The poor Whites loved to be in mobs and feel in mobs. Over their meals and at work and in the trolley cars they loved to talk in the way of the mob. Individually they don’t understand the Negro—they are afraid of him, like dogs that will only attack when in numbers. They mostly came to America after the Civil War and the Emancipation found the Negroes in possession of land or of work or of houses. They had their grievances, and instead of visiting them upon God or the Devil or Society in general, found the Negro a convenient fetish and visited their discontent on him. It soon became a habit, then it became a sort of lust and brutal sport.
The older and more solid people have been much annoyed by the growth of this brutality, and something definite is being done to combat it in Alabama. Committees have been formed, or were being formed in the fall of 1919, in every county in the State, half white, half colored, to inquire into racial strife and see what could be done for life and freedom.
An old Negro said to me: “We had two clocks on the cabin wall, and one was very slow and deliberate and always seemed to say:
“’Take yo’ time. Take yo’ time!’
“But the other gabbled to us:
“’Get together, get together, get together!’ That’s what we got to do to-day, brothers—get together.”
The Negroes are fond of emphasizing the triviality of color differences. They reprove the white man playfully. “Why get so excited about difference in color? We believe in equality of rights for all men,” I heard a leader say, “for all men of whatever color—white, black, brown, or yellow, or blue.” And his audience laughed. “Two boys go into a shop; one buys a red toy, the other a blue toy—but it is not very important which color—the toy’s the same.”
But of course color prejudice or preference is not such a haphazard matter, and prejudice against the Negro is prejudice against more than color. The toy, so to speak, is different. It may be as good, but it is different. The body, and especially the skull, of a Negro is different from that of the white man. The nervous system, the brain, the mind and soul, are different. I heard the theory put forward in the name of Christian Science that in God’s perfect plan there were no Negroes. Their dark skins were other men’s evil thought about them. All men were really white, and the outward appearance of their skin could be made to correspond to the white idea by concentrated true thought about them. That is a charitable and beautiful faith to live by. But what of the new line of Negroes who are proud of being black, who abhor pallor as nausea? There are many Negroes now who have a religion of being black. The new generation of children is being brought up to glorify Negro color. It is told of the princes and warriors from which it is descended, learns with the geography of the United States the geography of Africa, and delights in the cognomen—Afro-American. The color issue will never be settled by all Negroes becoming Whites. It seems clear also that it cannot be solved by all men becoming mulattoes. There seems to remain just one obvious solution, and that is in distinct and parallel development, equality before the law, and mutual understanding and tolerance.