FOLLOWING THE COLOUR LINE IN THE NORTH
Having followed the colour line in the South, it is of extraordinary interest and significance to learn how the Negro fares in the North. Is he treated better or worse? Is Boston a more favourable location for him than Atlanta or New Orleans? A comparison of the “Southern attitude” and the “Northern attitude” throws a flood of light upon the Negro as a national problem in this country.
Most of the perplexing questions in the North pertain to the city, but in the South the great problems are still agricultural. In the South the masses of Negroes live on the land; they are a part of the cotton, sugar, lumber and turpentine industries; but in the North the Negro is essentially a problem of the great cities. He has taken his place in the babel of the tenements; already he occupies extensive neighbourhoods like the San Juan Hill district in New York and Bucktown in Indianapolis, and, by virtue of an increasing volume of immigration from the South, he is overflowing his boundaries in all directions, expanding more rapidly, perhaps, than any other single element of urban population. In every important Northern city, a distinct race-problem already exists, which must, in a few years, assume serious proportions.
Country districts and the smaller cities in the North for the most part have no Negro question. A few Negroes are found in almost all localities, but an examination of the statistics of rural counties and of the lesser cities shows that the Negro population is diminishing in some localities, increasing slightly in others. In distinctly agricultural districts in the North the census exhibits an actual falling off of Negro population of 10 per cent. between 1880 and 1900. Cass County in Michigan, which has a famous Negro agricultural colony—one of the few in the North—shows a distinct loss in population. From 1,837 inhabitants in 1880 it dropped to 1,568 in 1900. A few Negro farmers have done well in the North (at Wilberforce, Ohio, I met two or three who had fine large farms and were prosperous), but the rural population is so small as to be negligible.
Negroes of Small Northern Towns
Most of the Negroes in the smaller towns and cities of the North are of the stock which came by way of the underground railroad just before the Civil War or during the period of philanthropic enthusiasm which followed it. They have come to fit naturally into the life of the communities where they live, and no one thinks especially of their colour. There is, indeed, no more a problem with the Negro than with the Greek or Italian. In one community (Lansing, Mich.) with which I have been long familiar, the Negroes are mostly mulattoes and their numbers have remained practically stationary for thirty years, while the white population has increased rapidly. At present there are only about 500 Negroes in a city of 25,000 people.
As a whole the coloured people of Lansing are peaceful and industrious, a natural part of the wage-working population. Individuals have become highly prosperous and are much respected. A few of the younger generation are idle and worthless.
So far as comfortable conditions of life are concerned, where there is little friction or discrimination and a good opportunity for earning a respectable livelihood, I have found no places anywhere which seemed so favourable to Negroes as these smaller towns and cities in the North and West where the coloured population is not increasing. But the moment there is new immigration from the South the conditions cease to be Utopian—as I shall show.
The great cities of the North present a wholly different aspect; the increases of population there are not short of extraordinary. In 1880 Chicago had only 6,480 coloured people; at present (1908) it has about 45,000, an increase of some 600 per cent. The census of 1900 gives the Negro population of New York as 60,666. It is now (1908) probably not less than 80,000. Between 1890 and 1900 the Negroes of Philadelphia increased by 59 per cent., while the Caucasians added only 22 per cent., and the growth since 1900 has been even more rapid, the coloured population now exceeding 80,000.
A NEGRO CABIN WITH EVIDENCES OF ABUNDANCE
OFF FOR THE COTTON FIELDS
It is difficult to realise the significance of these masses of coloured population. The city of Washington to-day has a greater community of Negroes (some 100,000) than were ever before gathered together in one community in any part of the world, so far as we know. New York and Philadelphia both now probably have as many Negroes as any Southern city (except Washington, if that be called a Southern city). Nor must it be forgotten that about a ninth of the Negro population of the United States is in the North and West. Crowded communities of Negroes in Northern latitudes have never before existed anywhere. Northern city conditions therefore present unique and interesting problems.
I went first to Indianapolis because I had heard so much of the political power of the Negroes there; afterward I visited Cincinnati, Philadelphia, New York, Boston, Chicago and several smaller cities and country neighbourhoods. In every large city both white and coloured people told me that race feeling and discrimination were rapidly increasing: that new and more difficult problems were constantly arising.
Generally speaking, the more Negroes the sharper the expression of prejudice.
