Is the watchword of Dr. Du Bois to be wondered?—
We return.
We return from fighting.
We return fighting.
I met at Memphis, Tennessee, one of the few Southern white men who are sympathetic to the Negro and understand the gravity of the situation. This was Mr. Bolton Smith, a rich business man, a member of the Rotary Club quand meme. As one who among other activities advances money on the security of real estate in the Mississippi Delta, he necessarily has been brought a great deal into contact with the Negro. Society in Memphis looked at him somewhat askance because he did not share the current conventional view, but he was not blackballed, only indulgently laughed at as one who had a weak spot in his mental armor. In places remote from Memphis, however, his views receive weighty consideration.
If he had his way he would give the Negro his right and his due, and stop lynching. He does not believe the Negro wishes “social equality,” the right to mix indiscriminately with white people, in schools, in trains, in marriage. He thinks the Negro prefers to be separate as long as there is no implied dishonor. He made a special study of the Frederick Douglass School at Cincinnati, an all black school which is admirably conducted, and found that by themselves the Negroes progress more than when mixed with Whites. As Cincinnati is a city on the northern fringe, with northern institutions, the Negroes had the choice to go to mixed schools with white children if they desired, but they preferred to be by themselves, and indeed did better by themselves. As regards Jim Crow cars, Smith said he would give equal comfort and equal facilities in colored cars and in colored waiting rooms. He does not think the Negro desires to be in a Pullman car where there are white women. It works without scandal in the North, but there is too much risk of the woman going into hysterics in the South, and the Negro getting lynched at a wayside station. He believes in abandoning “the policy of pin pricks,” and, above all, in suppressing lynching and race riot.
He was, however, strongly opposed to Du Bois and the National Association. He considered that Du Bois was leading the Negroes wrongly, leading them in fact to a worse calamity than any which had yet overtaken them. “If the Negro resorts to force,” said Mr. Smith to me, “he will be destroyed. In peace and in law the white man fails to understand how to handle the Negro, but if it comes to force, the issue becomes quite simple for the white man, and the Negro stands little more chance than a savage. Christianity alone can save the Negro, and the leaders of the National Association are leading the people away from Christianity.” He wished all Negroes could see how fatal it is for them to abandon Christianity.
“If it were not for the lynchings, the National Association and its newspaper would shrink to very small proportions. Every time a Negro is lynched it adds a thousand to the circulation of the Crisis, and a burning adds ten thousand,” said he.
“Hell would soon lose its heat should sin expire,” said I. I was inclined to agree that the only way was through Christianity. But there is such a thing as the wrath of God, and it is not incompatible with Divine Fatherhood and all-merciful Providence. John Brown has been greatly condemned, but he was not outside Christianity—surely he was a child of God. He used to think that without much shedding of blood the crimes of this guilty land could be purged away, but now....
I do not think the white South will be able to avert the wrath of God by machine guns, nor will it quell the Negro by force once the Negro moves from the depths of his being. Better than believe in meeting the great wrath is to be advised betimes and mend one’s ways. Was not the Civil War a sufficient bloodletting? Could not the lesson be learned?
It is certainly in vain to work directly against Du Bois when his power as a leader of revolt could be removed utterly by stopping the lynching. The U. S. Postmaster General refused postal facilities to one number of his newspaper because it was going too far in stirring up sedition, but it was ineffectual, and was, on the contrary, a useful advertisement for the paper. And then, is it not known there are far more advanced groups of Negroes than that of the association of which Dr. Du Bois is president? There are those who laugh Du Bois to scorn as a Moderate. There are those who have sworn that for every Negro done to death by the mob two white men shall somehow perish. An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth is the gospel—or rather, two eyes for one. Something is being started which will not cease with a recital of the Beatitudes. If America does not cast out the devil of class hate from the midst of her she will again be ravished by the Angel of Death as in the Civil War. The established peaceful routine of a country like America is very deceptive. All seems so permanent, so unshakable. The new refinement, the new politeness and well-lined culture, and vast commercial organization and press suggest that no calamity could overtake them. The force that makes for disruption and anarchy is generated silently and secretly. It accumulates, accumulates, and one day it must discharge itself. Its name is resentment, and its first expression is revenge.