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HALF A MAN
A Study of the Negro in New York

HAZEL
A Juvenile

THE SHADOWCopyright, 1927, by

THE VIKING PRESS, INC.

Printed in U. S. A.PORTRAITS
IN COLOR

By
Mary WHITE

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Ce rerForeword

THirTY years ago it might have been possible to
choose the twenty Negroes who could properly be
called the most distinguished representatives of
their race. Today, no one can make such a choice.
The colored men and women who have done impor-
tant work are too many in number. I have therefore
chosen my Portraits with the idea of covering a wide
range of achievement. This has meant the omission
of many able and well-known educators, executives,
artists, writers, musicians. It has been possible to
present only one or two examples in each profes-
sion.

I have written of no one whom I have not met and
seen at work. The Portraits are drawn from life.
This also has limited my choice.

After twenty-five years of active work striving
to improve Negro conditions, I inevitably have def-
inite views on the race problem. They will appear,
sometimes consciously, sometimes unconsciously,
in this book. I recognize that there are more ways
than one to reach a goal. To write wholly dis-
passionately, however, means to be dull—a much
greater sin than partisanship.

There are many people who have helped me in
Vilviil FOREWORD

securing my material. I extend to them all my thanks.
To James Weldon Johnson I give a special nod of
gratitude since he proposed my undertaking the
volume and gave it its name.

New York City, July, 1927.Contents

JAMES WELDON JOHNSON . . . oe.
has served his country as consul, Pere ee en

MARCUS GARVEY

sits in Atlanta prison stretching ee GGInGCOR like a arate

ber band around the continent of Africa.

MAX YERGAN

is the first “Y” secretary to work among the natives of

South Africa.

MORDECAI W. JOHNSON
occupies the highest scholastic pasion given any Negro. in
this country, the presidency of Howard University.

LUCY LANEY

would rather teach than eat. er echog! has been nen meat

and drink for forty-five years.

ROBERT RUSSA MOTON

successor to Booker T. W airngtone at maeeecees hae the

confidence of the white South.

W. E. BURGHARDT DU BOIS
by - genius as a writer forces Warerenen to ‘face the
Negro problem

SCIPIO AFRICANUS JONES

carried a great case to the Supreme lone of the United

States.

VALTER WHITE
writes novels, and plays a pa ae a ‘ahs man “anit ike
unearths the truth about lynching.

1x

43

64

78

92x CONTENTS

ROBERT S. ABBOTT .
made the colored newspaper a opalar ratory

MAGGIE LENA WALKER
runs a successful insurance nusinese cna fant

EUGENE KINCKLE JONES

helps, as secretary of the Urban Teague, to solve e the serious

problem of Negro unemployment.

LOUIS TOMPKINS WRIGHT
is a successful New York physician ana a member of the
staff of Harlem hospital.

ERNEST EVERETT JUST
has an international reputation as a eco

GEORGE WASHINGTON CARVER

has shown a hundred and one ways of using the pean and
the sweet potato.

JANIE PORTER BARRETT 5

has made the Virginia state farm for cored cee not a re-
formatory but a home.

LANGSTON HUGHES :

tells in his verse of simple, friendly palaeed folk.

PAUL ROBESON :
has won recognition as reer nce an musician.

META VAUX WARRICK FULLER

a favored pupil of Rodin’s, makes Beamer “BANCO Mone
clay.

ROLAND HAYES

by the nobility of his music pas aah the aH 0 Foraet
race.

els

- 127

. 148

160

169

194

. 216

. 227Portraits in ColorTee DTT

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TaterJames Weldon Johnson

In the winter of 1904 the most popular song in
New York and throughout the country where
new songs might be found, was ‘‘The Congo Love
Song.”? It was first sung by Marie Cahill in the
musical comedy Sally in Our Alley. The words
were by James Weldon Johnson, the music by J.
Rosamond Johnson. Twenty-one years from that
time, in the winter of 1925, among the ten best
sellers for thirty days, non-fiction, was The Book of
American Negro Spirituals, the arrangements by J.
Rosamond Johnson, the comprehensive and brilliant
introduction by his brother, James Weldon Johnson.
Again these two men were in the centre of the stage,
the second time with a more serious performance.
And it is a part of their genius that they have been
able so to reveal the folk music of their race as to
make it as intimate a part of the life of the American
people as their own gay songs.

