of tbe 
 
 ®[nibersiitj> of iaortlj Carolina 
 
 3(ns!titute for 3i0le£fearcfi 
 
 Social Science 
 
 32-fe"-'P53n 
 
UNIVERSITY OF N.C. AT OHAPEL HILL 
 
 10000364348 
 
THE NEW NEGRO 
 
 HIS POLITICAL, CIVIL AND MENTAL STATUS 
 
 AND 
 
 RELATED ESSAYS 
 

The New Negro 
 
 HIS POLITICAL, CIVIL AND MENTAL STATUS 
 
 AND 
 
 RELATED ESSAYS 
 
 BY 
 
 WILLIAM PICKENS, 
 
 Dean of Morgan College, Baltimore, Md. 
 
 Author of "The Heir of Slaves," "The 
 
 Superior Race," "A Visit to the 
 
 Art Centers of the Old 
 
 World, etc." 
 
 THE NEALE PUBLISHING COMPANY 
 
 440 FOURTH AVENUE, NEW YORK CITY 
 
 MCMXVI 
 
Copyright, 1916, by 
 
 THE NEALE PUBLISHING COMPANY. 
 
Affectionately Dedicated 
 
 to 
 
 The White and the Black Men of To- 
 morrow: A Faith in Whose Essential 
 Humanity and Justice Is the In- 
 spiration of These Pages. 
 
 
TABLE OF CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 The Renaissance of the Negro Race 9 
 
 •The Constitutional Status of the Negro from 
 
 i860 to 1870 16 
 
 The Negro a Test for Our Civilization 30 
 
 Fifty Years After Emancipation 44 
 
 Grounds of Hope 61 
 
 Frederick Douglass 71 
 
 Alexander Hamilton 103 
 
 Abraham Lincoln 119 
 
 Industry 148 
 
 Education 155 
 
 From the Christian Viewpoint 176 
 
 Lynching 190 
 
 The Ultimate Effects of Segregation 206 
 
 The New Negro 224 
 
THE RENAISSANCE 
 
 OF 
 
 THE NEGRO RACE 
 
 The Great Sphinx at Gizeh, which for many cen- 
 turies has looked with steady, enigmatical gaze 
 over the plains and the changes of civilization, 
 scarred and marred, but in the main enduring the 
 attacks of time and tide, is symbolic of much of 
 African history. The oldest authentic history is 
 Egypt; Egypt was the mother of civilization. In 
 the dawn of civilization there were no hard and 
 fast lines among the colors of the human race, but 
 it is certain that the darker groups matured more 
 quickly and took the lead. Milleniums before the 
 wolf suckled Romulus, many centuries before Ho- 
 mer sung, the black and brown and yellowish 
 peoples ruled in Egypt, overran the civilized and 
 known world, and brought and wrought the usual 
 changes of civilization before Greece and Rome 
 were even names in the earth. But altho Africa, 
 with its warm climate, its impressionable people 
 and its Nile valley, was fitted for the birth and 
 childhood of civihzation, ,under the conditions 
 that obtained in the ancient world, it was not 
 fitted for indefinite development; old Egypt was 
 flanked by burning deserts, and had what was at 
 
10 THE NEW NEGRO 
 
 that time the unknown, dark and inaccessible con- 
 tinent at its back. It was sometimes to be overrun 
 by the powers that grew in the more open and 
 accessible region of southwestern Asia, and then 
 it was to yield to the virile and aggressive people 
 who grew up in Europe and who had lighted their 
 torch of civilization at the lamp of Egypt itself. 
 
 The black people of this ancient world were not 
 of low caste or marked as inferiors in any special, 
 way. They were by no means a slave or servile 
 class; the blood of their veins was poured all 
 through the civilized and half-civilized world, and 
 its traces are clear today in southern Asia as far 
 as India and in southern Europe. Does the trav- 
 eller not notice the black people among the Turks, 
 and the beautiful brown face that is occasionally 
 met among the Italians? It is said, too, that these 
 African people had a cotton industry before Eng- 
 land, and that they originated the smelting of iron. 
 Think of what the invention of iron conferred 
 upon civilization. Our civilization without its iron 
 would be like the human body without its skeleton : 
 it would collapse, it could not stand and go, it 
 could only crawl and creep. 
 
 But this civilization of black men, after per- 
 forming its early mission in the world, was to have 
 its dark ages. The African world happened to be 
 overrun by early Islam (submission), instead 
 of by early Christianity. Islam is ritualistic and 
 formal and fixed, and is not progressive. Greece 
 and Rome, when they began to awake, enjoyed the 
 advantages of situation, of accessibility, of a coast 
 
THE NEW NEGRO ii 
 
 line suitable for commerce and trade, of free inter- 
 course and contact with many other peoples. It is 
 known that Rome was not an inventor, but that she 
 adopted and adapted the best that she found 
 among the subject peoples. This was her superior 
 genius. The civilization of Europe is the growth 
 and work of many minds and peoples, the con- 
 fluence of many streams. On the other hand, 
 whatever civilization was developed by the iron- 
 worker in the heart of Africa, was a straight lift 
 out of his own life and environment, a creature of 
 his own generations, a sort of progress over his 
 dead self. 
 
 And in addition to the ritualism from the Mo- 
 hammedan world Africa later received a still 
 more blighting visitation from the Christian world 
 — the slave-hunter. This abortive horror from 
 Europe and America came upon Africa as a very 
 contradiction of all Christian principles. This 
 emissary from the Christian world brought an era 
 that was worse than heathendom. Whatever civ- 
 ilization Africa had already developed was cut off 
 and broken up. The greed for blood-money took 
 hold of the tribes, setting chief against chief and 
 clan against clan. What need was there for the 
 slow processes of iron-work and textile industry, 
 when a strong tribe could get goods or gold by 
 simply hunting down the members of the neigh- 
 boring tribes and selling them to white men ? This 
 trade in men, brought in by civilized people from 
 Christian lands, was the worst blight that ever 
 overtook a continent. It is sometimes said by way 
 
12 THE NEW NEGRO 
 
 of excuse that the blacks in Africa were already 
 holding each other as slaves and were glad enough 
 to sell slaves to white men. If this were the whole 
 truth it would not be an excuse — but it is only the 
 half truth. The Negroes had a normal domestic 
 slavery, such as is found in every infant civiliza- 
 tion, such as was in Europe when Spartan noble 
 held helot and Roman patrician held plebeian. But 
 this great commerce in men, with its insatiable de- 
 mands, its cunning and its avarice, which changed 
 a whole continent into a slave corral, was never 
 before known in Africa and has never been known 
 in any other part of the civilized world. Is 
 there any wonder that centuries of such ravishment 
 should have destroyed African culture and broken 
 up whatever civilizing influences were at work 
 there? And altho Greece had looked up to the 
 pyramids of Egypt as the lighthouses of civiliza- 
 tion, and altho black men had not been marked 
 as special subjects for slavery before the fifteenth 
 century, yet under the influence of this lucrative 
 foreign commerce in human flesh black man and 
 slave became synonymous. 
 
 "Jove fixed it certain, that whatever day 
 Man makes a slave takes half his worth away." 
 
 Philosophically the pronoun his in this quota- 
 tion can refer with equal truth to the slave or to 
 the man who enslaves him. 
 
 Africa, which had produced the Fathers of the 
 early Christian church, now had many millions of 
 its people stolen and carried away into captivity by 
 
THE NEW NEGRO 13 
 
 Christian nations. The trade in men was profit- 
 able in money and made or straightened out the 
 fortunes of many a noble house. The energetic 
 Dutch wrested the trade from the indolent Por- 
 tuguese who had started it. So lucrative was the 
 business that the English took it from the Dutch 
 by war. But what providence was at work here? 
 The Negro blood was being carried to every civ- 
 ilized country, many millions coming to America. 
 The Negro became the major part of the popula- 
 tion in many of the West Indies, in parts of Brazil, 
 and practically half the population in much of the 
 southern United States. The children of the ex- 
 patriated slaves have become an ineradicable part 
 of the vast New World. In the progress of 
 civilization they have attained their freedom and 
 varying degrees of citizenship. In Latin America 
 they are accorded a place in civilization rather 
 more liberal than that which is accorded them in 
 Anglo-Saxon countries. This is true in spite of the 
 fact that the Negro has made the most substantial 
 progress in those parts of North America where 
 he is in contact with the Anglo-Saxon. And the 
 fact that he enjoys less equality there than in Bra- 
 zil, for example, would be very strange were it 
 not to be explained by the difference between the 
 natures of the Teutonic and the Latin races. The 
 latter have a much less intense race consciousness, 
 which permits them to quickly assimilate other 
 peoples. This difference is noticeable from the 
 time of Caesar and the Teutonic tribes, and is seen 
 to-day in the difference between the cordial equal- 
 
14 THE NEW NEGRO 
 
 ity which is accorded darker people in Paris and 
 the reserved toleration which they sometimes meet 
 in London — as well as in the difference between 
 the absolutely equal rights which the Negro enjoys 
 in Rio de Janeiro and the fine bigotry and benevo- 
 lent snobbishness with which he is often burdened 
 in Boston. But whatever his condition, a provi- 
 dence has given him the widest contact, has scat- 
 tered his scions in all the earth and is making him 
 one of the most versatile races of modern history. 
 He stands to-day on the threshold of a renais- 
 sance of civilization and culture after four hun- 
 dred years of interruption by captivity, slavery 
 and oppression. 
 
 This awakening of the darker and the more 
 handicapped people is to be noted all over 
 the world. Japan from the vantage ground of its 
 island independence, has led off nobly. China is 
 beginning to shake off the lethargy and conserv- 
 atism of thousands of years. The brown Hindu is! 
 growing conscious, the Philippino is pleading and/ 
 expectant, and the Ethiopian in Africa is stretch^ 
 ing forth his hand. In spite of the traditions of 
 the slave-hunt and the repressive measures of the 
 Christian foreigner in Africa, the natives are said 
 to have captured the unskilled labor market and 
 to be encroaching upon the skilled labor of the 
 whites. They are even clamoring for the vote in 
 the aboriginal land of their fathers. What is to 
 be the future of the African in Africa ? When the 
 Sphinx speaks, what will he say? In the West 
 Indies the blacks are asking and receiving a 
 
THE NEW NEGRO 15 
 
 greater share in their own government. In the 
 United States during the few years of their free- 
 dom the colored people have made a material, in- 
 tellectual and moral progress which Is wondered 
 at even by the white people among whom they live 
 — and yet they are stoutly held back and hindered 
 in civil and political development. And they are 
 now awakening to the truth that they must advance 
 along all lines to make their advancement secure 1 
 that they must "straighten out their front," as they 
 say in the European war. The struggle of fifty 
 years has made them know that their position in 
 this civilization cannot be secure unless they have 
 the full citizenship of the country. These essays 
 aim to voice that aspiration. Conditions will be 
 described from different viewpoints, without un- 
 necessary repetition. The condition of the Amer- 
 ican Negro is hardly sufficiently known to the 
 members of his own race. The history of the.race 
 has been distorted j^r^burled In contempt. But 
 along with the great advance which the Negro can 
 be expected to Biake,ia the United States in the 
 next fifty years, every f^w years should se.e a book 
 up to date on the general subject of "The Renais- 
 sance of the Negro Race" or "The New Negro," 
 the subjects respectively of the first and last essays 
 of this volume. 
 
THE CONSTITUTIONAL STATUS OF 
 THE NEGRO FROM i860 TO 1870 
 
 ? 
 
 The second decade of the latter half of the nine- 
 teenth century was the most epochal period in 
 American legal history since the time of the origin 
 of the national constitution. So far as the Amer- 
 ican Negro is concerned, this period marks the 
 greatest possible changes in legal and constitu- 
 tional status. Three years before the opening of 
 this decade the highest court of the nation had de- 
 .clared the Negro to have only the status of the 
 hower animals, while at the close of the decade the 
 Negro had acquired a status in the organic law of 
 the land which entitled him to membership in the 
 Supreme Court itself. In this period the Negro 
 changed from a chattel to a person, from an ani- 
 mal to a man, from a slave to a citizen, so far as 
 the supreme law of the land is concerned. 
 
 This period also contains the two extremes in 
 the scale of discriminations against the American 
 Negro in statute law. Before this period there 
 were comparatively few statutory discriminations 
 against the black race in the Southern states. For 
 in that section the Negro had no personal rights at 
 law, and discriminatory statutes were not neces- 
 sary. When a discrimination is made against a 
 class in statute law, it is thereby imphed that this 
 
 16 
 
THE NEW NEGRO 17 
 
 class has at least some rights based on the funda- 
 mental law of the land. Therefore, the legislative 
 discriminations against black people before this 
 period were found chiefly in the border states and 
 in the "free" states against "free" Negroes — a 
 strange contradiction of terms. But this decade, 
 from i860 to 1870, also contains the extremes of 
 the Negro's legal status in the South: at the open- 
 ing of the decade stood the Negro slave, at the 
 close stood the Negro senator; after the middle 
 of this period the South passed the extreme "Black 
 Laws," intended to nullify the effect of the Thir- 
 teenth Amendment as far as possible, while at the 
 end of the decade came the Fifteenth Amendment, 
 marking an epoch. These "Black Laws" of the 
 South were enacted between 1865 and 1868 and 
 were inspired by the ratification of the Thirteenth 
 Amendment. They had for their models, it is 
 claimed, the similar laws that had been passed in 
 previous decades against the helpless "free" 
 Negroes of the North and the border states. But 
 they outdid the models. 
 
 These "Black Laws" are worth considering, for 
 in them are found a sufficient cause and a very 
 cogent reason for the Fourteenth and Fifteenth 
 Amendments. There is really no need for the 
 charge that these two Amendments were the in- 
 spiration of revenge or of the desire for the 
 political advantage of the party in power. At any 
 rate, such great products of statesmanship should 
 stand on their merits, and not be condemned, even 
 if it could be shown that they were originally based 
 
1 8 THE NEW NEGRO 
 
 in unworthy motives. It does not lessen the beauty 
 of the rose if the plant was sprouted in manure. 
 But the argument of the ultra-motive is unneces- 
 sary, for the "Black Laws" of the South were the 
 immediate occasion, and doubtless the only effi- 
 cient cause, of the Fourteenth Amendment. After 
 the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment, if the 
 former slave states had accorded the ex-slaves 
 even half justice, it is very likely that the Negro's 
 friends in Congress would have quickly forgotten 
 him — ^as they have since done in the face of the 
 worst injustices. But it was not unnatural for the 
 South, after the ratification of the Thirteenth 
 Amendment which gave the Negro only the lowest 
 degree of freedom, to try to pass systems of laws 
 that would cause the Negro's freedom to make 
 as Httle change as possible in the social organism 
 and in his relation to the white race. Not to have 
 done so would have been evidence of superhuman 
 foresight and self-control. From the standpoint 
 of the Negro's interests, however, these laws v/ere 
 "black" not only in name and aim, but in their very 
 nature. Instead of being the property of a person- 
 ally interested master, the Negro was to be con- 
 verted into the slave of a much less sympathetic 
 society in general. The "free" Negro's lot was 
 to be much harder than that of the slave had been; 
 for altho no longer entitled to "board and keep" 
 from his employer, yet he was to be forbidden by 
 law to move or to change his employment. This 
 would have left his wages at the mercy of the em- 
 ployer. It is a law of economics that the mobility 
 
THE NEW NEGRO 19 
 
 of labor is necessary to the normal regulation of 
 wages. Some states absolutely forbade the freed- 
 men to engage in skilled work, leaving for them 
 only the most menial and least profitable occupa- 
 tions. In the famous old state of South Carolina 
 the employer was to be allowed to inflict corporal 
 punishment, or as the euphemism of the law put 
 it, to "moderately correct" the servants. "Mas- 
 ter" and "servant" were the terms used in these 
 laws, — not employer and employee. The vagrancy 
 laws and laws of apprenticeship were all of a na- 
 ture to entrap the ignorant and take advantage of 
 the weak. Famous old South Carolina even sought 
 to regulate the amount of "politeness" due from 
 the "servant" to the "master's family." 
 
 In the face of all these stereotyped facts, why 
 should any honest student of history have to resort 
 to any intangible and indefinite thing like a feeling 
 of revenge or a desire for political and party ad- 
 vantage as an explanation of the motives of those 
 who conceived and passed the Fourteenth Amend- 
 ment? This Amendment was passed by the friends 
 of freedom to k e e p the Thirteenth Amendment 
 from being a mere farce. They sought thereby to 
 secure for the Negro the protecting power of the 
 ballot, as the only effective means of influencing 
 his civil and political interests in a government like 
 this. There was no thought or hope of making 
 him dominant in a country that was predominantly 
 white. But the backers of the Amendment sought 
 to lead the state governments to this reasonable 
 end by inducing rather than compelling them. The 
 
20 THE NEW NEGRO 
 
 effect of this amendment was to be based on impar- 
 tial mathematics, and the choice was to be left to 
 the majority of the voters of the state. The state 
 was simply not to have a power in the national 
 government based on a population which the state 
 itself did not recognize as a part of its own citi- 
 zenry. 
 
 Up to 1865 nearly all of the states of the Union 
 had restricted the right to vote to white men. After 
 the Negro was freed some Northern states volun- 
 tarily removed this restriction. The friends of 
 freedom hoped that the Fourteenth Amendment 
 would induce others to do so, by making it to the 
 advantage of their national representative power. 
 But from the ratification of the Amendment in 
 1868 to 1870 not a single state, with the sole ex- 
 ception of Minnesota, heeded the warning or 
 yielded to the inducement of the suffrage clause of 
 the Fourteenth Amendment. And it might be 
 noted in passing that there were not enough Ne- 
 groes in Minnesota to make any difference either 
 way. Up to 1870 fourteen states still restricted 
 the suffrage to white men. This obstinacy on the 
 part of the reactionaries caused the friends of free- 
 dom in 1870 to ratify the Fifteenth Amendment, 
 which substituted must for persuasion and vir- 
 tually penalized discrimination against any race in 
 the matter of the suffrage. What evidence is there 
 that any one of these steps was taken in a spirit 
 of revenge? Revenge usually acts in haste and 
 without waiting on the development of other suffi- 
 cient causes. The persuasion of the Fourteenth 
 
THE NEW NEGRO 21 
 
 Amendment was not resorted to till three years 
 after the close of the war, and when there had 
 risen the plainest need for even more than per- 
 suasion in the interests of justice and humanity. 
 And the Fifteenth Amendment did not appear till 
 five years after the war, when even the Fourteenth 
 Amendment had failed to persuade. Why should 
 revenge wait so long and advance so reluctantly? 
 It seems that the friends of freedom, who had the 
 political power in their hands, were slow to anger 
 and plenteous in hope. 
 
 This suffrage amendment was to be a bulwark 
 to the Hberties not only of black men, but of all 
 men in America ; it was directed not only against 
 the "Black Laws" of the South, but against politi- 
 cal and civil slavery everywhere in the nation. It 
 is interesting to note that of the states who were 
 members of the Union up to 1865, only five can 
 be listed in the honor roll of those who have never 
 discriminated against the Negro voter: Maine, 
 Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, 
 and Vermont. 
 
 The constant question raised by these discrimi- 
 nating laws is: What is a Negro? When we are 
 going to discriminate against a fellow, we must be 
 careful and definite in pointing him out. And so 
 each set of discriminating laws contains its own 
 definition of the word Negro, and the definitions 
 have differed widely. At first in some parts of the 
 North the Negro was defined as any person who 
 was visibly colored. It is plain, however, that if 
 the matter is left to the eyes, millions of American 
 
22 THE NEW NEGRO 
 
 "Negroes" will have to be taken into the Cau- 
 casian race, — and so most of the state legislatures 
 reduced their definitions to the finer discrimina- 
 tions of mathematics. These mathematical defini- 
 tions vary all the way from one-fourth of the blood 
 of the black man to a mere one-sixteenth; but some 
 laws of the gallant South go so far as to say that 
 if one has even one drop of Negro blood in his 
 veins he is a Negro. Thus it is seen that "the 
 Negro," so far as the United States is concerned, 
 is an arbitrary creature of law and includes within 
 its scope hundreds of thousands of people who by 
 every law of God and nature and reason are mem- 
 bers of the Caucasian race, principally Anglo- 
 Saxons. For whatever the legal definition, it is 
 the common practice in the United States to class 
 as Negroes all persons known to have any part of 
 Negro blood. The white American, therefore, 
 ascribes the same potency to Negro blood which 
 he ascribes to the blood of Jesus Christ, — that it 
 only takes one drop "to make you whole." The 
 statement needs no proof that there are thousands 
 of people in America who are related to the Negro 
 and do not know it, and others who know it but 
 also know that its acknowledgment would not in- 
 crease their comforts in life. 
 
 It was especially necessary to define the term 
 Negro when the intermarriage laws were being 
 considered. These queer laws have always had 
 the support of the vast majority of white people, 
 wherever the Negro has become a considerable 
 part of the population, and especially after the 
 
THE NEW NEGRO 23 
 
 Negro was freed. I call them "queer laws" be- 
 cause they always, in spirit and in effect if not in 
 letter, tend to make the naturally honorable relar 
 tion of marriage a worse crime than the naturally 
 dishonorable practice of illicit intercourse, — whichj 
 abuse, however, is practiced chiefly by the men of \ 
 the stronger against the women of the weaker! 
 group. For this illicitness there is in practice no \ 
 punishment, while the sure penalties of intermar- \ 
 riage range all the way from a fine of one hundred I 
 dollars to ten years in the penitentiary, — and the I 
 danger of still more horrible extra-legal penalties. 
 There could be but one result of thus outlawing 
 decency and tolerating indecency, — of putting 
 honor under the foot of dishonor, — and that re- 
 sult has been attained in the United States; 
 namely, millions of interracial illegitimates, and 
 some admixture of Caucasian blood in at least 
 nine-tenths of the American Negro group. 
 
 Such is the American group against which these 
 discriminating laws have directly and indirectly 
 aimed. In the historic decade (i860 to 1870) 
 many forms of discrimination and distinction 
 began to appear in the laws of the South : in public 
 travel, in the courts and in the matter of suffrage. 
 In 1865 ^nd 1866 "Jim Crow" laws were passed 
 in Florida, Mississippi and Texas, but not in the 
 other states until 1881, when Tennessee started 
 the new era of "Jim Crow," which has since over- 
 run the whole South and threatens, as did slavery 
 itself, to invade the North. Is it not queer that 
 this passion should have gained such headway so 
 
24 THE NEW NEGRO 
 
 long after slavery? It would seem that the mon 
 the Negro advances in education and refinement, 
 the less acceptable he becomes to a large number 
 of white people. In North Carolina or South 
 Carolina a Negro may be taken into the white 
 people's car if he be a criminal or a lunatic; but 
 if he is a gentleman and a scholar, it will be a 
 serious offense against earth and heaven, subject 
 to heavy fine, — and when his train reaches Geor- 
 gia, even the conductor may be fined one thousand 
 dollars! This race distinction on the cars serves 
 no useful, honorable purpose which classified pas- 
 senger tickets would not serve. But of all the 
 humiliation, wrong and robbery possible against 
 a free people, the devil and the Sicilian tyrants 
 \ working together could never have devised a more 
 ingenious scheme than the "Jim Crow" car. 
 
 As to the courts. Until 1870 the laws of 
 
 Iowa forbade the Negro to practice law; many 
 
 states sought to invalidate or restrict the testimony 
 
 of a Negro witness against a white person; and 
 
 most reluctantly of all has any state conceded the 
 
 Negro the right to be a juror, even where both 
 
 parties to the suit are Negroes. In law and in 
 
 theory the Fifteenth Amendment, March 30, 
 
 A 1 870, repealed all statutes and nullified all con- 
 
 ' / stitutional clauses discriminating against people on 
 
 / account of race, color, or previous condition of 
 
 / servitude, but in practice in the United States the 
 
 / Negro is still handicapped as a lawyer, discredited 
 
 j as a witness and almost universally excluded from 
 
 ^-- — juries. This is queer again in the face of the 
 
THE NEW NEGRO 25 
 
 almost unanimous testimony of the courts to the 
 effect that the Negro juryman Is more IncHned to 
 convict a real Negro criminal than Is the white 
 juryman. 
 
 The Reconstruction constitutions of the South, 
 in 1868 and 1869, following the Fourteenth 
 Amendment, gave the Negroes the ballot. It is 
 needless to say that this was not the will of the 
 white majority. And It must always be said of 
 these Reconstruction governments that, whatever 
 faults they may have had, they made the first, and 
 up to the present time the last, serious and 
 straight-going efforts to establish real democratic- 
 republican organization in the South. In this era 
 the Congress of the United States was in the hands 
 of the friends of freedom, and in 1866 the Negro 
 was given the ballot in all the territories of the 
 United States. On June 8, 1867, the Congress 
 gave the ballot to the Negroes of the District of 
 Columbia, over the President's veto and against 
 the will of the white Inhabitants. In a popular 
 vote on the proposition the city of Washington 
 returned 6,521 votes against enfranchising the 
 blacks and 35 votes for It; while Georgetown re- 
 turned the Interesting figures of 812 votes against 
 the proposition, and for It one vote. This record 
 of fifty years ago is sufficient to indicate what 
 would be the condition in Washington, D. C, if 
 it were left to Its own devices. 
 
 Such are the facts of obstinate resistance to the 
 Negro's actual freedom, which brought the friends 
 of freedom In Congress rather slowly around to 
 
26 THE NEW NEGRO 
 
 the necessity of adopting the Fourteenth, and when 
 that failed, the Fifteenth Amendment. I repeat 
 that if, after the passage of the Thirteenth 
 Amendment, the legislatures and courts and other 
 creatures of popular suffrage had shown a genius 
 for doing justice to the Negro, it is likely that 
 his friends in Congress would have forgotten him 
 entirely, that the two subsequent amendments 
 would not have been proposed and that he would 
 have been left outside of the Constitutional pale 
 of citizenship indefinitely. The Thirteenth, Four- 
 teenth and Fifteenth Amendments put the enemies 
 of freedom successively on trial, and each time 
 they failed. Yea, even against the direct decree of 
 the Fifteenth Amendment have they defeated 
 democracy by indirection and duplicity. If the 
 aim of the Fifteenth Amendment should be finally 
 defeated, it would be the ultimate failure of de- 
 mocracy, — but there are late indications that in 
 the end it will not fail. And of all the many- 
 angled struggle which the colored people are sup- 
 porting in this country for their advancement and 
 ultimate security, the central aim of every fight- 
 ing line should be full-fledged citizenship. 
 
 There is no doubt about the truth of the plain 
 statement that the Negro race in the United 
 States of America does not get a "square deal." 
 But we observe frequent efforts to minimize the 
 appearance of this wrong by the ambiguous state- 
 ment that it is "natural" under the circumstances. 
 I call the statement ambiguous because in one 
 sense of the word every fact of life and history is 
 
THE NEW NEGRO 27 
 
 natural; all virtue and vice, lust and love are 
 natural. Many natural things are very undesir- 
 able, — and fortunately some of them are not in- 
 destructible or unalterable. It may be natural 
 for the white race to disfranchise, "Jin^-Crow" 
 and burn Negroes, but it naturally feels unnatural 
 to the Negro, and he is naturally opposed to that 
 procedure. Is it not natural for the victim to be 
 uncomfortable under these things, to complain 
 against them, to organize and fight them? The 
 naturalness of injustice, if it be natural, does not 
 make it one whit more just. It is natural, or at 
 least it is historic, that men will rob and commit 
 murder and bastardy, — but there seems to be 
 something in man which is higher than nature and 
 which fights against these things. 
 
 The same sort of fallacy in reasoning is re- 
 sorted to when the effort is made to palliate the 
 wrongs done in one section by stating the fact that 
 the same or similar wrongs have been done, are 
 being done or will be done to the Negro in other 
 sections or eventually in all sections of the United 
 States. What on earth has this to do with the 
 wrong, except to make it more horrible? Does 
 it justify wrong to show that other people have 
 done it, are doing it, or may do it? If so, then 
 sin itself ought to be the fairest thing in the world, 
 for all men in all ages and all countries have com- 
 mitted it. The poor sinning South painstakingly 
 points out and tabulates every single instance of 
 its own wrongs against black men which can be 
 found repeated in the North; and when the North 
 
28 THE NEW NEGRO 
 
 slips from virtue in the same path, it cries out 
 Pharisaically that such horrors are common or 
 even popular in the South. If mere ubiquity justi- 
 fies, remember that the devil's work is ubiquitous, 
 too. 
 
 Again I have read books and arguments that 
 sought to minimize the importance of the indus- 
 trial, civil and political discriminations against the 
 Negro by saying not only that these practices are 
 "not confined to any one section of the country," 
 but also that such-and-such an evil did not even 
 "originate" in the South. We are told with great 
 unction that Philadelphia and San Francisco once 
 excluded Negroes from street cars altogether, that 
 slavery originated in the commerce of the North, 
 and that Jim-Crowism was first met in Massachu- 
 setts. I have heard that the devil was first met 
 in the Garden of Eden, but he is none the less the 
 devil. And as to origin, who cares where the 
 smallpox or the yellow fever originated? It is 
 their nature, not their origin, which makes them 
 horrible. 
 
 There is really no room for one section to 
 boast or to proudly accuse the other. So far as 
 the Negro's experiences go, both sections need 
 to improve perhaps in their ideals but certainly 
 in their practices respecting democratic liberties 
 and human brotherhood. Let the Negro and his 
 friends realize that the Fourteenth and Fifteenth 
 Amendments to the United States Constitution 
 represent not a backward step, but a stride for- 
 ward in civilization, and that they were fostered 
 
THE NEW NEGRO 29 
 
 and ratified, not for the sake of the temporary 
 burden which they may have put upon the white 
 race in the South, but for the benefit of all races, 
 at all times, in all America. 
 
THE NEGRO A TEST FOR OUR 
 CIVILIZATION 
 
 More than three hundred years ago the Anglo- 
 Saxon came to this continent. Being very reli- 
 gious, he landed and immediately fell upon his 
 knees; but, being very ambitious, he arose and 
 immediately "fell upon the aborigines." At that 
 time provisions were scarce and work plentiful in 
 this country, and, in order to conquer the more 
 unconquerable wilderness, the white man wanted 
 the best help he could get and wanted to pay only 
 "board and keep," so he drove a bargain with the 
 Africans, the unsophisticated children of the sun. 
 For about two hundred and fifty years this pecu- 
 liar economic system persisted, the white man 
 reaping the chief benefits of the economics and 
 the black man bearing the chief burden of the sys- 
 tem and the peculiarity. 
 
 This system prevented the white man from see- 
 ing the black man as a fellow-Christian and fellow- 
 citizen; when he read "Love thy neighbor as thy- 
 self" in his Bible, his imagination pictured white 
 neighbors; and when he wrote "All men are born 
 free and equal", into his political creed, he was 
 thinking white. Taxation without representation 
 was wrong, of course, but right against the slave. 
 The white man thought black when he read from 
 
THE NEW NEGRO 31 
 
 the Old Testament, "a servant of servants shall 
 he be," or from the New Testament, "that servant 
 which knew his master's will, and prepared not 
 himself, neither did according to his will, shall be 
 beaten with many stripes." Little did the white 
 man suspect that the ultimate test for both his 
 government and his religion would lie in his rela- 
 tion to that silent, accommodating black man. 
 There is one Negro in every ten persons in this 
 country. How many white American citizens ever 
 imagined the Congress of the United States and 
 the legislative and judicial departments of all the 
 states with every tenth officer a Negro? On earth 
 there are about seven colored persons to one white. 
 Be honest, O white American Christians! how 
 many of you have ever pictured to yourselves the 
 joys of heaven with seven dark souls to one white? 
 
 All other nationalities who have come to this 
 country since the Negro have been more readily 
 accepted into the Anglo-Saxorf's scheme of gov- 
 ernment and Christian brotherhood. Two hun- 
 dred and fifty years of wrong relationship got this 
 civilization into the unfortunate habit of except- 
 ing the Negro. He became the standing excep- 
 tion to the rules of civilization. We can help a 
 man best when we know his hindrances. What 
 are the industrial, civil and political hindrances of 
 the American Negro? 
 
 Industrially he started as a slave, worked two 
 hundred and fifty years without a pay day, and 
 then got discharged without credit or capital, when 
 his employers fell out. The system had marked 
 
32 THE NEW NEGRO 
 
 him as menial in the eyes of his fellowmen, and 
 had not made industry attractive in his own eyes. 
 As a free laborer he began in the lowest-paid and 
 least desirable occupations and rose upward only 
 so far as economic necessity demanded. Indus- 
 trial society intended that the free Negro should 
 be what the economist might call the marginal 
 employee, — to be employed in that margin of in- 
 dustry where it is impossible or difficult to employ 
 any white person. And where, on the upper edge 
 of this margin, he was brought into contact with 
 other free Americans, he was to receive lower 
 wages or bear some other distinct badge of indus- 
 trial inferiority. We see this contact and dis- 
 tinction on American railroads, where colored 
 men and white men who do exactly the same work 
 are distinguished respectively as "porters" and 
 "trainmen." A few years ago there were some 
 Negro Pullman conductors on a road in the South, 
 but they were officially designated as "head 
 porters." It is needless to add that the wages 
 followed the designation. Industrial segregation 
 has been the tendency north and south: in the 
 South the Negro is more largely employed because 
 he is more needed; in the North he Is less largely 
 employed because he is less needed. In both he 
 is the "marginal employee," the margin being 
 wider in the South and narrower in the North. 
 
 It is plain that a permanent handicap like that 
 would tend to embarrass the whole life of the 
 Negro, for if industrial inferiority is to be main- 
 tained, certain other things are necessary and 
 
THE NEW NEGRO 33 
 
 logical, like class education and disfranchisement, 
 — a lower standard of living and a lower order 
 of citizenship. For with brains In his head and 
 a ballot in his hand a man cannot ultimately be 
 industrially repressed. The Negro's economic 
 progress as revealed In the census, when seen from 
 the viewpoint of this handicap, is exceedingly 
 creditable. When an unwelcome and beginning 
 race stands up against an entrenched civilization 
 and wrests from It an increased measure of life, 
 that race possesses the strongest potentialities of 
 civilization. Look at our humble possessions and 
 see how they have mounted upward from zero to 
 a billion dollars. Look at us and see how we 
 have grown from three and a half million chain- 
 marked slaves to ten million aspiring freemen. 
 
 The relation of the Negro to trades-unionism 
 shows that he Is to be either a help or a hindrance 
 to industrial freedom In America: he must be In 
 the union on terms of equality, or If out .of the 
 union he will be a strike-breaker and wage-re- 
 ducer, a weapon of the employer against the white 
 employee. If the black Is pushed down, the least 
 that the white laborer can expect Is to be pushed 
 down next to him. 
 
 Besides Industrial segregation, there is what we 
 will call civil segregation; and then there Is the 
 natural tendency to class education and dlsfran- 
 cblsement. The effect of segregation Is to handi- 
 cap and thwart the Neo:ro's progress. Some try 
 to hypnotize us Into the belief tbat It means simple, 
 harmless, spatial separation. But some of us who 
 
34 THE NEW NEGRO 
 
 are hard subjects to hypnotize continue to see and 
 to say that every single fact of color segregation 
 in this country, where it does not mean absolute 
 independence, means subordination and degrada- 
 tion for the weaker party. We have a right there- 
 fore to suspect that degradation is the aim; it is 
 at least such a huge temptation that no white or- 
 ganization or community has ever yet successfully 
 resisted the temptation to degrade after segregat- 
 ing. Our various "jim-crow" arrangements are 
 an illustration: there is not a railroad in this coun- 
 try required to furnish separate accommodations 
 for white and black, which makes those accommo- 
 dations equal. In many cases the arrangements 
 for the colored passenger are unsanitary and in- 
 decent: overcrowded cars, one toilet for both 
 sexes, and the white trainmen and rougher Ne- 
 groes permitted to smoke in the face of colored 
 women. I sometimes see the colored waiting- 
 room lined with cobwebs, and spittoons that have 
 not been emptied or disinfected for weeks. In all 
 cases, mind you, the Negro pays equal first-class 
 fares. However much he may be rated as inferior 
 in this country, he is counted equal in the payment 
 of fares, fines and taxes: equal in the bearing of 
 burdens, only inferior in the sharing of privileges 
 nd opportunities. 
 In many respects American civilization requires 
 just as much of the Negro as of the proudest and 
 most fortunate Anglo-Saxon, altho the Negro's 
 history in America has not bequeathed him a 
 chance in the present to meet the requirement. 
 
THE NEW NEGRO 35 
 
 The past seeks to damn him with its heritage and 
 the present casts about him an environment which 
 aims to restrict him much more than any other 
 race in America is restricted. It is not only true 
 that we exact of the Negro as much as we exact 
 of any other man, but sometimes we seem to re- 
 quire even more of him, to expect him to be even 
 more virtuous than other races: it is well known 
 that, on the whole, Negroes are given much longer 
 terms and heavier fines for the same crimes. Yet 
 they are called criminals by nature. Why mete 
 out to a criminal-by-nature severer punishment 
 than to a deliberate criminal? Negroes are given 
 inferior schools to meet equal tests; they are given 
 inferior wages to pay equal prices; they are ex- 
 pected to work out their economic salvation with 
 no political power, without even the ballot. These 
 wonders no other race has ever accomplished or 
 has ever been expected to accomplish. 
 
 Heredity and environment are the factors of 
 destiny. Heredity is the multiplicand and en- 
 vironment the multiplier. The Negro is a factor 
 of American destiny : the nearer zero any factor is, 
 the nearer zero will the product be. Justice can- 
 not be corrupted for black men and remain pure 
 for white men. Government cannot be tyranny 
 to the weak and democracy to the strong. Amer- 
 ican civilization will be what It Is to the Negro. 
 
 The effect of segregation Is felt In the Negro's 
 education, public and private. There has been 
 much effort to find a type of education which 
 would fit the Negro for the status which the weight 
 
36 THE NEW NEGRO 
 
 of American sentiment aimed to give him. If the 
 aim is right, the educational principle is all right: 
 if the Negro is to have a special place, he should 
 have special preparation for that place. But if 
 he is to be only an American citizen, he needs only 
 such education as other American citizens. ' Now 
 the Negro is not only good-natured but often very 
 cunning, and some of his leaders affect to have ac- 
 cepted these limitations for the sake of present 
 profits. These men are shrewd, not honest. They 
 believe, as they privately acknowledge, that the 
 only way to manage a white man is to allow him 
 to be quietly, peaceably, comfortably and com- 
 pletely fooled. The Negro is constantly trying to 
 manage the white man as "Br'er Rabbit" man- 
 aged "Br'er Fox," by his superior wits: by indi- 
 rection, circumvention and cunning. The defense 
 of the weak is cunning. The Negro had two hun- 
 dred and fifty years of schooling in this defensive 
 art. Even in the days of slavery the black "con- 
 jurer" often had both white and black at his mercy. 
 He learned to give Indirect answers, to profit by 
 ambiguous terms, and to get where he wanted to 
 go by a sort of broken and uncertain course. ^My 
 father told me of such a slave, who had everybody 
 on the plantation, white and black, believing that 
 he had the supernatural power of seeing Into all 
 secrets. One day his master even bet a sum of 
 money to some white neighbors that his Negro 
 could tell them anything they wanted to know. 
 They caught something and put It under a barrel, 
 all unknown to the Negro. The confident mas- 
 
THE NEW NEGRO 37 
 
 ter called in the slave and asked him to tell what 
 was under the barrel. For a moment the Negro 
 was baffled and almost trapped; but while his mas- 
 ter threatened, he used his ears and his wits. By 
 chance he overheard just one word spoken by one 
 of the white men, but he did not know whether 
 this word referred to him or to what was under the 
 barrel. The Negro knew that he must either 
 make good or beg for mercy. Therefore, he took 
 this one word and fashioned a sentence which 
 could pass either for an interpretation of what 
 was under the barrel, or failing in that, could be 
 taken as a plea for mercy: "Well, Massa, you has 
 done caught de ole coon at last." It happened to 
 be a coon under the barrel, and the white people 
 did not detect the double-edged nature of the re- 
 ply. Till this day the Negro is seldom frank to 
 the white man in America. He says what he does 
 not mean; he means what he does not say. I have 
 heard Negro speakers address mixed audiences of 
 white and colored persons, and both white and 
 black would go away rejoicing, each side thinking 
 that the speaker had spoken their opinions, altho 
 the opinions of the blacks were very different from 
 those of the whites, even contradictory. This 
 is one reason for the great misconception in the 
 white race respecting the desires, ambitions and 
 sentiments of the black. 
 
