Chapter XV

"THE VALE OF TEARS," 1890-1910

1. Current Opinion and Tendencies

In the two decades that we are now to consider we find the working out of all the large forces mentioned in our last chapter. After a generation of striving the white South was once more thoroughly in control, and the new program well under way. Predictions for both a broader outlook for the section as a whole and greater care for the Negro's moral and intellectual advancement were destined not to be fulfilled; and the period became one of bitter social and economic antagonism.

All of this was primarily due to the one great fallacy on which the prosperity of the New South was built, and that was that the labor of the Negro existed only for the good of the white man. To this one source may be traced most of the ills borne by both white man and Negro during the period. If the Negro's labor was to be exploited, it was necessary that he be without the protection of political power and that he be denied justice in court. If he was to be reduced to a peon, certainly socially he must be given a peon's place. Accordingly there developed everywhere—in schools, in places of public accommodation, in the facilities of city life—the idea of inferior service for Negroes; and an unenlightened prison system flourished in all its hideousness. Furthermore, as a result of the vicious economic system, arose the sinister form of the Negro criminal. Here again the South begged the question, representative writers lamenting the passing of the dear dead days of slavery, and pointing cynically to the effects of freedom on the Negro. They failed to remember in the case of the Negro criminal that from childhood to manhood—in education, in economic chance, in legal power—they had by their own system deprived a human being of every privilege that was due him, ruining him body and soul; and then they stood aghast at the thing their hands had made. More than that, they blamed the race itself for the character that now sometimes appeared, and called upon thrifty, aspiring Negroes to find the criminal and give him up to the law. Thrifty, aspiring Negroes wondered what was the business of the police.

It was this pitiful failure to get down to fundamentals that characterized the period and that made life all the more hard for those Negroes who strove to advance. Every effort was made to brutalize a man, and then he was blamed for not being a St. Bernard. Fortunately before the period was over there arose not only clear-thinking men of the race but also a few white men who realized that such a social order could not last forever.

Early in the nineties, however, the pendulum had swung fully backward, and the years from 1890 to 1895 were in some ways the darkest that the race has experienced since emancipation. When in 1892 Cleveland was elected for a second term and the Democrats were once more in power, it seemed to the Southern rural Negro that the conditions of slavery had all but come again. More and more the South formulated its creed; it glorified the old aristocracy that had flourished and departed, and definitely it began to ask the North if it had not been right after all. It followed of course that if the Old South had the real key to the problem, the proper place of the Negro was that of a slave.

It is not strange that under the circumstances we have now to record such discrimination, crime, and mob violence as can hardly be paralleled in the whole of American history. The Negro was already down; he was now to be trampled upon. When in the spring of 1892 some members of the race in the lowlands of Mississippi lost all they had by the floods and the Federal Government was disposed to send relief, the state government protested against such action on the ground that it would keep the Negroes from accepting the terms offered by the white planters. In Louisiana in 1895 a Negro presiding elder reported to the Southwestern Christian Advocate that he had lost a membership of a hundred souls, the people being compelled to leave their crops and move away within ten days.

In 1891 the jail at Omaha was entered and a Negro taken out and hanged to a lamp-post. On February 27, 1892, at Jackson, La., where there was a pound party for the minister at the Negro Baptist church, a crowd of white men gathered, shooting revolvers and halting the Negroes as they passed. Most of the people were allowed to go on, but after a while the sport became furious and two men were fatally shot. About the same time, and in the same state, at Rayville, a Negro girl of fifteen was taken from a jail by a mob and hanged to a tree. In Texarkana, Ark., a Negro who had outraged a farmer's wife was captured and burned alive, the injured woman herself being compelled to light the fire. Just a few days later, in March, a constable in Memphis in attempting to arrest a Negro was killed. Numerous arrests followed, and at night a mob went to the jail, gained easy access, and, having seized three well-known Negroes who were thought to have been leaders in the killing, lynched them, the whole proceeding being such a flagrant violation of law that it has not yet been forgotten by the older Negro citizens of this important city. On February 1, 1893, at Paris, Texas, after one of the most brutal crimes occurred one of the most horrible lynchings on record. Henry Smith, the Negro, who seems to have harbored a resentment against a policeman of the town because of ill-treatment that he had received, seized the officer's three-year-old child, outraged her, and then tore her body to pieces. He was tortured by the child's father, her uncles, and her fifteen-year-old brother, his eyes being put out with hot irons before he was burned. His stepson, who had refused to tell where he could be found, was hanged and his body riddled with bullets. Thus the lynchings went on, the victims sometimes being guilty of the gravest crimes, but often also perfectly innocent people. In February, 1893, the average was very nearly one a day. At the same time injuries inflicted on the Negro were commonly disregarded altogether. Thus at Dickson, Tenn., a young white man lost forty dollars. A fortune-teller told him that the money had been taken by a woman and gave a description that seemed to fit a young colored woman who had worked in the home of a relative. Half a dozen men then went to the home of the young woman and outraged her, her mother, and also another woman who was in the house. At the very close of 1894, in Brooks County, Ga., after a Negro named Pike had killed a white man with whom he had a quarrel, seven Negroes were lynched after the real murderer had escaped. Any relative or other Negro who, questioned, refused to tell of the whereabouts of Pike, whether he knew of the same or not, was shot in his tracks, one man being shot before he had chance to say anything at all. Meanwhile the White Caps or "Regulators" took charge of the neighboring counties, terrifying the Negroes everywhere; and in the trials that resulted the state courts broke down altogether, one judge in despair giving up the holding of court as useless.

Meanwhile discrimination of all sorts went forward. On May 29, 1895, moved by the situation at the Orange Park Academy, the state of Florida approved "An Act to Prohibit White and Colored Youth from being Taught in the same Schools." Said one section: "It shall be a penal offense for any individual body of inhabitants, corporation, or association to conduct within this State any school of any grade, public, private, or parochial, wherein white persons and Negroes shall be instructed or boarded within the same building, or taught in the same class or at the same time by the same teacher." Religious organizations were not to be left behind in such action; and when before the meeting of the Baptist Young People's Union in Baltimore a letter was sent to the secretary of the organization and the editor of the Baptist Union, in behalf of the Negroes, who the year before had not been well treated at Toronto, he sent back an evasive answer, saying that the policy of his society was to encourage local unions to affiliate with their own churches.