Music has been only one of the significant inter-
ests in James Weldon Johnson’s career. He is today
Secretary of the National Association for the Ac
vancement of Colored People. His work to secure the
Negro his civil rights in every part of the United
States brings him in contact with prominent legis-
lators and reformers and with tens of thousands of
the more progressive colored people of America. He

is engaged in the great national campaigns that oc-
1PORTRAITS IN COLOR

9
a

cupy the Association, campaigns against peonage,
segregation and lynching. A quiet man of middle
age, of careful dress, with strangely expressive eyes
—not brown or black as one might expect from his
dark face, but gray-green. A slender figure with
long, delicate, musician’s hands. A man of much dig-
nity, who never shows a sense of inferiority either
by shrinking back or by pushing himself forward.
His smile of welcome to those who enter his com-
fortable office, at once wins his visitor’s sympathy.
Indeed, the visitor, if he be white, is relieved at this
lack of racial consciousness. It makes it easy for
him to meet this eolored American, widely educated,
much travelled, of broad sympathies.
James Weldon Johnson was born in Jacksonville,
Florida. On his mother’s side he has West Indian
ancestry and counts among his far distant progeni-
tors, white men of distinction and prominence. His
mother was brought up, however, in New York City,
where there has been an old, if small, colored soci-
ety of free Negroes, dating back for over a hundred
years. It was a society that worked with the Under-
ground Railway, and battled for those rights which
the Negroes enjoy now without question in New
York. His father was a Virginian, free man of color,
but he came to New York to live and there he fell in
love with the girl who was to be his wife, when he
heard her sing at a concert. After their marriage,
they moved to Jacksonville, Florida, where James
Weldon and his brother Rosamond were born and
spent their childhood.JAMES WELDON JOHNSON 3

Jacksonville had only grammar-school facilities
at that time for colored boys, and Johnson, after
finishing school, was sent by his father to Atlanta.
There he stayed for seven years, going through the
high school and receiving his degree from the col-
lege. It was a happy choice of his father’s, who as a
Virginian might have chosen Hampton, but who
wisely sent a lad of literary tastes not to a manual
training institute but to a University. There may be
those who remember the Atlanta University Quar-
tette in 1890. If there are, they will recall a youth
with an irresistible smile who told a story which he
himself had written about a balky mule. It was not
the mule, however, who was the hero of the story,
but the driver, who, after seeing the sun set while
he was still five miles from home, took his mule out
of the harness and put him back in the shafts again,
this time his head facing the driver. In this way
they backed triumphantly the five miles into town.
So well was this story told that the audience were
for a time almost convinced of its truth. The
narrator won many friends for Atlanta Univer-
sity.

After college came the inevitable profession in
those days for the colored man—teaching. Returning
to Jacksonville, Johnson took the principalship of
a public school and held it for seven years. It was
a grammar school when he began, but when he left
it had become a high school. The young principal ac-
complished this without a word of agitation or con-
troversy. The school board did not realize what was“A PORTRAITS IN COLOR

happening. At the end of three years, the eraduating
class proving a promising one, the principal per-
suaded twenty of his pupils to stay. After one year,
they stayed for two. The board of education eranted
another teacher, and at the end of four years there
was a high school with a graduating class. All this
had been done without friction and without anyone
but the principal realizing what was happening. It
was a sign of that diplomacy which was later to
prove very valuable to him.

While teaching school, James Weldon Johnson
studied law in the office of a friendly white man.
When he was ready to pass his bar examinations he
went into the court house, the first colored man to
apply for admittance to the state bar through open
examination. Johnson came up before three prom-
inent white lawyers, one of them the Honorable Dun-
can U. Fletcher, now United States Senator from
Florida. After a long exhaustive series of questions,
some of them concerning international law, his three
examiners stepped aside, though not out of his hear-
ing, and discussed his qualifications. ‘‘I’m damned if
I'll stay and see a nigger admitted to the bar,’’ one
of them said; but Fletcher answered decisively,
‘““We’ve got to admit him. We can’t do anything else
in common justice. He has passed the examina-
tion.’? And it was Senator Fletcher who rose and
made the motion for this Negro’s admittance to the
Florida bar.

But neither law, which he prectised when he could
find time from his teaching, nor the principalship ofJAMES WELDON JOHNSON 5

a high school could keep him in Jacksonville. He
loved to write, especially verse, but he did little with
his scribbling until his brother, Rosamond, returned
to Jacksonville from Massachusetts, where he had
been studying at the Boston Conservatory of Music.
The two began to compose song's, one the words, the
other the music. At this time they wrote ‘‘ Lift Ev’ry
Voice and Sing.’’ Jt was composed in 1900 for a
chorus of five hundred colored school-children and
was sung by them on Lincoln’s birthday. It was
given by the children with the fervor and enthusiasm
that it deserved, was enjoyed by its composers and
then forgotten by them. But the children did not for-
get. Many of them went out as teachers and carried
the song with them. More and more it grew in pop-
ularity until now it is sung all over the United States
and has been rightly called the National Negro
Anthem.