 The greatest need in America to-day between 
 white and black people is an era of frankness and 
 honest expression of opinion. As long as we seek 
 to fool each other, employing cunning on the one 
 
38 THE NEW NEGRO 
 
 side and insincerity on the other, we shall not rest 
 on the solid foundation of truth and there will be 
 live coals under the smooth-looking ashes of our 
 sophistries and deception. We must face facts and 
 tolerate the truth, however much opposed it may 
 seem to our dearest preconceptions. We must 
 pursue the rule of justice even if it seems to lead 
 out of the window. 
 
 Now, as to politics, our first impulse is to won- 
 der that nine-tenths of a democratic state could be 
 so opposed to the voting power of one-tenth. Is 
 Reconstruction the cause? But the intelligent 
 Negro of to-day is not the ignorant Negro of 
 Reconstruction days. Besides, it was psycholog- 
 ically impossible earlier and now must remain 
 forever impossible to know the truth about Re- 
 construction. We can only judge of what must 
 have been the distortions of Reconstruction his- 
 tory by analogy with the distortions of present- 
 day Negro history; and we know that now, nearly 
 fifty years after Reconstruction, with nearly fifty 
 years more of civilization, Christianity and "free 
 speech," not one newspaper out of a hundred 
 dares to tell the truth about the Negro. How, 
 then, can we ever hope to have the truth handed 
 down from a society that was dominated by the 
 Ku Klux Klan? The Negro's argument for citi- 
 zenship Is based, not on the doubtful past, but on 
 the eternal and demonstrable present. Is It a 
 question of Ignorance and unfitness In the Negro? 
 The Negro can boast that he never has, does not 
 and never will ask to be enrolled as a voter on 
 
THE NEW NEGRO 39 
 
 any test more lenient than the test given white 
 men. He will let the white man "set the pace" 
 in the matter of attainable quaHfication. Is it a 
 desire to preserve the white race? Does the his- 
 tory of the world and the present European war 
 teach us that races and nations are preserved by 
 injustice and bullying? Finally, is it a vague and 
 inexplainable fear of the Negro? Well, if nine 
 white men fear one Negro on general principles, 
 they should be encouraged when they reflect how 
 much the one Negro must fear the nine white men 
 on the same principles. 
 
 Here again is where the Negro conjurer comes 
 in: he tries to charm the white man into the be- 
 lief that Negroes are not interested in politics; 
 that they regard balloting as a mere empty form- 
 ality which might just as well be left to the leisure- 
 loving and deluded white race, if only the long- 
 headed Negro is granted such useful blessings as 
 education, property and police protection. The 
 Negro does not mean this. He is interested in 
 politics and self-government. But he simply hopes 
 that the economic and industrial course will prove 
 to be an indirect route to these other things. 
 
 Let us see. First, as to education: this trifling 
 pastime of voting elects the educational officials, 
 and the states which have disfranchised the Negro 
 have relatively cut down his educational appro- 
 priation, in many cases shortening his school term 
 and lowering his school grade. The same preju- 
 dice which pushed him away from the polls tends 
 to push him out of the school. And now as to 
 
40 THE NEW NEGRO 
 
 property right, — have votes any bearing on that? 
 Will money-getting per se improve the condition 
 of the disfranchised or will it endanger his life by 
 making him a richer prey for the mobocrat? Votes 
 elect the taxers and decide the taxes. The power 
 that can take i per cent of a man's property with- 
 out his consent, can take fifty per cent of it, and 
 then the other fifty. The power to tax is the 
 power to confiscate, and taxation without repre- 
 sentation Is confiscation. But what about police 
 protection, protection of civil rights, and fair 
 treatment in public places? If the Negro will 
 only give up his vote and his annoying insistence 
 upon political equality, will not the officers elected 
 by the votes of white people be so obligated to 
 the Negro that they will be zealous in his interest, 
 while the halls of legislature will fairly ring with 
 enthusiasm for these admirable "wards of the 
 nation"? That is a flat contradiction of human 
 nature : elective officers are obligated to those who 
 elect them; legislators look after the interests of 
 those by whom they are sent; sheriffs respect the 
 influence of those who can vote in the next election. 
 Where the Negro is disfranchised, the white offi- 
 cers who have impulses to do him justice are han- 
 dicapped; they must constantly choose between jus- 
 tice to the Negro and their own personal interests, 
 — a dangerous dilemma for human nature. As a 
 result, in the very states where the Negro is dis- 
 franchised he receives the least protection and in- 
 curs the most virulent attacks from the successful 
 politician. To get the Negro question out of poli- 
 
THE NEW NEGRO 41 
 
 tics, give the Negro a fair ballot and he will vote 
 it out, — for if both races vote, no candidate who 
 needs the votes of both will drag the race question 
 into his campaign. 
 
 Fifteen years ago even the friends of the Negro 
 were persuaded to believe that if he were debarrd 
 from the polls, the mob would be pleased and 
 lynching would stop, — that pampered prejudice 
 would be sated and abated. But prejudice, like 
 most monsters, grows by that it feeds on. A white 
 officer is but human nature, and it is unfair to 
 expect him to choose the safety of Negro prison- 
 ers when society has made such a choice disastrous 
 to his own interests. Some officers are predis- 
 posed toward duty and loathe the thing which 
 they must tolerate: recently in Shreveport, La., 
 when an untried Negro was being hanged to a 
 telegraph pole of the courthouse corner, the poor 
 sherifF, torn by conflicting emotions, instead of 
 actively opposing the mob, sat upon the court- 
 house steps Hmp and helpless, almost in tears and 
 muttering his disgust, — a sight to stir the pity of 
 the gods ! Had the Louisiana Negro had a vote 
 to support that sheriff, he could have and in all 
 probability, would have acted the part of an officer. 
 / In this, as in many other matters, it is plain that 
 ' American civilization fixes its own status when it 
 fixes the status of the Negro. Give the Negro his 
 ballot and let him stand by American civilization 
 by active influence ; or take away his rights and he 
 will destroy American civihzation by passive in- 
 fluence. 
 
42 THE NEW NEGRO 
 
 Even the church does not escape : on some occa- 
 sions so triumphant becomes the spirit of barbarity 
 that even the white preachers yield and publicly 
 endorse the acts of the mob from their pulpits. 
 The church has done more for the education and 
 soul-freedom of the Negro than any other agency, 
 and it is regrettable that in many instances it is 
 acquiescing in and exemphfying the various forms 
 of jim-crowism and segregation, thus lending them 
 the authority of religion. We know nothing more 
 inconsistent with the recorded life of Jesus of 
 Nazareth, or which will be more embarrassing to 
 the influence of the church among colored people 
 in this country and in others. The church will be 
 judged in this world and in the next by its attitude 
 toward "the least of these." If the church yields 
 to jim-crowism, what shall we expect of railroads, 
 steamboats, theaters, labor unions and the United 
 States Government? 
 
 The Negro asks not pity: pity is shallow, evan- 
 escent and often unreasonable. We pity the over- 
 taken criminal. We ask only for a strict applica- 
 tion of those principles of morality and justice 
 which the white race has been foremost in formu- 
 lating and spreading in human society. 
 
 But whatever others may do, the Negro has a 
 duty to himself. He must continue to want and 
 to work. By no means must he stop wanting, for 
 that is the stimulus to his working. He must 
 want life, want civilization, want citizenship, want 
 votes and equal opportunities, — and for all these 
 wants he will work. A man is as civilized as his 
 
THE NEW NEGRO 43 
 
 wants J The only way to work effectively is through 
 organization : to work as individuals is like bailing 
 out the ocean with a quart cup. The Negro is 
 only one among ten in this country, but the white 
 man is human, and if the black man works well he 
 will gain friends and co-operation. The surest 
 way for a thousand to put ten thousand to flight 
 is by winning many of them and chasing the others. 
 The struggle of the Negro is not a struggle of 
 days, but of decades. Success can be measured 
 only by looking backward over the years. In the 
 last decade he seems to have advanced along many 
 lines but to have retreated along political and civil 
 hnes; but like a baffled but determined European 
 general he should call that retreat a "withdrawal 
 for strategical purposes only," and in the present 
 decade seek advancement along all lines with 
 greater intrepidity than ever. 
 
FIFTY YEARS AFTER EMANCIPATION 
 
 FIFTY YEARS I Half a century is but half 
 a day in the thought of God and in the life of a 
 race. It is scarcely the earthly hfe-time of one 
 full-grown human mind. A race which in so brief 
 a space can learn most of the lessons of civiHza- 
 tion, is indeed a precocious race. 
 
 From the middle of the 15th century for four 
 hundred years, from the time when Henry the 
 Navigator, of Portugal, accepted ten Negroes as 
 ransom for captive Moors till the time of Amer- 
 ican Emancipation, Africa had been the world's 
 big game preserve for the hunter of black slaves. 
 The system was on the verge of decline in Europe 
 when the New World with its uncultivated wilds 
 offered new fields and fresh motives for the pro- 
 pagation of human slavery. Again by the middle 
 pf the 19th century most of the civilized world 
 had come to regard slavery as a crime against 
 humanity, a contradiction to the Christian reli- 
 gion and a menace to the freedom of the free. 
 Even Russia abolished serfdom. Most of the 
 Spanish-American States had fallen into line, some 
 of them writing emancipation and freedom into 
 their new constitutions. But in this progressive 
 movement three parts of the Western World 
 44 
 
THE NEW NEGRO 45 
 
 lagged behind — Brazil, Cuba and the Southern 
 
 United States. 
 
 Mammon, who is the creating and sustain- 
 ing god of slavery, fought mightily to perpetuate 
 the system in America. Humanity and religion 
 and patriotism were all about to yield to men's 
 pockets and stomachs, — luxury and avarice, those 
 twin pests which, according to Cato the Censor, 
 have ever been the ruin of every state. Even the 
 Church, whose God is the Lord, bowed to its arch 
 and ancient enemy Mammon. The "Colonization 
 Journal," published not so much in the interest of 
 Liberia as in the interest of getting the free Ne- 
 groes out of the United States, declaring them to 
 be "a greater nuisance than slaves," said "You 
 cannot abolish slavery, for God is pledged to sus- 
 tain it." The Church was corrupted and God was 
 slandered. 
 
 But the modern slave had something which the 
 ancient slave had not,— an ABOLITIONIST,— 
 Garrison and Philips and John Brown and Fred- 
 erick Douglass, — the best conscience of the white 
 race and the best courage of the black. The run- 
 away slave was the pioneer abolitionist; he was 
 the appointed creator of antislavery sentiment, — 
 an avenger born from the womb of slavery for 
 slaverv's own destruction. "Wherever he went 
 with the stripes of his back and the eloquence of 
 his tongue he fired the hearts of men. 
 
 "Who would be free themselves must strike the 
 blow." The runaway Negro was the vanguard, 
 the first hero in the struggle to free his race. ^) 
 
46 THE NEW NEGRO 
 
 The result was war. And the result of war, tho 
 not its purpose, was freedom. It is one of the 
 mysteries of Providence that slavery caused a war 
 about something else, and that this war about 
 something else had for its most beneficent result 
 the abolition of slavery. When brave black men 
 answered the reluctant call of the hard pressed 
 Union and came to her defense, the war neces- 
 sarily took on a more definite anti-slavery phase 
 and the proclamation of emancipation became a 
 "war measure" in a new sense of the word. 
 
 Thus snatching freedom from the issues of a 
 war which had at first considered his liberty 
 neither as its immediate object nor its remote aim, 
 the emancipated Negro began a handicapped 
 struggle for existence, and a passive but effective 
 fight against the efforts to practically re-enslave 
 him. Much has been written and said about the 
 sad plight of the ex-master ; but even if the pathos 
 of his position has not been overdawn, it was less 
 pathetic than the outlook of the ex-slave. Upon 
 the ex-master shone the light of centuries; over 
 the ex-slave hung the darkness of ages. The ex- 
 master by race and blood and feature could easily 
 become a part of the very civilization against 
 which he had fought; the ex-slave was an alien in 
 blood, with the indelible birthmark on his fore- 
 head, destined to receive contempt, made worse 
 by pity from that same civilization, whose fall his 
 manacle-marked arm had stayed. The ex-master 
 inherited the cumulated results of 250 years of 
 toil; the ex-slave was grudgingly accorded the 
 
THE NEW NEGRO 47 
 
 threadbare clothes which hung upon his back. The 
 ex-master had a legal title to the very ground upon 
 which the ex-slave walked, while the latter could 
 not lay claim to the stones which bruised his naked 
 feet. 
 
 Against such desperate odds the freed black 
 man in America began his passive and voiceless 
 struggle, which for accomphshment is without 
 parallel in the records of the human race. Mere 
 statistics of material progress do not suffice, for 
 figures cannot give a fair idea of even the skele- 
 ton of life. We can count a man's dollars, but 
 not the resolutions and triumphs of his heart. We 
 can measure his land, but we cannot measure his 
 ambition and his sacrifice. We can sum up his 
 material gains, but not his moral progress. We 
 can know about him and not know him. Very 
 few white people, even of those who admire the 
 material progress, appreciate the pluck and stay- 
 ing stuff which in an uneven struggle have sus- 
 tained the American Negro in his half freedom for 
 half a century. In population he has had normal 
 increase under very abnormal burdens. The 
 prophets of fifty years ago, foreseeing the odds 
 against him, did not think that he could live and 
 multiply, and predicted his extinction. His death 
 rate is much discussed to-day, but if we regard the 
 conditions of his life, the rate at which he dies is 
 to be wondered at not for how large it is but for 
 how large it is not. Poverty and ignorance and 
 economic injustice are not good for a people's 
 health. Fairmindedness would rather credit the 
 
48 THE NEW NEGRO 
 
 Negro with the fact that he lives so well under 
 such conditions ; for as large as his death-rate fig- 
 ure is, it is not relatively as large as his poverty 
 figure or his ignorance figure, — his death rate is 
 not as high as his wages are low. Where Negroes 
 die twice as fast as white people they are gener- 
 ally much more than twice as poor or twice as 
 ignorant, and do not get half as good wages and 
 have not half as good housing, as a group. And 
 according to statistics of the United States Gov- 
 ernment, his death rate decreases as his home own- 
 ership and general welfare increases. 
 
 In the matter of acquiring property the Negro 
 has been verily emulous of his Creator; — for be- 
 ginning with nothing he has made his material 
 world. He is reputed to have a billion dollars, 
 and out of nothing created he it. He has almost a 
 billion known to the tax office, and we can be sure 
 that, emulating the virtues of his white brother, he 
 has been consistently modest in the presence of the 
 tax assessor. And how has this been acquired? 
 As a rule the Negro must do more and better work 
 for the same pay, — and sometimes for smaller 
 pay. Just as women get women's wages for work 
 equal to the work of men, so colored people get 
 "colored" wages. In reason we should think 
 that workers would be paid for their work, and 
 not for their sex or their color, but in fact it is 
 not so. The laws of economics, as often the 
 preachments and more often the practices of re- 
 ligion, will bow to a preiudice. The South is 
 sometimes called a good place for the Negro in- 
 
THE NEW NEGRO 49 
 
 dustrlally ; and in many respects it is a better place 
 than the North. It is said that the Negro has a 
 somewhat better opportunity to earn money in the 
 South and a somewhat fairer privilege to spend it 
 in the North ;and someone has said that the chance 
 to earn money is more important for the Negro 
 than the privilege to spend it. This remark is as 
 fallacious as it is shallow: for the chief incentive 
 to the earning of money is the privilege of spend- 
 ing it well. Money is not an end in itself. Neither 
 North nor South offer the Negro a fair industrial 
 opportunity, if in the one he can boast but starve, 
 while in the other he may eat but cringe. The 
 man who can earn a dollar and cannot spend it is 
 no better off than the man who can spend a dollar 
 but cannot earn one. The latter inability cuts off 
 a man's work while the former cuts off his stimulus 
 to work. The two roads lead to the same end. 
 The choice between these evils is like the choice 
 which the antebellum preacher offered "Josh," an 
 erring member of his flock. As "Josh" staggered 
 toward him the parson remonstrated: "Josh, you 
 has jes' got to choose the other way." Then sol- 
 emnly: "Dar am befo' you jes' two ways, Josh. 
 Broad am de way dat leads right to damnation, 
 but narrow am de way dat leads straight to perdi- 
 tion. Now, which one o' dem ways will you take?" 
 Josh, tho a double-seeing back-slider, had a quicker 
 perception for identities than had the parson, and 
 replied: "Well, parson, you can take whichever 
 one o' dem ways you please, but if dem's de only 
 two ways you's got, dis here Nigger is gwine to 
 
50 THE NEW NEGRO 
 
 take out right straight th'oo de woods." To nar- 
 rowly circumscribe the Negro's opportunity to 
 work certainly leads toward industrial damnation, 
 while to lessen his interest in work by cutting off 
 his privilege to spend what he earns in the sweat of 
 his face, heads him straight toward economic per- 
 dition. What the Negro needs for a normal in- 
 dustrial stimulus is the right to work at any trade 
 in which he can excel and the right to buy and 
 enjoy anything for which he can outbid his com- 
 petitors. 
 
 From their attitude of opposition to Negro edu- 
 cation many American people must be put into 
 that class, who, according to Sir Sydney Smith, 
 think "that ignorance is the great civilizer of the 
 world." It would seem that ignorance has actu- 
 ally been believed in as a cure for all the ills which 
 America has suffered as regards the Negro. The 
 education of the Negro has never yet been given 
 a bona fide trial as a remedy. The public power, 
 the State, during all these fifty years, has only 
 tolerated Negro education; has seldom assisted 
 and never truly encouraged it. And for the last 
 fifteen years, since the beginning of poHtical dis- 
 franchisement, the public school systems for the 
 Negro in the states which disfranchised him, have 
 been allowed to fall into a decadent condition. 
 With the passing of the Negro's ballot the public 
 school official lost the last poor incentive which 
 had spurred him to even half justice to the Negro 
 school. The average American public official will 
 not heed those to whose suffrage he owes no obli- 
 
THE NEW NEGRO 51 
 
 gation. And in that, he is human rather than 
 American. In many of the towns and cities there 
 is not seating capacity in the Negro public schools 
 for the children who apply for admittance, to 
 say nothing of others, who being discouraged by 
 the uncomfortable situation, do not even apply. 
 If the Negro school is in the "red hght" district, 
 the members of the school board, who owe noth- 
 ing to black men's votes, may lend a dull ear to 
 their protests. It sounds incredible, and I hope 
 that posterity will not believe it, but in some of 
 our states, while the pay of others has been in- 
 creased, the pay of the Negro public school 
 teacher has been pushed down, until a convict 
 working out a fine is allowed a higher wage per 
 day than the teacher of the Negro school. 
 
 And yet, at the end of fifty years of nominal 
 freedom less than one Negro out of three is un- 
 able to read and write. It would seem almost 
 superhuman to have accomplished so much against 
 such odds, did we not know that when surrounded 
 by dangers both animals and men instinctively de- 
 velop means of defense. In this case the Negro 
 has resorted to double taxation; he pays his taxes 
 to the state and taxes himself again in the neces- 
 sary fees to place his child in a private school kept 
 by some church or missionary society. In the 
 state of Alabama which is practically half white 
 and half colored and is a fair representative of 
 the states which have disfranchised colored men, 
 there are several large institutions maintained for 
 the higher and professional training of white men 
 
52 THE NEW NEGRO 
 
 and women at the expense of the public treasury, 
 and not one for the whole Negro population. And 
 yet they will tell us how many million dollars have 
 been spent on the public education of the Negro 
 "since the war," which sounds big in the aggre- 
 gate. But when we divide it up among several 
 million Negro children, extend it through a period 
 of nearly fifty years, and spread it over ten or 
 fifteen states, the figure then stands, not in millions 
 of dollars, but in pennies. It is generally assumed 
 and asserted in speech that the Negro is of an in- 
 ferior order of capacity, but it looks as if indeed 
 the white people believe the Negro to be a su- 
 perior being: those who are his friends expect him 
 to do so much with so little, and those who are 
 his enemies fear that he may do too much with too 
 little. 
 
 The one sufficient reply which the Negro can 
 make today to all his critics, old and new, as to 
 his education, is this: nearly ten thousand col- 
 lege graduates, thirty thousand busy teachers and 
 two million school children — and all this with 
 much less than half of his just share of the pub- 
 he educational funds. 
 
 The political history of the Negro in the 
 United States is full of tragedies and comedies. 
 Before the Civil War he was not regarded in 
 politics or court save as a chattel, — when he was 
 a chose In action, as the lawyers say. His only 
 constitutional privilege was that three-fifths of 
 him was taken to add political power to his mas- 
 ter, so that the South enjoyed the unique un- 
 
THE NEW NEGRO 53 
 
 American distinction of being able to vote its 
 property. After the war he was enfranchised, 
 and some seem to think that his early enfranch- 
 isement was particularly unfortunate and unwise. 
 It may have been unwise as man measures wis- 
 dom, but it was a very wise providence : for had 
 the Negro not been enfranchised within ten years 
 after Appomattox, while the rivers were still red 
 with blood and the memory of his heroic deeds 
 was yet fresh in the minds of his white comrade, 
 that man is not now born who would have lived 
 to see the day of his enfranchisement. "A de- 
 mocracy has a short memory," says James Bryce. 
 It may have been unfortunate for somebody tem- 
 porarily, but it was fortunate for the Negro ever- 
 lastingly that he got citizenship before his country 
 forgot. The best time to do a thing is when it 
 can be done. Reactionary sentiment may not be 
 strong enough to-day to take the 14th and 15th 
 Amendments out of the Constitution, — but there 
 is certainly not progressive spirit enough in any 
 political party to put those amendments into the 
 Constitution if they were not already there. If 
 the amount of energy displayed in efforts to divest 
 the Negro of his citizenship had been directed 
 into channels to fit him for good citizenship, he 
 would be to-day second to no citizenry of the 
 round world. Even Reconstruction, a word which 
 has been exaggerated into synonymy with all hor- 
 rors, had lessons for American democracy. It 
 should have taught the danger of ignorance and 
 
54 THE NEW NEGRO 
 
 demagoglsm, — ignorance in the black and dema- 
 goguery in the white. 
 
 Slavery and oppression are poor schools in 
 which to train citizens, poor for oppressor and 
 oppressed. The conclusion is, not that an op- 
 pressed people should be deprived of citizenship, 
 but that they should be relieved of oppression. 
 But whatever may have been the unfitness of the 
 Negro in the reconstruction period, who can con- 
 vince the reasonable people of the world that a 
 race which under a partial freedom has made 
 such progress in the short space of fifty years, is 
 not now fit for a voice in its own government? 
 Most of our Southern states have laws and con- 
 stitutional provisions which on their face have an 
 impartial-sounding phraseology to square with 
 the national constitution, but in their avowed in- 
 tent and in their administration they aim neither 
 at ignorance nor vice but at the American Negro 
 vote. These laws are mere shams, and the mil- 
 lions of youth of both races in the South are 
 growing up knowing that these laws are shams 
 and that they have absolutely no intent for what 
 they pretend. Is there any wonder that this 
 youth should come to regard other laws as shams, 
 — for example, the law against murder,— as mere 
 petty schemes for hedging about the interests of 
 one class and permitting it to depredate another 
 class with impunity? 
 
 Even the "grandfather clause," tho manifestly 
 unjust, discriminative and unconstitutional, was 
 reluctantly done to death only after being allowed 
 
THE NEW NEGRO 55 
 
 to live for many years to the great embarrassment 
 of respect for political justice in this country. 
 
 The American Negro's life is paradoxical. "A 
 little learning is a dangerous thing," — but for the 
 Negro, they say, much learning is perilous. His 
 race is continually called the "child race," but 
 full-grown white men of the full-grown white race 
 will not compete with him unless he is greatly han- 
 dicapped. He makes the laws of the South with- 
 out being in the legislatures, and elects or rejects 
 senators and governors without a vote. And the 
 part of the comedy which he enjoys less is: his 
 very presence and numbers, where he is disfran- 
 chised, makes him the source of political power 
 over which he has no control and which is pretty 
 generally used against him. As a slave he gave 
 his master three-fifths of a vote to keep him In 
 slavery, and as a free man he gives his oppressor 
 five-fifths of a vote to continue his oppression. He 
 is condemned in many words but feared in almost 
 every action. 
 
 A dozen or so years ago the states In which 
 Negroes are often lynched seemed to be saying: 
 If you will only allow us to disfranchise these 
 black people, we will not find it necessary to lynch 
 them; it is their vote, their defense, which annoys 
 and irritates us; disfranchise them and we will not 
 want to murder them. Aesop tells a fable of the 
 wolves and the sheep: the wolves were ever ma- 
 king war on the sheep, and the sheep kept for 
 their protection a number of dogs. One day the 
 wolves proposed terms of peace, saying that If 
 
56 THE NEW NEGRO 
 
 the sheep would only dismiss their dogs they 
 should no longer be annoyed by a wolf, and that 
 the idea of sheep defending themselves by dogs 
 was what insulted and angered the wolf tribe. 
 Aesop says that the innocent sheep accepted the 
 proposal and dismissed the dogs, — and you do not 
 need to be told the rest of the story. It is coarse 
 irony for one inspired with the lust of gain or 
 power to suggest to his intended victim that a sur- 
 render of his means of defense will appease that 
 lust. The greatest possible aid to the lynching 
 spirit is to make the sheriff of the county depend- 
 ent upon the votes of the lynching class and inde- 
 pendent of the favor of the victim class. No 
 greater burden could be laid upon the weak, no 
 greater temptation placed before the strong. 
 
 And yet colored people, because they do not as- 
 sist in running down a black man whom the rest 
 of the community is threatening to lynch if he is 
 caught, are accused of abetting and condoning 
 crime; while in fact it is because they are op- 
 posed to lynching which is the greatest of all 
 American crimes. They are forced into a seem- 
 ing favor for the accused: they are making an 
 indiscriminate defense against an indiscriminate 
 attack, — a thing which is as inevitable and neces- 
 sary as it is natural. The fact that a black pris- 
 oner can be so easily taken from the hands of the 
 law by the lyncher has caused Negroes to lose 
 enthusiasm for assisting officers. They know that 
 black men are lynched for having made a neces- 
 sary self-defense; they know that sometimes a 
 
THE NEW NEGRO 57 
 
 black man is lynched for defending his wife; they 
 know that colored women have been lynched for 
 defending their own virtue and honor. 
 
 And is there any creature upon whose head 
 the perils of this unnatural situation have fallen 
 more than on any other? Yes, — the Negro 
 woman. For two hundred and fifty years she was 
 absolutely without protection: and for the last 
 fifty years if protected, she has been protected 
 sometimes at the cost and always at the peril of 
 the life of the male member of her household. 
 Is there a record anywhere else in human history 
 that wife, sister, mother bore such a burden 
 borne so well, — and lost no more? Endowed 
 with all the affections of her race and denied all 
 the tenderness of her sex, for the first two hun- 
 dred and fifty years her life was one incessant 
 travail. But out of her original vitality of wom- 
 anhood and motherhood she has for fifty years of 
 partial freedom cheerfully supplied the sinews of 
 the war. The physical and moral well-being of 
 the race are largely within her keeping. Virtue 
 is a thing that is tried and proven, not a thing 
 that is protected and innocent. Therefore the 
 fmost virtuous creature in the United States of 
 'America is the virtuous Negro woman. Her re- 
 sisting and enduring powers are of the highest 
 order. In this she is a prototype and prophecy 
 of what her race is to be if it will overcome. Her 
 character is often assailed in fact and her repu- 
 tation more often assailed in slander. But those 
 of us who know the Negro race know that the 
 
58 THE NEW NEGRO 
 
 virtuous colored woman's name Is legion and that 
 her ranks are increasing. It seems almost ab- 
 surd to feel the necessity of saying so, — but the 
 boldness of the slander elicits the defense. This 
 woman has honored her sex by proving the vir- 
 tue of womanhood as few groups of women in 
 the history of the world have ever had the privi- 
 lege of proving It. The worst elements of both 
 races have been her pursuing enemy; and she has 
 run the gauntlet of the double fire and delivered 
 the destinies of a race. 
 
 These are some of the conditions out of which 
 has grown the demand for such an organization 
 as the National Association for the Advancement 
 of Colored People, which should seek to maintain 
 and advance the Negro's civil and political status. 
 There is as much need for such v/ork to-day as 
 there was for that of the Anti-Slavery Society in 
 1857. Some "new abolitionism" must free the 
 American Negro from the more subtle but not 
 less real chains which would perpetually shackle 
 his mind, his spirit and his soul. 
 
 Will the American white man forget how po- 
 tent a factor the American black man has been 
 in the prosperity of this great country? In all 
 her labors and struggles he has shared, — whether 
 as slave or freeman or patriot soldier. vThe Ne- 
 groes of America played a loyal part in the perils 
 of our country. And you know the story of Peter 
 Salem on Bunker Hill and of Crispus Attucks on 
 Boston Commons, and of the black battalions of 
 other Northern and Southern States, who at the 
 
THE NEW NEGRO 59 
 
 call of Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln 
 rushed to arms and interposed their bodies between 
 freedom and death ; not the freedom of the Negro, 
 for the Negro was already a slave, but that free 
 government might not perish from the earth. But 
 do you also know that Rhode Island had a Ne- 
 gro regiment in the Revolutionary War? That 
 there were 755 Negroes with Washington after 
 the battle of Monmouth? That he had about five 
 thousand Negroes before the end of his cam- 
 paigns? That in all of the white regiments there 
 were Negroes? That a Negro named Prince 
 helped to capture General Prescott at Newport? 
 That the Negro voted in at least five states when 
 the Constitution of the United States was 
 adopted? He helped Jackson at New Orleans 
 and paid full toll in the sacrifices before Rich- 
 mond. Lincoln said that the Civil War could 
 not have been won by the North without him, and 
 he made the Spanish-American War an almost 
 bloodless victory on the American side. There 
 has been much dispute as to whether the Negro's 
 best friends are in the North or in the South. 
 Sometimes I am in doubt as to who is the Negro's 
 best friend, — but there is one thing about which 
 I have no doubt, and that is that the very best 
 friend which the American white man has in the 
 whole round world is the American Negro. For 
 three hundred years he has been a part of the 
 life of this country. For fifty years he has been 
 a large factor in making it, especially the south- 
 ern part of it, what it is. In the next fifty years 
 
6o THE NEW NEGRO 
 
 it will become what it becomes largely because of 
 what he is. Active or passive his influence is 
 nevertheless relentless. 
 
 A providence wiser than men has brought the 
 children of Africa and mingled them in goodly 
 proportion in this great melting-pot of peoples. 
 After confusion there will be fusion of thought 
 and spirit. In summoning to her hills and val- 
 leys every type of man providence has given Amer- 
 ica the finest position on the whole battle-line of 
 humanity. The fight here is decisive. Our success 
 at this point means world-wide victory, our fail- 
 ure world-wide disaster. In the matter of race 
 adjustment all the lines of humanity will go for- 
 ward when we go forward or fall back when 
 we fall back. No finer ground could have been 
 chosen for freedom's last great battle than this 
 young and virile nation filled with all the ele- 
 ments of the world. The thought should inspire 
 the meanest. And let those who fight among the 
 pioneers remember the distress and glory of the 
 pioneer's fight — that against us are fighting 
 hoary-headed, horny-handed prejudice, and greed 
 and avarice, and mammon the mighty; while for 
 us are fighting love and justice, time and evolu- 
 tion, and God the Almighty. 
 
GROUNDS OF HOPE. 
 
 "The mainspring of effort," according to Hor- 
 ace Mann, is "The desire of bettering one's con- 
 dition." Back of this desire there must be hope. 
 Hope is the lodestar of human progress. There 
 can be no strong effort without desire ; there can 
 be no strong desire without hope ; and strong hope 
 must have some reasonable grounds. 
 
 If the progress of the Negro is to continue in 
 this country, he must be hopeful, and his friends 
 must hope. A confidence in the American Ne- 
 gro's future has many reasonable grounds, — first 
 
 In history. If anything in the records of the 
 last three hundred years can inspire the heart of 
 humanity, with a faith in God and the ultimate 
 success of the human family, that thing is the 
 tale of the American Negro. All the way from 
 Africa to America he has come; all the way from 
 savagery to civilization, all the way from slavery 
 to citizenship, all the way from ignorance to en- 
 lightenment, all the way from heathenism to 
 Christianity, — with every inch of the road made 
 hard or sternly disputed. He has had some friends, 
 but it has not always been in accordance with the 
 will of the majority of white men that the Ne- 
 gro has succeeded. We cannot thus explain his 
 attainment of freedom or of citizenship or of 
 
 61 
 
62 THE NEW NEGRO 
 
 education or of some measure of wealth. But the 
 weak has literally triumphed over the strong, as 
 if some strange divinity were at work in his his- 
 tory, mocking opposition. Single decades have 
 seen revolutions of opinion. 
 
 His fellowman has for the most part been a 
 blind helper in the divine plan of the Negro's 
 advancement. Those who brought him from 
 Africa did so without the slightest intention of 
 saving him from savagery, — it was a cold busi- 
 ness proposition with all the selfishness of com- 
 merce. There was not the least thought of sav- 
 ing him to Christianity; the god Mammon was 
 the only god in the consideration. Kings, poten- 
 tates and priests shared in the profits of the slave- 
 trade, and conscience was lulled to sleep in the lap 
 of luxury. Two hundred and fifty years ago 
 the Church on the American continent held it "a 
 sin to baptize a Negro." Irreligion and cruelty 
 are inevitable wherever Mammon is god. But 
 through inhumanity itself the first purpose of the 
 just God was fulfilled by a bodily transfer of a 
 large number of the race from a country where 
 environment forbade civilization to a jand ^of 
 large opportunity like America. 
 
 Then there was the period of American slav- 
 ery, — slavery which some indignant soul has 
 called the "sum of all villainies." American slav- 
 ery as a whole was the most cruel institution of its 
 kind that the world has ever seen. But Provi- 
 dence, partly through agitation of men and largely 
 through the demands of public policy and the ex- 
 
THE NEW NEGRO 63 
 
 actions of war, brought freedom. The American 
 Negro's freedom can hardly be ascribed to the 
 dehberate and purposed will of his fellowman. 
 Mars was mightier than Mammon and Jehovah 
 was superior to both. 
 
 After the acquisition of freedom came the ques- 
 tion of the Negro's citizenship. After getting 
 freedom in a democratic government, it takes cit- 
 izenship and the ballot to keep it. Freedom 
 without citizenship cannot stand any better than 
 an empty sack. In this matter, too, God and a 
 few good men proved to be an overwhelming 
 majority. Wise men saw that there is as much 
 hope for a flock of sheep in a pack of wolves as 
 for a voteless people in a selfish democracy. 
 
 Accordingly the Fourteenth and Fifteenth 
 Amendments were added to the fundamental law 
 of the land, primarily to protect the Negro, but 
 secondarily protecting every man in America. 
 Some might think that these amendments are veri- 
 table "broken reeds" of hope, since they are con- 
 tinually violated. But so it is with every other 
 law of man and every law that God has made 
 for man; they are continually violated. But they 
 are still the highest law of the land, the ideals 
 toward which the nation moves, the standards 
 of our justice, the straight-edged rules by which 
 just men of the future will measure the irregu- 
 larities of our courts of to-day. There is vindi- 
 cation for every violated law. 
 
 In 1856 political leaders asked Abraham Lin- 
 coln what principles should underly the new party 
 
64 THE NEW NEGRO 
 
 that was to be organized. Lincoln replied: "Let 
 us build our new party on the rock of the Decla- 
 ration of Independence and the gates of hell shall 
 not prevail against us." This Declaration of In- 
 dependence, with its lofty principles of equality, 
 which the political charlatan seeks to ridicule, is 
 still the best rock on which American civilization 
 can stand. 
 
 But there are some who lay upon their con- 
 sciences the unction of expediency, that the Ne- 
 gro is disfranchised simply for the sake of peace 
 with the lower and more unreasonable element of 
 whites, that this element will like the Negro bet- 
 ter if they can rob him of a good measure of his 
 freedom, and will be kinder to him, — in short, 
 that the Negro is disfranchised for his own best 
 welfare — physical welfare! Thus they would 
 damn his soul in order to save his hide, they 
 would deprive him of the precious jewel of lib- 
 erty in order to grant him the baser metal of 
 physical existence, — in order to do him a little 
 kindness, they will do him the greatest wrong in 
 the world. 
 
 But there is hope for the Negro because the 
 white man is waking up more and more to the 
 fact that he is "a part of all that he has met," 
 and that in this country he has met nearly a dozen 
 million Negroes. Their fate is his fate, unless 
 the laws of God and Nature are subject to re- 
 peal. The law of compensation is relentless: if 
 the virtue of the black race is set at naught, the 
 best citadels of the white race are undermined; 
 
THE NEW NEGRO 65 
 
 if a black man is pressed down to the brute end 
 of society, white men must then be brutal enough 
 to pay his brutish acts with retaliative brutality; 
 if a law is made to disfranchise Negroes in Geor- 
 gia, it will disfranchise a hundred thousand 
 whites, and the very class of poor whites whose 
 misguided votes made the disfranchising law pos- 
 sible. There is hope for the black man if there 
 be any hope for the white man. 
 
 There is hope for the Negro in education. The 
 question of capacity is a question of the past; 
 the man who does not know it is a quarter-century 
 behind. All the poverty of opportunity has been 
 unable to defeat his almighty desire for educa- 
 tion. In one locality in Alabama the Negro child 
 gets less than one dollar per annum for his edu- 
 cation, and the white child gets eighteen dollars, 
 — so that if attainment were proportioned to the 
 money (which, thank Heaven! it is not), it would 
 take a Negro 180 years to get as much learning 
 as the white child gets in ten years. The Negro's 
 desire for education is a tale that should stir 
 men's hearts. This desire persists even where 
 there is the meanest opportunity for satisfaction. 
 This attitude in the Negro should fill his friends 
 with hope. There is the story of the old gentle- 
 man who always had "something to thank God 
 for," whatever happened. He once slipped and 
 fell and dogs seized the meat which he was car- 
 rying home for his dinner. A voice of scorn 
 called out: "What is there to thank God for 
 now?" The answer came: "Well, my meat is 
 
66 THE NEW NEGRO 
 
 gone, and my dinner is gone, but thank God, I 
 have my APPETITE left." When there are 
 no means left, the Negro's desire and good cheer 
 and his hope abide, and these no man can de- 
 stroy. 
 
