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Title: When Africa awakes: The "inside story" of the stirrings and strivings of the new Negro in the Western world
Author: Harrison, Hubert H.
Language: English
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*** Start of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "When Africa awakes: The "inside story" of the stirrings and strivings of the new Negro in the Western world" ***
WHEN AFRICA AWAKES
THE “INSIDE STORY” OF THE STIRRINGS AND STRIVINGS
By HUBERT H. HARRISON, D.S.C.
Author of “The Negro and the Nation,” “Lincoln
and Liberty,” and Associate Editor of the Negro World
COPYRIGHTED
By HUBERT H. HARRISON, 1920.
PUBLISHED BY
THE PORRO PRESS
513 Lenox Avenue
1920
THIS LITTLE RECORD
IS AFFECTIONATELY DEDICATED
TO THOSE WHO
STOOD BY MY SIDE
IN
LOVE, LABOR AND SACRIFICE
WHEN
THE FOUNDATIONS
WERE LAID
[Illustration: Hubert H. Harrison]
TABLE OF CONTENTS
CHAPTERS PAGE
INTRODUCTION 5
1. THE BEGINNINGS 9
Launching the Liberty League. — Resolutions Passed at
Liberty League Meeting. — Petition to Congress.
2. DEMOCRACY AND RACE FRICTION. 14
The East St. Louis Horror. — “Arms and the Man.” —
The Negro and the Labor Unions. — Lynching: Its Cause
and Cure.
3. THE NEGRO AND THE WAR. 25
Is Democracy Unpatriotic? — Why Is the Red Cross? —
A Hint of “Our Reward.” — The Negro at the Peace
Congress. — Africa and the Peace. — “They Shall Not
Pass.” — A Cure for the Ku-Klux
4. THE NEW POLITICS. 39
The New Politics for the New Negro. — The Drift in
Politics. — A Negro for President. — When the Tail Wags
the Dog. — The Grand Old Party.
5. THE PROBLEMS OF LEADERSHIP. 54
Our Professional “Friends.” — Shillady Resigns. — Our
White Friends. — A Tender Point. — The Descent of Du
Bois. — When the Blind Lead. — Just Crabs.
6. THE NEW RACE-CONSCIOUSNESS. 76
The Negro’s Own Radicalism. — Race First versus Class
First. — An Open Letter to the Socialist. Party. —
“Patronize Your Own.” — The Women of Our Race. — To
The Young Men of My Race.
7. OUR INTERNATIONAL CONSCIOUSNESS. 96
The White War and the Colored World — U-need-a
Biscuit. — Our Larger Duty. — Help Wanted for Hayti. —
The Cracker in the Caribbean. — When Might Makes
Right. — Bolshevism in Barbados. — A New International.
The Rising Tide of Color. — The White War and the
Colored Races.
8. EDUCATION AND THE RACE. 123
Reading for Knowledge. — Education and the Race. —
The Racial Roots of Culture. — The New Knowledge for
the New Negro.
9. A FEW BOOKS. 135
The Negro in History and Civilization. — Darkwater. —
The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy.
EPILOGUE: THE BLACK MAN’S BURDEN; A Reply 145
to Rudyard Kipling
INTRODUCTORY
The Great War of 1914–1918 has served to liberate many new ideas
undreamt of by those who rushed humanity into that bath of blood. During
that war the idea of democracy was widely advertised, especially in the
English-speaking world; mainly as a convenient camouflage behind which
competing imperialists masked their sordid aims. Even the dullest can
now see that those who so loudly proclaimed and formulated the new
democratic demands never had the slightest intention of extending either
the limits or the applications of “democracy.” Ireland and India, Egypt
and Russia are still the Ithuriel’s spear of the great democratic
pretence. The flamboyant advertising of “democracy” has returned to
plague the inventors; for the subject populations who contributed their
millions in men and billions in treasure for the realization of the
ideal which was flaunted before their eyes are now clamoring for their
share of it. They are demanding that those who advertised democracy
shall now make good. This is the main root of that great unrest which is
now troubling the decrepit statesmanship of Europe and America. But the
rigid lines of the old regime will not permit the granting of these new
demands. Hence the new war against democracy which expresses itself in
the clever but futile attempt to outlaw the demands for fuller freedom
as “sedition” and “Bolshevism.”
The most serious aspect of this new situation is the racial one. The
white world has been playing with the catch-words of democracy while
ruthlessly ruling an overwhelming majority of black, brown and yellow
peoples to whom these catchwords were never intended to apply. But these
many-colored millions have taken part in the war “to make the world safe
for democracy,” and they are now insisting that democracy shall be made
safe for them. This, in plain English, their white overlords do not
intend to concede. “The undictated development of all peoples” was, at
best, intended “for white people only.” Thus, white civilization is
brought face to face with a crisis out of which may easily grow military
conflicts of tremendous scope and, more remotely, the passing of
international control out of the hands of a few white nations.
The tenseness of this new situation has been reflected here in the
United States in the mental attitude of the Negro people. They have
developed new ideas of their own place in the category of races and have
evolved new conceptions of their powers and destiny. These ideas have
quickened their race-consciousness and they are making new demands on
themselves, on their leaders and on the white people in whose midst they
live. These new demands apply to politics, domestic and international,
to education and culture, to commerce and industry. It seems proper that
the white people of America should know what these demands are and
should understand the spirit in which they are being urged. Obviously,
it is not well that they should be misrepresented and lied about. Futile
fulminations about the spread of “Bolshevism” among Negroes by
“agitators” will not help toward an understanding of this new
phenomenon. They can but befog the issues and defer the dawning of a
better day. On the other hand, the Negro people will profit by a
clarified presentation of their own side of the case. It is to meet this
dual need that this little book is launched. It is a compilation of some
of the author’s contributions to Negro journalism between 1917 and the
present year and consists of selected editorials, special articles and
reviews written for The Voice, The New Negro, and The Negro World. I
have selected for reproduction those only which could fairly be
considered as expositions of the new point of view evolved during the
Great War and coming into prominence since the peace was signed. So far,
this point of view has not been fully presented-by the Negro. White men,
like Messrs. Sandburg and Seligman, have essayed to interpret it to the
white world. This little volume presents directly that which they would
interpret.
It may seem unusual to put into permanent form the deliverances of this
species of literature. But I venture to think that, as literature, they
will stand the test; and I am willing to assume the risks. Besides, I
feel that I owe it to my people to preserve this cross-section of their
new-found soul. It was my privilege to assist in shaping some of the
forms of the new consciousness; and to preserve for posterity a portion
of its record has seemed a duty which should not be shirked.
It was in 1916 that I first began to hammer out some of the ideas which
will be found in these pages. It was in that year that I gave up my work
as a lecturer and teacher among white people to give myself exclusively
to work among my own people. In the summer of 1917, with the financial
aid of many poor but willing hearts I brought out _The Voice_, the first
Negro journal of the new dispensation, and, for some time, the only one.
The Voice failed in March, 1919; but in the meanwhile it had managed to
make an indelible impression. Many of the writings reproduced here are
taken from its files. The others are from _The Negro World_, of which I
assumed the joint editorship in January of this year. A few appeared in
_The New Negro_, a monthly magazine which I edited for a short time.
The account of the launching of the Liberty League is given here in the
first chapter because that meeting at historic Bethel on June 12, 1917,
and the labors of tongue and pen out of which that meeting emerged were
the foundation for the mighty structures of racial propaganda which have
been raised since then. This is a fact not generally known because I
have not hankered after newspaper publicity.
It is hardly necessary to point out that the AFRICA of the title is to
be taken in its racial rather than in its geographical sense.
HUBERT H. HARRISON.
New York, August 15, 1920.
CHAPTER I. THE BEGINNINGS
_Launching the Liberty League_
(From _The Voice_ of July 4, 1917.)
The Liberty League of Negro-Americans, which was recently organized by
the Negroes of New York, presents the most startling program of any
organization of Negroes in the country today. This is nothing less than
the demand that the Negroes of the United States be given a chance to
enthuse over democracy for themselves in America before they are
expected to enthuse over democracy in Europe. The League is composed of
“Negro-Americans, loyal to their country in every respect, and obedient
to her laws.”
The League has an interesting history. It grew out of the labors of
Mr. Hubert H. Harrison, who has been on the lecture platform for years
and is well and favorably known to thousands of white New Yorkers from
Wall Street to Washington Heights.
Two years ago Mr. Harrison withdrew from an international political
organization, and, a little more than a year ago, gave up lecturing to
white people, to devote himself to lecturing exclusively among his own
people. He acquired so much influence among them that when he issued the
first call for a mass-meeting “to protest against lynching in the land
of liberty and disfranchisement in the home of democracy,” although the
call was not advertised in any newspaper, the church in which the
meeting was held was packed from top to bottom. At this mass-meeting,
which was held at Bethel Church on June 12, the organization was
effected and funds were raised to sustain it and to extend its work all
over the country.
Harrison was subsequently elected its president, with Edgar Grey and
James Harris as secretary and treasurer, respectively. At the close of
this mass-meeting he hurriedly took the midnight train for Boston, where
a call for a similar meeting had been issued by W. Monroe Trotter,
editor of _The Boston Guardian_. While there he delivered an address in
Fanueil Hall, the cradle of American liberty, and told the Negroes of
Boston what their brothers in New York had done and were doing. The
result was the linking up of the New York and the Boston organizations,
and Harrison was elected chairman of a national committee of
arrangements to issue a call to every Negro organization in the country
to send delegates to a great race-congress which is to meet in
Washington in September or October and put their grievances before the
country and Congress.
At the New York mass-meeting money was subscribed for the establishment
of a newspaper to be known as The Voice and to serve as the medium of
expression for the new demands and aspirations of the new Negro. It was
made clear that this “New Negro Movement” represented a breaking away of
the Negro masses from the grip of the old-time leaders—none of whom was
represented at the meeting. The audience rose to their feet with cheers
when Harrison was introduced by the chairman. The most striking passages
of his speech were those in which he demanded that Congress make
lynching a Federal crime and take the Negro’s life under national
protection, and declared that since lynching was murder and a violation
of Federal and State laws, it was incumbent upon the Negroes themselves
to maintain the majesty of the law and put down the law-breakers by
organizing all over the South to defend their own lives whenever their
right to live was invaded by mobs which the local authorities were too
weak or unwilling to suppress.
The meeting was also addressed by Mr. J. C. Thomas, Jr., a young Negro
lawyer, who pointed out the weakness and subserviency of the old-time
political leaders and insisted that Negroes stop begging for charity in
the matter of their legal rights and demand justice instead.
Mr. Marcus Garvey, president of the Jamaica Improvement Association, was
next introduced by Mr. Harrison. He spoke in enthusiastic approval of
the new movement and pledged it his hearty support.
After the Rev. Dr. Cooper, the pastor of Bethel, had addressed the
meeting, the following resolutions were adopted and a petition to
Congress was prepared and circulated. In addition the meeting sent a
telegram to the Jews of Russia, congratulating them upon the acquisition
of full political and civil rights and expressing the hope that the
United States might soon follow the democratic example of Russia.
_Resolutions Passed at the Liberty League Meeting_
Two thousand Negro-Americans assembled in mass-meeting at Bethel A.M.E.
Church to protest against lynching in the land of liberty, and
disfranchisement in the home of democracy have, after due deliberation,
adopted the following resolutions and make them known to the world at
large in the earnest hope that whenever the world shall be made safe for
democracy our corner of that world will not be forgotten.
_We believe that this world war will and must result in a larger measure
of democracy for the peoples engaged therein—whatever may be the secret
ambitions of their several rulers._
_We therefore ask, first, that when the war shall be ended and the
council of peace shall meet to secure to every people the right to rule
their own ancestral lands free from the domination of tyrants, domestic
and foreign, the similar rights of the 250,000,000 Negroes of Africa be
conceded. Not to concede them this is to lay the foundation for more
wars in the future and to saddle the new democracies with the burden of
a militarism greater than that under which the world now groans._
Secondly, we, as Negro-Americans who have poured out our blood freely in
every war of the Republic, and upheld her flag with undivided loyalty,
demand that since we have shared to the full measure of manhood in
bearing the burdens of democracy we should also share in the rights and
privileges of that democracy.
And we believe that the present time, when the hearts of ninety millions
of our white fellow-citizens are aflame with the passionate ardor of
democracy which has carried them into the greatest war of the age with
the sole purpose of suppressing autocracy in Europe, is the best time to
appeal to them to give to twelve millions of us the elementary rights of
democracy at home.
For democracy, like charity, begins at home, and we find it hard to
endure without murmur and with the acquiescence of our government the
awful evils of lynching, which is a denial of the right to life; of
segregation, Jim Crowism and peonage, which are a denial of the right to
liberty; and disfranchisement, which is a denial of justice and
democracy.
And since Imperial Russia, formerly the most tyrannous government in
Europe, has been transformed into Republican Russia, whereby millions of
political serfs have been lifted to the level of citizenship rights;
since England is offering the meed of political manhood to the hitherto
oppressed Irish and the down-trodden Hindu; and since these things have
helped to make good the democratic assertions of these countries of the
old world now engaged in war;
Therefore, be it resolved:
That we, the Negro people of the first republic of the New World, ask
all true friends of democracy in this country to help us to win these
same precious rights for ourselves and our children.
That we invite the government’s attention to the great danger which
threatens democracy through the continued violation of the 13th, 14th
and 15th amendments, which is a denial of justice and the existence of
mob-law for Negroes from Florida to New York;
That we intend to protest and to agitate by every legal means until we
win these rights from the hands of our government and induce it to
protect democracy from these dangers, and square the deeds of our nation
with its declarations;
That we create adequate instruments for securing these ends and make our
voice heard and heeded in the councils of our country, and
That copies of these resolutions be forwarded to the Congress of the
United States and to such other public bodies as shall seem proper to
us.
_The Liberty League’s Petition to the House of Representatives
of the United States, July 4, 1917_
We, the Negro people of the United States, loyal to our country in every
respect, and obedient to her laws, respectfully petition your honorable
body for a redress of the specific grievances and flagrant violations of
your own laws as set forth in this statement. We beg to call your
attention to the discrepancy which exists between the public profession
of the government that we are lavishing our resources of men and money
in this war in order to make the world safe for democracy, and the just
as public performances of lynching-bees, Jim-crowism and
disfranchisement in which our common country abounds.
We should like to believe in our government’s professions of democracy,
but find it hard to do so in the presence of the facts; and we judge
that millions of other people outside of the country will find it just
as hard.
Desirous, therefore, of squaring our country’s profession with her
performance, that she may not appear morally contemptible in the eyes of
friends and foes alike, we, the Negro people of the United States, who
have never been guilty of any disloyalty or treason to our government,
demand that the nation shall justify to the world her assertions of
democracy by setting free the millions of Negroes in the South from
political and civil slavery through the enactment of laws which will
either take the Negroes under the direct protection of the U. S.
Congress by making lynching a Federal crime, or (by legislative mandate)
compelling the several States which now deprive the Negroes of their
right to self-government, to give them the suffrage as Russia has done
for her Jews. W ask his in the name of the American declaration that the
world shall be made safe for democracy and fervently pray that your
honorable body will not go back upon democracy.
CHAPTER II.
DEMOCRACY AND RACE FRICTION
_The East St. Louis Horror_
This nation is now at war to make the world “safe for democracy,” but
the Negro’s contention in the court of public opinion is that until this
nation itself is made safe for twelve million of its subjects the Negro,
at least, will refuse to believe in the democratic assertions of the
country. The East St. Louis pogrom gives point to this contention. Here,
on the eve of the celebration of the Nation’s birthday of freedom and
equality, the white people, who are denouncing the Germans as Huns and
barbarians, break loose in an orgy of unprovoked and villainous
barbarism which neither Germans nor any other civilized people have ever
equalled.
How can America hold up its hands in hypocritical horror at foreign
barbarism while the red blood of the Negro is clinging to those hands?
so long as the President and Congress of the United States remain dumb
in the presence of barbarities in their own land which would tip their
tongues with righteous indignation if they had been done in Belgium,
Ireland or Galicia?
And what are the Negroes to do? Are they expected to re-echo with
enthusiasm the patriotic protestations of the boot-licking leaders whose
pockets and positions testify to the power of the white man’s gold? Let
there be no mistake. Whatever the Negroes may be compelled by law to do
and say, the resentment in their hearts will not down. Unbeknown to the
white people of this land a temper is being developed among Negroes with
which the American people will have to reckon.
At the present moment it takes this form: If white men are to kill
unoffending Negroes, Negroes must kill white men in defense of their
lives and property. This is the lesson of the East St. Louis massacre.
The press reports declare that, “the troops who were on duty during the
most serious disturbances were ordered not to shoot.” The civil and
military authorities are evidently winking at the work of the
mobs—horrible as that was—and the Negroes of the city need not look to
them for protection. They must protect themselves. And even the United
States Supreme Court concedes them this right.
There is, in addition, a method of retaliation which we urge upon them.
It is one which will hit those white men who have the power to prevent
lawlessness just where they will feel it most, in the place where they
keep their consciences—the pocket-book. Let every Negro in East
St. Louis and the other cities where race rioting occurs draw his money
from the savings-bank and either bank it in the other cities or in the
postal savings bank. The only part of the news reports with which we are
well pleased is that which states that the property loss is already
estimated at a million and a half of dollars.
Another reassuring feature is the one suppressed in most of the news
dispatches. We refer to the evidences that the East St. Louis Negroes
organized themselves during the riots and fought back under some kind of
leadership. We Negroes will never know, perhaps, how many whites were
killed by our enraged brothers in East St. Louis. It isn’t the
news-policy of the white newspapers (whether friendly or unfriendly) to
spread such news broadcast. It might teach Negroes too much. But we will
hope for the best.
The occurrence should serve to enlarge rapidly the membership of The
Liberty League of Negro-Americans which was organized to take practical
steps to help our people all over the land in the protection of their
lives and liberties. —July 4th, 1917.
_“Arms and the Man”_
In its editorial on “The East St. Louis Horror” _The Voice_ said:
How can America hold up its hands in hypocritical horror at foreign
barbarism while the red blood of the Negro is clinging to those hands?
So long as the President and Congress of the United States remain dumb
in the presence of barbarities in their own land which would tip their
tongues with righteous indignation if they had been done in Belgium,
Ireland or Galicia?
And what are the Negroes to do? Are they expected to re-echo with
enthusiasm the patriotic protestations of the boot-licking leaders
whose pockets and positions testify to the power of the white man’s
gold? Let there be no mistake. Whatever the Negroes may be compelled
by law to do and say, the resentment in their hearts will not down.
_Unbeknown to the white people of this land a temper is being
developed among Negroes with which the American people will have to
reckon._
_At the present moment it takes this form: If white men are to kill
unoffending Negroes, Negroes must kill white men in defence of their
lives and property. This is the lesson of the East St. Louis
massacre._
To this, the New York _Age_ makes reply in two ways. Its editor, in an
interview given to the _Tribune_, declares that:
The representative Negro does not approve of radical socialistic
outbursts, such as calling upon the Negroes to defend themselves
against the whites.
And in its editorial of last week it insists that:
No man, or woman either, for that matter, is a friend to the race, who
publicly advises a resort to violence to redress the wrongs and
injustices to which members of the race are subjected in various
sections of the country at the present time.
The Negro race is afflicted with many individuals whose wagging
tongues are apt to lead them into indiscreet utterances that reflect
upon the whole race. … The unruly tongues should not be allowed to
alienate public sympathy from the cause of the oppressed.
Now, although _The Voice_ seeks no quarrel with _The Age_, we are forced
to dissent from this cringing, obsequious view which it champions. And
we do this on the ground that cringing has gone out of date, that _The
Age’s_ view does not now represent any influential or important section
of Negro opinion. The group which once held that view went to pieces
when Dr. Washington died. The white papers in their news items of last
week gave instance after instance showing that Negroes not only
counselled self-defense, but actually practiced it. (And _The Age_, by
the way, was the only _Negro_ paper in New York City which excluded
these items from its news columns.) If the press reports are correct,
then _The Voice_ told the simple truth when it spoke of the new temper
which was being developed “unbeknown to the white people of this land.”
And an outsider might conclude that _The Voice_ was a better friend to
the white people by letting them know this, than The Age was by trying
to lie about it.
But the controversy goes much deeper than the question of candor and
truthfulness. _The Age_ and _The Voice_ join issue on this double
question: Have Negroes a right to defend themselves against whites?
Should they defend themselves? (And this, of course, means violence.)
_The Voice_ answers, “Yes!” _The Age_ answers “No!” Who is to decide?
Let us appeal to the courts. Every law-book and statute-book, every
court in the civilized world and in the United States agree that every
_human_ being has the legal as well as moral right to kill those who
attack and try to kill him. Then the question for _The Age_ to decide,
is whether Negroes are human beings. To call our view “socialistic” is
to call the courts “socialistic,” and displays an amazing ignorance both
of Socialism and of human nature.
Before we leave this question, it is proper to consider the near and
remote consequences of the radical view. _The Age_ says that unruly
tongues will alienate public sympathy from the oppressed. Good God!
Isn’t it high time to ask of what value is that kind of sympathy which
is ready to be alienated as soon as Negroes cease to be “niggers” and
insist on being men? Is that the sort of sympathy on which _The Age_ has
thrived? Then we will have none of it.
And, as to the remoter consequences: neither we nor _The Age_ has a
lease on the future. We can but prophesy. But intelligent people reach
the unknown via the known, and prophesy the future from the known past
and present. And we do know that no race or group of people past or
present ever won to the status of manhood among men by yielding up that
right which even a singed cat will not yield up—the right to defend
their lives. If _The Age_ knows of any instance to the contrary in the
history of the past seven thousand years, let it mention that instance.
But _The Age_ may ask:
“What will self defense accomplish?” Let us see first what the absence
of self-defense accomplishes. In its news account of the St. Louis
massacre, the _Amsterdam News_ shows that whenever the white mobs found
a group of Negroes organized and armed, _they turned back_; while _The
Age_ itself had this significant and pathetic sentence:
Since the massacre, which will go down in history alongside the
atrocities committed in Brussels and Rheims, a delegation of Negroes
has held a conference with Governor Lowden at Springfield, _but the
outcome of this meeting will not bring back the lives of those who,
for no valid reason, were struck down and murdered in cold blood._
Taking the two things together the answer seems clear enough. When
murder is cheap murder is indulged in recklessly; when it is likely to
be costly it is not so readily indulged in. Will _The Age_ venture to
deny this? No? Then we say, let Negroes help to make murder costly, for
by so doing they will aid the officers of the city, state and nation in
instilling respect for law and order into the minds of the worst and
lowest elements of our American cities. And we go further: We say that
it is not alone the brutality of the whites—it is also the cowardice of
Negroes and the lickspittle leadership of the last two decades which,
like _The Age_, told us to “take it all lying down”—it is this which has
been the main reason for our “bein’ so aisily lynched,” as Mr. Dooley
puts it.
Whatever _The Age_ may say, Negroes will fight back as they are already
fighting back. And they will be more highly regarded—as are the
Irish—because of fighting back.
We are aiming at the white man’s respect—not at his sympathy. We cannot
win that respect by any conspicuous and contemptible cowardice; the only
kind of sympathy which we may win by that is the kind of sympathy which
men feel for a well-kicked dog which cringes while they kick it.
“Rights are to be won by those who are ready and willing to fight, if
necessary, to have those rights respected.”
Who says this? Theodore Roosevelt. So does President Wilson. So does the
U. S. Government. That is why we went to war with Germany. Our country
always acts upon the best and highest principle and we Negroes have just
begun to see that our country is quite right. Therefore, we are willing
to follow its glorious example. That is all.
_The Negro and the Labor Unions_
There are two kinds of labor unionism; the A.F. of L. kind and the other
kind. So far, the Negro has been taught to think that all unionism was
like the unionism of the American Federation of Labor, and because of
this ignorance, his attitude toward organized labor has been that of the
scab. For this no member of the A.F. of L. can blame the Negro. The
policy of that organization toward the Negro has been damnable. It has
kept him out of work and out of the unions as long as it could; and when
it could no longer do this it has taken him in, tricked him, and
discriminated against him.
On the other hand, the big capitalists who pay low wages (from the son
of Abraham Lincoln in the Pullman Co. to Julius Rosenwald of the Sears
Roebuck Co.) have been rather friendly to the Negro. They have given
their money to help him build Y.M.C.A.’s and schools of a certain type.
They have given him community help in Northern cities and have expended
charity on him— and on the newspapers and parsons who taught him. Small
wonder, then, that the Negro people are anti-union.
Labor unions were created by white working men that they might bring the
pressure of many to bear upon the greedy employer and make him give
higher wages and better living conditions to the laborer. When they, in
turn, become so greedy that they keep out the majority of working
people, by high dues and initiation fees, they no longer represent the
interests of the laboring class. They stand in the way of this class’s
advancement—_and they must go_. They must leave the way clear for the
20th century type of unionism which says: “To leave a single worker out
is to leave something for the boss to use against us. Therefore we must
organize in One Big Union of all the working-class.” This is the type of
unionism which organized, in 1911, 18,000 white and 14,000 black timber
workers in Louisiana. This is the I.W.W. type of unionism, and the
employers use their newspapers to make the public believe that it stands
for anarchy, violence, law-breaking and atheism, because they know that
if it succeeds it will break them.
