Go down, Moses,
Way down in Egyp’ lan’
Tell ole Pharaoh
Le’ ma people go!
Israel was in Egyp’ lan’
Oppres’ so hard dey could not stan’,
Le’ ma people go!
When casual observers say that the black man is naturally more religious than the white, they lose sight of the fact that the number of church-members per thousand individuals in the Negro population is about the same as the average for the United States as a whole; and they forget also the more important fact that the Negro has never had all he wanted of anything except religion—and in segregated churches at that. It is more true of the black men than of Engel’s proletarians, that they have been put off for a very long time with checks on the bank of Heaven.
Emancipation and the Fourteenth Amendment seemed to open the path to an earthly paradise; but this vision was soon eclipsed by a second Civil War that resulted in a substantial victory for the white South. Economic repression could not be made entirely effective, however, and in the fifty-three years from 1866 to 1919 the number of American Negro homeowners increased from 12,000 to 600,000 and the number of Negroes operating farms from 20,000 to 1,000,000. In 1910 the Negro population still remained 72.6 per cent. rural, but the cityward movement of the blacks during the years 1890 to 1910 was more rapid than that of the whites. Education has directly facilitated economic progress, and has resulted in an increase of literacy among the Negroes from ten per cent. in 1866 to eighty per cent. in 1919. During the period 1900 to 1910, the rate of increase of literacy among the blacks was much more rapid than that among the whites. Thus from the day he was cut off from his own inheritance, the American Negro has reached out eagerly for an alien substitute, until to-day, in practically everything that has to do with culture, he is not black but white—and artificially retarded.
Since America has deprived the Negro of the opportunity to grow up as an African, and at the same time has denied him the right to grow up as a white man, it is not surprising that a few daring spirits among the Negroes have been driven at last to the conclusion that there is no hope for their race except in an exodus from the white man’s culture and the white man’s continent. The war did a great deal to prepare the way for this new movement; the Negroes of America heard much talk of democracy not meant for their ears; their list of wrongs was lengthened, but at the same time their economic power increased; and many of them learned for the first time what it meant to fight back. Some of them armed themselves, and began to talk of taking two lives for one when the lynching-mob came. Then trouble broke in Chicago and Washington—and the casualties were not all of one sort. Out of this welter of unrest and rebellion new voices arose, some of them calling upon the Negro workers to join forces with their white brothers; some fierce and vengeful, as bitterly denunciatory of socialism and syndicalism as of everything else that had felt the touch of the white man’s hand; some intoxicated, ecstatic with a new religion, preaching the glory of the black race and the hope of the black exodus.