The crisis

by Various

THE APPEAL TO EUROPE.

On October 26 a statement and appeal was sent to Europe signed by thirty-two Negro Americans. The appeal was not sent out by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, nor did the association stand sponsor for it. It was sent solely on the authority of the men who signed it. These men include two editors, one dentist, seven lawyers, two ministers, two bishops, three physicians, one teacher, two presidents of educational institutions, one member of a Legislature and others.

This appeal, after stating that its signers do not agree with Mr. Washington’s picture of conditions here, states the following grievances:

“Our people were emancipated in a whirl of passion, and then left naked to the mercies of their enraged and impoverished ex-masters. As our sole means of defense we were given the ballot, and we used it so as to secure the real fruits of the war. Without it we would have returned to slavery; with it we struggled toward freedom. No sooner, however, had we rid ourselves of nearly two-thirds of our illiteracy and accumulated $600,000,000 worth of property in a generation, than this ballot, which had become increasingly necessary to the defense of our civil and property rights, was taken from us by force and fraud.

“To-day in eight States where the bulk of the Negroes live, black men of property and university training can be, and usually are, by law denied the ballot, while the most ignorant white man votes. This attempt to put the personal and property rights of the best of the blacks at the absolute political mercy of the worst of the whites is spreading each day.

“Along with this has gone a systematic attempt to curtail the education of the black race. Under a widely advertised system of ‘universal’ education, not one black boy in three to-day has in the United States a chance to learn to read and write. The proportion of school funds due to black children are often spent on whites, and the burden on private charity to support education, which is a public duty, has become almost intolerable.

“In every walk of life we meet discrimination, based solely on race and color, but continually and persistently misrepresented to the world as the natural difference due to condition.

“We are, for instance, usually forced to live in the worst quarters, and our consequent death rate is noted as a race trait, and reason for further discrimination. When we seek to buy property in better quarters we are sometimes in danger of mob violence or, as now in Baltimore, of actual legislation to prevent.

“We are forced to take lower wages for equal work, and our standard of living is then criticised. Fully half the labor unions refuse us admittance, and then claim that as ‘scabs’ we lower the price of labor.

“A persistent caste proscription seeks to force us and confine us to menial occupations where the conditions of work are worst.

“Our women in the South are without protection in law and custom, and are then derided as lewd. A widespread system of deliberate public insult is customary, which makes it difficult, if not impossible, to secure decent accommodation in hotels, railway trains, restaurants and theatres, and even in the Christian church we are in most cases given to understand that we are unwelcome unless segregated.

“Worse than all this is the wilful miscarriage of justice in the courts. Not only have 2,500 black men been lynched publicly by mobs in the last twenty-five years, without semblance or pretense of trial, but regularly every day throughout the South the machinery of the courts is used, not to prevent crime and correct the wayward among the Negroes, but to wreak public dislike and vengeance and to raise public funds. This dealing in crime as a means of public revenue is a system well-nigh universal in the South, and while its glaring brutality through private lease has been checked, the underlying principle is still unchanged.

“Everywhere in the United States the old democratic doctrine of recognizing fitness wherever it occurs is losing ground before a reactionary policy of denying preferment in political or industrial life to competent men if they have a trace of Negro blood, and of using the weapons of public insult and humiliation to keep such men down. It is to-day a universal demand in the South that on all occasions social courtesies shall be denied any person of known Negro descent, even to the extent of refusing to apply the titles of ‘Mr.,’ ‘Mrs.’ or ‘Miss.’

“Against this dominant tendency, strong and brave Americans, white and black, are fighting, but they need, and need sadly, the moral support of England and of Europe in this crusade for the recognition of manhood, despite adventitious differences of race, and it is like a blow in the face to have one who himself suffers daily insult and humiliation in America give the impression that all is well. It is one thing to be optimistic, self-forgetful and forgiving, but it is quite a different thing, consciously or unconsciously, to misrepresent the truth.”

This appeal has provoked widespread comment all over the world. The Vienna (Austria) Die Zeit, in publishing the document, says:

“During the sojourn in Vienna of Booker T. Washington, the distinguished apostle of the Negro, there appeared in Die Zeit a report from his pen in which he defended the white race of North America against the charge of systematic race prejudice and pictured the condition of the Negro race as on the whole very favorable. This report created great excitement in America and a deep disagreement among the intelligent leaders of the American Negroes. Booker T. Washington was warmly attacked in many American papers by both white and black speakers, and finally the American Negro leaders drew up an outspoken protest against Washington’s declarations.”

The Kölnische Volk Zeitung, Germany, speaks of an article which was “widely printed in Austria and Germany,” in which Mr. Washington “expressed himself in very optimistic words concerning his race in America and the undoubted solution of the problem,” and then reprints a part of the appeal.