One should hear this song given by thousands of
voices at a Negro convention. The music is sonorous,
with a deep beat that follows majestic words. In
swing and fervor and high patriotism it is far supe-
rior to any other anthem America possesses, unless
we except ‘‘The Battle Hymn of the Republic.”’
And it will ring as true a hundred years from now
as it does today, since there is nothing local or
immediate in its appeal.

A year after the writing of this song, James Wel-
don and his brother went to New York. Hach gave
up a lucrative job, the one principal of a high school,
the other a teacher of music in the colored schools.6 PORTRAITS IN COLOR

Their friends and relatives thought them foolhardy,
but a few, and among them white men who admired
their music, believed that they were justified in
going to the city to seek their fortunes. For some
time they had been writing songs, and packed in one
of their bags were the beautiful score sheets of a
light opera with full orchestration. With this they
meant to capture the New York musical world.

Their success was extraordinary. The opera was
never produced, but many of its songs became pop-
ular, and soon the two brothers were under contract
with Klaw and Erlanger to rewrite the Drury Lane
successes, Humpty Dumpty, Beauty and the Beast
and others. It was their music that opened the Am-
sterdam Theatre, its roof garden, and the Liberty.
Their lilting songs, humorous, and yet at times
oddly suggestive of the Spirituals, held the public.
As jazz is the fashion today, so was their music
twenty years ago.

Later Bob Cole joined them, and he and Rosa-
mond Johnson went into vaudeville. These were the
days when Williams and Walker were beginning
to make an impression upon Broadway, and when
Hrnest Hogan was starting out in his delicious com-
edy. Before long, musical comedies were given,
composed, sung, acted, and directed by Negroes.
Williams and Walker gave In Dahomey and In
Bandanna Land, Cole and Johnson, The Shoo-Fly
Regiment and The Red Moon. Samuel Dudley and
his donkey walked upon the stage. Colored and
white, though chiefly colored, flocked to these pro-JAMES WELDON JOHNSON 7

ductions, and might be flocking now, had not the
moving picture come to capture all the theatres that
such shows were able to rent. The silence of the
cinema succeeded the rare jokes, the whimsical
songs, the jovial laughter of the Negro stage.

James Weldon Johnson today addresses a Car-
negie Hall audience on the horrors of lynching, his
tall figure crouching as he tells of some brutality,
then straightening as his voice rings out dramati-
cally in denunciation of the murderers. But twenty
years ago he was singing one of his lyrics to Anna
Held, while his brother played the accompaniment,
and Anna Held was saying plaintively, ‘‘ You always
sing in such a sugary way, you make it so sweet, I
ean’t tell what it’s really like. You two boys can
make me believe anything will go.”’

But while he wrote sugary songs that sometimes
proved enormous successes, the desire to improve
his workmanship was always present. In Jackson-
ville he studied law. In New York he studied Eng-
lish, taking courses at Columbia in literature and
the drama. He came to know Brander Matthews
well, and won from him the high praise that can be
read in Matthew’s introduction to his volume of
poetry. And increasingly he felt the desire to do
writing of a more serious, thoughtful character.

He stayed in this musical comedy world for seven
years. It was good to him, it gave him interesting
contacts, it filled his pockets. But after all, it was
something of a factory system. Lyrics had to be
turned out, jokes had to be made, with clock-like8 PORTRAITS IN COLOR

regularity. Managers would not wait for an inspira-
tion. The song must be ready on a definite date. It.
must be cut after a certain pattern and the pattern
was becoming tiresome. He resolved when a good op-
portunity offered to break away from all that he had
been doing and to find a new field for work. He found
it in government service. He had not been espe-
cially active in politics, but through his friends he
was offered the position of consul at Puerto Cabello,
Venezuela, and he accepted. Later he was given a
more important post at Corinto, Nicaragua. He
spent in all seven years in the consular service.

