National Urban League
Another organization that is second to none in its usefulness and helpfulness to the America Colored people is the National Urban League for Social Service Among Negroes. This body was formed in 1911 and is also under the guidance of one of the staunchest white friends the Race has in the person of L. Hollingsworth Wood. His keen foresight discovers and leaves no stone unturned in bringing about for Colored people throughout the country fair chances to work in new lines of industry and be accorded just privileges to live in sanitary and comfortable quarters. This league has branches in more than thirty cities where thousands of Colored people yearly receive social and industrial helpfulness of the most encouraging nature. Few people know the full value of the tremendous work this league is doing and of the rapid growth it is making.
Those who are, as the chief officers in this league, wisely and unstintingly giving their time and efforts to aid Mr. Wood in this great work are W. H. Baldwin, A. S. Frissell, A. L. Jackson, E. K. Jones, Dr. R. R. Moton, Kelly Miller, John T. Emlen, J. C. Thomas and Lillian A. Turner.
Praiseworthy and thankful mention should be made on these pages regarding the backboned manhoods and Christian stands for protection and justice to Colored people three Southern governors have fearlessly taken within the past two years.
In July 1920, Governor Thos. W. Bickett of North Carolina sent the State Militia, under Capt. M. P. Fowler, to Graham, N. C. with orders to halt and prevent a white mob from breaking into jail and lynching three Negro prisoners. After the troops had arrived and were placed on guard the mob advanced on the jail to secure the prisoners but were halted and scattered by the militia’s machine gun that killed one and wounded three of the would-be lynchers.
During March 1921, Governor Edwin P. Morrow of Kentucky removed from office the white jailer, J. H. Edgar for allowing a white mob to enter the jail and lynch Richard James a Colored prisoner. This Governor also offered a reward of one thousand five hundred dollars for the capture and conviction of each member of the mob.
Right on the heels of the exposure and arrest of the Georgia white planter, J. S. Williams, who was convicted in April 1921 for the murder of Lindsey Peterson, a Colored laborer on Williams peonage plantation where the murdered bodies of at least ten other Colored laborers were found; Governor Hugh M. Dorsey, of Georgia had published and freely circulated a pamphlet entitled, “The Negro in Georgia.” In this publication the Governor bravely and in detail tells of 135 incidents of cruelties committed upon Georgia Negroes. In only two of these cases were the victims accused of crimes against white women. The remaining 133 exposures tell of the whippings, shootings, lynchings, and the enslavement of Colored laborers under the forced labor systems, as well as the driving away of wealthy Colored people from their homes by bodily abuses or threatened tortures.
When it is taken into consideration that those officials fully knew that their stands against and exposures of such savage behaviors of their own people would without doubt mean their political deaths, as well as making for themselves state wide enemies who would not hesitate to do them physical harm; the acts of those Governors were really those of heroes. In performing their full official and Christian duties, they have already influenced many other Southern officials to come forward like real men and help to wash away from the South (especially Georgia) its world-wide stain and shame.
During the past twenty years, Hon. Joseph C. Manning of Alabama, because of his continued courageous stands and his mighty platform and pen fights for justice to the Colored people, especially in the South, has constantly proved himself one of the most fearless and truest white friends the Negro race has in America today. In the April 23, 1921 issue of the Chicago Defender there was republished the article “Let Him Have Due Credit” that appeared in the April 16, 1921 issue of The Washington Bee. The article in part says:
“The peonage conditions in Georgia and the trail that has been going on down there recalls that it was Hon. Joseph C. Manning of Alabama who first brought peonage conditions in Alabama and the South to national attention and into national discussion.
“A letter written by Mr. Manning to the New York Evening Post in 1903 not only assailed this condition but named the peonage perpetrators. The Literary Digest made a review of the newspaper comment the article aroused. The papers in Alabama, some of them, vilified Mr. Manning unmercifully. He was denounced as a “defamer of his state”, branded as a liar, the peonage conditions were denied; but, in not a great while, the citizens he named were prosecuted and convicted through the operations of the Department of Justice when Mr. Moody was Attorney General.
“In the matter of peonage, as well as in the showing up of “black belt” frauds in the South, it was none other than Hon. Joseph C. Manning who took the initiative and has stood the burden to follow for having stood for right.
“Precisely as he fought “black belt” frauds, helping to unseat Southern members of Congress in 1897, he has kept on fighting disfranchisement and arraigned lynching and all sorts of mobs and mob government.
“President Harding, when in the United States Senate, was called on frequently by Mr. Manning, who discussed these wrongs with the man who was to become President. The Bee then followed the work being done, in 1917, right here in Washington by Mr. Manning. No man, more than the President of the United States, knows about this self-sacrificing labor of Mr. Manning for right and for justice.”
CORRECTED FRATERNAL INFORMATION
In order to prevent possible misleadings or misunderstandings on the part of any reader, the writer quotes below, from pages 457-8 of Work’s Negro Year Book, 1918-1919 edition, the relative positions of officers in different divisions of the Orders of Masons, Odd Fellows and Pythians, which detailed information he found it impossible to put on pages 128-9 on account of lack of space.