Mobile, Ala., October 3.—The Italian Government has taken notice of the situation at Sumrall, Miss., where the native whites are endeavouring to keep Italian children out of the schools and where a leader of the Italians was taken to the woods and whipped.
The Italian Consul at New Orleans, Count G. Morroni, reached Mobile this afternoon and began an investigation of the situation. He to-day heard the story of Frank Seaglioni, the leader of the Italian colony at Sumrall, who was a few days ago decoyed from his home at night with a bogus message from New Orleans and unmercifully whipped by a mob of white men.
A decided tendency also exists to charge up to the Negro, because he is a Negro, all the crimes which are commonly committed by any ignorant, neglected, poverty-stricken people. Only last summer we had in New York what the newspaper reporters called a “crime wave.” The crime in that case was what is designated in the South as the “usual crime” (offences against women) for which Negroes are lynched. But in New York not a Negro was implicated.
I was struck while in Philadelphia by a presentment of a grand jury in Judge Kinsey’s court upon the subject of a “crime wave” which read thus:
In closing our duties as jurymen, we wish to call to the attention of this court the large proportion of cases presented to us for action wherein the offences were charged to either persons of foreign birth or those of the coloured race, and we feel that some measures should be taken to the end that our city should be relieved of both the burden of the undesirable alien and the irresponsible coloured person.
Here, it will be seen, the “undesirable alien” and “irresponsible coloured person” are classed together, although it is significant of the greater prejudice against the coloured man that the newspaper report of the action of the grand jury should be headed “Negro Crime Abnormal,” without referring to the alien at all. When I inquired at the prosecutor’s office about the presentiment, I was told:
“Oh, the dagoes are just as bad as the Negroes.”
And both are bad, not because they are Negroes or Italians, but because they are ignorant, neglected, poverty-stricken.
Thus in the dust and confusion of the vast readjustments now going on in the South, the discomfort of which both races feel but neither quite understands, we have the white man blindly blaming the Negro and the Negro blindly hating the white. When they both understand that many of the troubles they are having are only the common gall-spots of the new industrial harness there will be a better living together.
I do not wish to imply, of course, that an industrial age or the wage system furnishes an ideal condition for race relationships; for in the North the Negro’s struggle for survival in the competitive field is accompanied, as I have shown elsewhere, by the severest suffering. The condition of Negroes in Indianapolis, New York, and Philadelphia is in some ways worse than it is anywhere in the South. But, say what we will, the wage system is one step upward from the old feudalism. The Negro is treated less like a slave and more like a man in the North. It is for this reason that Negroes, no matter what their difficulties of making a living in the North, rarely wish to go back to the South. And as the South develops industrially it will approximate more nearly to Northern conditions. In Southern cities to-day, because of industrial development, the Negro is treated more like a man than he is in the country; and this is one reason why Negroes crowd into the cities and can rarely be persuaded to go back into the country—unless they can own their own land.