In Boston, of all places, I expected to find much of the old sentiment. It does exist among some of the older men and women, but I was surprised at the general attitude which I encountered. It was one of hesitation and withdrawal. Summed up, I think the feeling of the better class of people in Boston (and elsewhere in Northern cities) might be thus stated:
We have helped the Negro to liberty; we have helped to educate him; we have encouraged him to stand on his own feet. Now let’s see what he can do for himself. After all, he must survive or perish by his own efforts.
In short, they have “cast the bantling on the rocks.”
Though they still preserve the form of encouraging the Negro, the spirit seems to have fled. Not long ago the Negroes of Boston organised a concert at which Theodore Drury, a coloured musician of really notable accomplishments, was to appear. Aristocratic white people were appealed to and bought a considerable number of tickets; but on the evening of the concert the large block of seats purchased by white people was conspicuously vacant. Northern white people would seem to be more interested in the distant Southern Negro than in the Negro at their doors.
Before I take up the cruder and more violent expressions of prejudice on the part of the lower class of white men in the North I want to show the beginnings of cold-shouldering as it exists in varying degrees in Northern cities, and especially in Boston, the old centre of abolitionism.
Superficially, at least, the Negro in Boston still enjoys the widest freedom; but after one gets down to real conditions he finds much complaint and alarm on the part of Negroes over growing restrictions.
Boston exercises no discrimination on the street cars, on railroads, or in theatres or other places of public gathering. The schools are absolutely free. A coloured woman, Miss Maria Baldwin, is the principal of the Agassiz school, of Cambridge, attended by 600 white children. I heard her spoken of in the highest terms by the white people. Eight Negro teachers, chosen through the ordinary channels of competitive examination, teach in the public schools. There are Negro policemen, Negro firemen, Negro officeholders—fully as many of them as the proportion of Negro population in Boston would warrant. A Negro has served as commander of a white post of the Grand Army.
Prosperous Negroes in Boston
Several prosperous Negro business men have won a large white patronage. One of the chief merchant-tailoring stores of Boston, with a location on Washington Street which rents for $10,000 a year, is owned by J. H. Lewis. He has been in business many years. He employs both white and Negro workmen and clerks and he has some of the best white trade in Boston. Not long ago he went to North Carolina and bought the old plantation where his father was a slave, and he even talks of going there to spend his old age. Another Negro, Gilbert H. Harris, conducts the largest wig-making establishment in New England. I visited his place. He employs coloured girls and his trade is exclusively white. Another Negro has a school of pharmacy in which all the students are white; another, George Hamm, has a prosperous news and stationery store. A dentist, Dr. Grant, who has a reputation in his profession for a cement which he invented, was formerly in the faculty of the Harvard dentistry school and now enjoys a good practice among white people. The real estate dealer who has the most extensive business in Cambridge, T. H. Raymond, is a Negro. He employs white clerks and his business is chiefly with white people. Two or three Negro lawyers, Butler Wilson in particular, have many white clients. Dr. Courtney, a coloured physician from the Harvard Medical School, was for a time house physician of the Boston Lying-in-Hospital, in which the patients were practically all white, and has now a practice which includes both white and coloured patients. Dr. Courtney has also served on the School Board of Boston, an important elective office. The Negro poet, William Stanley Braithwaite, whose father took a degree at Oxford (England), is a member of the Authors’ Club of Boston. His poems have appeared in various magazines, he has written a volume of poems, a standard anthology of Elizabethan verse, and he is about to publish a critical study of the works of William Dean Howells. Several of these men meet white people socially more or less.
I give these examples to show the place occupied by the better and older class of Boston Negroes. Most of those I have mentioned are mulattoes, some very light. It shows what intelligent Negroes can do for themselves in a community where there has been little or no prejudice against them.