This type of unionism wants Negroes—not because its promoters love
Negroes—but because they realize that they cannot win if any of the
working class is left out; and after winning they cannot go back on them
because they could be used as scabs to break the unions.
The A.F. of L., which claims a part of the responsibility for the East
St. Louis outrage, is playing with fire. The American Negro may join
hands with the American capitalist and scab them out of existence. And
the editor of _The Voice_ calls upon Negroes to do this. We have stood
the American Federation of Labor just about long enough. Join hands with
the capitalists and scab them out of existence—not in the name of
scabbery, but in the name of a real organization of labor. Form your own
unions (the A.C.E. is already in the field) and make a truce with your
capitalist enemy until you get rid of this traitor to the cause of
labor. Offer your labor to capitalism if it will agree to protect you in
your right to labor—and see that it does. Then get rid of the A.F. of L.
The writer has been a member of a party which stood for the rights of
labor and the principle of Industrial Unionism (the 20th century kind).
He understands the labor conditions of the country and desires to see
the working man win out. But his first duty, here as everywhere, is to
the Negro race. And he refuses to put ahead of his race’s rights a
collection of diddering jackasses which can publicly palliate such
atrocities as that of East St. Louis and publicly assume, as Gompers
did, responsibility for it. Therefore, he issues the advice to the
workers of his race to “can the A.F. of L.” Since the A.F. of L. chooses
to put Race before Class, let us return the compliment.
_Lynching: Its Cause and Cure_
Last week we had occasion to comment on the resignation of Mr. John R.
Shillady from the secretaryship of the N.A.A.C.P. Mr. Shillady’s
statement accompanying his resignation contains these significant
words:—
“I am less confident than heretofore of the speedy success of the
association’s full program and of the probability of overcoming within a
reasonable period the forces opposed to Negro equality by the means and
methods which are within the association’s power to employ.”
That the N.A.A.C.P. is not likely to affect the lynchings in this land
can be seen with half an eye by any one who will note that Governor J.
A. Burnquist of Minnesota “is also president of the St. Paul branch of
the association and one of the staunch supporters of its work”; that the
Minnesota lynching of last week was one of the most cynically brutal
that has occurred North or South in the last ten years, and that the
association has offered and is offering to give the Governor all the
assistance possible.
In most of the other cases of lynchings it is assumed that all the
officials were in collusion with the forces of violence, or were at any
rate in acquiescence. In the present case, however, the Governor of the
State is himself a high officer of the association. Yet we venture to
prophesy that no more will be done in the case of the Minnesota
lynchings than in the case of lynchings further south.
This leads us to a front face consideration of the problem of lynching.
Why do white men lynch black men in America? We are not dealing here
with the original historical cause; nor even with its present social
application. We are considering merely the efficient cause. White men
lynch black men or any other men because those men’s lives are
unprotected either by the authorities of the commonwealth or by the
victims themselves. White men lynch Negroes in America because Negroes’
lives are cheap. So long as they so remain, so long will lynching remain
an evil to be talked about, written about, petitioned against and
slobbered over. But not all the slobber, the talk or the petitions are
worth the time it takes to indulge in them, so far as the saving of a
single Negro life is concerned.
What, then, is the cure? The cure follows from the nature of the cause.
Let Negroes determine that their lives shall no longer be cheap; but
that they will exact for them as high a price as any other element in
the community under similar circumstances would exact. Let them see to
it that their lives are protected and defended, if not by the State,
then certainly by themselves. Then we will see the cracker stopping to
take counsel with himself and to think twice before he joins a mob in
whose gruesome holiday sport he himself is likely to furnish one of the
casualties.
“Let Negroes help to make murder costly, for by so doing they will aid
the officers of the city, State and nation in instilling respect for law
and order into the minds of the worst and lowest elements of our
American cities.” The law of every State says explicitly that killing in
defense of one’s own life is strictly proper, legal and justifiable.
Therefore, if Negroes determine to defend themselves from the horrible
outrage of lynching they should have the support of every official and
every citizen who really believes in law and order and is determined to
make the law of the land stand as a living reality among the people that
made it. —July, 1920.
CHAPTER III.
THE NEGRO AND THE WAR
[While the war lasted those of us who saw unpalatable truths were
compelled to do one of two things: either tell the truth as we saw it
and go to jail, or camouflage the truth that we had to tell. The present
writer told the truth for the most part, in so far as it related to our
race relations; but, in a few cases camouflage was safer and more
effective. That camouflage, however, was never of that truckling quality
which was accepted by the average American editor to such a nauseating
degree. I was well aware that Woodrow Wilson’s protestations of
democracy were lying protestations, consciously and deliberately
designed to deceive. What, then, was my duty in the face of that fact? I
chose to pretend that Woodrow Wilson meant what he said, because by so
doing I could safely hold up to contempt and ridicule the undemocratic
practices of his administration and the actions of his white countrymen
in regard to the Negro. How this was done is shown in the first two
editorials of the following chapter.]
_Is Democracy Unpatriotic?_
The present administration is all right. But it has its obstacles to
success. As usual some of the worst of these are its injudicious
“friends.” For instance, there are the people who are trying their best
to “queer” us in the eyes of civilized Europe. These silly souls, when
Negroes ask that the principle of “Justice in War Time”: be applied to
Negroes as well as whites, reply, in effect that this should not be;
that Negroes should not want Justice—in war time—and that any such
demand on their part is “disloyalty.” On the contrary, it is the fullest
loyalty to the letter and spirit of the President’s war-aims. To say
that it isn’t is to presume to accuse the President of having war-aims
other than those which he has set forth in the face of Europe.
Besides, no one can deny that freedom from lynching and disfranchisement
and the ending of discrimination—by the Red Cross for instance—will
strengthen the hand of the administration right now by strengthening its
hold on the hearts of the Negro masses and will make all
Negroes—soldiers as well as civilians—more competent to give effective
aid in winning the war.
Let us assume that we consent to being lynched—“during the war”—and
submit tamely and with commendable weakness to being Jim-crowed and
disfranchised. Very well. Will not that be the proof of our spirit and
of its quality? Of course. And what you _call_ that spirit won’t alter
its quality, will it? Now, ask all the peoples of all the world what
they call a people who smilingly consent to their own degradation and
destruction. They call such a people cowards—because they _are_ cowards.
In America we call such people “niggers.”
Is anyone unpatriotic enough to pretend that “cowards” can lick “Huns”?
No, this great world-task can be accomplished only by men—English men,
French men, Italian men, American men. Our country needs men now more
than it ever did before. And those who multiply its reserve of men are
adding to its strength. That is why the true patriots who really love
America and want it to win the war are asking America to change its
Negroes from “niggers” into men. Surely this is a patriotic request; and
any one who says that it isn’t must be prepared to maintain that
lynching, Jim-crow and disfranchisement are consistent with patriotism
and ought to be preserved. Reading the President’s proclamations in
reverent spirit, we deny both of these monstrous conclusions; and we
believe that we have on our side the President of America, the world’s
foremost champion of democracy who defined it as “the right of all those
who submit to authority to have a VOICE in their own government”—whether
it be in Germany or in Georgia. And we believe that the splendid spirit
of our common country, which has buckled on its sword in support of
“democracy” will support us in this reasonable contention. —July, 1918.
_Why Is the Red Cross?_
The Red Cross, or Geneva Association, was the product of a Swiss
infidel. He saw how cruel to man were those who loved God most—the
Christians—and, out of his large humanity and loving kindness, he
evolved an organization which should bring the charity of service to
lessen the lurid horrors of Christian battlefields.
A love that rose above the love of country—the love of human kind: this
was the proud principle of the Red Cross. Its nurses and its surgeons,
stretcher-bearers and assistants were supposed to bring relief to those
who were in pain, regardless of whether they were “friends” or
“enemies.” Discrimination was a word which did not exist for them: and
it is not supposed to exist now even as against the wounded German
aviator who has bombed a Red Cross hospital.
But, alack and alas! The splendid spirit of the Swiss infidel is
seemingly too high for Christian race-prejudice to reach. Where he would
not discriminate even against enemies, the American branch of his
international society is discriminating against most loyal friends and
willing helpers—when they are Negroes. Up to date the American Red Cross
Society, which receives government aid and co-operation to help win the
war, cannot cite the name of a single Negro woman as a nurse. True, it
says that it has “enrolled” some. This we refuse to believe. But even if
that were true, a nurse “enrolled” cannot save the life of any of our
soldiers in France.
The Red Cross says that it wants to win the war. What war? A white
people’s war, or America’s and the world’s? It this were a white
people’s war, as some seem to think, colored troops from Senegal, India,
Egypt, America and the West Indies would have been kept out of it. But
they were not, and we are driven to conclude that this is a world war.
Then why doesn’t the American Red Cross meet it in the spirit of the
President—of world democracy? The cry goes up for nurses to save the
lives of soldiers; yet here are thousands of Negro nurses whom the Red
Cross won’t accept. They must want to give Europe a “rotten” opinion of
American democracy. For we may be sure that these things are known in
Europe—even as our lynchings are. And anyone who would give Europe a
“rotten” opinion of America at this time is no friend of America.
The American Red Cross must be compelled to do America’s work in the
spirit in which America has entered the war. There need be no biting of
tongues: it must be compelled to forego Race Prejudice. If the
N.A.A.C.P. were truly what it pretends instead of a National Association
for the Advancement of Certain People, it would put its high-class
lawyers on the job and bring the case into the United States courts. It
would charge the American Red Cross with disloyalty to the war-aims of
America. And if it does not (in spite of the money which it got from the
“silent” protest parade and other moneys and legal talent at its
disposal) then it will merit the name which one of its own members gave
it—the National Association for the Acceptance of Color Proscription.
Get busy, “friends of the colored people”! For we are not disposed to
regard the camouflage of those who want nurses but do not want Negro
nurses in any other light than that of Bret Harte’s Truthful James:—
Which I wish to remark—
And my language is plain—
That for ways that are dark
And for tricks that are vain
The Heathen Chinee is peculiar:
Which the same I am free to maintain.
_A Hint of Our Reward_
The wisdom of our contemporary ancestors, having decided that “We
Negroes must make every sacrifice to help win the war and lay aside our
just demands for the present that we may win a shining place on the
pages of history,” it must be cold comfort to learn that the first
after-the-war schoolbook of American history is out, that it is written
by Reuben Gold Thwaites and Calvin Noyes Kendall, that it devotes
thirty-one pages to the war and America’s part in the war, and that _not
one word is said of the Negro’s part therein._
Of course, sensible men should feel no surprise at this, for they will
realize how little the part played by the Negro in the Civil War is
known by the millions of white school children who read the school
histories. Yet, if there is a spark of manhood left in the bosoms of our
“white men’s niggers” who sold us out during the war they must feel
pained and humiliated when the flood of after-the-war school histories,
of which this is the first, quietly sink the Negro’s contributions (as
chronicled by Mr. Emmett Scott and others) into the back waters of
forgetfulness.
The times change, but we don’t change with them.
_The Negro at the Peace Congress_
Now that they have helped to win the war against Germany, the Negro
people in these United States feel the absurdity of the situation in
which they find themselves. They have given lavishly of their blood and
treasure. They have sent their young men overseas as soldiers, and were
willing to send their young women overseas as nurses; but the innate
race-prejudice of the American Red Cross prevented them. They have
contributed millions of dollars to the funds of this same Red Cross and
scores of millions to the four Liberty Loans; and they have done all
this to help make the world “safe for democracy” even while in sixteen
States of the south in which nine-tenths of them reside, they have no
voice in their own government. Naturally they expect that something will
have to be done to remove their civil and other disabilities. This
expectation of theirs is a just and reasonable one. But— —
Now that the world is getting ready for the Peace Congress which is
expected to settle _the questions about which the war was fought_ our
Negroes want to know if the Peace Congress will settle such questions as
those of lynching, disfranchisement and segregation. IT WILL NOT! And
why? Simply because the war was not fought over these questions. Even a
fool can see that. Lynching, disfranchisement and Jim-crowing in America
are questions of American domestic policy and can be regulated only by
American law-making and administrative bodies. Even a fool should be
able to see this. And, since it was only by the military aid of the
United States that the Allies were able to win the war, why should our
people be stupid enough to think that the allied nations will aim a slap
at the face of the United States (even if such things were customary) by
attempting to interfere in her domestic arrangements and institutions?
We learn that various bodies of Negroes, who do not seem to understand
the modern system of political government under which they live, are
seeking to get money from the unsuspecting masses of our people “for the
purpose of sending delegates to the Peace Congress.” The project is
sublimely silly. In the first place, the Peace Congress is not open to
anybody who chooses to be sent. A peep into any handbook of modern
history would show that Peace Congresses are made up only of delegates
chosen by the heads of the governments of the countries which have been
at war, and never by civic, propaganda, or other bodies within those
nations. Only the President of the United States has power to designate
the American delegates to the Peace Congress.
Of course, if any body of people wish to send a visitor to Versailles or
Paris _at their expense_, the government of the United States has
nothing to do with that and would not prevent it. But such visitor,
lacking credentials from the President, could not get within a block of
the Peace Congress. They can (if they read French) get from the papers
published in the city where the Congress meets so much of the
proceedings as the Congress may choose to give to the press. But that is
all; and for that it is not necessary to go to France. Just send to
France for copies of _Le Temps_ or _Le Matin_ and prevent a useless
waste of the money of poor people who can ill afford it in any case.
“But,” we are told, “such person or persons can make propaganda (in
France) which will force the Peace Congress to consider American
lynching, disfranchisement and segregation,” Passing over the argument
that such person or persons would have to be able to write French
fluently, we wish to point out that the public sentiment of even one
French city takes more than a month to work up; that the sentiment of
one French city can have but slight weight with the Congress, and that,
if it could rise to the height of embarrassing them, the French
authorities would sternly put it down and banish the troublesome
persons. Karl Marx, Prince Kropotkin, Malatesta and Lenine are cases in
point as showing what France has done under less provoking
circumstances.
Let us not try to play the part of silly fools. Lynching,
disfranchisement and segregation are evils HERE; and the place in which
we must fight them is HERE. If foolish would-be leaders have no plan to
lay before our people for the fighting HERE, in God’s name, let them say
so, and stand out of the way! Let us gird up our loins for the stern
tasks which lie before us HERE and address ourselves to them with
courage and intelligence.
_Africa and the Peace_
“This war, disguise it how we may, is really being fought over African
questions.” So said Sir Harry Johnston, one of the foremost authorities
on Africa, in the London Sphere in June, 1917. We wonder if the Negroes
of the Western world quite realize what this means. Wars are not fought
for ideals but for lands whose populations can be put to work, for
resources that can be minted into millions, for trade that can be made
to enrich the privileged few. When King Leopold of Belgium and Thomas
Fortune Ryan of New York joined hands to exploit the wealth of the Congo
they did it with oiled phrases on their lips. They called that land of
horrors and of shame “The Congo FREE State!”
And, so, when Nations go to war, they never openly declare what they
WANT. They must camouflage their sordid greed behind some sounding
phrase like “freedom of the seas,” “self-determination,” “liberty” or
“democracy.” But only the ignorant millions ever think that those are
the real objects of their bloody rivalries. When the war is over, the
mask is dropped, and then they seek “how best to scramble at the
shearers’ feast.” It is then that they disclose their real war aims.
One of the most striking cases in point is the present peace congress.
Already President Wilson has had to go to look after democracy himself.
Already responsible heads of the Allied governments are making it known
that “freedom of the seas” means a benevolent naval despotism maintained
by them, and that “democracy” means simply the transfer of Germany’s
African lands to England and the others. Africa at the peace table
constitutes the real stakes which the winners will rake in. We may read
in headlines the startling item “Negroes Ask For German Colonies,” but
Negroes of sense should not be deluded. They will not get them because
they have no battleships, no guns, no force, military or financial. They
are not a Power.
Despite the pious piffle of nice old gentlemen like Professor Kelly
Miller, the King-word of modern nations is POWER. It is only Sunday
school “kids” and people of child-races who take seriously such fables
as that in the “Band of Hope Review” when we were children that “the
secret of England’s greatness is the Bible.” The secret of England’s
greatness (as well as of any other great nation’s) is not bibles but
bayonets—bayonets, business and brains. As long as the white nations
have a preponderance of these, so long will they rule. Ask Japan: she
knows. And as long as the lands of Africa can yield billions of
business, so long will white brains use bayonets to keep them—as the
British government did last year in Nigeria.
_Africa is turning over in her sleep, and this agitation now going on
among American Negroes for the liberation of Africa is a healthy sign of
her restlessness. But it is no more than that._ Africa’s hands are tied,
and, so tied, she will be thrown upon the peace table. Let us study how
to unloose her bonds later. Instead of futile expectations from the
doubtful generosity of white land-grabbers, let us American Negroes go
to Africa, live among the natives and LEARN WHAT THEY HAVE TO TEACH US
(for they have much to teach us). Let us go there—not in the
coastlands,—but in the interior, in Nigeria and Nyassaland; let us study
engineering and physics, chemistry and commerce, agriculture and
industry; let us learn more of nitrates, of copper, rubber and
electricity; so will we know why Belgium, France, England and Germany
want to be in Africa. Let us begin by studying the scientific works of
the African explorers and stop reading and believing the silly slush
which ignorant missionaries put into our heads about the alleged
degradation of our people in Africa. Let us learn to know Africa and
Africans so well that every educated Negro will be able at a glance to
put his hand on the map of Africa and tell where to find the Jolofs,
Ekois, Mandingoes, Yorubas, Bechuanas or Basutos and can tell something
of their marriage customs, their property laws, their agriculture and
systems of worship. For, not until we can do this will it be seemly for
us to pretend to be anxious about their political welfare.
Indeed, it would be well now for us to establish friendly relations and
correspondence with our brothers at home. For we don’t know enough about
them to be able to do them any good at THIS peace congress (even if we
were graciously granted seats there); but fifty years from now—WHO
KNOWS?
_“They Shall Not Pass!”_
When heroic France was holding the Kaiser’s legions at bay her
inflexible resolution found expression in the phrase, “Ils ne passeront
pas!”—they shall not pass! The white statesmen who run our government in
Washington seem to have adopted the poilu’s watchword in a less worthy
cause. The seventy-odd Negro “delegates” to the Peace Congress who have
got themselves “elected” at mass-meetings and concerts for the purpose
of going to France are not going—unless they can walk, swim, or fly. For
the government will not issue passports for them.
Of course, the government is not telling them so in plain English. That
wouldn’t be like our government. It merely makes them wait while their
money melts away. Day after day and week after week, they wearily wend
their way to the official Circumlocution Office where they receive a
reply considered sufficient for their child-minds: “Not yet.”
It is many weeks since Madam Walker, Mr. Trotter, Judge Harrison and
other lesser lights were elected, but “They shall not pass!” says the
government with the backing of Emmett Scott. THE VOICE holds no brief
for these people: in fact it has taken the trouble to tell them more
than once how silly their project was. But it is not out of order to
inquire why the government will not let them go, and to find an answer
to that question.
The government will not let them go to France, because the government’s
conscience is not clear. And the government ordered that ludicrous
lackey, Mr. R. R. Moton, to go—for the same reason. In fact, the
creation of sinecures for Mr. Scott and the other barnacles is due
largely to an uneasy conscience. How would it look to have Negroes
telling all Europe that the land which is to make the world “safe for
democracy” is rotten with race-prejudice; Jim-crows Negro officers on
ships coming over from France and on trains run under government
control; condones lynching by silent acquiescence and refuses to let its
Negro heroes vote as citizens in that part of the country in which
nine-tenths of them live. This wouldn’t do at all.
Therefore: They shall not pass! And if, finally, the government, nettled
by such criticisms, should lift the ban when the Peace Congress is
practically over, the Negroes of America may be sure that those
permitted to go will be carefully hand-picked.
But what is the matter with America as a land for pioneer work in
planting democracy? Are these Negro _emigrés_ afraid to face the white
men here in the Republican Party or any other and raise Hades until the
Constitution is enforced? Is cowardice the real reason for their running
to France to uncork their mouths? It looks very much like it. Ladies and
gentlemen: don’t run. The fight is here, and here you will be compelled
to face it, or report to us the reason why.
_A Cure for the Ku-Klux_
It was in the city of Pulaski in Giles County, Tennessee, that the
original Ku-Klux Klan was organized in the latter part of 1865. The war
had hardly been declared officially at an end when the cowardly
“crackers” who couldn’t lick the Yankees began organizing to take it out
of the Negroes. They passed laws declaring that any black man who
couldn’t show three hundred dollars should be declared a vagrant; that
every vagrant should be put to work in the chain-gang on the public
works of their cities; that three Negroes should not gather together
unless a white man was with them, and other such methods were used as
were found necessary to maintain “white supremacy.” When the national
Congress met in December, 1865, it looked upon these light diversions
with an unfriendly eye and, noting that nothing short of the
re-enslavement of the Negroes would satisfy the “crackers,” it kept them
out of Congress until they would agree to do better. Finding that they
were stiff-necked, Congress passed the 14th and 15th amendments and put
the “cracker” states under military rule until they accepted the
amendments. The result was that the Negro got the ballot as a protection
from “the people who know him best.”
In the meanwhile, the Ku-Klux after rampaging around under the
leadership of that traitor, General Nathaniel B. Forrest, was put
down-for good, as it was thought. Today, after the Negro has been
stripped of the ballot’s protection by the connivance of white
Republicans in Washington and white Democrats at the South, the Ku-Klux
dares to raise its ugly head in its ancestral state of Tennessee. This
time they want to increase that fine brand of democracy which every
coward editor knows that Negroes were getting when they were bidding
them to be patriotic. The Ku-Klux means to shoot them into submission
and torture them into terror before they get to showing their wounds and
asking for the ballot as a recompense.
In this crisis what have the Negro “leaders” got to say on their
people’s behalf? Where is Emmett Scott? Where are Mr. Moton and Dr. Du
Bois? What will the N.A.A.C.P. do besides writing frantic letters? We
fear that they can never rise above the level of appeals. But suppose
the common Negro in Tennessee decides to take a hand in the game?
Suppose he lets it be known that for the life of every Negro soldier or
civilian, two “crackers” will die? Suppose he lets them know that it
will be as costly to kill Negroes as it would be to kill real people?
Then indeed the Ku-Klux would be met upon its own ground. And why not?
All our laws, even in Tennessee, declare that lynching and white-capping
are crimes against the person. All our laws declare that people singly
or in groups have the right to kill in defense of their lives. And if
the Ku-Klux prevents the officers of the law from enforcing that law,
then it is up to Negroes to help the officers by enforcing the law on
their own account. Why shouldn’t they do it? Lead and steel, fire and
poison are just as potent against “crackers” as they were against
Germans, and democracy is as well worth fighting for in Tennessee as
ever it was on the plains of France. Not until the Negroes of the south
recognize this truth will anybody else recognize it for them.
“Hereditary bondmen, know ye not
Who would be free themselves must strike the blow?”
CHAPTER IV.
THE NEW POLITICS.
_The New Politics for the New Negro_
The world of the future will look upon the world of today as an
essentially new turning point in the path of human progress. All over
the world the spirit of democratic striving is making itself felt. The
new issues have brought forth new ideas of freedom, politics, industry
and society at large. The new Negro living in this new world is just as
responsive to these new impulses as other people are.
In the “good old days” it was quite easy to tell the Negro to follow in
the footsteps of those who had gone before. The mere mention of the name
Lincoln or the Republican party was sufficient to secure his allegiance
to that party which had seen him stripped of all political power and of
civil rights without protest—effective or otherwise.
Things are different now. The new Negro is demanding elective
representation in Baltimore, Chicago and other places. He is demanding
it in New York. The pith of the present occasion is, that he is no
longer begging or asking. He is demanding as a right that which he is in
position to enforce.
In the presence of this new demand the old political leaders are
bewildered, and afraid; for the old idea of Negro leadership by virtue
of the white man’s selection has collapsed. The new Negro leader must be
chosen by his fellows—by those whose strivings he is supposed to
represent.
Any man today who aspires to lead the Negro race must set squarely
before his face the idea of “Race First” Just as the white men of these
and other lands are white men before they are Christians, Anglo-Saxons
or Republicans; so the Negroes of this and other lands are intent upon
being Negroes before they are Christians, Englishmen, or Republicans.
Sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. Charity begins at home, and
our first duty is to ourselves. It is not what we wish but what we must,
that we are concerned with. The world, as it ought to be, is still for
us, as for others, the world that does not exist. The world as it is, is
the real world, and it is to that real world that we address ourselves.
Striving to be men, and finding no effective aid in government or in
politics, the Negro of the Western world must follow the path of the
Swadesha movement of India and the Sinn Fein movement of Ireland. The
meaning of both these terms is “ourselves first.” This is the mental
background of the new politics of the New Negro, and we commend it to
the consideration of all the political parties. For it is upon this
background that we will predicate such policies as shall seem to us
necessary and desirable.