 If there be any truth in the statement that 
 the education of the Negro has brought evils, 
 still the reply is, that the only remedy for the 
 evils of education is MORE education. Some 
 men speak as if ignorance were the sum of all 
 blessings. If the education of the Negro has been 
 an evil to anybody, that body has not been the 
 Negro. The elevation of a man may be an evil 
 to the man who is trying to keep him down; to 
 the man who is trying to rise, every bit of aid 
 is an undeniable blessing. Ignorance for the op- 
 pressed is a necessary part of the policy of op- 
 pression. 
 
 There is hope for the Negro in religion, — in 
 his own religion and in the religion of the people 
 among whom he lives. The Negro, for his part, 
 has enough rehglousness to save America. In 
 many cases this religiousness very sorely needs 
 to be Christianized. Less religion and more 
 Christianity would not hurt the Negro — nor his 
 friends. 
 
 The progress of a race cannot be measured day 
 after day, but must be taken decade after decade, 
 or generation after generation. Has the Negro 
 advanced? Fifty years ago he did not own his 
 own body; now he owns a billion dollars besides. 
 Then he was a man without a countrj", hardly 
 
THE NEW NEGRO 67 
 
 claiming a foot of land; now he has three hundred 
 thousand farms, half a million homes and half 
 a hundred banks. Then he was ignorant; now 
 he has thirty thousand schools with more than 
 thirty thousand teachers, and half a dozen mil- 
 hons who can read. He always had religion, 
 but now, In addition to that, he has about thirty 
 thousand churches with millions of members and 
 the Lord only knows how many preachers. 
 
 Should America be hopeless of a people who, 
 in proportion to their numbers and opportunities, 
 have done as much for America as any other peo- 
 ple living? Who have cleared the forests of the 
 South and driven the dragon from her swamps? 
 The South sometimes boasts of the purity of its 
 Anglo-Saxon blood. For that It must thank the 
 Negro; for the superior fitness of Negro labor 
 kept out the foreigner. The Negro has been 
 the vaccine in the body of the South which has 
 impregnated the system against the worst dis- 
 eases of southern Europe and Asia. But for the 
 Negro, Atlanta would to-day be as much of an 
 interracial hodge podge as Is Boston or New 
 York. 
 
 The black American should advance faster in 
 the future than In the past, for nothing succeeds 
 like success. But If It should take two years of 
 the future to equal one year of the past, it would 
 not justify despair. In 1837 Lovejoy was mur- 
 dered in Illinois for a mild opinion against Ne- 
 gro slavery; in 1863 a man of Illinois issued a 
 proclamation freeing millions of Negroes. In 
 
68 THE NEW NEGRO 
 
 1857 the highest court in the land expressed an 
 opinion that the Negro had no more respectable 
 rights than the beasts of the field; and a little 
 more than ten years later the Negro was made 
 a citizen by the highest law in the land. Fifty 
 years ago if a book was found in the hands of 
 a Negro, that hand might be cut off with a car- 
 penter's tool; while to-day he has thousands of 
 schools and millions of students. There is abso- 
 lutely no reason in despair. 
 
 When a black slave woman saw Lincoln at last 
 entering Richmond in 1865, she exclaimed, "Well, 
 de Lord am slow, but He am sho," — and the 
 truth is as sound as the grammar is poor. 
 
 In the last fifty years the Negro has accom- 
 plished all that he could have been expected to 
 accomplish and more than he actually was ex- 
 pected to accomphsh. Perhaps no people in all 
 history have ever disappointed so many ill pre- 
 dictions as has the American Negro. If the ter- 
 rible prophets of forty years ago could rise from 
 the dead, they ought to be most agreeably sur- 
 prised. He has answered the prophecy of rever- 
 sion to savagery by becoming at least the most 
 rehgious element in the country. He has an- 
 swered the prophecy of ignorance by wiping out 
 two-thirds of his illiteracy. He has answered the 
 prophecy of public menace by being peace-loving. 
 He has answered the prophecy of extinction by 
 multiplying his numbers by 300 per cent, accord- 
 ing to the count, and perhaps by another 100 per 
 
THE NEW NEGRO 69 
 
 cent, who never get counted. He stands to-day 
 the despair of the prophets. 
 
 He should be taught that next to the hand of 
 God his own hand rules his destiny. The story 
 is told of a white preacher who was endeavoring 
 to explain to a Negro candidate for the ministry 
 the doctrine of ELECTION, — that some men are 
 elected to be saved while others are elected to 
 be lost, by fore-ordaining powers over which they 
 have no control. The black candidate could not 
 understand how a fellow could be elected to a 
 position without ever consenting to be nominated, 
 until a Negro bystander volunteered to help the 
 white man out by offering this explanation: "It 
 is just like this," said the Negro, "God, He votin' 
 for you; and the devil, he votin' 'gin you; so 
 whichever way you vote, that's the way the 'lec- 
 tion goes." In the decision of a man's own 
 fate he has the deciding vote. 
 
 That truth is not at all inconsistent with the 
 fact that we are all, white and black, subjects of 
 circumstances, children of antecedents over which 
 we have no control. The present is the offspring 
 of the past. We have been cast up as a moun- 
 tain is cast up from the deep, and it will take 
 time to alter our relation to one another and 
 to the rest of the wold. Tho all is not well, and 
 tho the changes of a day are invisible, yet the 
 decades and the ages are telling and will tell 
 the story of our progress and mutual adjust- 
 ment. Race prejudice is simply the last great 
 enemy of human brotherhood, and in its turn it 
 
70 THE NEW NEGRO 
 
 will be destroyed as have all the other enemies. 
 It is simply the last barrier behind which the re- 
 treating narrowness of the human heart has taken 
 refuge. All other bars to universal brotherhood 
 have been broken one by one : First, man tried 
 to live to himself; every man's hand was against 
 his neighbor, and he scarcely trusted even the 
 female with whom he associated. This isolating 
 prejudice was finally broken down and he ac- 
 quired an Interest in certain other individuals, his 
 family. But it was family against family now. 
 Intermarriage brought families into alliances, and 
 retreating prejudice took its next stand behind the 
 clan-family, — and it was clan against clan, and 
 finally tribe against tribe. It is now nation against 
 nation and league against league. Will it later be 
 race against race and color against color? The 
 hnes of civilization are surely drawing closer 
 against the grim and ancient caste of race preju- 
 dice. And whether it comes as a sequal to gigan- 
 tic interracial conflict or through the long siege 
 of intellectual, moral and religious forces, it 
 seems certain that the overthrow of this last enemy 
 will mark the establishment of Universal Human 
 Brotherhood. 
 
FREDERICK DOUGLASS 
 
 We shall next speak of the history of three re- 
 markable men, a Negro, a near-Negro and a white 
 man. Frederick Douglass, who was known and 
 treated as a member of the American Negro 
 group, — ^Alexander Hamilton who was not gen- 
 erally known to be a Negro in the American sense 
 of the word, and was therefore not recognized 
 and treated as a member of that group, — and 
 Abraham Lincoln, the American of the Ameri- 
 cans, whose connection with the life and history 
 of the Negro race is like that of a finger of destiny. 
 
 It is a terrible, almost incredible history which 
 we are about to recite, but the authors and actors 
 thereof have already appeared before the just 
 judgment of Heaven, — and the living can review 
 their virtues and their vices and read the lesson 
 of their lives with neither mahce nor passion. 
 
 The life of Frederick Douglass is an epitome 
 of human life, which begins at the very lowest and 
 ends at the very highest. The life of Abraham 
 Lincoln is typically American; the life of Fred- 
 erick Douglass is typically human. Lincoln began 
 in the lowest deprivation of American freedom; 
 Douglass began in the lowest degradation of 
 human slavery. Douglass was 21 years old when 
 
72 THE NEW NEGRO 
 
 he escaped from slavery to a partial freedom, — 
 21 years old before he reached the place where 
 Lincoln began. The life of this black man, more 
 nearly than that of any other notable American, 
 spans the whole space of the life of man. 
 
 Human slavery is pre-eminent enough in its 
 badness to deserve a word by itself. Slavery is a 
 human custom, one of the mores, — Hke commerce, 
 marriage, agriculture, labor, law. But unlike 
 these other mores it is born not of worthy but of 
 unworthy sentiments. The others are born of de- 
 sires and efforts on the part of the individual to 
 serve himself and his fellows, and they develop a 
 fellow-feeling. Slavery is born of the desire to 
 serve oneself at the expense of his fellows, and 
 begets ill-feeling. So while slavery is like other 
 mores a child of human life, it is an illegitimate 
 child, dishonorably born; its mother is laziness 
 and its father is Mammon. It is the degenerate 
 offspring of the desire to have, mated with an 
 abhorrence for work. Indeed like the half-human 
 creatures of ancient myths, slavery seems to be the 
 unnatural issue of the man and the brute. 
 
 Some scholars claim that in savage and un- 
 civilized society slavery is normal. Whether that 
 be true or false, it is abnormal and unnatural 
 everywhere in civilization. But any institution, 
 however wrong, which allies itself with human 
 greed, bids fair to outlive the day of its normality, 
 to die hard, and to defy the bolts of the reformer. 
 Slavery is such an institution : it has the powerful 
 alliance of men's pockets and stomachs, and the 
 
THE NEW NEGRO 73 
 
 passion of gain. As society becomes civilized and 
 conscience begins to open its eyes, men begin to 
 palliate and excuse their pet passions. The wish 
 will father any kind of thought. The civilized, 
 Christianized enslaver accepted the doctrine of 
 the brotherhood of man and piously said: We 
 will elevate and bless our heathen brother by re- 
 ducing him to slavery. This absurd contradiction 
 for nearly two thousand years seduced the Chris- 
 tian church. It is notorious that no group ever 
 enslaved another group from the motive of con- 
 ferring benefits. 
 
 As we have indicated in a previous chapter the 
 commerce in slavery began in 1442 when Hg nrv 
 the Navigator^ a Portuguese prince, allowed some 
 Moors to ransom their own men by delivering ten 
 Negroes instead. This taste of human blood at 
 once excited the cupidity and avarice of the Span- 
 ish race, which gradually infected better civiliza- 
 tions and filled the earth with a million horrors. 
 What with the seductiveness and contagion of 
 avarice, and what with the discovery of a New 
 World and the development of agriculture, Africa 
 became the world's mart for the raw material of 
 slavery. The horrors of the slave ship are mat- 
 ters of cold record, written not by the victims but 
 by the perpetrators. Two captives out of every 
 three were either starved or drowned or butch- 
 ered on the high seas, before reaching a worse 
 fate In the Western World. 
 
 With this virus British America was inoculated 
 In the year of 161 9 at Jamestown in the colony of 
 
74 THE NEW NEGRO 
 
 Virginia. Until thistles produce figs a system 
 rooted in such antecedents will be ugly in its fruit, 
 ugly to see and ugly to relate. In such antecedents 
 American slavery was rooted. In this institution 
 began the life of Douglass, which we shall report 
 with fidelity to truth, — with love of right and 
 hatred of wrong, but without malice. 
 
 In Feb., 1817, as nearly as he could determine 
 over half a century afterwards, Frederick Doug- 
 lass was born in Tuckahoe, Talbot County, Mary- 
 land, — a place till this day remarkable for noth- 
 ing save the sole fact that Douglass was born 
 there. His mother was Harriet Bailey, a slave 
 owned by Aaron Anthony. She was black and of 
 comely African hneaments. Of his father nobody 
 knows anything; some have supposed that he was 
 one of the slave owners or overseers, — but Doug- 
 lass was woolly-haired and rather dark for a 
 mulatto. Until seven years of age he lived hap- 
 pily in ignorance of the fact that he was a slave 
 with his own grandmother, Betsy Bailey, who was 
 the caretaker of all the slave babies of Capt. 
 Anthony until they should be ready for the field or 
 the market. 
 
 Between seven and eight years of age he was 
 carried by his grandmother, with a crowd of other 
 youngsters who had reached a useful or a market- 
 able age, to his master, who was general superin- 
 tendent of the plantations of Col. Lloyd, a 
 wealthy Marylander, owning a thousand slaves 
 and many farms. The home of Col. Lloyd, 
 known among the slaves as "The Great House," 
 
THE NEW NEGRO 75 
 
 with its imposing wealth and antebellum munifi- 
 cence, made a profound impression upon the mind 
 of the child. 
 
 Here he had his first taste of the bitterness of 
 slavery, and as an onlooker beheld some of the 
 horrors to which his birth would make him heir. 
 In the first place he was put under the stern and 
 cruel governance of "Aunt Katy," a slave 
 woman who seemed to be a sort of superintendent 
 of the youthful slave property of Capt. Anthony. 
 He seldom saw his mother, for in order to have 
 a moment with him she had to walk twelve miles 
 from another plantation at night and be back for 
 work in the morning. Through all his life he 
 remembered with profoundest gratitude how upon 
 one such mission she came just in the nick of time 
 to save him from actual starvation at the hands of 
 merciless "Aunt Katy." Lucretia, his master's 
 daughter, and little Daniel, the youngest son of 
 Col. Lloyd, were his "friends at court," and often 
 befriended him against the tyranny of "Aunt 
 Katy" by buttered biscuits and other food, or by 
 the still more kindly ministrations of humane and 
 sympathetic words. His mother's nocturnal visits 
 suddenly ceased altogether: she had either died 
 or, still worse, been sold to the "far South." 
 Somehow she had learned to read and it was a 
 risk to keep such a slave too near to the borders 
 of the free states. — And alas! for the horrors 
 which his waking mind was permitted to see 
 through his natural eyes; he saw slave girls 
 beaten and mangled by the overseers without 
 
76 THE NEW NEGRO 
 
 remonstrance from their owners; he saw the un- 
 defined and indefinable crime of "impudence" 
 punished like murder; he saw young Denby shot 
 down in cold blood for running from the lash; 
 through a crack in the wall of the little cell where 
 he slept on the ground without covering, he 
 peeped early one frosty morning into a neighbor- 
 ing room and saw .his Aunt Esther, a beautiful 
 slave girl, tied up by her hands and on tiptoe, 
 while a human demon stood by and coolly draw- 
 ing his rawhide through his hand, as if delighted 
 with its delicious feel, dealt blow after blow until 
 her bare back was like fresh bloody beef, — and 
 for an unnameable reason entirely to the credit of 
 the girl. Sometimes he saw the slave resist and 
 fight the overseer, — and although a resisting slave 
 was sure to be overpowered, tied and whipped 
 finally, as a matter of policy, his youthful mind 
 was quick to seize the fact that those who resisted 
 most sternly were seldom attacked. A fight with 
 such a slave was neither pleasant nor safe, and 
 the overseer would diplomatically avoid an en- 
 counter. This observation caused young Fred to 
 make a formula which he carried and repeated 
 through his whole life : That those are whipped 
 oftenest who are whipped easiest. 
 
 A working slave's weekly allowance of food 
 was two pounds of pickled pork, one peck of meal 
 and one handful of salt, — and his clothing was of 
 the same scantiness. But the most neglected little 
 animals of any slave plantation were the slave 
 children not yet large enough to work. Little 
 
THE NEW NEGRO 77 
 
 pigs could soon be killed for meat, and so they 
 were fed; little calves could be slaughtered for 
 veal, and so they were fattened; but little "nig- 
 gers" could do nothing but consume what they 
 could not earn, and so they were stinted. Until 
 ten years of age they were allowed neither hat or 
 shoes, coat nor trousers, — only one tow-linen 
 shirt per annum, and if that wore out before the 
 end of the year they could wear their skins for 
 the remaining months. They had no beds but the 
 floor or ground of their huts. Fred found him an 
 empty feed sack and used to crawl into it, and 
 slept head in and heels out. No wonder that he 
 said when reflecting on this childhood that "the 
 pigs in the pen had leaves, and the horses in the 
 stable had straw, but the children had no beds." 
 Their food was coarse meal boiled into a mush 
 and poured into a common trough, — and like little 
 piggies they were called and like little piggies they 
 came, with neither spoons nor forks, but some 
 with oyster-shells, and some with chips or pieces 
 of shingle or potsherds from the yard, — and the 
 strong and more muscular would get most and the 
 weak and most needy would get least. Fred could 
 have fought his way but the vindictive hate of 
 "Aunt Katy" would punish him if he pushed the 
 others. So that even in childhood, which is prover- 
 bially happy, he says he was led to wish that he 
 had never been born. 
 
 "Why am I a slave?" was a question that puz- 
 zled his boyish brain. 
 
 So the "great house" of the slave plantation. 
 
78 THE NEW NEGRO 
 
 with all its splendor, had an underworld, an anti- 
 podal condition, within a stone's throw. Like the 
 ancient conception of the future life it had the 
 abodes of the blest and the damned in close prox- 
 imity. The opulence and plenty of the mansion 
 were balanced by the poverty and squalor of the 
 cabin. But the slave servants in the "great house" 
 itself were more fortunate ; that is, they were bet- 
 ter fed and dressed, fat and sleek. And a visitor 
 from the outside world, from free states or from 
 Europe, might be shown the mansion but not the 
 slave quarters; and seeing the well-kept, liveried 
 waiters standing behind the chairs in the dining- 
 room, he might wonder why it is that Lovejoy and 
 Garrison and Phillips lose their lives or get them- 
 selves into so much trouble over a people who are 
 being treated so kindly. 
 
 Miss Lucretia, the kindly daughter of his 
 owner, was to marry Thomas Auld, and Fred 
 was to be sent to Thomas' brother, Hugh Auld, 
 in Baltimore to take care of the little nephew 
 Tommy Auld. Boys usually regret to leave their 
 homes and early mates, but little Fred received 
 the news from Miss Lucretia that he was to be 
 transported out of this den of horrors with un- 
 bounded joy. His tow-linen shirt was to be ex- 
 changed for real trousers; he had three days to 
 prepare for the journey, and he spent most of 
 the time bathing in the creek and scraping the 
 dead skin from his knees and the soles of his feet. 
 When he reached his Baltimore home Mrs. 
 Sophia Auld, the wife and mother, said to her 
 
THE NEW NEGRO 79 
 
 little son: "Tommy, here's your Freddy," — as 
 one might speak of a new poodle. 
 
 But Mrs. Auld was at heart a kind and gentle 
 lady, who had never been a slaveholder, who did 
 not know the philosophy of slavery, and who 
 made the egregious blunder, from the slavehold- 
 ing standpoint, of teaching "Freddy" to read. 
 And one of the greatest indictments against slav- 
 ery is illustrated by the change which the poison 
 of irresponsible power wrought in this noble 
 woman's character. Her disposition gradually 
 changed from sweet to bitter, from gentle to vin- 
 dictive. One day, while her soul was still white 
 and unscarred, she innocently boasted to her hus- 
 band how quickly and well Fred had learned to 
 read the Bible, — but Master Hugh was better in- 
 structed in the creed of slavery, and immediately 
 he forbade it, and thundered his disapproval in 
 these words: that "if you give a nigger an inch 
 he will take an ell. Learning will spoil the best 
 nigger in the world. If he learns to read the 
 Bible it will forever unfit him to be a slave." No 
 wonder that Douglass contended in all his after 
 life that this was the first and one of the best 
 anti-slavery speeches he had ever heard. He 
 caught the cue at once: learning is inconsistent 
 with being in slavery. All right. He had already 
 seen enough of slavery to give his vote against 
 that, and if learning was the key to the way out, 
 he was going to find the key. Master Hugh's 
 objection was as great a stimulus as Mrs. Sophia's 
 instruction. 
 
8o THE NEW NEGRO 
 
 Poor Mrs. Auld now sought to undo what she 
 had done. She was more vindictive than her hus- 
 band: she tore papers from Fred's hand, she 
 peeped through keyholes and cracks, she eaves- 
 dropped at his door. Too late; she had given 
 him the "inch" and he took the "ell." Persecu- 
 tion stimulated him. Crayon was his pen, and a 
 barrel head or the pavement of the street was his 
 desk. This contradiction in her noble soul made 
 the woman lose her sweet disposition and become 
 vixenish and shrewish even to her own family. 
 An anthropologist says that no man was ever 
 known to be great and good enough to be a slave- 
 holder. 
 
 Capt. Anthony died, and Fred had to go back 
 to the farm where he and the other slaves and the 
 horses and sheep and cattle and plows must be 
 "valued and divided" among the heirs. Being 
 "valued and divided" he fell to Miss Lucretia, 
 and to his great joy and greater fortune she loaned 
 him again to the Aulds in Baltimore. 
 
 Lucretia died, leaving him the property of her 
 husband, Thomas Auld, and he was brought from 
 Baltimore to Thomas' plantation near St. Mich- 
 ael's, Talbot County, Maryland. Thomas mar- 
 ried a new wife, who "knew not Joseph," who 
 was hateful and stingy, and she starved Fred and 
 the other slaves almost to death. She had a horse 
 from her father's place, which when he got loose 
 would run back to her father's house. Fred 
 would let him loose to get to go after him. Beast 
 and man had the same object in going: the horse 
 
THE NEW NEGRO 8i 
 
 found fodder and Fred found bread. A cook was 
 there who was generous to the hungry. 
 
 The boy was not an ideal slave ; he hated slav- 
 ery; he was rebellious. He exasperated Thomas 
 Auld, who was one of the worst types of slave- 
 holding character, — selfish, cruel, stingy. Finally 
 the slaveholders had a great Methodist camp- 
 meeting and Master Thomas professed religion. 
 The slaves secretly rejoiced at this conversion, 
 hoping for more bread and less beating from the 
 hand of a Christian master, — to their great dis- 
 appointment. The only difference was that now 
 when "brother" Thomas Auld, class leader of his 
 church, got ready to whip a slave, he would quote 
 the passage of scripture which says: "That serv- 
 ant which knew his lord's will and prepared not 
 himself, neither did according to his will, shall 
 be beaten with many stripes." The sternness and 
 gravity of religion were added to his meanness. 
 Fred was fifteen years old and had professed re- 
 ligion himself, but he doubted the genuineness of 
 Thomas Auld's conversion. 
 
 Finally Thomas decided that Fred needed 
 "breaking." You have heard of "broncho- 
 busters" and "ox-breakers." Well, Thomas had 
 a neighbor known as a "Negro-breaker." This 
 Edward Covey was a pious man; his religion kept 
 him from breaking any rule of the Sabbath, but 
 not from breaking any bone of a slave's body on 
 any other day of the week. Fred's treatment 
 by this man in the year of 1834 is too harrowing, 
 bloody and inhuman to relate in detail. In the 
 
82 THE NEW NEGRO 
 
 first six months he was several times nearly killed 
 by untamed oxen which he was compelled to drive, 
 or by Covey's lash and bludgeon, until one morn- 
 ing in despair he made up his mind that, live or 
 die, he was going to resist. After Covey had 
 fought him for hours without being able to sub- 
 due or whip him, he turned Fred loose and said 
 diplomatically: "Now, you scoundrel, go to your 
 work; I would not have whipped you half so hard 
 if you had not resisted." This physical fight, this 
 resistance, this refusal to be whipped, reawakened 
 Fred's intellectual and moral manhood and was 
 one of the crises of his life. He never received 
 another whipping in slavery. 
 
 "Those are whipped oftenest who are whipped 
 easiest." 
 
 Slavery would be bad enough if the slave could 
 be treated as well as the horse, the cow and the 
 dog. But no system of slavery can ever treat 
 its average slave as well as the horse and cow and 
 dog. Slavery itself is such a revolt against human 
 nature that the slave's very humanity, instead of 
 protecting him, damns him. For instance: if the 
 horse balks, he is an unreasoning brute — pat him 
 and coax him; if the slave balks, he is a malicious 
 devil — kill him. If a horse breaks a wagon, it is 
 an accident; if a slave breaks a tool, it is sullen 
 revenge — beat him. If the horse is sick, he is 
 sick; if a slave is sick, he is trying to get out of 
 work. If the horse is slow, he is a slow horse; 
 if a slave is slow, he is stubborn. If the horse 
 injures his owner, it is regrettable; if a slave in- 
 
THE NEW NEGRO 83 
 
 jures his owner, it is murder. And the most 
 blinding and dangerous thing of all is this thought 
 in the mind of the slaveholder: If I were in that 
 fellow's place and he in mine, I would do every 
 sly, mean thing I could do to him, and I know he 
 does the same. Thus a man always develops 
 hatred for the one whom he habitually wrongs. 
 The slave's very humanhood damns him below the 
 dumb unreasoning beast; and as to slaveholder, 
 there is no position within the gift of the devil 
 better fitted to destroy the character of the one 
 who fills it. 
 
 The next year our 17-year-old lad was rented 
 out to William Freeland, who was not a church 
 member, but as compared with the brutality of 
 Covey he was a kind and gentle master. You 
 might think that the slave would be contented with 
 kind treatment after being treated so inhumanly. 
 But such is not human nature. The "inch" and 
 the "ell" philosophy is literally true in the matter 
 of liberty. Give a slave a cruel master and he 
 will wish a kinder master; give him a kind master 
 and he will want no master at all. The half free 
 aspires to full freedom. Give him an inch and 
 he demands an ell. Such is human nature. And 
 human nature is right: kindness or cruelty is not 
 the essential question; it is slavery or freedom. 
 To make a man a slave and then treat him kindly 
 is to put a chain on him and paint it with gold 
 paint. To be chained with a chain is to be chained, 
 whether the chain be gold or iron. 
 
 So, what did Fred do under the experience of 
 
84 THE NEW NEGRO 
 
 better slave treatment? Thank God and be con- 
 tented? The first, but not the last. He planned 
 to run away from all slavery, kind and cruel, 
 "good" or worse. He began to teach John and 
 Henry Harris how to read to inspire them with 
 the feeling of liberty. Thus organizing a band 
 of five he wrote passes for each and set a day for 
 flight. They were betrayed, arrested and put 
 into jail on the horrible charge of an attempt to 
 steal themselves. But the brave little fraternity 
 stood together, ate their passes with their bread 
 and gave not a word of incriminating evidence 
 one against the other. They narrowly escaped 
 being sold into Georgia or Louisiana or Alabama, 
 a fate worse than hanging; they were released 
 from jail and Fred was sent back to Hugh Auld's 
 in Baltimore. 
 
 Here he learned ship-calking, and at One time 
 was nearly beaten to death by the white appren- 
 tices, who thus showed their resentment at work- 
 ing with a "nigger," — a spirit which organized 
 labor still holds. Master Hugh took all his earn- 
 ings, allowing him poor clothes and poorer food. 
 He hired the boy out as helper to the carpenters 
 in a shipyard, — not to one carpenter but to the 
 seventy-five. All had an equal claim to his time 
 and obedience. He had seventy-five masters, 
 when, as he suggests, one was bad enough. He 
 was to answer the beck and call of each one, even 
 if they all beckoned and called at the same time. 
 He tells how, as a bewildered boy, he received 
 impossible and simultaneous orders from these 
 
THE NEW NEGRO 85 
 
 hard men: "Fred, come help me to cant this tim- 
 ber here," — "Fred, come carry this timber yon- 
 der," — "Fred, bring that roller here," — "Fred, 
 go get a fresh can of water," — "Fred, come help 
 saw off the end of this timber," — "Fred, go quick 
 and get the crowbar," — "Fred, hold on the end 
 of this fall," — "Fred, go to the blacksmith's shop 
 and get a new punch," — "Halloo, Fred! run and 
 bring me a cold-chisel," — "I say, Fred, bear a 
 hand, and get up a fire under the steam-box as 
 quick as lightning," — "Hullo, nigger! come turn 
 this grindstone," — "Come, come; move, move! 
 and bowse this timber forward," — "I say, darkey, 
 blast your eyes ! why don't you heat up some 
 pitch?" — "Halloo! halloo! halloo! (three voices 
 at the same time) — "Come here; go there; 
 hold on where you are. D — n you. If you move 
 I'll knock your brains out!" 
 
 "Why am I a slave?" mused he. "Why can 
 I not claim the fruits of my own labor?" Finally 
 he was permitted to rent himself at the hard bar- 
 gain of $3 per week and to pay for all his living 
 besides. But this taste of liberty and possession 
 determined him to try again for freedom, and 
 he fixed his date for flight on September 3, 1838. 
 
 A second failure would be fatal. Moreover It 
 required unusual courage for any slave to run 
 away. Illiterate slaves knew no more of geog- 
 raphy or distance than an Infant child, and the 
 very names of the free states were kept from 
 them. Any white person could halt. Interrogate 
 and arrest any colored person on any road. A 
 
86 THE NEW NEGRO 
 
 gang of ruffians might sometimes catch a free col- 
 ored person, destroy his free papers and sell him 
 into slavery. There were professional kidnappers 
 who caught runaways; and sometimes cunningly 
 inducing a slave to run away, they would overtake 
 him and get the reward for catching him. These 
 fellows literally infested the borderline between 
 the slave and the free states, hke human carrion 
 crows circling about the rotten carcass of slavery. 
 Besides, running away was like going into a living 
 death, — burying oneself forever from friends and 
 relatives, — walking into a tomb with eyes open 
 and consciousness unimpaired. The slave who 
 could run away was a hero, and to such heroes 
 the other slaves owe their freedom. These brave 
 men indicted slavery wherever they went. In the 
 free states and in Canada they did slavery no 
 good by their reports. The fugitive slave was 
 the creator of the abolitionist. He made "Uncle 
 Tom's Cabin" and Garrison and Phillips; and 
 those in turn made political parties and Abraham 
 Lincoln. Sometimes fugitives fought with in- 
 credible heroism when overtaken. These exiles, 
 perhaps more than a hundred thousand strong, 
 with bleeding backs, tortured limbs and eloquent 
 tongues, were every one ambassadors against the 
 Slave Power. 
 
 One of the very means which the law created to 
 protect slavery helped to destroy it, namely, the 
 "free papers" which free Negroes had to carry. 
 Slaves often borrowed these from their free 
 brethren, escaped to Canada and sent them back 
 
THE NEW NEGRO 87 
 
 by mail. Frederick borrowed a Negro sailor's 
 "protection" papers, boarded a train as it was 
 pulling out of Baltimore, to avoid being ques- 
 tioned and measured by the ticket agent; and 
 being dressed like a sailor and using a sailor's 
 slang, he outwitted the conductor and within 
 twenty-four hours found himself in the city of 
 New York. He was not beyond the reach of fugi- 
 tive slave laws, and was somewhat dazed by the 
 success of this bold attempt. But an escaped 
 slave cannot live on joy, so David Ruggles, a 
 Negro anti-slavery worker in New York, advised 
 him to go to New Bedford, Mass., where ship- 
 calking was in demand. Even slaves love : the 
 free colored girl in Baltimore received a secret 
 message, came on to New York, and they were 
 married; Frederick paid the minister with 
 "thanks." 
 
 From New York to Newport they passed the 
 night on the deck of the steamer, not being al- 
 lowed in the cabin. From Newport to New Bed- 
 ford they went by stage, and the driver held their 
 baggage for stage-fare. This was at once fur- 
 nished by a New Bedford Negro, Nathan John- 
 son. In these early struggles for freedom the 
 Negroes stood by each other nobly. Nathan 
 Johnson had just read Scott's "Lady of the Lake," 
 so he induced Frederick to name himself Doug- 
 lass. Fred had come under the false name of 
 "Johnson," and Nathan Johnson perhaps thought 
 that there were enough black "Johnsons" in New 
 Bedford. And the name which Fred's mother 
 
88 THE NEW NEGRO 
 
 had given him in slavery was FREDERICK 
 AUGUSTUS WASHINGTON BAILEY. Irony 
 of ironies! The greatest Prussian, the greatest 
 Roman, and the greatest American in a black slave 
 baby. 
 
 The people of New Bedford would have died 
 rather than allow a slave hunter to return a man 
 from their town to slavery; but they would not 
 give Douglass a fair chance to earn a living at his 
 trade. So he did odd jobs of all sorts. The 
 sweetness of possessing himself and the fruits of 
 his toil inspired him to any honest work. Mean- 
 while he read the "Liberator," heard anti-slavery 
 discussions, and was schooled in Garrisonian prin- 
 ciples. He was much interested by the wealth and 
 industry of New Bedford, and learned for the 
 first time in his life that white people could be 
 rich without owning black people. In Tuckahoe, 
 Talbot County, Maryland, those who did not own 
 Negroes were "po' white trash." 
 
 In 1 841 Mr. Garrison called an anti-slavery 
 convention at Nantucket. Douglass attended as 
 a spectator, was urged to speak, and was at once 
 employed as agent of the Massachusetts Anti- 
 Slavery Society, — just three years out of slavery. 
 Consequently he was often introduced to audi- 
 ences as "a recent graduate from the institution 
 of slavery with his diploma written on his back." 
 
 Frequently at the risk of his life he now fought 
 slavery like one who knew the monster, and where 
 to hit and how hard. Dauntless in courage, un- 
 bending in principle and terrible in logic, he be- 
 
THE NEW NEGRO 89 
 
 came one of the most inveterate and uncompro- 
 mising foes to oppression that mankind has pro- 
 duced. If halls and churches were not open to 
 him, he rang a bell through the streets, summoned 
 an audience and spoke under the roof of high 
 heaven. In Syracuse he talked all day, and his 
 open-air audience grew from five in the morning 
 to five hundred in the afternoon. He encountered 
 foul eggs, fouler words, and at one time was 
 beaten into unconsciousness by an Indiana mob. 
 The Northern states were at that time disposed 
 toward the Negro about as Georgia and Mis- 
 sissippi are now, — continually seeking to "jim- 
 crow," disfranchise and dishonor him. But wher- 
 ever the fight was thickest, Douglass was there. 
 He helped to defeat the disfranchising "Dorr 
 Constitution" in Rhode Island, and in Massachu- 
 setts he made so much trouble by refusing to be 
 "jim-crowed" that the Eastern Railroad ran its 
 passenger trains through Lynn without stopping, 
 because Douglass lived there. When the church 
 people protested, the president of the road handed 
 them a rejoinder like this: Well, the railroads are 
 no better than the churches, and the churches liave 
 their "Negro pew." That was a good argiiment 
 against the churches, but a poor one against justice 
 to Douglass. 
 
 Douglass's color brought him the usual queer 
 experiences of the Negro, some of the hardest and 
 heaviest of which he softened and lightened with 
 a joke, as is characteristic of his race. Once he 
 was on a train in the North. It was crowded, 
 
90 THE NEW NEGRO 
 
 many were standing but Douglass had a seat and 
 no one would occupy the seat beside him. As the 
 night grew on he took advantage of this vacant 
 seat, pulled his hat over his face and lay down 
 to sleep. He had begun to feel the real fun of 
 the thing, but just as he was enjoying all the 
 luxury of being black, a well-dressed white man 
 got on at a station and came and tapped him on 
 the shoulder and wanted to sit down by him. With 
 a sleepy yawn and the merriest deviltry in his 
 voice, Douglass said aloud, so that his white fel- 
 low-passengers could hear: "Don't sit down here, 
 my friend, I'm a Nigger!" There was great 
 laughter, and the newcomer sat down beside him. 
 Once he and several other colored men who were 
 speakers in the anti-slavery cause, arrived at 
 Janesville, Wis., and at the hotel they were, of 
 course, segregated at a table in one corner of the 
 dining-room. This attracted to them quite a deal 
 of annoying attention. Every eye in the dining- 
 room was directed toward them as toward a group 
 of most curious animals. Even the doorway and 
 the windows got piled full of curious faces who 
 stopped as they passed along the street. When 
 this curiosity was at its height Douglass said in 
 a full loud voice to one of the other colored inen: 
 "I have just made a great discovery!" "What 
 is it?" asked the other. "Why I have just been 
 out to the hotel stables, where I saw white horses 
 and black horses eating out of the same trough in 
 peace! From which I infer that the horses of 
 Janesville are more civilized than its people!" 
 
THE NEW NEGRO 91 
 
 This raised such a storm of laughter at the man- 
 agement's expense that the colored men were no 
 longer segregated in the dining-room. 
 
 The ex-slaves and their children have never yet 
 realized how much they owe their early freedom 
 to this one black fugitive. His example was an 
 unanswerable argument. His very power and 
 presence made converts. Men reasoned like this: 
 If slavery is keeping such men as Frederick Doug- 
 lass in chains, it is the devil's own institution; and 
 since he is, there must be others. 
 
 Indeed such an impression was made by this 
 "runaway nigger," as pro-slavery papers called 
 him, that men began to doubt whether he had ever 
 been a slave. To set the question at rest he pub- 
 lished a pamphlet, "Frederick Douglass's Narra- 
 tive," giving the details of his bondage and the 
 name and address of his owner. This subjected 
 him hourly to the danger of being kidnapped and 
 returned, — for oh, how Thomas Auld and Tucka- 
 hoe, Talbot County, Maryland, would have liked 
 to get hands on him then ! So he sailed for Eng- 
 land. He was not allowed in the cabin and had to 
 go in steerage. The passengers learned who he 
 was and invited him to make a speech; some 
 young fellows from New Orleans and Georgia 
 threatened to throw him into the ocean for speak- 
 ing, and the captain threatened to put them into 
 irons. When they reached England, these inju- 
 dicious young men flew to the British press with 
 their grievances against the captain and this 
 Negro, the British people sided with the captain, 
 
92 THE NEW NEGRO 
 
 and the incident served only to furnish Douglass 
 with the best possible introduction to the British 
 public. 
 
 The English were pioneers in emancipation, 
 and had become constant and consistent friends 
 of the slave. Canada had steadfastly refused to 
 enter into any extradition treaty to return fugi- 
 tives from bondage, and the English courts had 
 held that when a slave set foot on English soil 
 and breathed English air, he became ipso facto 
 ivtt. 
 
 While abroad Douglass did American slavery 
 all the damage he possibly could, — in England, 
 Wales, Ireland and Scotland. He heard the 
 foremost orators, met the pioneer workers for 
 freedom, and enjoyed the society of the greatest 
 men of the time, having the same experiences 
 which the American Negro still has — to be 
 treated better in any other civilized country of 
 the world than in his own. 
 
 Yet he wanted to return; he could not enjoy 
 English freedom for the haunting visions and 
 clanking chains of his fellow bondsmen in 
 America. Two English ladies, therefore, started 
 a movement to raise the blood-money, seven hun- 
 dred and fifty dollars, to buy him from Thomas 
 and Hugh Auld in Maryland and make him a 
 present of himself to himself. 
 
 Here are copies of the deeds and the manu- 
 mission papers by which Douglass and his race 
 came into possession of his body, his soul and his 
 history: 
 
THE NEW NEGRO 93 
 
 "Know all men by these presents: That I, 
 Thomas Auld of Talbot County and state of 
 Maryland, for and in consideration of the sum 
 of one hundred dollars, current money, to me 
 paid by Hugh Auld, of the city of Baltimore, in 
 the said state, at and before the sealing and de- 
 livery of these presents, the receipt whereof, I 
 the said Thomas Auld, do hereby acknowledge, 
 have granted, bargained, and sold, and by these 
 presents do grant, bargain and sell unto the said 
 Hugh Auld, his executors, administrators, and as- 
 signs, ONE NEGRO MAN, by the name of 
 FREDERICK BAILEY— or DOUGLASS as he 
 calls himself — he is now about twenty-eight years 
 of age — to have and to hold the said Negro man 
 for life. And I the said Thomas Auld, for my- 
 self, my heirs, executors, and administrators, all 
 and singular, the said FREDERICK BAILEY 
 alias DOUGLASS unto the said Hugo Auld, his 
 executors and administrators, and against all and 
 every other person or persons whatsoever, shall 
 and will warrant and forever defend by these 
 presents. In witness whereof, I set my hand and 
 seal, this thirteenth day of November, eighteen 
 hundred and forty-six (1846). 
 
 THOMAS AULD. 
 "Signed, sealed, and delivered, in presence of 
 Wrightson Jones, John C. Lear." 
 (Attested also by N. Harrington.) 
 
