This was strictly a new-world voyage, and a comparatively easy one, with plenty of passengers and of freight. The cry is for more ships and bigger enterprise, and if the company makes good Africa will no doubt see Africa come riding toward itself on the waves. It is possible, however, that the Whites of Africa may prove more hostile than those of the easy-going States of South America and the Indies. The news of the Negro line is no doubt very rousing for all intelligent colored people.
What in reality is Black Internationalism is hardly realized as yet, especially by Great Britain. Anything said against the Negroes is heard by a vast number of educated and intelligent colored people. Thus you find the words of the Germanophile E. D. Morel used to stir the masses against Britain. Says Morel, according to the Negroes: “The results of installing black barbarians among European communities are inevitable.... The African is the most developed sexually of any.... Sexually, they are unrestrained and unrestrainable. That is perfectly well known.... For the working classes the importation of Negro mercenaries by the hundred thousand from the heart of Africa to fight the battles and execute the lusts of capitalist governments in the heart of Europe is a terrific portent. The workers alike of Britain, France, and Italy will be ill advised if they allow it to pass in silence.” And when the Daily Herald says that “Wherever there are black troops who have been long distant from their own womenfolk there follows a ghastly outbreak of prostitution, rape, and syphilis” it is necessarily treated as a slur by Negroes. A Negro writer who protested in a well-written and cogent letter to that newspaper fails to get his letter printed, but he prints it all right in the Negro press of America, and asks, “Why this obscene maniacal outburst about the sex-vitality of black men in a proletarian paper?”
If there is a race riot as at Cardiff or Liverpool, or if a scheme is mooted to dispossess the squatters of Rhodesia of more of their land, or a General Dyer machine-guns a crowd of civilians in the name of keeping order in India—it is absurd to think of the matter locally and provincially. It is discussed throughout the world. It is impossible to act now as if the subject races had no collective consciousness.
So much for the point of view of the world outside America. There is another point of view which is perhaps closer to those subjects specially treated in this volume. What the world does to the native and says of him are known in America. America has power to help the native races of dark color throughout the world, and many Americans, white as well as dark, are willing to do so. But there is one very serious difficulty, and that is the moral sanction.
While those things occur; such as burning Negroes at the stake and denying them the equable justice of a true Court of Law, America has no right to speak; her truly grand idealism is rendered almost wholly impotent. It was the same in the promulgation of the League of Nations and the idea of helping small nations; it is the same with regard to American interference, in the name of human rights and ideals, in the Irish question. It can always be objected: Why do you not look after your own subjects first, and save your Negroes? An American said to me in Philadelphia: “I am not overfond of the Bolsheviks, but of one thing I am glad—The red hand of the Tsar will never rule again.”
No?
And another said: “Thank God the pogroms are over.”
Are they?
And a third said: “I am sorry America refused to take a mandate for Armenia.”