In the British Parliament the Irish Home Rule party clubbed its full
strength and devoted itself so exclusively to the cause of Free Ireland
that it virtually dictated for a time the policies of Liberals and
Conservatives alike. The new Negro race in America will not achieve
political self-respect until it is in a position to organize itself as
politically independent party and follow the example of the Irish Home
Rulers. This is what will happen in American politics. —September, 1917.
_The Drift in Politics_
The Negroes of America—those of them who think—are suspicious of
everything that comes from the white people of America. They have seen
that every movement for the extension of democracy here has broken down
as soon as it reached the color line. Political democracy declared that
“all men are created equal,” meant only all white men; the Christian
church found that the brotherhood of man did not include God’s bastard
children; the public school system proclaimed that the school house was
the backbone of democracy—“for white people only,” and the civil service
says that Negroes must keep their place—at the bottom. So that they can
hardly be blamed for looking askance at any new gospel of freedom.
Freedom to them has been like one of
“those juggling fiends
That palter with us in a double sense;
That keep the word of promise to our ear,
And break it to our hope.”
In this connection, some explanation of the former political solidarity
of those Negroes who were voters may be of service. Up to six years ago
the one great obstacle to the political progress of the colored people
was their sheep-like allegiance to the Republican party. They were
taught to believe that God had raised up a peculiar race of men called
Republicans who had loved the slaves so tenderly that they had taken
guns in their hands and rushed on the ranks of the southern slaveholders
to free the slaves; that this race of men was still in existence,
marching under the banner of the Republican party and showing their
great love for Negroes by appointing from six to sixteen near-Negroes to
soft political snaps. Today that great political superstition is falling
to pieces before the advance of intelligence among Negroes. They begin
to realize that they were sold out by the Republican party in 1876; that
in the last twenty-five years lynchings have increased, disfranchisement
has spread all over the South and “Jim-crow” cars run even into the
national capitol—with the continuing consent of a Republican Congress, a
Republican Supreme Court and Republican President.
Ever since the Brownsville affair, but more clearly since Taft declared
and put in force the policy of pushing out the few near-Negro
officeholders, the rank and file have come to see that the Republican
party is a great big sham. Many went over to the Democratic party
because, as the _Amsterdam News_ puts it, “They had nowhere else to go.”
Twenty years ago the colored men who joined that party were ostracized
as scalawags and crooks. But today, the defection to the Democrats of
such men as Bishop Walters, Wood, Morton, Carr and Langston—whose uncle
was a colored Republican Congressman from Virginia—has made the colored
democracy respectable and given quite a tone to political heterdoxy.
All this loosens the bonds of their allegiance and breaks the bigotry of
the last forty years. But of this change in their political view-point
the white world knows nothing. The two leading Negro newspapers are
subsidized by the same political pirates who own the title-deeds to the
handful of hirelings holding office in the name of the Negro race. One
of these papers is an organ of Mr. Washington, the other pretends to be
independent—that is, it must be bought on the installment plan, and both
of them are in New York. Despite this “conspiracy of silence” the
Negroes are waking up, are beginning to think for themselves, to look
with more favor on “new doctrines.” ¹
Today the politician who wants the support of the Negro voter will have
to give something more than piecrust promises. The old professional
“friend to the colored people” must have something more solid than the
name of Lincoln and party appointments.
We demand what the Irish and the Jewish voter get: nominations on the
party’s ticket in our own districts. And if we don’t get this we will
smash the party that refuses to give it.
For we are not Republicans, Democrats or Socialists any longer. We are
Negroes first. And we are no longer begging for sops. We demand, not
“recognition,” but representation, and we are out to throw our votes to
any party which gives us this, and withhold them from any party which
refuses to give it. No longer will we follow any leader whose job the
party controls. For we know that no leader so controlled can oppose such
party in our interests beyond a given point.
That is why so much interest attaches to the mass-meeting to be held at
Palace Casino on the 29th where the Citizens’ Committee will make its
report to the Negro voters of Harlem and tell them how it was “turned
down” by the local representatives of the Republican party when it
begged the boon of elective representation. All such rebuffs will make
for manhood-if we are men and will drive us to play in American politics
the same role which the Irish party played in British politics. That is
the new trend in Negro politics, and we must not let any party forget
it. —1917.
_A Negro for President_
For many years the Negro has been the football of American politics.
Kicked from pillar to post, he goes begging, hat in hand, from a
Republican convention to a Democratic one. Always is he asking some one
else to do something for him. Always is he begging, pleading, demanding
or threatening. In all these cases his dependence is on the good will,
sense of justice or gratitude of the other fellow. And in none of these
cases is the political reaction of the other fellow within the control
of the Negro.
But a change for the better is approaching. Four years ago, the present
writer was propounding in lectures, indoors and outdoors, the thesis
that the Negro people of America would never amount to anything much
politically until they should see fit to imitate the Irish of Britain
and to organize themselves into a political party of their own whose
leaders, on the basis of this large collective vote, could “hold up”
Republicans, Democrats, Socialists or any other political group of
American whites. As in many other cases, we have lived to see time ripen
the fruits of our own thought for some one else to pluck. Here is the
editor of the _Challenge_ making a campaign along these very lines. His
version of the idea takes the form of advocating the nomination of a
Negro for the Presidency of the United States. In this form we haven’t
the slightest doubt that this idea will meet with a great deal of
ridicule and contempt. Nevertheless, we venture to prophesy that,
whether in the hands of Mr. Bridges or another, it will come to be
ultimately accepted as one of the finest contributions to Negro
statesmanship.
No one pretends, of course, that the votes of Negroes can elect a Negro
to the high office of President of the United States. Nor would any one
expect that the votes of white people will be forthcoming to assist them
in such a project. The only way in which a Negro could be elected
President of the United States would be by virtue of the voters not
knowing that the particular candidate was of Negro ancestry. This, we
believe, has already happened within the memory of living men. But, the
essential intent of this new plan is to furnish a focussing-point around
which the ballots of the Negro voters may be concentrated for the
realization of racial demands for justice and equality of opportunity
and treatment. It would be carrying “Race First” with a vengeance into
the arena of domestic politics. It would take the Negro voter out of the
ranks of the Republican, Democratic and Socialist parties and would
enable their leaders to trade the votes of their followers, openly and
above-board, for those things for which masses of men largely exchange
their votes.
Mr. Bridges will find that the idea of a Negro candidate for President
presupposes the creation of a purely Negro party and upon that
prerequisite he will find himself compelled to concentrate. Doubtless,
most of the political wise-acres of the Negro race will argue that the
idea is impossible because it antagonizes the white politicians of the
various parties. They will close their eyes to the fact that politics
implies antagonism and a conflict of interest. They will fail to see
that the only things which count with politicians are votes, and that,
just as one white man will cheerfully cut another white man’s throat to
get the dollars which a black man has, so will one white politician or
party cut another one’s throat politically to get the votes which black
men may cast at the polls. But these considerations will finally carry
the day. Let there be no mistake. The Negro will never be accepted by
the white American democracy except in so far as he can by the use of
force, financial, political or other, win, seize or maintain in the
teeth of opposition that position which he finds necessary to his own
security and salvation. And we Negroes may as well make up our minds now
that we can’t depend upon the good-will of white men in anything or at
any point where our interests and theirs conflict. Disguise it as we
may, in business, politics, education or other departments of life, we
as Negroes are compelled to fight for what we want to win from the white
world.
It is easy enough for those colored men whose psychology is shaped by
their white inheritance to argue the ethics of compromise and
inter-racial co-operation. But we whose brains are still unbastardized
must face the frank realities of this situation of racial conflict and
competition. Wherefore, it is well that we marshal our forces to
withstand and make head against the constant racial pressure. Action and
reaction are equal and opposite. Where there is but slight pressure a
slight resistance will suffice. But where, as in our case, that pressure
is grinding and pitiless, the resistance that would re-establish equal
conditions of freedom must of necessity be intense and radical. And it
is this philosophy which must furnish the motive for such a new and
radical departure as is implied in the joint idea of a Negro party in
American politics and a Negro candidate for the Presidency of these
United States. —June, 1920.
_When the Tail Wags the Dog_
Politically, these United States may be roughly divided into two
sections, so far as the Negroes are concerned. In the North the Negro
population has the vote. In the South it hasn’t. This was not always so.
There was a time when the Negro voters of the South sent in to Congress
a thin but steady stream of black men who represented their political
interests directly. Due to the misadventures of the reconstruction
period, this stream was shut off until at the beginning of this century
George White, of North Carolina, was the sole and last representative of
the black man with a ballot in the South.
This result was due largely to the characteristic stupidity of the Negro
voter. He was a Republican, he was. He would do anything with his ballot
for Abraham Lincoln—who was dead—but not a thing for himself and his
family, who were all alive and kicking. For this the Republican party
loved him so much that it permitted the Democrats to disfranchise him
while it controlled Congress and the courts, the army and navy, and all
the machinery of law-enforcement in the United States. With its
continuing consent, Jim-crowism, disfranchisement, segregation and
lynching spread abroad over the land. The end of it all was the
reduction of the Negro in the South to the position of a political serf,
an industrial peon and a social outcast.
Recently there has been developed in the souls of black folk a new
manhood dedicated to the proposition that, if all Americans are equal in
the matter of baring their breasts to foreign bayonets, then all
Americans must, by their own efforts, be made equal in balloting for
Presidents and other officers of the government. This principle is
compelling the Republican party in certain localities to consider the
necessity of nominating Negroes on its local electoral tickets. Yet the
old attitude of that party on the political rights of Negroes remains
substantially the same.
Here, for instance, is the Chicago convention, at which the Negro
delegates were lined up to do their duty by the party. Of course, these
delegates had to deal collectively with the white leaders. This was to
their mutual advantage. But the odd feature of the entire affair was
this, that, _Whereas the Negro people in the South are not free to cast
their votes, it was precisely from these voteless areas that the
national Republican leaders selected the political spokesmen for the
voting Negroes of the North._ Men who will not vote at the coming
election and men who, like Roscoe Simmons, never cast a vote in their
lives were the accredited representatives in whose hands lay the destiny
of a million Negro voters.
But there need be no fear that this insult will annoy the black brother
in the Republican ranks. A Negro Republican generally runs the
rhinoceros and the elephant a close third. In plain English, the average
Negro Republican is too stupid to see and too meek to mind. Then, too,
here is Fate’s retribution for the black man in the North who has never
cared enough to fight (the Republican party) for the political freedom
of his brother in the South, but left him to rot under poll-tax laws and
grandfather clauses. The Northern white Democrats, for letting their
Southern brethren run riot through the Constitution, must pay the
penalty of being led into the ditch by the most ignorant, stupid and
vicious portion of their party. Even so, the Northern Negro Republican,
for letting his Southern brother remain a political ragamuffin, must now
stomach the insult of this same ragamuffin dictating the destiny of the
freer Negroes of the North. In both cases the tail doth wag the dog
because of “the solid South.” Surely, “the judgments of the Lord are
true and righteous altogether!” —July, 1920.
_The Grand Old Party_
In the early days of 1861, when the Southern Senators and
Representatives were relinquishing their seats in the United States
Congress and hurling cartels of defiant explanation broadcast, the
Republican party in Congress, under the leadership of Charles Francis
Adams of Massachusetts, organized a joint committee made up of thirteen
members of the Senate and thirty-three members of the House to make
overtures to the seceding Southerners. The result of this friendly
gesture was a proposed thirteenth amendment, which, if the Southerners
had not been so obstinate, would have bridged the chasm. For this
amendment proposed to make the slavery of the black man in America
eternal and inescapable. It provided that no amendment to the
Constitution, or any other proposition affecting slavery in any way,
could ever be legally presented upon the floor of Congress unless its
mover had secured the previous consent of _every Senator and
Representative from the slave-holding States_. It put teeth into the
Fugitive Slave Law and absolutely gave the Negro over into the keeping
of his oppressors.
Most Negro Americans (and white ones, too) think it fashionable to
maintain the most fervid faith and deepest ignorance about points in
their national history of which they should be informed. We therefore
submit that these facts are open and notorious to those who know
American history. The record will be found slimly and shame-facedly
given in McPherson’s “History of the Rebellion”; at indignant length in
Blaine’s “Twenty Years of Congress” and Horace Greeley’s “The Great
American Conflict.” The document can be examined in Professor
Macdonald’s “Select Documents of United States History.” These works are
to be found in every public library, and we refer to them here because
there are “intellectual” Negroes today who are striving secretly, when
they dare not do so openly, to perpetuate the bonds of serfdom which
bind the Negro Americans to the Republican party. This bond of serfdom,
this debt of gratitude, is supposed to hinge on the love which Abraham
Lincoln and his party are supposed to have borne towards the Negro; and
the object of this appeal to the historical record is to show that that
record demonstrates that if the Negro owes any debt to the Republican
party it is a debt of execration and of punishment rather than one of
gratitude.
It is an astounding fact that in his First Inaugural Address Abraham
Lincoln gave his explicit approval to the substance of the Crittenden
resolutions which the joint committee referred to above had collectively
taken over. This demonstrates that the Republican party at the very
beginning of its contact with the Negro was willing to sell the Negro,
bound hand and foot, for the substance of its own political control.
This Thirteenth Amendment was adopted by six or eight Northern States,
including Pennsylvania and Illinois; and if Fort Sumter had not been
fired upon it would have become by State action the law of the land.
The Republican party did not fight for the freedom of the Negro, but for
the maintenance of its own grip on the government which the election of
Abraham Lincoln had secured. If any one wants to know for what the
Republican party fought he will find it in such facts as this: That
thousands of square miles of the people’s property were given away to
Wall Street magnates who had corrupted the Legislature in their effort
to build railroads on the government’s money. The sordid story is given
in “Forty Years in Wall Street,” by the banker, Henry Clews, and others
who took part in this raid upon the resources of a great but stupid
people.
But the Civil War phase of the Republican party’s treason to the Negro
is not the only outstanding one, as was shown by the late General
Tremaine in his “Sectionalism Unmasked.” Not only was General Grant
elected in 1868 by the newly created Negro vote, as the official records
prove, but his re-election in 1872 was effected by the same means. So
was the election of Rutherford B. Hayes in 1876. Yet when the election
of Hayes had been taken before the overwhelmingly Republican Congress
this shameless party made a deal whereby, in order to pacify the white
“crackers” of the South, the Negro was given over into the hands of the
triumphant Ku-Klux; the soldiers who protected their access to the
ballot box in the worst southern states were withdrawn, while the
“crackers” agreed as the price of this favor to withdraw their
opposition to the election of Hayes. For this there exists ample proof
which will be presented upon the challenge of any politician or editor.
As a Republican Senator from New England shamelessly said, it was a
matter of “Root, hog, or die” for the helpless Negro whose ballots had
buttressed the Republican party’s temple of graft and corruption. So was
reconstruction settled against the Negro by the aid and abetting of the
Republican party.
And since that time lynching, disfranchisement and segregation have
grown with the Republican party in continuous control of the government
from 1861 to 1920—with the exception of eight years of Woodrow Wilson
and eight years of Grover Cleveland. With their continuing consent the
South has been made solid, so that at every Republican convention
delegates who do not represent a voting constituency but a grafting
collection of white postmasters and their Negro lackeys can turn the
scales of nomination in favor of any person whom the central clique of
the party, controlled as it has always been by Wall Street financiers,
may foist upon a disgusted people, as they have done in the case of
Harding. So long as the South remains solid, so long will the Republican
delegates from the South consist of only this handful of hirelings; so
long will they be amenable to the “discipline” which means the pressure
of the jobs by which they get their bread. Therefore the Republican
leaders will know that the solidarity of the South is their most
valuable asset; and they are least likely to do anything that will break
that solidarity. The Republican party’s only interest in the Negro is to
get his vote for nothing; and so long as Negro Republican leaders remain
the contemptible grafters and political procurers that they are at
present, so long will it get Negro votes for nothing.
Through it all the Republican party remains the most corrupt influence
among Negro Americans. It buys up by jobs, appointments and gifts those
Negroes who in politics should be the free and independent spokesmen of
Negro Americans. But worse than this is its private work in which it
secretly subsidizes men who pose before the public as independent
radicals. These intellectual pimps draw private supplementary incomes
from the Republican party to sell out the influence of any movement,
church or newspaper with which they are connected. Of the enormity of
this mode of procedure and the extent to which it saps the very springs
of Negro integrity the average Negro knows nothing. Its blighting,
baleful influence is known only to those who have trained ears to hear
and trained eyes to see.
And now in this election the standards will advance and the cohorts go
forward under the simple impulse of the same corrupting influence. But
whether the new movement for a Negro party comes to a head or not, the
new Negro in America will never amount to anything politically until he
enfranchises himself from the Grand Old Party which has made a political
joke of him. —July, 1920.
1. The first part of this editorial is reprinted from an article
written in 1912.
CHAPTER V.
THE PROBLEMS OF LEADERSHIP.
[In all the tangles of our awakening race consciousness there are
perhaps none more knotty than the tangles relating to leadership.
Leadership among Negro Americans, as among other people, means the
direction of a group’s activities, whether by precept, example or
compulsion. But, in our case, there is involved a strikingly new
element. Should the leading of our group in any sense be the product of
our group’s consciousness or of a consciousness originating from outside
that group? What the new Negro thinks on the problem of “outside
interference” in the leadership of his group is expressed in the first
and sixth editorials of this chapter, one of which appeared in _The
Voice_ and the other in _The Negro World_.
“A Tender Point” formulates one part of the problem of leadership which
is seldom touched upon by Negro Americans who characteristically avoid
any public presentation of a thing about which they will talk
interminably in private; namely, the claim advanced, explicitly and
implicitly, by Negroids of mixed blood to be considered the natural
leaders of Negro activities on the ground of some alleged “superiority”
inherent in their white blood.
“The Descent of Du Bois” was written at the request of Major Loving of
the Intelligence Department of the Army at the time when Dr. Du Bois,
the editor of _The Crisis_, was being preened for a desk captaincy at
Washington. Major Loving solicited a summary of the situation from me as
one of those “radicals” qualified to furnish such a summary. This he
incorporated in his report to his superiors in Washington, and this I
published a week later in _The Voice_ of July 25, 1918, as an editorial
without changing a single word. I was informed by Major Loving that this
editorial was one of the main causes of the government’s change of
intention as regards the Du Bois captaincy. Since that time Dr. Du
Bois’s white friends have been fervidly ignoring the occurrence and the
consequent collapse of his leadership. “When the Blind Lead” was written
as a reminder to the souls of black folks that “while it is as easy as
eggs for a leader to fall off the fence, it is devilishly difficult to
boost him up again.” “Just Crabs” was a delightful inspiration in the
course of defending, not Mr. Garvey personally, but the principles of
the New Negro Manhood Movement, a portion of which had been incorporated
by him and his followers of the U.N.I.A. and A.C. L. It was the opening
gun of the defense, of which some other salvos were given in the serial
satire of The Crab Barrel—which I have been kind enough to omit from
this record. This controversy also gave rise to the three first
editorials of chapter 6.]
_Our Professional “Friends”_
This country of ours has produced many curious lines of endeavor, not
the least curious of which is the business known as “being the Negro’s
friend.” It was first invented by politicians, but was taken up later by
“good” men, six-per-cent philanthropists, millionaire believers in
“industrial education,” benevolent newspapers like the _Evening Post_,
and a host of smaller fry of the “superior race.” Just at this time the
business is being worked to death, and we wish to contribute our mite
toward the killing-by showing what it means.
The first great “friend” of the Negro was the Southern politician, Henry
Clay, who, in the first half of the nineteenth century organized the
American Colonization Society. This society befriended the “free men of
color” by raising funds to ship them away to Liberia, which was accepted
by many free Negroes as a high proof of the white man’s “friendship.”
But Frederick Douglass, William Still, James McCune Smith, Martin R.
Delaney, and other wide-awake Negroes were able to show (by transcripts
of its proceedings) that its real purpose was to get rid of the free
Negroes because, so long as they continued to live here, their freedom
was an inducement to the slaves to run away from slavery, and their
accomplishments demonstrated to all white people that the Negro
(contrary to the claims of the slave-holders) was capable of a higher
human destiny than that of being chattels—and this was helping to make
American slavery odious in the eyes of the civilized world.
Since that time the dismal farce of “friendship” has been played many
times, by politicians, millionaires and their editorial adherents, who
have been profuse in giving good advice to the Negro people. They have
advised them to “go slow,” that “Rome was not built in a day,” and that
“half a loaf is better than no bread,” that “respect could not be
demanded,” and, in a thousand different ways have advised them that if
they would only follow the counsels of “the good white people” who
really had their interests at heart, instead of following their own
counsels (as the Irish and the Jews do), all would yet be well. Many
Negroes who have a wish-bone where their back-bone ought to be have been
doing this. It was as a representative of this class that Mitchell’s
man, Mr. Fred R. Moore, the editor of _The Age_, spoke, when in July he
gave utterance to the owlish reflection that,
The Negro race is afflicted with many individuals whose wagging
tongues are apt to lead them into indiscreet utterances that reflect
upon the whole race. … The unruly tongues should not be allowed to
alienate public sympathy from the cause of the oppressed.
It was as a fairly good representative of the class of “good white
friends of the colored people” that Miss Mary White Ovington, the
chairman of the New York Branch of the National Association for the
Advancement of Colored People, sent to _The Voice_ the following bossy
and dictatorial note:
My dear Mr. Harrison,
I don’t see any reason for another organization, or another
paper. If you printed straight socialism it might be different.
Yours truly,
MARY W. OVINGTON.
These “good white people” must really forgive us for insisting that we
are not children, and that, while we want all the friends we can get, we
need no benevolent dictators. It is we, and not they, who must shape
Negro policies. If they want to help in carrying them out we will
appreciate their help.
Just now the white people even in the South—have felt the pressure of
the new Negro’s manhood demands, in spite of the fact that
backward-looking Negroes like _The Age_’s editor condemn the inflexible
spirit of these demands. All over the South, the white papers, scared by
the exodus of Negro laborers who are tired of begging for justice
overdue, are saying that we are right, and friendlier legislation has
begun to appear on Southern statute books. Mr. Mencken and other
Southern writers are saying that the Negro is demanding, and that the
South had better accede to his just demands, as it is only a matter of
time when he will be in position to enforce them. One should think,
then, that those who have been parading as our professional friends
would be in the van of this manhood movement. But the movement seems to
have left them in the rear. Now, that we are demanding the whole loaf,
they are begging for half, and are angry at us for going further than
they think “nice.”
It was the N.A.A.C.P. which was urging us to compromise our manhood by
begging eagerly for “Jim Crow” training camps. And the same group is
asking, in the November _Crisis_, that we put a collective
power-of-attorney into their hand and leave it to them to shape our
national destiny. The N.A.A.C.P. has done much good work for
Negroes—splendid work—in fighting lynching and segregation. For that we
owe it more gratitude and good will than we owe to the entire Republican
party for the last sixty years of its existence. But we cannot, even in
this case, abdicate our right to shape more radical policies for
ourselves. It was the realization of the need for a more radical policy
than that of the N.A.A.C.P. that called into being the Liberty League of
Negro Americans. And the N.A.A.C.P., as mother, must forgive its
offspring for forging farther ahead.
Then, there is the case of the New York _Evening Post_, of which
Mr. Villard is owner. This paper was known far and wide as “a friend to
Negroes.” But its friendship has given way to indifference and worse. In
the good old days every lynching received editorial condemnation. But
the three great lynchings this year which preceded East St. Louis found
no editorial of condemnation in the _Post_. It was more than luke-warm
then. But, alack and alas! As soon as the Negro soldiers in Houston,
goaded to retaliation by gross indignities, did some shooting on their
own account, the _Evening Post_, which had no condemnation of the
conduct of the lynchers, joined the chorus of those who were screaming
for “punishment” and death. Here is its brief editorial on August 25th:
As no provocation could justify the crimes committed by mutinous Negro
soldiers at Houston, Texas, so no condemnation of their conduct can be
too severe. It may be that the local authorities were not wholly
blameless, and that the commanding officers were at fault in not
foreseeing the trouble and taking steps to guard against it. But
nothing can really palliate the offence of the soldiers. They were
false to their uniform; they were false to their race. In one sense,
this is the most deplorable aspect of the whole riotous outbreak. It
will play straight into the hands of men like Senator Vardaman who
have been saying that it was dangerous to draft colored men into the
army. And the feeling against having colored troops encamped in the
South will be intensified. The grievous harm which they might do to
their own people should have been all along in the minds of the
colored soldiers, and made them doubly circumspect. They were under
special obligation, in addition to their military oath, to conduct
themselves so as not to bring reproach upon the Negroes as a whole, of
whom they were in a sort representative. Their criminal outrage will
tend to make people forget the good work done by other Negro soldiers.
