At Home Buying Liberty Bonds
“The Biennial meeting of the National Association of Colored Women’s Clubs was held in Denver, Colorado in July, 1918. Among the important subjects considered at this meeting were: Temperance, Suffrage, Lynchings, Religious Work, Negro Women’s Problems, Food Conservation and what the Negro Women Were Contributing to War Work Service. It was pointed out that the Association had representation on the Women’s Committee of the Council of National Defense, that in the Third Liberty Loan, 7,000 Negro Women were at work and raised $5,000,000. It was also stated that, judging from the number of buttons sold through the colored women’s clubs, that about $300,000 had been contributed in Red Cross Drives.”
“David H. Rains, a wealthy Negro farmer, living near Shreveport, Louisiana, walked into the Liberty Loan Headquarters in that city and purchased $100,000 worth of the Fourth Liberty Loan Bonds and said that: ‘If they fell short of the quota he would make up the deficiency.’ (Work’s Negro Year Book, 1918-1919 edition, pages 48-49). According to an article on page 273 in the April 1921 issue of The Crisis, ‘Mr. Rains, who is reputed to be worth $1,500,000, owns 2,000 acres of land on which there are 40 producing oil wells; he pays a clerk $100 a day to check up his royalties.’”
“A report from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, was that the Negro school children subscribed for $27,000 worth of Third Liberty Loan Bonds. Through a Negro bank in that city, over $400,000 worth of Bonds were bought, and it was stated that the total amount of Third Liberty Loan Bonds purchased by the Negroes of Philadelphia was more than $1,000,000.”
“At the close of the Third Liberty Loan Drive, the United States Treasury Department awarded first place among all the banks of the country to a Negro bank, the Mutual Savings, Portsmouth, Virginia. This bank was given a quota of $5,700 to raise. A total of over $100,000, almost twenty times the stipulated quota was raised. This bank was assigned $12,500 as its quota of the Fourth Liberty Loan. Its total subscription for this loan was reported to have been $115,000.”
“The Negroes of Jacksonville, Florida, were awarded the first honor flag given to Negroes for exceeding their quota in the Third Liberty Loan Drive. They were asked to raise $50,000; they raised $250,000. In the Fourth Liberty Loan Drive, they were assigned a quota of $500,000 and raised over $100,000 more than this amount. The following are additional examples of subscriptions of Negroes to the Fourth Liberty Loan: Mobile, Alabama, $250,000; Norfolk, Virginia, $250,000; Kansas City, Missouri, $500,000; Savannah, Georgia, $500,000; Memphis, Tennessee, $700,000; Chicago, Illinois, $1,000,000; Birmingham, Alabama, $1,155,000; Maryland, $2,000,000.”
“When Secretary McAdoo visited Little Rock, Arkansas, in the interest of the First Liberty Loan, he was presented with a certified check for $60,000 as the Mosaic Templars’ bit toward financing the war. This society’s subscriptions were added to for subsequent loans until a total of $135,000 was invested in Liberty Bonds.”
Not only rich Colored people gave freely of their wealth, but poor Colored people sacrificed to extents that are not imaginable in giving their last few dollars to help end that world strife, as soon as possible.
“Mary Smith, a colored cook in Memphis, Tennessee, was asked by her mistress if she would not undertake to buy a $100 Bond. Mary said: “No. I don’t want no little $100 Bond. I want a $1000 and I am going to pay cash for it.” She gave her lifetime’s savings to help the United States carry on the war.”
“The Chicago Illinois Post, in an editorial headed: “The Widow’s Mite,” among other things said: “We should like to tell the story of an old Negro woman, who, with seamed face and knotted hands, lives on the South Side and works for $7 a week. ‘Out of these meager wages,’ says the Favorite Magazine, ‘this daughter of a race that has traveled the road of trials and tribulations, has purchased three Liberty Bonds and $25 worth of War Savings Stamps. She contributes $5 a month to her church—before the war it was $10—belongs to the N. A. A. C. P. and a Court of Calanthe, subscribed to three Negro periodicals and contributes a dollar a month to the Home for the Aged. She does not knit, but she sits sometimes in the sunset, dreaming of the two stalwart sons that she has given the nation to fight its battles across the sea’.””