In the United States the comment has taken wide range. From the South comes some bitterness when, for instance, the Raleigh News and Courier says:

“It is hard to tell which is the worst enemy of the Negro race—the brute who invites lynching by the basest of crimes, or the social-equality-hunting fellow like Du Bois, who slanders his country. Fortunately for the peaceable and industrious Negroes in the South, the world does not judge them either by Du Bois or the animal, and helps them and is in sympathy with their efforts to better their condition.”

The Richmond Leader adds:

“Efforts on the part of the Negro to give practical expression to the dream of equality may, indeed, cause temporary trouble and discomfort to the whites, but ultimately and necessarily they could not fail to provoke stern repression, and, if necessary, cruel punishment to the blacks. Fortunately, the great bulk of the Negro population in the South realizes this, and, having—at least for the time—accepted it as inevitable, they adjust themselves to the subordinate place to which their race consigns them, and in which the very existence of the superior race makes it absolutely necessary to keep them. There is little friction, therefore, between them and the white people among whom they live.”

The Chattanooga Times regards the document as “treasonable incendiarism,” and many papers denounce it as a demand for “social equality.” The New Orleans Times-Democrat says:

“To the average American the most striking feature is this ‘appeal,’ aside from its attack upon Booker Washington, is its confession, virtually in so many words, that the theory of racial social equality is losing ground ‘everywhere in the United States.’ Thoughtful students of the American race problem long ago noted the steady spread of race instinct, or prejudice, into sections other than the South; but it was hardly to be expected that the blatant Negro agitators would confess that their strident demands for race equality have not only completely failed, but have helped to turn the scale against them. Such progress as the Negro has made is recorded not by aid of these aspirants for social equality, but in spite of them.”

The Jersey City Journal says Negroes can vote in the North, they are educated in the North, they are only partially restricted in residence, they usually get equal pay for equal work, and the “objection to having colored people in residence sections is natural.”

The Chicago Tribune “can understand and sympathize” with the signers of the protest, but points out that the positions occupied by the signers themselves show the progress of the Negro.

The New York World says:

“Undeniably, the black population of the United States has just grievances. So also has the white population in the United States. Race prejudice is here as it is in Europe, and blacks are not the only sufferers. There is brutal tyranny in industry, but the blacks are not the only victims. There are social limitations that are cruel and inexcusable, but the blacks are not the only ones against whom the gates are shut.

“This is a world in which true men give and take. It is a world in which all must make allowances. It is a world in which, after all, men are judged not so much by race or nationality or possessions as by personal merit. Otherwise, how could a Booker Washington, born a Virginia slave, have ‘stood before kings’ and associated for the greater part of his life with the earth’s greatest and best?

“We do not condemn the American men of color who have made this protest. We simply remonstrate with them. They are asking more than a white man’s chance, and in the circumstances that is inadmissible.”

The Boston Globe, however, thinks that “these and other complaints are backed by educated Negroes, who demand that the old world shall know their wrongs. They deny that Dr. Washington is giving the right impression of the situation in this country. It would seem to the average person that admittedly there is much truth in the catalog of wrongs the association recites.”

The Brooklyn Times, too, acknowledges that “the lot of the colored American is a hard one at best, but there is nothing to be gained by complaining over conditions and prejudices that cannot be altered or eradicated in the lifetime of a single generation. There are obstacles in the path of the Afro-American, even the most intelligent and aspiring, of which the meanest white man can hardly form an adequate conception; the only thing the Negro can do is to make the best of hard conditions and do his utmost by his individual achievements to make the handicap of his color forgotten.

“It is not surprising, however, that to many ambitious colored citizens patience sometimes ceases to seem a virtue.”

It adds that the appeal “is a mild statement of existing conditions. The lot of the colored American is indeed a hard one. But it is improving. The area of sweet reasonableness is being gradually extended. Old prejudices, and especially racial prejudices, die hard, as the history of the dispersed Hebrew nation tells on every page of the annals of 2,000 years. But prejudice is not eternal, and every colored American who does the utmost of his duty in the place he fills does his part in bringing about the day when ungenerous and unjust discrimination will disappear, and when

Man to man, the world o’er,

Shall brothers be, for a’ that.”

Finally, the Buffalo Express says emphatically:

“The memorial recites the long and familiar list of Negro wrongs—the political disfranchisement, the denial of education in some States, the discriminations in public places, the forcing into menial occupations, the hostility of trades unions, the attempts to confine Negroes to certain quarters of towns, the insults to Negro women, etc. It need not be gone over here. Readers of the Express are familiar with the shameful record. The fact that this is an appeal to the people of Europe against the people of the United States will arouse fresh antagonism to the Negro in some quarters, but, on the whole, it will do good. For shame’s sake, if not for that of justice, it may arouse us to do our duty. The opinion of the civilized world must have some effect on the most calloused American official conscience. And it is our governing class, our men and women of light and leading, that need to be aroused on this question.”