Tennessee Farmer Has Negro Bishop and His Wife Ejected from a Sleeping Car
Irvine McGraw, a Tennessee farmer, brought Kentucky’s Jim Crow law into prominent notice yesterday on an Illinois Central Pullman car. When McGraw entered the car he saw the coloured divine, Rev. Dr. C. H. Phillips, bishop of the coloured Methodist Episcopal Churches in Tennessee, North Carolina, Texas and a portion of Arizona and New Mexico, and his wife preparing to retire for the night. He demanded that the conductor order them out of the car, but the conductor refused.
After he entered Kentucky he hunted for an officer at every station and finally at Hopkinsville Policeman Bryant Baker agreed to undertake the task of ejecting the Negroes from the car. The train was held nine minutes while they dressed and repaired to the coloured compartment.
I have now described two of the three great classes of Negroes: First, the worthless and idle Negro, often a criminal, comparatively small in numbers but perniciously evident. Second, the great middle class of Negroes who do the manual work of the South. Above these, a third class, few in numbers, but most influential in their race, are the progressive, property-owning Negroes, who have wholly severed their old intimate ties with the white people—and who have been getting further and further away from them.
A White Man’s Problem
It keeps coming to me that this is more a white man’s problem than it is a Negro problem. The white man as well as the black is being tried by fire. The white man is in full control of the South, politically, socially, industrially: the Negro, as ex-Governor Northen points out, is his helpless ward. What will he do with him? Speaking of the education of the Negro, and in direct reference to the conditions in Atlanta which I have already described, many men have said to me:
“Think of the large sums that the South has spent and is spending on the education of the Negro. The Negro does not begin to pay for his education in taxes.”
Neither do the swarming Slavs, Italians, and Poles in our Northern cities. They pay little in taxes and yet enormous sums are expended in their improvement. For their benefit? Of course, but chiefly for ours. It is better to educate men in school than to let them so educate themselves as to become a menace to society. The present kind of education in the South may possibly be wrong; but for the protection of society it is as necessary to train every Negro as it is every white man.
When I saw the crowds of young Negroes being made criminal—through lack of proper training—I could not help thinking how pitilessly ignorance finally revenges itself upon that society which neglects or exploits it.