened and disciplined by their fall from power, the most energetic and industrious, the boldest and most assertive Negroes have, since 1876, been steadily moving into the mammoth cities of the North and West, to there build up in the segregated districts, groups of New Negroes, as the Report of the Chicago riot shows “more perfect thro suffering.”
By a joint committee of blacks and whites that riot has been discussed and that makes the discussion the more valuable.
In that great city of two and a half million of inhabitants, after ten days of riot, bloodshed, arson and murder, in response to the appeal of representative citizens, Governor Lowden appointed an emergency committee to study the underlying causes of the riot of 1919 and to make recommendations. According to the Census of 1920 there were then in Chicago 109,458 Negroes. The chairman of the committee was Edgar A. Bancroft, a leading lawyer, subsequently appointed by President Coolidge Ambassador to Japan. The vice chairman was Dr. Francis W. Sheppardson, at one time of the University of Chicago. The most prominent Negro on the Committee was Robert S. Abbott, proprietor of the greatest and most influential Negro paper in the United States, The Chicago Defender. The report was published in 1922. It indicates 38 persons killed in the riot, 15 whites and 23 Negroes. Of the 527 injured, 178 were white, 342 Negroes, the race denomination of 17 not being established.
For the 38 deaths, there were nine presentments for murder returned, four persons being convicted.
While it is stated that the merciless bombing of Negro households was due to a systematic campaign conducted by the press against Negroes buying properties to one side of the district in which 90 per cent of the Negro population reside, that they moved, (on account of their increase), towards the side to which they did go, rather than in the opposite direction, the report says—
“may be explained partly by the hostility which the Irish and Polish groups had often shown to Negroes.”[393]
That Negroes were killed deliberately, as a business measure, in response to propaganda against them simply as Negroes, is an unavoidable conclusion. Extracts from “The Property Owners Journal” show that again and again there was an attempt to appeal to a “Higher Law” than the law of the land. It seems to have been the law of greed. Here is an extract:
“Any property owner who sells property anywhere in our district to undesirables is an enemy to the white owner and should be discovered and punished.... The Negro is using the Constitution and its legal rights to abuse the moral rights of the white.”[394]
Following this hypocritical appeal, 58 houses, bought by Negroes, were bombed, the residence of Jesse Binga, a Negro banker having been bombed six times without breaking down his firm determination to stand the storm. The house of a Negro woman was bombed three times. Her home had been attacked in the riots and the front door battered down; but, upon calling on the police, she and her husband were by them arrested, altho’ later acquitted. The report charges gross and continuous exaggeration during the riot, in which it is distinctly stated that the Chicago Tribune led, although it is also stated, that the paper owned by one of the committee, in one instance, could hardly have been surpassed. That this last statement should have been made, speaks volumes for the fairness of the committee and the member of the committee thus concurring with the stricture on himself. It also states, of the paper published by Robert S. Abbott, “The Defender”:
“It is probably no exaggeration to say that the Defender’s policy prompted thousands of restless Negroes to venture North, where there were assured of its protection and championship of their cause.”[395]
The Governor in his FOREWORD states that the report shows “that the presence of Negroes in large numbers in our great cities is not a menace in itself.” Incidents cited showed high courage and efficiency on the part of Negro policeman and the exhibition of a stern sense of duty controlling race prejudice.
The report says:
“It is clear that migrant Negroes are not returning South. On the contrary there is a small but continuous stream of migration to the industrial centres of the North. No great numbers of Negroes returned to the South even during the trying unemployment period in the early part of 1921.”[396]
Sustaining the country’s stand against the unrestricted immigration of the ante bellum period, just about this time, the New Republic asserted:
“If we can hold the gates closed for another decade, these abuses are bound to go. Not everybody in America would like this. Nor would everybody in America be pleased with another natural consequence of restriction, that it will draw more and more Negroes out of the rural South, especially the lynching belt for common labor in the industries.”[397]
In his FOREWORD to the Chicago report, Governor Lowden places himself in absolute opposition to Lincoln. He says:
“Our race problem must be solved in harmony with the fundamental law of the nation and with its free institutions. These prevent any deportation of the Negro as well as any restriction of his freedom of movement within the United States.”[398]
But the report of the Chicago riot contains much more than an expression of the views of the committee as to the cause of that outburst of savagery. In its 667 pages are the views of many Negroes on the greatest variety of subjects. The first article of the belief of the members of the Negro Urban League of Chicago is—
“I realize that our soldiers have learned new habits of self-respect and cleanliness.”[399]
That is a short sentence, but it contains much.
Here is another which indicates that the Negro will not only learn much from the Northern and Western white man; but also teach him a bit. It is not very sweetly expressed, but it is well worth pondering for all that:
“There is one trait, and I might say only one, that I take off my hat to the southern ‘Cracker’ for, and that is his respect and high regard for women. While he hasn’t much for the other fellow’s (the Negro’s) wives and daughters, yet he respects his own. We must set a good example for him and respect all women, regardless of race, color or creed. Then you will win the admiration of all civilized people. Men who do not respect and honor their women are not worthy of citizenship.”[400]
Only one trait, but what an important one!