 "To all whom it may concern : Be it known that 
 I, Hugh Auld, of the city of Baltimore, in Balti- 
 
94 THE NEW NEGRO 
 
 more county of the state of Maryland, for divers 
 good causes and considerations me thereunto mov- 
 ing, have released from slavery, liberated, manu- 
 mitted, and set free, and by these presents do 
 hereby release from slavery, liberate, manumit, 
 and set free, MY NEGRO MAN, named FRED- 
 ERICK BAILEY, otherwise called DOUG- 
 LASS, being of the age of twenty-eight years, or 
 thereabouts, and able to work and gain a suf- 
 ficient livelihood and maintenance; and him the 
 said negro man, named FREDERICK DOUG- 
 LASS, I do declare to be henceforth free, manu- 
 mitted, and discharged from all manner of servi- 
 tude to me, my executors and administrators for- 
 ever. 
 
 "In witness whereof, I the said Hugh Auld, 
 have hereunto set my hand and seal the fifth of 
 December, in the year one thousand eight hundred 
 and forty-six. 
 
 HUGH AULD. 
 "Sealed and delivered in presence of T. Hanson 
 
 Belt, James N. S. T. Wright." 
 
 After about two years in England he returned 
 in 1847, took up his home in Rochester, N. Y., 
 founded a paper on money furnished by English 
 friends, and for twenty years, in one of the most 
 eventful periods of all history, he worked as 
 never ex-slave worked before to free a fellow- 
 slave. He risked life and liberty as an officer of 
 the "Underground Railroad." This is the only 
 great railroad system in the United States on 
 
THE NEW NEGRO 95 
 
 which Negroes never suffered any kind of "jim- 
 crow," and they held all sorts of positions, from 
 stockholders and division superintendents down to 
 engineers and porters. Trains ran mostly on a 
 night schedule, and in one general direction, from 
 South to North. Douglass's Rochester home was 
 the last station this side of Canada, and he had 
 as high as eleven passengers at one time. 
 
 Editing a paper made Douglass read and 
 think, — and reading and thinking brought him to 
 disagree with some of the tenets of the Garrison- 
 ian anti-slavery school. Garrison held that hon- 
 orable abolitionists should not vote or have any- 
 thing to do with the United States Constitution, 
 which he regarded as a slaveholding instrument, — 
 or, as he expressed it, a covenant with death and 
 an agreement with hell. The abolitionists then 
 wanted the free states to separate from the slave 
 states. Douglass came to feel that the Constitu- 
 tion is in spirit an instrument of freedom, inas- 
 much as those who framed it had shown that they 
 were ashamed to use the word SLAVERY, pre- 
 sumably hoping that the institution would soon 
 end. And he knew that for the free states to leave 
 the Union might consign his people to endless 
 southern bondage. 
 
 He became acquainted with Harriet Beecher 
 Stowe and was on intimate terms with John 
 Brown, the hero of Osawatomie and Harper's 
 Ferry, the short-built, plain-looking man, lean and 
 sinewy, with rawhide boots and leather cravat, 
 with iron will and flinty nerve. Brown confided 
 
96 THE NEW NEGRO 
 
 to him the details of his plans for a sort of guer- 
 rilla warfare from the Allegheny Mountains, to 
 vex slavery and slaveholders and carry off their 
 slaves to Canada. Meanwhile the legislatures, 
 courts and congresses of the country were hot 
 with the fever of impending conflict. There were 
 fugitive slave laws, Dred Scott decisions, com- 
 promises and repeals of compromises. One of 
 the most horrible laws ever enacted by a civilized 
 people was the Fugitive Slave Law now passed 
 by a recreant congress. It endangered the liberty 
 of a hundred thousand industrious prosperous 
 fugitives, made it possible for any two villains 
 to swear away a free colored person's liberty, 
 and gave the judge in the case twice as much fee 
 if he condemned the victim as he would get if 
 he freed him. Even Douglass was in danger: 
 his purchase was of doubtful validity, the owner 
 not having possession of the property at the time. 
 But no act of legislation ever did more to free 
 the slaves than did this abominable law. It stung 
 decent people into a fearful resentment. Indeed 
 the Negro will always have to thank the aggres- 
 siveness of the slave power for the rapidity with 
 which the cause of freedom was pushed forward 
 in this last decade of slavery. 
 
 In the midst of all this war of words and con- 
 flict of principles, John Brown, who had taken 
 eye for eye and tooth for tooth in Kansas, deter- 
 mined to throw himself like a firebrand. Three 
 weeks before his famous "raid" he asked Doug- 
 lass to meet him at Chambersburg, Pa. Douglass 
 
THE NEW NEGRO 97 
 
 did so and brought with him Shields Green, a 
 black fugitive from South Carolina and next to 
 Brown the bravest man at Harper's Ferry. 
 Douglass tried to persuade Brown not to make 
 the raid, seeing the physical impossibility of suc- 
 cess. But Brown said in effect that if he could 
 not succeed, he could die and so awake the sleep- 
 ing conscience of a nation. 
 
 After the raid the United States Government, 
 then in the hands of Mr. Buchanan and the slave- 
 holders, determined to arrest all who were in any 
 way intimate with Brown and turn them over to 
 the tender mercies of Virginia. Brown impli- 
 cated nobody and said that he alone was responsi- 
 ble for all that he had done. But if they could 
 not have proven that Douglass had anything to 
 do with the raid, they could have proven that he 
 was Frederick Douglass, which would have been 
 enough to hang him in any court of the South 
 at this particular time. So he again fled from 
 the terrible claws of the American eagle to a 
 place of refuge under the mane of the British lion. 
 His connection with Brown made him exceedingly 
 popular in England, and when he returned to the 
 United States six months later, because of the 
 death of his daughter, he found sentiment so 
 changed that Brown had been transformed from 
 a felon into a martyr and the country was fast 
 moving on to the election of Lincoln and war. 
 There were three candidates in the presidential 
 field, every one running on the "Negro Question" : 
 Breckenridge for the right of the slaveholder to 
 
98 THE NEW NEGRO 
 
 carry his slaves into any territory regardless of 
 the wishes of its people ; Stephen A. Douglass for 
 the right of the people of a territory to vote 
 slavery in or out; and Abraham Lincoln for the 
 right of Congress to prohibit slavery from the 
 territories altogether and confine it to the then 
 present slave states. Nobody had any idea of 
 freeing the Negro where he was already a slave. 
 But the ways of Providence often mock the ways 
 of man. Man is not always master of his own 
 fate ; if he were it would oftener be a very sorry 
 fate. 
 
 Douglass at once saw that Lincoln's position 
 was the only hope of the slave ; for to attempt to 
 limit slavery was to fight slavery. The training 
 of a slaveholder is such that he will not submit 
 his wishes to debate. He is used to saying to 
 men, "Go yonder," and they go — "Come here," 
 and they come — "Stay there," and they stay. 
 Such a man will not brook dictation, arbitration 
 or limitation. If you elect Lincoln, we will leave 
 the Union, they said; and after Lincoln was 
 elected one of their leaders said. If you gave us 
 a blank sheet of paper on which to write our own 
 conditions for staying in the Union, we would not 
 stay. 
 
 So, behind the candidacy of Lincoln Douglass 
 threw himself with all the might of his tongue and 
 his pen. It is familiar history now, how the North 
 was at first a very lamb in its desire for peace; 
 how the guns of Sumter changed the lamb into a 
 lion, "and his roar was terrible," — but he only 
 
THE NEW NEGRO 99 
 
 roared and showed his teeth, at first reluctant to 
 fight: How Lincoln and the whole administration 
 declared to the world that the war would not be 
 an abolition war, that however the war might end 
 the master would be master still and the slave 
 still slave; how Providence confounded these 
 declarations; how under the shock of rebellion the 
 nation began to totter; how Douglass and others 
 urged the administration to unchain in the nation's 
 defence the nation's great black hand; how these 
 blacks, unchained, rushed to the front two hun- 
 dred thousand strong and stayed a nation's fall. 
 The details would be a long story. Suffice it to say 
 that Frederick Douglass did more than any other 
 man to recruit and rally the Negro troops. He 
 knew that the Negro troops were not treated 
 fairly, but he saw at the other end freedom. 
 "Hereditary bondmen, know ye not 
 Who would be free themselves must strike the 
 blow?" 
 At once the 54th Massachusetts, a Negro regi- 
 ment recruited mainly through the efforts of 
 Douglass, by its gallant and terrible assault on 
 Fort Wagner, put at rest in one night more ques- 
 tions about Negro manhood, courage and worth 
 than could have been settled by a century of de- 
 bate. And if any man opens his mouth to say 
 that the Negro was given his freedom and did 
 not win it, let him pause long enough to read 
 how 200,000 blacks rushed into a bloody war, 
 where when captured they were not treated as 
 prisoners but butchered or sold like cattle, — and 
 
loo THE NEW NEGRO 
 
 how, according to the testimony of the com- 
 mander-in-chief of the armies and navies of the 
 United States, they saved a nation's life. 
 
 After the war he saw that his people were but 
 half free, and that freedom without citizenship 
 was a mockery and might become worse than slav- 
 ery. In acquiring the franchise for the Negro 
 race Douglass bore a part second only to that 
 of Charles Sumner of the United States Senate. 
 As usual the reasons urged against Negro en- 
 franchisement were the best reasons for It. For 
 instance, it was urged that It would bring the ex- 
 slave into conflict and antagonism to the ex- 
 master; which Is an acknowledgment that the two 
 might have conflicting interests, and becomes the 
 best possible reason for giving the Negro the bal- 
 lot and a fair chance to defend his own. If no 
 conflicting Interests were ever possible between 
 white and black people in this country, It would be 
 a sound reason for not enfranchising the Negro or 
 for disfranchising the white man. 
 
 Douglass had sense enough to be aggressive. 
 Truth is always truth, whatever opinion might be. 
 And I only speak the truth when I say that the 
 only way in the world to break up an unreasonable 
 prejudice is to contradict it In practice. Prejudice 
 is from custom, and how can a custom ever be 
 displaced unless the opposite custom Is established 
 by practice? Those who have rights to defend 
 must be vigilant; those who have rights to ac- 
 quire must be aggressive. Such is human nature. 
 To complain that it should not be so is to com- 
 
THE NEW NEGRO loi 
 
 plain against the weather. No people ever ac- 
 quired rights by sitting down and waiting for 
 them. Rights never come — calamities come — 
 rights, you must go and get them. 
 
 For over half a century Douglass retained the 
 respect and esteem of his fellow-man, espoused 
 the cause of woman's suffrage and every other 
 honorable ambition, and held many positions of 
 honor and trust under the United States Govern- 
 ment and elsewhere, — among which were Com- 
 missioner to San Domingo, member of the upper 
 house of the legislature of the District of Colum- 
 bia, Marshall of the District, Recorder of Deeds 
 in the District, Presidential Elector at large for 
 the state of New York, Minister to Hayti, Presi- 
 dent of the Freedmen's bank, and his last public 
 service was as Commissioner for the republic of 
 Hayti at the World's Columbian Exposition in 
 Chicago. On February 20, 1895, at Anacostia 
 Heights, a suburb of the city of Washington and 
 where he had lived for many years, "he died in 
 action with his armor on." 
 
 The city of Rochester, N. Y., has erected for 
 him a bronze monument; he has built for himself 
 more enduring monuments in the hearts of the 
 bronze-colored American group for whom he 
 spent his life. 
 
 I know no better model for ambitious youth or 
 struggling people. His life completes the record 
 of human degradation, endeavor and rise. Are 
 you poor? Here is one who did not possess his 
 own soul and body; in his own words, his body 
 
102 THE NEW NEGRO 
 
 belonged to his master and his soul belonged to 
 God, so he poor fellow had nothing left for him- 
 self. Are you scorned? Here is one from the 
 lowest condition to which humanity can be de- 
 pressed. Are you buffeted? Here is one who was 
 beaten with stripes. Are you denied the privi- 
 leges of a man? He was not accorded the com- 
 forts of a horse. Are you handicapped in the 
 struggle for education? Here Is one whose study 
 hours were stolen at the risk of the lash, in the 
 school of adversity, with oppression as his teacher. 
 Is there hope for you? Can you succeed? He 
 did. From the bottom of despair he reached the 
 top of success. He was born to the status of the 
 cattle, by his own exertions he freed his body and 
 liberated his mind, he literally wrung recognition 
 from the reluctant hands of a public long steeped 
 in the idea of the essential Inferiority of his kind, 
 he fixed the attention of two continents, and when 
 he died, a literary friend of the Caucasian race in 
 a volume of sonnets to the memory of Frederick 
 Douglass pronounced him "the noblest slave that 
 ever God set free." 
 
ALEXANDER HAMILTON 
 
 "My blood is as good as that of those who 
 plume themselves upon their ancestry." 
 
 The above are the words of Alexander Hamil- 
 ton. Hamilton was a Negro. He was a Negro 
 according to the definition accepted in our day. 
 That is, he was a man whose blood was mixed 
 black and white. Alexander Hamilton, like the 
 French dramatist Alexandre Dumas, and the 
 Russian poet Alexander Sergeievitch Poushkin, 
 and the American poet Henry Timrod, and the 
 English poet Robert Browning, had Negro blood. 
 Some of these remarkable men had more Negro 
 blood than many of the American Negroes whom 
 we see every day. And it was only the merciful 
 accidents of birth and circumstance that saved 
 them from Jim Crow cars and disfranchisement. 
 Yea, if Poushkin and Dumas had lived in Georgia 
 and Alabama instead of in Russia and France, 
 they would have been slaves. 
 
 Unjust sneers were cast upon Hamilton because 
 of his parentage. And perhaps his impetuous and 
 imperious soul was smarting under a sense of this 
 injustice when he gave expression to the above 
 words. 
 
 But it is not our purpose to deal with Hamilton 
 here as a Negro, but as a MAN, — for we admire 
 
104 THE NEW NEGRO 
 
 him for his manhood and not for his ancestry. 
 And yet we will make no pretense of suppressing 
 the genuine pleasure which these FACTS give 
 us in confuting and confounding the race-bigoted, 
 color-mad theorists. 
 
 Any one who is familiar with sketches and 
 biographies of Alexander Hamilton has doubtless 
 noted the obscurity that hangs about his parent- 
 age: some say that his mother died before he 
 was old enough to remember her, others say that 
 she came with him to New York when he was 
 sixteen years old; it is pretty generally agreed that 
 his father was of Scotch extraction and that 
 his mother was a "native" of the Isle of Nevis in 
 the British West Indies; but some assert shortly 
 that he was the illegitimate son of a rich West 
 Indian planter, and some, that his mother was a 
 "French" widow of Huguenot descent, who for 
 some obscure reason had been divorced from her 
 former husband, ahd one of Hamilton's biograph- 
 ers (Lodge) says that he was "dark of skin." 
 One well-known writer went to the West Indies 
 to look up Hamilton's early life, with the inten- 
 tion of writing his biography, but finding on every 
 hand evidences that he was a Negro, she fell 
 into the mood of fiction and wrote "The Con- 
 queror" instead. 
 
 Thank heaven, Hamilton's claim upon the 
 gratitude and admiration of mankind rests in 
 his life and deeds and not in his ancestry. 
 
 He was born in January, 1757, on the island of 
 Nevis, the son of some man and some woman. 
 
THE NEW NEGRO 105 
 
 Like most creatures, plant or animal, of the south- 
 ern clime, he matured rapidly. At the age of thir- 
 teen he was put to work in a merchant's counting 
 house at St. Croix. His precocity and genius were 
 at once recognized by his friends, and in 1772 they 
 sent him to the continental colonies to be edu- 
 cated. In a school of EHzabethtown, N. J., he 
 quickly prepared for King's (now Columbia) 
 College in New York. 
 
 The anti-British sentiment was now growing 
 hot and events were rapidly moving toward the 
 Revolution of 1776. In the midst of the passions 
 and excitements of the times it is interesting to 
 see this lad of seventeen years deliberately read- 
 ing the discussions and looking into the merits of 
 both sides, preparing to make his choice. The 
 colonies were not his home, their quarrel was not 
 his quarrel; but he decided, spite of "Tory" of- 
 fers, that justice and humanity lay on the side of 
 the Patriots and espoused the cause of the latter. 
 
 And immediately that magnanimity and broad- 
 ness of sympathy, characteristic of Hamilton's 
 whole life, comes out in this ardent, high-spirited 
 boy: he opposed the mobbish spirit of the "pa- 
 triots," plead for justice and mercy, and endan- 
 gered his life by interposing himself between the 
 mob and the Tory. 
 
 At the age of seventeen he was writing anony- 
 mous articles in defense of the Patriot cause 
 which the public mind was ascribing to the emi- 
 nent and mature statesman, John Jay. He intro- 
 duced himself to the public by startling his hearers 
 
io6 THE NEW NEGRO 
 
 with his grasp of the situation at a political stump- 
 speaking of the Patriots. 
 
 In 1776 he used his last "allowance" sent by 
 his friends from the West Indies in fitting up a 
 company of artillery, commissioned by the gov- 
 ernment of New York. Captain Alexander Ham- 
 ilton of this New York light battery was now 
 scarcely twenty, but his gallantry at once attracted 
 the attention of the commander-in-chief, and in 
 1777, at the age of twenty, he became aide-de- 
 camp to the most towering character of the eigh- 
 teenth century, Gen. George Washington of Vir- 
 ginia. Hamilton was very useful to Washing- 
 ton, managing all of the General's tremendous 
 correspondence with the multifarious state gov- 
 ernments and with the long-winded and verbose 
 but headless and factious "Continental Congress." 
 
 In personal character, self-control, and as a 
 leader of the masses of men, Washington was 
 Hamilton's superior, and the superior of every 
 other American of his day. In the genius of gov- 
 ernment, constructive ability, and as a leader of 
 the leaders of men, Hamilton was Washington's 
 superior, and the superior of every other man of 
 his day. 
 
 In 1780 Hamilton acquired the greatest for- 
 tune that can fall to the lot of any good man, — a 
 good wife, in the person of a daughter of Gen. 
 Philip Schuyler, a veteran of his adopted state. 
 
 The next year an incident happened which il- 
 lustrates the difference between the characters of 
 Hamilton and Washington. Washington ad- 
 
THE NEW NEGRO 107 
 
 dressed Hamilton with the authority of a com- 
 mander and a superior and Hamilton resigned 
 his staff position on the spot. Washington apolo- 
 gized, but the proud spirit of Hamilton would not 
 again accept the position. This gives us a glimpse 
 of Washington's true superiority. But fortun- 
 ately for the American Republic the friendship 
 of these two men was not broken or permanently 
 strained. He was with Washington when Corn- 
 wallis surrendered and helped to carry that last 
 great fight against the British. 
 
 But Hamilton was more a statesman and finan- 
 cier than a soldier, was admitted to the bar in 
 1782 and elected from New York to the Conti- 
 nental Congress, — a giant in a body consisting 
 mainly of pigmies. He at once saw the weakness 
 of the "confederacy" of states, that it was in- 
 volved in financial chaos, had lost respect and 
 confidence, and was in great danger of becoming 
 a by-word among the nations. Congress could 
 do nothing but talk and it did plenty of that: it 
 voted the veterans of the war abundance of praise 
 but not one cent of cash. Hamilton was not sorry 
 to return to private life and the practice of law 
 in 1783. 
 
 Meanwhile "Shay's Rebellion" and jealousies 
 and commercial difficulties of the different states, 
 were teaching the thoughtful what Hamilton's 
 logic had not taught them : that the present gov- 
 ernment was weak and needed to be superseded 
 by a stronger one. Chnton, governor of New 
 York and leader of the destructionists, was trying 
 
io8 THE NEW NEGRO 
 
 to break up the Confederacy, and did. But for- 
 tunately (and no thanks to him) this act of de- 
 struction made way for a better and truer Union. 
 Hamilton was elected from New York to a con- 
 vention to meet at Annapolis in 1786 and unify 
 the commerce of the states. He went, when be- 
 hold, there were the representatives of only four 
 states, — such was the indifference of the times to 
 anything like a national spirit or a centralized gov- 
 ernment. But this small meeting performed one 
 service: it issued a call for another meeting which 
 resulted in the famous Constitutional Convention 
 at Philadelphia in 1787. 
 
 Hamilton a member of the minority party in 
 New York, tactfully coerced his state to be rep- 
 resented at this Convention through himself and 
 two members of the opposition party. At the 
 opening of this convention he made the great 
 speech of his life. 
 
 Great as had been his services to his adopted 
 country theretofore, he now began the Herculean 
 labors for which America and all her heirs should 
 pay him everlasting gratitude. It is fitting right 
 here to notice just what were his distinctive ideas 
 of a general American government. His scheme 
 might be briefly called an "Aristocratic Republic"; 
 the President and Senators to hold office "during 
 good behavior," the state Governors to be ap- 
 pointed by the President and to have absolute 
 veto power over all state legislation. This, of 
 course, would have made the central Government 
 everything and the state nothing. 
 
THE NEW NEGRO 109 
 
 It can be readily believed that Alexander Ham- 
 ilton was the only man in America who had both 
 the physical and the moral courage to make such 
 a proposition to the democracy-mad fathers of 
 the American Revolution. His idea did not pre- 
 vail to its full extent but It performed its mission 
 in toning down the French-revolutionary senti- 
 ment of the times; it caused the government that 
 was organized to be made stronger than it other- 
 wise would have been. The first mad mutterings 
 of the French reign of terror and rain of blood 
 were arousing the hearts of men in the utmost 
 limits of civilization; in France it was "liberty, 
 equality, fraternity, or death," — and the greatest 
 of these was Death. Hamilton saw, or thought he 
 saw, that the American zealots were tending rap- 
 idly toward the brink of the same abyss. 
 
 The Constitution was adopted as we know it. 
 Hamilton signed it for all New York, as his two 
 opposition colleagues refused their assent. And 
 the next labor of the American Hercules was to 
 secure its ratification by his stubborn and Intract- 
 able state. In defense of the Constitution he 
 published, with some assistance from Jay and 
 Madison, the series of essays known as the "Fed- 
 eralist," which gives him a place in the literature 
 of this country; and then he went into his state 
 convention supported by a minority of only 19 
 out of its 65 members, and when the question 
 came to vote, the Constitution was ratified by a 
 majority of three. This is one of the greatest 
 recorded victories of persuasive and argumenta- 
 
no THE NEW NEGRO 
 
 tive oratory. Great was the joy of his heart in 
 thus assuring the accomplishment of the ambition 
 of his hfe, — the American Republic: for the 
 strategic position of New York rendered it im- 
 perative that it be brought into the Union. 
 
 The new government was formed, and Wash- 
 ington was made its first Chief Executive. Here 
 again we have a pleasing reminder of the master- 
 ful character of that great Virginian. His quick 
 and superior knowledge of men always stood him 
 in good stead. The greatest task of American 
 history was to confront the first head of the 
 United States Treasury: foreign and domestic 
 credit were to be established, and order was to 
 be brought out of general financial chaos. Wash- 
 ington accordingly selected for this post a man 
 who Talleyrand afterwards said had the greatest 
 skill "in the appHcation of the elementary prin- 
 ciples of government to practical administration," 
 a man who was only 32 years old, Alexander 
 Hamilton. The keen insight and statesmanship 
 of the new Secretary were at once brought to bear 
 on the condition of the new nation by his great 
 report to Congress on the Public Credit. It will 
 be remembered that at this time the Constitution 
 was a mere body of rules in which every effort 
 had been made by the jealous states to limit and 
 throttle the central government; it was a mere 
 lifeless form that could not even authorize the 
 United States to levy taxes, until Hamilton blew 
 into it the breath of life and made it the one 
 supreme thing in this country. He advanced the 
 
THE NEW NEGRO iii 
 
 doctrine of the "implied powers" of the Consti- 
 tution, and showed to the satisfaction of Wash- 
 ington that "to provide for the general welfare" 
 could be construed to give the central government 
 authority to establish a National Bank and to levy 
 an excise tax. And when the levying of this tax 
 caused a "whiskey rebellion" in Pennsylvania, he 
 won respect for the Government by putting it 
 down with a show of national troops. 
 
 He wished for honorable and respectable gov- 
 ernment and did not care to cheat the Revolu- 
 tionary veterans out of their soldier's pay; so his 
 financial policy embraced payment of both the 
 Foreign and the Domestic Debt, and Assumption 
 of the war-debts of the States. He advocated the 
 "double standard" in coinage and originated poli- 
 cies upon which great political parties have since 
 divided. 
 
 And what was Jefferson doing, the "father" of 
 our present Democratic party? Jefferson was at 
 this time Secretary of State, but whenever Wash- 
 ington had a difficult matter of state or foreign 
 policy, he went to Hamilton, and not to Jefferson, 
 for his solution. He wanted a man who had the 
 energy to work out a plan from start to finish. 
 
 No clearer emphasis can be put upon a truly 
 great and constructive genius like Hamilton than 
 by showing his relation to a destructive and "op- 
 position" nature like Thomas Jefferson. Hamil- 
 ton's time was all spent in planning and building; 
 the chief activity of Jefferson was in opposing 
 what Hamilton had planned and tearing down 
 
112 THE NEW NEGRO 
 
 what Hamilton was trying to build. They re- 
 spectively represent the positive and negative 
 forces of early American history. It Is significant 
 that Hamilton's followers assumed the name of 
 "Federalists," that is, constructive unionists, and 
 Jefferson's party became the "anti-Federalists," 
 that is, destructive disunionists. The successor to 
 the Hamiltonian party is the present Republican 
 party; and the Jeffersonian party survives in the 
 present Democratic party. It makes us smile 
 when we hear a "stumping" politician say, "I am 
 a Jeffersonian Democrat," or that he beheves In 
 "the fundamental principles laid down by Thomas 
 Jefferson." Do you know what these "funda- 
 mental principles" are? Stripped of all their 
 cunning indirection and vituperation, and reduced 
 to their lowest and simplest terms, they were 
 simply this: "Down with Hamilton and the ac- 
 cursed Federalists!" The French fever in Ameri- 
 can politics rendered the populace violently hos- 
 tile to anything that smacked of aristocracy or 
 monarchy; Jefferson was cunning enough to take 
 advantage of this passion and use it for all it 
 was worth against Hamilton's centralization poli- 
 cies. For the sake of appearances he changed 
 the name of his "anti-Feds" to "Republicans." It 
 is the irony of fate that the party which he op- 
 posed has since acquired that name, and that the 
 aristocratic republicanism which he so bitterly op- 
 posed in Hamilton afterwards attained its highest 
 and most threatening reahzation in his own dear 
 Virginia and the other slave oligarchies of the 
 
THE NEW NEGRO 113 
 
 South. Before Jeffersoa became such a bitter 
 enemy to Hamilton he had made a political "deal" 
 with him: he had secured votes for Hamilton's 
 Assumption policy and Hamilton had secured 
 votes to have the national capital located in the 
 South. The success of Assumption was particu- 
 larly offensive to the "anti-Federahsts," and Jef- 
 ferson explained his embarrassing deal by saying 
 that he had been "duped by Hamilton." The 
 truth is that an ingenuous man like Hamilton 
 could succeed at anything better than at duping 
 a fox like Jefferson. When duping was done Jef- 
 ferson did it: he duped old man Madison into 
 an essay polemic with Hamilton, a thing which 
 Jefferson feared for himself. Madison was not 
 a half match for Hamilton; Aaron Burr has tes- 
 tified that for a man to put himself on paper 
 against Hamilton was to seal his own destruction. 
 
 When there was trouble between France and 
 England in 1793 Hamilton inspired Washington 
 with a neutrahty policy on principles which gave 
 rise to the "Monroe Doctrine," which could more 
 properly be called the "Hamilton Doctrine." 
 Jefferson on the other hand wanted this country 
 to act in offensive and defensive alliance with 
 France, a policy which Hamilton saw would have 
 been dangerous for America. But Jefferson, who 
 always influenced people through their prejudices, 
 did not lose the opportunity to call Hamilton's 
 sympathies "British." 
 
 Jefferson's narrow political ideas rendered him 
 so uncomfortable in the Cabinet of Washington 
 
114 THE NEW NEGRO 
 
 that he was forced to resign his Secretaryship. 
 Hamilton stayed at his post till 1795, when he re- 
 signed after demanding a full investigation of his 
 official conduct, to justify himself against the 
 many slanders and charges of his enemies. It 
 is hardly needful to say that the investigation left 
 his official integrity without a stain. 
 
 Hamilton now went back to the practice of law 
 and to private citizenship, but he continued to 
 be the influential adviser of President Washing- 
 ton. He was, in every good sense of the term, 
 the poHtical "boss" of his party. He supported 
 the unpopular "Jay treaty" with England. And 
 in the presidential election which followed, al- 
 though Adams was not his personal choice he 
 supported him as the regular nominee of the 
 party. Jefferson, the nominee of the opposition, 
 was defeated. Now, this man Adams was a 
 small man in mental stature and statecraft. He 
 hated Hamilton and Hamilton made the ingenuous 
 mistake of letting him know that he was not his 
 personal choice for President. This break be- 
 tween its two leaders sealed the fate of the Fed- 
 eralist party. 
 
 In our little war with France in 1798 Adams 
 asked Washington to take command of the Army. 
 Washington accepted only on condition that Ham- 
 ilton be made chief of staff and be given the full 
 commission for organizing the army and getting 
 it ready for the field. This greatly displeased 
 Adams but for fear of popular wrath he could 
 not bicker with Washington, and yielded. Ham- 
 
THE NEW NEGRO 115 
 
 ilton soon had an army on foot which might have 
 kept Austerlitz out of history, had Napoleon come 
 to America. But amicable relations were re-es- 
 tablished and the war cloud passed. But Ham- 
 ilton's labors had borne abiding fruit in the es- 
 tablishment of the military school at West Point. 
 
 Hamilton was an imperialist: if hostilities had 
 continued he intended to seize Florida and Louisi- 
 ana, getting complete control of the Mississippi. 
 Hamilton disliked France on principle, although 
 the French soldiers with Lafayette had been much 
 attached to Hamilton. His dislike of pure and 
 unrestrained democracy caused him to support 
 the ill-fated Alien and Sedition laws. 
 
 The above laws together with the utter lack 
 of tact in President Adams wrecked the Federalist 
 party. The death of Washington left Hamilton 
 commander-in-chief of the Army, a thing which 
 Adams was pigmy enough to ignore. 
 
 The quarrel of the leaders caused disaffection 
 among the followers, and Pennsylvania was lost to 
 the Federalists. Then the struggle was for New 
 York. Now Hamilton had opposed to him in 
 New York a cheap politician named Aaron Burr, 
 a schemer and trickster, a master of little things. 
 The noble mind of Hamilton could not stoop to 
 Burr's petty methods of solicitation and vote- 
 buying, and lost New York City. And so, then as 
 now, that meant the loss of New York state, and 
 the loss of political power for the Federalist party. 
 And then came the one blot upon Hamilton's 
 political escuthcheon : he proposes to Governor Jay 
 
ii6 THE NEW NEGRO 
 
 that they secure the choice of Presidential electors 
 through the old legislature before the new opposi- 
 tion legislature could convene, a plain proposition 
 to defraud the will of the majority. In despair he 
 saw the party of distruction headed by Jefferson 
 coming into power and argued the damnable 
 doctrine that "to do a great right one is justified 
 in doing a little wrong." — Jay, to his everlasting 
 honor, said, "I won't." 
 
 In the election which ensued it happened that 
 Burr and Jefferson, men of the same party, re- 
 ceived an equal number of votes and a higher num- 
 ber than Adams and Pinclvney, which left it to the 
 House of Representatives to choose between the 
 two former. Hamilton knew the cheap and 
 unprincipled man from New York and so used his 
 influence and secured the election of Jefferson. 
 This was the last great service which he rendered 
 his adopted country; he afterwards did only one 
 service which can in any way compare with this, 
 and that was when he again thwarted Burr in his 
 designs on the governorship of the state of New 
 York. 
 
 Meanwhile the busy lawyer, Alexander Hamil- 
 ton, had risen to the head of his profession in New 
 York state. He was moving and swaying juries, 
 not with his imagination, but by direct, impas- 
 sioned, irresistible appeals to their heads and 
 hearts. A small and narrow nature like Burr's was 
 bound to become embittered, and to pass from bit- 
 terness into a mad rage against this man for whose 
 
THE NEW NEGRO 117 
 
 mind he was no match. He swells with vengeance 
 and literally forces a quarrel with Hamilton. 
 
 The "code of honor" was in force at that day, 
 and, strange to say, men obeyed it even against 
 the express command of God. Burr sent the 
 challenge, and Hamilton accepted, not as a 
 believer in the duello, but that no imputation of 
 personal cowardice might lessen his usefulness in 
 those future crises in which he felt sure his country 
 would need him. — His preparation for the duel 
 was in settHng up his business affairs and writing 
 his condemnation of the "code of honor." Burr's 
 preparation was in destroying his compromising 
 letters from worthless women and practicing with 
 his pistol. 
 
 They met on the bright morning of July 11, 
 1804, on the banks of the Hudson, the spot where 
 Hamilton's eldest son had recently fallen in a 
 duel. The son was 19; the father is 47. He falls 
 mortally wounded at the first fire. And Burr 
 becomes a leper and his name anathema to the 
 American public. 
 
 They did not know that they loved him so until 
 he was dead. And he blessed them even in his 
 death, for it created the first solid sentiment for 
 the abolition of the "code of honor." 
 
 He was under-sized, but erect and courtly in his 
 bearing. No one could be indifferent toward him, 
 — he must be either loved or hated with intensity. 
 
 He was a prophet: he wrote Washington in 
 1798 that even then could he see, in the action of 
 the South, the fatal oncoming of sectional and 
 
ii8 THE NEW NEGRO 
 
 geographical politics, — how the country "from 
 the South of Maryland" was becoming solid, — 
 and he was one of the founders of the New York 
 manumission society for the abolishment of 
 slavery. 
 
 He made nothing for himself, he made every- 
 thing for America. The Frenchman Talleyrand 
 saw him, after his retirement to private life, 
 laboring at night in his law office in New York, 
 and said: "I have seen one of the wonders of the 
 world. I have seen a man laboring all night to 
 support his family, who has made the fortune of 
 a nation." 
 
 Chief justice Marshall, an American, says that 
 Hamilton is next to Washington. Talleyrand, 
 a Frenchman says: "I consider Napoleon, Fox and 
 Hamilton the three greatest men of our epoch, 
 and without hesitation I award the first place to 
 Hamilton." 
 
ABRAHAM LINCOLN 
 
 We shall now essay the praise of "arms and a 
 man." And in praising the wisdom of the man 
 or recounting the success of the arms it is no part 
 of our purpose to deride those who disagreed 
 with that man nor to taunt those who were van- 
 quished by those arms. 
 
 We are here in memory of the humblest citizen 
 of a nation and in honor of the greatest states- 
 man of his time. Abraham Lincoln's life ran the 
 whole gamut of American society. He was born 
 into the "poor white trash" of Southern back- 
 woods; he was pioneer and frontiersman; he was 
 rail-splitter and flatboat-man; he was champion 
 wrestler, cock-pit umpire and saloonkeeper; he 
 was merchant, surveyor and country lawyer; he 
 was the leading lawyer and politician, the acknow- 
 ledged head and the champion orator of a political 
 party in his state ; he was legislator, congressman, 
 statesman and President; he was leader in the 
 most remarkable war prior to the 20th century — 
 he was the tallest figure of the nineteenth century 
 — he was the liberator of a race and martyr to the 
 hfe of his country. Abraham Lincoln was the first 
 president of the United States who was character- 
 istically American. 
 
 One hundered and seven years ago in what was 
 
 119 
 
I20 THE NEW NEGRO 
 
 then Hardin County, Kentucky, Abraham Lincoln 
 was born. In the aristocratic sense of the phrase, 
 he was a man of "no ancestry." His father prob- 
 ably decended from people who came first from 
 England to Massachusetts, thence to Virginia, 
 thence to Kentucky. Abraham Lincoln's grand- 
 father and namesake was a brother-in-law of 
 Daniel Boone and was one of the pioneers of the 
 middle West. This grandfather had been shot 
 by the Indians when Lincoln's father, Thomas 
 Lincoln, was about six years of age. Mordecai, 
 brother of Lincoln's father, Is reputed to have 
 been Industrious, but Thomas, the father of 
 Abraham Lincoln, was what we might call, with- 
 out exaggeration, lazy and trifling. 
 
 When we consider this man's ancestry and early 
 surroundings, we are both enlightened and con- 
 fused. We are enlightened in that we can see in 
 his humble origin the source of his sympathy for 
 his humblest fellow-man. In his frontier life we can 
 see the cause of his manly independence, and In his 
 early associations we can see the foundation of his 
 firm faith in the "plain people," — but we are con- 
 fused In that we cannot find In his immediate par- 
 entage and environment the necessary stimulus and 
 inspiration, and from his early lack of opportunity 
 we cannot account for the development of mental 
 power, tact and executive ability. In these latter 
 respects the law of cause and effect is apparently 
 broken. 
 
 His mother had been one Nancy Hanks, a 
 woman of very humble origin and of a melancholy 
 
THE NEW NEGRO 121 
 
 disposition. His father Thomas was a thriftless, 
 ignorant fellow who loved to tell stories. He 
 seemed to lack the instinct or ambition to settle 
 down and build a decent home, even after he was 
 married. He moved and moved and moved, and 
 like the proverbial "roUing stone," he gathered no 
 moss. The ignorance and inconsequentiahty of 
 the Lincoln family may be gathered from the fact 
 that it had no uniform way of spelling its name : 
 sometimes it was spelled L-i-n-k-h-o-r-n, sometimes 
 L-i-n-c-k-o-r-n, sometimes even L-i-c-k-e-r-n. 
 
 As is well known, such poor white people in the 
 first half of the nineteenth century had very lim- 
 ited chances in a slave commonwealth, and so, to 
 escape the condition into which slavery forced the 
 poorer whites, when the son was but seven or eight 
 years old, the happy-go-lucky, unprogressive father 
 loaded all the family belongings on a boat of his 
 own construction and floated down the Ohio to 
 Indiana. This aimless traveler finally landed and 
 constructed a rude camp in a wild, uninhabited re- 
 gion near the present town of Gentryville, Indiana. 
 The structure which Thomas Lincoln here erected 
 to shelter his wife and young children, cannot be 
 named out of the terminology of the dwellings of 
 civilized man. It was not a house ; it was what was 
 known in pioneer days as a "half-faced camp": 
 that is, it was closed on only three sides and its 
 floor was the earth. The bed was constructed 
 from a number of poles fastened to the logs in 
 one corner of this cheerless habitation, the outer 
 corner of the bed being supported by a forked 
 
122 THE NEW NEGRO 
 
 stick. In this camp the wife and children shivered 
 for one whole winter, before Thomas could rouse 
 himself to provide a better dwelling. 
 
 The melancholy, feeble mother died in the boy's 
 childhood; an event which is a great calamity to 
 most boys but was a great blessing to young Abe, 
 for it enabled him to acquire at the early age of 
 ten a very capable, energetic and motherly step- 
 mother. This God-sent stepmother treated Abe 
 and his little sister with impartiality among her 
 own children; she also aroused all of whatever 
 human aspiration there was in the father Thomas. 
 She became the boy's tutor and protector against 
 the educational indifference and hostility of his 
 father; for Thomas was quite willing that his 
 posterity should forever go the way their father 
 and their fathers had gone. 
 