The life at Puerto Cabello was of the tissue of
which we dream. The consulate an immense, beau-
tiful Spanish building, with enormous patio. A ret-
inue of servants to anticipate human wants. Long
horseback rides in the afternoon up into the moun-
tains among giant ferns at which Northerners gaze
occasionally in florists’ windows. A position of dis-
tinction, in charge of French interests as well as
American. A member of the leading club, where
eards and billiards helped to while away the hot
evenings. It was a vivid change from New York. And
above all it gave him leisure, leisure in which to
write some of the things that for a long time had
been in the back of his mind.

Corinto was a more active port, and the consul,
with his newlywed wife, young, beautiful, gracious
in manner, saw something again of his countrymen.
In Puerto Cabello the society was wholly South
American, the language Spanish. But in NicaraguaJAMES WELDON JOHNSON 9

there were Americans back in the hills and many
American battleships stopped at the port. There
was much entertaining at home and on shipboard.
The consul met everyone, from the admiral to the
common sailor, from the wealthy tourist to the
beachcomber.

At times there was much work to do. Johnson
saw three revolutions, one in Venezuela, when Cas-
tro was overthrown, two in Nicaragua. He went
through the bubonic plague, when fear sent the for-
eigners scuttling out of the country. At Corinto the
last revolution began to look serious when the rebels
took the capital. Americans flocked from the hills to
the port town where they were protected by the con-
sul, the women placed on a ship in the harbor, the
men taken into the consulate. When the marines,
earnestly looked-for, at last landed, there was much
rejoicing. There were some who were sheltered at
this time, who love to recall the dignity of this
American Negro, their country’s representative, his
courtesy and the confidence with which he inspired
them. He was a servant of their government in
whom they took pride and for whom they felt affec-
tion.

In 1915 Johnson left Corinto and the consular
service and returned to New York. Returned, though
he little guessed it, to do far more strenuous work
than he had ever before known, to take up a task
that would exhaust his body and rack his spirit. His
period of leisurely thinking, of pleasant, unhurried
social intercourse, of bodily comfort, was at an end.10 PORTRAITS IN COLOR

Latin America had received him without a thought
of color and he in his turn had learned to speak its
language as though it were his own, to respect its
conventions and to enjoy its friendships. Now he
was to return to the United States, to experience
the humiliations, the discomforts, the harassing nui-
sance of the jim-crow system. After a wearying day
and evening of work, he was to sit up all night in a
dirty, crowded day-coach. He was to enter a South-
ern town where the fact that he was well-dressed
and intelligent meant danger to his life. He was to
go without food because there was no place where
he, as a colored man, travelling on his business,
could secure it. Certainly he showed a sporting spirit
when, from the position of consul, ranking first in
any gathering he attended, his flag flymg from the
mast of whatever ship he visited, he turned to be
field secretary of an organization especially marked
for persecution by the Ku Klux Klan.

He had no idea of going into such work when he
returned to New York. He expected to continue his
writing. There was a novel, The Autobiography of
an Ex-Colored Man, to be placed with a publisher;
there was a volume of poems to be printed, and there
was always his former writing for the stage to fall
back upon. His knowledge of Spanish brought him
the translation of the libretto of the opera Goyescas,
produced in 1915 at the Metropolitan Opera House.
A pleasant literary career seemed before him. But
like nearly every other prominent Negro of his gen-JAMES WELDON JOHNSON 11

eration, he was caught in the meshes of the reform
movement. He felt he must work directly for the
amelioration of conditions among his people. And
at the earnest invitation of its chairman, J. EH. Spin-
garn, he accepted the position of field secretary of
the National Association for the Advancement of
Colored People.

His new work drew him into the South, not as a
principal of a school in a friendly city, but as an
investigator and organizer. He studied conditions at
first hand, followed in the wake of more than one
lynching, and then turned to arouse the Negroes to
the necessity of asserting themselves against barba-
rism. Instead of writing of a Sunset in the Tropics:

“Tn her firefly crown,
Queen Night on velvet-slippered feet comes softly down,”

he told a breathless audience of the burning of Hill
Person near Memphis. He described the Negro as
he lay in the flames, his hands crossed upon his
breast, silent among the screaming crowd. And then
he turned to organize into a local branch the black
men and women who had been listening to his story.
And he sueceeded—for all of his sincerity and dra-
matic power had gone into his speech.

In 1921, he followed John R. Shillady as secretary
of the N.A.A.C.P. In his report of 1923, he defines
the object of the Association as follows: ‘‘It is not
to obtain more benefits and privileges for the Negro
that the National Association for the Advancement12 PORTRAITS IN COLOR

of Colored People is striving; it is striving to vindi-
cate the American idea. That idea is: that every man
shall have the opportunity for the highest self-
development and that his achievements shall not be
denied recognition on their merits.’’