While the Negroes were an inconsequential part of the population, they passed unnoticed, but with increasing numbers (especially of the lower sort of Negroes and black Negroes), accompanied by competition for the work of the city and active political power, they are inevitably kindling the fires of race-feeling. Prejudice has been incited also by echoes of the constant agitation in the South, the hatred-breeding speeches of Tillman and Vardaman, the incendiary and cruel books and plays of Dixon, and by the increased immigration of Southern white people with their strong Southern point of view.
Pathetic Expectations of the Negro
One finds something unspeakably pathetic in the spectacle of these untold thousands of Negroes who are coming North. To many of them, oppressed within the limitations set up by the South, it is indeed the promised land. I shall never forget the wistful eagerness of a Negro I met in Mississippi. He told me he was planning to move to Indianapolis. I asked him why he wanted to leave the South.
“They’re Jim Crowin’ us down here too much,” he said; “there’s no chance for a coloured man who has any self-respect.”
“But,” I said, “do you know that you will be better off when you get to Indianapolis?”
“I hear they don’t make no difference up there between white folks and coloured, and that a hard-working man can get two dollars a day. Is that all so?”
“Yes, that’s pretty nearly so,” I said—but as I looked at the fairly comfortable home he lived in, among his own people, I felt somehow that he would not find the promised land all that he anticipated.
And after that I visited Indianapolis and other cities and saw hundreds of just such eager Negroes after they had reached the promised land. Two classes of coloured people came North: the worthless, ignorant, semi-criminal sort who find in the intermittent, high-paid day labour in the North, accompanied by the glittering excitements of city life, just the conditions they love best. Two or three years ago the Governor of Arkansas, Jeff Davis, pardoned a Negro criminal on condition that he would go to Boston and stay there! The other class is composed of self-respecting, hard-working people who are really seeking better conditions of life, a better chance for their children.
And what do Negroes find when they reach the promised land?
In the first place the poorer sort find in Indianapolis the alley home, in New York the deadly tenement. Landowners in Indianapolis have been building long rows of cheap one-story frame tenements in back streets and alleys. The apartments have two or three rooms each. When new they are brightly painted and papered and to many Negroes from the South, accustomed to the primitive cabin, they are beautiful indeed.
Even the older buildings are more pretentious if not really better than anything they have known in the rural South; and how the city life, nearly as free to the coloured man as to the white, stirs their pulses! No people, either black or white, are really free until they feel free. And to many Negroes the first few weeks in a Northern city give them the first glimpses they have ever had of what they consider to be liberty.
A striking illustration of this feeling came to my notice at Columbia, South Carolina. One of the most respected Negro men there—respected by both races—was a prosperous tailor who owned a building on the main street of the city. He was well to do, had a family, and his trade came from both races. I heard that he was planning to leave the South and I went to see him.
“Yes,” he said, “I am going away. It’s getting to be too dangerous for a coloured man down here.”
It was just after the Atlanta riot.
“Where are you going?” I asked.
“I think I shall go to Washington,” he said.
“Why Washington?”
“Well, you see, I want to be as near the flag as I can.”
What the Negro Really Finds in the Promised Land
But they soon begin to learn things! It is true that the workingman can get high wages, and the domestic servant is paid an amount which astonishes her, but on the other hand—a fact that somehow never occurs to many of these people, or indeed to the foreigners who come flocking to our shores—the living cost is higher. For his gaudy tenements the landlord extorts exorbitant rentals. Ignorance is ever roundly and mercilessly taxed! I saw a double house built for white people just on the edge of a Negro neighbourhood and held at a rental of $18 a month, but not being able to secure white tenants the landlord rented to Negroes for $25 a month.
When he came North the Negro (even though he had lived in cities in the South, as many of the immigrants have) never dreamed that it would require such an amount of fuel to keep him through the long Northern winter, or that his bill for lights, water, and everything else would be so high. And in the South many Negro families of the poorer sort are greatly assisted by baskets of food brought from the white man’s kitchen and the gift of cast-off clothes and shoes, to say nothing of tobacco, and even money—a lingering loose survival of the relationships of slavery. But in the North the Negro finds himself in an intense industrial atmosphere where relationships are more strictly impersonal and businesslike. What he gets he must pay for. Charity exists on a large scale, as I shall show later, but it is the sharp, inquiring, organised charity of the North.