 The neighbors say that the boy Abe was "awful 
 lazy," by which they mean that he was fonder of 
 thinking and studying and talking and reasoning 
 and story-telling, than he was of physical exertion. 
 But the sympathetic stepmother understood and 
 fostered the ambition of the boy. He had been 
 to school a little: all his schooling put together 
 would not amount to more than one year, some 
 say not more than six months. But this hmited bit 
 of schooling was spread over a period of nine years 
 and the boy made good use of what he learned in 
 school by self-culture in the intervals, all of which 
 might teach us the important educational principle 
 that it is not the quantity of schooling but the thor- 
 oughness of it. The boy even developed enough 
 
THE NEW NEGRO 123 
 
 of the poetic spirit to be the author of this stanza : 
 "Abraham Lincoln 
 his hand and pen. 
 He will be good, but 
 god Knows When." 
 
 The neighborhood of Gentryville was very su- 
 perstitious : it believed in the bad luck of Fridays 
 and in the influence of the moon on crops. So 
 Abraham Lincoln was superstitious till his dying 
 day. He was an ungainly looking lad and did not 
 arouse high expectations by his personal appear- 
 ance. He was lanky in appearance, with a head 
 of unmanageable hair, and had what at first struck 
 one as a lazy, dreamy look about the eyes. His 
 clothes were made of tanned deer hide, his trous- 
 ers usually being several inches too short and his 
 suspenders of the one-gallows kind. Thus endowed 
 by nature and thus clad in the garb of frontier pov- 
 erty, he was not an a^ttractive looking youngster, 
 and a lawyer of the time who saw him, described 
 it as "the ungodliest sight I ever saw." When 
 Abraham was twenty-one his roving father moved 
 again, still westward, and this time to a place near 
 Decatur, Illinois. Thus at the legal age of man- 
 hood he entered, unknown and unrespected, the 
 State which was to be the future theatre of his life 
 — of the greatest life of that State, of that Nation 
 and of that Century. 
 
 It is impossible for any fiction to be stranger 
 than the subsequent life of this poor boy. It was 
 now the year 1830, and in thirty years more he 
 was to be the chosen executive of the greatest re- 
 
124 THE NEW NEGRO 
 
 public in history. He had worked at hard manual 
 drudgery since his babyhood. Now legally eman- 
 cipated from his father, he helped to build a house 
 for the family, split rails to make fences, and with 
 the small bundle of all his earthly possessions he 
 set out into the world to pursue his ambition. He 
 was physically powerful and wiry; mentally slow, 
 but patient, persistent and sure. 
 
 The story of this man's rise from that time forth 
 should make every American proud of American 
 institutions and American possibilities. The fact 
 of his rise is a proof of democracy, and the suc- 
 cess of his rise is a justification of republican gov- 
 ernment. His first trip into the wide, wide world 
 was taken in 1831 to New Orleans, where he met, 
 saw and hated slavery. On his return to Illinois 
 he out-wrestled Jack Armstrong, the champion 
 wrestler of the frontier, and ran for the General 
 Assembly in 1832. The fact that a man with 
 Lincoln's antecedents and attainments could enter 
 the race for legislator of Illinois, shows what 
 Western politics meant in that day. In this his 
 first political contest he announced a principle 
 which became the leading principle of all his after 
 life and the chief element of his great statesman- 
 ship : he said: "so soon as I discover my opinions 
 to be erroneous, I shall be ready to renounce 
 them." This was in New Salem. He was beaten 
 in this contest, but he could say with pride in after 
 years that it was the only time in which Abraham 
 was beaten on a direct vote of the people. In this 
 same year he had been a captain of volunteers in 
 
THE NEW NEGRO 125 
 
 the Black Hawk War, and this man who was des- 
 tined to command an army of a million men, when 
 he gave his first order to this Httle volunteer com- 
 pany, received for a reply, "Go to the devil, sir." 
 Once forgetting the necessary word of command 
 for swinging his company endwise so that it could 
 march through a narrow gate, he simply shouted: 
 "This company is dismissed for two minutes, when 
 it will fall in again on the other side of the gate." 
 After his political defeat he went into the store- 
 keeping business and failed: his partner was too 
 lazy and Abe himself was too fond of talking and 
 reading politics to attend the success of the ven- 
 ture. He was also postmaster of New Salem in 
 1833, carrying the letters in his hat, and was as- 
 sistant to the county surveyor. 
 
 All the while he was studying law, which seemed 
 ridiculous to his acquaintances. He was successful 
 in getting to the legislature in 1834, where he 
 served four terms. His chief acts In this body 
 were protesting against its pro-slavery resolutions 
 and helping to enact some very disastrous finan- 
 cial legislation. He had been admitted to the bar 
 in 1836 and moved to Springfield in 1837. 
 
 Being a very susceptible lover he first fell in love 
 with a girl who died of a broken heart for another 
 man. He wished to marry on the slightest provo- 
 cation, and after a fruitless Platonic affair with 
 another woman he finally married Miss Mary 
 Todd in 1 842, she declaring that she did not marry 
 him because he was good-looking, but because she 
 thought he would some day be President of the 
 
126 THE NEW NEGRO 
 
 United States. In 1847 he entered the lower house 
 of congress for one term, where he again put him- 
 self on record against slavery extension. It was 
 not until after this congressional term that he 
 was finally able to pay the last of the debts occa- 
 sioned by his business failure, and the faithful pay- 
 ment won him the useful title of "Honest Old 
 Abe." 
 
 He now seemed to retire from politics and to 
 settle down to the practice of law, when in 1854 
 the country became a volcano of political activity, 
 and Abraham Lincoln was again aroused to take 
 a hand in the greatest political battles in the his- 
 tory of free government. The repeal of the Mis- 
 souri Compromise had aroused the latent anti- 
 slavery feeling in the North to its highest pitch. 
 This compromise had limited the northward 
 spread of slavery to a certain parallel, and when 
 it was repealed, even conservative men like Lin- 
 coln felt bound to cry out. Douglas, the Demo- 
 cratic statesman, had fathered this "repeal" and 
 the enactment of the Kansas-Nebraska bill, which 
 was to allow the people of those territories to de- 
 cide for themselves whether or not they should 
 have slavery. In 1854 Lincoln debated this ques- 
 tion against the Democratic champion, and at 
 Peoria he said: "Repeal the Missouri Compro- 
 mise, repeal all compromises, repeal the Declara- 
 tion of Independence, repeal all past history, you 
 still cannot repeal human nature. It still will be 
 the abundance of man's heart that slavery exten- 
 
THE NEW NEGRO 127 
 
 sion is wrong, and out of the abundance of his 
 heart his mouth will continue to speak." 
 
 He at once became the recognized champion of 
 those who were opposed to the "repeal" and the 
 Nebraska bill. His oratorical powers had been 
 wonderfully developed by his constant law prac- 
 tice since his retirement from congress. He had 
 ridden the circuit and told stories with the West- 
 ern lawyers and judges and could fairly "skin" 
 his opponent in court. His method of argument 
 avoided sophistry and lead straight to the heart 
 of the matter. He was now well known in Illinois 
 and was universally esteemed, and was at once 
 accepted as just the man with the qualities to cope 
 with the doughty Douglas, the famous "Little 
 Giant." This Douglas was called "Little Giant" 
 because of the smallness of his body as compared 
 with the largeness of his mind. 
 
 Lincoln had been a Whig. In 1856 the Repub- 
 lican party was formed, which crystallized the op- 
 position to the spread of slavery. In his state he 
 became the undisputed leader of this party. Their 
 nominee for the presidency was defeated and 
 Buchanan was elected. Immediately followed 
 Judge Taney's "Dred Scott Decision," which fur- 
 ther drew the line between those who favored and 
 those who opposed slavery. Lincoln's comment 
 on the Dred Scott Decision is characteristic, show- 
 ing how his mind penetrated sham and technicality 
 and went straight to the fundamental justice of a 
 case. He said: "It seems strange to me that our 
 courts will hold that a man nev^er loses his title to 
 
128 THE NEW NEGRO 
 
 his property if that is stolen, but that he imme- 
 diately loses his title to himself when he is stolen." 
 
 The next year, 1858, is famous for the Lincoln- 
 Douglas debates. Douglas's senatorial term was 
 about to expire and the Republicans put forward 
 Lincoln to contest for the prize. Lincoln had al- 
 ready magnanimously yielded one senatorial con- 
 test to secure the election of an anti-Nebraska 
 Democrat, and he had lost a nomination for the 
 vice-presidency. In the contest with Douglas he 
 won the debates but lost the senatorship. This 
 man's losses, however, later proved to be his 
 greater gains. 
 
 It is interesting to compare and contrast these 
 two champions. They were both conservative, 
 sober-minded men. But Douglas was a recog- 
 nized statesman, while Lincoln was but a novus 
 homo. Few outside of Lincoln's own friends and 
 better acquaintances expected him to come off with 
 any honor against the fierce "Little Giant." Doug- 
 las was quick; Lincoln was deliberate. Douglas 
 was polished and cultured ; Lincoln was an uncouth, 
 poor-mannered man, according to the tastes of 
 polite society. Douglas was cunning and devious 
 in argument; Lincoln was straight as an arrow. 
 Douglas was a powerful intellect; and so was 
 Lincoln. 
 
 The battle was eagerly watched throughout the 
 North, which had become a sort of political cal- 
 dron, because of what was felt to be the aggres- 
 sions of the pro-slavery element. Like a knowing 
 antagonist Lincoln attacked Douglas at his most 
 
THE NEW NEGRO 129 
 
 vulnerable point, assailing his record in connection 
 with the repeal of the Missouri Compromise and 
 the passage of the Nebraska Bill. Douglas, skill- 
 ful sophist that he was, dodged and attempted to 
 parry this blow by thrusting certain well-directed 
 questions at Lincoln. Whereupon Lincoln became 
 interrogatory himself and asked Douglas one 
 question which destroyed Douglas, split Douglas's 
 party in twain, and drew the issue squarely between 
 the opposing forces of the entire country. He 
 asked Douglas a question which, if answered in the 
 affirmative, would offend the South, and which, if 
 answered in the negative, would offend Illinois. 
 Douglas wanted the immediate senatorship from 
 Illinois, so he answered in the affirmative and 
 gained the senatorship, but he offended the South 
 and lost their support for the presidency two years 
 later — just as Lincoln had calculated. The famous 
 question was — "Can the people of a Territory, in 
 a lawful way, against the wish of any citizen of the 
 United States, exclude slavery from that Terri- 
 tory, prior to its adoption of a State Constitution?" 
 Douglas was re-elected to the senatorship by the 
 state legislature, but Lincoln was from that day 
 the chosen man of the people of Illinois. In a 
 parade prior to one of the debates the Douglas 
 men had carried an inscription which read, "The 
 Little Giant," and the Lincoln men carried an 
 inscription which read, "Lincoln the Giant Killer." 
 Douglas had traveled on special trains, waving 
 banners and beating drums; Lincoln had jour- 
 neyed in the simplicity of the most undistinguished 
 
I30 THE NEW NEGRO 
 
 citizen. Douglas had spent $80,000 in his canvass ; 
 Lincoln had spent less than $1,000. Lincoln had 
 lost and Douglas had won; Douglas had grown 
 weak, and Lincoln had grown strong. 
 
 Lincoln was now in the eye of the country and 
 was invited to lecture in the East, which he did so 
 acceptably as to utterly astonish all the bigots of 
 New York and New England, who had not be- 
 lieved that anything very remarkable could come 
 out of the West. Horace Greely and others who 
 did not like Seward, began to see in Lincoln a 
 "presidential possibility." In i860 he was nomi- 
 nated and elected by the RepubHcan party, the 
 first Chief Executive to come out of the great 
 North-West. 
 
 So slow is the world to believe, that even then 
 there was scarcely anybody who thought Lincoln 
 really competent to fill the office and accomplish 
 the task before him. Six states had seceded before 
 he could be inaugurated. The South was very 
 angry. The Union was actually going to pieces. 
 Europe was laughing and acting with the airs of 
 one who feels like shouting : "I told you so !" And 
 the greater sentiment in the North at this time 
 seemed disposed to let the States secede without 
 war; men were not inclined to fight, they were too 
 busy in their shops and factories — -they had no 
 time to measure the world-wide, age-long conse- 
 quences of the destruction of the greatest republic 
 in the world. Men poked fun at the new president 
 as an ordinary Western lawyer with no executive 
 ability. Cartoonists vied with one another In carl- 
 
THE NEW NEGRO 131 
 
 caturing his homely looks, exaggerating the long- 
 ness of his arms and legs, and size of his feet and 
 the thickness of his lips. He was represented as 
 subhuman, as a gorilla, some even charging him 
 with the very heinous offence of being part "nig- 
 ger." All this he bore with the steadfastness and 
 courage of a man who knows himself. He never 
 swerved from his position that the Union must be 
 preserved, adding an element to our statesmanship 
 by showing that the first and foremost duty of a 
 government is to defend its own existence, and that 
 the right to do this is inherent in the nature of 
 government and does not have to be conceded to it 
 among any delegated powers. If the government 
 had, in any way whatsoever, either by grant or 
 conquest, acquired the right to exist, that very 
 right carried with it the duty of self preservation. 
 On the question of slavery he was not an Aboli- 
 tionist, by politics at least. It was his expressed 
 wish that all men everywhere might be free, but as 
 President of the United States he was not an offi- 
 cer of the Abolition Societies, but the chief execu- 
 tive of the American government under the Con- 
 stitution — and the Constitution protected slavery. 
 So, whatever were his private feelings on the ques- 
 tion, he intended to sacrifice them to his solemn 
 oath to defend the Constitution. He enforced the 
 "fugitive slave law" and in his inaugural he had 
 renounced any intention to interfere with slavery 
 where it already existed legally. But he was against 
 its further extension, and upon this he said he 
 would "hold firm as a chain of steel." 
 
132 THE NEW NEGRO 
 
 So while the South was fast uniting and prepar- 
 ing for war, the North was rather undecided and 
 hesitant, but the guns of Sumter, which were 
 heard around the world and whose echo shall re- 
 sound through all the future history of a great 
 nation, did what neither Lincoln nor danger from 
 the South nor a mere latent love for the Union 
 could do — they absolutely united the North. Dem- 
 ocrats and Republicans, the followers of Douglas 
 and the followers of Lincoln, became of one mind 
 to settle the question of the perpetuity of the 
 Union; all Northern parties became one party, 
 which might be denominated the War Party. A 
 call for seventy-five thousand was answered by the 
 willing voices of a million, and Massachusetts had 
 a regiment on the way to Washington within 48 
 hours after the call. 
 
 Here again comes out the chief element of his 
 statesmanship: he did not call until he knew that 
 men were ready, and even anxious to come. If he 
 had called for troops as soon as he was inaugu- 
 rated, he would probably have received much the 
 same reply as when he gave his first orders to the 
 Black Hawk volunteers. "My policy Is to have 
 no policy," said he; he waited upon events and 
 acted according to the great heart and the great 
 will of the people. "Time was his prime minister." 
 After deciding upon a course of action he never 
 outran the opportunity: he made every effort con- 
 sistent with the authority of government to win 
 conciliation, but he called for troops when men 
 were ready to fight; he revoked the emancipation 
 
THE NEW NEGRO 133 
 
 orders of his too hasty generals, but In response 
 to the popular demand he issued his Emancipation 
 Proclamation upon the heels of a Federal victory; 
 he returned fugitive slaves, but when the Northern 
 soldiers had become so weary as to be glad for 
 anybody to help to do the fighting, he called for 
 the black legions, whose appearance marked the 
 turning point of the War. 
 
 And the guns of Sumter had no less effect upon 
 the men of the South. Eleven seceded States 
 formed themselves into a Confederacy. The bor- 
 der States of Missouri, Kentucky and Maryland 
 were with difficulty kept in the Union, and such 
 was the volcanic nature of the cleavage that the 
 State of Virginia was finally divided against itself. 
 Lincoln at once reaHzed the strategic situation of 
 the border states, and with the instincts of the 
 great strategist that he was, he concentrated his 
 first efforts upon their retention. So important 
 was the task and so earnestly did Lincoln apply 
 himself to It that some observer said: "Lincoln 
 would Hke to have God on his side, but he must 
 have Kentucky." 
 
 The line of cleavage did not limit itself to terri- 
 tory, but reached into the administrative branches 
 of the government, into the army and into the 
 navy. One-third of the officers, because of South- 
 ern lineage or Southern sympathies, left the regu- 
 lar naval and military forces of the Union. Among 
 those who deserted the government was one of the 
 ablest captains of history, Robert E. Lee. Many 
 Southern men, however, preferred to stand by the 
 
134 THE NEW NEGRO 
 
 Government, notably among whom were Senator 
 Andrew Johnson, Generals Scott and Thomas, and 
 Commodore Farragut. And It is to be said of the 
 common soldier and sailor that not one of them 
 deserted his post before actual war. 
 
 Let us for a moment right here consider the 
 relation of slavery to the dreadful war that was 
 waged. Some say that slavery brought on the war, 
 and others say that the war was not waged in the 
 interest of slavery. Slavery was not the immediate 
 cause, the immediate "bone of contention," but 
 slavery was the underlying cause, the cause of the 
 cause of the war. We can best explain by a para- 
 ble. There are two neighbors living with no 
 fence between them and no definite boundary line. 
 One of those neighbors has a bad dog which the 
 other does not like. They often quarrel about this 
 dog. The one thinks that he has a right to keep 
 him and let him run free ; the other thinks that his 
 neighbor has no right to keep that dog, or that, 
 if he will keep him, he should keep him tied or 
 in a kennel. Finally one of the neighbors decides 
 to rid himself of the other neighbor by building a 
 dividing fence. A fight grows out of their dispute 
 about the right to build and the place to locate the 
 fence. They are fighting about the fence. But it 
 is not hard to see the relation of the dog to this 
 fence. Well, slavery was the dog of the Civil 
 War. Secession was the fence. 
 
 During the war there was a popular rhyme that 
 ran thus: 
 
THE NEW NEGRO 135 
 
 "In sixty-one, the war begun; 
 In sixty-two, we'll put it thru ; 
 In sixty-three, the nigger'll be free ; 
 In sixty-four, the war'll be o'er — 
 And Johnny come marching home." 
 
 The prophecy of this popular doggerel was 
 fulfilled, almost to the letter. In 1861, in spite 
 of the president's protestations of non-interfer- 
 ence with slavery, war could not be averted. For 
 the question had shifted from a question about 
 the dog to a dispute about the fence. The price 
 which the South demanded for peace ;was no 
 longer slavery but secession. This price the gov- 
 ernment would not pay. The spirit of war was 
 full grown; the gaiidium certaminis swept the 
 whole manhood of the nation toward the front. 
 The first great shock at Bull Run resulted in a 
 Northern defeat; which perhaps did more good 
 for the North than it did for the South, for it 
 filled the South with confidence, but it filled the 
 North with caution. In "sixty-two" the war 
 was Hterally "put thru," and from the summer of 
 this year till the appearance of black troops the 
 outlook was very dark for the Union cause. In 
 "sixty-three" came freedom and the Negro soldier, 
 at the turning point of the war. The great com- 
 mander thus brought up his black reserves just 
 in time to strike the decisive blow. Lincoln had 
 the felicity of doing the right thing at the right 
 time. Negro troops would not have been wel- 
 comed by the Northern soldier before this time, 
 
136 THE NEW NEGRO 
 
 and even now Lincoln found it hard to get the 
 Negroes into the government uniform; the white 
 soldier wanted the Negroes to be dressed in a 
 different color and sort of suit from his own. 
 But the Union's need of the Negro overcame this 
 prejudice. The Emancipation Proclamation was 
 just in time, too — just in time to make the masses 
 of foreign nations sympathize with the Northern 
 side of the struggle, as being a struggle for free- 
 dom as well as for Union. If issued earlier, it 
 would have been indeed a "Pope's bull against the 
 comet." In "sixty-four" the war was practically 
 over; even the Confederates had the feeling that 
 it was simply a question of time and a question of 
 terms. Lincoln steadfastly refused to consider any 
 terms but the restoration of the Union and the 
 authority of the government. 
 
 Through it all Lincoln had been prosecuting the 
 war with the energy of an experienced commander- 
 in-chief. He had been sifting and shifting gen- 
 erals until he had finally brought out Grant. Pope, 
 McClellan, Burnside, Hooker, had all gone be- 
 fore. Some of them were energetic and aggressive, 
 but none of them could be a match for the genius 
 of the Confederate captain, Lee. McClellan was 
 a great organizer but lacked the abiUty for ener- 
 getic command in the field. So hesitant and un- 
 aggressive was he that during his command there 
 came into existence the famous phrase, "All is 
 quiet on the Potomac." Somebody praised Mc- 
 Clellan for being a great "engineer"; Lincoln said 
 yes, but that he seemed to have a special talent for 
 
THE NEW NEGRO 137 
 
 developing a "stationary" engine. It is a remark- 
 able thing to say of a man who was a civilian about 
 all of his life, but Lincoln was a better strategist, 
 excepting perhaps Grant, than any general that 
 ever came to the command of the Army of the Po- 
 tomac. By observation and study and sympathy, 
 he learned more of the art of war than did his 
 generals in the field. He warned Hooker not to 
 have his army crossing the Rappahannock River in 
 the presence of Lee, saying that Hooker's army 
 would then be "like an ox jumped half over a fence 
 and liable to be torn by the dogs front and rear, 
 without a fair chance to gore one way or kick the 
 other." He noted every detail in the movements 
 of armies; he saw every opportunity to strike a 
 deciding blow. Had he been in McClellan's shoes 
 after Antietam, he would have injured Lee. Had 
 he been in Meade's shoes after Gettysburg, he 
 might have crushed Lee. He kept telling his com- 
 manders that the objective of the Army of the 
 Potomac should be Lee's army and not Richmond. 
 And when Grant came to command in the East he 
 adopted the exact hnes of tactics which Lincoln 
 had been endeavoring to urge upon his other gen- 
 erals; and Grant's success attests the military sense 
 of Lincoln. 
 
 In his relations with his cabinet and other public 
 officials his justness and patriotism are plainly 
 shown. He chose the members of his cabinet with 
 a view to their fitness for serving the country, re- 
 gardless of other considerations; he chose Chase, 
 who was thinking that the country had made a 
 
138 THE NEW NEGRO 
 
 great mistake In electing Lincoln to the presidency 
 instead of him; he chose Seward, who thought that 
 he knew much more about the presidential office 
 than the inexperienced Illinois lawyer, and was not 
 kind enough to hide his opinion even from Lincoln 
 himself; he chose Stanton, a Democrat, who had 
 personally insulted Lincoln as a lawyer a few years 
 before, who had despised Lincoln the President as 
 a frivolous story-teller, and from whom the presi- 
 dent had sometimes to compel subordination. It 
 is a marvellous record of tact and patriotic devo- 
 tion how he harmonized and ruled these conflicting 
 and contending spirits; how he remained both 
 master and friend. 
 
 But be it said to the undying honor of all these 
 men that they were devoted to their country and 
 rendered invaluable service in her defense. Espe- 
 cially Stanton: he was a tyrant and a relentless 
 prosecutor, — and that Is well, for he was a good 
 check upon the over-mercifulness of Lincoln. 
 These two characters complemented each other in 
 the great task of the administration : Stanton was 
 the grim, relentless Mars, the god of war, caring 
 more for the business than either for the sorrow 
 or for the joy of battle; while Lincoln was the 
 superior divinity, unlimited in power but preferring 
 mercy to justice, and restraining with patient but 
 authoritative hand, the too furious course of the 
 subordinate war-god. He sometimes referred to 
 Stanton as "Old Mars over there at the war de- 
 partment." 
 
 Lincoln also had many puny but pestiferous 
 
THE NEW NEGRO 139 
 
 politicians on his hands. When asked how he 
 managed these, he told the story of an old farmer 
 who was a neighbor of theirs when he was a boy. 
 When this old farmer was asked how he got rid of 
 a bothersome log that lay in his field, he replied: 
 "I jes' ploughed around it!" 
 
 This great man also found it often necessary to 
 "plough around" the disaffection or the apathy of 
 the "plain people," in whom he had such noble con- 
 fidence. This is not better seen anywhere than in 
 his relation to the slavery question. On this ques- 
 tion he was too slow for some and too fast for 
 others; he was too cold for the Abolitionists and 
 too hot for the pro-slavery faction. It is the lot 
 of a great, level, even, balanced man like Lincoln 
 to be censured by both extremists. So normal was 
 he that we find different persons applying exactly 
 opposite epithets to him: some say that he was too 
 radical, others that he was too conservative; some 
 that he was too partisan, others that he was too 
 liberal; some that he was extremely democratic, 
 others that he was a tyrant; some say that he was 
 too subject to sentiment, others that he was as 
 feelingless as a stone ; while his friends were charg- 
 ing him with being too lenient and too merciful to 
 the enemy, the enemy was painting him as the in- 
 carnation of devilish malice. So it is not surprising 
 that while some say that the whole purpose of his 
 war and administration was to free and elevate 
 the Negroes, others declare that he would never 
 have issued the Emancipation Proclamation if he 
 had not been compelled to do so. The true posi- 
 
I40 THE NEW NEGRO 
 
 tlon of Lincoln Is to be found about half way be- 
 tween all of these extremes. Personally he de- 
 spised slavery. But as President of the United 
 States he had sense enough to see that it was his 
 duty to look out for the interests of the govern- 
 ment, because the Negroes and all others would be 
 lost without the government. He would interfere 
 with slavery only when such interference was some- 
 how connected with the welfare of the Union; he 
 would save the Union either with or without 
 slavery. What he did for black men, he did be- 
 cause he saw that it was good for all men, white 
 and black. Said he: "In giving freedom to the 
 slave, we assure freedom to the free — honorable 
 alike In what we give and what we preserve." 
 
 He was perfectly clear as to his personal inchna- 
 tlon, saying: "If slavery is not wrong, nothing 
 is wrong." He hated slavery most because of its 
 demoralizing effect upon white men; because it 
 compelled white men to engage in too many sham 
 arguments In their efforts to defend it; because it 
 often made them attack the very foundation of 
 human liberty; because it made them attack even 
 the Declaration of Independence. He issued his 
 proclamation of freedom deliberately and without 
 compulsion, because he saw it would be a winning 
 card in the great game of war which he was playing 
 for the prize of a united country. There is no doubt 
 about his estimation of the act; he called it "the 
 central act of my administration and the great 
 event of the 19th century." He also said: "It is 
 a momentous thing to be the instrument under 
 
THE NEW NEGRO 141 
 
 Providence of the liberation of a race," and "If my 
 name ever goes into history it will be for this act." 
 The most valuable posession of all that he has left 
 us on this question of the Negro is his willingness 
 to learn and change his mind; he at first thought 
 that the Negro soldiers would not fight; but when 
 they fought, he acknowledged it; once he thought 
 that only white men should vote, but later he ac- 
 knowledged that to say that self-government is 
 right and to say also that for one race to govern 
 another against its wish and without its co-opera- 
 tion is likewise right, are as opposite "as God and 
 Mammon." 
 
 By 1 865 he had overcome opposition in America 
 and had outhved the sneers of Europe, and was 
 the most powerful man in the world. His favorite 
 general, Grant, by literally battering the Con- 
 federate army and pounding the defenses of Rich- 
 mond, with repeated strokes like the blows of 
 Thor's hammer, had finally opened the gates of 
 Richmond and compelled the retreat of the out- 
 numbered and outdone, but not outgeneralled, 
 Lee. Lincoln had entered Richmond, not as the 
 conqueror enters the fallen stronghold of the 
 enemy, but as the sympathetic man enters the scene 
 of the common scourge of his country. The 
 Negro troops who were among the first to enter 
 Richmond, fed and watered the starving Con- 
 federates from their canteens and acted more like 
 a rescue party after an earthquake than a victo- 
 rious army after a stubborn siege. On the 9th of 
 April Lee surrendered an army of the most nervy 
 
142 THE NEW NEGRO 
 
 and long-suffering soldiers that had ever followed 
 an Anglo-Saxon captain. On April the 14th, after 
 a long season of the clouds and thunders and indis- 
 criminating fires of war, glad for the returning 
 sunshine of peace, filled with the milk of human 
 kindness, and with the tenderest feelings of merci- 
 fulness and pardon, the Great President was slain 
 by the bullet of a misguided zealot. The foolish 
 man expected some men to praise him for the deed, 
 but the whole world abhorred him, hunted him, 
 and killed him like a dog. Grant, himself a man 
 without the passion of hate, said of Lincoln: "In 
 his death the nation lost its greatest hero; in his 
 death the South lost its most just friend." At the 
 funeral, immediately behind his coflUn, marched a 
 detachment of the troops of the race he had 
 emancipated. 
 
 He was buried in Springfield, III., which had so 
 long been his home. No one knew his birthplace, 
 but the whole world knows his grave. At his 
 death he was just fairly entered upon a second 
 presidential term. Lowell calls him "the first 
 American." He was the first president of the Re- 
 public who was American through and through. 
 There was not one foreign element in his bringing 
 up ; he was an unmixed child of the Western plains, 
 born in the South, reared in the North. Most of 
 the presidents before him being reared nearer the 
 Atlantic, had imbibed more or less of Eastern cul- 
 ture and had European airs. This man Lincoln 
 M^as so thoroughly democratic as to astonish both 
 Old and New England. He never acted "the 
 
THE NEW NEGRO 143 
 
 President," and was always a man among men, 
 the honored servant of the people. 
 
 From a five dollar fee before a justice of the 
 peace, he had risen to a five thousand dollar fee 
 before the supreme court of Illinois. From a 
 study of "Dilworth's Spelling Book" in his seventh 
 year, he had risen to write, in his fifty-seventh 
 year, his second Inaugural, which is the greatest 
 utterance of man and yet all of his days in school 
 added together, are less than one year. His 
 pioneer life had given him a vein of humor which 
 became his "Life-preserver" in times of stress; 
 it had also given him a love for human liberty 
 that was unaffected. He felt that the enslave- 
 ment of some men was but the advance guard, the 
 miner and sapper, of the enslavement of all men. 
 He respected, even revered, the Constitution of 
 his country, but he would violate a clause in order 
 to save the whole instrument — just as a good 
 surgeon will amputate a limb to save a life. 
 From a poor captain of volunteers in the scan- 
 dalous little Black Hawk War, where he jokingly 
 said he "bled, died, and came away," although 
 he never had a skirmish nor saw an Indian, he 
 had risen to the chief command in a war that num- 
 bered three thousand battles and skirmishes and 
 cost three billion dollars. Having no ancestry 
 himself, being able to trace his line by rumor and 
 tradition only as far back as his grandfather, he 
 became, like George Washington, the Father of 
 his Country. Born of a father who could not 
 write his name, he himself had written the Proc- 
 
144 THE NEW NEGRO 
 
 lamatlon of Emancipation, the fourth great state 
 paper in the history of the Anglo-Saxon race, — 
 the others being Magna Charta, the Declaration of 
 Independence and the Constitution. If we accept 
 the statement of Cicero that the days on which we 
 are saved should be as illustrious as the days on 
 which we are born, then Lincoln the Savior must 
 always remain co-ordinate with Washington, the 
 Father of his country. Jackson was "Old 
 Hickory," Taylor was "Old Rough," and there 
 have been various names given to the other presi- 
 dents, but Washington and Lincoln were the only 
 ones whom the American people styled "Father." 
 
 Nature tried herself in the year of 1809; 
 many great and varied geniuses Vv^ere born. 
 Charles Darwin and Abraham Lincoln were born 
 on the same day, one to the mastery of nature, 
 and the other to the mastery of men; both circum- 
 polar stars that never set. 
 
 European people could not understand how a 
 man like Lincoln, who was born what they call 
 a peasant in Europe, could wear supreme power 
 as lightly as Lincoln wore his. Thev had been 
 used to Cromwells and Napoleons, who rose to 
 rule and not to obey, to enslave and not to free, 
 the people. A Frenchman could not understand 
 why n ruler like Lincoln, in command of a million 
 armed men, would ieonardize his tenure of office 
 bv holding a presidential election in 1864. A 
 European might have declared the whole Consti- 
 tution suspended and himself Dictator during the 
 remainder of the war. But the Republican form 
 
THE NEW NEGRO 145 
 
 of government was more respected by Lincoln In 
 time of war than by some other presidents in 
 times of the greatest peace. In this he rendered 
 a great service, not only to his country but to the 
 whole liberty-loving world; for he showed the 
 ability of a Republic to save itself in a life and 
 death grapple without abating the freedom of its 
 citizenship. After his death the French Liberals 
 sent Mrs. Lincoln a medal to the honor of the de- 
 ceased president, part of the inscription being: 
 "Saved the Republic without veiling the Statue of 
 Liberty." For the first time in the history of the 
 world democracy had demonstrated its right to 
 a place of respect beside the more ancient form of 
 government. 
 
 Again it is to the everlasting honor of the 
 American people that the death of a man like 
 Lincoln in a time like Lincoln's should cause such 
 a little stir and no revolution in the government. 
 The vice-president, a man who did not possess the 
 entire confidence of the party in power, was 
 allowed to assume the office of president without 
 a struggle. And it is a marvel of patriotism, of 
 order and self-control, that an army of a million 
 men, who held within their hands the nation's 
 fate, should march down Pennsylvania Ave., in 
 review before this new president, lay down their 
 victorious arms, and return to the fireside and to 
 the toil of factory and field. It was a sight for 
 the gods, the demi-gods and the crowned heads 
 of the ancient world. It was the triumph of 
 democracy. 
 
146 THE NEW NEGRO 
 
 Child of the American soil, cradled and 
 nursed in the very bosom of nature, he loved 
 his country with the passion with which most men 
 love their human mothers. He could not bear the 
 thought of one iota of detraction from her honor, 
 her dignity or her welfare. Against her dis- 
 memberment he was willing to fight to the end of 
 his second administration or till the end of time. 
 He might tolerate anything else except disunion, — 
 even the right of some of his fellowmen to enslave 
 others. Of every concession which he made dur- 
 ing his administration, to friend or foe, the sine qua 
 non was Union. A house divided against itself 
 cannot stand. In this he left us a great heritage ; 
 it is a lesson for both sections, and all races of any 
 section. White men of America, black men of 
 America, by the eternal God of heaven, 
 there can be no division of destiny on the 
 same soil and in the bosom and in the lap of the 
 same natural mother. Men may attempt 
 and accomplish discrimination in a small way, but 
 Almighty God and all-mothering nature are abso- 
 lutely impartial. They have woven the fabric of 
 life so that the thread of each man's existence 
 is a part of the whole. He who sets fire to his 
 neighbor's house, endangers the existence of his 
 own; he who degrades his neighbor's children, 
 undermines the future of his own. Together we 
 rise and together we fall is the plan of God and the 
 rule of nature. We must lean together in the 
 common struggle of life: the syncline is stronger 
 than the anticline. — In a great nation with an 
 
THE NEW NEGRO 147 
 
 increasing fame, the lesson of Lincoln's life must 
 grow in importance. Long as the human heart 
 loves freedom his name will be a word on the 
 tongues of men. His name will be a watchword 
 wherever liberty in her struggles with tyranny, 
 lifts her embattled banners. No man of the an- 
 cient or the modern world has a securer place in 
 the hearts and memories of men than this man 
 Lincoln, who was born in obscurity, who died 
 in a halo, and who now rests in an aureole of 
 historic glory. 
 
INDUSTRY 
 
 For over three hundred years the "lazy" Negro 
 has done the hardest work in America. Theoreti- 
 cally freedom would keep any lazy being from 
 work, — that is, freedom from chains and the whip. 
 The Negro was expected to almost die of starva- 
 tion rather than work in a state of freedom. But 
 to-day out of seven million colored people above 
 the age of ten years, five million are at work, — 
 two million women and three million men. They 
 are still doing the hardest work in America : farm- 
 ing, gardening, dairying, fishing, mining, milling, 
 and all sorts of domestic and personal service. 
 There are nearly a million Negro farmers and 
 two million farm laborers ; a million Negro women 
 are working on the farms. 
 
 In the main the Negro is doing the work which 
 the white people wish most to shun. In slavery 
 he did the drudgery under compulsion, and the 
 white man naturally reasoned that the Negro 
 would escape from such work at all costs as soon 
 as he was set free. On the other hand the Negro 
 took advantage of the hard lessons he had learned 
 in slavery and began to lay his economic founda- 
 tion deep and firm in all the avenues of hard 
 work to which he was admitted. He had worked 
 two hundred and fifty years for board and clothes, 
 
 148 
 
THE NEW NEGRO 149 
 
 and very poor board and clothes at that. He 
 is the one element in America to whom America 
 owes a large past debt, never to be paid and per- 
 haps absolutely unpayable. The African Negro) 
 was the forerunner of American civihzation in( 
 the South; he was the army which attacked the' 
 forests, the canebrakes and the swamps. 
 
 Instead of taking his freedom as a good op- 
 portunity to quit work and starve to death, he 
 has become such a competitor to those about him 
 that every possible effort is made to handicap and 
 check him. Only menial and hard work have 
 been opened willingly to him, and efforts are 
 being made in some places to push him out of 
 even the higher forms of menial service, — such 
 as hotel waiters, porters and barbers. Under 
 the pressure of late economic conditions, white 
 men have become more and more willing to do 
 such work. Twenty-five years ago it was a dis- 
 grace to a white man to be seen shaving another 
 white man; Booker T. Washington said that the 
 white man in the chair did not feel that it was safe 
 to let another white man get a razor under 
 his throat. Many Negro men on the other hand 
 got really wealthy at the barber's trade. In the 
 South white men have lately entered into sharp 
 competition against colored men In this field, 
 especially in the larger cities and In connection 
 with the hotels. 
 
 Again, the Negro worker is handicapped by 
 Inferior sanitary conditions of work, as a rule. In 
 print It Is merely proclaimed that the Negro Is 
 
150 THE NEW NEGRO 
 
 physically unfit and Inferior to other peoples, but 
 in practice it is taken for granted that the Negro 
 can live under conditions that would kill a white 
 man. It always seems strange to me that anybody 
 could express surprise that the Negro's death 
 rate is higher in America than that of white folk; 
 and it seems even stupid to hear some ascribe it 
 to the Negro's color or race when it can be amply 
 explained by the unsanitary conditions of his life. 
 The house which the landlord or employer usually 
 offers to the Negro tenant or workman, is usu- 
 ally nothing but a bare shelter for the animal, 
 often one or two rooms and without sufficient 
 breathing space for the family. All modern sani- 
 tary arrangements are conspicuous by their ab- 
 sence, often even water is scarce. The great army 
 of Negro prisoners in the South Is kept under 
 conditions which impregnate them with diseases, 
 and when their terms expire, if they are alive, 
 they are sent back among the masses of colored 
 people to scatter these diseases. The greater part 
 of the living condition of Negroes in the South 
 is in the hands of white people, but the general 
 unsanitary living of the Negro masses and the 
 rate at which they die are often held up as the 
 fault of the Negroes alone. It is significant that 
 a recent publication by the United States Census 
 Bureau shows that the Negroes live better and 
 their death-rate decreases in proportion as they 
 gain posession and control of their own homes. 
 
 Again, the Negro laborer is practically every- 
 where underpaid. It is said that his standard of 
 
THE NEW NEGRO 151 
 
 living is lower. It is forgotten that the standard of 
 living is as much an effect as a cause ; poverty and 
 low wages keep down the standard of living. Is the 
 Negro expected to raise his standard of living 
 before his wages are raised? Great organiza- 
 tions of white men have gone on strike to compel 
 the employer to pay the Negro workmen lower 
 wages for the same work for which they them- 
 selves were getting a higher wage. In Georgia 
 there was a great strike of the white railroad men 
 for lower wages — for black railroad men. It 
 seems to us that this will ultimately work against 
 the interests of white men, for if soulless cor- 
 porations are compelled to hire colored men at 
 lower wages, they will find every excuse possible 
 to hire more of the cheaper labor and less of the 
 higher labor. 
 