After the rigid investigation which the War Department has ordered,
the men found guilty should receive the severest punishment. As for
the general army policy affecting colored troops, we are glad to see
that Secretary Baker appears to intend no change in his recent orders.
We ourselves cannot forget that while the question of whether the
_Post’s_ editor would get a diplomatic appointment (like some other
editors) was under consideration during the first year of Woodrow
Wilson’s first administration, the _Post_ pretended to believe that the
President didn’t know of the segregation practiced in the government
departments. The N.A.A.C.P., whose letter sent out at the time is now
before us, pretended to the same effect.
After viewing these expressions of frightful friendliness in our own
times, we have reached the conclusion that the time has come when we
should insist on being our own best friends. We may make mistakes, of
course, but we ought to be allowed to make our own mistakes—as other
people are allowed to do. If friendship is to mean compulsory compromise
foisted on us by kindly white people, or by cultured Negroes whose ideal
is the imitation of the urbane acquiescence of these white friends, then
we had better learn to look a gift horse in the mouth whenever we get
the chance. —November, 1917.
_Shillady Resigns_
Mr. John R. Shillady, ex-secretary of the N.A.A.C.P., states in his
letter of resignation that “I am less confident than heretofore of the
speedy success of the association’s full program and of the probability
of overcoming within a reasonable period the forces opposed to Negro
equality by the means and methods which are within the association’s
power to employ.” In this one sentence Mr. Shillady, the worker on the
inside, puts in suave and serenely diplomatic phrase the truth which
people on the outside have long ago perceived, namely, that the
N.A.A.C.P. makes a joke of itself when it affects to think that lynching
and the other evils which beset the Negro in the South can be abolished
by simple publicity. The great weakness of the National Association for
the Advancement of Colored People has been and is that, whereas it aims
to secure certain results by affecting the minds of white people and
making them friendly to it, it has no control over these minds and has
absolutely no answer to the question, “What steps do you propose to take
if these minds at which you are aiming remain unaffected? What do you
propose to do to secure life and liberty for the Negro if the white
Southerner persists, as he has persisted for sixty years, in refusing to
grant guarantees of life and liberty?” The N.A.A.C.P. has done some good
and worth-while work as an organization of protest. But the times call
for something more effective than protests addressed to the other
fellow’s consciousness. What is needed at present is more of the
mobilizing of the Negro’s political power, pocketbook power and
intellectual power (which are absolutely within the Negro’s own control)
to do for the Negro the things which the Negro needs to have done
without depending upon or waiting for the co-operative action of white
people. This co-operative action, whenever it does come, is a boon that
no Negro, intelligent or unintelligent, affects to despise. But no Negro
of clear vision, whether he be a leader or not, can afford to predicate
the progress of the Negro upon such co-operative action, because it may
not come.
Mr. Shillady may have seen these things. It is high time that all
Negroes see these things whether their white professional friends see
them or not. —July, 1920.
_Our White Friends_
In the good old days when the black man’s highest value in the white
man’s eye was that of an object of benevolence especially provided by
the Divine mind for calling out those tender out-pourings of charity
which were so dear to the self-satisfied Caucasian—in those days the
white men who fraternized with black people could do so as their guides,
philosophers and friends without incurring any hostility on the part of
black folk. Today, however, the white man who mixes with the black
brother is having a hard time of it. Somehow Ham’s offspring no longer
feels proud of being “taken up” by the progeny of Japhet. And when the
white man insists on mixing in with him the colored brother will persist
in attributing ulterior motives.
What is the cause of this difference? The answer will be found only by
one who refuses to wear the parochial blinkers of Anglo-Saxon
civilization and sees that the relations of the white and black race
have changed and are changing all over the world. Such an observer would
note that the most significant fact of the growing race consciousness is
to be found in the inevitable second half of the word. It isn’t because
these darker people are motivated by race that their present state of
mind constitutes a danger to Caucasian overlordship. It is because they
have developed consciousness, intelligence, understanding. They have
learned that the white brother is perfectly willing to love them—“in
their place.” They have learned that that place is one in which they are
not to develop brains and initiative, but must furnish the brawn and
muscle whereby the white man’s brain and initiative can take eternally
the products of their brawn and muscle. There are today many white men
who will befriend the Negro, who will give their dollars to his comfort
and welfare, so long as the idea of what constitutes that comfort and
welfare comes entirely from the white man’s mind. Examples like those of
Dr. Spingarn and Mr. E. D. Morel are numerous.
And not for nothing does the black man balk at the white man’s “mixing
in.” For there are spies everywhere and the _agent provocateur_ is
abroad in the land. From Chicago comes the news by way of the Associated
Press (white) that Dr. Jonas, who has always insisted in sticking his
nose into the Negro peoples’ affairs as their guide, philosopher and
friend, has been forced to confess that he is a government agent,
presumably paid for things which the government would later suppress.
Dr. Jonas is reported to have said that he is connected with the British
secret service; but since the second year of the European war it has
been rather difficult for us poor devils to tell where the American
government ended and the British government began, especially in these
matters. In any case, we have Dr. Jonas’ confession, and all the silly
Negroes who listened approvingly to the senseless allegations made by
Messrs. Jonas, Gabriel and others of a standing army of 4,000,000 in
Abyssinia and of Japanese-Abyssinian diplomatic relations and
intentions, must feel now very foolish about the final result.
How natural it was that Jonas, the white leader, should have gone scot
free, while Redding and his other Negro dupes are held! How natural that
Jonas should be the one to positively identify Redding as the slayer of
the Negro policeman! And so, once again, that section of the Negro race
that will not follow except where a white man leads will have to pay
that stern penalty whereby Dame Experience teaches her dunces. Under the
present circumstances we, the Negroes of the Western world, do pledge
our allegiance to leaders of our own race, selected by our own group and
supported financially and otherwise exclusively by us. Their leadership
may be wise or otherwise; they may make mistakes here and there;
nevertheless, such sins as they may commit will be our sins, and all the
glory that they may achieve will be our glory. We prefer it so. It may
be worth the while of the white men who desire to be “Our Professional
Friends” to take note of this preference.
_A Tender Point_
When the convention of turtles assembled on the Grand Banks of
Newfoundland it was found absolutely impossible to get a tortoise
elected as leader. All turtles, conservative and radical, agreed that a
land and water creature, who was half one thing and half another, was
not an ideal choice for leader of a group which lived exclusively in the
water. Whenever a leader of the Irish has to be selected by the Irish it
is an Irishman who is selected. No Irishman would be inclined to dispute
the fact that other men, even Englishmen like John Stuart Mill and the
late Keir Hardie, could feel the woes of Ireland as profoundly as any
Irishman. But they prefer to live up to the principle of “Safety First.”
These two illustrations are to be taken as a prelude to an important
point which is not often discussed in the Negro press because all of
us—black, brown and parti-colored—fear to offend each other. That point
concerns the biological breed of persons who should be selected by
Negroes as leaders of their race. We risk the offense this time because
efficiency in matters of racial leadership, as in other matters, should
not be too tender to these points of prejudice when they stand in the
way of desirable results. For two centuries in America we, the
descendants of the black Negroes of Africa, have been told by white men
that we cannot and will not amount to anything except in so far as we
first accept the bar sinister of their mixing with us. Always when white
people had to select a leader for Negroes they would select some one who
had in his veins the blood of the selectors. In the good old days when
slavery was in flower, it was those whom Denmark Vesey of Charleston
described as “house niggers” who got the master’s cast-off clothes, the
better scraps of food and culture which fell from the white man’s table,
who were looked upon as the Talented Tenth of the Negro race. The
opportunities of self-improvement, in so far as they lay within the hand
of the white race, were accorded exclusively to this class of people who
were the left-handed progeny of the white masters.
Out of this grew a certain attitude on their part towards the rest of
the Negro people which, unfortunately, has not yet been outgrown. In
Washington, Boston, Charleston, New York and Chicago these proponents of
the lily-white idea are prone to erect around their sacred personalities
a high wall of caste, based on the ground of color. And the black
Negroes have heretofore worshipped at the altars erected on these walls.
One sees this in the Baptist, Methodist and Episcopal churches, at the
various conventions and in fraternal organizations. Black people
themselves seem to hold the degrading view that a man who is but half a
Negro is twice as worthy of their respect and support as one who is
entirely black. We have seen in the social life of some of the places
mentioned how women, undeniably black and undeniably beautiful, have
been shunned and ostracised at public functions by men who should be
presumed to know better. We have read the fervid jeremiads of “colored”
men who, when addressing the whites on behalf of some privilege which
they wished to share with them, would be, in words, as black as the ace
of spades, but, when it came to mixing with “their kind,” they were
professional lily-whites, and we have often had to point out to them
that there is no color prejudice in America—except among “colored”
people. Those who may be inclined to be angry at the broaching of this
subject are respectfully requested to ponder that pungent fact.
In this matter white people, even in America, are inclined to be more
liberal than colored people. If a white man has no race prejudice, it
will be found that he doesn’t care how black is the Negro friend that he
takes to his home and his bosom. Even these white people who pick
leaders for Negroes have begun in these latter years to give formal and
official expression to this principle. Thus it was that when the
trustees of Tuskegee had to elect a head of Tuskegee and a putative
leader of the Negroes of America to succeed the late Dr. Washington,
they argued that it was now necessary to select as leader for the Negro
people a man who could not be mistaken by any one for anything other
than a Negro. Therefore, Mr. Emmett Scott was passed over and Dr. Robert
R. Morton was selected. We are not approving here the results of that
selection, but merely holding up to Negroes the principle by which it
was governed.
So long as we ourselves acquiesce in the selection of leaders on the
ground of their unlikeness to our racial type, just so long will we be
met by the invincible argument that white blood is necessary to make a
Negro worth while. Every Negro who has respect for himself and for his
race will feel, when contemplating such examples as Toussaint
Louverture, Phyllis Wheatley, Paul Laurence Dunbar and Samuel Ringgold
Ward, the thrill of pride that differs in quality and intensity from the
feeling which he experiences when contemplating other examples of great
Negroes who are not entirely black. For it is impossible in such cases
for the white men to argue that they owed their greatness of their
prominence to the blood of the white race which was mingled in their
veins. It is a legitimate thrill of pride, for it gives us a hope nobler
than the hope of amalgamation whereby, in order to become men, we must
lose our racial identity. It is a subject for sober and serious
reflection, and it is hoped that sober and serious reflection will be
given to it.
_The Descent of Du Bois_
In a recent bulletin of the War Department it was declared that
“justifiable grievances” were producing and had produced “not
disloyalty, but an amount of unrest and bitterness which even the best
efforts of their leaders may not be able always to guide.” This is the
simple truth. The essence of the present situation lies in the fact that
the people whom our white masters have “recognized” as our leaders
(without taking the trouble to consult us) and those who, by our own
selection, had actually attained to leadership among us are being
revaluated and, in most cases, rejected.
The most striking instance from the latter class is Dr. W. E. Du Bois,
the editor of the _Crisis_. Du Bois’s case is the more significant
because his former services to his race have been undoubtedly of a high
and courageous sort. Moreover, the act by which he has brought upon
himself the stormy outburst of disapproval from his race is one which of
itself, would seem to merit no such stern condemnation. To properly
gauge the value and merit of this disapproval one must view it in the
light of its attendant circumstances and of the situation in which it
arose.
Dr. Du Bois first palpably sinned in his editorial “Close Ranks” in the
July number of the _Crisis_. But this offense (apart from the trend and
general tenor of the brief editorial) lies in a single sentence: “Let
us, while this war lasts, _forget our special grievances_ and close our
ranks, shoulder to shoulder with our white fellow-citizens and the
allied nations that are fighting for democracy.” From the latter part of
the sentence there is no dissent, so far as we know. The offense lies in
that part of the sentence which ends with the italicized words. It is
felt by all his critics, that Du Bois, of all Negroes, knows best that
our “special grievances” which the War Department Bulletin describes as
“justifiable” consist of lynching, segregation and disfranchisement, and
that the Negroes of America can not preserve either their lives, their
manhood or their vote (which is their political life and liberties) with
these things in existence. The doctor’s critics feel that America can
not use the Negro people to any good effect unless they have life,
liberty and manhood assured and guaranteed to them. Therefore, instead
of the war for democracy making these things less necessary, it makes
them more so.
“But,” it may be asked, “why should not these few words be taken merely
as a slip of the pen or a venial error in logic? Why all this hubbub?”
It is because the so-called leaders of the first-mentioned class have
already established an unsavory reputation by advocating this same
surrender of life, liberty and manhood, masking their cowardice behind
the pillars of war-time sacrifice? Du Bois’s statement, then, is
believed to mark his entrance into that class, and is accepted as a
“surrender” of the principles which brought him into prominence—and
which alone kept him there.
Later, when it was learned that Du Bois was being preened for a berth in
the War Department as a captain-assistant (adjutant) to Major Spingarn,
the words used by him in the editorial acquired a darker and more
sinister significance. The two things fitted too well together as motive
and self-interest.
For these reasons Du Bois is regarded much in the same way as a knight
in the middle ages who had had his armor stripped from him, his arms
reversed and his spurs hacked off. This ruins him as an influential
person among Negroes at this time, alike whether he becomes a captain or
remains an editor.
But the case has its roots much farther back than the editorial in
July’s _Crisis_. Some time ago when it was learned that the _Crisis_ was
being investigated by the government for an alleged seditious utterance
a great clamor went up, although the expression of it was not open.
Negroes who dared to express their thoughts seemed to think the action
tantamount to a declaration that protests against lynching, segregation
and disfranchisement were outlawed by the government. But nothing was
clearly understood until the conference of editors was called under the
assumed auspices of Emmet Scott and Major Spingarn. Then it began to
appear that these editors had not been called without a purpose. The
desperate ambiguity of the language which they used in their report (in
the War Department Bulletin), coupled with the fact that not one of
them, upon his return would tell the people anything of the proceedings
of the conference—all this made the Negroes feel less and less
confidence in them and their leadership; made them (as leaders) less
effective instruments for the influential control of the race’s state of
mind.
Now Du Bois was one of the most prominent of those editors “who were
called.” The responsibility, therefore, for a course of counsel which
stresses the servile virtues of acquiescence and subservience falls
squarely on his shoulders. The offer of a captaincy and Du Bois’s
flirtation with that offer following on the heels of these things
seemed, even in the eyes of his associate members of the N.A.A.C.P.
to afford clear proof of that which was only a suspicion before, viz:
that the racial resolution of the leaders had been tampered with, and
that Du Bois had been privy to something of the sort. The connection
between the successive acts of the drama (May, June, July) was too
clear to admit of any interpretation other than that of deliberate,
cold blooded, purposive planning. And the connection with Spingarn
seemed to suggest that personal friendships and public faith were not
good working team-mates.
For the sake of the larger usefulness of Dr. Du Bois we hope he will be
able to show that he can remain as editor of the _Crisis_; but we fear
that it will require a good deal of explaining. For, our leaders, like
Caesar’s wife, must be above suspicion. —July, 1918.
_When the Blind Lead_
In the February issue of the _Crisis_ its editor begins a brief
editorial on “Leadership,” with the touching reminder that “Many a good
cause has been killed by suspected leadership.” How strikingly do these
words bring back to us Negroes those dark days of 1918! At that time the
editor of the _Crisis_ was offering certain unique formulas of
leadership that somehow didn’t “take.” His “Close Ranks” editorial and
the subsequent slump in the stock of his leadership have again
illustrated the truth long since expressed in Latin: “Descensus Averni
facilis; sed revocare gradus,—hoc opus est,” which, being translated,
might mean that, while it’s as easy as eggs for a leader to fall off the
fence, it is devilishly difficult to boost him up again. In September,
1918, one could boldly say, “The _Crisis_ says, first your Country, then
your Rights!” Today, when the Negro people everywhere are responding to
Mr. Michael Coulsen’s sentiment that “it’s Race, not Country, first,” we
find the “leader” of 1918 in the position described by Lowell in these
words: “A moultin’ fallen cherubim, ef he should see ye’d snicker,
Thinkin’ he warn’t a suckemstance.”
How fast time flies!
But the gist of Dr. Du Bois’s editorial is the moral downfall of another
great leader. “Woodrow Wilson, in following a great ideal of world
unity, forgot all his pledges to the German people, forgot all his large
words to Russia, did not hesitate to betray Gompers and his unions, _and
never at any single moment meant to include in his democracy twelve
million of his fellow Americans, whom he categorically promised `more
than mere grudging justice,’ and then allowed 350 of them to be lynched
during his Presidency._ Under such leadership what cause could succeed?”
He notes that out of the World War, with the Allies triumphant, have
come Britain’s brutal domination of the seas, her conquest of Persia,
Arabia and Egypt, and her tremendous tyranny imposed on two-thirds of
Africa.
But we saw these things, as early as 1917, to be the necessary
consequences of the Allies’ success, when the editor of the _Crisis_ was
telling his race: “You are not fighting simply for Europe; you are
fighting for the world.” Was Dr. Du Bois so blind then that he couldn’t
see them? And if he was, is he any less blind today? In 1918 the
lynchings were still going on while Dr. Du Bois was solemnly advising us
to “forget our grievances.” Any one who insisted then on putting such
grievances as lynchings, disfranchisement and segregation in the
fore-ground was described by the _Crisis_’ editor as seeking “to turn
his country’s tragic predicament to his own personal gain.” At that time
he either believed or pretended to believe every one of the empty words
that flowed from Woodrow Wilson’s lips, and on the basis of this belief
he was willing to act as a brilliant bellwether to the rest of the
flock. Unfortunately, the flock refused to follow the lost leader.
“If the blind lead the blind they will both fall into the ditch.” But in
this case those being led were not quite so blind as those who wanted to
lead them by way of captaincies in the army. Which was why some
captaincies were not forthcoming. The test of vision in a leader is the
ability to foresee the immediate future, the necessary consequences of a
course of conduct and the dependable sentiments of those whom he assumes
to lead. In all these things Dr. Du Bois has failed; and neither his
ungrateful attack on Emmett Scott nor his belated discovery of Wilsonian
hypocrisy will, we fear, enable him to climb back into the saddle of
race leadership. This is a pity, because he has rendered good service in
his day. But that day is past. The magazine which he edits still remains
as a splendid example of Negro journalism. But the personal primacy of
its editor has departed, never to return. Other times, other men; other
men, other manners.
Even the Negro people are now insisting that their leaders shall in
thought and moral stamina keep ahead of, and not behind, them,
“It takes a mind like Willum’s [fact!] ez big as all outdoors
To find out thet it looks like rain arter it fairly pours.”
The people’s spiritual appetite has changed and they are no longer
enamoured of “brilliant” leaders, whose chorus is:
“A marciful Providence fashioned us holler
O’purpose that we might our principles swaller;
It can hold any quantity on ’em—the belly can—
An’ bring ’em up ready fer use like the pelican.”
And this is a change which we commend to the kindly consideration of all
those good white friends who are out selecting Negro “leaders.” It is a
fact which, when carefully considered, will save them thousands of
dollars in “overhead expense.” The Negro leaders of the future will be
expected not only to begin straight, take a moral vacation, and then go
straight again. They will be expected to go straight all the time; to
stand by us in war as well as in peace; not to blow hot and cold with
the same mouth, but “to stand four-square to all the winds that blow.”
—1920.
_Just Crabs_
Once upon a time a Greedy Person went rummaging along the lagoon with a
basket and a stick in quest of Crabs, which he needed for the Home
Market. (Now, this was in the Beginning of Things, Best Beloved.) These
were Land Crabs—which, you know, are more luscious than Sea Crabs, being
more Primitive and more full of meat. He dug into their holes with his
stick, routed them out, packed them on their backs in his basket and
took them home. Several trips he made with his basket and his stick, and
all the Crabs which he caught were dumped into a huge barrel. (But this
time he didn’t pack them on their backs.) And all the creatures stood
around and watched. For this Greedy Person had put no cover on the
barrel. (But this was in the Beginning of Things.)
He knew Crab Nature, and was not at all worried about his Crabs. For as
soon as any one Crab began to climb up on the side of the barrel to work
his way toward the top the other Crabs would reach up, grab him by the
legs, and down he would come, kerplunk! “If we can’t get up,” they would
say—“if we can’t get up, you shan’t get up, either. We’ll pull you down.
Besides, you should wait until the barrel bursts. There are Kind Friends
on the Outside who will burst, the barrel if we only wait, and then,
when the Great Day dawns, we will all be Emancipated and there’ll be no
need for Climbing. Come down, you fool!” (Because this was in the
Beginning of Things, Best Beloved.) So the Greedy Person could always
get as many Crabs as he needed for the Home Market, because they all
depended on him for their food.
And all the creatures stood around and laughed. For this was very funny
in the Beginning of Things. And all the creatures said that the Reason
for this kink in Crab Nature was that when the Creator was giving out
heads he didn’t have enough to go around, so the poor Crabs didn’t get
any.
And the Greedy Person thanked his lucky stars that Crabs had been made
in that Peculiar way, since it made it unnecessary to put a cover on his
barrel or to waste his precious time a-watching of them. (Now, all this
happened long ago, Best Beloved, in the very Beginning of Things.)
---
The above is the first of our Just-So Stories—with no apologies to
Rudyard Kipling or any one else. We print it here because, just at this
time the Crabs are at work in Harlem, and there is a tremendous clashing
of claws as the Pull ’Em Down program goes forward. It’s a great game,
to be sure, but it doesn’t seem to get them or us anywhere. The new day
that has dawned for the Negroes of Harlem is a day of business
accomplishment. People are going into business, saving their money and
collectively putting it into enterprises which will mean roofs over
their heads and an economic future for themselves and their little ones.
But the Subsidized Sixth are sure that this is all wrong and that we
have no right to move an inch until the Socialist millennium dawns, when
we will all get “out of the barrel” together. It does not seem to have
occurred to them that making an imperfect heaven now does not unfit any
one for enjoying the perfect paradise which they promise us—if it ever
comes. Truly it is said of them that “the power over a man’s subsistence
is the power over his will”—and over his “scientific radicalism,” too.
But we remember having translated this long ago into the less showy
English of “Show me whose bread you eat, and I’ll tell you whose songs
you’ll sing.” Surely this applies to radicals overnight as well as to
ordinary folk. And if not, why not?
But when the reek of the poison gas propaganda has cleared away and the
smoke of the barrage has lifted it will be found that “White Men’s
Niggers” is a phrase that need not be restricted to old-line politicians
and editors. Criticism pungent and insistent is due to every man in
public life and to every movement which bids for public support. But the
cowardly insinuator who from the safe shelter of nameless charges
launches his poisoned arrows at other people’s reputation is a
contemptible character to have on any side of any movement. He is
generally a liar who fears that he will be called to account for his
lies if he should venture to name his foe. No man with the truth to tell
indulges in this pastime of the skulker and the skunk. Let us, by all
means, have clear, hard-hitting criticism, but none of this foul filth
which lowers the thing that throws it. In the name of common sense and
common decency, quit being Just Crabs.
CHAPTER VI.
THE NEW RACE CONSCIOUSNESS.
_The Negro’s Own Radicalism_
Twenty years ago all Negroes known to the white publicists of America
could be classed as conservatives on all the great questions on which
thinkers differ. In matters of industry, commerce, politics, religion,
they could be trusted to take the backward view. Only on the question of
the Negro’s “rights” could a small handful be found bold enough to be
tagged as “radicals”—and they were howled down by both the white and
colored adherents of the conservative point of view. Today Negroes
differ on all those great questions on which white thinkers differ, and
there are Negro radicals of every imaginary stripe—agnostics, atheists,
I.W.W.’s Socialists, Single Taxers, and even Bolshevists.
In the good old days white people derived their knowledge of what
Negroes were doing from those Negroes who were nearest to them,
generally their own selected exponents of Negro activity or of their
white point of view. A classic illustration of this kind of knowledge
was afforded by the Republican Party; but the Episcopal Church, the
Urban League, or the U. S. Government would serve as well. Today the
white world is vaguely, but disquietingly, aware that Negroes are awake,
different and perplexingly uncertain. Yet the white world by which they
are surrounded retains its traditional method of interpreting the mass
by the Negro nearest to themselves in affiliation or contact. The
Socialist party thinks that the “unrest” now apparent in the Negro
masses is due to the propaganda which its adherents support, and
believes that it will function largely along the lines of socialist
political thought. The great dailies, concerned mainly with their chosen
task of being the mental bellwethers of the mob, scream “Bolshevist
propaganda” and flatter themselves that they have found the true cause;
while the government’s unreliable agents envisage it as “disloyalty.”
The truth, as usual, is to be found in the depths; but there they are
all prevented from going by mental laziness and that traditional
off-handed, easy contempt with which white men in America, from scholars
like Lester Ward to scavengers like Stevenson, deign to consider the
colored population of twelve millions.