In short, coming North to find a place where he will be treated more like a man and less like a serf, the Negro discovers that he must meet the competitive struggle to which men of the working class are subjected in the highly developed industrial system of the North.
Sufferings of the Northern Negro
In the South the great mass of Negroes have lived with their doors open, fireplaces have kept their homes ventilated, they could leave the matter of sanitation to fresh air and sunshine. And the Negro’s very lack of training for such an environment as that of the North causes him untold suffering. To save fuel, and because he loves to be warm and sociable, he and his family and friends crowd into one close room, which is kept at fever temperature, not by a healthful fireplace, but by a tight stove. This, with the lack of proper sanitary conveniences, often becomes a hotbed of disease. Even in mild weather I have been in Negro houses in the North where the air was almost unendurably warm and impure.
I know of nothing more tragic than the condition of the swarming newer Negro populations of Northern cities—the more tragic because the Negro is so cheerful and patient about it all. I looked into the statistics closely in several of them, and in no instance does the birth-rate keep pace with the death-rate. Even allowing for the fact that birth statistics are not very accurately kept in most cities it is probable that if it were not for the immigration constantly rolling upward from the South the Negro population in Northern cities would show a falling off. Consumption and the diseases of vice ravage their numbers. One of the ablest Negro physicians I have met, Dr. S. A. Furniss, who has practised among his people in Indianapolis for many years, has made a careful study of conditions. In a paper read before a medical association Dr. Furniss says:
“The reports of the Indianapolis Board of Health show that for no month in the last ten years has the birth-rate among Negroes equalled the death-rate.”
Here are the statistics from 1901 to 1905:
| Deaths | Births | |||
| 1901 | 332 | 279 | ||
| 1902 | 329 | 280 | ||
| 1903 | 448 | 283 | ||
| 1904 | 399 | 327 | ||
| 1905 | 443 | 384 |
“Race Suicide” Among Negroes
From inquiries that I have made everywhere in the North there would seem, indeed, to be a tendency to “race suicide” among Negroes as among the old American white stock. Especially is this true among the better class Negroes. The ignorant Negro in Southern agricultural districts is exceedingly prolific, but his Northern city brother has comparatively few children. I have saved the record from personal inquiry of perhaps two hundred Northern Negro families of the better class. Many have no children at all, many have one or two, and the largest family I found (in Boston) was seven children. I found one Negro family in the South with twenty-one children! Industrialism, of course, is not favourable to a large birth-rate. All Northern cities show a notable surplus, according to the statistics, of Negro women over Negro men. Many of these are house servants and, like the large class of roving single men who do day labour on the streets and railroads, they are without family ties and have no children.
Dr. Furniss finds that the deaths of Negroes from tuberculosis constitute over half the total deaths from that cause in the city of Indianapolis, whereas, in proportion to Negro population, they should constitute only one-eighth.
His observations upon these startling facts are of great interest:
“I believe the reason for these conditions is plain. First of all it is due to Negroes leaving the country and crowding into the larger cities, especially in the North, where they live in a climate totally different from that with which they have been familiar. They occupy unsanitary homes; they are frequently compelled to labour with insufficient food and clothing and without proper rest. Of necessity they follow the hardest and most exposed occupations in order to make a livelihood. I regret to say that intemperance and immorality play a part in making these figures what they are. They easily fall victim to the unusual vices of the city.
“Another reason for increased mortality is improper medical attention. Not only among the ignorant but among the intelligent we find too much trust put in patent medicines; the belief, latent it is true in many cases, but still existing among the ignorant, in the hoodoo militates against the close following of the doctor’s orders.
“What shall we do about it?” asks Dr. Furniss. “We must urge those around us to more personal cleanliness, insist on a pure home life, and less dissipation and intemperance: to have fewer picnics and save more money for a rainy day. Tell the young people in the South not to come to Northern cities, but to go to the smaller towns of the West, where they can have a fair chance. Unless something is done to change existing conditions, to stop this movement to our Northern cities, to provide proper habitations and surroundings for those who are already here, it will be only a question of time until the problem of the American Negro will reach a solution not at all desirable from our point of view.”
Of course a doctor always sees the pathological side of life and his view is likely to be pessimistic. I saw much of the tragedy of the slum Negroes in the cities of the North, and yet many Negroes have been able to survive, many have learned how to live in towns and are making a success of their lives—as I shall show more particularly in the next chapter. It must not be forgotten that Negro families in Boston and Philadelphia (mostly mulattoes, it is true) as well as in Charleston, Savannah, and New Orleans, have lived and thrived under city conditions for many generations. Not a few Negroes in Indianapolis whose homes I visited are housed better than the average of white families.