More grave than anything else was the formal denial of the Negro's political rights. As we have seen, South Carolina in 1895 followed Mississippi in the disfranchising program and within the next fifteen years most of the other Southern states did likewise. With the Negro thus deprived of any genuine political voice, all sorts of social and economic injustice found greater license.

2. Industrial Education: Booker T. Washington

Such were the tendencies of life in the South as affecting the Negro thirty years after emancipation. In September, 1895, a rising educator of the race attracted national attention by a remarkable speech that he made at the Cotton States Exposition in Atlanta. Said Booker T. Washington: "To those of my race who depend on bettering their condition in a foreign land, or who underestimate the importance of cultivating friendly relations with the Southern white man who is their next door neighbor, I would say, 'Cast down your bucket where you are'—cast it down in making friends in every manly way of the people of all races by whom we are surrounded.... To those of the white race who look to the incoming of those of foreign birth and strange tongue and habits for the prosperity of the South, were I permitted I would repeat what I say to my own race, 'Cast down your bucket where you are.' Cast it down among 8,000,000 Negroes whose habits you know, whose fidelity and love you have tested in days when to have proved treacherous meant the ruin of your fire-sides.... In all things that are purely social we can be as separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress."

The time was ripe for a new leader. Frederick Douglass had died in February, 1895. In his later years he had more than once lost hold on the heart of his people, as when he opposed the Negro Exodus or seemed not fully in sympathy with the religious convictions of those who looked to him. At his passing, however, the race remembered only his early service and his old magnificence, and to a striving people his death seemed to make still darker the gathering gloom. Coming when he did, Booker T. Washington was thoroughly in line with the materialism of his age; he answered both an economic and an educational crisis. He also satisfied the South of the new day by what he had to say about social equality.

The story of his work reads like a romance, and he himself has told it better than any one else ever can. He did not claim the credit for the original idea of industrial education; that he gave to General Armstrong, and it was at Hampton that he himself had been nurtured. What was needed, however, was for some one to take the Hampton idea down to the cotton belt, interpret the lesson for the men and women digging in the ground, and generally to put the race in line with the country's industrial development. This was what Booker T. Washington undertook to do.

He reached Tuskegee early in June, 1881. July 4 was the date set for the opening of the school in the little shanty and church which had been secured for its accommodation. On the morning of this day thirty students reported for admission. The greater number were school-teachers and some were nearly forty years of age. Just about three months after the opening of the school there was offered for sale an old and abandoned plantation a mile from Tuskegee on which the mansion had been burned. All told the place seemed to be just the location needed to make the work effective and permanent. The price asked was five hundred dollars, the owner requiring the immediate payment of two hundred and fifty dollars, the remaining two hundred and fifty to be paid within a year. In his difficulty Mr. Washington wrote to General J.F.B. Marshall, treasurer of Hampton Institute, placing the matter before him and asking for the loan of two hundred and fifty dollars. General Marshall replied that he had no authority to lend money belonging to Hampton Institute, but that he would gladly advance the amount needed from his personal funds. Toward the paying of this sum the assisting teacher, Olivia A. Davidson (afterwards Mrs. Washington), helped heroically. Her first effort was made by holding festivals and suppers, but she also canvassed the families in the town of Tuskegee, and the white people as well as the Negroes helped her. "It was often pathetic," said the principal, "to note the gifts of the older colored people, many of whom had spent their best days in slavery. Sometimes they would give five cents, sometimes twenty-five cents. Sometimes the contribution was a quilt, or a quantity of sugarcane. I recall one old colored woman, who was about seventy years of age, who came to see me when we were raising money to pay for the farm. She hobbled into the room where I was, leaning on a cane. She was clad in rags, but they were clean. She said, 'Mr. Washington, God knows I spent de bes' days of my life in slavery. God knows I's ignorant an' poor; but I knows what you an' Miss Davidson is tryin' to do. I knows you is tryin' to make better men an' better women for de colored race. I ain't got no money, but I wants you to take dese six eggs, what I's been savin' up, an' I wants you to put dese six eggs into de eddication of dese boys an' gals.' Since the work at Tuskegee started," added the speaker, "it has been my privilege to receive many gifts for the benefit of the institution, but never any, I think, that touched me as deeply as this one."

It was early in the history of the school that Mr. Washington conceived the idea of extension work. The Tuskegee Conferences began in February, 1892. To the first meeting came five hundred men, mainly farmers, and many woman. Outstanding was the discussion of the actual terms on which most of the men were living from year to year. A mortgage was given on the cotton crop before it was planted, and to the mortgage was attached a note which waived all right to exemptions under the constitution and laws of the state of Alabama or of any other state to which the tenant might move. Said one: "The mortgage ties you tighter than any rope and a waive note is a consuming fire." Said another: "The waive note is good for twenty years and when you sign one you must either pay out or die out." Another: "When you sign a waive note you just cross your hands behind you and go to the merchant and say, 'Here, tie me and take all I've got.'" All agreed that the people mortgaged more than was necessary, to buy sewing machines (which sometimes were not used), expensive clocks, great family Bibles, or other things easily dispensed with. Said one man: "My people want all they can get on credit, not thinking of the day of settlement. We must learn to bore with a small augur first. The black man totes a heavy bundle, and when he puts it down there is a plow, a hoe, and ignorance."

It was to people such as these that Booker T. Washington brought hope, and serving them he passed on to fame. Within a few years schools on the plan of Tuskegee began to spring up all over the South, at Denmark, at Snow Hill, at Utica, and elsewhere. In 1900 the National Negro Business League began its sessions, giving great impetus to the establishment of banks, stores, and industrial enterprises throughout the country, and especially in the South. Much of this progress would certainly have been realized if the Business League had never been organized; but every one granted that in all the development the genius of the leader at Tuskegee was the chief force. About his greatness and his very definite contribution there could be no question.

3. Individual Achievement: The Spanish-American War

It happened that just at the time that Booker T. Washington was advancing to great distinction, three or four other individuals were reflecting special credit on the race. One of these was a young scholar, W.E. Burghardt DuBois, who after a college career at Fisk continued his studies at Harvard and Berlin and finally took the Ph.D. degree at Harvard in 1895. There had been sound scholars in the race before DuBois, but generally these had rested on attainment in the languages or mathematics, and most frequently they had expressed themselves in rather philosophical disquisition. Here, however, was a thorough student of economics, and one who was able to attack the problems of his people and meet opponents on the basis of modern science. He was destined to do great good, and the race was proud of him.

