Chattanooga is a larger city than Knoxville, better built and more spacious. One has entered the rayon of Southern steel and coal. Its many factory chimneys and its sooty sky testify to considerable industrialism. As in its sister city of Birmingham, Alabama, there are many non-union shops. A great steel strike was in progress in the United States, but while the workers in the North stood their ground in a long and bitter struggle, there was scarcely the semblance of a walkout in places like Chattanooga and Birmingham. Northern labor trouble seemed to mean Southern capitalistic prosperity.
One reason why Southern labor remains to a great extent unorganized is the Negro difficulty. Unions are not ready to accept Negro membership. Therefore the Negro can always be brought in to do the white man’s work if the latter goes on strike. Whether union or non-union, the wages seem fairly high. I talked with a Negro moulder who earned on an average six dollars a day. That is over eighteen hundred dollars American, and about five hundred pounds British money a year. A non-union unskilled man would, however, earn little more than two dollars a day—which, with the cost of food so high, is very little.
I noticed a difference in the attitude of the colored population in Chattanooga. It was much more depressed than that of Knoxville or the Virginian cities. Nothing terrible had occurred in Chattanooga, but there was said to be a bad mob, and what had happened at Knoxville had frightened them. The newspapers contained intimidating news paragraphs. On September 26th, at Omaha, Nebraska, the mob had burned down the courthouse, lynched a Negro, and tried to lynch also the mayor, E. P. Smith, who was twice hoisted to a lamp-post because he refused to hand over a prisoner to the mob. “As I stood under that lamp-post with the mob’s rope necktie circling my neck and listened to the yells ‘Lynch him,’ I took the same course any true American would have taken,” said the mayor. In the face of death he refused to yield his authority to Judge Lynch. That was at Omaha, in the West. On September 29th two Negroes were lynched by twenty-five masked men at Montgomery, Alabama, for alleged assault of a white woman. On October 1st the terrifying color riot broke out at Elaine, Arkansas, on a dispute over cotton prices. On October 6th two Negroes were burned at the stake and three were shot to death at Washington, Georgia, for supposed complicity in the murder of a deputy sheriff. Next day, at Macon, Eugene Hamilton was lynched for attempted murder, and so on. Since the Civil War one could scarcely find a more bloody and terrible period. And the poor Whites of Chattanooga kept hinting that Chattanooga’s turn would soon come. I was told Negroes did not care to stray far from their homes in the suburbs after dark. They were tormented and mauled on their way home from church. The Jim Crow portion of the trolley car was invaded by roughs trying to start trouble. In some cities in the South the Negroes have all-black motor omnibuses and jitneys running. These would obviate much of the danger of the trolley car which has only a straw screen between the races. But Negro enterprise has not risen to motor omnibuses in depressed Chattanooga. From a white point of view, the city might be improved by more light. It is a dark and extensive place. The great companies do not want to lose their Negroes and might do more to keep them. I found the Negroes scared, and many were ready to seize the first opportunity to go northward. Mr. T—— said, “They might kill us all.” Mrs. W—— said: “All who have children want to go away. There’ll be no chance for our children here. Before the war it was much better, but they seem to dislike us more now. Perhaps it would have been better if none of our men had gone to the war.” I endeavored to reassure most of those with whom I talked, for they had an exaggerated idea of their danger.
At Chattanooga there was no library for the colored people. There seemed to be little Negro business. I was at once introduced to the druggist and the undertaker. Undertaking and drug-selling, which includes ice-cream-soda dispensing, seem the most popular business enterprises among the Negroes. Wherever three or four polite Negroes were gathered together and I was talking to them someone would say, “Permit me to introduce Undertaker So-and-So,” and the latter would smile blandly and offer his brown hand. At Chattanooga I visited a swell establishment and looked over a show-room of elegant coffins, and I was shown into the parlor and the embalming room, where on a stone slab the bodies were prepared. This undertaker had started originally with one coffin, and had now become, as I saw, one of the rich men of the city. Funerals cost between a hundred and a hundred and fifty dollars, and were usually defrayed by the insurance companies.
I found the large East Side drug store, kept by a young man who had been in charge of the pneumonia ward of the 92nd Divisional Hospital in France. He had as many white customers as colored. He did not sell much patent medicine, as he said the attitude of the United States Government to patent medicines had become most severe. He was a fully qualified chemist. Doctors prescribed and he dispensed in the ordinary way. Yes, many were surprised to find a Negro chemist in a position of authority in a hospital, but that was due to white people’s ignorance of the progress made by colored students of medicine.
I greatly enjoyed “Joseph’s Bondage,” a dramatic cantata sung by a colored choir. Evidently the Negroes had composed the cantata themselves, for the verbiage was very quaint and simple. In a packed hall to be the only Whites was for myself and the lady who was with me a curious position. It caused a whole row of seats to remain empty in the midst of a crowded house. No Negro male dared sit down next to the white woman for fear of what I might do. However, when I left my place to talk to a Negro I knew in another part of the hall the empty line filled up mechanically.
The production of the cantata was quite amusing. Potiphar’s guards were the smartest possible, being ex-soldiers from Pershing’s army, upright Negro boys in khaki. But Potiphar was in blue, and looked like a man in charge of an elevator, and wore the slackest of pants. Leva, his wife, pawed Joseph over and yowled: “I love you, I love you.” Pharaoh, with glistening steel crown and steel slippers, was impressive. Joseph as a slave was the Negro workingman in his shirt; as Vizier, however, with the purple on him, he looked very grand, and the jubilee chorus which he sang when at length Pharaoh stepped down and he sat in Pharaoh’s seat, was very jolly, swaying to one side of the crowd around him and singing to them, swaying to the other side and singing to them, and then to all and God——
I did not leave the city without attending church, and I heard a little black Boanerges give a brilliant address. He walked up and down his rostrum with arms folded, and cooed and wheedled, but ever and anon crouching and exploding, lifting his hand to strike, bawling, even yelling to humanity and the Almighty. In dumb show he pulled the rope of a poor fellow being lynched—and sent straight to hell. He spoke of the race riots, and then suddenly becoming breathless, as if he were a messenger just arrived with bad tidings, he flung both arms wide apart, dilated his eyeballs, and cried in a terrorizing shriek—“there is riot and anarchy in the land.”
He had chosen a fine combination of texts for his sermon: “Can the Ethiopian change his skin or the leopard his spots? That which is born of the flesh is flesh and that which is born of the Spirit is Spirit.”
Though a complete stranger, I was singled out and brought to the front to give the congregation a Christian greeting. I told them I had read in a Negro paper that “the Negro church had failed. Prayer had been tried for fifty years and had been proved to be no use.” And I said what I firmly believe to be true, that only Christianity can save color.