In the first place, the cause of “radicalism” among American Negroes is
international. But it is necessary to draw clear distinctions at the
outset. The function of the Christian church is international. So is
art, war, the family, rum and the exploitation of labor. But none of
these is entitled to extend the mantle of its own peculiar
“internationalism” to cover the present case of the Negro
discontent—although this has been attempted. The international Fact to
which Negroes in America are now reacting is not the exploitation of
laborers by capitalists; but the social, political and economic
subjection of colored peoples by white. It is not the Class Line, but
the Color Line, which is the incorrect but accepted expression for the
Dead Line of racial inferiority. This fact is a fact of Negro
consciousness as well as a fact of externals. The international Color
Line is the practice and theory of that doctrine which holds that the
best stocks of Africa, China, Egypt and the West Indies are inferior to
the worst stocks of Belgium, England and Italy, and must hold their
lives, lands and liberties upon such terms and conditions as the white
races may choose to grant them.
On the part of the whites, the motive was originally economic; but it is
no longer purely so. All the available facts go to prove that, whether
in the United States or in Africa or China, the economic subjection is
without exception keener and more brutal when the exploited are black,
brown and yellow, than when they are white. And the fact that black,
brown and yellow also exploit each other brutally whenever Capitalism
has created the economic classes of plutocrat and proletarian should
suffice to put purely economic subjection out of court as the prime
cause of racial unrest. For the similarity of suffering has produced in
all lands where whites rule colored races a certain similarity of
sentiment, viz.: a racial revulsion of racial feeling. The peoples of
those lands begin to feel and realize that they are so subjected because
they are members of races condemned as “inferior” by their Caucasian
overlords. The fact presented to their minds is one of race, and in
terms of race do they react to it. Put the case to any Negro by way of
test and the answer will make this clear.
The great World War, by virtue of its great advertising campaign for
democracy and the promises which were held out to all subject peoples,
fertilized the Race Consciousness of the Negro people into the stage of
conflict with the dominant white idea of the Color Line. They took
democracy at its face value—which is—equality. So did the Hindus,
Egyptians and West Indians. This is what the hypocritical advertisers of
democracy had not bargained for. The American Negroes, like the other
darker peoples, are presenting their checques and trying to “cash in,”
and delays in that process, however unavoidable to the paying tellers,
are bound to beget a plentiful lack of belief in either their intention
or their ability to pay. Hence the run on Democracy’s bank—“the Negro
unrest” of the newspaper paragraphers.
Undoubtedly some of these newly-awakened Negroes will take to Socialism
and Bolshevism. But here again the reason is racial. Since they suffer
racially from the world as at present organized by the white race, some
of their ablest hold that it is “good play” to encourage and give aid to
every subversive movement within that white world which makes for its
destruction “as it is.” For by its subversion they have much to gain and
nothing to lose. Yet they build on their own foundations. Parallel with
the dogma of Class-Consciousness they run the dogma of
Race-Consciousness. And they dig deeper. For the roots of
Class-Consciousness inhere in a temporary economic order; whereas the
roots of Race-Consciousness must of necessity survive any and all
changes in the economic order. Accepting biology, as a fact, their view
is the more fundamental. At any rate, it is that view with which the
white world will have to deal. —The _New Negro_, October, 1919.
_Race First Versus Class First_
“In the old days white people derived their knowledge of what Negroes
were doing from those Negroes who were nearest to them, largely their
own selected exponents of Negro activity or of their white point of
view. * * * Today the white world is vaguely, but disquietingly, aware
that Negroes are awake; different, but perplexingly uncertain. Yet the
white world by which they are surrounded retains its traditional method
of interpreting the mass by the Negro nearest to themselves in
affiliation or contact. The Socialist party still persists in thinking
that the unrest now apparent in the Negro masses is due to the
propaganda which its paid adherents support, and believes that the
unrest will function largely along the lines of Socialist political
thought.” It is necessary to insist on this point today when the
Socialist party of America has secretly subsidized both a magazine and a
newspaper to attempt to cut into the splendid solidarity which Negroes
are achieving in response to the call of racial necessity. It is
necessary to point out that “radical” young Negroes may betray the
interests of the race into alien hands just as surely as “the old
crowd.” For, after all, the essence of both betrayals consists in making
the racial requirements play second fiddle to the requirements dictated
as best for it by other groups with other interests to serve. The fact
that one group of alien interests is described as “radical” and the
other as “reactionary” is of very slight value to us.
In the days when the Socialist Party of America was respectable,
although it never drew lines of racial separation in the North, it
permitted those lines to be drawn in the South. It had no word of
official condemnation for the Socialists of Tennessee who prevented
Theresa Malkiel in 1912 from lecturing to Negroes on Socialism either in
the same hall with them or in meetings of their own. It was the national
office of the party which in that same presidential year refused to
route Eugene V. Debs in the South because that Grand Old Man let it be
known that he would not remain silent on the race question while in the
South. They wanted the votes of the white South then, and were willing
to betray by silence the principles of inter-racial solidarity which
they espoused on paper.
Now, when their party has shrunk considerably in popular support and
sentiment, they are willing to take up our cause. Well, we thank honest
white people everywhere who take up our cause, but we wish them to know
that we have already taken it up ourselves. While they were refusing to
diagnose our case we diagnosed it ourselves, and, now that we have
prescribed the remedy—Race Solidarity—they come to us with their
prescription—Class Solidarity. It is too late, gentlemen! This racial
alignment is all our own product, and we have no desire to turn it over
to you at this late day, when we are beginning to reap its benefits. And
if you are simple enough to believe that those among us who serve your
interests ahead of ours have any monopoly of intellect or information
along the lines of modern learning, then you are the greater gulls
indeed.
We can respect the Socialists of Scandinavia, France, Germany or England
on their record. But your record so far does not entitle you to the
respect of those of us who can see all around a subject. We say Race
First, because you have all along insisted on Race First and class after
when you didn’t need our help. We reproduce below a brief portion of
your record in those piping times of peace, and ask you to explain it.
If you are unable to do so, set your lackeys to work; they may be able
to do it in terms of their own “radical scientific” surface slush. The
following is taken from the majority report of one of your national
committees during one of your recent national conventions. It was signed
by Ernest Untermann and J. Stitt Wilson, representing the West, and
Joshua Wanhope, editor of the _Call_, and Robert Hunter, representing
the East, and it was adopted as a portion of the party program. We learn
from it that—
“Race feeling is not so much a result of social as of biological
evolution. It does not change essentially with changes of economic
systems. It is deeper than any class feeling and will outlast the
capitalist system. It persists even after race prejudice has been
outgrown. It exists not because the capitalists nurse it for economic
reasons, but the capitalists rather have an opportunity to nurse it
for economic reasons because it exists as a product of biology. It is
bound to play a role in the economics of the future society. If it
should not assert itself in open warfare under a Socialist form of
society, it will nevertheless lead to a rivalry of races for expansion
over the globe as a result of the play of natural and sexual
selection. We may temper this race feeling by education, but we can
never hope to extinguish it altogether. Class-consciousness must be
learned, but race consciousness is inborn and cannot be wholly
unlearned. A few individuals may indulge in the luxury of ignoring
race and posing as utterly raceless humanitarians, but whole races
never. Where races struggle for the means of life, racial animosities
cannot be avoided. Where working people struggle for jobs,
self-preservation enforces its decrees. Economic and political
considerations lead to racial fights and to legislation restricting
the invasion of the white man’s domain by other races.”
It is well that the New Negro should know this, since it justifies him
in giving you a taste of your own medicine. The writer of these lines is
also a Socialist; but he refuses in this crisis of the world’s history
to put either Socialism or your party above the call of his race. And he
does this on the very grounds which you yourselves have given in the
document quoted above. Also because he is not a fool. —March 27th, 1920.
_An Open Letter to the Socialist Party of New York City_
Gentlemen: During 1917 the white leaders of the Republican party were
warned that the Negroes of this city were in a mood unfavorable to the
success of their party at the polls and that this mood was likely to
last until they changed their party’s attitude toward the Negro masses.
They scouted this warning because the Negroes whom they had selected to
interpret Negro sentiment for them still confidently assured them that
there had been no change of sentiment on the part of the Negro people,
and white politicians did not think it necessary to come and find out
for themselves. Consequently they were lied to by those whose bread and
butter depended on such lying. Then came the mayoralty campaign, and,
when it was too late they discovered their mistake. At a memorable
meeting at Palace Casino John Purroy Mitchell, the candidate of the
Republican party, and Theodore Roosevelt, its idol, were almost hissed
off the stage, while the Mitchell outdoor speakers found it impossible
to speak on the street corners of Harlem. The party went down to defeat
and Judge Hylan was elected.
All this is recent history, and it is called to your attention at this
time only because you are in danger of making a similar costly mistake.
You, too, have selected Negro spokesmen on whose word you choose to rely
for information as to the tone and temper of Negro political sentiment.
You have chosen to adopt the same faulty method of the white Republican
politicians, and you do not care to go behind the word of your selected
exponents of Negro thought and feeling. Yet the pitiful vote which you
polled in the last election might have warned you that something had
gone wrong in your arrangements. What that something is we shall now
proceed to show you—if you are still able to see.
During the recent world war the Negro in America was taught that while
white people spoke of patriotism, religion, democracy and other sounding
themes, they remained loyal to one concept above all others, and that
was the concept of race. Even in the throes of war, and on
the battlefields of France it was “race first” with them. Out of this
realization was born the new Negro ideal of “race first” for us. And
today, whether Negroes be Catholics or Protestants, capitalists or wage
workers, Republicans or Democrats, native or foreign-born, they begin
life anew on this basis. Alike in their business alignments, their
demands on the government and political parties, and in their courageous
response to race rioters, they are responding to this sentiment which
has been bred by the attitude of white men here and everywhere else
where white rules black. To be sure, neither Burleson nor Palmer have
told you or the rest of the white world this. The Angle-Saxon white man
is a notorious hypocrite; and they have preferred to prate of
Bolshevism—your “radicalism”—rather than tell the truth of racialism,
our “radicalism,” because this was an easier explanation, more in
keeping with official stupidity. But we had supposed that you were
intelligent enough to find this out. Evidently, you were not.
Your official Negro exponents, on behalf of their bread and butter, have
seized on this widely-published official explanation to make you believe
that the changed attitude of the Negro masses was due to the propaganda
which you were paying them (at their published request) to preach. But
this is a lie. Don’t take our word for it. Do some reading on your own
account. Get a hundred different Negro newspapers and magazines, outside
of those which you have subsidized, and study their editorial and other
pronouncements, and you will see that this is so.
But let us come nearer home. The propaganda of Socialism has been
preached in times past in Harlem by different people without awakening
hostility of any sort. Today it elicits a hostility which is outspoken.
Send up and see; then ask yourselves the reason. You will find a Negro
Harlem reborn, with business enterprises and cultural arrangements. And
these things have been established without any help from you or those
who eat your bread. Even the work of Socialist propaganda was neglected
by you between 1912 and 1917. Consult your own memories and the columns
of the Call.
All these things are the recent products of the principle of “race
first.” And among them the biggest is the Universal Negro Improvement
Association, with its associate bodies, the Black Star Line and the
Negro Factories Corporation. No movement among American Negroes since
slavery was abolished has ever attained the gigantic proportions of
this. The love and loyalty of millions go out to it as well as the cold
cash of tens of thousands. Yet your Negro hirelings have seen fit to use
the organs which you have given them to spread Socialist propaganda for
the purpose of attacking all these things, and the Black Star Line in
particular. Do you wonder now that they meet with such outspoken
opposition that they have been driven to seek an underhanded alliance
with the police (as your Negro Socialist organ avows in its latest
issue)? Isn’t that a glorious alliance for purposes of Negro propaganda?
When such things can happen you may depend upon it that someone has been
fooling you.
And, just as the white Republicans did, you have assumed that those whom
chance or change brought your way have, somehow, achieved a monopoly of
the intellect and virtue of the Negro race. Do you think that this is
sound sense on your part? Of course, it was natural that they should
tell you so. But was it natural for you to be so simple as to believe
it? On March 27 this newspaper in an editorial quoted a passage from one
of your official documents showing that the white men of your party
officially put “race first” rather than “class first,” which latter
phrase is your henchmen’s sole contribution to “sociology”—for us. The
quoted passage cuts the very heart out of their case. And yet, those
whom you have selected to represent you are so green and sappy in their
Socialism that, although six weeks have elapsed since this was hurled at
their thick heads, not one of them has yet been able to trace to its
source, this quotation from one of your own official documents. Think of
it! And in the meantime you yourselves are such “easy marks” that you
believe them, on their own assertion, to be the ablest among the Negroes
of America. It is not easy to decide which of the two groups is the
bigger joke—you or they.
You have constantly insisted that “there is no race problem, only an
economic problem,” but you will soon be in a fair way to find out
otherwise. Some day you will, perhaps, have learned enough to cease
being “suckers” for perpetual candidates who dickered with the Democrats
up to within a month of “flopping” to your party only because they
“couldn’t make it” elsewhere; some day, perhaps, you will know enough to
put Socialism’s cause in the hands of those who will refrain from using
your party’s organ for purposes of personal pique, spite and venom. When
that day dawns Socialism will have a chance to be heard by Negroes on
its merits. And even now, if you should send anyone up here (black or
white) to put the cause of Karl Marx, freed from admixture of rancor and
hatred of the Negro’s own defensive racial propaganda, you may find that
it will have as good a chance of gaining adherents as any other
political creed. But until you change your tactics or make your
exponents change theirs your case among us will be hopeless indeed.
—May, 1920.
_“Patronize Your Own.”_
The doctrine of “Race First,” although utilized largely by the Negro
business men of Harlem, has never received any large general support
from them. If we remember rightly, it was the direct product of the
out-door and indoor lecturers who flourished in Harlem between 1914 and
1916. Not all who were radical shared this sentiment. For instance, we
remember the debate between Mr. Hubert Harrison, then president of the
Liberty League, and Mr. Chandler Owen, at Palace Casino in December,
1918, in which the “radical” Owen fiercely maintained “that the doctrine
of race first was an indefensible doctrine”; Mr. Harrison maintaining
that it was the source of salvation for the race. Both these gentlemen
have run true to form ever since.
But to return to our thesis. The secondary principle of “patronize your
own,” flowing as it does from the main doctrine of “race first,” is
subject to the risk of being exploited dishonestly—particularly by
business men. And business men in Harlem have shown themselves capable
of doing this all the time. They seem to forget that “do unto others as
you would have them do unto you” is a part of the honest application of
this doctrine. Many of these men seem to want other black people to pay
them for being black. They seem to think that a dirty place and
imperfect service and 3 cents more a pound should be rewarded with
racial patronage regardless of these demerits.
On the other hand, there have grown up in Harlem Negro businesses,
groceries, ice cream parlors, etc., in which the application of prices,
courtesy and selling efficiency are maintained. This is the New Negro
business man, and we say “more power to him.” If this method of applying
the principle should continue to increase in popularity we are sure to
have in Harlem and elsewhere a full and flowing tide of Negro business
enterprises gladly and loyally supported by the mass of Negro purchasers
to their mutual benefit.
The Negro business man who is unintelligently selfish, makes a hash of
racial welfare in the attempt to achieve individual success. A case in
point is that of the brown-skinned dolls. Twenty years ago the Negro
child’s only choice was between a white Caucasian doll and the “nigger
doll.” On the lower levels the one was as cheap as the other. Then, a
step at a time came the picturesque poupee, variously described as the
“Negro doll,” the “colored doll” and the “brown-skinned doll.” This was
sold by white stores at an almost prohibitive price. It was made three
times as easy for the Negro child to idolize a white doll as to idolize
one with the features of its own race. When the principle of “Race
First” began to be proclaimed from scores of platforms and pulpits,
certain Negro business men saw a chance to benefit the race and,
incidently to reap a wonderful harvest of profits, by appealing to a
principle for whose support and maintenance, here and elsewhere, they
had never paid a cent. “Factories” for the production of brown-skinned
dolls began to spring up—most of the factoring consisting of receiving
these dolls from white factories and either stuffing them with saw dust,
excelsior or other filling, or merely changing them from one wrapper to
another. Bear in mind that the proclaimed object was to make it easier
for the Negro mother to teach race patriotism to her Negro child. Yet it
was soon notorious that these leeches were charging $3, $4 and $5 for
Negro dolls which could sell at prices ranging from 75 cents to $1.25,
and yet leave a handsome margin of profit.
The result is that today even in Negro Harlem nine out of ten Negro
children are forced to play with white dolls, because rapacious
scoundrels have been capitalizing the principle of “patronize your own”
in a one-sided way. By lowering their prices to a reasonable level, they
could extend their business tremendously. Failing to do this, they are
playing into the hands of the vendors of white dolls and making it much
easier for the Negro mother to select a white doll for her child;
limiting at once their own market and restricting the development of a
larger racial ideal.
_The Women of Our Race_
America owes much to the foreigner and the Negro in America owes even
more. For it was the white foreigner who first proclaimed that the only
music which America had produced that was worthy of the name was Negro
music. It naturally took some time for this truth to sink in, and, in
the meantime, the younger element of Negroes, in their weird worship of
everything that was white, neglected and despised their own race-music.
More than one college class had walked out, highly insulted, when their
white teachers had asked them to sing “Swing Low Sweet Chariot” and “My
Lord, What a Morning.”
It is to be hoped that they now know better. But the real subject of
this editorial is not Negro music, but Negro women. If any foreigner
should come here from Europe, Asia or Africa and be privileged to pass
in review the various kinds of women who live in our America he would
pick out as the superior of them all—the Negro woman. It seems a great
pity that it should be left to the foreigner to “discover” the
Negro-American woman. For her own mankind have been seeing her for
centuries. And yet, outside of the vague rhetoric of the brethren in
church and lodge when they want her to turn their functions into
financial successes, and outside of Paul Dunbar and perhaps two other
poets, no proper amount of esthetic appreciation of her has been
forthcoming from their side.
Consider the facts of the case. The white women of America are charming
to look at-in the upper social classes. But even the Negro laundress,
cook or elevator-girl far surpasses her mistress in the matter of
feminine charms. No white woman has a color as beautiful as the dark
browns, light-browns, peach-browns, or gold and bronze of the Negro
girl. These are some of the things which make a walk through any Negro
section of New York or Washington such a feast of delight.
Then, there is the matter of form. The bodies and limbs of our Negro
women are, on the whole, better built and better shaped than those of
any other women on earth—except perhaps, the Egyptian women’s. And their
gait and movement would require an artist to properly describe. The
grace of their carriage is inimitable.
But their most striking characteristic is a feature which even the crude
mind of mere man can appreciate. It is, to quote “Gunga Din,” “the way
in which they carry their clothes.” They dress well—not merely in the
sense that their clothing is costly and good to look at; but in that
higher sense in which the Parisian woman is the best-dressed woman in
Europe. From shoes and stockings to shirtwaists and hats, they choose
their clothes with fine taste and show them off to the best advantage
when they put them on. That is why a man may walk down the avenue with a
Negro cook or factory girl without anyone’s being able to guess that she
has to work for a living. And, finally, in the matter of that
indefinable something which, for want of a better word, we call simply
“charm”—the Negro women are far ahead of all others in America. They
have more native grace, more winsomeness, greater beauty and more fire
and passion. These facts have already begun to attract attention, here
and elsewhere, and, eventually, the Negro woman will come into her own.
What say you, brothers! Shall we not love her while she is among us?
Shall we not bend the knee in worship and thank high heaven for the
great good fortune which has given us such sisters and sweethearts,
mothers and wives?
_To the Young Men of My Race_
The Negro is already at work on the problems of reconstruction. He finds
himself in the midst of a world which is changing to its very
foundations. Yet millions of Negroes haven’t now—and have never had—the
slightest knowledge or idea of what those foundations are. How can they
render effective aid to the world without understanding something of how
the world, or society, is arranged, how it runs, and how it is run?
No one, friendly or unfriendly, can deny that the Negroes of America do
wish to help in constructing this world of men and things which will
emerge from the Great War. They want to help, because they realize that
their standing and welfare and happiness in that world will very largely
depend upon what kind of world it is. They have not been happy, so far,
in America—nor, so far as the white man’s rule is concerned,—anywhere
else under it. And they want to be happy, if that be possible. For which
reason they want to help in the re-shaping of the world-to-be.
They feel the burdens put on them by the White Lords of subjection and
repression, of 39 cents worth of education a year in Alabama, of the
deep race hatred of the Christian Church, the Y.M.C.A. and the
Associated Press; of lynching in the land of “liberty,” disfranchisement
in “democratic” America and segregation on the Federal trains and in the
Federal departments. They feel that the world should be set free from
this machinery of mischief-for their sakes as well as that of the world.
Such is the state of mind of the Negro masses here. And now what does
this attitude of the Negro masses require? GUIDANCE! Guidance, shaping
and direction. Here is strength, here is power, here is a task to call
forth the sublimest heroism on the part of those who should lead them.
And what do we find? No guidance, no shaping of the course for these
millions. The blind may not safely lead the blind in these critical
times—and blind men are practically all that we have as leaders.
The old men whose minds are always retrospecting and reminiscing to the
past, who were “trained” to read a few dry and dead books which they
still fondly believe are hard to get—these do not know anything of the
modern world, its power of change and travel, and the mighty range of
its ideas. Its labor problems and their relation to wars and alliances
and diplomacy are not even suspected by these quaint fossils. They think
that they are “leading” Negro thought, but they could serve us better if
they were cradelled in cotton-wool, wrapped in faded roses, and laid
aside in lavender as mementoes of a dead past.
The young men must gird up their loins for the task of leadership and
leadership has its stern and necessary duties. The first of these is
TRAINING. Not in a night did the call come to Christ, not in a day was
He made fit to make the great sacrifice. It took thirty years of
preparation to fit him for the work of three. Even so, on you, young men
of Negro America, descends the duty of the great preparation. Get
education. Get it not only in school and in college, but in books and
newspapers, in market-places, institutions, and movements. Prepare by
knowing; and never think you know until you have listened to ten others
who know differently—and have survived the shock.
The young man’s second duty is IRREVERENCE. Reverence is in one sense,
respect for what is antiquated because it is antiquated. This race has
lived in a rut too long to reverence the rut. Oldsters love ruts because
they help them to “rub along,” they are easy to understand; they require
the minimum of exertion and brains, and they give the maximum of ease.
Young man! If you wish to be spiritually alert and alive; to get the
very best out of yourself—shun a rut as you would shun the plague! Never
bow the knee to Baal because Baal is in power; never respect wrong and
injustice because they are enshrined in “the sacred institutions of our
glorious land”; never have patience with either Cowardice or Stupidity
because they happen to wear venerable whiskers. Read, reason, and think
on all sides of all subjects. Don’t compare yourself with the runner
behind you on the road; always compare yourself with the one ahead; so
only will you go faster and farther. And set it before you, as a sacred
duty always to surpass the teachers that taught you—and this is the
essence of irreverence.
The last great duty is COURAGE. Dear man of my people, if all else
should fail you, never let _that_ fail. Much as you need preparation and
prevision you are more in need of Courage. This has been, and is yet, A
DOWNTRODDEN RACE. Do you know what a down-trodden race needs most? If
you are not sure, take down your Bible and read the whole story of
Gideon and his band. You will then understand that, as Dunbar, says:
“Minorities since time began
Have shown the better side of man;
And often, in the lists of time,
One Man has made a cause sublime.”
You will learn the full force of what another American meant when he
told the young men of his age:
“They are slaves who dare not choose
Hatred, scoffing and abuse,
Rather than in silence shrink
From the truth they needs must think,
They are slaves who dare not be
In the right with two or three.”
A people under the heels of oppression has more need of heroic souls
than one for whom the world is bright. It was in Egypt and in the
wilderness that Israel had need of Moses, Aaron and Joshua. No race
situated like ours, has any place of leadership for those who lack
courage, fortitude, heroism. You may have to turn your eyes away from
the fleshpots of Egypt; you may be called on to fight with wild beasts
at Ephesus; you may have to face starvation in the wilderness or
crucifixion on Calvary. Have the courage to do that which the occasion
demands when it comes. And I make you no promise that “in the end you
will win a glorious crown.” You may fail, fall and be forgotten. What of
it? When you think of our heroic dead on Messines Ridge, along the Aisne
and at Chateau Thierry—how does your heart act? It thrills! It thrills
because
“Manhood hath a larger span
And wider privilege of life than Man.”
and you, young Negro Men of America, you are striving to give the gift
of manhood to this race of ours.
The future belongs to the young men.
—January, 1919.
CHAPTER VII.
OUR INTERNATIONAL CONSCIOUSNESS.
[The ideas expressed in the title of this chapter were formulated as
early as 1915 when I was in the unique position of being the black
leader and lecturer of a white lecture forum, organized by white
liberals, radicals and others at the old Lenox Casino, at 116th St. &
Lenox Ave., New York City. What white people in general thought of the
value of my services at this forum can be read in a letter written by a
white southerner and appearing in the New York Globe of December 15,
1920. After the closing of this lecture forum the same explanation of
the racial significance of the whole process of the war was expressed in
other lectures given to white people at a lecture forum which I
maintained in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn. I make these
explanations here because I value somewhat the point of priority in the
face of Mr. Lothrop Stoddard’s remarkable book, “The Rising Tide of
Color Against White World-Supremacy” and the sweeping tide of racial
consciousness which found expression subsequently in those Negro
newspapers and magazines which have been called radical.]