 This question of pay reminds us that it is 
 often said that white people prefer Negroes for 
 certain forms of work and service: colored men 
 for porters, butlers and house "boys," — and 
 colored women for cooks, maids, laundresses and 
 even sick nurses. This matter of pay has largely 
 determined that preference. The Negroes are 
 not preferred because they are black, certainly. 
 But the Negro servant can be had for lower 
 wages, or what amounts to the same thing, he will 
 do more work for the same wages. The Negro 
 trained nurse is expected to be the chamber maid 
 also, to empty the slops and clean the room. They 
 have even been required to serve meals to the 
 family. If a white woman is hired as cook, she 
 
152 THE NEW NEGRO 
 
 will want a boy to bring in the wood and draw 
 water from the well. Or what amounts to the 
 same thing still, the Negro servant will work 
 longer hours and take more mistreatment and 
 accept inferior accommodations from the em- 
 ployer, not because the Negro prefers these con- 
 ditons but because of his disadvantages in the 
 struggle to live and because his other avenues of 
 employment are largely limited by prejudice and 
 labor unions. In short, the preference for a 
 Negro servant or workman is by no means a pre- 
 ference for the Negro. The Negro is such a 
 large competitor in some fields, like mining and 
 smelting, that he is admitted to the unions, usually 
 in segregated organizations, however. It is the 
 general practice of white labor unions to admit 
 Negroes wherever it is vitally necessary to protect 
 the interests of the white workingmen, and to 
 exclude the Negro whenever his membership 
 would benefit the Negro alone. 
 
 We must speak of the perils that beset the 
 Negro woman and child, especially as domestic 
 servants. In many communities we have found the 
 white people complaining that it is getting harder 
 and harder to persuade the "lazy" Negroes to 
 work as cooks, house-servants, washerwomen and 
 chamber maids. This is true, all except the ques- 
 tion-begging word "lazy." The reason is not 
 laziness : it is the unprotected condition of colored 
 women and girls. A Negro girl has little enough 
 protection against the stranger in the streets, and 
 when she goes into domestic service there is no 
 
THE NEW NEGRO 153 
 
 protecting law that follows her; she is entirely 
 at the mercy of the honor of the white male 
 members of the household, and bitter experiences 
 have shown that in many, many cases that cannot 
 be relied upon. Consequently, whenever a 
 colored man can earn enough to barely keep his 
 wife and daughters at home, he does so. The 
 truth about the rapacity which the colored female 
 has had to withstand will never be fully told; and 
 if told, it would be incredible to most of those 
 who had not first-hand knowledge of conditions, 
 if one white female were outraged by a black man 
 to every ten black females that are outraged by 
 white men in America, the ninety millions would 
 start a war of extermination against the ten mil- 
 lions. And yet the Negro is the one who has been 
 advertised to the world as the rapist. What a 
 powerful agent the associated press is ! It can 
 literally make black white and white black. White 
 men own and operate practically the whole of the 
 free press in this country. The Negroes with a 
 few limited weekly and monthly sheets dare not 
 speak the truth on this subject. 
 
 In spite of these hindrances the Negro has de- 
 veloped a large industrial class and some business 
 organizations. The colored people have in the 
 main worked willingly at whatever their hands 
 found to do. Contrary to the popular impression, 
 they have not rushed heedlessly away from lower 
 forms of employment toward higher forms before 
 they were prepared to do so. Many of them have 
 left the farms, but not nearly in so large a propor- 
 
154 THE NEW NEGRO 
 
 tlon as the white people of this civihzation have 
 left the farms. And besides the Negro had not 
 only the normal industrial development but also 
 abnormal conditions, political, civil and educa- 
 tional to drive him from the country. 
 
 The Negro is going forward also in business 
 organizations, especially in those sections where 
 prejudice is most unreasonable. Race prejudice 
 is responsible for many a Negro drug store and 
 other merchant businesses. The race is con- 
 tinually trying by indirect routes to get around the 
 obstructions that are put into its pathway. Some- 
 times, as in the case of these business enterprises, 
 it seems to reap a temporary benefit from the 
 very fact of the existence of the obstruction. 
 Therefore even some Negroes have made the 
 mistake of crediting race prejudice with race 
 prosperity, — which is about as logical as giving 
 credit to war for general prosperity because it 
 temporarily stimulates the iron industry and raises 
 the price of shares in the steel corporation. 
 
 In the South as a whole, it is a fact, to be 
 variously explained of course, but it still is a fact 
 that the Negro laborer is preferred and that the 
 white people would not substitute for him the 
 laborer of any other race in the world. 
 
EDUCATION. 
 
 The foundations of Negro education in the 
 South were fortunately laid by generous and fair- 
 minded people of the North and East, through 
 church organizations hke the Freedmen's Aid 
 Society, the American Missionary Association and 
 the Baptist Education Society, and through inde- 
 pendent schools like Hampton and Tuskegee. 
 Such organizations and institutions have created 
 leadership for the race and made the education 
 of the race possible; but if such organizations 
 and schools were many times rnultiplied, they 
 could not educate the American Negro. That can 
 be done only by the pubhc school, the biggest 
 university of them all. These private efforts have 
 created a leadership and made the pubhc school 
 possible, but the pubhc school must do the job of 
 educating the Negro. As a rule in these essays we 
 are considering the Negro in his relations to the 
 body politic, rather than in relation to any private 
 interests. We wish to speak now especially of his 
 public school education. 
 
 What is the "public school?" For it seems to 
 be a prominent and permanent part of modern 
 education, and like all human institutions it must 
 have had a beginning and a sufficient cause for its 
 instituting. We speak of "the public school 
 
156 THE NEW NEGRO 
 
 system," meaning sometimes the machinery of 
 public education, but often alluding to the type 
 of education as distinguished from that of sec- 
 tarian and private schools. The Greeks were 
 the first to develop a system of education distinct 
 from theology and priestcraft, and they recognized 
 at once the necessary two sides of a complete 
 system in mental and physical training, which they 
 termed respectively music and gymnastics. But 
 altho the Greek and the later Roman systems 
 recognized these two sides, still the Greek ideal 
 was self-culture, while the Roman ideal was what 
 we would call self-sacrifice, if that word were not 
 too specific in its meaning, and so we will call it 
 self-putting-forth or self-action. The Greek 
 looked upon the soul and wanted an ideal man of 
 well-defined principles and lofty virtues, — and 
 then trusted the results of his action. The Roman 
 looked out upon the world and wanted a practi- 
 cal man of efficiency and power to manage that 
 world, — and trusted the fate of his soul. But 
 no system of education is complete which does 
 not consider both, — the ideal and the opportune. 
 In the Middle Ages there had grown up two 
 educational institutions, the monastery and the 
 castle, for the training of monks and knights, and 
 learning was the jealously guarded privilege of 
 the classes until Martin Luther did for education 
 what Socrates is said to have done for philosophy, 
 — brought it down from heaven to dwell in the 
 huts of men. Luther contended that the child of 
 the humblest peasant was entitled to the best 
 
THE NEW NEGRO 157 
 
 learning that his country could afford. That was 
 a great step forward, for it had been thought that 
 a book in the hand of the peasant would not be 
 a torch but a firebrand. — But still this did not 
 make a "public school:" it meant only that the 
 peasant should not be forbidden; it was not yet 
 the "golden rule" of education. 
 
 And thanks to the genius of the common people, 
 when once they were admitted to membership, 
 education got closer to real things and real life. 
 Teachers began to develop maxims and principles : 
 "Teach a thing first and then the reason for it," 
 said Ratke. There grew up a co-operative and 
 mutually helpful companionship between theory 
 and practice, learning and wisdom, the mother 
 tongue and the other tongues. But there was 
 still no "public school system," except that the 
 general public was nominally entitled to learn. 
 Education was not a state concern, being con- 
 trolled not by the statesman but by the priest and 
 the pedagogue. 
 
 This was, however, a good foundation and 
 preparation for the public school. With the 
 growth of knowledge the spirit of freedom grew, 
 and the spirit of freedom is the creator of the 
 public school. Be it remembered to the honor of 
 America that she was the first to reach the public 
 school stage ; for she was first to have the necessary 
 cause, — universal suffrage. Universal education 
 is as necessary to popular self-government as air 
 is to life. New England recognized this early and 
 established the "public school," making it as vital 
 
158 THE NEW NEGRO 
 
 an interest of the community as war and real 
 estate. We now reach what I choose to call the 
 "golden rule" of education : not that any man may 
 be schooled, but that every man must be educated. 
 Education had been a private matter, to be had 
 or done without according to the means or fortune 
 of the individual — like an automobile or a 
 diamond pin. The state had not been interested, 
 but when manhood suffrage is attempted, either 
 ignorance or intelligence must rule. Democracy 
 is the condition of the public school and the 
 ballot is its causa essendi. 
 
 At present all civilized nations, whatever their 
 form of government, are interested in public edu- 
 cation. A kingdom, like Prussia, may be in the 
 front rank. Such government is democratic in 
 spirit tho monarchic in theory. And the late 
 advent of the public school into the Southern part 
 of the United States was due to the persistence 
 of slavery. Under the slave regime the state 
 government was democratic in theory but oligar- 
 chic in spirit and in fact. This explains, too, the 
 comparatively slow development of our Southern 
 schools: they have suffered in the struggle of 
 democracy against oligarchy. If the few are to 
 rule, what is the need of universal education? 
 Besides, the rule of the few is precarious under 
 even the rudiments of popular instruction. But 
 we have advanced somewhat with the general edu- 
 cational advancement: we have public schools 
 maintained by the state and supported by public 
 taxes; and public lands and certain fines have 
 
THE NEW NEGRO 159 
 
 been diverted to school purposes. The system 
 has grown up through graded school and high 
 school even into normal school and university, 
 so that it is possible for one to acquire even the 
 highest professional training under non-sectarian, 
 civil authorities. 
 
 And how has the Negro fared in this battle of 
 democracy and education against oligarchy and 
 ignorance? He has been the objective position of 
 much of the fighting; and his situation has been 
 all the more critical because the forces on both 
 sides have been not only in earnest but in many 
 cases sincere, — some believing that he should not 
 be admitted to full membership in the democracy 
 and therefore not to the fullest education, and 
 others believing that the destiny of democracy 
 and education and even of Christianity depends 
 upon their ability to meet the challenge of the 
 Negro and take him in. All the prejudices and 
 passions which the classes have always had against 
 the advance of the masses were aggravated and 
 enhanced against the ex-slave, who was not only of 
 a different class but of a different race and even of 
 a different color. This badged him to the very eye 
 of the jealous civilization that surrounded him. 
 His color had been the mark of enslavement and 
 was taken to be also the mark of Inferiority; for 
 prejudice does not reason, or it would not be 
 prejudice. If, for example, the slaves had been 
 white but only five feet high, for generations 
 afterward there would have been in this country 
 a strong prejudice against all short people. This 
 
i6o THE NEW NEGRO 
 
 element cannot be ignored if one would under- 
 stand the development and the present condtion 
 of Negro education in the public and largely in the 
 private schools of this country. 
 
 At first very few of those who opposed and 
 not many of those who favored his education 
 believed him really capable of much education, 
 and so the debate was not interesting. As time 
 went he took the question out of debate by demon- 
 strating his capacity, and the opposition became 
 more determined. It was argued that the Negro's 
 educational advancement threatened the economic 
 well-being of the South, that what this section 
 needed was an unthinking mass of common labor- 
 ers and farm-hands, — not artisians and farmers, 
 mind you, but laborers and farm-hands, — and that 
 education was spoiling this class. But it has been 
 shown, not only in other countries like England 
 and Prussia where the people are educated, but 
 even in those parts of the South where the Negro 
 is better educated, that an intelligent workman 
 is better than a laborer and an intelligent, self- 
 directing small-farmer is more economical to the 
 state than a driven, irresponsible farm-hand. Be- 
 sides, the more intelligent the working class, the 
 more they want, — better shoes, better clothes, 
 better houses and more comforts, — and the satis- 
 fying of these wants stimulates trade and lifts 
 the general level of living. It pushes those who 
 are up further up. When you raise the bottom of 
 society you push up the top, you do not overturn 
 it. In a democracy individuals will naturally find 
 
THE NEW NEGRO i6i 
 
 their way from the bottom to the top, and in- 
 ferior individuals will sink from the top toward 
 the bottom. But this is the reason for democracy 
 and the strongest argument in its favor; and there 
 is but one way to prevent this, and that is to have 
 no democracy. 
 
 Some say that the education of the Negro tends 
 p to pull him away from the farm and deranges the 
 economic system of the South, and that the city 
 Negro is not worth as much to the (white) South 
 as is the rural Negro, These views consider the 
 Negro in his relation to white people only as a 
 commodity. Suppose we consider the city Negro 
 from the standpoint of his own interests. Would it 
 be better for the American Negro if all Negroes 
 stayed in the rural districts and none went to the 
 cities? The Negro as a whole has been advertised 
 in his worst phase, but the city Negro, being under 
 the whiter light of the centers of civilization, has 
 had his baser and uglier traits more than exag- 
 gerated. Most of what the world has been told 
 about him is half truth. Everybody knows that 
 cities produce the most criminal Negroes, but 
 ^ few know that they produce the most intelligent; 
 all have heard of the moral and physical disease 
 and death, but few have been told of his ad- 
 mirable organizations to promote material, moral, 
 and intellectual health; it is bruited abroad that he 
 fills proportionately more of the prisons and con- 
 vict stockades, but there is absolute silence about 
 the fact that he supplies by far the greater number 
 of teachers, professional and business men and 
 
1 62 THE NEW NEGRO 
 
 the more competent preachers. If he fills the 
 city slums, he also fills the greater proportion of 
 the best homes of the Negro race; if his life 
 is shorter, it is more interesting; if he is weaker, 
 he is wiser. Better 20 years of Atlanta than 
 a century of the semi-slavery of the "Mississippi 
 bottoms." As is true of all races, the height to 
 which the Negro has attained is to be measured 
 in cities rather than elsewhere. This is due to 
 better educational advantages and to the fact 
 that city life tends more to inspire independence 
 of character. 
 
 Another argument which lends itself much more 
 to passion than to reason, is that the advance of 
 the Negro threatens race integrity, — that is, the 
 integrity of the white race. But experience, which 
 is the most reliable teacher in such matters, has 
 shown that ignorance and weakness in the one 
 race constitute a far greater danger to the integrity 
 of both than inteUigence and strength could pos- 
 sibly become. Put a poor, ignorant and defense- 
 less woman in the presence of a rich, powerful 
 and wicked man, and the only salvation for their 
 races is to educate that woman and her race. Igno- 
 rance and weakness are fertile soil for bad fruit- 
 age. The white race can never be strong and in- 
 telligent in the midst of a weak and ignorant race. 
 God never intended that a man should get entirely 
 free from the character of his neighbors : he must 
 always be in part at least what his neighbors are. 
 If we are surrounded by weak and ignorant 
 neighbors we are constantly tempted to cheat and 
 
u 
 
 THE NEW NEGRO 163 
 
 oppress them ; sometimes we yield and sink. The 
 most helpful environment that a strong man can 
 have is to be surrounded by other strong men 
 whom he can neither cheat nor wrong. The race 
 is as the man. 
 
 But the economic and race-integrity arguments 
 are aimed against the progress of the race in 
 general, while there are some special charges 
 aglnst its educational progress in particular. It 
 is charged that the Negro does not pay taxes; that 
 education makes him more criminal and less use- 
 ful; and that his inferiority in general causes and 
 justifies the indifference and opposition to his edu- 
 cation. 
 
 ^ Does the Negro race pay taxes? Does it bear 
 its share of the financial burden of state govern- 
 ment? In the matter of tax-burden the just 
 measure of a man's share is the measure of his 
 ability, — and I have never heard that the officials 
 of any state have even pretended to say that their 
 colored people do not pay as taxes the same pro- 
 portion of their posessions as the white race pays. 
 This could not be otherwise, for white people 
 assess and collect the taxes, — and it is generally 
 understood that the Negro who owns real estate 
 and other visible property, is assessed in a higher 
 valuation than anybody else. If the man who 
 owns a million dollars pays the same number of 
 mills out of each one of those dollars as the 
 man vv^ho owns one dollar pays out of his single 
 dollar, the millionaire bears no greater burden 
 of taxation than the man of a single dollar; and 
 
1 64 THE NEW NEGRO 
 
 indeed our new inheritance and income tax laws, 
 in their graduated scale of assessments, recognize 
 the truth that in such case the man of many dollars 
 is not burdened as much as the man of few dollars. 
 All of the widow's mite is more than a tithe of the 
 rich man's hoard. In South Carolina, where the 
 Negro child receives two dollars for its education to 
 fourteen dollars for the white child, it was proven 
 one year on the authority of white investigators 
 that the Negroes paid by direct school taxation 
 every cent of the money that was spent on their 
 own schools and twenty thousand dollars of that 
 which was spent on white schools. 
 
 That is direct taxation. But what about indirect 
 taxes? Society has other ways of collecting taxes 
 thian by a visit of the tax-collector, and more 
 people pay taxes than ever see the inside of the 
 tax office. The great indirect tax, the most im- 
 portant tax-burden of all, is paid by every man 
 who eats food, wears clothes and occupies a rented 
 space upon the ground. A landlord with a hundred 
 tenants is but a tax-agent appointed by the laws 
 of society to gather the taxes of those tenants 
 and turn the same over to the tax-collector. He 
 raises rents or lowers wages in proportion to the 
 taxes he must deliver to the state. The man who 
 has the title to the property enjoys this vantage 
 and honor; he does not bear the burden, — the 
 worker and the consumer have the honor of doing 
 that. If vv^e count only direct taxes as taxes, the 
 cause of the non-landholding element will be 
 helpless and hopeless. Take our Southern rail- 
 
THE NEW NEGRO 165 
 
 roads: in proportion as the Negro uses them, in 
 that proportion does he pay the company's taxes. 
 But a white man hands the money to the tax- 
 collector and gets the receipt, and it is recorded 
 among white men's taxes. The Negro customer 
 pays the merchant's taxes: the prices include both 
 license and tax. Your very servants share your 
 tax-burden. The man who blacks your boots 
 help to pay your taxes: he pays the tax on the 
 blacking when he buys it, and if the state would 
 forgive you your taxes you would gladly pay him 
 a dime where you now pay him a nickel. He 
 pays through the merchant and through you. It 
 is as impossible to live in the state and not pay 
 as to hve in the air and not breathe. 
 
 Does education make Negroes more criminal 
 and less useful? If this were true, the Negro 
 would be a contradiction to the experience of all 
 mankind in all previously recorded history. And 
 whoever makes the assertion should be required 
 to prove the proposition beyond the slightest 
 shadow of a doubt, — else we should continue to 
 expect the same thing of the American Negro 
 that is true in the Hves of all the peoples of the 
 past, namely, that they became better and more 
 useful as they gained more knowledge of man and 
 God. They have always fallen when they have 
 forgotten God and oppressed their fellowmen. I 
 will not beg the question by saying that education 
 Itself means making the man better and more 
 useful, but I call for the facts. The records 
 of our schools harmonize with the experience of 
 
1 66 THE NEW NEGRO 
 
 mankind: do the graduates of Negro schools fur- 
 nish a bigger proportion in our state penitentiary 
 than do those Negroes who have never seen the 
 inside of any of these schools? No man is bold 
 enough to affirm a definite thing like that, and 
 yet men assert in a general way that education 
 makes Negroes criminals. If there is a greater 
 proportion of our colored population than of our 
 white population in the state penitentiary, it is 
 partially explained by the fact that it is easier for 
 a Negro to get into the penitentiary than for 
 a white man. Our white sheriff, white judge, 
 white jury and white lawyers are so partial to 
 the Negro who applies for admission to our penal 
 institutions that they never want to exclude him,, 
 while in the case of a white man there is more 
 dehberation, demurrer and objection. If you put 
 black men into these official positions and give 
 the accused white man a fair chance to get in, 
 I dare say that within a very few months he 
 would demonstrate his equality with the Negro in 
 this important particular. In the case of the 
 school it is easier for the white man and harder 
 for the Negro to get in, and consequently there 
 is a greater proportion of the v/hite race on the 
 inside. The law of least resistance is a partial 
 explanation of these phenomena. 
 
 As to the question of usefulness the opposition 
 also states its case in a general way, but coming 
 down to specifications, are the untrained farmers 
 and ignorant unskilled laborers of the Negro race 
 more useful to the state than his business and pro- 
 
THE NEW NEGRO 167 
 
 fessional men, his teachers and the trained gradu- 
 ates of his industrial schools? I admit that an 
 ignorant man may be more profitable to some indi- 
 vidual employer who likes the advantage, but his 
 ignorance is unprofitable and expensive to society 
 as a whole. And when it is said that education 
 "unfits" the Negro, perhaps it is meant that it 
 makes him less fit to be cheated and abused. It 
 makes him less fit for individual exploitation but 
 more fit to serve the common interests of a civi- 
 lized community. How long will some of our 
 white people continue to think that a wasteful, 
 shiftless Negro is a good economic asset simply 
 because he will take kicking and "cussing?" 
 
 Again, those who are responsible for the poor 
 schools, few teachers and scant appropriations, 
 seek to ease their consciences and justify their 
 ways by charging the Negro race with general 
 incapacity and inferiority. There are seldom 
 offered any definite facts in support of this theory. 
 Sometimes it is said that Negroes do not deserve 
 or appreciate any better opportunities and almost 
 that they do not want them. In one of our 
 largest Southern cities, when an organization of 
 colored women went to complain against the bar- 
 barous treatment of their public schools, one of 
 the ofl^cials met their complaint with the significant 
 statement: "You have already gotten much more 
 than you ever asked for." And so the impres- 
 sion exists that not only the Negro's needs but 
 even his wants are inferior : that an uncomfortable 
 and unequipped schoolhouse will do for the Negro 
 
1 68 THE NEW NEGRO 
 
 child, and that one dollar suffices for the Negro 
 teacher where three or five dollars are needed 
 by the white teacher. There is no surer way of 
 destroying sympathy for a man who is being mis- 
 treated than by establishing the belief that the man 
 himself does not care, that he is satisfied and 
 incapable of appreciating better treatment. We 
 feel different when the same thing happens to a 
 man and an animal. But there is a commonsense 
 philosophy which believes that men are more ahke 
 than different, that they are differentiated by the 
 modifying influence of circumstances, and that they 
 cannot be classified a priori from the color of their 
 skins or the shapes of their noses. 
 
 Is not the inferiority of the Negro's educational 
 status and progress amply explained by the in- 
 feriority of his educational advantages? Let us 
 look at a recent annual report of the Superinten- 
 dent of Education in the state of Alabama and see 
 what it reveals concerning the Negro. There 
 were more than 328 thousand Negro children 
 of school age and about 399 thousand white 
 children. In other words about half, or strictly 
 more than 45% of the children to be schooled 
 were Negroes. In the first place just six schools 
 were provided for each thousand of these colored 
 children, while twelve schools were provided for 
 each thousand whites. The property valuation 
 of the white schools was more than ten times the 
 value of the Negro schools; the equipment on the 
 inside of the white school was worth more than 
 the land, buildings and all the total property of 
 
THE NEW NEGRO 169 
 
 the Negro school. If all went to school each 
 Negro teacher would have 138 pupils, and each 
 white teacher 56 pupils. But the Negro teacher 
 is saved by the fact that the people are so poor 
 and the schoolhouses so uncomfortable and incon- 
 venient that only 41% of the colored children can 
 attend, while 73% of the whites attend. The 
 average salary of rural white teachers is about 
 $300, — the average of rural Negro teachers is 
 less than $150 a year. In our cities also the 
 average salary of the white teacher with fewer 
 pupils is more than double that of the Negro 
 teacher with more pupils. The white schools have 
 20 times as many libraries as the Negro schools. 
 The state has no higher education for Negroes; 
 for the whites there is the university with 
 colleges and normal schools. There are white 
 high schools for over sixteen thousand pupils. 
 The figures given for Negro high school grades 
 is 1,476. All the agricultural and county high 
 schools are white. All the school officials are 
 white. 
 
 What a fearful thing it is to be a superior race 1 
 How much it costs to maintain that superiority! 
 I almost believe that the Negro race would be 
 tempted to retrograde into a superior race if it 
 could get hold of the money, the machinery and 
 the offices. To cope against an inferior race in 
 education, a superior race must have more than 
 ten times as much money, more than twice as many 
 schools, two or three times as many teachers, 36 
 more of school days in each year, fifteen to twenty 
 
I70 THE NEW NEGRO 
 
 times as many auxiliary books, — and all of the 
 management and say-so. 
 
 The race which enjoys all the advantages of 
 official position and emolument, should be scrupu- 
 lously just if not generous to the cause of the race 
 that has none of these advantages. It is said 
 that the legislature in its annual appropriation 
 counts all children, white and black, and votes 
 the same number of dollars for each head. That 
 is but half the truth; the more important half of 
 this truth is in the apportionment of this appro- 
 priation. What earthly good is done the Negro 
 child by being counted equal in the voting of the 
 appropriation, if it is counted only one-tenth in 
 the distribution of the funds? The Negro child 
 simply helps the white child to get a few more 
 dollars than the white child would otherwise get. 
 One might as well try to justify disfranchisement 
 on the ground that every Negro in the state is 
 counted in the basis of the state's representation 
 in Congress: the Negro population is counted to 
 the advantage of the state of Alabama, but when 
 the representatives are elected they are all white 
 and represent white people. It might be better 
 for the Negro if his share of the representation 
 were disallowed altogether, for it only increases 
 the power of those who oppose him. The equal 
 count in the legislature will do the Negro child no 
 good unless he is counted equal by county boards 
 and local trustees. 
 
 Nobody will deny that in the payment of taxes 
 and fines the Negro race in America is treated as 
 
THE NEW NEGRO 171 
 
 if it were absolutely the equal of any race. They 
 are assessed and fined as much as anybody. To 
 say the least they are given as long terms in 
 our penitentiary and on our convict farms as any 
 white man is given for the same offense. A people 
 v^^ho are required to bear equally the burdens 
 should be permitted to share equally the benefits 
 of government. To get a given amount of educa- 
 tion the Negro child needs at least the same 
 amount of money as the white child, — for the black 
 race can hardly be expected under the circumstances 
 to be very superior to the white race. Equal shar- 
 ing in school funds would be no favor to the Negro 
 race, but simply justice : his direct taxation is pro- 
 portionately as high as that of the white race, and 
 his indirect tax is almost always higher, — for ex- 
 ample, on almost every railroad in the South the 
 Negro pays proportionately much more for what 
 he gets than does the white man. Every landless 
 Negro in the state is paying taxes for some one 
 else, usually for a white landlord. 
 
 The South is now coming into the era of compul- 
 sory education. We believe in it with all our soul, 
 but the reform will miss more than half of its 
 great opportunity if it is schemed so as to leave 
 out the Negro race ; if the law is so worded that 
 the proposition can be juggled in the case of a 
 Negro child. If we want to be a civilized nation, 
 we must civilize all the people ; for we shall always 
 be barbaric in proportion as we have an ignorant 
 and barbarous population in our midst. 
 
 Vocational training is now occupying a large 
 
172 THE NEW NEGRO 
 
 place in the program of our Southern states. This 
 is more fortunate for the Negro than even some 
 of the promoters suppose. There is but one 
 kind of education, and that is developing in a 
 man his individual possibilities. But there can 
 be no doubt of the value right now of voca- 
 tional training for a race economically situated 
 as the Negro race is in this country and having 
 the industrial opposition which it has, and 
 which in many instances must fight first to save 
 its body in order to give its mind a chance. 
 But when I speak in favor of industrial and voca- 
 tional training I am not speaking in favor of the 
 shams that are to be found in many of his schools. 
 Saws and hammers and rulers hanging on the 
 walls of some public schoolrooms do not always 
 mean training of any sort, except training in the 
 bad habit of wasting precious time. It is some- 
 times simply a game between the superintendent 
 and the colored principal : the superintendent try- 
 ing to graft another system on the already too 
 meagre system of academic instruction, and the 
 colored principal trying to satisfy the white 
 superintendent without really doing the thing sup- 
 posed. The chief sufferer is the helpless Negro 
 pupil: in this sham battle between his superiors 
 his chance for any sort of effective training is 
 utterly lost. He not only fails to get efficiency, 
 but he gets a bad moral lesson : he thinks he has 
 found out that the way to manage white people 
 is to keep them fooled. Surely our larger cities 
 should maintain distinct courses, and if possible 
 
THE NEW NEGRO 173 
 
 distinct school buildings for academic and indus- 
 trial work. And there should be special teachers 
 for each class of work. Periods of handiwork 
 might accompany all the grades, but serious voca- 
 tional training should come after at least a good 
 graded school education. This will strengthen the 
 foundation, on which the student can build a better 
 vocation ; and at any rate a man should be a man 
 before he is a piece in the world's machinery. 
 
 What is the Negro going to do about it? He 
 must convince the white man that the education of 
 the Negro is worth while ; that it will not only not 
 hurt white people but will help them. It is not 
 enough to convince the well-disposed white man 
 only, but the average white person. What is the 
 white man going to do about it? We are all in the 
 same boat, and when this civilization reaches its 
 destiny we are all going to arrive together. The 
 slower the machinery works in any of its parts, the 
 slower will be our progress, and the later the day 
 of our arrival at a more perfect social adjustment. 
 The two races must see each other less as com- 
 petitors and more as co-workers, more as fellow 
 travellers on the road to destiny. 
 
 It is true that the untutored Negro has been 
 useful to American white people : he has been the 
 instrument by which they have felled their forests, 
 drained their swamps, tilled their fields and piled 
 their fortunes. Tho poor, he has made them rich. 
 He has been no burden : in the name of God he has 
 paid every cent of his "keep" with interest. On 
 his back their civihzation has been stable, and in 
 
174 THE NEW NEGRO 
 
 his hand their life secure. He was not objected to 
 until he changed from an instrument into a co- 
 worker. 
 
 For nearly three hundred years in America the 
 Negro was chiefly an implement, the white man 
 supplying the thought. Upon this historic relation 
 is based the extraordinary question as to whether 
 the free Negro should better be trained in mind or 
 in hand. I will tell you which the American Negro 
 needs more, his mind or his hand, if you will tell 
 me which he can dispense with. It reminds me of 
 a debating society which I once ran across in the 
 backwoods of the Alabama "black belt," in which 
 the subjects for debate on the regular meeting 
 nights ran like these: "Which is the more useful 
 to man, the steamboat or the railroad?" or "which 
 is the more necessary to man, air or water?" It 
 is hard for some white men to think of the black 
 man other than as either a useful thing or a nuis- 
 ance. They cannot conceive him as a thinking, 
 self-active agent pursuing his own ends. As a free 
 'man he must put thought in front of his work and 
 industry. He must think first and act afterwards. 
 As a member of the body politic, instead of a mere 
 tool thereof, he must cultivate the intellect, which 
 is the guide both to the hand and to the heart. The 
 intellect is the dynamo, the hand is the motor; it 
 is also one of the eyes of conscience. The mind 
 of man is his pathfinder in industry and in moral 
 prudence : it is the most lordly and admirable thing 
 in the human world. Nothing is great in the world 
 but man, nothing great in man but mind. It has 
 
THE NEW NEGRO 175 
 
 searched the inscrutable past and prophesied the 
 unsearchable future. It has delved to the center 
 of the earth and mounted to the invisible star. It 
 has taken the rocks of the earth as the pages of a 
 ponderous book and has read therein the history 
 of the prehistoric age and the records of a manless 
 world. From the scattered bones of the sohtary 
 plains it has reconstructed, clothed in flesh and 
 revived the ancestor of man and beast. With its 
 daring hand it has caught the loud-threatening 
 thunderbolt, tamed it and made of it a willing 
 messenger. In its magic hand it catches the ray 
 of light that has fled from the verge of the uni- 
 verse and compels it to "reveal the secrets" of its 
 far-off home. Standing in the present it links the 
 past and future, projects and extends the life of an 
 individual man over milleniums of history, and it 
 re-thinks the very thoughts of God. 
 
FROM THE CHRISTIAN VIEWPOINT 
 
 "Whom the gods would destroy they first make 
 mad." That is the method of inferior "gods" and 
 devils. But whom the true God loves and whom 
 he would make great, he challenges, he tries, he 
 tests, he proves. The Negro race in America is 
 God's high challenge and supreme test of Amer- 
 ican Christian democracy. Will it accept the chal- 
 lenge? Can it stand the test? 
 
 There are other tests which America has met 
 and is meeting, but this is the supreme test. The 
 question is not whether we can receive from for- 
 eign lands multitudes, who are of the same race 
 and color as ninety per cent of our American pop- 
 ulation, and assimilate them to our civilization, — 
 but here is a people who are a part of America's 
 own history, speaking her language and knowing 
 only her institutions, differing merely in race and 
 color, or, to speak more truly, differing only par- 
 tially in race and color, — and the question is : Can 
 American Christianity and democracy cross this 
 imaginary line, or is it easier to cross the ocean? 
 Will the American religion be exclusive like Juda- 
 ism, but without having as good reasons for its ex- 
 clusiveness? Judaism could justify its narrowness 
 on the deep grounds of national history and self- 
 
THE NEW NEGRO i77 
 
 defense. The best test of American Christianity 
 is not whether we can send the most missionaries, 
 count the most converts and spend the most money 
 in India, China and Japan or even Africa, but 
 what can we do and what are we doing for ten 
 million Negroes in America. It is not whether we 
 can preach brotherhood to all the world, but 
 whether we can practice brotherhood in our neigh- 
 borhood. 
 
 With neither hope nor intention of detracting 
 from the glory and goodness of foreign mission- 
 ary work, we say that the spirit of the Founder of 
 Christianity is opposed to a sentiment which makes 
 it easier to practice Christian brotherhood through 
 the collection box, the mails and the missionary 
 magazines than to practice the same across the 
 street and over my neighbor's fence. The meek 
 but fearless Jesus of Nazareth would have called 
 such inconsistency the ne plus ultra of Pharisaism. 
 The principles of Christianity are pre-eminently 
 suited to a solution of our domestic problems. Its 
 teaching is necessarily democratic; it was founded 
 by a. democrat. Whatever the outward govern- 
 ment of the community, its Christianity must be a 
 democracy, — a democracy of souls. It is a radical 
 doctrine, and compromises are conspicuously ab- 
 sent from its fundamental teachings: Love thy 
 neighbor as thyself — Love your enemies — ' The 
 gain of the world will not compensate the loss of a 
 soul — All nations are of one blood — and in that 
 sheet which Peter saw let down from heaven there 
 
178 THE NEW NEGRO 
 
 were not only beasts and birds but toads and 
 snakes. 
 
 Such is the doctrine that has proved to be of 
 greater vitality than any other in the history of 
 human nature. For nearly two thousand years it 
 has met no condition or phase of society where it 
 proved to' be inapplicable. It includes Jew and 
 gentile, Greek and barbarian; it began in the low- 
 est ranks of society, but has long ago reached the 
 highest. What will this simple doctrine mean if 
 applied to American race conditions without adul- 
 teration? Let us consider its application: in In- 
 dustry, in Pohtics, in the Church, and in our social 
 relations generally. 
 
 There is need of a higher ideal of Christian 
 brotherhood in the industrial forces of this coun- 
 try, not only as between employer and employed, 
 but also between different groups of the employed, 
 and especially between different race groups. In 
 all industrial pursuits race lines should be obliter- 
 ated. How can one laborer consistently or safely 
 deny to another the right to earn his bread in the 
 sweat of his face? Labor unions should be prin- 
 cipled not on social equahty but on the equality of 
 labor. Christianity is utterly opposed to denying 
 tfie black man the right to work in any sphere or 
 Calling for which he is individually fit: for if col- 
 ored folk are brothers in Christ, why are they not 
 also brothers in the machine-shop and the factory? 
 Besides, it is against the interest of the labor unions 
 themselves to exclude the Negro : if there is any 
 need for the union of labor, there is the same need 
 
THE NEW NEGRO 179 
 
 for the union of all labor, white and black. When 
 the black man is excluded he is made a strike- 
 breaker and wage-reducer; he is forced into war 
 upon organized labor, and the fact that this war is 
 marked by the color line causes discord to grow 
 between the races. Some shrewd and unscrupulous 
 employers will foster race dissension in the labor- 
 ing forces, and thus keep all labor as near as pos- 
 sible to starvation wages by the strategy of "divide 
 and conquer." But the Christian rehgion, which 
 was founded by a laborer and originated among 
 the common people, should be the means of bring- 
 ing the industrial element of the two races into 
 closer fellowship and co-operation. 
 
 Christianity is opposed to any effort to restrict 
 colored people to any certain sphere of employ- 
 ment, be that sphere high or low. Not all Negroes 
 are fit to be lawyers, and not all Negroes are fit 
 to be farmers. The Negro race has a varied 
 genius, especially in America, where it seems to 
 be a part of all other races; and it is uneconomic 
 and wasteful of human energies to attempt to force 
 any race into any limited number of occupations. 
 The only sensible reason for engaging in any line 
 of work is individual fitness. For the useful activi- 
 ties known to mankind, color neither fits nor unfits. 
 The color line in work is not natural and the race 
 test is artificial; and segregation on this artificial 
 line, rather than on the natural basis of individual 
 fitness, not only wastes human energy by keeping 
 men out of activities for which they are naturally 
 fit, but, as in the case of the exclusive labor union, 
 
i8o THE NEW NEGRO 
 
 it sows the seeds of discord and postpones the day 
 of race adjustment. And besides all this argument 
 on the lower plane of industrial and economic wel- 
 fare, we can say in a higher plane that Christ rec- 
 ognized the value and the rights of the individual, 
 so that the whole circumscription, restriction and 
 segregation idea is most cruelly unchristian. 
 
 The same logic and the same sense of justice 
 should forbid "colored wages," as well as "wom- 
 en's wages." Workers should be rewarded for 
 work, and not for sex or color. Wage discrimi- 
 nation on race and sex is a relic of barbarism, at- 
 testing the former enslavement of color and of 
 women. When white workmen combine to compel 
 the employer to pay Negro workmen a lower wage 
 for the same work, they throw a boomerang: they 
 force into the employer's hand a weapon to cut 
 down their own wages, and they justify the Negro 
 in accepting lower wages to secure employment, — 
 all of which disturbs our interracial peace. And 
 when the employer dehberately and of his own ac- 
 cord pays "colored wages," he not only commits 
 legalized robbery against the Negro, but he lessens 
 the motive to work in his white workmen who come 
 to feel that the margin of extra pay which they re- 
 ceive is not for any extra work which they should 
 do, but only the privilege of their birth and caste. 
 He sows the dragon's teeth of discrimination and 
 reaps repeated crops of demands for more privi- 
 lege, more immunity, less work and more recogni- 
 tion of mere color. And he is constantly tempted 
 to meet these demands in so far as possible at the 
 
THE NEW NEGRO i8i 
 
 expense of the "colored wages." But what can 
 be expected In the lower walks of life, if in the 
 the United States Government, in some church or- 
 ganizations, religious societies and schools there 
 are special salaries and fixed places for the colored 
 co-laborer? Will not this tend to demoralize the 
 youth of both races? They will see that the value 
 is placed, not on individual worth and attainment, 
 but on the accidents of privilege and caste, and 
 they will feel in their hearts that our religious pro- 
 fessions and democratic declarations are largely a 
 sham. The white boy will strive less, thinking 
 that striving for him is less necessary; the black 
 boy will strive less, thinking that striving for him 
 is in vain. 
 
