Two Negro Parties Compared
These two points of view, of course, are not peculiar to Negroes; they divide all human thought. The opportunist and optimist on the one hand does his great work with the world as he finds it: he is resourceful, constructive, familiar. On the other hand, the idealist, the agitator, who is also a pessimist, performs the function of the critic, he sees the world as it should be and cries out to have it instantly changed.
Thus with these two great Negro parties. Each is working for essentially the same end—better conditions of life for the Negro—each contains brave and honest men, and each is sure, humanly enough, that the other side is not only wrong, but venally wrong, whereas both parties are needed and both perform a useful function.
Photograph by Purdy
DR. W. E. B. DU BOIS
of Atlanta University
The chief, and at present almost the only, newspaper exponent of the radical Negro point of view is the Boston Guardian, published by William Monroe Trotter. Mr. Trotter is a mulatto who was graduated a few years ago with high honours from Harvard. His wife, who is active with him in his work, has so little Negro blood that she would ordinarily pass for white. Mr. Trotter’s father fought in the Civil War and rose to be a lieutenant in Colonel Hallowell’s Massachusetts regiment. He was one of the leaders of the Negro soldiers who refused to accept $8 a month as servants when white soldiers received $13. He argued that if a Negro soldier stood up and stopped a bullet, he was as valuable to the country as the white soldier. Though his family suffered, he served without pay rather than accept the money. It was the uncompromising spirit of Garrison and Phillips.
A Negro Newspaper of Agitation
The Guardian is as violent and bitter in some of its denunciations as the most reactionary white paper in the South. It would have the North take up arms again and punish the South for its position on the Negro question! It breathes the spirit of prejudice. Reading it sometimes, I am reminded of Senator Tillman’s speeches. It answers the white publicity given in the South to black crime against white women by long accounts of similar crimes of white men. One of its chief points of conflict is the position of President Roosevelt regarding the Brownsville riot and the discharge of Negro soldiers; the attack on Roosevelt is unceasing, and in this viewpoint, at least, it is supported undoubtedly by no small proportion of the Negroes of the country. Another leading activity is its fight on Booker T. Washington and his work. Denouncing Washington as a “notorious and incorrigible Jim Crowist,” it says that he “dares to assert that the best way to get rights is not to oppose their being taken away, but to get money.” Two or three years ago, when Mr. Washington went to Boston to address a coloured audience in Zion Church, Mr. Trotter and his friends scattered cayenne pepper on the rostrum and created a disturbance which broke up the meeting. Mr. Trotter went to jail for the offence. From the Guardian of September 2d I cut part of the leading editorial which will show its attitude:
PROPHET OF SLAVERY AND TRAITOR TO RACE