IN NORTH FLORIDA AND NEW ORLEANS
Lynching is more associated with the cotton-growing districts than with others. It is not a fact that the further south you go the more violent the temper of the people. Southeastern Georgia, where the main business is lumbering and rice growing, has a better record than the cotton-growing interior. The cotton planters are aware of this, and it is not uncommon to curse the cotton and wish they could turn to something else. Cotton is not a popular industry. In the old days it bound slavery upon planter and Negro—for cotton necessitates cheap labor—and now it keeps the Negro down and perpetuates an ungenerous type of life.
I worked down the Atlantic coast to Brunswick and Jacksonville, preparing in mind for some sort of joyful surprise when I should enter Florida. Brunswick is one of the oldest ports in Georgia. As far as records go, it has never been disgraced by a lynching. Its background of industry is chiefly timber, and the eye looks in vain for a cotton bale or a cotton blossom. It is a peaceful little city, all sand and low palm and scrub, with innumerable grasshoppers and butterflies even in December. An open-streeted port with placid, happy Negroes and no race movement of any kind.
At Jacksonville one experiences a complete change of air. It is the climate of Florida, and the difference between cotton and fruit. The difference also between much sombre business and some gilded pleasure. When the rich from the North step out of their cars in Florida and take their ease at Palm Beach, they naturally would not care to be mixed up in the South’s pet sport. Lynchings are bad business in Florida, for if the things occurred there that take place in the neighboring State of Georgia it would certainly frighten away many polite and wealthy visitors. As regards the white woman also, the Floridians do not so assiduously libel the Negro as do the Georgians. Ladies need not be afraid to visit the watering places; the colored man is said to have his passions well under control. Most of the trouble that does occur is in more obscure places, and more in northern than in southern Florida.
Jacksonville is a large port with a population bordering on a hundred thousand. Naturally, there are masses of poor as well as numbers of rich. There is employment for a great quantity of Negro labor, and on the streets one may observe the characteristics of a large maritime city. What strikes an Englishman visiting these Atlantic ports—Baltimore, Norfolk, Savannah, Jacksonville, when compared with Hull, Cardiff, Liverpool, London Docks, etc.—is the absence of that somewhat agitating phenomenon of black dock laborers walking out with poor white girls. You may see them any evening in England. As a natural and instinctive thing, most Whites resent it, and street fights in England are the not uncommon result. In America, walking out with Negroes either innocently or otherwise is impossible. Riots and lynchings do not arise from that reason, but from alleged individual assaults upon white women. It should be remarked that womanhood in America is practically idealized. The public as a whole is disinclined to tolerate a woman smoking or drinking, or bathing in inadequate attire, or even “spooning.” It would not occur to a poor white factory girl as even possible to walk out with a Negro. Her moral self-esteem is higher than that of her English sister. The girls who are seen walking out with Negroes in London belong more often to a class which is economically or morally submerged.
The Jacksonville Negroes were in a state of considerable anxiety and ferment when I was there. Not because of white-woman trouble, but in anticipation of a riot breaking out on one plea or another. A bad lynching had occurred in the preceding September. A drunken White quarreled with a Negro taxi driver, threatened him and exasperated him, whereupon a conflict ensued in which the White was killed. The white mob then rounded up every Negro chauffeur in the city and terrified a great number of homes, because the lyncher does not care whether he lynches the right Negro or not, as long as one of them suffers. And in this case two paid the penalty. Undoubtedly the horror and terror of being taken by the mob is the worst of an execution of this kind.
The Negroes were very suspicious of white men, and I did not make much progress inquiring into their ways of life. I found, however, a considerably inflated prosperity of churches, due to the philanthropy of Northern visitors, and a well-to-do black proletariat working in the shipbuilding yard and the docks. Nearly all the work done by them was, however, unskilled, and they were only taken as substitutes on skilled work. Substitutes earned as much as seven dollars a day. There is a “Colored” Bank and, as at Birmingham, a so-called “skyscraper” of six stories accommodating all and sundry of trades and professions. Once more, successful drug stores and burial parlors, and a Mme. Nettie Price with beauty establishment. I called at the War Camp Community Club for colored soldiers and sailors—not so enterprising as the one I visited at Norfolk—but the right sort of institution, well used in a proper and discreet way.
I crossed the neck of land to Pensacola, passing through Tallahassee, a district where fine leaves of tobacco for cigar wrapping are grown under trellis. Orange groves hung in plenteous fruit just ripe to pick, changing from green to gold. Pensacola is a port with a great history of its own involving Spanish, British, French, American history. Its background is of orange groves and pecan orchards. The pecan nut, a refinement from the walnut, is so prized in the rest of the United States that one can make a good living and save money on a planting of a hundred or so trees. The main street of Pensacola, leading down to the long pier, is very picturesque, with its mariners’ grocers and marine stores. A passenger vessel plies weekly to Mobile, the great fruit port of southern Alabama, and it is possible to get a passage on cargo boats going to New Orleans. Before the war there was much maritime traffic, but few of the vessels which sailed away to do transport and other war duties have returned.
Pensacola claims to be the oldest white city in the United States, disputing the matter with St. Augustine, Jacksonville, and is taking the question very seriously in view of any celebration. It is not an important place, but is building toward its own supposed greatness, has a fine new railway station and huge, white stone post office and mammoth hotel. These buildings are puzzling in a town where life seems so placid.
Here was a bad lynching for rape a year ago, and a Negro was burned to death. Representations were made to the governor of Florida on the matter. The governor, Sidney I. Catts, replied that he made every effort to keep down lynching in the State, but he could not bring the lynchers to trial, as the citizenship of the State would not stand for it. Apparently he condoned the burning of the Negro, because it was a clear case of sexual wantonness and violence on the part of one of the Negro race. It is somewhat surprising that the chief officer of the law should thus fail to uphold the law. Who is to uphold it if he do not? A contrast this, to the heroic behavior of Mayor Smith of Omaha!