Sickness Among Northern Negroes
Not only is the death-rate high in the North, but the Negro is hampered by sickness to a much greater degree than white people. Hospital records in Philadelphia show an excess of Negro patients over whites, according to population, of 125 per cent. About 5,000 Negroes passed through the hospitals of Philadelphia last year, averaging a confinement of three weeks each. Mr. Warner, in American Charities, makes sickness the chief cause of poverty among coloured people in New York, Boston, New Haven, and Baltimore. The percentage of sickness was twice or more as high as that of Germans, Irish, or white Americans.
Such are the pains of readjustment which the Negroes are having to bear in the North.
A question arises whether they can ever become a large factor of the population in Northern latitudes. They are certainly not holding their own in the country or in the smaller cities, and in the large cities they are increasing at present, not by the birth-rate, but by constant immigration.
Hostile physical conditions of life in the North are not the only difficulties that the Negro has to meet. He thought he left prejudice behind in the South, but he finds it also showing its teeth here in the North. And, as in the South, a wide difference is apparent between the attitude of the best class of white men and the lower class.
How Northerners Regard the Negro
One of the first things that struck me when I began studying race conditions in the North was the position of the better class of white people with regard to the Negro. In the South every white man and woman has a vigorous and vital opinion on the race question. You have only to apply the match, the explosion is sure to follow. It is not so in the North. A few of the older people still preserve something of the war-time sentiment for the Negro; but the people one ordinarily meets don’t know anything about the Negro, don’t discuss him, and don’t care about him. In Indianapolis, and indeed in other cities, the only white people I could find who were much interested in the Negroes were a few politicians, mostly of the lower sort, the charity workers and the police. But that, of course, is equally true of the Russian Jews or the Italians. One of the first white men with whom I talked (at Indianapolis) said to me with some impatience:
“There are too many Negroes up here; they hurt the city.”
Another told me of the increasing presence of Negroes in the parks, on the streets, and in the street cars. He said:
“I suppose sooner or later we shall have to adopt some of the restrictions of the South.”
He said it without heat, but as a sort of tentative conclusion, he hadn’t fully made up his mind.
Race Prejudice in Boston
In Boston, of all places, I expected to find much of the old sentiment. It does exist among some of the older men and women, but I was surprised at the general attitude which I encountered. It was one of hesitation and withdrawal. Summed up, I think the feeling of the better class of people in Boston (and elsewhere in Northern cities) might be thus stated:
We have helped the Negro to liberty; we have helped to educate him; we have encouraged him to stand on his own feet. Now let’s see what he can do for himself. After all, he must survive or perish by his own efforts.
In short, they have “cast the bantling on the rocks.”
Though they still preserve the form of encouraging the Negro, the spirit seems to have fled. Not long ago the Negroes of Boston organised a concert at which Theodore Drury, a coloured musician of really notable accomplishments, was to appear. Aristocratic white people were appealed to and bought a considerable number of tickets; but on the evening of the concert the large block of seats purchased by white people was conspicuously vacant. Northern white people would seem to be more interested in the distant Southern Negro than in the Negro at their doors.
Before I take up the cruder and more violent expressions of prejudice on the part of the lower class of white men in the North I want to show the beginnings of cold-shouldering as it exists in varying degrees in Northern cities, and especially in Boston, the old centre of abolitionism.
Superficially, at least, the Negro in Boston still enjoys the widest freedom; but after one gets down to real conditions he finds much complaint and alarm on the part of Negroes over growing restrictions.
Boston exercises no discrimination on the street cars, on railroads, or in theatres or other places of public gathering. The schools are absolutely free. A coloured woman, Miss Maria Baldwin, is the principal of the Agassiz school, of Cambridge, attended by 600 white children. I heard her spoken of in the highest terms by the white people. Eight Negro teachers, chosen through the ordinary channels of competitive examination, teach in the public schools. There are Negro policemen, Negro firemen, Negro officeholders—fully as many of them as the proportion of Negro population in Boston would warrant. A Negro has served as commander of a white post of the Grand Army.
