Woodrow Wilson is my leader. What he commands me to do I shall do. Where he commands me to go I shall go. I had naught of ill will toward Von Bernsdorf until Wilson pointed him out as a national menace. Whom Woodrow Wilson cannot receive into fellowship, I cannot receive.
A Negro resident of Chicago for fourteen years, formerly of Louisiana, said:
I went to Wilson's last inauguration in Washington and tried to talk to the President. I got in the gate, but the guard would not let me go farther without a pass. I went into every place that men were allowed to enter and found no "Jim-Crowing" in any public place. The nearest approach to it was in the printing department of the government. There were several colored girls all working at the same table. In other departments I had seen white and colored together. I went into every washroom on every floor of one building and must have washed my hands twenty times.
Negroes, real Americans.—A letter from a Negro workman to Governor Lowden said:
Why is it that intelligent colored people, the real Americans and the most humble and purest nation that ever trod the soil of America since they have been here—we have never thrown any bombs; we have never written a black-hand letter and what disgrace and shameful things we do it was learned to us by our foreparents' masters down south because they taught them to steal and murder and do all other most disgraceful things. We have never bombed any white people's homes, but I cannot see into it why it is that all nations such as the Polish, Japan, Chinaman, Mexican, German and Russ and now you see what they have done to this country; they have done everything to overthrow this Government and have got the I.W.W. and the Red. Where have we done such dirty deeds? We have enriched this soil of America with our blood in every war for this country and then cannot live where we want to as an American citizen. We even shed our blood in France to save someone else money and their homes, and the thanks we got when we come back was a big race riot which I do believe was started by southern white men to put a disgrace on the North because the North do not lynch and burn as they do. Of course I know you cannot do anything by yourself. But if you can get enough men who have got a backbone to protect the ones who have always protected them this outrage could be stopped. I read a piece in the Herald-Examiner that it would be a riot here; that has poisoned the minds of so many people. So now I hope you will try to stop such trouble.
Defensive philosophy; silence does not mean contentment.—A Negro educator said:
Many white men of high intellectual ability and keen discernment have mistaken the Negro silence for contentment, his facial expression for satisfaction at prevailing conditions, and his songs and jovial air for happiness. But not always so. These are his methods of bearing his troubles and keeping his soul sweet under seeming wrongs. In the absence of a spokesman or means of communication with the whites over imagined grievances, he has brightened his countenance, smiled and sung to give ease to his mind. In the midst of it all he is unable to harmonize the teachings of the Bible which the white Christian placed in his hands with the practices of daily life. He finds it difficult to harmonize the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man, and his faith is put to the test in that "Providence" which enslaved his ancestors, corrupted his blood and placed upon him stigmas more damaging than to be a leper or convict by making his color a badge of infamy and his preordained social position at the bottom of human society. So firmly has his status been fixed by this "Providence" that neither moral worth, fidelity to trust, love of home, loyalty to country or faith in God can raise him to human recognition.
Votes for Negroes.—The Crisis for January, 1921, said:
The astonishing thing about the Bourbon South is its intellectual bankruptcy when it comes to the Negro. It continually assumes that the Negro is a fool. Some Negroes are fools, but the proportion among them is steadily decreasing, while that among the Bourbons seems to increase. When the average white Southerner faces the problem of racial contact he has absolutely nothing to offer except what he offered in 1861, namely: the Will of God, Force and Bloodshed, and, "The best friend in the world to the Negro is the Southern white man—the only one who truly loves him." We quote from our ever-delightful friend, the editor of the Macon (Ga.) Telegraph.
The tragedy of the situation is that this man believes what he says. He knows absolutely just the "place" for which God made "niggers"; but to support this sincere belief he spreads falsehoods. He says that the woman suffrage party by its secret machinations "probably" caused the blood shed in the Florida elections! He threatens murder for black men who want to vote, and almost weeps over the misguided Negroes who have left the Empire State of lynching and gone to Chicago.