In 1896 also an authentic young poet who had wrestled with poverty and doubt at last gained a hearing. After completing the course at a high school in Dayton, Paul Laurence Dunbar ran an elevator for four dollars a week, and then he peddled from door to door two little volumes of verse that had been privately printed. William Dean Howells at length gave him a helping hand, and Dodd, Mead & Co. published Lyrics of Lowly Life. Dunbar wrote both in classic English and in the dialect that voiced the humor and the pathos of the life of those for whom he spoke. What was not at the time especially observed was that in numerous poems he suggested the discontent with the age in which he lived and thus struck what later years were to prove an important keynote. After he had waited and struggled so long, his success was so great that it became a vogue, and imitators sprang up everywhere. He touched the heart of his people and the race loved him.

By 1896 also word began to come of a Negro American painter, Henry O. Tanner, who was winning laurels in Paris. At the same time a beautiful singer, Mme. Sissieretta Jones, on the concert stage was giving new proof of the possibilities of the Negro as an artist in song. In the previous decade Mme. Marie Selika, a cultured vocalist of the first rank, had delighted audiences in both America and Europe, and in 1887 had appeared Flora Batson, a ballad singer whose work at its best was of the sort that sends an audience into the wildest enthusiasm. In 1894, moreover, Harry T. Burleigh, competing against sixty candidates, became baritone soloist at St. Georges's Episcopal Church, New York, and just a few years later he was to be employed also at Temple Emanu-El, the Fifth Avenue Jewish synagogue. From abroad also came word of a brilliant musician, Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, who by his "Hiawatha's Wedding-Feast" in 1898 leaped into the rank of the foremost living English composers. On the more popular stage appeared light musical comedy, intermediate between the old Negro minstrelsy and a genuine Negro drama, the representative companies becoming within the next few years those of Cole and Johnson, and Williams and Walker.

4. Mob Violence; Election Troubles; The Atlanta Massacre

After two or three years of comparative quiet—but only comparative quiet—mob violence burst forth about the turn of the century with redoubled intensity. In a large way this was simply a result of the campaigns for disfranchisement that in some of the Southern states were just now getting under way; but charges of assault and questions of labor also played a part. In some places people who were innocent of any charge whatever were attacked, and so many were killed that sometimes it seemed that the law had broken down altogether. Not the least interesting development of these troublous years was that in some cases as never before Negroes began to fight with their backs to the wall, and thus at the very close of the century—at the end of a bitter decade and the beginning of one still more bitter—a new factor entered into the problem, one that was destined more and more to demand consideration.

On one Sunday toward the close of October, 1898, the country recorded two race wars, one lynching, two murders, one of which was expected to lead to a lynching, with a total of ten Negroes killed and four wounded and four white men killed and seven wounded. The most serious outbreak was in the state of Mississippi, and it is worthy of note that in not one single case was there any question of rape.

November was made red by election troubles in both North and South Carolina. In the latter state, at Phoenix, in Greenwood County, on November 8 and for some days thereafter, the Tolberts, a well-known family of white Republicans, were attacked by mobs and barely escaped alive. R.R. Tolbert was a candidate for Congress and also chairman of the Republican state committee. John R. Tolbert, his father, collector of the port of Charleston, had come home to vote and was at one of the polling-places in the county. Thomas Tolbert at Phoenix was taking the affidavits of the Negroes who were not permitted to vote for his brother in order that later there might be ground on which to contest the election. While thus engaged he was attacked by Etheridge, the Democratic manager of another precinct. The Negroes came to Tolbert's defense, and in the fight that followed Etheridge was killed and Tolbert wounded. John Tolbert, coming up, was filled with buckshot, and a younger member of the family was also hurt. The Negroes were at length overpowered and the Tolberts forced to flee. All told it appears that two white men and about twelve Negroes lost their lives in connection with the trouble, six of the latter being lynched on account of the death of Etheridge.

In North Carolina in 1894 the Republicans by combining with the Populists had secured control of the state legislature. In 1896 the Democrats were again outvoted, Governor Russell being elected by a plurality of 9000. A considerable number of local offices was in the hands of Negroes, who had the backing of the Governor, the legislature, and the Supreme Court as well. Before the November elections in 1898 the Democrats in Wilmington announced their determination to prevent Negroes from holding office in the city. Especially had they been made angry by an editorial in a local Negro paper, the Record, in which, under date August 18, the editor, Alex. L. Manly, starting with a reference to a speaker from Georgia, who at the Agricultural Society meeting at Tybee had advocated lynching as an extreme measure, said that she "lost sight of the basic principle of the religion of Christ in her plea for one class of people as against another," and continued: "The papers are filled with reports of rapes of white women, and the subsequent lynching of the alleged rapists. The editors pour forth volleys of aspersions against all Negroes because of the few who may be guilty. If the papers and speakers of the other race would condemn the commission of crime because it is crime and not try to make it appear that the Negroes were the only criminals, they would find their strongest allies in the intelligent Negroes themselves, and together the whites and blacks would root the evil out of both races.... Our experience among poor white people in the country teaches us that the women of that race are not any more particular in the matter of clandestine meetings with colored men than are the white men with colored women. Meetings of this kind go on for some time until the woman's infatuation or the man's boldness brings attention to them and the man is lynched for rape." In reply to this the speaker quoted in a signed statement said: "When the Negro Manly attributed the crime of rape to intimacy between Negro men and white women of the South, the slanderer should be made to fear a lyncher's rope rather than occupy a place in New York newspapers"—a method of argument that was unfortunately all too common in the South. As election day approached the Democrats sought generally to intimidate the Negroes, the streets and roads being patrolled by men wearing red shirts. Election day, however, passed without any disturbance; but on the next day there was a mass meeting of white citizens, at which there were adopted resolutions to employ white labor instead of Negro, to banish the editor of the Record, and to send away from the city the printing-press in the office of that paper; and a committee of twenty-five was appointed to see that these resolutions were carried into effect within twenty-four hours. In the course of the terrible day that followed the printing office was destroyed, several white Republicans were driven from the city, and nine Negroes were killed at once, though no one could say with accuracy just how many more lost their lives or were seriously wounded before the trouble was over.