_The White War and the Colored World_
The newspapers which we read every day inform us that the world is at
war. Searching the pages of the statisticians, we find that the world is
made up of 17 hundred million people of which 12 hundred million are
colored—black and brown and yellow. This vast majority is at peace and
remains at peace until the white minority determines otherwise. The war
in Europe is a war of the white race wherein the stakes of conflict are
the titles to possession of the lands and destinies of this colored
majority in Asia, Africa and the islands of the sea.
There can be no doubt that the white race as it exists today, is the
superior race of the world. And it is superior, not because it has
better manners more religion or a higher culture; these things are
metaphysical and subject to dispute. The white race rests its claim to
superiority on the frankly materialistic ground that it has the guns,
soldiers, the money and resources to keep it in the position of the
top-dog and to make its will go. This is what white men mean by
civilization, disguise it how they may. This struggle is a conflict of
wills and interests among the various nations which make up the white
race, to determine whose will shall be accepted as the collective will
of the white race; to decide, at least for this century, who shall be
the inheritors of the lands of Africa and Asia and dictators of the
lives and destinies of their colored inhabitants.
The peculiar feature of the conflict is that the white race in its
fratricidal strife is burning up, eating up, consuming and destroying
these very resources of ships, guns, men and money upon which its
superiority is built. They are bent upon this form of self-destruction
and nothing that we can say will stop them.
As representatives of one of the races constituting the colored majority
of the world, we deplore the agony and blood-shed; but we find
consolation in the hope that when this white world shall have been
washed clean by its baptism of blood, the white race will be less able
to thrust the strong hand of its sovereign will down the throats of the
other races. We look for a free India and an independent Egypt; _for
nationalities in Africa flying their own flags and dictating their own
internal and foreign policies._ This is what we understand by “making
the world safe for democracy.” Anything less than this will fail to
establish “peace on earth and good will toward men.” For the majority
races cannot be eternally coerced into accepting the sovereignty of the
white race. They are willing to live in a world which is the equal
possession of all peoples—white, black, brown and yellow. If the white
race is willing, they will live at peace with it. But if it insists that
freedom, democracy and equality are to exist only for white men, then,
there will be such bloodshed later as this world has never seen. And
there is no certainty that in such a conflict the white race will come
out on top. Not the destinies of the world, but the destinies of the
white race are in the hands of the white race. —1917.
_U-Need-a Biscuit_
There is one advertisement which appears in the magazines, on the
streets and bill boards which has always seemed to us a masterly
illustration of the principle of repetition. When going to work in the
morning we look up from our daily newspaper and see the flaring sign
which states that U-need-a Biscuit, we may ignore its appeal the first
time, but as the days go by the constant insistence reaches our inner
consciousness and we decide that perhaps after all we do need a biscuit.
At any rate, whenever we have biscuits to buy it is natural that the
biscuit which has been most persistently advertised should recur at once
to our minds and that we should buy that particular biscuit.
We beg to call the above apologue to the attention of the white people
of this country who guide the ship of state either in the halls of
Congress or through the columns of the white newspapers. They are
seemingly at a loss to account for the new spirit which has come over
the Negro people in the Western world. Some pretend to believe that it
is Bolshevism—whatever that may be. Others tell us that it is the
product of alien agitators, and yet others are coming to the front with
the novel explanation that it springs from a desire to mingle our blood
with that of the white people.
Perhaps we are wasting our time in offering an explanation to the white
men of this country. It has been proven again and again that the
Anglo-Saxon is such a professional liar that with the plain truth before
his eyes he will still profess to be seeing something else. Nevertheless
we make the attempt because we believe that a double benefit may accrue
to us thereby. Does any reader who lived through the years from 1914 to
1919 and is still living remember what “Democracy” was? It was the
U-need-a Biscuit advertised by Messrs. Woodrow Wilson, Lloyd George,
Georges Clemenceau and thousands of perspiring publicists, preachers and
thinkers, who were on one side of a conflict then raging in Europe.
Now, you cannot get men to go out and get killed by telling them plainly
that you who are sending them want to get the other fellow’s land, trade
and wealth, and you are too cowardly or too intelligent to go yourself
and risk getting shot over the acquisition. That would never do. So you
whoop it up with any catchword which will serve as sufficient bait for
the silly fools whom you keep silly in order that you may always use
them in this way. “Democracy” was such a catch-word, and the honorable
gentlemen to whom we referred above advertised it for all it was
worth—to them. But, just as we prophesied in 1915, there was an
unavoidable flare-back. When you advertise U-need-a Biscuit incessantly
people will want it; and when you advertise democracy incessantly the
people to whom you trumpet forth its deliciousness are likely to believe
you, take you at your word, and, later on, demand that you make good and
furnish them with the article for which you yourself have created the
appetite.
Now, we Negroes, Egyptians and Hindus, under the pressure of democracy’s
commercial drummers, have developed a democratic complex which in its
turbulent insistence is apt to trouble the firms for whom these drummers
drummed. Because they haven’t any of the goods which they advertised in
the first place, and, in the second place, they haven’t the slightest
intention of passing any of it on—even if they had.
So, gentlemen, when you read of the Mullah, of Said Zagloul Pasha and
Marcus Garvey or Casely Hayford; when you hear of Egyptian and Indian
nationalist uprisings, of Black Star Lines and West Indian
“seditions”—kindly remember (because we know) that these fruits spring
from the seeds of your own sowing. You have said to us “U need a
biscuit,” and, after long listening to you, we have replied, “We do!”
Perhaps next time—if there is a next time—you will think twice before
you furnish to “inferior” peoples such a stick as “democracy” has proved
for the bludgeoning of your heads. In any case your work has been too
well done for even you to obliterate it. The Negro of the Western world
can truthfully say to the white man and the Anglo-Saxon in particular,
“You made me what I am today, I hope you’re satisfied.” And if the white
man isn’t satisfied—well, we should worry. That’s all. —July, 1920.
_Our Larger Duty_
The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the Color Line.
But what is the Color Line? It is the practice of the theory that the
colored and “weaker” races of the earth shall not be free to follow
“their own way of life and of allegiance,” but shall live, work and be
governed after such fashion as the dominant white race may decide.
Consider for a moment the full meaning of this fact. Of the seventeen
hundred million people that dwell on our earth today more than twelve
hundred million are colored—black and brown and yellow. The so-called
white race is, of course, the superior race. That is to say, it is on
top by virtue of its control of the physical force of the worldships,
guns, soldiers, money and other resources. By virtue of this control
England rules and robs India, Egypt, Africa and the West Indies; by
virtue of this control we of the United States can tell Haytians,
Hawaiians and Filipinos how much they shall get for their labor and what
shall be done in their lands; by virtue of this control Belgium can
still say to the Congolese whether they shall have their hands hacked
off or their eyes gouged out—and all without any reference to what
Africans, Asiatics or other inferior members of the world’s majority may
want.
It is thus clear that, as long as the Color Line exists, all the
perfumed protestations of Democracy on the part of the white race must
be simply downright lying. The cant of “Democracy” is intended as dust
in the eyes of white voters, incense on the altar of their own
self-love. It furnishes bait for the clever statesmen who hold the
destinies of their people in their hands when they go fishing for
suckers in the waters of public discussion. But it becomes more and more
apparent that Hindus, Egyptians, Africans, Chinese and Haytians have
taken the measure of this cant and hypocrisy. And, whatever the white
world may think, it will have these peoples to deal with during this
twentieth century.
In dealing with them in the past it has been considered sufficient that
the white man should listen to his own voice alone in determining what
colored peoples should have; and he has, therefore, been trying
perpetually to “solve” the problems arising from his own assumption of
the role of God. The first and still the simplest method was to kill
them off, either by slaughter pure and simple, as in the case of the
American Indians and the Congo natives, or by forcibly changing their
mode of life, as was done by those pious prudes who killed off the
Tasmanians; or by importing among them rum, gin, whiskey and
consumption, as has been attempted in the case of the Negroes of Africa
and North America. But, unlike the red Indians and Tasmanians, most of
these subject peoples have refused to be killed off. Their vitality is
too strong.
The second method divides itself into internal and external treatment.
The internal treatment consists in making them work, to develop the
resources of their ancestral lands, not for themselves, but for their
white overlords, so that the national and imperial coffers may be filled
to overflowing, while the Hindu ryot, on six cents a day, lives down to
the level of the imperialist formula:
“The poor benighted Hindoo,
He does the best he kin do;
He never aches
For chops and steaks
And for clothes he makes his skin do.”
The external treatment consists of girdling them with forts and
battleships and holding armies in readiness to fly at their throats upon
the least sign of “uppishness” or “impudence.”
Now, this similarity of suffering on the part of colored folk has given,
and is giving, rise to a certain similarity of sentiment. Egypt has
produced the Young Egypt movement; India, the Swadesha, the All-India
Congress, and the present revolutionary movement which has lit the fuse
of the powder-keg on which Britain sits in India today; Africa has her
Ethiopian Movement which ranges from the Zulus and Hottentots of the
Cape to the Ekoi of Nigeria; in short, the darker races, chafing under
the domination of the alien whites, are everywhere showing a disposition
to take Democracy at its word and to win some measure of it for
themselves.
What part in this great drama of the future are the Negroes of the
Western world to play? The answer is on the knees of the gods, who often
make hash of the predictions of men. But it is safe to say that, before
the Negroes of the Western world can play any effective part they must
first acquaint themselves with what is taking place in that larger world
whose millions are in motion. They must keep well informed of the trend
of that motion and of its range and possibilities. If our problem here
is really a part of a great world-wide problem, we must make our
attempts to solve our part link up with the attempts being made
elsewhere to solve the other parts. So will we profit by a wider
experience and perhaps be able to lend some assistance to that ancient
Mother Land of ours to whom we may fittingly apply the words of Milton:
“Methinks I see in my mind a mighty and puissant nation, rousing herself
like a strong man after sleep and shaking her invincible locks; methinks
I see her like an eagle mewing her mighty youth and kindling her
undazzled eyes at the full noon-day beam; methinks I see her scaling and
improving her sight at the fountain itself of heavenly radiance, while
the whole noise of timorous and flocking birds—with them also that love
the twilight—hover around, amazed at what she means, and in their
useless gabble would prognosticate a year of sects and schisms.” —The
New Negro, August, 1919.
_Help Wanted for Hayti_
While we were at war our President declared, over and over again, that
we were calling upon the flower of our manhood to go to France and make
itself into manure in order that the world might be made safe for
democracy. Today the deluded people of the earth realize that the accent
is on the “moc(k).” Ireland, India and Egypt are living proofs that the
world has been lied to. We need not bite our tongues about it. Those who
told us that the world would be made safe for democracy have lied to us.
All over the world men and women are finding out that when an American
President, a British Premier or a French “tiger” speaks of “the world,”
he does not include the black and brow: and yellow millions, who make up
the vast majority of the earth’s population. And now the sheeted ghost
of a black republic rises above the tomb where its bones lie buried and
points its silent but accusing finger at American democracy. What can we
answer in the case of Hayti? British India and Ireland, Turkish Armenia
or Russian Poland have never presented such ruthless savagery as has
been let loose in Hayti in a private war for which President Wilson has
never had the consent of Congress. The white daily papers speak
complacently of the repulse of “bandits.” What is this but a developing
disease of the American conscience, to put the blinkers of a catchword
over the eyes of the spirit?
The people of Hayti are being shot, sabred and bombed, while resisting
an illegal invasion of their homes, and, if public decency is not dead
in America white and black men and women will insist that Congress
investigate this American Ireland.
When Ireland feels the pressure of the English heel, the Irish in
America make their voices heard and help to line up American public
opinion on their side. When Paderewski’s government massacres Jews in
Poland, the Jews of America raise money, organize committees, put the U.
S. Government on the job—and get results. But when Negroes are
massacred—not in Africa, but in Hayti, under American control—what do we
American Negroes do? So far, nothing. But that inaction will not last.
Negroes must write their Congressmen and Senators concerning the
atrocity perpetrated at Port au Prince last week. They should organize
committees to go before Congress and put the pitiful facts, demanding
investigation, redress and punishment.
For as long as such things can be done without effective protest or
redress, black people every where will refuse to believe that the
democracy advertised by lying white politicians can be anything but a
ghastly joke.
_The Cracker in the Caribbean_
“Meanwhile the feet of civilized slayers have woven across the fair
face of the earth a crimson mesh of murder and rapine. The smoke of
blazing villages ascends in lurid holocaust to the bloody god of
battles from the altar of human hate in the obscene temple of race
prejudice.”
These words, which we wrote in 1912, come back to our mind eight years
later with no abatement of the awful horror which they express. And what
gives a special point to them at this moment is the bloody rape of the
republics of Hayti and Santo Domingo which is being perpetrated by the
bayonets of American sailors and marines, with the silent and shameful
acquiescence of 12,000,000 American Negroes too cowardly to lift a voice
in effective protest or too ignorant of political affairs to know what
is taking place. What boots it that we strike heroic attitudes and talk
grandiloquently of Ethiopia stretching forth her hands when we Africans
of the dispersion can let the land of L’Ouverture lie like a fallen
flower beneath the feet of swine?
The facts of the present situation in that hapless land are given in the
current issue of _The Nation_ (a white American weekly). Taken together
with the accounts which we have printed from time to time, it tells a
tale of shuddering horror in comparison with which the Putumayo pales
into insignificance and the Congo atrocities of Belgium are tame. The
two West Indian republics have been murderously assaulted; their
citizens have been shot down by armed ruffians, bombed by aeroplanes,
hunted into concentration camps and there starved to death. In their own
land their civil liberties have been taken away, their governments have
been blackjacked and their property stolen. And all this by the
“cracker” statesmanship of “the South,” without one word of protest from
that defunct department, the Congress of the United States!
The Constitution of the United States says that the power to declare war
shall belong exclusively to the Congress of the United States. But the
Congress of the United States has been shamelessly ignored. In
furtherance of the God-given “cracker” mandate to “keep the nigger in
his place,” a mere Secretary of the Navy has assumed over the head of
Congress the right to conquer and annex two nations and to establish on
their shores the “cracker-democracy” of his native Carolina slave-runs.
It is high time that the Negro people of the United States call the hand
of Josephus Daniels by appealing to the Legislature of the United States
to resume its political functions, investigate this high-handed outrage
and impeach the Secretary of the Navy of high crimes and misdemeanors
against the peace and good name of the United States. The ordinary
excuse of cowards will not obtain in this case. We would not be
violating any law—wartime or other—but, on the contrary, we should be
striving to put an end to a flagrant violation of the Constitution
itself on the part of a high officer, who took an oath to maintain,
support and defend it. This is our right and our duty. Irishmen, on
behalf of Ireland, sell the bonds of an Irish loan to free Ireland from
the tyranny of Britain—with whom we are on friendly terms—on the very
steps of New York’s City Hall, while we black people are not manly
enough to get up even a petition on behalf of our brothers in Hayti.
Out upon such crawling cowardice! Rouse, ye slaves, and show that the
spirit of liberty is not quite dead among you! You who elected
“delegates” to go to a Peace Conference to which you had neither
passport nor invitation, on behalf of bleeding Africa, get together and
present a monster petition to the American Congress, over which you have
some control. Remember that George the Third engaged in a contest with
these colonies because he had trouble at home. He could not defeat the
Pitts, Burkes and Foxes at home, and wanted to win prestige from the
colonials. Had he succeeded in setting his foot on their necks he would
have returned home with increased prestige and power to bend the free
spirits of
England to his will. Pitt knew this, and so did Fox and Burke. That is
why they took the side of their distant cousins against the British
king. And the British liberals of today thank their memories for it. If
the “crackers” of the South can fasten their yoke on the necks of our
brothers overseas, then God help us Negroes in America in the years to
come!
If we were now appealing directly to the white men of America we might
dwell upon the moral aspects of the question. But we must leave that to
others. Yet we cannot do so without recalling the words of a great poet:
“But man, proud man,
Drest in a little brief authority,
Most ignorant of what he’s most assured—
His glassy essence—like an angry ape,
Plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven
As make the angels weep.”
And we draw some slight consolation from the fact that, even if he
should escape impeachment, Josephus Daniels must surrender up his “brief
authority” in another twelvemonth.
But we who are still free in a measure must not wait twelve months to
act. We could not do that and preserve our racial self-respect. For—
“Whether conscious or unconscious, yet Humanity’s vast frame
Through its ocean-sundered fibres feels the gush of joy or shame;
In the gain or loss of one race all the rest have equal claim.”
_When Might Makes Right_
A correspondent whose letter appears elsewhere raises the question of
the relation between mental competence and property rights. “Does
inability to govern destroy title to ownership?” he asks. The white race
assumes an affirmative answer in every case in which the national
property of darker and weaker races are concerned and deny it in cases
in which their own national property interests are involved. It seems
strange that whereas the disturbances occurring in our own southern
states are never considered sufficient to justify the destruction of
their sovereignty, on the other hand, such disturbances occurring in
Hayti or Mexico are considered a sufficient reason for invasion and
conquest by white Americans. The same is true of England, France and
Italy. A disturbance in Alexandria, Delhi, Ashanti or the Cameroons
suffices to fix upon those territories and cities the badge of
inferiority and incompetence to rule themselves. The conclusion is
always drawn in such cases that the white race has been called by this
fortunate combination of circumstances to do the ruling for them. But
similar disturbances occurring in Wales, Essen or Marseilles would never
be considered as sufficient to justify the dictatorship of foreign
powers in the interest of “law and order.”
The truth is that “might makes right” in all these cases. White
statesmen, however, often deny this at the very moment when they are
using “force without stint, force to the utmost” to establish “rights”
which they claim over territories, peoples, commerce and the high seas.
Their characteristic hypocrisy keeps them from telling the truth as
plainly as Von Bernhardi did in his now famous book, “Germany and the
Next War.” The “sociological” reason for this hypocrisy is the fact that
they need to preach “goodness,” “right” and “justice” to those over whom
they rule in order that their ruling may be made easy by the consequent
good behavior of the ruled. But they themselves, however good, must
practice ruthlessness, injustice and the rule of the strong hand to make
their governance go. It is this fact which causes intelligent Negroes,
Filipinos, Chinese and Egyptians to spurn with contempt the claims which
Caucasian diplomats, statesmen, writers and missionaries make on behalf
of their moral superiority. They lie; they know that they lie, and now
they’re beginning to know that we know it also. This knowledge on our
part is a loss of prestige for them, and our actions in the future,
based upon this knowledge, must needs mean a loss of power for them.
Which is, after all, the essential fact.
_Bolshevism in Barbados_
Among the newspapers in Barbados there is a charming old lady by the
name of the _Barbados Standard_. From time to time this faded creature
gets worried about the signs of awakening observable in those Negroes
who happen to be living in the twentieth century. Then she shakes and
shivers, throws a few fits, froths at the mouth, and, spasmodically
flapping her arms, yells to all and sundry that there is “Bolshevism
among Negroes.”
Recently this stupid old thing and its congeners have discovered
evidences of a Bolshevist R–r–r–revolution in Trinidad, and,
presumptively, all over the British West Indies. Now the specter which
these fools fear is nothing but the shadow cast by the dark body of
their own system of stiff-necked pride, stark stupidity and stubborn
injustice whenever the sun of civic righteousness rises above the
horizon of sloth and ignorance. But, like fools afraid of their own
shadows, they point at the thing for which they alone are responsible
and shriek for salvation.
We shouldn’t care to suggest to them that to lie down and die would be
one good way to avoid these fearful shadows, because we see the
possibility of another way. Let them resolve that they will cease making
a lie of every promise of liberty, democracy and self-determination that
they frantically made from 1914 to 1919. Let the white Englishman learn
that justice exists not only for white Englishmen, but for all men. Let
him get off the black man’s back, stand out of the black man’s light,
play the game as it should be played, and he will find very little need
for wasting tons of print paper and thousands of pounds in a crusade
against the specter of Bolshevism.
_A New International_
In the eyes of our overlords internationalism is a thing of varying
value. When Mr. Morgan wants to float a French or British loan in the
United States; when Messrs. Wilson, Clemenceau, Lloyd George and Orlando
want to stabilize their joint credit and commerce; when areas like the
Belgian Congo are to be handed over to certain rulers without the
consent of their inhabitants—then the pæans of praise go up to the god
of “internationalism” in the temple of “civilization.” But when any
portion of the world’s disinherited (whether white or black) seeks to
join hands with other groups in the same condition, then the lords of
misrule denounce the idea of internationalism as anarchy, sedition,
Bolshevism and disruptive propaganda.
Why the difference? It is because the international linking up of
peoples is a source of strength to those who are linked up. Naturally,
the overlords want to strengthen themselves. And, quite as naturally,
they wish to keep their subject masses from strengthening themselves in
the same way. Today the great world-majority, made up of black, brown
and yellow peoples, are stretching out their hands to each other and
developing a “consciousness of kind”—as Professor Giddings would call
it. They are seeking to establish their own centers of diffusion for
their own internationalism, and this fact is giving nightmares to
Downing street, the Quai d’Orsay and other centers of white capitalist
internationalism.
The object of the capitalist international is to unify and standardize
the exploitation of black, brown and yellow peoples in such a way that
the danger to the exploiting groups of cutting each other’s throats over
the spoils may be reduced to a minimum. Hence the various agreements,
mandates and spheres of influence. Hence the League of Nations, which is
notoriously not a league of the white masses, but of their gold-braided
governors. Faced by such a tendency on the part of those who bear the
white man’s burden for what they can get out of it, the darker peoples
of the world have begun to realize that their first duty is to
themselves. A similarity of suffering is producing in them a similarity
of sentiment, and the temper of that sentiment is not to be mistaken.
To the white statesmen “civilization” is identical with their own
overlordship, with their right and power to dictate to the darker
millions what their way of life and of allegiance shall be. To this the
aroused sentiment of the world’s darker majority demurs. They want to be
as free as England, America or France. They do not wish to be “wards of
the nations” of Europe any longer. And the problem for the white
statesmen of the future will be to square democracy with the subjection
of this dark majority. Can they achieve either horn of this dilemma? Can
they effect a junction of the two?
Frankly, we doubt it. Continued suppression may be fraught with
consequences disastrous to white overlordship. In any case the tendency
toward an international of the darker races cannot be set back.
Increasing enlightenment, the spread of technical science, and the
recently acquired knowledge of the weak points of white “civilization”
gained by the darker peoples during the recent World War, are enough to
negative such a supposition. The darker peoples will strive increasingly
for their share of sunlight, and if this is what white “civilization”
opposes, then white “civilization” is likely to have a hard time of it.
_The Rising Tide of Color_
Mr. William Randolph Hearst, the ablest white publicist in America, has
broken loose, and, in a recent editorial in the New York _American_, has
absolutely endorsed every word of the warning recently issued by Lothrop
Stoddard in his book, “The Rising Tide of Color.” In justice to
Mr. Hearst, it must be pointed out (as we ourselves did in 1916) that he
saw this handwriting on the wall long ago. Mr. Hearst is not
particularly famous as a friend of the darker races; but one must give
him credit for having seen what was involved in the war between the
white nations of Europe and America. As far back as 1915, the present
writer was engaged in pointing out to white people that the racial
aspect of the war in Europe was easily the most important, despite the
fact that no American paper, not even Mr. Hearst’s, would present that
side of the matter for the consideration of its readers. Now, however,
they are beginning to wake up—as people generally do when disaster is
upon them—frantically with much screaming and flapping of arms. But, in
such cases, the doom approaching is but the ripened result of deeds that
have been done, and is, therefore, absolutely inescapable.
The white race has lied and strutted its way to greatness and prominence
over the corpses of other peoples. It has capitalized, christianized,
and made respectable, “scientific,” and “natural,” the fact of its
dominion. It has read back into history the race relations of today,
striving to make the point that previous to its advent on the stage of
human history, there was no civilization or culture worthy of the name.
And with minatory finger it admonishes us that if it were to pass off
the stage as the controlling factor in the World’s destiny, there would
be no civilization or culture remaining. Naturally, we take exception to
both these views, because, for the past, we know better and, for the
future, we think better of the many peoples who make up the cycle of
civilization.
But these conditions are not the gravest at present. The fact of most
tremendous import is that the white race in trying to settle its own
quarrels has called in black, brown and yellow to do its fighting for
it, with the result that black, brown and yellow will learn thereby how
to fight for themselves, even against those whom they were called in to
assist. The white race cannot escape from its dilemma, however. If it
were to decree hereafter that wars between whites should be restricted
to whites alone, then we should be given the poignant spectacle of the
white race continuing to cut its own throat while the increasing masses
of black, brown and yellow remained unaffected by that process, “It is
to laugh,” as the cynical gods would say. Or, to use a trite
Americanism, it is, “heads I win, tails you lose.” It is thumbs down for
the white race in the world’s arena, and they are to be the dealers of
their own death blow. Such are the consequences of conquest!