It was a pleasing circumstance that the first
colored secretary should have been a man whose
achievements had received recognition. He could
work the better to attain recognition for others.

The story of James Weldon Johnson’s activities
as field secretary and later as executive secretary is
the story of the Association which he served. He
did two pieces of work, however, that were of great
importance and that were peculiarly his own.

When field secretary, he went, in 1920, to Haiti
to investigate conditions under the American Oc-
cupation. There were charges of great brutality to
the peasantry and of insolent treatment of the edu-
cated Haitians. He stayed on the island six weeks,
and was able to present facts to the American publie
that led to a congressional investigation and to a
cessation of the worst brutalities. Something was ac-
complished for the peasantry. But nothing could be
done again to secure independence for the Haitian
people. Imperialism had its grip on the island, and
American interests meant that the grip should be
maintained.

There was nothing new in the secretary’s story
printed in the Nation of the loss of independence of
one more West Indian island. It had-become a com-
monplace. But his account of the Haitians them-JAMES WELDON JOHNSON 13

selves was a revelation. The black republic has been
pictured chiefly to American readers as a land of
voodoo. Johnson saw a Catholic peasantry with a
devoted priesthood. He found cleaner, prettier
homes among the poor than he had known in many
parts of the agricultural South. There was igno-
rance, but there was decency. Soap and water were
in evidence. The marketplaces saw shrewd bargain-
ing, and the women, as they swung down the road,
their baskets on their heads, were full of dignity.

But it was of Port au Prince, where he was re-
ceived with a pathetic confidence in his power, that
he drew the most interesting picture. He found a
cultured society, such as one might meet in an Amer-
ican college town, but with more ease, more urbanity.
For this society was educated in France, and looked
not to New York, but to Paris. It was lovely, grace-
ful, and doomed. For it was colored. American ma-
rines, born in some obscure parish in Louisiana and
given authority because they spoke French, felt at
liberty to shove its men off the sidewalk into the
street. Color prejudice treated the society contemp-
tuously. And imperial interests were beginning their
system of taxation which would later lead to the
renting of the beautiful villas high on the hills to
American Naval officers, while their former occu-
pants went into less expensive homes. Haitian inde-
pendence was gone. And all the efforts of the
friends of Haitian freedom have not succeeded in
restoring it. No secretary of any association could
prevent the continuance of a policy of aggression.14 PORTRAITS IN COLOR

 

His other piece of work was more satisfying. For
two years he spent much of his time in Washing-
ton, endeavoring to secure the passage of the anti-
lynching bill.

It was a job needing all his diplomacy. It was not
a time for oratory, but for good lobbying. There was
first the work in the House. Mondell, Republican
floor leader, Madden, chairman of the Committee on
Appropriations, Gillette, Speaker of the House—
these and others grew to know his figure well :—tall,
thin, and with his curious light eyes. He worked te-
naciously. There were many discouragements. There
was a tendency to delay the bill. There was a tend-
ency to emasculate it. There were always the out-
and-out enemies who opposed any Federal legisla-
tion against lynching as unnecessary. The debate
in the House was long and educating. When a mem-
ber made a speech declaring, with the old-time con-
fidence, that lynching was used only as a punishment
for the unspeakable crime of rape, the secretary
saw that his Association’s literature the next morn-
ing was upon the desk of every member of the
House. There they could read the figures showing
that during thirty years four out of five of the per-
sons lynched had not even been accused of rape.
There, too, was the evidence that in those thirty
years fifty women had been lynched. Those fifty
women, to the men who made ‘‘the unspeakable
crime’’ an excuse for unspeakable brutality, stood
like three unanswerable fates. During the months ofJAMES WELDON JOHNSON 15

debate on the bill there was read into the congres-
sional record, page after page of facts on lynching—
startling statistics and gruesome investigations. The
members of the House and the people of the country
began to understand the truth.

The bill passed the House in January, 1922. The
fight was then taken up in the Senate, first in the
Judiciary Committee, and when reported out of
that, on the floor. At last came the final trial of
strength and with it defeat. The Democrats filibus-
tered, and the Republicans soon dropped the bill.
Their leaders made only a feeble resistance.