Charles W. Chesnutt, in The Marrow of Tradition, has given a faithful portrayal of these disgraceful events, the Wellington of the story being Wilmington. Perhaps the best commentary on those who thus sought power was afforded by their apologist, a Presbyterian minister and editor, A.J. McKelway, who on this occasion and others wrote articles in the Independent and the Outlook justifying the proceedings. Said he: "It is difficult to speak of the Red Shirts without a smile. They victimized the Negroes with a huge practical joke.... A dozen men would meet at a crossroad, on horseback, clad in red shirts or calico, flannel or silk, according to the taste of the owner and the enthusiasm of his womankind. They would gallop through the country, and the Negro would quietly make up his mind that his interest in political affairs was not a large one, anyhow. It would be wise not to vote, and wiser not to register to prevent being dragooned into voting on election day." It thus appears that the forcible seizure of the political rights of people, the killing and wounding of many, and the compelling of scores to leave their homes amount in the end to not more than a "practical joke."

One part of the new program was the most intense opposition to Federal Negro appointees anywhere in the South. On the morning of February 22, 1898, Frazer B. Baker, the colored postmaster at Lake City, S.C., awoke to find his house in flames. Attempting to escape, he and his baby boy were shot and killed and their bodies consumed in the burning house. His wife and the other children were wounded but escaped. The Postmaster-General was quite disposed to see that justice was done in this case; but the men charged with the crime gave the most trivial alibis, and on Saturday, April 22, 1899, the jury in the United States Circuit Court at Charleston reported its failure to agree on a verdict. Three years later the whole problem was presented strongly to President Roosevelt. When Mrs. Minne Cox, who was serving efficiently as postmistress at Indianola, Miss., was forced to resign because of threats, he closed the office; and when there was protest against the appointment of Dr. William D. Crum as collector of the port of Charleston, he said, "I do not intend to appoint any unfit man to office. So far as I legitimately can, I shall always endeavor to pay regard to the wishes and feelings of the people of each locality; but I can not consent to take the position that the door of hope—the door of opportunity—is to be shut upon any man, no matter how worthy, purely upon the grounds of race or color. Such an attitude would, according to my convictions, be fundamentally wrong." These memorable words, coming in a day of compromise and expediency in high places, greatly cheered the heart of the race. Just the year before, the importance of the incident of Booker T. Washington's taking lunch with President Roosevelt was rather unnecessarily magnified by the South into all sorts of discussion of social equality.

On Tuesday, January 24, 1899, a fire in the center of the town of Palmetto, Ga., destroyed a hotel, two stores, and a storehouse, on which property there was little insurance. The next Saturday there was another fire and this destroyed a considerable part of the town. For some weeks there was no clue as to the origin of these fires; but about the middle of March something overheard by a white citizen led to the implicating of nine Negroes. These men were arrested and confined for the night of March 15 in a warehouse to await trial the next morning, a dummy guard of six men being placed before the door. About midnight a mob came, pushed open the door, and fired two volleys at the Negroes, killing four immediately and fatally wounding four more. The circumstances of this atrocious crime oppressed the Negro people of the state as few things had done since the Civil War. That it did no good was evident, for in its underlying psychology it was closely associated with a double crime that was now to be committed. In April, Sam Hose, a Negro who had brooded on the happenings at Palmetto, not many miles from the scene killed a farmer, Alfred Cranford, who had been a leader of the mob, and outraged his wife. For two weeks he was hunted like an animal, the white people of the state meanwhile being almost unnerved and the Negroes sickened by the pursuit. At last, however, he was found, and on Sunday, April 23, at Newnan, Ga., he was burned, his execution being accompanied by unspeakable mutilation; and on the same day Lige Strickland, a Negro preacher whom Hose had accused of complicity in his crime, was hanged near Palmetto. The nation stood aghast, for the recent events in Georgia had shaken the very foundations of American civilization. Said the Charleston News and Courier: "The chains which bound the citizen, Sam Hose, to the stake at Newnan mean more for us and for his race than the chains or bonds of slavery, which they supplanted. The flames that lit the scene of his torture shed their baleful light throughout every corner of our land, and exposed a state of things, actual and potential, among us that should rouse the dullest mind to a sharp sense of our true condition, and of our unchanged and unchangeable relations to the whole race whom the tortured wretch represented."

Violence breeds violence, and two or three outstanding events are yet to be recorded. On August 23, 1899, at Darien, Ga., hundreds of Negroes, who for days had been aroused by rumors of a threatened lynching, assembled at the ringing of the bell of a church opposite the jail and by their presence prevented the removal of a prisoner. They were later tried for insurrection and twenty-one sent to the convict farms for a year. The general circumstances of the uprising excited great interest throughout the country. In May, 1900, in Augusta, Ga., an unfortunate street car incident resulted in the death of the aggressor, a young white man named Whitney, and in the lynching of the colored man, Wilson, who killed him. In this instance the victim was tortured and mutilated, parts of his body and of the rope by which he was hanged being passed around as souvenirs. A Negro organization at length recovered the body, and so great was the excitement at the funeral that the coffin was not allowed to be opened. Two months later, in New Orleans, there was a most extraordinary occurrence, the same being important because the leading figure was very frankly regarded by the Negroes as a hero and his fight in his own defense a sign that the men of the race would not always be shot down without some effort to protect themselves.

About three o'clock on Friday afternoon Charles was found to be in a two-story house at the corner of Saratoga and Clio Streets. Two officers, Porteus and Lally, entered a lower room. The first fell dead at the first shot, and the second was mortally wounded by the next. A third, Bloomfield, waiting with gun in hand, was wounded at the first shot and killed at the second. The crowd retreated, but bullets rained upon the house, Charles all the while keeping watch in every direction from four different windows. Every now and then he thrust his rifle through one of the shattered windowpanes and fired, working with incredible rapidity. He succeeded in killing two more of his assailants and wounding two. At last he realized that the house was on fire, and knowing that the end had come he rushed forth upon his foes, fired one shot more and fell dead. He had killed eight men and mortally wounded two or three more. His body was mutilated. In his room there was afterwards found a copy of a religious publication, and it was known that he had resented disfranchisement in Louisiana and had distributed pamphlets to further a colonization scheme. No incriminating evidence, however, was found.