Prosperous Negroes in Boston
Several prosperous Negro business men have won a large white patronage. One of the chief merchant-tailoring stores of Boston, with a location on Washington Street which rents for $10,000 a year, is owned by J. H. Lewis. He has been in business many years. He employs both white and Negro workmen and clerks and he has some of the best white trade in Boston. Not long ago he went to North Carolina and bought the old plantation where his father was a slave, and he even talks of going there to spend his old age. Another Negro, Gilbert H. Harris, conducts the largest wig-making establishment in New England. I visited his place. He employs coloured girls and his trade is exclusively white. Another Negro has a school of pharmacy in which all the students are white; another, George Hamm, has a prosperous news and stationery store. A dentist, Dr. Grant, who has a reputation in his profession for a cement which he invented, was formerly in the faculty of the Harvard dentistry school and now enjoys a good practice among white people. The real estate dealer who has the most extensive business in Cambridge, T. H. Raymond, is a Negro. He employs white clerks and his business is chiefly with white people. Two or three Negro lawyers, Butler Wilson in particular, have many white clients. Dr. Courtney, a coloured physician from the Harvard Medical School, was for a time house physician of the Boston Lying-in-Hospital, in which the patients were practically all white, and has now a practice which includes both white and coloured patients. Dr. Courtney has also served on the School Board of Boston, an important elective office. The Negro poet, William Stanley Braithwaite, whose father took a degree at Oxford (England), is a member of the Authors’ Club of Boston. His poems have appeared in various magazines, he has written a volume of poems, a standard anthology of Elizabethan verse, and he is about to publish a critical study of the works of William Dean Howells. Several of these men meet white people socially more or less.
I give these examples to show the place occupied by the better and older class of Boston Negroes. Most of those I have mentioned are mulattoes, some very light. It shows what intelligent Negroes can do for themselves in a community where there has been little or no prejudice against them.
But with crowding new immigration, and incited by all the other causes I have mentioned, these conditions are rapidly changing.
A few years ago no hotel or restaurant in Boston refused Negro guests; now several hotels, restaurants, and especially confectionery stores, will not serve Negroes, even the best of them. The discrimination is not made openly, but a Negro who goes to such places is informed that there are no accommodations, or he is overlooked and otherwise slighted, so that he does not come again. A strong prejudice exists against renting flats and houses in many white neighbourhoods to coloured people. The Negro in Boston, as in other cities, is building up “quarters,” which he occupies to the increasing exclusion of other classes of people. The great Negro centre is now in the South End, a locality once occupied by some of the most aristocratic families of Boston. And yet, as elsewhere, they struggle for the right to live where they please. A case in point is that of Mrs. Mattie A. McAdoo, an educated coloured woman, almost white, who has travelled abroad, and is a woman of refinement. She had a flat in an apartment house among white friends. One of the renters, a Southern woman, finding out that Mrs. McAdoo had coloured blood, objected. The landlord refused to cancel Mrs. McAdoo’s lease and the white woman left, but the next year Mrs. McAdoo found that she could not re-rent her apartment. The landlord in this instance was the son of an abolitionist. He said to her:
“You know I have no prejudice against coloured people. I will rent you an apartment in the building where I myself live if you want it, but I can’t let you into my other buildings, because the tenants object.”
An attempt was even made a year or so ago by white women to force Miss Baldwin, the coloured school principal to whom I have referred, and who is almost one of the institutions of Boston, to leave Franklin House, where she was living. No one incident, perhaps, awakened Boston to the existence of race prejudice more sharply than this.
Churches Draw the Colour Line
One would think that the last harbour of prejudice would be the churches, and yet I found strange things in Boston. There are, and have been for a long time, numerous coloured churches in Boston, but many Negroes, especially those of the old families, have belonged to the white churches. In the last two years increased Negro attendance, especially at the Episcopal churches, has become a serious problem. A quarter of the congregation of the Church of the Ascension is coloured and the vicar has had to refuse any further coloured attendance at the Sunday School. St. Peter’s and St. Philip’s Churches in Cambridge have also been confronted with the colour problem.