The analogies between the present situation of the white race and the
situation of the Roman Empire in the fourth century of the Christian era
are too many and striking to be easily ignored. Now, as then, we have
“barbarians” and “super-men.” Now, as then, the super-men are such in
their own estimation. Now, as then, they have, as they fondly think, a
monopoly of the money power, brain power and political power of the
world. Now, as then, the necessities of their own selfishness and greed,
constrain and compel them to share their education and their culture
with the races whom they exploit. Now, as then, in the crisis of their
fortunes, they must utilize the knowledge and abilities of these
barbarian folk, and now, as then, this exercising of abilities on behalf
of the overlord develops abilities and ambition at an equal rate; and,
having given the barbarian tiger its first taste of blood, the unleashed
results can not now be restrained.
In the Roman days, as in the days of Charlemagne’s successors, those who
hold the balances generally also wield the sword; and if _their_ blood
and sand determine which among the rulers shall get the prizes of
victory, then these same qualities must needs urge them to take from
such victors-by-proxy so much of the fruits of victory as their own
needs may suggest or their own power maintain. Truly “they that take the
sword shall perish by the sword.”
_The White War and the Colored Races_
[The following article was written in 1918 when the Great War still
raged. It was written for a certain well known radical magazine; but was
found to be “too radical” for publication at that time. It is given now
to the Negro public partly because the underlying explanation which it
offers of the root-cause of the war has not yet received treatment (even
among socialistic radicals) and partly because recent events in China,
India, Africa and the United States have proved the accuracy of its
forecasts.]
The Nineteenth Christian Century saw the international expansion of
capitalism—the economic system of the white peoples of Western Europe
and America-and its establishment by force and fraud over the lands of
the colored races, black and brown and yellow. The opening years of the
Twentieth Century present us with the sorry spectacle of these same
white nations cutting each other’s throats to determine which of them
shall enjoy the property which has been acquired. For this is the real
sum and substance of the original “war aims” of the belligerents;
although in conformity with Christian cunning, this is one which is
never frankly avowed. Instead, we are fed with the information that they
are fighting for “Kultur” and “on behalf of small nationalities.” Let us
look carefully at this camouflage.
_The Sham of “Democracy”_
In the first place, we in America need not leave our own land to seek
reasons for suspecting the sincerity of democratic professions. While we
are waging war to establish democracy three thousand miles away,
millions of Negroes are disfranchised in our own land by the “cracker”
democracies of the Southern States which are more intent upon making
slaves of their black fellow-citizens than upon rescuing the French and
Belgians from the similar brutalities of the German Junkers. The
horrible holocaust of East St. Louis was possible only in three modern
States—Russia of the Romanoffs, Turkey and the United States—and it ill
becomes any one of them to point a critical finger at the others.
But East St. Louis was simply the climax of a long series of butcheries
perpetrated on defenseless Negroes which has made the murder rate of
Christian America higher than that of heathen Africa and of every other
civilized land. And, although our government can order the execution of
thirteen Negro soldiers for resenting the wholesale insults to the
uniform of the United States and defending their lives from civilian
aggressors, not one of the murderers of black men, women and children
has been executed or even ferreted out. Nor has our war Congress seen
fit as yet to make lynching a Federal crime. What wonder that the Negro
masses are insisting that before they can be expected to enthuse over
the vague formula of making the world “safe for democracy” they must
receive some assurance that their corner of the world—the South—shall
first be made “safe for democracy!” Who knows but that perhaps the
situation and treatment of the American Negro by our own government and
people may have kept the Central Powers from believing that we meant to
fight for democracy in Europe, and caused them to persist in a course
which has driven us into this war in which we must spend billions of
treasure and rivers of blood.
It should seem, then, that “democracy,” like “Kultur,” is more valuable
as a battle-cry than as a real belief to be practised by those who
profess it. And the plea of “small nationalities” is estopped by three
facts: Ireland, Greece and Egypt, whose Khedive, Abbas Hilmi, was
tumbled off his throne for failing to enthuse over the claims of
“civilization” as expounded by Lord Grey.
_Sir Harry Johnston Speaks_
But this is merely disproof. The average American citizen needs some
positive proof of the assertion that this war is being waged to
determine who shall dictate the destinies of the darker peoples and
enjoy the usufruct of their labor and their lands. For the average
American citizen is blandly ignorant of the major facts of history and
has to be told. For his benefit I present the following statement from
Sir Harry Johnston, in “The Sphere” of London. Sir Harry Johnston is the
foremost English authority on Africa and is in a position to know
something of imperial aims.
“Rightly governed, I venture to predict that Africa will, if we are
victorious, repay us and all our allies the cost of our struggle with
Germany and Austria. The war, deny it who may, was really fought over
African questions. The Germans wished, as the chief gain of victory,
to wrest rich Morocco from French control, to take the French Congo
from France, and the Portuguese Congo from Portugal, to secure from
Belgium the richest and most extensive tract of alluvial goldfield as
yet discovered. This is an auriferous region which, properly
developed, will, when war is over, repay the hardest hit of our allies
(France) all that she has lost from the German devastation of her home
lands. The mineral wealth of trans-Zambezian Africa—freed forever, we
will hope, from the German menacemis gigantic; only slightly exploited
so far. Wealth is hidden amid the seemingly unprofitable deserts of
the Sahara, Nubia, Somaliland and Namaqua. Africa, I predict, will
eventually show itself to be the most richly endowed of all the
continents in valuable vegetable and mineral substances.”
There is the sum and substance of what Schopenhauer would have called
“the sufficient reason” for this war. No word of “democracy” there, but
instead the easy assumption that, as a matter of course, the lands of
black Africa belong to white Europe and must be apportioned on the good
old principle:—
“… the simple plan,
That he shall take who has the power,
And he must keep who can.”
_The Economics of War_
It is the same economic motive that has been back of every modern war
since the merchant and trading classes secured control of the powers of
the modern state from the battle of Plassy to the present world war.
This is the natural and inevitable effect of the capitalist system, of
what (for want of a worse name) we call “Christendom.” For that system
is based upon the wage relationship between those who own and those who
operate the gigantic forces of land and machinery. Under this system no
capitalist employs a worker for two dollars a day unless that worker
creates more than two dollars’ worth of wealth for him. Only out of this
surplus can profits come. If ten million workers should thus create one
hundred million dollars’ worth of wealth each day and get twenty or
fifty millions in wages, it is obvious that they can expend only what
they have received, and that, therefore, every nation whose industrial
system is organized on a capitalist basis must produce a mass of surplus
products over and above, not the need, but the purchasing power of the
nation’s producers. Before these products can return to their owners as
profits they must be sold somewhere. Hence the need for foreign markets,
for fields of exploitation and “spheres of influence” in “undeveloped”
countries whose virgin resources are exploited in their turn after the
capitalist fashion. But, since every industrial nation is seeking the
same outlet for its products, clashes are inevitable and in these
clashes beaks and claws—armies and navies—must come into play. Hence
beaks and claws must be provided beforehand against the day of conflict,
and hence the exploitation of white men in Europe and America becomes
the reason for the exploitation of black and brown and yellow men in
Africa and Asia. And, therefore, it is hypocritical and absurd to
pretend that the capitalist nations can ever intend to abolish wars.
For, as long as black men are exploited by white men in Africa, so long
must white men cut each other’s throats over that exploitation. And
thus, the selfish and ignorant white worker’s destiny is determined by
the hundreds of millions of those whom he calls “niggers.” “The strong
too often think that they have a mortgage upon the weak; but in the
domain of morals it is the other way.”
_The Color Line_
But economic motives have always their social side; and this
exploitation of the lands and labor of colored folk expresses itself in
the social theory of white domination; the theory that the worst human
stocks of Montmartre, Seven Dials and the Bowery are superior to the
best human stocks of Rajputana or Khartoum. And when these colored folk
who make up the overwhelming majority of this world demand decent
treatment for themselves, the proponents of this theory accuse them of
seeking social equality. For white folk to insist upon the right to
manage their own ancestral lands, free from the domination of tyrants,
domestic and foreign, is variously described as “democracy” and
“self-determination.” For Negroes, Egyptians and Hindus to seek the same
thing is impudence. What wonder, then, that the white man’s rule is felt
by them to rest upon a seething volcano whose slumbering fires are made
up of the hundreds of millions of Chinese, Japanese, Hindus and
Africans! Truly has it been said that “the problem of the 20th Century
is the problem of the Color Line.” And wars are not likely to end; in
fact, they are likely to be wider and more terrible—so long as this
theory of white domination seeks to hold down the majority of the
world’s people under the iron heel of racial repression.
Of course, no sane person will deny that the white race is, at present,
the superior race of the world. I use the word “superior” in no cloudy,
metaphysical sense, but simply to mean that they are on top and their
will goes—at present. Consider this fact as the pivotal fact of the war.
Then, in the light of it, consider what is happening in Europe today.
The white race is superior—its will goes—because it has invented and
amassed greater means for the subjugation of nature and of man than any
other race. It is the top dog by virtue of its soldiers, guns, ships,
money, resources and brains. Yet there in Europe it is deliberately
burning up, consuming and destroying these very soldiers, guns, ships,
money, resources and brains, the very things upon which its supremacy
rests. When this war is over, it will be less able to enforce its
sovereign will upon the darker races of the world. Does any one believe
that it will be as easy to hold down Egypt and India and Persia after
the war as it was before? Hardly.
_The Racial Results of the War_
Not only will the white race be depleted in numbers, but its quality,
physical and mental, will be considerably lowered for a time. War
destroys first the strongest and bravest, the best stocks, the young men
who were to father the next generation, The next generation must,
consequently, be fathered by the weaker stocks of the race. And thus, in
physical stamina and in brain-power, they will be less equal to the task
of holding down the darker millions of the world than their fathers
were. This was the thought back of Mr. Hearst’s objection to our
entering the war.
He wanted the United States to stand as the white race’s reserve of
man-power when Europe had been bled white. But what will be the effect
of all this upon that colored majority whose preponderant existence our
newspapers ignore? In the first place, it will feel the lifting of the
pressure as the iron hand of “discipline” is relaxed. And it will
expand, when that pressure is removed, to the point where it will first
ask, then demand, and finally secure, the right of self-determination.
It will insist that, not only the white world, but the whole world, be
made “safe for democracy.” This will mean a self-governing Egypt, a
self-governing India, and independent African states as large as Germany
and France—and larger. And, as a result, there will come a shifting of
the basis of international politics and business and of international
control. This is the living thought that comes to me from the newspapers
and books that have been written and published by colored men in Africa
and Asia during the past three years. It is what I have heard from their
own lips as I have talked with them. And, yet, of this thought which is
inflaming the international underworld, not a word appears in the
parochial press of America, which seems to think that if it can keep its
own Negroes down to servile lip-service, it need not face the world-wide
problem of the “Conflict of Color,” as Mr. Putnam-Weale calls it.
But that the more intelligent portions of the white world are becoming
distressingly conscious of it, is evident from the first great manifesto
of the Russian Bolsheviki last year when they asked about Britain’s
subject peoples.
And the British workingmen have evidently done some thinking in their
turn. In their latest declarations they seem to see the ultimate
necessity of compelling their own aristocrats to forego such imperial
aspirations as that of Sir Harry Johnston, and of extending the
principle of self-determination even to the black people of Africa. But
eyes which have for centuries been behind the blinkers of race prejudice
cannot but blink and water when compelled to face the full sunlight. And
Britain’s workers insist that “No one will maintain that the Africans
are fit for self-government.” And on the same principle (of excluding
the opinion of those who are most vitally concerned) Britain’s ruling
class may tell them that “No one maintains that the laboring classes of
Britain are fit for self-government.” But their half-hearted demand that
an international committee shall take over the British, German, French
and Portuguese possessions in Africa and manage them as independent
nationalities(?) until they can “go it alone,” would suggest that their
eyesight is improving.
To sum it all up, the war in Europe is the result of the desire of the
white governments of Europe to exploit for their own benefit the lands
and labor of the darker races, and, as the war continues, it must
decrease the white man’s stock of ability to do this successfully
against the wishes of the inhabitants of those lands. This will result
in their freedom from thralldom and the extension of political, social,
and industrial democracy to the twelve hundred million black and brown
and yellow peoples of the world. This, I take it, is what President
Wilson had in mind when he wished to make the world “safe for
democracy.” But, whether I am mistaken or not, it is the idea which
dominates today the thought of those darker millions.
CHAPTER VIII.
EDUCATION AND THE RACE.
[With most of the present sources of power controlled by the white race
it behooves my race as well as the other subject races to learn the
wisdom of the weak and to develop to the fullest that organ whereby
weakness has been able to overcome strength; namely, the intellect. It
is not with our teeth that we will tear the white man out of our
ancestral land. It isn’t with our jaws that we can ring from his hard
hands consideration and respect. It must be done by the upper and not by
the lower parts of our heads. Therefore, I have insisted ever since my
entry into the arena of racial discussion that we Negroes must take to
reading, study and the development of intelligence as we have never done
before. In this respect we must pattern ourselves after the Japanese who
have gone to school to Europe but have never used Europe’s education to
make them the apes of Europe’s culture. They have absorbed, adopted,
transformed and utilized, and we Negroes must do the same. The three
editorials in this chapter and the article which follows them were
written to indicate from time to time the duty of the transplanted
African in this respect.]
_Reading for Knowledge_
Some time ago we wrote an editorial entitled “Read, Read, Read!” We
touch upon the same subject again, because in our recent trip to
Washington we found thousands of people who are eager to get in touch
with the stored-up knowledge which the books contain, but do not know
just where to turn for it. In New York the same situation obtains, and
no help is afforded by the papers of our race.
The reason is that some of our newspaper editors don’t read and don’t
know beans themselves. James W. Johnson is one of the notable
exceptions. We were cheered up a good deal by noting his recent
editorial advice to our “leaders” to read Arthur Henderson’s “The Aims
of Labor.” But that was six months after the editor of _The Voice_ had
been telling thousands of the “led” all about it and about the British
Labor Party and the Russian Bolsheviki in his outdoor talks in Harlem.
But there is no doubt that the New Negro is producing a New Leadership
and that this new leadership will be based not upon the ignorance of the
masses, but upon their intelligence. The old leadership was possible
partly because the masses were ignorant. Today the masses include
educated laymen who have studied science, theology, history and
economics, not, perhaps in college but, nevertheless, deeply and down to
date. These young men and women are not going to follow fools and,
indeed, are not going to follow any one, blindly. They want a reason for
the things that they are asked to do and to respect. The others, the
so-called Common People, are beginning to read and understand. As we sat
in the great John Wesley A.M.E. Zion Church in Washington one Sunday
night, and heard the cultured black minister speak to his people on
literature, science, history and sociology, and yet so simply that even
the dullest could catch the meat and inspiration of his great ideas, we
could not help saying as we went out of the church: “Depend upon it,
these people will demand as much from their next minister.” In fact our
race will demand as much from all its leaders. And they will demand no
less for themselves.
So, with a glad heart, we reprint the following paragraphs from our
earlier editorial trusting that our readers everywhere may find them
helpful:
As a people our bent for books is not encouraging. We mostly read trash.
And this is true not only of our rank and file but even of our leaders.
When we heard Kelly Miller address the Sunrise Club of New York at a
Broadway hotel two or three years ago, we were shocked at the ignorance
of modern science and modern thought which his remarks displayed. His
biology was of the brand of Pliny who lived about eighteen hundred years
ago. For him Darwin and Spencer and Jacques Loeb had never existed nor
written. His ignorance of the A.B.C.’s of astronomy and geology was
pitiful. If this is true of the leaders to whom our reading masses look,
what can we expect from those reading masses? The masses must be taught
to love good books. But to love them they must first know them. The
handicaps placed on us in America are too great to allow us to ignore
the help which we can get from that education which we get out of school
for ourselves—the only one that is really worth while.
Without the New Knowledge the New Negro is no better than the old. And
this new knowledge will be found in the books. Therefore, it would be
well if every Negro of the new model were to make up his (or her) mind
to get the essentials of modern science and modern thought as they are
set down in the books which may be easily had. Don’t talk about Darwin
and Spencer: read them!
To help the good work along we append the following list of books that
are essential. When you _master_ these you will have a better
“education” than is found in nine-tenths of the graduates of the average
American college.
“Modern Science and Modern Thought,” by Samuel Laing; “The Origin of
Species” and “The Descent of Man,” by Charles Darwin; “The Principles of
Sociology” and “First Principles,” by Herbert Spencer; “The Childhood of
the World” and “The Childhood of Religion,” by Edward Clodd;
“Anthropology,” by E. B. Tylor (very easy to read and a work of standard
information on Races, Culture and the origins of Religion, Art and
Science); Buckle’s “History of Civilization”; Gibbon’s “Decline and Fall
of the Roman Empire”; “The Martyrdom of Man,” by Winwood Reade; the
books on Africa by Livingstone and Mungo Park, and “The Mind of
Primitive Man,” by Franz Boas. —Sept., 1918.
_Education and the Race_
In the dark days of Russia, when the iron heel of Czarist despotism was
heaviest on the necks of the people, those who wished to rule decreed
that the people should remain ignorant. Loyalty to interests that were
opposed to theirs was the prevailing public sentiment of the masses. In
vain did the pioneers of freedom for the masses perish under the knout
and the rigors of Siberia. They sacrificed to move the masses, but the
masses, strong in their love of liberty, lacked the head to guide the
moving feet to any successful issue. It was then that Leo Tolstoi and
the other intelligentsia began to carry knowledge to the masses. Not
only in the province of Tula, but in every large city, young men of
university experience would assemble in secret classes of instruction,
teaching them to read, to write, to know, to think and to love
knowledge. Most of this work was underground at first. But it took.
Thousands of educated persons gave themselves to this work-without pay:
their only hope of reward lay in the future effectiveness of an
instructed mass movement.
What were the results? As knowledge spread, enthusiasm was backed by
brains. The Russian revolution began to be sure of itself. The
workingmen of the cities studied the thing that they were “up against,”
gauged their own weakness and strength as well as their opponents’. The
despotism of the Czar could not provoke them to a mass movement before
they were ready and had the means; and when at last they moved, they
swept not only the Czar’s regime but the whole exploiting system upon
which it stood into utter oblivion.
What does this mean to the Negro of the Western world? It may mean much,
or little: that depends on him. If other men’s experiences have value
for the New Negro Manhood Movement it will seek now to profit by them
and to bottom the new fervor of faith in itself with the solid support
of knowledge. The chains snap from the limbs of the young giant as he
rises, stretches himself, and sits up to take notice. But let him, for
his future’s sake, insist on taking notice. To drop the figure of
speech, we Negroes who have shown our _manhood_ must back it by our
_mind_. This world, at present, is a white man’s world—even in Africa.
We, being what we are, want to shake loose the chains of his control
from our corner of it. We must either accept his domination and our
inferiority, or we must contend against it. But we go up to win; and
whether we carry on that contest with ballots, bullets or business, we
can not win from the white man unless we know at least as much as the
white man knows. For, after all, knowledge _is_ power.
But that isn’t all. What kind of knowledge is it that enables white men
to rule black men’s lands? Is it the knowledge of Hebrew and Greek,
philosophy or literature? It isn’t. It is the knowledge of explosives
and deadly compounds: that is chemistry. It is the knowledge which can
build ships, bridges, railroads and factories: that is engineering. It
is the knowledge which harnesses the visible and invisible forces of the
earth and air and water: that is science, modern science. And that is
what the New Negro must enlist upon his side. Let us, like the Japanese,
become a race of knowledge-getters, preserving our racial soul, but
digesting into it all that we can glean or grasp, so that when Israel
goes up out of bondage he will be “skilled in all the learning of the
Egyptians” and competent to control his destiny.
Those who have knowledge must come down from their Sinais and give it to
the common people. Theirs is the great duty to simplify and make clear,
to light the lamps of knowledge that the eyes of their race may see;
that the feet of their people may not stumble. This is the task of the
Talented Tenth.
To the masses of our people we say: Read! Get the reading habit; spend
your spare time not so much in training the feet to dance, as in
training the head to think. And, at the very outset, draw the line
between books of opinion and books of information. Saturate your minds
with the latter and you will be forming your own opinions, which will be
worth ten times more to you than the opinions of the greatest minds on
earth. Go to school whenever you can. If you can’t go in the day, go at
night. But remember always that the best college is that on your
bookshelf: the best education is that on the inside of your own head.
For in this work-a-day world people ask first, not “Where were you
educated?” but “What do you know?” and next, “What can you do with it?”
And if we of the Negro race can master modern knowledge—the kind that
counts—we will be able to win for ourselves the priceless gifts of
freedom and power, and we will be able to hold them against the world.
_The Racial Roots of Culture_
Education is the name which we give to that process by which the ripened
generation brings to bear upon the rising generation the stored-up
knowledge and experience of the past and present generations to fit it
for the business of life. If we are not to waste money and energy, our
educational systems should shape our youth for what we intend them to
become.
We Negroes, in a world in which we are the under dog, must shape our
youth for living in such a world. Shall we shape them mentally to accept
the status of under-dog as their predestined lot? Or shall we shape them
into men and women fit for a free world? To do the former needs nothing
more than continuing as we are. To do the latter is to shape their souls
for continued conflict with a theory and practice in which most of the
white world that surrounds them are at one.
The educational system in the United States and the West Indies was
shaped by white people for white youth, and from their point of view, it
fits their purpose well. Into this system came the children of Negro
parents when chattel slavery was ended—and their relation to the
problems of life was obviously different. The white boy and girl draw
exclusively from the stored-up knowledge and experience of the past and
present generations of white people to fit them for the business of
being dominant whites in a world full of colored folk. The examples of
valor and virtue on which their minds are fed are exclusively white
examples. What wonder, then, that each generation comes to maturity with
the idea imbedded in its mind that only white men are valorous and fit
to rule and only white women are virtuous and entitled to chivalry,
respect and protection? What wonder that they think, almost
instinctively, that the Negro’s proper place, nationally and
internationally, is that of an inferior? It is only what we should
naturally expect.
But what seems to escape attention is the fact that the Negro boy and
girl, getting the same (though worse) instruction, also get from it the
same notion of the Negro’s place and part in life which the white
children get. Is it any wonder, then, that they so readily accept the
status of inferiors; that they tend to disparage themselves, and think
themselves worth while only to the extent to which they look and act and
think like the whites? They know nothing of the stored-up knowledge and
experience of the past and present generations of Negroes in their
ancestral lands, and conclude there is no such store of knowledge and
experience. They readily accept the assumption that Negroes have never
been anything but slaves and that they never had a glorious past as
other fallen peoples like the Greeks and Persians have. And this despite
the mass of collected testimony in the works of Barth, Schweinfurth,
Mary Kingsley, Lady Lugard, Morel, Ludolphus, Blyden, Ellis, Ratzel,
Kidd, Es-Saadi, Casely Hayford and a host of others, Negro and white.
A large part of the blame for this deplorable condition must be put upon
the Negro colleges like Howard, Fisk, Livingstone and Lincoln in the
United States, and Codrington, Harrison and the Mico in the West Indies.
These are the institutions in which our cultural ideals and educational
systems are fashioned for the shaping of the minds of the future
generations of Negroes. It cannot be expected that it shall begin with
the common schools; for, in spite of logic, educational ideas and ideals
spread from above downwards. If we are ever to enter into the
confraternity of colored peoples it should seem the duty of our Negro
colleges to drop their silly smatterings of “little Latin and less
Greek” and establish modern courses in Hausa and Arabic, for these are
the living languages of millions of our brethern in modern Africa.
Courses in Negro history and the culture of West African peoples, at
least, should be given in every college that claims to be an institution
of learning for Negroes. Surely an institution of learning for Negroes
should not fail to be also an institution of Negro learning. —The New
Negro, Sept. 1919.
_The New Knowledge for the New Negro_
Quite a good deal of unnecessary dispute has been going on these days
among the guardians of the inner temple as to just which form of worship
is necessary at the shrine of the Goddess Knowledge. In plain English,
the pundits seem to be at odds in regard to the kind of education which
the Negro should have. Of course, it has long been known that the
educational experts of white America were at odds with ours on the same
subject; now, however, ours seem to be at odds among themselves.
The essence of the present conflict is not the easy distinction between
“lower” and “higher” education, which really has no meaning in terms of
educational principles, but it is rather “the knowledge of things”
versus “the knowledge of words.” The same conflict has been waged in
England from the days of Huxley’s youth to the later nineties when the
London Board Schools were recognized and set the present standard of
efficiency for the rest of England. The present form of the question is,
“Shall education consist of Latin and Greek, literature and metaphysics,
r of modern science, modern languages and modern thought?” The real
essence of the question is whether we shall train our children to
grapple effectively with the problem of life that lies before them, or
to look longingly back upon the past standards of life and thought and
consider themselves a special class because of this.
If education be, as we assert, a training for life, it must of course
have its roots in the past. But so has the art of the blacksmith, the
tailor, the carpenter, the bookbinder or the priest. What the
classicists really seek is the domination of the form, method and aim of
that training by the form, methods and aims of an earlier age.
