The Jersey City Journal says Negroes can vote in the North, they are educated in the North, they are only partially restricted in residence, they usually get equal pay for equal work, and the “objection to having colored people in residence sections is natural.”
The Chicago Tribune “can understand and sympathize” with the signers of the protest, but points out that the positions occupied by the signers themselves show the progress of the Negro.
The New York World says:
“Undeniably, the black population of the United States has just grievances. So also has the white population in the United States. Race prejudice is here as it is in Europe, and blacks are not the only sufferers. There is brutal tyranny in industry, but the blacks are not the only victims. There are social limitations that are cruel and inexcusable, but the blacks are not the only ones against whom the gates are shut.
“This is a world in which true men give and take. It is a world in which all must make allowances. It is a world in which, after all, men are judged not so much by race or nationality or possessions as by personal merit. Otherwise, how could a Booker Washington, born a Virginia slave, have ‘stood before kings’ and associated for the greater part of his life with the earth’s greatest and best?
“We do not condemn the American men of color who have made this protest. We simply remonstrate with them. They are asking more than a white man’s chance, and in the circumstances that is inadmissible.”
The Boston Globe, however, thinks that “these and other complaints are backed by educated Negroes, who demand that the old world shall know their wrongs. They deny that Dr. Washington is giving the right impression of the situation in this country. It would seem to the average person that admittedly there is much truth in the catalog of wrongs the association recites.”
The Brooklyn Times, too, acknowledges that “the lot of the colored American is a hard one at best, but there is nothing to be gained by complaining over conditions and prejudices that cannot be altered or eradicated in the lifetime of a single generation. There are obstacles in the path of the Afro-American, even the most intelligent and aspiring, of which the meanest white man can hardly form an adequate conception; the only thing the Negro can do is to make the best of hard conditions and do his utmost by his individual achievements to make the handicap of his color forgotten.
“It is not surprising, however, that to many ambitious colored citizens patience sometimes ceases to seem a virtue.”
It adds that the appeal “is a mild statement of existing conditions. The lot of the colored American is indeed a hard one. But it is improving. The area of sweet reasonableness is being gradually extended. Old prejudices, and especially racial prejudices, die hard, as the history of the dispersed Hebrew nation tells on every page of the annals of 2,000 years. But prejudice is not eternal, and every colored American who does the utmost of his duty in the place he fills does his part in bringing about the day when ungenerous and unjust discrimination will disappear, and when