A proposition is now afoot to establish a Negro mission which shall gradually grow into a separate coloured Episcopal Church, a movement which causes much bitterness among the coloured people. I shall not soon forget the expression of hopelessness in the face of a prominent white church leader as he exclaimed:
“What shall we do with these Negroes! I for one would like to have them stay. I believe it is in accordance with the doctrine of Christ, but the proportion is growing so large that white people are drifting away from us. Strangers avoid us. Our organisation is expensive to keep up and the Negroes are able to contribute very little in proportion to their numbers. Think about it yourself: What shall we do? If we allow the Negroes to attend freely it means that eventually all the white people will leave and we shall have a Negro church whether we want it or not.”
In no other city are there any considerable number of Negroes who attend white churches—except a few Catholic churches. At New Orleans, I have seen white and coloured people worshipping together at the cathedrals. White ministers sometimes have spasms of conscience that they are not doing all they should for the Negro.
Let me tell two significant incidents from Philadelphia. The worst Negro slum in that city is completely surrounded by business houses and the homes of wealthy white people. Within a few blocks of it stand several of the most aristocratic churches of Philadelphia. Miss Bartholomew conducts a neighbourhood settlement in the very centre of this social bog. Twice during the many years she has been there white ministers have ventured down from their churches. One of them said he had been troubled by the growing masses of ignorant coloured people.
“Can’t I do something to help?”
Miss Bartholomew was greatly pleased and cheered.
“Of course you can,” she said heartily. “We’re trying to keep some of the Negro children off the streets. There is plenty of opportunity for helping with our boys’ and girls’ clubs and classes.”
“Oh, I didn’t mean that,” said the minister; “I thought, in cases of death in their families, we might offer to read the burial service.”
And he went away and did not see the humour of it!
Another minister made a similar proposition: he wanted to establish a Sunday School for coloured people. He asked Miss Bartholomew anxiously where he could hold it.
“Why not in your church in the afternoon?”
“Why, we couldn’t do that!” he exclaimed; “we should have to air all the cushions afterward!”
But to return to Boston. A proposition was recently made to organise for coloured people a separate Y. M. C. A., but the white members voted against any such discrimination. Yet a coloured man said to me hopelessly:
“It’s only delayed. Next time we shall be put off with a separate institution.”
Colour Line at Harvard
Even at Harvard where the Negro has always enjoyed exceptional opportunities, conditions are undergoing a marked change. A few years ago a large class of white students voluntarily chose a brilliant Negro student, R. C. Bruce, as valedictorian. But last year a Negro baseball player was the cause of so much discussion and embarrassment to the athletic association that there will probably never be another coloured boy on the university teams. The line has already been drawn, indeed, in the medical department. Although a coloured doctor only a few years ago was house physician at the Boston Lying-in-Hospital, coloured students are no longer admitted to that institution. One of them, Dr. Welker (an Iowa coloured man), cannot secure his degree because he hasn’t had six obstetrical cases, and he can’t get the six cases because he isn’t admitted with his white classmates to the Lying-in-Hospital. It is a curious fact that not only the white patients but some Negro patients object to the coloured doctors. In a recent address which has awakened much sharp comment among Boston Negroes, President Eliot of Harvard indicated his sympathy with the general policy of separate education in the South by remarking that if Negro students were in the majority at Harvard, or formed a large proportion of the total number, some separation of the races might follow.
And this feeling is growing, notwithstanding the fact that no Negro student has ever disgraced Harvard and that no students are more orderly or law-abiding than the Negroes. On the other hand, Negro students have frequently made distinguished records for scholarship: last year one of them, Alain Leroy Locke, who took the course in three years, won the first of the three Bowdoin prizes (the most important bestowed at Harvard) for a literary essay, and passed for his degree with a magna cum laude. Since then he has been accepted, after a brilliant competitive examination, for the Rhodes scholarship from the state of Pennsylvania.
Such feeling as that which is developing in the North comes hard, indeed, upon the intelligent, educated, ambitious Negro—especially if he happens to have, as a large proportion of these Negroes do have, no little white blood. Many coloured people in Boston are so white that they cannot be told from white people, yet they are classed as Negroes.
Accompanying this change of attitude, this hesitation and withdrawal of the better class of white men, one finds crude sporadic outbreaks on the part of the rougher element of white men—who have merely a different way of expressing themselves.
White Gangs Attack Negroes
In Indianapolis the Negro comes in contact with the “bungaloo gangs,” crowds of rough and lawless white boys who set upon Negroes and beat them frightfully, often wholly without provocation. Although no law prevents Negroes from entering any park in Indianapolis, they are practically excluded from at least one of them by the danger of being assaulted by these gangs.