_Classics, Clerics and Class Culture_
Perhaps an explanation of that earlier training may serve to give the
real innerness of the classicists’ position so that ordinary people may
understand it better than the classicists themselves seem to do. In the
Middle Ages, the schools of Western Europe and the subject matter of the
education given in them were based upon the Latin “disciplines.” Western
Europe had no literature, no learning, no science of its own. It was the
church—particularly the monasteries—to which men had to go to get such
training as was obtainable in a barbarous age. This training was, of
course, given in the tongue of the church which was Latin, the clerical
language. The contact of medieval Europeans with the dark-skinned Arabs
added Greek and the knowledge of Greek literature and philosophy to the
earlier medieval discipline. Imbedded in this was the substance of
science nurtured by the Arabs and added to by them.
The ruling classes kept their children within the treadmill of these two
literatures and languages and it came to be thought that this was the
indispensable training for a gentleman. But:—
_“Tempora mutantur, nos et mutamur in illis.”_
We are in a different age, an age in which the nation, not the church,
gives training to all children, and not merely to the children of
aristocrats who will grow up to do nothing. The children of the people
must become the doers of all that is done in the world of tomorrow, and
they must be trained for this doing. Today in England, not Oxford, the
home of lost ideals, but such institutions as the University of London,
are the sources of that training which gives England its physicians,
surgeons, inventors, business men and artists.
_Classicists Ignorant of Latin and Greek_
But the noise of the classicists may be rudely stopped by merely
pointing out the hollowness of their watch words. These persons would
have us believe that Latin and Greek are, in their eyes, the backbone of
any education that is worth while. Very well then, let us take them at
their word. I make the broad assertion that not one in one thousand of
them can read a page of Greek or Latin that may be set before them. I
offer to put under their noses a page of Athenaeus or Horace (to say
nothing of more important classical authors) and if they should be able
to read and translate it at sight I shall be genuinely surprised. Let
the common reader who is a man of today make the test with this little
bit of Latin verse:
_“Exegi momentum acre perennius_
_Regalique situ pyramidum altius.”_
Let him ask some classicist to translate off-hand this common school
boy’s tag from a most popular author and note whether they can place the
author or translate the lines. Here is another:
_Per varios casus, per tot discrimina rerum,_
_Tendimus in Latium._
To speak in plain United States, when it comes to the showdown it will
be found that those of us who argue in favor of the modern discipline
(in so far as we have any knowledge of classical literature) know more
about them than those whose sole defence they are.
It is said by the classicists that a knowledge of Latin and Greek is
necessary to an adequate comprehension of the English language. But so
is the knowledge of Sanscrit, Arabic, French and Italian. And when it
comes to facility and clearness of expression, it will be found that
Huxley’s prose is superior to that of Matthew Arnold, and Brisbane’s
superior to that of any professor of the Latin language in Harvard or
Yale. So much for the ghost fighters. Requiescant in pace!
_The Knowledge We Need_
Now, what is the knowledge which the New Negro needs most? He needs
above all else a knowledge of the wider world and of the long past. But
that is history, modern and ancient: History as written by Herodotus and
John Bach McMaster; sociology not as conceived by Giddings, but as
presented by Spencer and Ward, and anthropology as worked out by Boas
and Thomas. The Negro needs also the knowledge of the best thought; but
that is literature as conceived, not as a collection of flowers from the
tree of life, but as its garnered fruit. And, finally, the Negro needs a
knowledge of his own kind, concerning which we shall have something to
say later, And the purposes of this knowledge? They are, to know our
place in the human processus, to strengthen our minds by contact with
the best and most useful thought-products evolved during the long rise
of man from anthropoid to scientist; to inspire our souls and to lift
our race industrially, commercially, intellectually to the level of the
best that there is in the world about us. For _never until the Negro’s
knowledge of nitrates and engineering, of chemistry and agriculture, of
history, science and business is on a level, at least, with that of the
whites, will the Negro be able to measure arms successfully with them._
CHAPTER IX.
A FEW BOOKS.
_The Negro in History and Civilization_
(From Superman to Man, by J. A. Rogers.)
This volume by Mr. Rogers is the greatest little book on the Negro that
we remember to have read. It makes no great parade of being
“scientific,” as so many of our young writers do who seem to think that
science consists solely in logical analysis. If science consists
fundamentally of facts, of information and of principles derived from
those facts, then the volume before us is one of the most scientific
that has been produced by a Negro writer. It sweeps the circle of all
the social sciences. History, sociology, anthropology, psychology,
economics and politics—even theology—are laid under contribution and
yield a store of information which is worked up into a presentation so
plain and clear that the simplest can read and understand it, and yet so
fortified by proofs from the greatest standard authorities of the past
and present that there is no joint in its armor in which the keenest
spear of a white scientist may enter.
Unlike an older type of scholar (now almost extinct) the author does not
go to vapid verbal philosophers or devotional dreamers for the facts of
history and ethnology. He goes to historians and ethnologists for them
and to anthropologists for his anthropology. The result is information
which stands the searching tests of any inquirer who chooses to doubt
and investigate before accepting what is set before him.
From this book the unlearned reader of the African race can gather proof
that his race has not always been a subject or inferior race. He has the
authority of Professor Reisner, of Harvard; of Felix Dubois, Volney,
Herodotus, Finot, Sergi, the modern Egyptologists and the scholars of
the white world who assembled at the Universal Races Congress in London
in 1911, for the belief that his race has founded great civilizations,
has ruled over areas as large as all Europe, and was prolific in
statesmen, scientists, poets, conquerors, religious and political
leaders, arts and crafts, industry and commerce when the white race was
wallowing in barbarism or sunk in savagery. Here he can learn on good
authority, from St. Jerome and Cicero, Herodotus and Homer down to the
modern students of race history, that cannibalism has been a practise
among white populations like the Scythians, Scots and Britons; that the
white races have been slaves; that here in America the slavery of white
men was a fact as late as the 19th century, and “according to Professor
Cigrand, Grover Cleveland’s grandfather, Richard Falley, was an Irish
slave in Connecticut.” In short, he will learn here, not that newspaper
science which keeps even “educated” Americans so complacently ignorant,
but the science of the scientists themselves. He will learn all that
this kind of science has to tell of the relative capacity and standing
of the black and white races—and much of it will surprise him. But all
of it will please and instruct.
The book also deals with the facts of the present position of the Negro
in America and the West Indies; with questions of religion, education,
politics and political parties, war work, lynching, miscegenation on
both sides, the beauty of Negro women and race prejudice. And on
everyone of these topics it gives a minimum of opinion and a maximum of
information. This information flows forth during the course of a series
of discussions between an educated Negro Pullman porter and a Southern
white statesman on a train running between Chicago and San Francisco.
The superior urbanity of the Negro, coupled with his wider information
and higher intelligence, eventually wins over the Caucasian to admit
that the whole mental attitude of himself and his race in regard to the
Negro was wrong and based on nothing better than prejudice.
This conversational device gives the author an opportunity to present
all the conflicting views on both sides of the Color Line, and the
result is a wealth of information which makes this book a necessity on
the bookshelf of everyone, Negro or Caucasian, who has some use for
knowledge on the subject of the Negro. The book is published by the
author at 4700 State Street, Chicago.
_“Darkwater”_
By W. E. B. Du Bois.
An unwritten law has existed for a long time to the effect that the
critical estimates which fix the status of a book by a Negro author
shall be written by white men. Praise or blame—. the elementary
criticism which expresses only the reviewer’s feelings in reference to
the book—has generally been the sole function of the Negro critic. And
the results have not been good. For, in the first place, white critics
(except in music) have been too prone to judge the product of a Negro
author as Dr. Johnson judged the dancing dog: “It isn’t at all like
dancing; but then, one shouldn’t expect more from a dog.” That is why
many Negro poets of fifth grade merit are able to marshal ecomiums by
the bushel from friendly white critics who ought to know better. On the
other hand, there is the danger of disparagement arising solely from
racial prejudice and the Caucasian refusal to take Negro literary
products seriously.
In either case the work fails to secure consideration solely on its
merits. Wherefore, it is high time that competent appraisal of Negro
books should come from “our side of the street.” But, then, the Negro
reading public should be taught what to expect, viz., that criticism is
neither “knocking” nor “boosting”; but an attempt, in the first place,
to furnish a correct and adequate idea of the scope and literary method
of the book under review, of the author’s success in realizing his
objects, and of the spirit in which he does his work. In the second
place, the critic should be expected to bring his own understanding of
the subject matter of the book to bear upon the problem of enlightening
the readers’ understanding, that at the end the reader may decide
whether the work is worth his particular while.
This book of Dr. Du Bois’ is one which challenges the swing of seasoned
judgment and appraisal. It challenges also free thinking and plain
speaking. For, at the very outset, find ourselves forced to demur to the
publishers’ assumptions as to its author’s status. “Even more than the
late Booker Washington, Mr. Du Bois is now chief spokesman of the two
hundred million men and women of African blood.” So say the
publishers—or the author. But this is outrageously untrue. Once upon a
time Dr. Du Bois held a sort of spiritual primacy among The Talented
Tenth, not at all comparable to that of Booker Washington in scope, but
vital and compelling for all that. The power of that leadership,
however, instead of increasing since Mr. Washington’s death, has
decreased, and is now openly flouted by the most active and outspoken
members of The Talented Tenth in Negro America. And, outside of the
twelve or fifteen millions “of African blood” in the United States, the
mass of that race in South and West Africa, Egypt and the Philippines
know, unfortunately, very little of Dr. Du Bois. It may be, however,
that this is merely a publishers’ rhodomontade.
And it is the publishers themselves who challenge for this volume a
comparison with “The Souls of Black Folk,” which was published by
McClurg in 1903. It is regrettable that they should force the issue, for
“The Souls of Black Folk” is a greater book than “Darkwater” in many
ways. In the first place, its high standard of craftsmanship is
maintained through every chapter and page. There are no fag-ends, as in
the chapter “Of Beauty and Death” in the present volume, where the
rhetoric bogs down, the author loses the thread of his purpose and goes
spieling off into space, spinning a series of incongruous purple patches
whose tawdry glitter shows the same reversion to crude barbarism in
taste which leads a Florida fieldhand to don opal-colored trousers, a
pink tie, pari-colored shirt and yellow shoes. Artistically, that
chapter is an awful thing, and I trust that the author is artist enough
to be ashamed of it.
And, though it may savor of anti-climax, “The Souls of Black Folk” was
more artistically “gotten” up—to use the grammar of its author.
“Darkwater” is cheaply bound and cheaply printed on paper which is
almost down to the level of the Seaside Library. Neither in mechanical
nor mental quality does the book of 1920 come up to the level of that of
1903.
Yet, in spite of some defects, “Darkwater” (with the exception of
chapters six, seven, eight and nine) is a book well worth reading. It is
a collection of papers written at different times, between 1908 and
1920, and strung loosely on the string of race. One wishes that the
author could have included his earlier essay on The Talented Tenth and
his address on the aims and ideals of modern education, delivered some
twelve years ago to the colored school children of Washington, D. C.
Each paper makes a separate chapter, and each chapter is followed by a
rhetorical sprig of symbolism in prose or verse in which the tone-color
of the preceding piece is made manifest to the reader. Of these
tone-poems in prose and verse, the best are the Credo; A Litany at
Atlanta; The Riddle of the Sphinx, and Jesus Christ in Texas. In these
the lyrical quality of the author’s prose is lifted to high levels. In
these elegance does not slop over into turgid declamation and rhetorical
claptrap—which has become a common fault of the author’s recent prose as
shown in The Crisis. In this, the first part of the book, the work is
genuine and its rhetoric rings true. Nevertheless, the sustained
artistic swing of “The Souls of Black Folk,” which placed that work (as
a matter of form and style) on the level of Edgar Saltus’ _Imperial
Purple_—this is not attained in “Darkwater.”
The book may be said to deal largely with the broad international
aspects of the problem of the color line and its reactions on
statecraft, welt-politik, international peace and international trade,
industry, education and the brotherhood of man. Each chapter, or paper,
is devoted to one of these reactions. Then there is a charming
autobiographical paper, “The Shadow of Years,” which first appeared in
The Crisis about three years ago, in which we have the study of a soul
by itself. The growth of the author’s mind under the bewildering shadow
cast by the color line is tragically set forth. I say tragically with
deliberation; for what we see here, despite its fine disguise, is the
smoldering resentment of a mulatto who finds the beckoning white doors
of the world barred on his approach. One senses the thought that, if
they had remained open, the gifted spirit would have entered and made
his home within them. _Mais, chacun a son gout_, and no one has the
right to quarrel with the author on that doubtful score.
In the chapter on “The Souls of White Folk” we have a fine piece, not so
much of analysis, as of exposition. The author puts his best into it.
And yet that best seems to have failed to bite with acid brutality into
the essential iron of the white man’s soul. For the basic elements of
that soul are Hypocrisy, Greed and Cruelty. True, the author brings this
out; but he doesn’t burn it in. The indictment is presented in terms of
an appeal to shocked sensibilities and a moral sense which exists, for
the white man, only in print; whereas it might have been made in other
terms which come nearer to his self-love. Nevertheless it is
unanswerable in its logic.
In “The Hands of Ethiopia,” as in “The Souls of White Folk,” we catch
the stern note of that threat which (disguise it as our journals will),
the colored races are making, of an ultimate appeal in terms of color
and race to the white man’s only God—the God of Armed Force. But the
author never reaches the height of that newer thought—an international
alliance of Black, Brown and Yellow against the arrogance of White.
In “Work and Wealth” and “The Servant in the House” the problems of work
and its reward, and the tragedy of that reward, are grippingly set forth
in relation to the Negro in America and in the civilized world. “The
Ruling of Men” is followed by three papers of very inferior merit and
the book ends with a fantastic short story, “The Comet” which, like “The
Coming of John” in “The Souls of Black Folk,” suggests that Dr. Du Bois
could be a compelling writer of this shorter form of fiction. The touch
in this story of incident is light, but arresting.
Dr. Du Bois, in the looseness of phrase current in our time in America,
is called a scholar—on what grounds we are not informed. But Dr. Du Bois
is not a scholar; his claim to consideration rests upon a different
basis, but one no less high. And when the Negro culture of the next
century shall assay the products of our own it will seem remarkable that
this supreme wizard of words, this splendid literary artist, should have
left his own demesne to claim the crown of scholarship. Surely, there is
honest credit enough in being what he is, our foremost man of culture.
And this “Darkwater,” despite its lapses from artistic grace, helps to
rivet his claim to that consideration. It is a book which will well
repay reading.
_The Rising Tide of Color Against White World Supremacy_
By Lothrop Stoddard
About ten years ago Mr. B. L. Putnam Weale in “The Conflict of Color”
tried to open the eyes of the white men of the world to the fact that
they were acting as their own grave diggers. About the same time
Mr. Melville E. Stone, president of the Associated Press, in an address
before the Quill Club on “Race Prejudice in the Far East” reinforced the
same grisly truth. Five years later “T. Shirby Hodge” wrote “The White
Man’s Burden: A Satirical Forecast,” and ended it with these pregnant
words: “The white man’s burden is—himself.” His publishers practically
suppressed his book, which, by the way, should have been in the library
of every intelligent Negro. The white world was indisposed then to
listen to its voices of warning. But today the physical, economic and
racial ravages of the World War have so changed the white world’s mind
that within four weeks of its appearance “The Rising Tide of Color
Against White World Supremacy,” by Lothrop Stoddard, has struck the
bull’s-eye of attention and has already become the most widely talked-of
book of the year. White men of power are discussing its facts and its
conclusions with bated breath and considerable disquietude.
Here is a book written by a white man which causes white men to shiver.
For it calls their attention to the writing on the wall. It proves that
the white race in its mad struggle for dominion over others has been
exhausting its vital resources and is exhausting them further. It proves
to the hilt the thesis advanced in 1917 in my brief essay on “The White
War and the Colored Races” that, whereas the white race was on top by
virtue of its guns, ships, money, intellect and massed man-power, in the
World War it was busy burning up, depleting and destroying these very
resources on which its primacy depended. But even though the white
capitalists knew all this their mad greed was still their master. This
great race is still so low spiritually that it sells even its racial
integrity for dollars and cents. Mr. Stoddard’s book may disturb its
sense of security for a brief space, but it cannot keep white
“civilization” from its mad dance of death. “What shall it profit a man
if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul?” And the white race
will finally find that this is even more true racially than
individually.
We have noticed for many years that whereas domestic journalism was
merely journalism—the passing register of parochial sensations—the
journalism of the international publicists like Lord Bryce, Meredith
Townsend, Archibald Colquhoon, Putnam Weale and Hyndman was something
more solid than journalism. In the writings of these men hard fact and
stark reality are wedded to wide reading and deep thinking. They are the
real social scientists rather than the stay-at-home, cloistered
sociologists who, presuming to know everything, have seen nothing. The
present volume is one of the best of the former and is full of the
qualities of its class. But at the very outset it suffers from the
unwelcome assistance of Dr. Madison Grant, “chairman of the New York
Zoological Society and trustee of the American Museum of Natural
History.” Dr. Grant has accumulated a large stock of musty ethnological
ideas of which he unburdens himself in what he evidently intends as a
“learned” introduction, without which freightage the book would be much
better. The difference in value and accuracy between Mr. Stoddard’s text
and the pseudo-scientific introduction of Dr. Grant would furnish fair
material for philosophic satire. Unfortunately we cannot indulge the
inclination in the columns of a weekly newspaper.
Dr. Grant, in owlish innocence, splutters out the usual futile folly
which (in other domains) has brought the white race to the frontiers of
the present crisis. He reads back into history the racial values of
today and trails the Anglo-Saxon’s crass conceit and arrogance across
the pages of its record, finding “contrast of mental and spiritual
endowments … elusive of definition,” and other racial clap-trap whose
falsity has been demonstrated again and again by warm-hearted
enthusiasts like Jean Finot and coldly critical and scientific scholars
like Dr. Taylor (“Origin of the Aryans”), Sergi (“The Mediterranean
Race”) and J. M. Robertson (“The Evolution of States”). But one can
forgive Dr. Grant; he is a good American, and good Americans (especially
“scientists” on race) are usually fifty years behind the English, who,
in turn, are usually twenty years behind the Germans. Dr. Grant’s
annexation of the past history of human culture to the swollen record of
the whites sounds good—even if it smells bad. And he is in good
Anglo-Saxon company. Sir Harry Johnston does the same thing and gets
titles (scientific and other) by so doing. The Englishman takes the very
Egyptians, Hindus and tribal Liberians, whom he would call “niggers” in
New York and London, and as soon as he finds that they have done
anything worth while he tags them with a “white” tag. Thus, to the
professional “scientist” like Dr. Grant, living in the parochial
atmosphere of the United States, science is something arcane, recondite
and off the earth; while to the American like Mr. Stoddard, who has been
broadened by travel and contact with the wider world, science, is, as it
should be, organized daily knowledge and common sense. Thus journalists,
good and bad, are the ones who form opinion in America, because
“scientists” are so distressingly stupid.
Mr. Stoddard’s thesis starts from the proposition that of the seventeen
hundred million people on our earth today the great majority is made up
of black, brown, red and yellow people. The white race, being in the
minority, still dominates over the lands of black, brown, red and (in
the case of China) has assumed a right of dictatorship and disposal even
in the yellow man’s lands. In the course of this dictatorship and
domination the white race has erected the barrier of the color line to
keep the other races in their place. But this barrier is cracking and
giving way at many points and the flood of racial self-assertion,
hitherto dammed up, threatens to overflow the outer and inner dikes and
sweep away the domination of the whites.
The author approaches his theme with a curiously graduated respect for
other races. This respect, while it is a novelty in the attitude of the
blond overlords, is always in direct proportion to the present power and
discernible potentialities of the races discussed. For the yellow man of
Japan and China he shows the greatest deference. The browns (of India,
Persia, Afghanistan, Egypt and the Mohammedan world in general) are, of
course, inferior, but must be respected for their militancy. The reds
(the original American stock which is the backbone of the population of
Mexico, Central and South America) are a source of contamination for
white blood and an infernal nuisance, capable of uniting with Japan and
China in an onslaught on the land areas reserved for white exploitation
in the western world; while the blacks, at the foot of the ladder, have
never amounted to anything, don’t amount to anything now, and can never
seriously menace the superiority of the whites.
The gradation is full of meaning, especially to those fervid theorists
who affect to believe that religion, morality, loyalty and good
citizenship constitute a good claim to the white man’s respect. For it
is Japan’s actual military might and China’s impending military might
which have put them in Grade A, while the brown man’s show of resistance
in Egypt, India and elsewhere under Islam, and his general physical
unrest and active discontent have secured for him a classification in
Grade B. The American in Mexico and South America keeps his window open
toward the east; but the black man still seems, in our author’s eyes, to
be the same loyal, gentle, stupid beast of burden that the white man’s
history has known—except in those parts of Africa in which he has
accepted the Mohammedan religion and thus become a part of the potential
terror of the Moslem world. In this we think our author mistaken; but,
after all, it is neither arguments nor logic that will determine these
matters, but deeds and accomplishments.
But, however his racial respect may be apportioned, Mr. Stoddard holds
that his race is doomed. “If the present drift be not changed we whites
are all ultimately doomed. Unless we set our house in order the doom
will sooner or later overtake us all.” The present reviewer stakes his
money on “the doom,” for the white race’s disease is an ingrowing one
whose development inheres in their very nature. They are so singularly
constituted that they would rather tear themselves to pieces parading as
the lords of creation than see any other people achieve an equal favor
of fortune.
In the pages of this book the author presents many chastening truths and
wide vistas of international politics which are enlightening when
carefully studied. But it is not our intent to cover the entire field of
his work, and we think that we have said enough to indicate the high
value and suggestiveness of the work. But we may be allowed to point out
that all the way through the author, though clear and enlightened,
remains an unreconstructed Anglo-Saxon, desirous of opening the eyes of
his race to the dangers which beset them through their racial injustice
and arrogance; but sternly, resolutely, intent that they shall not share
their overlordship with any other of the sons of earth. His book is
written in a clear and commendable style; he shows but few defects of
temper and a shrewd mastery of his materials. The book should be widely
read by intelligent men of color from Tokio to Tallahassee. It is
published by Charles Scribner’s Sons at $3, and is well worth the price.
THE BLACK MAN’S BURDEN
(A Reply to Rudyard Kipling.)
By HUBERT H. HARRISON
Take up the Black Man’s burden—
Send forth the worst ye breed,
And bind our sons in shackles
To serve your selfish greed;
To wait in heavy harness
Be-devilled and beguiled
Until the Fates remove you
From a world you have defiled.
Take up the Black Man’s burden—
Your lies may still abide
To veil the threat of terror
And check our racial pride;
Your cannon, church and courthouse
May still our sons constrain
To seek the white man’s profit
And work the white man’s gain.
Take up the Black Man’s burden—
Reach out and hog the earth,
And leave your workers hungry
In the country of their birth;
Then, when your goal is nearest,
The end for which you fought,
Watch other’s trained efficiency
Bring all your hope to naught.
Take up the Black Man’s burden
Reduce their chiefs and kings
To toil of serf and sweeper
The lot of common things:
Sodden their soil with slaughter,
Ravish their lands with lead;
Go, sign them with your living
And seal them with your dead.
Take up the Black Man’s burden—
And reap your old reward:
The curse of those ye cozen,
The hate of those ye barred
From your Canadian cities
And your Australian ports;
And when they ask for meat and drink
Go, girdle them with forts.
Take up the Black Man’s burden—
Ye cannot stoop to less.
Will not your fraud of “freedom”
Still cloak your greediness?
But, by the gods ye worship,
And by the deeds ye do,
These silent, sullen peoples
Shall weigh your gods and you.
Take up the Black Man’s burden—
Until the tale is told,
Until the balances of hate
Bear down the beam of gold.
And while ye wait remember
That justice, though delayed,
Will hold you as her debtor
Till the Black Man’s debt is paid.
TRANSCRIBER’S NOTE
Obvious typographical errors and punctuation errors have been corrected
after careful comparison with other occurrences within the text and
consultation of external sources.
Except for the changes noted below, misspelling in the text, and
inconsistent or archaic usage, have been retained.
In Chapter 3, “Emmet” has been replaced with “Emmett”.
“posiiton” has been replaced with “positon”.
In Chapter 5, “conquences” has been replaced with “consequences”; “lke”
has been replaced with “like”; “whch” has been replaced with “which”.
In Chapter 6, “Chanler” has been replaced with “Chandler”.
In Chapter 7, “behaf” has been replaced with “behalf”; “perpertrated”
has been replaced with “perpetrated”; “delibertaely” has been replaced
with “deliberately”; “whtie” has been replaced with “white”;
“sovereignity” has been replaced with “sovereignty”.
In Chapter 8, “anthroplology” has been replaced with “anthropology”.
“preceeding” has been replaced with “preceding”; In Chapter 9,
“resoures” has been replaced with “resources”. Additionally, the header
“CHAPTER NINE” has been replaced with “CHAPTER IX” to match with other
chapter headings in the book.
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