In the same memorable year, 1900, on the night of Wednesday, August 15, there were serious riots in the city of New York. On the preceding Sunday a policeman named Thorpe in attempting to arrest a colored woman was stabbed by a Negro, Arthur Harris, so fatally that he died on Monday. On Wednesday evening Negroes were dragged from the street cars and beaten, and by midnight there were thousands of rioters between 25th and 35th Streets. On the next night the trouble was resumed. These events were followed almost immediately by riots in Akron, Ohio. On the last Sunday in October, 1901, while some Negroes were holding their usual fall camp-meeting in a grove in Washington Parish, Louisiana, they were attacked, and a number of people, not less than ten and perhaps several more, were killed; and hundreds of men, women, and children felt forced to move away from the vicinity. In the first week of March, 1904, there was in Mississippi a lynching that exceeded even others of the period in its horror and that became notorious for its use of a corkscrew. A white planter of Doddsville was murdered, and a Negro, Luther Holbert, was charged with the crime. Holbert fled, and his innocent wife went with him. Further report we read in the Democratic Evening Post of Vicksburg as follows: "When the two Negroes were captured, they were tied to trees, and while the funeral pyres were being prepared they were forced to suffer the most fiendish tortures. The blacks were forced to hold out their hands while one finger at a time was chopped off. The fingers were distributed as souvenirs. The ears of the murderers were cut off. Holbert was beaten severely, his skull was fractured, and one of his eyes, knocked out with a stick, hung by a shred from the socket.... The most excruciating form of punishment consisted in the use of a large corkscrew in the hands of some of the mob. This instrument was bored into the flesh of the man and the woman, in the arms, legs, and body, and then pulled out, the spirals tearing out big pieces of raw, quivering flesh every time it was withdrawn." In the summer of this same year Georgia was once more the scene of a horrible lynching, two Negroes, Paul Reed and Will Cato—because of the murder of the Hodges family six miles from the town on July 20—being burned at the stake at Statesville under unusually depressing circumstances. In August, 1908, there were in Springfield, Illinois, race riots of such a serious nature that a force of six thousand soldiers was required to quell them. These riots were significant not only because of the attitude of Northern laborers toward Negro competition, but also because of the indiscriminate killing of Negroes by people in the North, this indicating a genuine nationalization of the Negro Problem. The real climax of violence within the period, however, was the Atlanta Massacre of Saturday, September 22, 1906.

5. The Question of Labor

In March, 1895, there were bloody riots in New Orleans, these growing out of the fact that white laborers who were beginning to be organized objected to the employment Of Negro workers by the shipowners for the unloading of vessels. When the trouble was at its height volley after volley was poured upon the Negroes, and in turn two white men were killed and several wounded. The commercial bodies of the city met, blamed the Governor and the Mayor for the series of outbreaks, and demanded that the outrages cease. Said they: "Forbearance has ceased to be a virtue. We can no longer treat with men who, with arms in their hands, are shooting down an inoffensive people because they will not think and act with them. For these reasons we say to these people that, cost what it may, we are determined that the commerce of this city must and shall be protected; that every man who desires to perform honest labor must and shall be permitted to do so regardless of race, color, or previous condition." About August I of this same year, 1895, there were sharp conflicts between the white and the black miners at Birmingham, a number being killed on both sides before military authority could intervene. Three years later, moreover, the invasion of the North by Negro labor had begun, and about November 17, 1898, there was serious trouble in the mines at Pana and Virden, Illinois. In the same month the convention of railroad brotherhoods in Norfolk expressed strong hostility to Negro labor, Grand Master Frank P. Sargent of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen saying that one of the chief purposes of the meeting of the brotherhoods was "to begin a campaign in advocacy of white supremacy in the railway service." This November, it will be recalled, was the fateful month of the election riots in North and South Carolina. The People, the Socialist-Labor publication, commenting upon a Negro indignation meeting at Cooper Union and upon the problem in general, said that the Negro was essentially a wage-slave, that it was the capitalism of the North and not humanity that in the first place had demanded the freedom of the slave, that in the new day capital demanded the subjugation of the working class—Negro or otherwise; and it blamed the Negroes for not seeing the real issues at stake. It continued with emphasis: "It is not the Negro that was massacred in the Carolinas; it was Carolina workingmen, Carolina wage-slaves who happened to be colored men. Not as Negroes must the race rise;... it is as workingmen, as a branch of the working class, that the Negro must denounce the Carolina felonies. Only by touching that chord can he denounce to a purpose, because only then does he place himself upon that elevation that will enable him to perceive the source of the specific wrong complained of now." This point of view was destined more and more to stimulate those interested in the problem, whether they accepted it in its entirety or not. Another opinion, very different and also important, was that given in 1899 by the editor of Dixie, a magazine published in Atlanta and devoted to Southern industrial interests. Said he: "The manufacturing center of the United States will one day be located in the South; and this will come about, strange as it may seem, for the reason that the Negro is a fixture here.... Organized labor, as it exists to-day, is a menace to industry. The Negro stands as a permanent and positive barrier against labor organization in the South.... So the Negro, all unwittingly, is playing an important part in the drama of Southern industrial development. His good nature defies the Socialist." At the time this opinion seemed plausible, and yet the very next two decades were to raise the question if it was not founded on fallacious assumptions.

The real climax of labor trouble as of mob violence within the period came in Georgia and in Atlanta, a city that now assumed outstanding importance as a battleground of the problems of the New South. In April, 1909, it happened that ten white workers on the Georgia Railroad who had been placed on the "extra list" were replaced by Negroes at lower wages. Against this there was violent protest all along the route. A little more than a month later the white Firemen's Union started a strike that was intended to be the beginning of an effort to drive all Negro firemen from Southern roads, and it was soon apparent that the real contest was one occasioned by the progress in the South of organized labor on the one hand and the progress of the Negro in efficiency on the other. The essential motives that entered into the struggle were in fact the same as those that characterized the trouble in New Orleans in 1895. Said E.A. Ball, second vice-president of the Firemen's Union, in an address to the public: "It will be up to you to determine whether the white firemen now employed on the Georgia Railroad shall be accorded rights and privileges over the Negro, or whether he shall be placed on the same equality with the Negro. Also, it will be for you to determine whether or not white firemen, supporting families in and around Atlanta on a pay of $1.75 a day, shall be compelled to vacate their positions in Atlanta joint terminals for Negroes, who are willing to do the same work for $1.25." Some papers, like the Augusta Herald, said that it was a mistaken policy to give preference to Negroes when white men would ultimately have to be put in charge of trains and engines; but others, like the Baltimore News, said, "If the Negro can be driven from one skilled employment, he can be driven from another; but a country that tries to do it is flying in the face of every economic law, and must feel the evil effects of its policy if it could be carried out." At any rate feeling ran very high; for a whole week about June I there were very few trains between Atlanta and Augusta, and there were some acts of violence; but in the face of the capital at stake and the fundamental issues involved it was simply impossible for the railroad to give way. The matter was at length referred to a board of arbitration which decided that the Georgia Railroad was still to employ Negroes whenever they were found qualified and that they were to receive the same wages as white workers. Some thought that this decision would ultimately tell against the Negro, but such was not the immediate effect at least, and to all intents and purposes the white firemen had lost in the strike. The whole matter was in fact fundamentally one of the most pathetic that we have had to record. Humble white workers, desirous of improving the economic condition of themselves and their families, instead of assuming a statesmanlike and truly patriotic attitude toward their problem, turned aside into the wilderness of racial hatred and were lost.