The street cars are free in all Northern cities, but the Negro nevertheless sometimes finds it dangerous to ride with white people. Professor R. R. Wright, Jr., himself a Negro, and an acute observer of Negro conditions, tells this personal experience:
“I came out on the car from the University of Pennsylvania one evening in May about eight o’clock. Just as the car turned off Twenty-seventh to Lombard Street, a crowd of about one hundred little white boys from six to about fourteen years of age attacked it. The car was crowded, but there were only about a dozen Negroes on it, about half of them women. The mob of boys got control of the car by pulling off the trolley. They threw stones into the car, and finally some of them boarded the car and began to beat the Negroes with sticks, shouting as they did so, ‘Kill the nigger!’ ‘Lynch ’em!’ ‘Hit that nigger!’ etc. This all happened in Philadelphia. Doubtless these urchins had been reading in the daily papers the cry ‘Kill the Negro!’ and they were trying to carry out the injunction.”
While I was in Indianapolis a clash of enough importance to be reported in the newspapers occurred between the races on a street car; and in New York, in the San Juan Hill district, one Sunday evening I saw an incident which illustrates the almost instinctive race antagonism which exists in Northern cities. The street was crowded. Several Negro boys were playing on the pavement. Stones were thrown. Instantly several white boys sided together and began to advance on the Negroes. In less time than it takes to tell it thirty or forty white boys and young men were chasing the Negroes down the street. At the next corner the Negroes were joined by dozens of their own race. Stones and sticks began to fly everywhere, and if it hadn’t been for the prompt action of two policemen there would have been a riot similar to those which have occurred not once but many times in New York City during the past two years. Of course these instances are exceptional, but none the less significant.
Bumptiousness as a Cause of Hatred
Some of the disturbances grow out of a characteristic of a certain sort of Negro, the expression of which seems to stir the deepest animosity in the city white boy. And that is the bumptiousness, the airiness, of the half-ignorant young Negro, who, feeling that he has rights, wants to be occupied constantly in using them. He mistakes liberty for licence. Although few in numbers among thousands of quiet coloured people, he makes a large showing. In the South they call him the “smart Negro,” and an almost irresistible instinct exists among white boys of a certain class to take him down. I remember walking in Indianapolis with an educated Northern white man. We met a young Negro immaculately dressed; his hat-band was blue and white; his shoes were patent leather with white tops; he wore a flowered waistcoat, and his tread as he walked was something to see.
“Do you know,” said my companion, “I never see that young fellow without wanting to step up and knock his head off. I know something about him. He is absolutely worthless: he does no work, but lives on the wages of a hard-working coloured woman and spends all he can get on his clothes. I know the instinct is childish, but I am just telling you how I feel. I’m not sure it is racial prejudice; I presume I should feel much the same way toward a Frenchman if he did the same thing. And somehow I can’t help believing that a good thrashing would improve that boy’s character.”
I’m telling this incident just as it happened, to throw a side-light on one of the manifestations of the growing prejudice. One more illustration: Miss Eaton conducts a social settlement for Negroes in Boston. One day a teacher said to one of the little Negro boys in her class:
“Please pick up my handkerchief.”
The boy did not stir; she again requested him to pick up the handkerchief; then she asked him why he refused.
“The days of slavery are over,” he said.
Now, this spirit is not common, but it exists, and it injures the Negro people out of all proportion to its real seriousness.
In certain towns in Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, on the borders of the old South, the feeling has reached a stage still more acute. At Springfield, O., two race riots have occurred, in the first of which a Negro was lynched and in the second many Negroes were driven out of town and a row of coloured tenements was burned. There are counties and towns where no Negro is permitted to stop over night. At Syracuse, O., Lawrenceburg, Ellwood, and Salem, Ind., for example, Negroes have not been permitted to live for years. If a Negro appears he is warned of conditions, and if he does not leave immediately, he is visited by a crowd of boys and men and forced to leave. A farmer who lives within a few miles of Indianapolis told me of a meeting, held only a short time ago by thirty-five farmers in his neighbourhood, in which an agreement was passed to hire no Negroes, nor to permit Negroes to live anywhere in the region.
