However, looking around the houses of the industrialized masses here, one can only be appalled at the inadequacy of civilization. There is nothing that is better than in the forlorn mining villages of the Russian Ural. It makes a sort of Negro little better than a nigger, and it is surprising that he does not run amuck more often than he does.
If the outlying settlements reminded of the Ural, the center of the city reminded of nothing better than Omsk. Here on the main street, at Eighteenth Street, is a very “jazzy” corner, resplendent with five times too much light at night, vocal with noisy music, and swarming with Negroes of all castes and colors. By day it is like a web of gregarious larvæ; by night it is the entrance to wonderland. Here is massed together the Negro enterprise of the city. Most of the characters of Octavus Roy Cohen’s clever Negro stories are thought to be derived from this corner—Mr. Florian Slappey, Lawyer Evans Chew, and the rest. Do not their ways and doings divert a vast number of readers to the Saturday Evening Post? I may have met some of them. I cannot say. But I met their like.
The chief establishment is the savings bank building, a squat, six-story erection in red brick. It is flanked by places of amusement, but in itself it is an ark of professionalism and learning. It is a hive of many cells or cabinets, and every cabinet has its special occupant, a doctor here, a dentist there, a lawyer in the other, another doctor, a professor, an agent, and so on. You may meet nearly all who count in Birmingham Negrodom here. By the way, the local way of pronouncing the name of the city is Bumming Ham; if you say politely, Birmingham, pronouncing with lips and teeth in the front part of the mouth, no one will understand what you mean. A Negro pastor whirled me round to the hub of Bumming Ham in his brand-new car. He had lately had a very successful revival, of which the motor was an outward and visible sign. And I called on many of the notables. I met a short, scrubby Negro of fifty, whose complexion seemed to have been drenched in yellowness. He explained this by the statement that the blood of Senator H—— flowed in his veins. The senator had taken a liberty with his mother, who for her part was thoroughly black. He thanked the senator, since probably he had given him some brains; his mother’s side of the family was unusually hard-headed. He had become a professor. His daughter was a remarkable public speaker, and as Senator H—— was an orator, he used to tell his Sarah that there was Senator H—— coming out in her. “The Negro has been mixed with the best blood in the South,” said he; “the blood of the masters, the English aristocrats who came first to the country.”
I did not think there was much in that.
“Are mulattoes increasing or decreasing in numbers?” I asked.
He thought they were increasing. But he did not deny the fact that Negro children tend to revert to type. When two mulattoes marry, the children are generally darker than the parents, and often real Negro types. The white man’s strain is thrown out rapidly.
“How, then, is it that mulattoes and near Whites are on the increase?” The professor thought for one reason there was still much illegitimacy, and for another the Negro race under civilized conditions was getting a little fairer on the whole. Some of the mulatto women were extremely beautiful, and consequently more attractive to white men. The white women of the South hated the mulatto women because they took their husbands away from them. He thought a good deal of race hatred was fostered by the white woman, who instinctively hated the other race.
“Did you ever hear of a union between a Negro woman and a white man that was on other than an animal plane?” I asked him.
Professor M—— knew of several instances where an infatuation for a Negro woman had inspired a white man to make good in life. It was generally a tragedy, for they could not marry, and they were subject to coarse suspicion and raillery and intrigue. It stood in the way of the white man finding a white bride, and of the Negro woman finding a Negro husband. Where a white man had become interested in a Negro woman it was not good for the health of a Negro man to pretend to her affections. The mob feeling against Negroes was so readily aroused that it was the easiest thing in Alabama for a white man who had a grudge against a Negro to “frame up” a crime or a scandal and make him leave the neighborhood or remain constantly in danger of being roughly handled.
Alabama has a bad record for lynching. It is about fifth in the list of bad States. I understood that lynching was on the increase. The old folk, the people who had been slave owners, the settled inhabitants of places like Anniston and Montgomery, and of the country, knew all the family history of their “niggers” from A to Z, and what they might do, or could do, and they were friendly, compared with the “new sort.”