 And now we come to politics. We are not talk- 
 ing about demagogism and petty trickery, but poli- 
 tics in the noblest sense of that honorable word. 
 There are those who admit or concede that the 
 Negro should have the privilege of work : that he 
 should be allowed to labor In any industrial and 
 some professional lines, to receive equal pay for 
 equal work and accumulate property to any 
 amount, — and still they say that he should not take 
 part in politics. This position is Inconsistent: half 
 freedom Is half slavery, half civilization is half 
 barbarism, and an intentional half truth is a whole 
 lie. These people assume the impossible: that 
 there can be secure democracy in industry along- 
 side of oligarchy and repression In government, — 
 that the right of property is safe when the right 
 of self-government Is denied. They forget that 
 
1 82 THE NEW NEGRO 
 
 the power to tax is the power to confiscate, and 
 that taxation without representation Is tyranny and 
 an irresistible temptation to legahzed robbery. Is 
 it not the purpose of votes to defend and advance 
 the interests of those who vote? Can it be that 
 people who would deny a man the means of self- 
 defense and advancement would still be wiUIng 
 that he should be defended and advanced? But, 
 they say consolingly, with the privilege of work 
 and the accumulation of wealth the political rights 
 will come. Will they ? Do rights ever "come ?" — 
 or must they be gone after and repeatedly gone 
 after until they are got? Has the accumulation of 
 dollars brought political rights to the Russian Jew, 
 or has It made him a richer prey for the oppressor 
 and a quicker temptation to the leader of pogroms? 
 Growing wealth without the capacity for self-de- 
 fense is an Increasing menace to the lives of those 
 who possess It and to the character of those who 
 covet it. 
 
 But when we speak of the Negro and politics 
 there are some who always speak of reconstruction 
 days ; they talk fifty years behind the times, — as if 
 the inevitable condition of the Negro fifty years 
 ago were proof against the Negro of to-day, — 
 as if the consequences of Ignorance were an argu- 
 ment against undeniable Intelligence. Does such a 
 man not know that the Negro's condition has 
 changed in fifty years, and that if he could even 
 prove that the race should not have been enfran- 
 chised fifty years ago, the proof would have little 
 bearing on the question of to-day? The present 
 
THE NEW NEGRO 183 
 
 unreasonable opposition to an intelligent Negro 
 vote proves the wisdom of providence : providence 
 foresaw that if the Negro were not enfranchised 
 in the day of Sumner and Stevens, he could not be 
 enfranchised in the day of Vardaman and Blease. 
 The Negro cannot be normally included every- 
 where else and excluded from pohtics. And the 
 brotherhood of Christ and the "Golden Rule" 
 would deter any Christian group from placing such 
 a heavy handicap upon another and taking such 
 serious advantage. 
 
 Any attempt to exclude the Negro from politics 
 and equality of citizenship could be defended only 
 on some such assumptions as these : that the white 
 race is so highly developed morally and spiritually 
 that it can justly take absolute and unchecked con- 
 trol of another people, and that the Negro if ad- 
 mitted to self-government would make it worse for 
 himself and others. But, indeed, the Anglo-Saxon 
 race, which is somewhat new in the walks of civili- 
 zation, has nowhere shown such superhuman ca- 
 pacity for self-control as is implied in the first 
 assumption. Wherever it has been in control of 
 other peoples it has proven itself thoroughly hu- 
 man, and it would be unfair to the destiny of the 
 American white man to subject him to any such 
 temptation. The second assumption is rendered 
 unnecessary by the fact that the Negro can be ad- 
 mitted under fair, just and equal tests for his quali- 
 fication. There should be no "grandfather" tests, 
 — altho many of those who voted before the war 
 were grandfathers to the present generation of 
 
1 84 THE NEW NEGRO 
 
 Negroes. The tests should apply, not to the con- 
 ditions of a previous generation, but to the attain- 
 ments of the present generation, — to the man who 
 wants to vote and not to his grandfather. As to 
 the severity of the test the Negro has no specifica- 
 tion ; whatever education or other attainable quali- 
 fication the white race may feel able to require of 
 itself, the Negro will not murmur if the same, no 
 more or less, is required of him. Less than this 
 no race with a sense of its own manhood and in- 
 terests could ask. Less than this no Christian- 
 spirited people would grant. 
 
 And we come now to the church itself. And 
 by church here we mean everything there is to it : 
 spiritual body, membership, organization, and 
 whatever else the term may connote. If the Negro 
 is to be counted as an equal in anything with which 
 Christian people have to do, surely that equality 
 should begin in the Christian church. But we find 
 church leaders, some of eminence and influence, 
 trying to twist the simple and straightforward gos- 
 pel of Jesus Christ to the support of color-preju- 
 dice and race injustice. There is nothing in any 
 religion that is clearer than the attitude of Jesus 
 Christ on the relation of his church to all men and 
 the universality of its principles and privileges. 
 The true Christian church is the best authorized 
 and the most inclusive democracy in the world. 
 But there are not wanting among its leaders men 
 who think behind the age, medieeval-minded men, 
 who would make the pulpit the mouthpiece of 
 Mammon and the church the citadel of privilege 
 
THE NEW NEGRO 185 
 
 and caste. Can the American church stand for 
 righteousness as applied to the Negro in America? 
 Or is it easier to cross the ocean and help the Ne- 
 gro in Africa, where Mammon and the oppressor 
 have less objection? Jesus Christ would have made 
 a parable on such weakness and Inconsistency. If 
 the church beheves in itself it must believe in the 
 black man in this country, for there is no possible 
 (interpretation of the teaching of Christ which 
 would exclude the American Negro or any other 
 race. 
 
 It has been hinted that church leaders do not 
 find it easy to stand by the Negro outside of the 
 church because they have not yet whole-heartedly 
 accepted the Negro on the inside of the church. 
 Some seem to think that we can be separated on 
 earth but united in heaven, — or they take the atti- 
 tude that the church is primarily a white man's in- 
 stitution and that the Negro is to be tolerated only 
 in so far as will not seem inconsistent with what 
 they conceive to be the best interests of that in- 
 stitution, — somewhat as the politician relates the 
 Negro to state government or as the educational 
 authorities relate him to the public school. If any 
 church or religious organization takes this attitude 
 toward the rising generation of American Negroes, 
 it will seem hypocritical, it will lose them, it will 
 fail, — and it will create about the most serious 
 danger that our civilization has yet had to face. 
 The Christian church which lays so much stress on 
 the value and importance of the soul and relatively 
 so minimizes the importance of every other thing, 
 
1 86 THE NEW NEGRO 
 
 even the human body, can have but one consistent 
 attitude on the question of the degradation, segre- 
 gation and "jim-crowing" of colored Christians. 
 
 And now we come to the phase of the question 
 in which men usually deliberate with their pre- 
 judices and decide with their passions. But we 
 believe that even this matter is amenable to reason 
 and commonsense and to the principles of Chris- 
 tianity. Some say : We know that the Negro must 
 work and that he should be secure in his property; 
 that it is inconsistent and perhaps even dangerous 
 to our own liberties to attempt to exclude him from 
 the democracy; and that without him the church 
 cannot really follow Jesus Christ; but, they con- 
 clude, we imagine and fear that the advance of the 
 Negro threatens race integrity. Let us look this 
 matter squarely in the face. We hold no brief 
 either for or against race integrity: we do not now 
 argue whether it is a good or a bad thing; for 
 present purposes we can grant anybody's opinion 
 on that question. We ask this question : Whatever 
 may be the correct position in that matter, will 
 not two educated, elevated. Christianized and 
 mutually respectful races be better able and more 
 likely to assume that correct position than two 
 degraded, un-Christian and mutually hateful 
 groups? If the Negro is civilized and Christian- 
 ized he can be all the more readily brought to 
 understand and agree to his proper relation to the 
 white race, whatever that may be. To take the 
 opposite view is to indict civihzation and Chris- 
 tianity. The case may be without exact precedent, 
 
THE NEW NEGRO 187 
 
 but any other assumption contradicts commonsense 
 and arises from unreasonable fear. Commonsense 
 lighted by the torch of experience is our only g^ide 
 in a new matter. And if we must proceed at times 
 without experience, is not the kingdom of heaven of 
 as much concern to the church as the distinction 
 of race types? Is the salvation of the world of 
 less account than the preservation of an aquiline 
 nose? 
 
 The bases of co-operation are these : identity 
 of interest, mutual understanding, mutual respect 
 and mutual trust. As to identity of interest, — God 
 never bound two races more firmly to the same 
 destiny than the white and black people of this 
 country: we are all in the same boat, and when 
 we land we are all going to land together, however 
 much we may delay the journey by mutual bickering 
 and useless hostilities. And there must be mutual 
 understanding: naturally misunderstanding des- 
 troys co-operation, and the failure of co-operation 
 begets new misunderstandings, so that our mutual 
 troubles chase each other in a never ending, self 
 perpetuating cycle. When two differing parties 
 come thoroughly to understand each other, in that 
 moment do half of their differences dissolve, or 
 rather are found to be non-existent and imaginary. 
 To know each other we must cross the line, — or 
 come near enough to it to shake hands and talk. 
 And mutual respect will increase with mutual 
 understanding: we cannot be just to a man whom 
 we do not respect, for he will not let us, — he will 
 resent disrespect and that will embitter us. But 
 
1 88 THE NEW NEGRO 
 
 mutual trust like a well-nurtured plant, will grow 
 out of understanding and respect, — and on trust 
 will blossom the flower of Peace! 
 
 But, think some, that means equality. Exactly I 
 Equality in the truest and noblest sense of the 
 word. The equality of manhood does not mean 
 that you are as tall as I am, that you weigh as 
 much, that you have as good health or that you can 
 commit a dozen lines of Homer's Iliad as quickly. 
 All men, as individuals, are unequal in those re- 
 spects. But it means that you are as free to do what 
 *you can do as I am to do what I can do, and that we 
 are equally accountable to the laws of man and the 
 laws of God. There is no other equahty worth 
 the mention. This is the foundation of real friend- 
 ship and lasting peace, and on such basis we can co- 
 operate. But if we approach each other in differ- 
 ent planes there will not be co-operation, tho there 
 may be a more or less distressing operation of 
 the one upon the other. 
 
 But perfect understanding, sound respect, mu- 
 tual trust and ideal co-operation are largely a mat- 
 ter of growth. In the meanwhile what is our 
 duty to each other? The Negro of brains and 
 character must not only feel responsible for his 
 individual conduct, but an interest amounting al- 
 most to a sense of responsibility for the rest of 
 his race. It is not enough for him to say simply 
 that he does not condone the criminals of his race 
 and to abjure responsibihty for their conduct: he 
 must show an active interest in their reformation. 
 For, whether or not as a matter of right, they do 
 
THE NEW NEGRO 189 
 
 as a matter of fact affect him. It Is God's way of 
 keeping us interested in the lower element, by 
 weaving our destiny with theirs. On the other 
 hand, it is not enough for the enlightened and con- 
 scientious white man to say, when others kill or 
 degrade or plunder the Negro, that "they do not 
 represent the best white South." The worst white 
 South will help to make destiny for the best. In 
 this world certainly, and I expect in the next; for 
 before God we are all respondsible to the utmost 
 of our ability. The best white people of the South 
 are therefore more responsible than any other 
 single element, for they are the ablest and have 
 the greatest circumstantial advantages. 
 
 Finally we aver our faith In the Christian relig- 
 ion and its fitness to bring these two races into a 
 right and peaceful relationship. Christianity 
 has met and overcome hard things in its history: 
 the corruption of empires, the stubbornness of 
 superstition and the night of heathendom. It has 
 brought truer freedom and stabler self-govern- 
 ment than the world has ever known before. It 
 is the faith of the buoyant Negro race that this 
 most vital of all reforming and informing forces 
 will ultimately help us, white and black In this 
 country, to lay aside the sin of prejudice that doth 
 so easily and so sorely beset us and run with 
 courage and endurance the race of civilization 
 which God has set before us. 
 
LYNCHING 
 
 The individual lyncher should be treated as 
 a lawbreaker and murderer. But the ultimate re- 
 moval of any such evil must come through the 
 evolution of public opinion, the persistent combat- 
 ting of lies and the gradual bringing out of truth. 
 No law and no executive can do away with such 
 evils until these civilizing influences have done 
 their work; but a good law and a strong executive 
 are powerful elements behind this evolutionary 
 process. They help along the evolution. But our 
 purpose here, as generally in these essays, is to make 
 the condition known. Our only apology is the fact 
 that conditions are not known to the American pub- 
 lic as a whole. Ignorance is the trench through 
 which all this deviltry has sneaked up close to 
 the very life of our civilization. The average 
 American white man does not know how distorted, 
 how absolutely false often, are the reports of the 
 causes which lead to a lynching. If the average 
 American knew, he would be opposed to lynching; 
 else the average American is not human. If a man 
 reads the press dispatches about the causes of 
 lynchings and thinks he is reading the truth even in 
 one case out of many, he is a novitiate, he is indeed 
 very, very "green." If he should witness one or 
 two such cases and then compare what he knows 
 
 190 
 
THE NEW NEGRO 191 
 
 with what he reads in the newspapers, he would be 
 cured. These fabricated reports, however, have 
 fashioned public opinion. The pitiful and almost 
 helpless ignorance of this public opinion is shown 
 by what the good white man will usually ask or 
 say whenever he talks on lynching. "Well, why 
 don't the Negroes stop committing crimes?" 
 Think of the wisdom of that question 1 If some 
 malignant power should decide that white people 
 must be hanged and burned without trial until the 
 white race "stops committing crimes," for how 
 many thousand years do we suppose the hanging 
 and burning would continue ? Again we are asked, 
 "Why do colored men keep on assaulting white 
 women?" This question is asked in spite of the 
 fact that all the evidence of a decade proves that 
 such crimes are very exceptional, that criminal 
 assault is not the cause of the lynching of Negroes, 
 that only a small per cent of those lynched are even 
 so much as charged with any kind of connection 
 with women, and that in the South (as has often 
 been found after the Negro was dead and buried) ; 
 "charged" does not mean proven. One who lives 
 in the South for many years where Negro men 
 are in daily contact with the white race in private 
 life, is impressed with the fact of how exceedingly 
 rare it is for a colored man to impose in any way 
 upon a white woman. But the few scattered cases 
 are gatherd together by the white press and hurled 
 into the ears of the innocent outside world with 
 great effect. 
 
 If only colored women could be equally safe in 
 
192 THE NEW NEGRO 
 
 the hands of white men ! The writer has lived 
 nearly all his life in the heart of the Southern South. 
 In all of that time he never stood face to face 
 with a case or personally knew of a case, in any 
 of the many communities in which he lived, of 
 a colored man committing assault upon a white 
 woman. But in the same time and in the same 
 places he knew of so many cases where white 
 men forcibly outraged colored girls that he can- 
 not now recollect or count them all. He knew 
 of cases where colored men suffered violence for 
 protecting the females of their families, and of a 
 few cases of colored men who were forced to leave 
 the community because they were vaguely 
 suspected of intimacy with white women. But 
 the average colored woman of the South thinks 
 that our moral world is upside-down indeed when 
 she hears that colored men are lynched for offering 
 indirect verbal insult to white women. 
 
 The cause of lynching is not Negro crime of any 
 sort. The temptation of the lyncher is the weak 
 administration of the law when the Negro is to 
 be protected and the helpless position into which 
 the colored race is forced by disfranchisement 
 and other forms of oppression. The ultimate 
 motive is human greed and the desire to keep the 
 Negro economically dependent. Lynching is one 
 of the necessary products of the general repres- 
 sion of the race. In short, the Negro will be 
 lynched and brutally handled by the lower elements 
 of the white race as long as he is disfranchised 
 and pushed down by the upper elements. The 
 
THE NEW NEGRO 193 
 
 one thing which the Negro's white friends and 
 the more friendly statesmen seem not to under- 
 stand, is that no people could be held in the 
 position in which they wish to hold the Negro 
 without being made the prey of the baser elements 
 of the stronger race. It is hard really for even the 
 best white people to tell just exactly what position 
 they do want the Negro to occupy. But this seems 
 true : that the majority want him down and under, 
 but do not wish to brutally mistreat him in any 
 other way, — they would not hang and burn him 
 without law. They fail to see, however, that 
 brutality and murder are the necessary sequel to 
 their own finer forms of repression: if the better 
 whites keep the Negro down, the inferior whites 
 will take care of the hanging and burning. The 
 only way in civihzation to save the American 
 Negro is to permit him to save himself, — to 
 enfranchise him and give him otherwise a full 
 man's chance in America. 
 
 We will give a few illuminating cases, the truth 
 of which we learned in spite of the newspapers. — 
 In one Southern town where w^e lived for a number 
 of years, a Negro was brought in from a neighbor- 
 ing state to work in a new industry. He was an 
 expert at what he was to do, and the management 
 could not find a white man in the community who 
 could do the work as well. His wages were 
 accordingly above that of the white men. He 
 was a genial fellow, was liked by the superin- 
 tendent, but was the object of frequent petty 
 insult from his fellow workmen. One day they 
 
194 THE NEW NEGRO 
 
 removed the dipper from the water-bucket so that 
 he could not drink. The Negro complained of 
 this, not in the presence of the men, but in the 
 presence of the boy who brought the water. The 
 boy told the men. They immediately began to 
 threaten the Negro, one of them actually telephon- 
 ing to the town for one of his friends to come out 
 and help kill a Negro, saying that there would be 
 "hell to play." This friend coolly announced to 
 others what was going to be done and got into his 
 buggy and went out. Meanwhile the Negro had 
 gotten anxious for his own safety, and had brought 
 back his revolver when he returned from noon 
 lunch. When the mill closed and he was emerging 
 from the door the white man and his friend, who 
 had been drinking preparatory to the deed, opened 
 fire on the Negro. The white superintendent 
 testified that the Negro was shot in the hand be- 
 fore he took his own revolver from his pocket. 
 But by good luck, and by virtue of not being alco- 
 holic, his first shot killed one of his assailants and 
 his second shot wounded the other. A clear case of 
 self-defense, but the white men of the town rode 
 out with dogs and guns, and the Negro was only 
 saved by the fact that he fled, covering his retreat 
 with his Winchester. For defending his life he 
 had to leave his employment and his home. 
 
 But the local newspaper, anticipating the pos- 
 sible capture of this man, prepared in its very next 
 issue a most perfect case against the Negro, in 
 terms that would not only tend to justify but even 
 to inspire his lynching if caught. The paper told 
 
THE NEW NEGRO 195 
 
 how the Negro had sent "insulting remarks" to 
 white men who had done nothing to him, how these 
 innocent white men had gone peaceably to this 
 Negro to "talk" the matter over, and how the 
 vicious Negro, without provocation, had jerked 
 out his Colt's pistol and shot one of the gentlemen 
 dead before the unsuspecting whites could even 
 think of their guns, which, by the way, they only 
 accidentally had in their pockets. Thus the local 
 newspaper which controls the associated press dis- 
 patches, made out a most flagrant case of vicious- 
 ness and aggression against the Negro. But for 
 the Negro's immedate flight from the community 
 and the Winchester which he was reported to carry 
 with him, he would have been done to death before 
 sundown, and good white men away up in Maine 
 and Minnesota would have read their newspapers 
 and said: "Too bad, too, too bad — but what are 
 they going to do with such Negroes?" 
 
 Now for one or two little tales of horror from 
 the northeast corner of Texas and from famous 
 old Shreveport, La. These little stories are facts, 
 not fiction; they did not happen "once upon a 
 time" but most of them happened in the years of 
 our Lord's grace, 19 14 and 1915. 
 
 The writer lived for a while in the northeast 
 corner of Texas. In the memory of men who had 
 lived there for a quarter century no white man had 
 ever been punished for shooting a Negro, altho 
 the killing of Negroes by mobs or by individual 
 white men is one of the commonest criminal occur- 
 ences of the community. The Negroes of this 
 
196 THE NEW NEGRO 
 
 locality are by no means backward or troublesome 
 or criminal. The two best institutions of learn- 
 ing for Negroes in the state of Texas are located 
 in this section. But in the county there are two 
 blacks to one white. This causes the lower instincts 
 of the whites to resent any, even the most legiti- 
 mate, effort of the Negro to hold up his head. I 
 have found it to be the rule in the South that more 
 meanness and murder are done the Negroes 
 wherever they are ambitious and outnumber the 
 whites, causing a certain element of whites to feel 
 that they hold their own position in the community 
 by virtue of a fraudulent exercise of power. 
 
 One such white man was riding around to hire 
 some "field hands," and came to a cabin where a 
 young Negro lived and supported his mother. 
 The young man informed him that there was no 
 one there but his mother whom he supported and 
 that he did not allow her to work in the fields. 
 Whereupon the white man remarked: "She's no 
 more'n any other damned wench!" The young 
 man resented this insult by mere verbal protest, 
 and in the ensuing quarrel and shooting scrape the 
 white man was killed. When the mob had the 
 rope over the limb of a tree, and all was ready to 
 draw the Negro up and shoot him, they first gave 
 him a chance to "speak," as he stood with hands 
 tied behind him and the noose around his neck. 
 Those witnesses who were unsympathetic with the 
 mob, say that he began thus : "You are nothing 
 but a lot of damned cowards! And this is what 
 you call a white man's civilization, is it? Hun- 
 
THE NEW NEGRO 197 
 
 dreds of you with guns, ready to shoot one poor 
 Negro with his hands tied behind his back, and sim- 
 ply because he defended his own mother and his 
 
 own hfe ." "Pull him up!" yelled the mob, 
 
 who could not stand the sting of such words. 
 
 In this same community, a little colored boy was 
 playing with white children. They all became 
 fond of each other, and as children use, they 
 kissed, — the little Negro boy finally kissing one 
 of the little girls. These children were not old 
 enough to be wicked or to understand the mean- 
 ing of the color hne. But they were observed by 
 some older person. This child was advertised in 
 the press as a "young Negro," committing "as- 
 saults" upon little white girls. Finally he was 
 taken in charge by a mob, marched through the 
 streets of the little city toward midnight, and 
 set on the top of a huge pile of drygoods boxes 
 and other combustible material that had been 
 assembled in a public place to burn him alive. It 
 was so late and so far past his bedtime that the 
 little fellow sat on top of the pyre and nodded in 
 sleep. This phenomenon touched the heart of 
 one member of the mob, who had little ones at 
 home, and he suggested that the httle "nigger" be 
 not burned but be taught a lesson in some other 
 way. Being persuaded to mercy, the mob simply 
 cut off his ears and mutilated his body in other 
 unmentionable ways and turned him over to his 
 parents. One year later a black face was seen to 
 be hovering at nightfall about certain premises 
 where white women lived. He was watched, and 
 
198 THE NEW NEGRO 
 
 when he entered, the mob rushed in, seized him 
 and mutilated his body in the same way in which 
 they had mutilated the little Negro boy twelve 
 months before. But when they brought in more 
 light, the smut was seen to be rubbing off the 
 victim's face. He was one of the young white 
 men of the town. Not a word of this got into 
 the associated press. 
 
 While I was in this northeast corner of Texas, 
 so much hanging and burning of Negroes without 
 trial was going on in the neighboring parts of 
 Louisiana, in and around Shreveport, that I de- 
 cided to go over there and find out some of those 
 whispered things which colored people always 
 know, but which they dare not tell in public. The 
 following is what I discovered and wrote at the 
 time, and which none of the newspapers to which 
 I sent it, in or out of the South, found it profitable 
 to print. 
 
 When one endeavors to find out the occasion, 
 motives and method of any particular lynching, 
 he is impressed with the difiicultness of the task. 
 This is due, first, to the fact that the white people 
 who know about it are either too much interested 
 or to indifferent to talk, and, second, to the fact 
 that the colored people who know about it are 
 afraid to talk. Fear makes the colored people 
 more absolutely silent than guilt and indifference 
 make the white people. Consequently the advert- 
 ised reports are usually endorsements of the 
 lynchers or excuses for them. Some colored men 
 in Shreveport, La., tried to find out the facts con- 
 
THE NEW NEGRO 199 
 
 nected with some of the numerous lynchlngs in 
 and around that city. A colored man teaches 
 school in the locality where the aged and probably 
 innocent colored man was burned, — and when 
 asked to tell what he had learned about it, replied 
 that the school superintendent for his county 
 or parish had ordered him to keep his mouth shut 
 and attend to his own business. Fear for his per- 
 son and for his position reduced him to silence. 
 
 The following, however, was learned. A white 
 storekeeper a little way out of Shreveport was 
 robbed and murdered by unknown party or parties. 
 Three Negroes were arrested on suspicion, — the 
 suspicion being based solely on the facts that they 
 were customers of the murdered man and that 
 some of them were supposed to have traded at his 
 place on the evening before he was murdered. 
 Then an aged Negro was arrested, — the suspicion 
 against him being based solely on the fact that he 
 was acquainted with the white man and had some- 
 times done odd jobs for him. The little money of 
 which the murdered man was robbed seemed to be 
 a more tempting object of the mob's pursuit than 
 was anything else, and for some reason the old 
 man was suspected of knowing the probable where- 
 abouts of the cash. A detective was jailed with the 
 old man, and playing the part of another wronged 
 prisoner he wormed himself thoroughly into the 
 old man's confidence, but only secured from him 
 a stout denial of any connection with or knowledge 
 of the murder. This seemed to prove even to the 
 sheriff that the old man was innocent, — for when 
 
200 THE NEW NEGRO 
 
 a Negro is arrested under such circumstances it is 
 his innocence and not his guilt that must be proven. 
 The sheriff is reported to have said : I believe the 
 old man is innocent and I am going to take him 
 to Shreveport and put him into jail there for safe- 
 keeping, but, "you all can have those other three 
 Negroes." Whether he said this or not, this he 
 did : he took the old man to Shreveport and left the 
 other three who were promptly lynched. 
 
 But the mob did not agree with the sheriff : the 
 mob did not think that a Negro who had committed 
 the awful crime of being arrested under suspicion 
 of having known about the hiding place of the 
 money of a murdered white man should be let off, 
 — even if he seemed not to know. So after lynch- 
 ing the other three the mob marched into Shreve- 
 port, was joined by some of the gallant citizens of 
 that place, broke into the jail, took the old man 
 out, and in order to repay him for the extra trouble 
 to which he had put them they gave him an extra- 
 horrible lynching in the style of being burned alive. 
 
 Whether any of these men had any part in or 
 any knowledge of the murder of that storekeeper, 
 only God knows. 
 
 It is significant that a few days after the murder 
 two white tramps, accompanied by a woman in 
 male attire, were discovered in this locality. It 
 is further significant that a few days after the 
 Negroes were lynched another white storekeeper 
 near Shreveport was similarly murdered. The 
 real murderers had perhaps been encouraged by 
 the ease with which their tracks were covered by 
 
THE NEW NEGRO 201 
 
 the blood of the Innocent and helpless. What 
 happened then? Again several Negroes were 
 arrested on suspicion, for having lived in the 
 neighborhood of the murdered man. Lynching 
 was threatened, but as the attitude of the grand 
 jury toward the previous lynching was still a little 
 uncertain, the affair was postponed.' Meanwhile 
 detectives secured what they called good evidence 
 that certain white neighbors had murdered this 
 second man, but this evidence failed to convince 
 the district attorney, and at last accounts the whites 
 had not been arrested and the Negroes had not 
 been released. 
 
 What will the courts do ? Who runs the courts ? 
 Who elects the courts, and who will elect the next 
 court if that court condemns those lynchers? We 
 cannot fail to observe that the Negro is most 
 peculiarly helpless where he is disfranchised. 
 
 The coroner, a Jew, is said to have reported 
 that he saw some prominent Shreveport citizens 
 emerging from the woods where the old man was 
 burned, but not even the coroner has dared to 
 make those names public. Some business men 
 also admitted that they went out merely to see and 
 enjoy the affair, but that they were not personally 
 acquainted with any of the performers. It is evi- 
 dently very hard to get evidence against a white 
 man and very easy to get evidence against a Negro, 
 — and yet the Negro has been given a reputation 
 for hiding his criminals. A few nights after the 
 murder of the second storekeeper a white girl was 
 frightened by some one at night, and she said 
 
202 THE NEW NEGRO 
 
 that it was so dark that she could not see him, but 
 that she felt sure that he was a "Nigger." 
 
 Another case, A white man was killed some- 
 where in the oil fields near Shreveport and several 
 Negroes were arrested and brought to Shreveport. 
 Late one night the officers were seized by a sudden 
 humane inspiration that the Negroes ought to be 
 taken to Mansfield for safe-keeping from mobs. 
 Those who know Mansfield say that it is a great 
 joke to take a Negro even from Shreveport to 
 Mansfield for the Negro's safety. At any rate five 
 miles out of Shreveport a mob was waiting, which 
 took the Negroes and lynched them. The officers 
 were not hurt. 
 
 Whether the officers knew of the presence of this 
 mob, I do not know. But I do know that most of 
 the Negroes who are lynched in the South to-day 
 pass conveniently through the hands of the law 
 into the hands of the mob. For some reason mobs 
 prefer not to capture Negroes themselves, but to 
 wait until the officers have arrested, disarmed and 
 tied the Negro or cooped him up in jail. This not 
 only undermines the mob's respect for law, but 
 it undermines the Negro's confidence in the officers 
 of the law, — so that there is surely coming into the 
 hearts of sound, sensible, peace-loving colored 
 folk in the South a conviction that in all cases of 
 color-line troubles the officer is but the agent of 
 the mob. This is a planting of "dragon's teeth!" 
 
 It is seen that none of these seven or eight mur- 
 dered Negroes had done any kind of personal 
 wrong to any woman. Readers of the Crisis, 
 
THE NEW NEGRO 203 
 
 which has become the most reliable authority on 
 American Lynchings and other color-line questions, 
 must be impressed by the small proportion of mob 
 victims in any year who have done or who have 
 even been suspected of doing any wrong to women. 
 Beyond a doubt, if the editor of the Crisis could 
 learn the particulars in each case, even that small 
 percentage would be greatly reduced. The term 
 "rape" has been greatly widened in the mind of the 
 South where a black man and a white woman are 
 concerned. The same term has been greatly nar- 
 rowed in its meaning when a white man and a 
 colored girl even in her earliest 'teens are con- 
 cerned. In the case of the black man and the white 
 woman every possible relation that involves a mat- 
 ter of sex is covered by the word "rape." 
 
 Shreveport furnished a good example in the 
 middle of the year, both because of the unprovable 
 nature of the case and because of the savagery 
 attending the lynching performance. It seems 
 that a colored boy, of whom no one reports any 
 previous wrong, was the janitor in a local theatre. 
 A white girl was the ticket-seller. One morning 
 before ticket-seUing time the girl came in while 
 the boy was cleaning the floors. They quarreled 
 about something. Those who know say that the 
 boy and girl were friends, and that it was only 
 a friends' quarrel in which the girl was the aggres- 
 sor. She was evidently the aggressor, having gone 
 in where the boy was at work. Some say that the 
 quarrel was overheard, others say that she re- 
 ported it. At any rate the boy was arrested and 
 
204 THE NEW NEGRO 
 
 jailed for rape. A great crowd of men, women 
 and children gathered in the midday, nobody wear- 
 ing a mask. A few officers were there to protect 
 the crowd but evidently not to interfere with the 
 performance. By accident, of course, the jailer 
 had placed the boy in a cell by himself and con- 
 veniently located so that no other prisoners would 
 be .released with him. And by accident again, the 
 mob battered in the jail walls at the very spot 
 where this cell was located. In their zeal some 
 cut his face, stabbed him in the back and made 
 him a bloody spectacle before he was led forth at 
 the end of a long rope. It seemed that some fero- 
 cious wild beast had been captured. They led 
 him to the most prominent city square, and tied 
 him to a telegraph pole near the court house, the 
 temple of justice. There he was further cut and 
 tortured, while the women and children jabbed 
 him with their umbrellas and spat upon him, till 
 he died. 
 
 The next thing on program was to be the burn- 
 ing, but a severe rainstorm prevented this. A few 
 days later one of the police officers was heard to do 
 himself credit with this remark: that it was he who 
 really forbade the crowd to drag the body through 
 the streets and burn it, — because he did not think it 
 would look nice before the women and children. 
 
 It is plain that those spectacles are degrading 
 our white people and embittering our colored 
 people. 
 
 This is the truth as best I could discover it at the 
 time. But who is going to tell the truth about 
 
THE NEW NEGRO 205 
 
 such matters? Truth is powerful, but not when 
 it is unknown. Undiscovered gold has no market 
 value. It would make a great difference in 
 America if only these things could be rightly re- 
 ported and represented. For white men and black 
 men are alike human, and the truth would influence 
 them. But the telling of the truth is not a profit- 
 able business for any paper now. It will have to 
 be done largely as a missionary work, as a phil- 
 anthropy, through some such organization as the 
 National Association for the Advancement of 
 Colored People and its organ, the Crisis. It 
 will have to be paid for largely by the Negroes 
 themselves, but by white people also. On the race 
 question the average newspaper does not take up 
 the facts and draw the necessary conclusion from 
 those facts. That is ordinary logic; but logic 
 does not work that way on the Negro. Just as 
 there are colored schools, colored churches, 
 colored cars and colored wages, there is also a 
 colored logic, which interested parties use when 
 they reason about the Negro : in which they take 
 the conclusion first, and then go hunting for facts 
 that are agreeable to that conclusion. There 
 is need of organized propaganda to make the 
 truth known along the color line. The best pro- 
 tection of wickedness is the darkness, its worst 
 enemy is the light. 
 
THE ULTIMATE EFFECTS 
 OF SEGREGATION 
 
 From a moral point of view the Negro question 
 is the most important question before the American 
 people. And in the long run the morale of a nation 
 will be chief among the factors of its destiny. In 
 none of our problems is there more need of the 
 scientific spirit, which seeks the facts, all of the 
 facts, and faces the full meaning of those facts, 
 regardless of prejudice or preconception. 
 
 One of the greatest defects in the reasoning of 
 many who have dealt with this problem is the lack 
 of adequate knowledge of the Negro's real inter- 
 est, motives and opinions. On this question it is 
 very probable that colored people know the opin- 
 ions of white people much better than white people 
 know the opinions of colored people : The Negro 
 reads the white man's opinion in the daily, weekly 
 and monthly press; he hears it reiterated in the 
 debates of Congress and in a dozen state legis- 
 latures; he hears the white man talk much oftener 
 than the white man hears him talk. The inevitable 
 result is that the Negro knows his own opinion 
 and the white man's too, — while the white man 
 as a rule knows only his own opinion. This lack 
 of contemporary knowledge concerning the Negro 
 causes many white speakers to appeal to far- 
 
THE NEW NEGRO 207 
 
 fetched evidence, even to the foreordainments of 
 providence : ever since my childhood I have heard 
 it said that providence ordained the Negro for 
 such-and-such a destiny, and that God created 
 the Negro to be so-and-so. I learned later that 
 the creation antedates all history and all human 
 experience, so that its facts and motives are inad- 
 missible evidence. My faith has been further 
 shaken by the gradual discovery that those who 
 quote providence are almost without exception the 
 Negro's most active enemies, — and the Negro 
 should be very suspicious of a providence that 
 reveals its will concerning him only to his enemies. 
 In our present discussion we aim to state plainly 
 the ultimate meaning of segregation and discrim- 
 ination in the life of the American Negro ; and we 
 make less appeal to providences, which we under- 
 stand not, than to the evidences of our senses, and 
 to the ordinary everyday arguments of justice and 
 humanity. 
 
 The Negro Opposes 
 Jim Crow Cars, 
 Residential Segregation, 
 Civil Service Segregation, 
 Separate School Laws, in large Nothern cities 
 
 with large Negro population. 
 And Laws Forbidding the Intermarriage of 
 the Races, in places where such prohibition 
 has not heretofore been established. 
 And finally, the Negro wants full, voting 
 citizenship. 
 How many of the Negro's friends know the 
 
208 
 
 THE NEW NEGRO 
 
 motives behind his attitude ? I admit that I have 
 great patience with those who are shocked at his 
 position on the intermarriage question, and that is 
 just why I shall state plainly the motives which 
 hold the Negro to this position, so that his sincere 
 friends may judge for themselves whether there 
 be any justice in his contention. I have learned 
 through my acquaintance with some of these 
 friends that the shock which they feel arises not 
 from the Negro's real motives, which they know 
 not, but from motives which their own imagina- 
 tions postulate in the Negro. I have even seen 
 some shocked in the opposite direction when they 
 first saw the thing from the Negro's standpoint. 
 
 But first as to separate railway cars. The 
 Negro opposes them, and the real motive of his 
 opposition is wrongly assumed to be a desire 
 to ride with white people. The fact is ignored 
 that on every separate car system white people 
 are given superior accommodations and black 
 people are given inferior accommodations. Re- 
 verse the conditions and black people would prefer 
 Ito ride with black people, — and some white people 
 'would too. In Europe there are first, second and 
 third class accommodations on the railroads. In 
 America the difference between white and black 
 accommodations is often as great as the difference 
 between first and third class in Europe, — but in 
 Europe the fares are as different as the accom- 
 modations, while in America the fares are the same. 
 Now let an American white man imagine that in 
 Europe he is compelled to ride in third class but 
 
THE NEW NEGRO 209 
 
 to pay for first class, while all other travelers, even 
 yellow and black, are admitted to first class for 
 the same fares. When he opposed this arrange- 
 ment as legalized robbery, what a joke It would 
 be for the yellow and black folks to ask, "Why 
 do you want to get away from your own people?" 
 The truth is, he would want to get away from that 
 injustice and carry all of his "own people" away 
 with him. 
 
 But suppose the Negro were given absolutely 
 equal accommodations, what then? That would 
 be a decent supposition if human nature and all of 
 the facts were not against it: nowhere in the whole 
 separate car system has there ever been systematic 
 equality of accommodations. In the majority of 
 cases colored men and women are put into one end 
 of a smoker, not always fully screened off from 
 smoking white passengers. This is just as if the 
 law required white people and black people to pay 
 three dollars for each pair of shoes, but allowed 
 the merc^hant to sell the Negro, for his three dol- 
 lars, shoes that were worth only one dollar. In 
 that case a merchant with a large Negro trade 
 could afford to sell to a hard-to-please white cus- 
 tomer shoes actually worth more than the three 
 dollars which he paid. The Negro would pay the 
 difference. The passenger in the "jim crow car" 
 , supplements the luxury of the "parlor car," — and 
 ! the same principle of Indirect robbery pervades the 
 whole system of jim-crowism and segregation in 
 public coveniences. 
 I This glaring financial and material injustice 
 
2IO THE NEW-NEGRO 
 
 makes it hardly necessary to mention the Christian- 
 democratic argument. But if a people were singled 
 out from among all the other peoples of the 
 world for public stigmatization, that people could 
 hardly be expected to accept it cheerfully even on 
 a plane of absolute equality. An insignificant right 
 becomes important when it is assailed: you do not 
 much value your right to walk the streets bare- 
 headed, but you would claim the right if it were 
 denied. If such a right were successfully denied, 
 the more vital rights would be exposed to attack. 
 Now, as to segregating Negroes into restricted 
 areas of our cities. Why are Negroes not willing 
 to live by themselves? To live by themselves 
 would be more comfortable for the Negroes, all 
 other things being equal. But there's the "rub:" 
 all other things are not equal and will not be, wher- 
 ever segregation opens the door and lays the temp- 
 tation to inequality. To make segregation just, con- 
 ditions would have to be equal; especially would 
 the Negro's representation in the government have 
 to be made consistent with his ratio of human inter- 
 ests: to make segregation impartial in Mississippi 
 every other alderman or commissioner should be a 
 Negro, every other governor, every other legis- 
 lator, every other tax officer, and by all means 
 every other member of whatever board or commis- 
 sion might have charge of public improvements. 
 We speak now of segregation by law; segregation 
 in fact has existed since the day of the "slave 
 quarters." Since emancipation this segregation has 
 been more or less continued by buying out the 
 
THE NEW NEGRO 211 
 
 Negro, outwitting his ignorance, and even by vio- 
 lently forcing him out. But against this economic 
 and brute-force opposition the Negro had hope, 
 based on at least a fighting chance. He could 
 "fight It out on this line," if It took generations. 
 But the opponent, in spite of his overwhelming 
 advantages In the struggle, has appealed for laws 
 that will eliminate the Negro from the contest 
 altogether. 
 