Story of a Northern Race Riot
I stopped at Greensburg, Ind., on my way East and found there a remarkable illustration showing just how feeling arises in the North. Greensburg is a comfortable, well-to-do, conservative, church-going old town in eastern Indiana. Many of the residents are retired farmers. The population of 7,000 is mostly of pure American stock, largely of Northern origin. And yet last April this quiet old town was shaken by a race riot. I made careful inquiries as to conditions there and I was amazed to discover how closely this small disturbance paralleled the greater riot at Atlanta which I have already written about. Negroes had lived in Greensburg for many years, a group of self-respecting, decent, prosperous men and women. They were known to and highly regarded by their white neighbours. One of them, named Brooks, owned a barber shop and was janitor for the Presbyterian Church and for one of the banks. Another, George W. Edwards, whom I met, has been for years an employee in the Garland Mills.
“There isn’t a better citizen in town than Edwards,” a white lawyer told me; and I heard the same thing from other white men.
Another Negro, George Guess, is an engineer in the electric light plant. Of the local Negro boys, Robert Lewis, the first coloured graduate of the local schools, is now teaching engineering at Hampton Institute. Oscar Langston, another Negro boy, is a dentist in Indianapolis. These and other Negroes live in good homes, support a church and have a respectable society of their own. I found just such a body of good coloured people in Atlanta.
Well, progress brought an electric railroad to Greensburg. To work on this and on improvements made by the railroad hundreds of labourers were required. And they were Negroes of the ignorant, wandering, unlooked-after sort so common in similar occupations in the South. When the work was finished a considerable number of them remained in Greensburg. Now Greensburg, like other American cities, was governed by a mayor who was a “good fellow,” and who depended on two influences to elect him: party loyalty and the saloon vote. He allowed a Negro dive to exist in one part of the town, where the idle and worthless Negroes congregated, where a murder was committed about a year before the riot. Exactly like Decatur Street in Atlanta! A rotten spot always causes trouble sooner or later. Good citizens protested and objected—to no purpose. They even organised a Good Citizenship League, the purpose of which was to secure a better enforcement of law. But the saloon interests were strong and wanted to sell whiskey and beer to the Negroes, and the city authorities were complaisant.
“Who cares,” one of them asked, “about a few worthless Negroes?”
But in a democracy people must care for one another.
A Negro Crime in the North
One day last April a Negro labourer who had been working for Mrs. Sefton, a highly respected widow who lived alone, appeared in the house in broad daylight and criminally assaulted her. His name was John Green, a Kentucky Negro; he was not only ignorant, but half-witted; he had already committed a burglary and had not been punished. He was easily caught, convicted, and sentenced. But the town was angry. On April 30th a crowd of men and boys gathered, beat two or three Negroes, and drove many out of town. They never thought of mobbing the city officials who had allowed the Negro dives to exist. And, as in Atlanta, the decent Negroes suffered with the criminals: a crowd broke windows in the home of George Edwards, and threatened other respectable coloured men. As in Atlanta, the better white people were horrified and scandalised; but, as in Atlanta, the white men who made up the mob went unpunished (though Atlanta did mildly discipline a few rioters). As in Atlanta, the newspaper reports that were sent out made no distinction between the different sorts of Negroes. The entire Negro population of Greensburg was blamed for the crime of a single ignorant and neglected man. I have several different newspaper reports of the affair from outside papers, and nearly all indicate in the headlines that all the Negroes in Greensburg were concerned in the riot and were driven out of town, which was not, of course, true. As a matter of fact the respectable Negroes are still living in Greensburg on friendly terms with the white people.
Human Nature North and South
In fact, the more I see of conditions North and South, the more I see that human nature north of Mason and Dixon’s line is not different from human nature south of the line.
Different degrees of prejudice, it is true, are apparent in the two sections. In the South the social and political prejudice the natural result of the memories of slavery and reconstruction, of the greater mass of Negro population and of the backward economic development, is stronger. In the North, on the other hand, comparatively little social and political prejudice is apparent; but the Negro has a hard fight to get anything but the most subservient place in the economic machine.
Over and over again, while I was in the South, I heard remarks like this:
“Down here we make the Negro keep his place socially, but in the North you won’t let him work.”
This leads me to one of the most important phases of race-relationship in the North—that is, the economic struggle of the Negro, suddenly thrown, as he has been, into the swift-moving, competitive conditions of Northern cities. Does he, or can he, survive? Do the masses of Negroes now coming North realise their ambitions? Is it true that the North will not let the Negro work?
These questions must, perforce, be discussed in another chapter.