It was a long and seemingly a losing battle. The
Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill did not become a law. But
the agitation on the subject and the publicity was so
enormous, that when the secretary, worked to the
raw edge of physical endurance, returned to his of-
fice, he knew that defeat was close to victory. The
facts had been given to the world, and when the
world’s condemnation overtook the states that had
rolled up their list of deaths by violence and torture,
the deaths began to decrease. In 1926, there were
thirty-four lynchings as against ninety-six ten years
before. The South, after defeating Federal interven-
tion, began its housecleaning.

The achievements of the National Association for
the Advancement of Colored People under its pres-
ent secretary have been considerable. His leadership
has been virile, at times aggressive, but always sane.
He is meticulous. Nothing goes from his desk that16 PORTRAITS IN COLOR

has not been considered with care. It is amusing to
see him slowly scan a news story, while the director
of publicity who has asked for an immediate O. K.
stands nervously waiting. Everything that goes into
print from the secretary’s office is weighed and bal-
anced and frequently rewritten. Enthusiasm has its
important part in keeping alive any great reform,
but James Weldon Johnson does not let it get the
better of discretion. It is this that has made it pos-
sible for him to work with success at Washington.
The senator who flees from the Negro orator wel-
comes this man to his inner office. He deals in
present-day facts rather than in eternal platitudes.

A Southern authority on Negro folk-music came
to New York especially to see James Weldon John-
son. The two men met and were at once friends.
For the outstanding trait in this man of many tal-
ents is his charm. Charm is a hard thing to define.
Friendliness must surely be there and a kindly
spirit. But many feel friendliness and are unable
to express it. An unconscious self-respect must also
be present. Then the personality escapes in a ges-
ture, an expression, a word, and meets its friend. So
it is with this colored man. Consequently, as he
moves through the city of New York upon his busi-
ness or his pleasure, he receives more consideration
than any other Negro of as dark a skin as he. Ex-
pecting the best, he gets it. For he gives his best.
And whether he walks down the street with the
stride of the actor, his hat a little on one side,
whether he stands before an audience reading fromJAMES WELDON JOHNSON 17

his last and best book of verse, God’s Trombones, or
whether he greets an acquaintance with his disarm-
ing smile, he is always the gentleman. One knows
him to be one reared in gentle ways, endowed with
graciousness.Marcus Garvey

“We have reached the time when every minute, every second
must count for something done, something achieved in the cause
of Africa. We need the freedom of Africa now. At this moment
methinks I see Ethiopia stretching forth her hands unto God, and
methinks I see the angel of God taking up the standard of the
Red, the Black, and the Green, and saying: ‘Men of the Negro
race, Men of Ethiopia, follow me!’

“Tt falls to our lot to tear off the shackles that bind Mother
Africa. Can you do it? You did it in the Revolutionary War.
You did it in the Civil War. You did it at the battles of Marne
and Verdun. You did it in Mesopotamia. You can do it marching
up the battle heights of Africa. Climb ye the heights of liberty,
and cease not in well-doing until you have planted the banner
of the Red, the Black, and the Green upon the hilltops of Africa.”

Marcus Garvey, who poured out these words at an
immense gathering of delegates at Liberty Hall,
New York, in August, 1921, is now serving a sentence
at the Atlanta Federal Prison, for fraudulent use of
the mails. The organization that he built up is di-
vided against itself, weakened, full of recrimina-
tions. When Garvey has served his time he will be
deported to the British West Indies under a law
that makes deportation mandatory in the case of
crimes involving moral turpitude committed within
five years of the arrival of the immigrant. The likeli-
hood that the banner of the red, the black, and the
green will ever be planted on Africa’s hilltops, is, to
say the least, remote. But though in retrospect
Garvey seems to most white Americans a figure in
vaudeville, or, in the poetic words of the New York
World, ‘‘the eternal child playing ‘let’s pretend,’ ”’
18MARCUS GARVEY 19

to hundreds of thousands of his own people he was
and still is a magnificent leader, a Washington, a
Lincoln, with a glorious programme of emancipa-
tion. He was the first Negro in the United States to
capture the imagination of the masses. Among the
poor and the exploited, even among those whose
money he misappropriated, he is defended with an
ardor that abashes the critic. Charlatan or fanatic,
profiteer or martyr, he has profoundly stirred the
race consciousness of Negroes throughout the
world.