This review naturally prompts reflection as to the whole function of the Negro laborer in the South. In the first place, what is he worth, and especially what is he worth in honest Southern opinion? It was said after the Civil War that he would not work except under compulsion; just how had he come to be regarded in the industry of the New South? In 1894 a number of large employers were asked about this point. 50 per cent said that in skilled labor they considered the Negro inferior to the white worker, 46 per cent said that he was fairly equal, and 4 per cent said that, all things considered, he was superior. As to common labor 54 per cent said that he was equal, 29 per cent superior, and 17 per cent inferior to the white worker. At the time it appeared that wages paid Negroes averaged 80 per cent of those paid white men. A similar investigation by the Chattanooga Tradesman in 1902 brought forth five hundred replies. These were summarized as follows: "We find the Negro more useful and skilled in the cotton-seed oil-mills, the lumber-mills, the foundries, brick kilns, mines, and blast-furnaces. He is superior to white labor and possibly superior to any other labor in these establishments, but not in the capacity of skillful and ingenious artisans." In this opinion, it is to be remembered, the Negro was subjected to a severe test in which nothing whatever was given to him, and at least it appears that in many lines of labor he is not less than indispensable to the progress of the South. The question then arises: Just what is the relation that he is finally to sustain to other workingmen? It would seem that white worker and black worker would long ago have realized their identity of interest and have come together. The unions, however, have been slow to admit Negroes and give them the same footing and backing as white men. Under the circumstances accordingly there remained nothing else for the Negro to do except to work wherever his services were desired and on the best terms that he was able to obtain.

6. Defamation: Brownsville

Still another line of attack was now to attempt to deprive the Negro of any credit for initiative or for any independent achievement whatsoever. In May, 1903, Alfred H. Stone contributed to the Atlantic a paper, "The Mulatto in the Negro Problem," which contended at the same time that whatever meritorious work the race had accomplished was due to the infusion of white blood and that it was the mulatto that was constantly poisoning the mind of the Negro with "radical teachings and destructive doctrines." These points found frequent iteration throughout the period, and years afterwards, in 1917, the first found formal statement in the American Journal of Sociology in an article by Edward Byron Reuter, "The Superiority of the Mulatto," which the next year was elaborated into a volume, The Mulatto in the United States. To argue the superiority of the mulatto of course is simply to argue once more the inferiority of the Negro to the white man.

All of this dispraise together presented a formidable case and one from which the race suffered immeasurably; nor was it entirely offset in the same years by the appearance even of DuBois's remarkable book, The Souls of Black Folk, or by the several uplift publications of Booker T. Washington. In passing we wish to refer to three points: (1) The effect of education on the Negro; (2) the matter of the Negro criminal (and of mortality), and (3) the quality and function of the mulatto.

Education could certainly not be blamed for the difficulties of the problem in the new day until it had been properly tried. In no one of the Southern states within the period did the Negro child receive a fair chance. He was frequently subjected to inferior teaching, dilapidated accommodations, and short terms. In the representative city of Atlanta in 1903 the white school population numbered 14,465 and the colored 8,118. The Negroes, however, while numbering 35 per cent of the whole, received but 12 per cent of the school funds. The average white teacher received $745 a year, and the Negro teacher $450. In the great reduction of the percentage of illiteracy in the race from 70 in 1880 to 30.4 in 1910 the missionary colleges—those of the American Missionary Association, the American Baptist Home Mission Society, and the Freedmen's Aid Society—played a much larger part than they are ordinarily given credit for; and it is a very, very rare occurrence that a graduate of one of the institutions sustained by these agencies, or even one who has attended them for any length of time, has to be summoned before the courts. Their influence has most decidedly been on the side of law and order. Undoubtedly some of those who have gone forth from these schools have not been very practical, and some have not gained a very firm sense of relative values in life—it would be a miracle if all had; but as a group the young people who have attended the colleges have most abundantly justified the expenditures made in their behalf, expenditures for which their respective states were not responsible but of which they reaped the benefit. From one standpoint, however, the so-called higher education did most undoubtedly complicate the problem. Those critics of the race who felt that the only function of Negroes in life was that of hewers of wood and drawers of water quite fully realized that Negroes who had been to college did not care to work longer as field laborers. Some were to prove scientific students of agriculture, but as a group they were out of the class of peons. In this they were just like white people and all other people. No one who has once seen the light chooses to live always on the plane of the "man with the hoe." Nor need it be thought that these students are unduly crowding into professional pursuits. While, for instance, the number of Negro physicians and dentists has greatly increased within recent years, the number would still have to be four or five times as great to sustain to the total Negro population the same proportion as that borne by the whole number of white physicians and dentists to the total white population.