 / And why does the Negro oppose legal segrega- 
 tion? Because a generation of experience has 
 taught him the meaning of successful segregation : 
 a general absence of Improvements In the Negro 
 sections, — sometimes no pavements, no lights, no 
 sewers, and no police protection against brothels 
 and saloons. The Negro section Is equally taxed: 
 They must pay taxes on all the city improvements 
 and bonded Indebtedness. This Injustice Is simi- 
 tar to that Imposed by the jIm-crow car, for the 
 Negro is constantly paying to Improve other peo- 
 ple's property. If he could live on any street 
 anywhere, this discrimination would be Impossible; 
 but legal separation is a devil which drags In Its 
 tall a host of petty discriminations. Some fail to 
 see the difference between segregation by law and 
 the actual segregation which already exists In all 
 cities where there is a large number of Negroes. 
 But there is a vast difference; under the present 
 system the Negro has at least one chance, — he 
 can persuade the authorities to improve his section, 
 to provide lights, sewers and police protection; for 
 in order to persuade him to stay where he is, they 
 
212 THE NEW NEGRO 
 
 must make the necessary Improvements at least. 
 But if he be shut in by the bars of legislation he 
 will lose the advantage of even this mutual 
 persuasion. 
 
 To ask the Negro to accept this ghetto and do 
 these things for himself, would be a capital joke 
 if it were not so serious a matter. The Negro 
 could only do that if his section were set apart 
 as an independent municipality, with its own mayor 
 and government and the control over its own taxes, 
 — and this will not be allowed. But, says the oppon- 
 ent, the law is just and equal and constitutional, 
 is it not? It does not discriminate: it says that 
 blacks shall not move in where there is a majority 
 of whites, but it also says that whites shall not move 
 in where there is a majority of blacks. That is 
 constitutional in letter and equal in phraseology, 
 but I believe it is unconstitutional in spirit and I 
 know it is unequal in effect. The effect of a law and 
 v'not its rhetorically balanced phrases, should be 
 the test of its constitutionality. It may be literally 
 constitutional to make a law that the rich shall 
 not lend to the poor, nor the poor to the rich, — 
 that the intelligent shall not teach the Ignorant, nor 
 the ignorant the intelligent. It should not make a 
 law constitutional to thus simply convert its terms 
 in successive phrases. The segregation law in 
 effect means that those who have no homes shall 
 not acquire homes of those who have homes; and 
 aspires to constitutionality by adding that those 
 who have homes shall also not acquire homes 
 of those who have them not. The segregation 
 
THE NEW NEGRO 213 
 
 law is an effort to keep the Negro and the white 
 man where they now are; but it always looks 
 suspicious for the fellow who has a tremendous 
 advantage to try to make a hard and fast law to 
 forever maintain the status quo! 
 
 As to civil service segregation. The Negro's 
 opposition to this type of discrimination, which is 
 new, is not based directly on experience; but is 
 based indirectly on his experience with other forms 
 of segregation. But his reasoning by analogy is 
 being justified: in the Carolinas, as soon as it 
 proved possible to segregate the Negro railway 
 mail clerks, on one line they were given the hardest 
 runs and put on mostly at night; when bathroom 
 segregation appeared in one of the departments 
 at Washington, it proved convenient to assign the 
 colored women a toilet that faced the one assigned 
 to white men. Nowhere in this country have the 
 results of segregation inspired the Negro with the 
 hope of a "square deal." 
 
 The undermining of the democratic foundation 
 principles of a great government may be even 
 more serious than the injury done the Negro in 
 particular, but in this discussion we are taking up 
 only the Negro's independent case against segrega- 
 tion policies. 
 
 The separate school and intermarriage questions 
 come up chiefly in Northern communities where 
 there is not yet a rigid opinion on these matters. 
 Let us feel, if we can, as if we have no interest 
 in the whole matter and are now examining the 
 Negro's side of it for the first time, — not what 
 
214 THE NEW NEGRO 
 
 others said about him, but what the Negro says 
 for himself. 
 
 The Negroes in Northern communities are gen- 
 erally opposed to the separate school idea and 
 face the usual accusation that they "do not want 
 to associate with their own people," which ignores 
 the more positive reason which the Negro himself 
 advances, — the universal tempation and tendency 
 of the school authorities to degrade the Negro 
 schools wherever they have been successfully 
 segregated. The separate system prevails in the 
 South, and in many of those states the neglect of 
 the Negro school is a disgrace to civilization. 
 Besides, there is perhaps not a state in the Union, 
 certainly not in the South, with a segregated 
 school system which gives the Negro an absolutely 
 equal chance for public education. The legislature 
 may determine the amount to be appropriated by 
 a per capita reckoning including black and white, 
 but when this appropriation is expended the Negro 
 child may get only one dollar out of eight or ten, 
 on the same per capita basis. By having been ac- 
 counted equal for appropriation purposes he has 
 helped the white child to a per capita expenditure 
 that is higher than the per capita appropriation. 
 I heard a state supervisor of education say to 
 Negroes that whenever retrenchment was neces- 
 sary the Negro's share was always trimmed down 
 first. He said that the white officers dislike to do 
 this, but he defended it on the plea of "human na- 
 ture." Perhaps the Northern Negro who opposes 
 the separate school movement, has reckoned on 
 
THE NEW NEGRO 215 
 
 this same human nature and has little hope that 
 mere geography will modify it. He knows that 
 where black and white ^attend the same school this 
 discrimination is forever impossible. The Negro 
 pays an equal rate of direct school taxes, and 
 where other forms of discrimination exist, hke jim 
 crow cars and exorbitant rents, he pays a higher 
 indirect tax. A man may pay a tax without know- 
 ing the tax exists : the buyer pays the seller, — the 
 consumer pays the retailer. Besides, a percentage 
 paid out of poverty means more as a sacrifice than 
 the same percentage paid out of wealth. By the 
 law of marginal utilities, ten per cent to the pos- 
 sessor of a few hundred dollars may mean more 
 than ten per cent to the possessor of thousands. 
 
 Cincinnati, Washington and St. Louis have the 
 best separate schools for the Negro in the United 
 States, and it is significant that the percentage of 
 attendance of colored children at these schools is 
 lower than at the mixed schools of Boston, Cleve- 
 land and New York. The percentages of attend- 
 ance of Negro children from ten to fourteen years 
 of age are these — 
 
 In the segregated school: Cincinnati, 93.1; 
 Washington, 90.5; St. Louis, 89.4. 
 
 In the mixed schools: Boston, 95; Cleveland, 
 94; New York City, 93.1. 
 
 These figures made from the United States Cen- 
 sus, Indicate at least that even the best separate 
 schools are unfavorable to the attendance of col- 
 ored children. The figures for divisions and states 
 show that the percentage of the Negro's school 
 
2i6 THE NEW NEGRO 
 
 attendance is higher in the schools that are open 
 to all than in the segregated schools. It is not to 
 be supposed that colored children simply enjoy 
 going to school with white children, where in 
 fact they are often woefully ostracized, but it is 
 rather to be supposed that the white school attracts 
 colored people for the same reason why it would 
 attract any people, because of its superior location 
 and equipment. The low pubhc school atten- 
 dance of colored children in the South is largely 
 due to the inconveniently located and miserably 
 equipped school houses. 
 
 And now we come to the most interesting ques- 
 tion of all, — the one on which more passion is felt, 
 more opinions expressed and less investigation and 
 thought are put than on any of the others. Why 
 under heaven do Negroes oppose laws forbidding 
 white to marry colored and colored to marry 
 white ? Is it not simply because the Negro wants 
 to marry a white person? Some say, the Negro 
 may be right on other questions, but surely he 
 is wrong here : this law cannot possibly discrimi- 
 nate, it always concerns both a white and a col- 
 ored person, and squares absolutely with the 14th 
 and 15th amendments. Let us see if the Negro 
 has any decent motive to state for himself. The 
 literal constitutionality of such a law must be 
 admitted; it would also be constitutional to make 
 a law to hang children of six years or to grant 
 divorces for poorly prepared meals, — but it 
 would not be humane or wise. It would be a mad 
 legislature that considered only the constitutional- 
 
THE NEW NEGRO 217 
 
 ity of a bill; bare constitutionality is no proof of 
 its wisdom, its morality or its justice. The ulti- 
 mate test of a law is its effect, — and the Negro 
 / claims that the effect of a law forbidding inter- 
 / marriage is to lower the status of colored women, 
 '/without raising the status of white women, and 
 that it protects and fosters miscegenation and bas- 
 tardyw Such a law promotes the very thing it in- 
 tends to defeat, race intermixture, by giving per- 
 fect immunity to the men of the stronger race. 
 It is natural and logical to ask — Does it not give 
 like immunity to the men of the minority race? 
 No. For not since the foundation of human so- 
 ciety has any serious problem existed between the 
 men of a weaker and the women of a stronger 
 group. ^ The weak are never tempted to impose 
 upon the strong, and a prohibition of marriage 
 simply further protects the strong in its imposi- 
 tions upon the weak, by nullifying the traditional 
 rule of objective morality which compels the man 
 to accept his mate and acknowledge his offspring. 
 The intermarriage law is in effect a discrimination 
 against the women of the weak. And wherever 
 any race is ninety millions and rich and powerful, 
 while another race is ten millions and poor and 
 disadvantaged, the case will be the same. 
 
 The constitutionality of a law, I suppose, can 
 be taken care of in its phraseology, but its wisdom 
 and justification must exist in the conditions to 
 which the law is to apply. This is the special 
 nature of laws intending to regulate the relations 
 of a stronger and a weaker group; for here the 
 
21 8 THE NEW NEGRO 
 
 actual conditions, the laws of human nature and 
 the laws of relative power must be figured into a 
 fair equation. It is said to be one of the worst 
 methods of partiality and injustice to deliberately 
 treat unequals as if they were equal. A color- 
 line law is not fair simply because it has "black" 
 written into one phrase and "white" written into 
 the homologous part of the next phrase. It may 
 be unconstitutional in spirit and effect. To show 
 the insecurity of mere verbal equality: if the 
 weaker race were put temporarily in charge of 
 Congress it might think out a law on this very 
 question of miscegenation which would be abso- 
 lutely "constitutional" in a literal sense and yet 
 bear harder upon the stronger race — for example, 
 "Be it enacted that when a white child is born into 
 the colored race, or a black child is born into 
 the white race, the father of such child is to be 
 immediately hanged." Such a law would not hang 
 one Negro in a hundred thousand, and I know 
 communities, where the Negro does not vote, and 
 where such a law would be so unpopular as to 
 be overwhelmingly defeated in a referendum. 
 Why would a law to hang the father work a 
 special hardship upon the white race? Because 
 it would be based on the false assumption that 
 white men in general sustain the same relation of 
 innocence to colored women which colored men 
 in general sustain to white women. Why, then, 
 is a law forbidding intermarriage unjust to the 
 colored race? Because of the unfair assumption 
 that colored women are as well protected against 
 
I 
 
 THE NEW NEGRO 219 
 
 the lower instincts of whites as white women are 
 protected against the lower Instincts of blacks. 
 And "there is no greater inequality than the equal 
 treatment of unequals." 
 
 The primary motive of the black man is not a 
 desire for a mixed family but for the protection of 
 his own colored family. He believes that a law 
 to compel fathers to marry the mothers would 
 break up more miscegenation in a week than a 
 law prohibiting marriage will break up in twenty- 
 five years. This motive is proven by the fact 
 that the Negroes who oppose the prohibitive laws 
 are already married, and would not consent for 
 their children to get into the trouble which it costs 
 to marry a white person in America, legally or 
 illegally Again the Negro's contention is sup- 
 ported by the United States Census. Listen, — in 
 forty years the mulatto part of the population has 
 increased 
 
 In Michigan, where there are no laws against 
 intermarriage, 48 per cent, 
 
 In Arkansas, where there are strict prohibitive 
 laws, 559 per cent. 
 
 It is further noticeable that in Indiana, just 
 over the line from the South and where a 
 considerable sentiment is prohibitive of lawful 
 relations, the Increase of mulattoes was still 
 only 107 per cent, — while in South Carolina, 
 where strict law is added to the most violent sen- 
 timent, the Increase was about 383 per cent. In 
 whatever way the figures for mulattoes are 
 manipulated, they always tell the same story: 
 
220 THE NEW NEGRO 
 
 namely, that there is more miscegenation in those 
 states which degrade their colored women by laws 
 forbidding intermarriage than in the states which 
 offer equal protection to all women. This appears 
 whether we consider the mulattoes in the rate 
 of their own increase or in their increasing pro- 
 portion to the whole Negro population. The 
 law seems to help the violator of "race integrity;" 
 for the mulatto is not a theory, he is a fact. Ac- 
 cording to these figures, while one mulatto is being 
 added to a given number of Negroes in Michigan, 
 about twelve mulattoes are being added to the 
 same number of Negroes in Arkansas. And the 
 still more impressive consideration is, that the one 
 mulatto in Michigan may be legitimate, while the 
 twelve mulattoes in Arkansas must be illegitimate. 
 Which would civilization choose? Which should 
 the opponent of miscegenation prefer? What is 
 the difference between Michigan and Arkansas? 
 In Michigan the man of the stronger race is faced 
 by at least the legal threat of compulsory inter- 
 marriage, if he crosses the line, while in Arkansas 
 he is so far protected by law. I ask in the most 
 solemn earnestness, might it not prove more sob- 
 ering to a white youth to be directly told, "You 
 would have to marry your colored associate," — 
 than to be indirectly informed that he will have 
 immunity in that case ? 
 
 We have purposely confined our discussion to 
 the Negro's vital interest in this question, and 
 have avoided its wider phase, — the revolutionary, 
 or the devolutionary, idea of taking marriage, the 
 
THE NEW NEGRO 221 
 
 most honorable institution of the human species, 
 and putting it on a legal plane with fornication, 
 adultery and all the other most horrible sins cata- 
 logued in the Old and New Testaments. Such a 
 subversion of objective morality may have far- 
 reaching consequences, indeed, in which white and 
 black will reap equally. 
 
 These are the opinions and the arguments of 
 practically all of the most intelligent Negroes in 
 the United States, many of whom I Icnow person- 
 ally, and if they do not convince the race's avowed 
 enemies they should at least cause the impartial 
 to believe that the real motives are not what they 
 are popularly said to be. The intelligent Negro, 
 in his arguments against segregation and discrimi- 
 nation, seldom sinks to the level of mere "social 
 equality" consideration. 
 
 Finally, is the reason not now apparent why the 
 Negro wants to vote? Is he after "black suprem- 
 acy" in a country where his ratio is one to ten and 
 growing less all the time? Segregation and dis- 
 crimination are a sufficient justification of his de- 
 sire for the ballot; these evils get their greatest 
 support from disfranchisement, and they vary 
 directly as the Negro's unjust exclusion from par- 
 ticipation in self-government. A minority group 
 in a democratic-republican form of government 
 needs the ballot more desperately than the major- 
 ity group needs it. It is unfair to expect a white 
 administration to protect the Negro when the 
 Negro has been stripped of his only power to 
 support or check that administration. Neither 
 
222 THE NEW NEGRO 
 
 "'lucatlon nor money will settle the question with- 
 -ut the ballot: for a ballotless group cannot com- 
 iTiand the resources of public education, and a sub- 
 ject and helpless class by growing richer only en- 
 dmgers its life by becoming a more tempting 
 ,^rey to any powerful oppressor. The officers of 
 the law could not, if they would, be impartial to a 
 decitizenized people : the elected are obligated to 
 the electors. A disfranchised group could fare 
 much better under hereditary independent rulers 
 than under elective obligated officers. The very 
 advantages of a democracy make disfranchise- 
 ment therein the worst of tyrannies.^ This prin- 
 ciple will be true as long as human nature is human 
 and not divine. The only way to insure the Negro 
 against injustice in other particulars is to remove 
 the most effective defense of injustice, — dis- 
 / criminatory disfranchisement. The Negro does 
 not object to impartial disfranchisement, incident 
 upon a failure to meet prescribed and attainable 
 qualifications; the white man may prescribe a col- 
 lege education, if he deem it reasonable and make 
 it impartial. Besides, the white population out- 
 numbers the Negro population ten to one, and 
 according to the census it is outgrowing the Negro 
 population by immigration and natural increase; 
 so that the statesman does not have to look out for 
 "white supremacy," — the history of three hun- 
 dred years has already looked out for that. What 
 the statesman does need to look out for is justice 
 to the Negro and the avoidance of national moral 
 degeneration because of injustice to the Negro. 
 
THE NEW NEGRO 223 
 
 Impartial suffrage cannot mean "black suprem- 
 acy" in America, but would mean healthier self- 
 government by giving the Negro here and there 
 a better chance to speak for himself and locally 
 to defend his nearest and dearest interests. Sup- 
 pose the Negro should be given his full ratio in 
 the Congress of the United States: at present 
 there would be one Negro congressman to nine 
 white congressmen. What could the white lose? 
 Nothing. They would still have the vote and the 
 real power. But what would all gain, white and 
 black alike? The blacks would gain voice, hope, 
 a high sense of American justice, patriotism, — 
 civilization. And the white would gain a sounder 
 knowledge of the Negro's condition, needs, 
 thoughts and aims, so that on bills affecting the 
 interests of the Negro race the white majority 
 would vote more wisely than it now votes. One 
 of the greatest handicaps to our mutual adjust- 
 ment is the American white man's general ignor- 
 ance of the Negro race. 
 
THE NEW NEGRO 
 
 What I aspired to be, 
 
 And was not, comforts me : 
 
 A brute I might have been, but would not sink i' the scale. 
 
 — From Browning's "Rabbi Ben Ezra." 
 
 The "new Negro" is not really new: he ir, the 
 same Negro under new conditions and subjected 
 to new demands. Those who regret the passing 
 of the "old Negro" and picture the "new" as 
 something very different, must remember that 
 there is no sharp hne of demarcation between the 
 old and the new in any growing organism like a 
 germ, a plant or a race. The present generation 
 of Negroes have received their chief heritage 
 from the former and, in that, they are neither 
 better nor worse, higher nor lower than the previ- 
 ous generation. But the present Negro is differ- 
 ently circumstanced and must be measured by dif- 
 ferent standards. He has not less fidelity to 
 duty than had the old Negro : the present Negro 
 soldier is just as true to his uniform, his flag and 
 his country as was the old Negro slave to his 
 master's family. He is not more indolent: cer- 
 tainly the present Negro does a great deal more 
 of voluntary work than did the Negro slave. He 
 is not as much more criminal than the old Negro 
 as his criminal record would seem to indicate : the 
 present Negro gets into jail for offenses and 
 
 224 
 
THE NEW NEGRO 225 
 
 charges for which the slave received thirty-nine 
 unrecorded lashes. Besides, a repressive attitude 
 toward a man in freedom subjects him to worse 
 temptations than a bond-slave is subjected to. 
 Furthermore and quite as important as anything 
 else, there has been some change of attitude in 
 the white people among whom the Negro lives: 
 there is less acquaintanceship, — less sympathy and 
 toleration than formerly. 
 
 The average white man of the present genera- 
 tion who sees the Negro daily, perhaps knows less 
 of the Negro than did the similarly situated white 
 man of any previous generation since the black 
 race came to America. This lack of knowledge 
 has a fearful influence on the judgment: it is both 
 history and psychology that where knowledge is 
 wanting, imagination steps in. What naive ex- 
 planations men once gave of natural phenomena, 
 what odd shapes they ascribed to the earth, and 
 what erroneous proportions and fanciful rela- 
 tions they imagined among the heavenly bodies. 
 The most serious handicap to the creation of a 
 wholesome public opinion on matters affecting the 
 Negro, is the ignorance of the better class of white 
 people concerning the better class of colored peo- 
 ple who live in their community. They often 
 know the other classes : the servants through their 
 kitchens and the criminals through the news- 
 papers. In a large Southern city lived the most 
 experienced Negro banker in the United States, 
 with his bank, for twenty-five or thirty years ; but, 
 excepting the few bankers and others with whom 
 
226 THE NEW NEGRO 
 
 he came into business contact, practically the 
 whole group of intelligent white people in that city 
 were ignorant of the fact that this Negro existed. 
 In another Southern town of seven thousand peo- 
 ple, half white and half colored, an elderly, cul- 
 tured, Christian white woman, who had lived 
 there all here life, did not know that the Negroes 
 were not given a public school building by her 
 municipahty, and had supposed that a primary 
 school for Negroes which had been maintained by 
 a missionary society for thirty or forty years, was 
 the Negro public school. From an old Maryland 
 community a young Negro went out, got an edu- 
 cation in some of the best schools, took a course 
 in theology at Yale, and then returned to that 
 community to pastor a church. He worked with 
 great energy, aroused his people to build a fine 
 new church, and awakened so much enthusiasm 
 in the colored masses that finally some inklings of 
 his success trickled in behind the ivied walls of an 
 old mansion where lived two wealthy white ladies 
 of the "good old days," when the Negro was so 
 much better than he is now, as they could well tes- 
 tify from the superb character of the "black 
 mammy," now dead and gone, but who had been 
 for many years an indispensable part of their 
 household conveniences. Hearing of the fine new 
 building, for the first time in their lives they de- 
 cided to attend the dedication of a Negro church. 
 On learning the name and antecedents of the young 
 pastor they found him to be the son of their be- 
 moaned "black mammy," — him whom they sup- 
 
THE NEW NEGRO 227 
 
 posed had long since gone to the dogs, whither 
 their daily newspapers were saying all the young 
 and aspiring Negroes were bound. The mother 
 had been a "member" of their family, but the son 
 had struggled against poverty and prejudice, had 
 got his education and done his work without any 
 encouragement from them, without even so much 
 as their confidence or their knowledge. How can a 
 people so hedged about by tradition and handi- 
 capped by prejudice "know the Negro" as he now 
 is, even though they be good people and knew him 
 as he once was? 
 
 Not only does this ignorance of the Negro 
 prevent many white people from sympathizing 
 with his condition and struggles, but it does a 
 mischief more positive than that: it prepares 
 them to believe any charge of crime or viciousness 
 or depravity which may be brought against the 
 race. They will not analyze the evidence. If it 
 is said that in proportion to their population there 
 are four or five times as many blacks as whites in 
 a Southern penitentiary, men will conclude at once, 
 without thought or investigation, that such is the 
 ratio of the criminality of the Negro and the 
 white man. They overlook the multitude of other 
 differences which may account for this difference 
 in criminal statistics: the poverty, the ignorance, 
 the homelessness and helplessness, and the very 
 sort of prejudice which they themselves are sub- 
 stituting for thought. The ease with which a 
 Negro can be lynched in the South schould make 
 them know how much more easily he can get into 
 
228 THE NEW NEGRO 
 
 the penitentiary. Another thing that largely ac- 
 counts for the Negro's superior numbers among 
 the prisoners : most Southern states allow the dis- 
 cretion of the court a very wide latitude as to the 
 number of years for which the condemned is to 
 be sentenced. The law is often like this: a fine 
 of so many dollars, or ten years in prison, or both. 
 The Negro usually gets the limit, perhaps "both." 
 To make an extreme but simplifying case, suppose 
 one Negro and one white man commit a certain 
 crime every year; if the white criminal is either 
 fined or given only one year in prison, while the 
 colored criminal is given ten years, in the tenth 
 year when the visitor goes to that prison he will 
 find nine or ten Negroes there for a certain crime, 
 but only one white man. The easy-going investi- 
 gator might conclude that the Negro is ten times 
 as criminal in that respect as is the white man, 
 while as a matter of fact both races would have 
 committed exactly the same number of crimes. 
 The long-term sentences of Negroes cause them to 
 accumulate In prison. There are much more 
 scientific ways of explaining the Negro's situation 
 in this country than by reference to an unprovable 
 something like Innate depravity. 
 
 One of the greatest handicaps under which the 
 new Negro lives is the handicap of the lack of 
 acquaintanceship between him and his white 
 neighbor. Under the former order, when prac- 
 tically all Negroes were either slaves or servants, 
 every Negro had the acquaintance of some white 
 man; as a race he was better known, better under- 
 
THE NEW NEGRO 229 
 
 stood, and was therefore the object of less su- 
 spicion on the part of the white community. But 
 under the present order there are many Negroes 
 who are independent, in occupation or in fortune, 
 doing business for themselves, rendering profes- 
 sional service to their own race or living inde- 
 pendently at home. These Negroes, unknown to 
 the white mass, are the objects of its special su- 
 spicions and distrust, for they are "something 
 new under the sun." When riots break out, this 
 unknown Negro, well-to-do and equally well-be- 
 haved, the one who ought to be safest, is the one 
 most liable to attack by the mob. This is because 
 ignorance and prejudice have made the very things 
 which pass for virtues in white men, seem like 
 vices in the Negro; pride, ambition, self-respect, 
 un-satisfaction with the lower positions of life, 
 and the desire to live in a beautiful house and 
 to keep his wife and children at home and out 
 of "service." There can be no sympathy where 
 there is no knowledge, and the Negro of this class, 
 being rather a stranger to his white neighbors, is 
 regarded as a bad example to those humbler and 
 more helpless Negroes who are servants. This 
 is not so in every case, but this is the rule, and the 
 rule is the thing. And we are not talking hearsay 
 but speaking out of the experiences of our life- 
 time. 
 
 If prejudice could only reason, it would dispel 
 itself. If it could think, its thoughts might run 
 like this: If it be true that the Negro is innately 
 low and criminal in his instincts, then the Negro 
 
230 THE NEW NEGRO 
 
 must be the same In all places, — but the Negroes 
 of other countries do not bear this reputation; 
 those of Brazil and the rest of South America, of 
 Central America, of the West Indies and of 
 Mexico, are not distinguished as criminals. There 
 are great numbers of Negroes In parts of these 
 countries, and being in many of them unrestricted 
 as to the position to which they may aspire in 
 society and state, they would have a better chance 
 to demonstrate any essential inferiority In those 
 lands than in the United States. The truth is, 
 that If the Negro be Inferior, in the United States 
 he has never yet had a chance to prove his inferi- 
 ority. But prejudice does not investigate or rea- 
 son. — What we are trying to do In this essay, con- 
 cerning the new Negro, Is to tell what is, and not 
 what ouffht to be, though the latter would make a 
 more pleasing story than the former. 
 
 Another thing which gets the better of our 
 normal psychology and causes us to believe almost 
 any wild report about the Negro, Is the free and 
 superior advertising given Negro crime above that^ 
 accorded to any other form of Negro achieve- 
 ment. Booker Washington used to tell with great 
 amusement how he entered a little town and spoke 
 to a large gathering, making as good a speech as 
 he was capable of. The next morning he picked 
 up the town paper, expecting to see himself and 
 the meeting given considerable and prominent 
 space, but found only an Inch or so of recognition 
 on the last page. He had made a successful 
 speech, but the whole front page was given to a 
 
THE NEW NEGRO 231 
 
 Negro who at the same time had made an unsuc- 
 cessful attempt to snatch a woman's purse. An 
 unsophisticated outsider, reading that paper, 
 would have concluded that the constructive work 
 which such Negroes as Booker Washington are 
 doing, is of small consequence as compared with 
 the faihng efforts of a Negro criminal. Again, 
 when a white person commits a crime, the papers 
 say simply that a burglar was caught, a man shot 
 a woman, or a highwayman has been sentenced, — 
 not white burglar, not white man and woman, and 
 not white highwayman. In the case of colored 
 people, however, it is reported as Negro thief, 
 Negro, loafer, black brute, Negress. This forms 
 in us an association of ideas : black and Negro are 
 made to suggest crime. The one term calls up the 
 other in the pubHc mind; they are tied together by 
 as definite a law as the law of gravitation. If the 
 word white were written with every Caucasian 
 criminal, it would be as bad for the word white, — 
 or worse. We might say that we also give the 
 Negro credit for his good deeds by attaching the 
 word black or colored. But do we, with the same 
 emphasis and persistence with which we link him 
 with his bad deeds? Booker T. Washington 
 was given an inch on the last page, and the Negro 
 purse-snatcher was given the whole of the front 
 page. I know a black Negro who did well in a 
 Northern University, and I have his picture from 
 some newspapers wherein they deliberately light- 
 ened his complexion, straightened his hair, peaked 
 his nose and labeled him thus as a mulatto. And 
 
232 THE NEW NEGRO 
 
 often we refuse to mention the racial Identity at 
 all when the Negro's deed is good. While we 
 write, every newspaper in the United States is 
 mentioning the good work of the Tenth Cavalry 
 In Mexico, but very few of the dailies take time 
 to say that the Tenth Cavalry Is a regiment of 
 black men. When the Negro soldiers were dis- 
 charged for shooting up Brownsville, Tex., not 
 a newspaper In the whole Republic failed to men- 
 tion the race to which they belonged. Suppose 
 we pursued the same policy with respect to the 
 red-heads among us : whenever a black-haired, 
 brown-haired or gray-haired person committed a 
 crime, we should say simply that a man or woman 
 did this or that, but when the hair was red, should 
 say red-headed burglar, red-headed embezzler, 
 red-headed murderer, red-headed rapist, — very 
 soon the red-haired would be marked as criminals 
 among us and we should be prejudiced at the very 
 sight of them. 
 
 It is an Interesting Inquiry as to how the Negro 
 stands to-day as a patriot. In that regard he is 
 still one of the soundest classes in America, but 
 he does not stand to-day where he used to stand. 
 He still loves America, his native land, — it is the 
 only country he has or knows anything about, — 
 but he Is more prone to-day to identify "the coun- 
 try" with the powers who happen, for the time 
 being, to have control thereof. One hears expres- 
 sions from Individual Negroes now which were 
 not to be heard twenty years ago : that the United 
 States needs humiliation; that it would "help the 
 
THE NEW NEGRO 233 
 
 Negro If any foreign power should humble this 
 country;" that the Negro has "nothing to fight 
 for" in the United States, and "nothing to de- 
 fend;" that he (the individual who may be speak- 
 ing) "would not volunteer;" that it would be "in- 
 consistent for the Negro to fight the Japanese, 
 who have done nothing to him, and in behalf of 
 American white people;" that no foreign con- 
 queror could possibly "make conditions any worse 
 for the Negro here;" and many other expressions 
 which show that the Negro is beginning to look 
 for dehverance from abroad rather than at home. 
 This is a small and at present impotent beginning, 
 but it is foreboding. And it is too bad that some 
 American newspapers and congressmen are sec- 
 onding these thoughts of the Negro by proclaim- 
 ing a "white man's country" and a "white man's 
 war," and by obstructing the enlistment of pa- 
 triotic colored people in the army and navy. How 
 different is the present Negro spirit from that of 
 1898 when his youth, wherever admitted, rose as 
 one man to meet the Spaniard; from many of his 
 Southern schools the whole male student body who 
 could qualify as soldiers went into the camps. 
 That is not because the Negro was not mistreated 
 or oppressed at that time, but because he still 
 looked upon "Uncle Sam" as being some person- 
 ality separate and apart from the oppressor. He 
 then regarded the oppressor as a merely local 
 character; but he looked up to the great Nation 
 with hope and confidence, as the embodiment of 
 rigid justice and high ideals. He thought that 
 
234 THE NEW NEGRO 
 
 the spirit of the Emancipator and of the defenders 
 of the Union still ruled in the highest councils of 
 the land, and he swore by "Uncle Sam." He 
 hoped, too, to better his local conditions by this 
 opportunity to show his patriotism at San Juan 
 Hill and in the Philippines. But since that time 
 one or two weak Republican administrations and 
 a very hostile Democratic term have made him 
 identify his former ideal of the nation with the 
 oppressor himself. This impression has been 
 deepened especially by lynchings, segregation and 
 discrimination in the North, from which he once 
 expected ultimate justice. We fear that the ex- 
 tent and importance of this new feeling is not 
 generally understood by white people. The foun- 
 dation of preparedness should be laid in the mind 
 and the heart. As we write, the newspapers are 
 full of comments on the fact that a little black 
 boy of Des Moines, Iowa, refused under threats 
 to salute the American flag, on the ground that it 
 meant nothing to him and his. Some are advocat- 
 ing punishment for this lad as the remedy. That 
 reminds us of the "remedy" offered by the httle 
 boy who, when he was frankly told by the little 
 girl that she did not love him, replied, as he sailed 
 into her with his fists : "When I get through beatin' 
 the stuffin' out o' you, I bet you'll love me!" He 
 was adopting the method which would not only 
 fail to change indifference into love but would 
 finally arouse hatred and hostility. The Negro 
 will not fail to love the flag and be its staunchest 
 defender, if it means to him a reasonable measure 
 
THE NEW NEGRO 235 
 
 of protection for life, liberty and property and 
 civil and political rights. If these things are 
 denied him, no amount of preaching or cussing or 
 killing will make him love America. He could be 
 compelled for the time being to employ the weap- 
 ons of the weak, — pretense and cunning. 
 
 But the colored soldier and the masses of the 
 race are still loyal. There is no hyphen in the 
 short word Negro; he is every inch American; 
 he is not even Afro-American. One Negro regi- 
 ment beat all records by not having a single de- 
 sertion in twelve months. Nobody has any doubt 
 as to what the Negro soldiers are doing in Mexico 
 now; that they can be relied on implicitly to carry 
 out orders and serve the interests of the American 
 people. During our strained relations with vari- 
 ous European nations there have been frequent 
 expressions of doubt as to the loyalty of many ele- 
 ments of our population, but never one word of 
 doubt as to the Negro's loyalty has parted the lips 
 of even his fondest enemies. He is loyal and is 
 understood to be loyal, but a continuous adverse 
 pressure will finally break even the strongest 
 bar, — or bend it. 
 
 At present the Negro would stand fast and 
 firm by America against any European state; but 
 on the other hand when the Negro goes into any 
 European state he finds himself better treated and 
 freer from insult than in any state of the American 
 Union. How long will his loyalty last under that 
 test? The Negro abroad in any of the other 
 really civilized countries of the world, is practi- 
 
236 THE NEW NEGRO 
 
 cally never insulted or treated as an inferior un- 
 less he runs into a party of his own white fellow- 
 citizens from the United States. There are 
 Americans, of course, to whom this inconsistent at- 
 titude toward one of the most loyal classes of all 
 our citizenry is a shame and a distaste. 
 
 Naturally it proves disagreeable, at first, for 
 many American white people to turn from the old 
 to the new Negro: from the patient, unquestion- 
 ing, devoted semi-slave to the self-conscious, as- 
 piring, proud young man. It always shocks our 
 psychology to have our old and accustomed ideals 
 contradicted. The changes from tallow candles 
 to oil lamps, to gas lights and to electric bulbs 
 must have been unpleasant experiences for many 
 of the older members of the community. The 
 older folk did not want to put pipe organs and 
 other musical instruments into the church service. 
 It is a plain matter of psychology: the old ideal 
 was being smashed by something new, which is 
 disagreeable even when the something new 5s 
 something better. Nearly all concede that there 
 are good Negroes, but they are very slow to 
 revise their ideals as to what constitutes a "good" 
 Negro. To some it means the old "uncles" and 
 "aunties" or the present usable servants. It is 
 difficult for them to conceive of an independent, 
 self-respecting, self-directing Negro as good. 
 There is a great motion-picture film, the chief 
 fault of which, aside from its perversions of com- 
 mon history, is the fact that it attempts to teach 
 that the Negro is good only as a slave or servant, 
 
THE NEW NEGRO 237 
 
 and that every Intelligent and aspiring Negro in 
 society, law or state, is bad and criminal. This 
 hoary prejudice is our great stumbling block: 
 it causes intolerance and opposition to the rising 
 and aspiring but perfectly human and normal 
 younger Negroes. There are white people, ap- 
 parently fair-minded, who probably wish the 
 Negro well, and who can stand or sit and talk for 
 a long time with a dirty, ignorant and comical 
 Negro, but who could not have five minutes of 
 patience with one that is clean, intelligent and 
 self-respecting. I heard a Negro say that it 
 mystified him how white people would hire as 
 servants in their homes, or nurses for their chil- 
 dren Negro men and girls whom he would not 
 permit to touch his children. In the other direc- 
 tion, too, the thing often runs to the ridiculous: 
 a young Negro was to be ousted by his white as- 
 sociates from a certain position; they admitted 
 that his morals were sound, that his education and 
 general qualifications were all right, that his logic 
 was good and his arguments irrefutable, — but, 
 they explained, when he talks on some phases of 
 the race question he sometimes clinches his teeth! 
 They evidently preferred that when he talked of 
 the great injustices he would not do what Horace 
 says the speaker should always do (show the feel- 
 ing himself which he would arouse in others), but 
 that he would rather show his teeth in the concilia- 
 tory, apologetic grin of the old-fashioned Negro. 
 
 The greatest risk that the strong have to run is 
 the risk of their morals and ideals. The white 
 
238 THE NEW NEGRO 
 
 people of America are In a position to be greatly 
 tempted to regard the Negro only in the Hght 
 of his usefulness to them, — only as a utility, and 
 not as a personality to pursue his own ends and 
 fulfil his own destiny. This little drop of selfish- 
 ness is likely to vitiate a great many efforts "on 
 behalf of the American Negro." The Negro 
 is beginning to insist, however, that he must be 
 regarded first as a man and only incidentally as a 
 usable article. For example, the Negro really 
 beHeves in all kinds of education, and especially 
 in those forms of training which will best fit the 
 masses to become independent workers and of 
 the greatest service to themselves and others. But 
 that little drop of gall has caused many of those 
 who are trying to educate him, to view their mis- 
 sion exclusively from the selfish-utilitarian stand- 
 point. These enthusiasts have themselves put the 
 Negro on the defensive as to his right to pursue 
 other forms of culture. And that is why many of 
 his best friends and the ablest thinkers of his own 
 race have insisted and do insist that the race needs 
 not only farm-hands, domectic servants, carpen- 
 ters and other industrial workers, but also business 
 men, doctors, lawyers and well educated preach- 
 ers. The white people who desire that the Negro 
 be a separate race in America, often fail to see 
 that this very separateness would make it more 
 imperative that the race develop all occupations 
 and professions and advance along all line^. I 
 heard a white speaker, at a great missionary meet- 
 ing held "on behalf of Negro education," say: 
 
THE NEW NEGRO 239 
 
 We want the Negroes to produce farmers and 
 other industrial workers, — we already have plenty 
 of lawyers, doctors, historians and poets. His 
 "we" could not really include the Negro, about 
 whom he was supposed to be speaking, for the 
 Negro has very few lawyers, doctors, historians 
 and poets, — and the white historian and poet will 
 not really write the Negro's history nor sing his 
 songs. ! 
 
 The new Negro is a sober, sensible creature, 
 conscious of his environment, knowing that not all 
 is right, but trying hard to become adjusted to this 
 civilization in which he finds himself by no will 
 or choice of his own. He is not the shallow, vain, 
 showy creature which he is sometimes advertised 
 to be. He still hopes that the unreasonable op- 
 position to his forward and upward progress will 
 relent. But, at any rate, he is resolved to fight, 
 and live or die, on the side of God and the Eter- 
 nal Verities. 
 
 'For thence, — a paradox 
 Which comforts while it mocks, — 
 Shall life succeed in that it seems to fail. 
 
 FINIS.