The negro workers

by Eugene V. Debs

I want to make my modest contribution to this campaign of education and organization that gives you the opportunity to register your protest against capitalist corruption and misrule as well as the degree of your class consciousness and intelligence. (Applause.)

A matter of local interest to you in this campaign is the housing proposition. The law expires in February coming. It will not be re-enacted by the old parties. All the combined landlords have launched a campaign of opposition to it. This is an issue in which the workers are especially concerned. The rich are not worried about housing conditions. It is the workers who will be the prey of the greedy landlords of New York. That is an important issue in this campaign and the Socialist Party stands squarely for the re-enactment of the housing law and for the curbing of capitalistic greed in the interest of better housing conditions for the benefit of the working class and the exploited and suffering poor. (Applause.)

There is another matter of local interest. I was waited on to-day at my hotel by a delegation of policemen and City firemen. When officers of the law call on me they usually have a warrant (laughter); but on this occasion they were on a perfectly friendly mission.

When we had our meeting at Brooklyn the other night they had half the police force of that section there, just as they had at Toledo, the police surrounding the Opera House. But Socialist meetings are uniformly orderly. (Applause.) You never hear of a disorderly Socialist meeting. We appeal to the intelligence of the people (applause); we seek to educate them. A Socialist meeting has something of a religious spirit in it.

But they sent the police force there because they said “he is a very dangerous man; there is no telling what may happen when he comes to town.” (Laughter.) You see they are afraid of a man who tells the truth (Applause); that is the one thing they cannot stand. (Applause.) And if you cannot be bribed or brow-beaten—if you cannot be intimidated, if you insist upon being true to your own soul’s integrity, and speak what is in your heart, then of course, you must expect to pay the penalty, and I have been and am now ready to pay to the limit. I went down to Atlanta for three years almost; that was my fifth term in one of the peculiar educational institutions of capitalism and it has all had its good results. (Laughter.) But I have no bitterness; I have no resentment. I felt sorry for the man who had to lock me up. He did not want to do it.

Soon after I was in prison I came in touch with a colored man who had a most tragic history. He had been there for thirty years and ten years of that he had been placed in solitary confinement because they couldn’t break his spirit. When they insulted him he resented it and defended himself. When I got down there I heard about him. His name was Sam Moore. He was one of the many, many colored men who never had a chance in life. In his childhood—in his very infancy he was tossed out into the world; he knew only poverty and neglect; his mother was dead seven years before he knew it. He was never in school; no one had ever given him a kind word; buffeted about he tried to help himself and fight his way along; he got arrested, as they all do, was put in jail, got into a quarrel and in a fight that followed he chanced to kill another prisoner when they sent him to the penitentiary, more than thirty years ago, and he has been there ever since. When I came in touch with him they said “he is a bad man.” I soon found him to be a brother. The Chaplain was asked: “What has Debs done to Sam Moore, he is an entirely different man?” The Chaplain answered: “Just loves him; that’s all.” (Applause.) Oh, the magic and the power of human love, were it but understood! Sam Moore had never been touched by the hands of kindness; everything that was combative in his nature was developed by the cruel, inhuman treatment he had been subjected to all his life. And when I came down there and we met face to face on the same level, I said to myself, if I had been born as Sam Moore was and under the same condition, I would be Sam Moore; I would be where he is now. I am not one bit better than he. On the contrary I was reminded of the divine Easterner who prayed to his Allah: “Be Thou merciful to the vicious and forgive them; Thou hast already blessed the virtuous by making them so.”

As I thought of Sam Moore and of the environment and conditions under which he had been reared and had to suffer and struggle, I made allowance accordingly, and he was the last inmate I saw when I left that prison.

There were almost three thousand human beings there. The prison is the poor man’s institution; the rich don’t go there, no matter what crime they may commit. About one-third of the prisoners were colored people, and they used to come to me when they had petitions to make or there was some little service I could render them. I used to write their letters and I could not but sympathize with them. They tried to segregate them in the prison. We were occasionally permitted to see moving pictures. They admitted the white men to one side of the auditorium and the colored men to the other side. Some of the white “superior” element said: “Let the Niggers sit in the rear”; and so on the next occasion they allowed the white men to occupy all the front seats and put the colored men in the rear where they could hardly see the stage. They appointed a committee to call on me to see what they could do about it. I said “I am with you; we will protest against the injustice.” We did and we put an end to it. After that the colored men were given the same consideration as the white prisoners.

I loved all of those almost three thousand prisoners, charged with every conceivable offense against society. I treated them all as if they had been members of my own family, and there was not one of them I would not have invited to my table or to my home. They were poor, most of them ignorant; they never had a fair chance. They had, for the most part, committed some petty offense and were pushed into the penitentiary and branded as “convicts.”

The lowest thing about a prison is often the prison guard—the only fellow I was ashamed to associate with. (Laughter.) The last inmate I saw when I left prison was Sam Moore. There was a fine woman in that neighborhood whose sympathy had been enlisted, and on the day I left she brought a beautiful cake she had baked. She said: “This is for Sam,” and the warden said: “I will send it to him”; I said: “No; please send for Sam, I wish to place it in his hands and bid him good-bye.” Sam came. There was something of the majesty of the man about him, notwithstanding his thirty years of cruel usage and persecution. He was like some monarch of the forest that the tempest had riven and denuded. But he still stood erect, unbroken in spirit. I presented him with the cake and the tears rolled down his face. At parting we put our arms around each other and wept together. That was my farewell scene in the Atlanta prison. I can still hear, in broken words, the sobbing entreaty: “I want to get out of here and to be where I can do for you and your family anything in my power all the rest of my life.” That was Sam Moore, the man they had said was a desperado, an incorrigible and dangerous criminal. He was as tender and responsive as a child; the divine within him had not been extinguished; all he needed was the touch of human kindness; and that is what has been denied him and his race through all the centuries.