“Warner Brown, of Brenham, Texas, an ex-slave, seventy-five years old, had accumulated $50 by chopping wood and doing other jobs. He invested this in a Liberty Bond.” “Gilbert Denman, an eighty-seven year old Negro of Greenville, Alabama after listening to an appeal of speakers from a war relic train, tendered his entire worldly wealth, fifteen cents, to the cause of the United States Government.”
Since a large percentage of the loyalty and patriotism of American citizens was weighed on the Roosevelt standard testing machine of 100 per cent Americanism with weights of paper, silver and gold money; then surely the two hundred twenty-five million dollars and more in cash that was dumped into the American scales of Liberty Loan Campaigns, Thrift Stamps, Red Cross Drives and other War Work activities, by the Colored people in the United States, pushed high above the level the opposite scales that contained Negro one hundred per cent Americanism.
Thus did the Colored people at home give their over-flowing measure and extra weight of money toward the putting down of a threatened world autocracy and the establishment of a hopeful universal democracy. And justly may those Colored people, who stayed at home in America during the World War and so unselfishly gave of their strength and money, truthfully and consolingly repeat that beautiful, fifty-fifty and “square deal” law of King David’s found in First Samuel, thirtieth chapter, twenty-fourth verse: “But as his part is that goeth down to the battle, so shall his part be that tarrieth by the stuff; they shall part alike.”
(All quotations, facts and figures contained in this chapter titled “In The World War At Home”, unless otherwise stated herein, are extracts taken from Work’s Negro Year Book, 1918-1919 edition, pages 14-45-46-47-48-49-50.)
IN THE CHURCHES
Fresh Air Religion
The preachers of to-day now seek
Fresh air within God’s House to keep;
And not hot rooms with germ-filled airs
In sermons and their church affairs.
—Harrison.
EVEN during the Revolutionary War, George Leile, a Baptist slave who had been freed by his owner, preached to slaves in Savannah, Ga. From that time on up the Negro pulpit has been wielding among the masses of Colored people in America an influence for good that is the first of all influences that has the greatest hold upon the Race.
Some of the other early preachers who helped to lay the rock foundation of this ruling influence were Lemuel Haynes of Connecticut, a wonderful orator and honored veteran of the Revolutionary War; Richard Allen and Absolem Jones of Pennsylvania, Allen having founded the famous old Bethel Church in Philadelphia and was ordained in 1816 the first bishop of the A. M. E. Church; Amanda Smith of Maryland, who won thousands of Colored and white converts over to God as a result of her powerful sermons and temperance lectures in England, Scotland, Africa and India as well as in America; John Chavis of North Carolina, who on account of his superior education won fame and recognition as a school teacher of rich white Southern boys and girls and also as a powerful pulpit preacher to enslaved men and women of his own race; and John Gloucester of Tennessee and Pennsylvania, who was the first Colored minister of a Presbyterian church in the United States. Thus were the ways those early God-Fearing men and women of days before and right after the Civil War blazed the plain guiding marks in the forests of ministry, in order that the clear-sighted and sure-footed gospel leaders who have since followed them might have no trouble in choosing the right paths through which to lead their trusting and loyal congregations.
The following is an article quoted from the August 6, 1921, issue of the Chicago Defender:
“C. T. Walker, Noted Pastor, Dies in South.”—“Augusta, Ga., Aug. 5—The Rev. Charles T. Walker, often referred to as the greatest preacher of his time, died Friday July 29, at his home here.
“Dr. Walker was vice-president of the National Baptist convention of the United States and pastor of the Tabernacle Baptist church here for the past forty years, excepting five years when he was pastor of the Mount Olivet Baptist church, New York City.
“He founded the Y.M.C.A. in New York City for our people, traveled extensively in Europe and the Holy Land, and was the author of a number of books of travel as well as sermons.
“As an evangelist, he was widely known, and no other minister ever drew larger crowds when he spoke. His church in this city was often visited by Northern winter tourists, among them former President Taft and John D. Rockefeller. It was the latter who paid an artist to paint pictures of the Christ Child on the walls of Rev. Walker’s church.”