The subjects of the criminality and the mortality of the race are in their ultimate reaches closely related, both being mainly due, as we have suggested, to the conditions under which Negroes have been forced to live. In the country districts, until 1900 at least, there was little provision for improvements in methods of cooking or in sanitation, while in cities the effects of inferior housing, poor and unlighted streets, and of the segregation of vice in Negro neighborhoods could not be otherwise than obvious. Thus it happened in such a year as 1898 that in Baltimore the Negro death rate was somewhat more and in Nashville just a little less than twice that of the white people. Legal procedure, moreover, emphasized a vicious circle; living conditions sent the Negroes to the courts in increasing numbers, and the courts sent them still farther down in the scale. There were undoubtedly some Negro thieves, some Negro murderers, and some Negroes who were incontinent; no race has yet appeared on the face of the earth that did not contain members having such propensities, and all such people should be dealt with justly by law. Our present contention is that throughout the period of which we are now speaking the dominant social system was not only such as to accentuate criminal elements but also such as even sought to discourage aspiring men. A few illustrations, drawn from widely different phases of life, must suffice. In the spring of 1903, and again in 1904, Jackson W. Giles, of Montgomery County, Alabama, contended before the Supreme Court of the United States that he and other Negroes in his county were wrongfully excluded from the franchise by the new Alabama constitution. Twice was his case thrown out on technicalities, the first time it was said because he was petitioning for the right to vote under a constitution whose validity he denied, and the second time because the Federal right that he claimed had not been passed on in the state court from whose decision he appealed. Thus the supreme tribunal in the United States evaded at the time any formal judgment as to the real validity of the new suffrage provisions. In 1903, moreover, in Alabama, Negroes charged with petty offenses and sometimes with no offense at all were still sent to convict farms or turned over to contractors. They were sometimes compelled to work as peons for a length of time; and they were flogged, starved, hunted with bloodhounds, and sold from one contractor to another in direct violation of law. One Joseph Patterson borrowed $1 on a Saturday, promising to pay the amount on the following Tuesday morning. He did not get to town at the appointed time, and he was arrested and carried before a justice of the peace, who found him guilty of obtaining money under false pretenses. No time whatever was given to the Negro to get witnesses or a lawyer, or to get money with which to pay his fine and the costs of court. He was sold for $25 to a man named Hardy, who worked him for a year and then sold him for $40 to another man named Pace. Patterson tried to escape, but was recaptured and given a sentence of six months more. He was then required to serve for an additional year to pay a doctor's bill. When the case at last attracted attention, it appeared that for $1 borrowed in 1903 he was not finally to be released before 1906. Another case of interest and importance was set in New York. In the spring of 1909 a pullman porter was arrested on the charge of stealing a card-case containing $20. The next day he was discharged as innocent. He then entered against his accuser a suit for $10,000 damages. The jury awarded him $2,500, which amount the court reduced to $300, Justice P.H. Dugro saying that a Negro when falsely imprisoned did not suffer the same amount of injury that a white man would suffer—an opinion which the New York Age very naturally characterized as "one of the basest and most offensive ever handed down by a New York judge."

In the history of the question of the mulatto two facts are outstanding. One is that before the Civil War, as was very natural under the circumstances, mulattoes became free much faster than pure Negroes; thus the census of 1850 showed that 581 of every 1000 free Negroes were mulattoes and only 83 of every 1000 slaves. Since the Civil War, moreover, the mulatto element has rapidly increased, advancing from 11.2 per cent of the Negro population in 1850 to 20.9 per cent in 1910, or from 126 to 264 per 1000. On the whole question of the function of this mixed element the elaborate study, that of Reuter, is immediately thrown out of court by its lack of accuracy. The fundamental facts on which it rests its case are not always true, and if premises are false conclusions are worthless. No work on the Negro that calls Toussaint L'Ouverture and Sojourner Truth mulattoes and that will not give the race credit for several well-known pure Negroes of the present day, can long command the attention of scholars. This whole argument on the mulatto goes back to the fallacy of degrading human beings by slavery for two hundred years and then arguing that they have not the capacity or the inclination to rise. In a country predominantly white the quadroon has frequently been given some advantage that his black friend did not have, from the time that one was a house-servant and the other a field-hand; but no scientific test has ever demonstrated that the black boy is intellectually inferior to the fair one. In America, however, it is the fashion to place upon the Negro any blame or deficiency and to claim for the white race any merit that an individual may show. Furthermore—and this is a point not often remarked in discussions of the problem—the element of genius that distinguishes the Negro artist of mixed blood is most frequently one characteristically Negro rather than Anglo-Saxon. Much has been made of the fact that within the society of the race itself there have been lines of cleavage, a comparatively few people, very fair in color, sometimes drawing off to themselves. This is a fact, and it is simply one more heritage from slavery, most tenacious in some conservative cities along the coast. Even there, however, old lines are vanishing and the fusion of different groups within the race rapidly going forward. Undoubtedly there has been some snobbery, as there always is, and a few quadroons and octoroons have crossed the color line and been lost to the race; but these cases are after all comparatively few in number, and the younger generation is more and more emphasizing the ideals of racial solidarity. In the future there may continue to be lines of cleavage in society within the race, but the standards governing these will primarily be character and merit. On the whole, then, the mulatto has placed himself squarely on the side of the difficulties, aspirations, and achievements of the Negro people and it is simply an accident and not inherent quality that accounts for the fact that he has been so prominent in the leadership of the race.

The final refutation of defamation, however, is to be found in the actual achievement of members of the race themselves. The progress in spite of handicaps continued to be amazing. Said the New York Sun early in 1907 (copied by the Times) of "Negroes Who Have Made Good": "Junius C. Groves of Kansas produces 75,000 bushels of potatoes every year, the world's record. Alfred Smith received the blue ribbon at the World's Fair and first prize in England for his Oklahoma-raised cotton. Some of the thirty-five patented devices of Granville T. Woods, the electrician, form part of the systems of the New York elevated railways and the Bell Telephone Company. W. Sidney Pittman drew the design of the Collis P. Huntington memorial building, the largest and finest at Tuskegee. Daniel H. Williams, M.D., of Chicago, was the first surgeon to sew up and heal a wounded human heart. Mary Church Terrell addressed in three languages at Berlin recently the International Association for the Advancement of Women. Edward H. Morris won his suit between Cook County and the city of Chicago, and has a law practice worth $20,000 a year."