Garvey was born in the year 1887 at St. Anne’s
Parish, Jamaica, British West Indies. His place in
this island was that of a member of an inferior race,
one of the black masses ruled by a few whites. Be-
tween the black and the white were the mulattoes, or
‘‘ecolored,’? who enjoyed greater privileges, social
and economic, than the black. The boy Marcus was
educated at public and private schools, and at six-
teen was taught the printer’s trade. He supported
himself at this work for some years, and brought
out a paper of his own. He managed to visit England,
where at London he studied evenings in the Univer-
sity and met interesting people. Among them was
Duse Mahomad Effendi, editor of the African and
Oriental Review. Effendi spoke of him afterwards
as an excellent talker, but lazy. Garvey travelled on
the continent, where he was a careful observer, and
on the ship returning to America, met a passenger
recently from Africa, who recited tales of the cruelty
practised upon the natives. He cruised in the West20 PORTRAITS IN COLOR

Indies, worked at ports in Central America, and saw
everywhere the exploitation of the black man. Black
Jamaicans, his countrymen, were piling up millions
of profits for the great companies that employed
them, and yet they themselves remained in poverty.

“‘Poverty is a hellish state to be in,’’ he wrote
later, ‘‘it is no virtue, it is a crime.”’

There grew in his mind, from his European obser-
vations and from his intimate knowledge of condi-
tions in the Caribbean, the conviction that a race
could not attain permanent wealth and power in a
land that was not its own. The government would
always be prejudiced against it. If the master race
increased in numbers, the servant race would be left
to starve. This, he felt, was not a trait peculiar to
the whites, but was shared by all people. Therefore,
the only hope for Negro advancement was a return
to Africa, where with native blacks, the American
Negro, led by Marcus Garvey, would build up a civi-
lization equal to any in the world.

It took two trips to the United States to win for
Garvey even the slightest foothold. He endured many
hardships, and was cold and hungry his first winter
in New York. A few beans, a can of sardines, a ba-
nana or two, insufficient clothing—these seemed a
poor exchange for the beauty and warmth of Ja-
maica. But Garvey held his ground and slowly gained
support. His ideas appealed at first to the West In-
dian rather than to the American Negro, and he has
been accused, with some justice, of setting black
against mulatto. One of his most important convertsMARCUS GARVEY 21

was the West Indian, Hubert Harrison, at one time
a socialist, who had won fame by his brilliant, witty
street speeches. It was not, however, until Garvey
was able to acquire the Negro World, an inconspicu-
ous colored sheet, that his real success began. With
a newspaper of his own, he could spread his propa-
ganda throughout the States.

He had two plans—first, propaganda, preaching
the doctrine of a return to Africa; second, a com-
mercial enterprise, a triangular steamship company,
that should ply between the United States, the West
Indies, and Africa. He spoke of Africa vaguely, but
he seemed to have in mind the South and West coast.
Here American Negroes, aided by natives, should
get a foothold, and from this point of vantage would
form a Negro super-government, of which Garvey
would be the head. This super-government would
control the four hundred million of the Negro race
as the Pope from the Vatican controlled the Catho-
lies of the world. The two immediate steps then nec-
essary were the spread of the gospel of African
freedom and the operation of the Black Star Line.

The Black Star Line! Whatever the Garvey move-
ment lacked in practicality it made up in poesy. The
name of the new line of steamships, soon to be ad-
vertised in the Negro World, fired the imagination
of the American Negro. Donations for the enter-
prise poured in. Garvey received them as donations,
but a disobliging district attorney insisted that
money for a business enterprise could not be received
in this casual way, to be used without accounting as22 PORTRAITS IN COLOR

 

the recipient might see fit. The Black Star Line
must be incorporated. This was done. The line was
capitalized at ten million dollars and two million
dollars’ worth of stock was offered for sale. As the
stock began to sell, the company proceeded to liqui-
date its debts acquired prior to incorporation—an
illegal proceeding. Business training had not been
a part of Marcus Garvey’s education.

Other business enterprises were started—laun-
dries, a factory or two, and Liberty Hall, an im-
mense auditorium, was purchased. The movement
was christened the Universal Negro Improvement
Association. It received its greatest impetus when, in
the fall of 1919, a crank fired four times at Garvey
as he was about to go to a Black Star Line meeting.
He was wounded and partly crippled for life, but
bandaged and limping he entered Liberty Hall. The
enthusiasm was prodigious. Men and women went
wild. Their leader became a martyr, a saint. Stock
was lavishly subscribed, and Garvey’s popularity as-
sured.

