The Negro and the nation

by Hubert H. Harrison

But it is not in Europe alone that these baneful effects of calumny appear. Here in America, and even in the south where the bulk of the Negroes live in the midst of a people who resentfully declare that they should be left to deal with the Negro because they alone know him—even there the notion of the Negro, fostered by the press and other agencies of public opinion is as wide of the truth as it can be. To illustrate:

In the March number of Van Norden’s Magazine in 1907 there appeared a symposium on The Negro Question. It was composed of expressions of opinion from twelve intelligent southerners, and was followed by an article by Mr. Booker T. Washington. The humor of the think lay in this, that these men were Southern college presidents and heads of banks, had lived all their lives among Negroes, and were, by their own words, proved to be either woefully or willfully ignorant of what the Negro had done and was doing. The mordant irony of fate decreed that Mr. Washington should be the one to present the facts that changed their seeming sapience to Falstaffian farce. The president of Randolph-Macon Woman’s College, Va. set forth that the Negro will not work regularly, that he needs but three dollars a week and, therefore, works but three days to get it and “quits work to spend it.” The president of Howard College, Alabama declared that, “My deliberate opinion is that the days of the Negro as a fair, honest laborer are numbered, and are few at that. He is becoming daily more shiftless, more unreliable, more restless, less inclined to work steadily.” The president of the University of South Carolina and the president of the North Carolina College of Agriculture and Mechanic Arts re-echoed the same doleful dictum while the president of the First National Bank of Birmingham, Ala. and the president of the Bank of Lexington, N.C. declared that it was a mistake to grant the rights of citizenship to the Negro and that education was a curse to him. The president of Guilford College repeated the “lazy, shiftless” argument while the president of Randolph-Macon College, Va. said, “Reduce their wages so that they shall have to work all the time to make a living and they will become better workmen or disappear in the struggle for existence,” repeating in substance, the argument of his brother-president of the Woman’s college.

Mr. Washington’s article did not show any sign that it had been written as a reply of any sort. But it did show among other things, that the census of 1900 proved that the Negro people owned in the very states of these college presidents, “23,383 square miles of territory, an area nearly as large as that of Holland and Belgium combined”; that this represented only a quarter of the farms worked by them; that, “after a searching investigation, I have not been able to find that a single graduate of Tuskegee, Hampton or any of the Negro colleges can now be found in the prisons of the South;” that in a single county of Virginia-Gloucester Co.—Negroes were paying taxes on land valued at 88 million dollars and on buildings assessed at 80 millions, and all this on the soil where they had been slaves forty years before.

Is not this eloquent of the value of American opinion on the American Negro as given in the American press? And the question suggested is, whether such statements are published in ignorance or ill-will? In either case it is equally damnatory.

In December 1907 Professor R. R. Wright, Jr., an eminent Negro sociologist, published in McGirt’s Magazine an article on “The Newspapers and the Negro”, showing how the Negro is being “done” by headlines and other newspaper devices. The Horizon, at that time the most brilliant Negro periodical, dealt with the subject in its issue for April 1908. Under the caption, “The Color Line in the Press Dispatches”, it quoted approvingly these words of a Socialist paper—The Appeal to Reason—“The hand that fakes the Associated Press is the hand that rules the world.” European readers who are acquainted with the occasional diversions of Reuter’s Hong Kong and Shanghai correspondents will appreciate the point.

The Horizon was constrained to refer to the matter again in its August issue. In both instances specific cases were cited and proof given. Since that time the need of some formal protest has been growing in the minds of all those thinking Negroes who are not compelled to “crook the pregnant hinges of the Knee”; and it has grown largely because the practices complained of have grown to alarming proportions.

The newspapers of this country have many crimes to answer for. They feature our criminals in bold head lines: our substantial men when noticed at all are relegated to the agate type division. Their methods, whether they obtain through set purpose or through carelessness, constantly appeal to the putrid passion of race hatred. They cause rapine to break loose by nurturing rancor. They help create untold sorrow. They are week-kneed and apologizing when the hour is bloody.

But how can such a protest be effectively put? Though Truth come hot on the heels of Falsehood it could not quite undo its devil’s work. And the detractors of the weak and helpless are well aware of this.

But Truth in the Negro’s case is not even unleashed. Truth, in fact, is chained up and well guarded, and it is this terrible task of setting Truth free that the Negro must essay in the very teeth of the American press. It is not an easy task to voice an adequate protest, for it needs the widest publicity. And since prejudice will oppose, it needs prestige also. Any such effort must feel itself feeble, and yet it must be made.