In one department of effort, that of sport, the Negro was especially prominent. In pugilism, a diversion that has always been noteworthy for its popular appeal, Peter Jackson was well known as a contemporary of John L. Sullivan. George Dixon was, with the exception of one year, either bantamweight or featherweight champion for the whole of the period from 1890 to 1900; and Joe Gans was lightweight champion from 1902 to 1908. Joe Walcott was welterweight champion from 1901 to 1904, and was succeeded by Dixie Kid, who held his place from 1904 to 1908. In 1908, to the chagrin of thousands and with a victory that occasioned a score of racial conflicts throughout the South and West and that resulted in several deaths, Jack Johnson became the heavyweight champion of America, a position that he was destined to hold for seven years. In professional baseball the Negro was proscribed, though occasionally a member of the race played on teams of the second group. Of semi-professional teams the American Giants and the Leland Giants of Chicago, and the Lincoln Giants of New York, were popular favorites, and frequently numbered on their rolls players of the first order of ability. In intercollegiate baseball W.C. Matthews of Harvard was outstanding for several years about 1904. In intercollegiate football Lewis at Harvard in the earlier nineties and Bullock at Dartmouth a decade later were unusually prominent, while Marshall of Minnesota in 1905 became an All-American end. Pollard of Brown, a half-back, in 1916, and Robeson of Rutgers, an end, in 1918, also won All-American honors. About the turn of the century Major Taylor was a champion bicycle rider, and John B. Taylor of Pennsylvania was an intercollegiate champion in track athletics. Similarly fifteen years later Binga Dismond of Howard and Chicago, Sol Butler of Dubuque, and Howard P. Drew of Southern California were destined to win national and even international honors in track work. Drew broke numerous records as a runner and Butler was the winner in the broad jump at the Inter-Allied Games in the Pershing Stadium in Paris. In 1920 E. Gourdin of Harvard came prominently forward as one of the best track athletes that institution had ever had.

In the face, then, of the Negro's unquestionable physical ability and prowess the supreme criticism that he was called on to face within the period was all the more hard to bear. In all nations and in all ages courage under fire as a soldier has been regarded as the sterling test of manhood, and by this standard we have seen that in war the Negro had more than vindicated himself. His very honor as a soldier was now to be attacked.

In August, 1906, Companies B, C, and D of the Twenty-fifth Regiment, United States Infantry, were stationed at Fort Brown, Brownsville, Texas, where they were forced to exercise very great self-restraint in the face of daily insults from the citizens. On the night of the 13th occurred a riot in which one citizen of the town was killed, another wounded, and the chief of police injured. The people of the town accused the soldiers of causing the riot and demanded their removal. Brigadier-General E.A. Garlington, Inspector General, was sent to find the guilty men, and, failing in his mission, he recommended dishonorable discharge for the regiment. On this recommendation President Roosevelt on November 9 dismissed "without honor" the entire battalion, disqualifying its members for service thereafter in either the military or the civil employ of the United States. When Congress met in December Senator J.B. Foraker of Ohio placed himself at the head of the critics of the President's action, and in a ringing speech said of the discharged men that "they asked no favors because they were Negroes, but only justice because they were men." On January 22 the Senate authorized a general investigation of the whole matter, a special message from the President on the 14th having revoked the civil disability of the discharged soldiers. The case was finally disposed of by a congressional act approved March 3, 1909, which appointed a court of inquiry before which any discharged man who wished to reënlist had the burden of establishing his innocence—a procedure which clearly violated the fundamental principle in law that a man is to be accounted innocent until he is proved guilty.

7. The Dawn of a To-morrow

The bitter period that we have been considering was not wholly without its bright features, and with the new century new voices began to be articulate. In May, 1900, there was in Montgomery a conference in which Southern men undertook as never before to make a study of their problems. That some who came had yet no real conception of the task and its difficulties may be seen from the suggestion of one man that the Negroes be deported to the West or to the islands of the sea. Several men advocated the repeal of the Fifteenth Amendment. The position outstanding for its statesmanship was that of ex-Governor William A. McCorkle of West Virginia, who asserted that the right of franchise was the vital and underlying principle of the life of the people of the United States and must not be violated, that the remedy for present conditions was an "honest and inflexible educational and property basis, administered fairly for black and white," and finally that the Negro Problem was not a local problem but one to be settled by the hearty coöperation of all of the people of the United States.

Along with the mob violence, moreover, that disgraced the opening years of the century was an increasing number of officers who were disposed to do their duty even under trying circumstances. Less than two months after his notorious inaugural Governor Vardaman of Mississippi interested the reading public by ordering out a company of militia when a lynching was practically announced to take place, and by boarding a special train to the scene to save the Negro. In this same state in 1909, when the legislature passed a law levying a tax for the establishment of agricultural schools for white students, and levied this on the property of white people and Negroes alike, though only the white people were to have schools, a Jasper County Negro contested the matter before the Chancery Court, which declared the law unconstitutional, and he was further supported by the Supreme Court of the state. Such a decision was inspiring, but it was not the rule, and already the problems of another decade were being foreshadowed. Already also under the stress of conditions in the South many Negroes were seeking a haven in the North. By 1900 there were as many Negroes in Pennsylvania as in Missouri, whereas twenty years before there had been twice as many in the latter state. There were in Massachusetts more than in Delaware, whereas twenty years before Delaware had had 50 per cent more than Massachusetts. Within twenty years Virginia gained 312,000 white people and only 29,000 Negroes, the latter having begun a steady movement to New York. North Carolina gained 400,000 white people and only 93,000 Negroes. South Carolina and Mississippi, however, were not yet affected in large measure by the movement.

This organization is outstanding as an effort in coöperation between the races for the improvement of the condition of the Negro. Of special interest along the line of economic betterment has been the National League on Urban Conditions among Negroes, now known as the National Urban League, which also has numerous branches with headquarters in New York and through whose offices thousands of Negroes have been placed in honorable employment. The National Urban League was also formally organized in 1910; it represented a merging of the different agencies working in New York City in behalf of the social betterment of the Negro population, especially of the National League for the Protection of Colored Women and of the Committee for Improving the Industrial Conditions among Negroes in New York, both of which agencies had been organized in 1906. As we shall see, the work of the League was to be greatly expanded within the next decade by the conditions brought about by the war; and under the direction of the executive secretary, Eugene Kinckle Jones, with the assistance of alert and patriotic officers, its work was to prove one of genuinely national service.

Interesting also was a new concern on the part of the young Southern college man about the problems at his door. Within just a few years after the close of the period now considered, Phelps-Stokes fellowships for the study of problems relating to the Negro were founded at the Universities of Virginia and Georgia; it was expected that similar fellowships would be founded in other institutions; and there was interest in the annual meetings of the Southern Sociological Congress and the University Commission on Southern Race Questions.

Thus from one direction and another at length broke upon a "vale of tears" a new day of effort and of hope. For the real contest the forces were gathering. The next decade was to be one of unending bitterness and violence, but also one in which the Negro was to rise as never before to the dignity of self-reliant and courageous manhood.