“It jarred the white folk terrible bad that Jack Johnson was the real champion of the world,” said the trainer. “When the news came through of Jack Johnson beating Jeffries so far away as Denver, Colorado, the white folk began pulling the Negroes off the street cars in Norfolk, Virginia, and beating them, just to vent their rage, they were so sore.”
I thought that rather amusing, but the trainer took a gloomy view. However, in we went to the shipbuilding yard and looked at many great vessels in dry dock. Out came a motley crowd of men, blacker than their nature through the dirt of their work. The ship painters were splashed from head to foot with the characteristic red paint of ships, and looked like some new tribe; the blue-shirted rivetters and chippers were all frayed and ragged from contact with sharp edges and iron. These Negro workers were very happy and jolly. They seemed nearly all to be on piecework and earned in most cases ten dollars a day, and in some exceptional cases and upon occasion twenty or twenty-five dollars. The rivetters, according to the scale of pay, seemed to be capable of earning huge wages, and many of them were comparatively well off, possessing their homes, and giving their children a good education. The trainer pointed out to me his athletic pets. He was employed by the company to organize competitions and races and baseball teams and the like. The strongest Negroes seemed among the gentlest. The heavyweight champion was a large and beautiful child. He never lost his temper in the ring, because, as I was told, he never needed to. His ears were not turned to “cauliflower” and his nose was not flattened out—as yet.
The lunch hour was remarkable for the swarms of men belched forth by the works. A twenty-cent lunch was ready for all. Wives and mothers also were allowed to come and bring food to supplement what was served at the stands. Lunch over, the men formed into groups, and in some places there were Bible discussions, in others sporting competitions. Despite high wages, I noticed some Negroes going about picking up crusts and putting them into paper bags, presumably to feed the chickens with when they got home. My guide said this was due to the “Save” propaganda which had been carried on. Y. M. C. A. work was very much to the fore, an industrial “Y” having been financed by the owners of the yard. I was told that a little while ago the company found it difficult to keep the young Negro boys—the heaters and passers, on whose work the rivetter depends, for one boy heats the rivet and another passes it, and the rivetter strikes it home. They found so little in the place to interest them that they drifted away from the works. It was this that had determined the firm to embark on a program of physical culture and games. There was also a Y. M. C. A. hut and its usual appurtenances. A long list of evening classes was being arranged. A large building had been promised to the “Y” if it made good.
I could not find any man who belonged to a genuine trade-union affiliated to the American Federation of Labor, though most belonged to “Colored People’s Brotherhoods.” The Whites with whom they worked, and with whom they have upon occasion great rivetting competitions, were presumably non-union also, but that is common; labor in America is poorly organized, compared with labor in Great Britain. Almost the whole of Negro labor is at present outside the recognized unions, and for that reason can almost always be used to break strikes. This is, of course, unfortunate for the Negro, who is thus branded as a “blackleg” in addition to being black by nature, which was reproach enough.
I met a strange character in the evening, one of the colored organizers, a friend of the white men, and in with the bosses of the yards. He was possibly a descendant of the type of Negro who in slavery days acted as agent for the slave merchants, and was to be found on the West African shore lording it over the batches of poor savages who with hands tied up were being hustled on to the slave ships. It used to be a recognizable type. When they themselves were brought over to America they became overseers or field drivers, and brutal enough they were to their fellow men of color. To-day they are foremen or speeders up of Negro gangs, or you find them under the auspices of “Welfare.”
This was a lazy Negro, fat and heavy, with a confused non-thinking mind, great sooty lips, and bloodshot eyes. He told me he put on a wig at night and prowled about the town, spying on vice. The great numbers of black soldiers embarking or disembarking had attracted sharps and bad women of all kinds. The streets were infested with sin, and he knew which boarding houses were disreputable and which were properly kept. He knew where there was drink, and who was organizing the “bootlegging” business, and what graft the police took. Though sluggish by nature, this gloomy soul evidently got full of life at night—spying on the people.
He told me the richest colored man in Newport News was a dentist who charged as much as six dollars an hour for stopping teeth. The example of this dentist’s success had caused several fathers to educate their children for dentistry rather than the Church or the Law. “But we Negroes don’t want to rise,” said he. “We want to show off. We are great imitators of swagger. They’ll come wearing a forty-dollar suit and a clean collar, and brandish a cigar in your face when that is all they have in the world. We’re a crude people, sir.”
There was on the one hand in Newport News a nucleus of prosperous Negro families, and on the other hand the many gambling places and dancing dens where health and ambition and money, and everything else which can help a man to rise could be squandered. In time to come, when society takes root, Newport News should become a Negro stronghold. Already there are so many Negroes no white man dare start a riot.
Not far from Newport News is Hampton Institute, the “Negro Eton,” which produces the Curzons and the Cecils of the colored race, as someone amusingly expressed it. It is the crown of Northern effort to educate the Negro. Endowment and instruction are mostly by Whites. Everyone is engaged in vital self-support, and the students plough the fields, make boots, build wagons, print books, and learn all manner of practical lessons in life. Above all, they are made ready to teach and help others of their race. It is the show place of the Negro world, and rightly so, as most of those who lead Negrodom hail as yet from Hampton.
I did not myself visit Hampton, because it has been adequately described in books, and generally speaking I would rather study the Negro in his unperfumed haunts, where he is less disguised with Northern culture. Perhaps one learns more of the needs and requirements of the Negroes by visiting a poor school where the ordinary routine of teaching is going on. I visited a high school named after Booker T. Washington, and talked to the students in the classes. The young lady who took me to the head master wore a low-cut, white blouse from which her dainty neck and her head of kinky hair grew like a palm tree. She had dog’s teeth for eardrops hanging from her ears, and large, kind, questioning eyes. The head master was a quiet young man from some Negro university, full of pent-up enthusiasm for his race and for learning. He had boundless enthusiasm for the Negro people and their possibilities. Was not the greatest French writer a colored man, and the greatest Russian poet of Negro blood? We went into the composition class. They were doing “Argumentation,” which is perhaps a trifle dull, but we discussed brevity and the principle of suspense. In the English class each child had read “Silas Marner” and was taking it in turn to re-tell the story when called upon by the teacher. This was pretty well done, though Americanisms were frequent, and the two brothers were said to be “disagreeable” when it was meant that they disagreed. In French the whole class was standing around the walls of the room, writing French sentences on the blackboards fitted into the panelling. French was very popular. Every child wanted to go to France by and by. In the Latin class we discussed the merits of Cæsar, in the cookery class whether they ate what they cooked, in the needlework, invisible mending—when suddenly the fire bell sounded. Each class at once got up and filed out in orderly manner. In one minute the whole school of seven hundred black children was cleared. Then they marched back in twos, shoulder to shoulder, in fine style, to the rub-a-dub-dub of a kettledrum. It was a surprise alarm, called by a visiting fire inspector. None, even of the teachers, had known whether the alarm was real.