In the winter of 1919 and the spring of 1920, half
a million dollars’ worth of Black Star stock was sold
to the Negroes. In one college alone in Louisiana,
students raised seven thousand dollars. No white
man might become a stockholder or a member of the
U.N.I.A. In many places no white man might be ad-
mitted to a Garvey meeting. This was a black man’s
job. And all over the United States, on the pleasant
farms of Virginia, in the cabins of the cotton belt, in
the city homes of the Pacific coast, throughout theMARCUS GARVEY 23

Negro quarters of the Middle West, wherever black
men and women were gathered in numbers, word was
spread of the new organization that would bring
freedom to all, and of the line of steamships that
would soon ply between America and the Mother-
land.

White people, when they heard of the movement,
either laughed or applauded. Despite the very real
popularity of Negro labor among many employers,
white Americans look with favor upon the departure
of the black man, and with him his problem, from the
United States. The World’s Work printed a long
and highly entertaining article on Marcus Garvey.
Newspapers enjoyed giving him publicity, and the
prestige of the Black Star Line and the Universal
Negro Improvement Association grew each month.

The majority of the educated Negroes stood aloof,
not feeling they could praise, not wishing to blame.
«They either think I am crazy,’’ Garvey said, ‘‘or
they do what is far worse, ignore me.’’ But some
gathered to his side, among them William Ferris,
scholar and lecturer, to whom he gave high honor,
and Noah Thompson of Los Angeles, a prominent
citizen whose endorsement gave Garvey prestige on
the coast. Leaders were found to head the movement
in various sections and it gained in numbers not only
in this country, but in the West Indies.

Students of African tribal life say that a Negro
government tends to despotism. This was true with
the United Negro Improvement Association. At the
head was His Excellency, His Highness, the Provi-24 PORTRAITS IN COLOR

sional President of Africa. Then came the knights—
only a few of these—Knight-Commanders of the Dis-
tinguished Order of Ethiopia, Knight-Commanders
of the Sublime Order of the Nile. There were lesser
nobles, and there were commoners. There were Black
Cross nurses, and there was the great African Army.
The colors of the new movement were Black, Red,
and Green. ‘‘Black for our race,’’ as His Excellency
said, in his regal robes of these colors, ‘‘Red for our
blood, and Green for our hope.’’ The old fraternal
orders with their regalia paled before this new or-
ganization. It appealed to the love of beauty, of color
so keen in the African, and it also aroused his self-
respect and pride. The sweeper in the subway, the
elevator boy eternally carrying fat office men and
perky girls up and down a shaft, knew that when
night came he might march with the African Army
and bear a wonderful banner to be raised some day
in a distant, beautiful land. Liberty Hall rang at
night with songs of battle and victory.

The Second International Convention was held in
August, 1921. It lasted for a month. Delegates came,
not only from the states and larger cities of the
Union, but also from Cuba, Haiti, the West Indies,
Central and South America. They came from
Canada, trom Europe, from Australia, from Abys-
sinia, from Liberia. An immense meeting took place
in Madison Square Garden, the largest auditorium
in New York. A procession formed at Liberty Hall
that for gold braid and brass buttons surpassed any-
thing Harlem had seen. Garvey led on his horse,MARCUS GARVEY 25

robed in the colors of United Africa. Following him
came the knights and nobles; then the grand, re-
splendent Army. Banners waved bearing victorious
slogans: ‘‘Africa Must Be Free.’’ ‘‘The Negro
fought in Kurope, he ean fight in Africa.’’ ‘‘ Africa
a Nation, One and Indivisible.’’ ‘‘Garvey, The Man
of the Hour.’’ Best of all, trumpets blared, and
drums beat their magnificent music.

This convention marked the height of Garvey’s
power, but it also marked the beginning of his down-
fall. Of oratory there was plenty. The auditors were
told by Africa’s president that day by day they
were writing a new history, recounting new deeds of
valor. But the Universal Negro Improvement As-
sociation was a business concern and the delegates
wanted a careful financial statement. Wspecially they
wanted to see the Black Star Line ships. Three had
been bought, they knew, the Yarmouth, the Maceo,
and the Shadyside. A fourth, the Phyllis Wheatley,
was advertised weekly in the Negro World. It was
a noble ship, equipped with all modern improve-
ments, formerly the Orion, purchased by the Black
Star Line from the United States Shipping Board.
According to the advertisement the vessel wonld
run to Havana, Cuba, St. Kitts, Barbados, Trinidad,
Demerara, Dakar, and Monrovia. The date of sail-
ing had been frequently postponed, but tite adver-
tisement continued to appear in the Negro World.
Where, then, was the ship?

The delegates demanded that they be taken to in-
spect it. But each time a delegate asked to see the26 PORTRAITS IN COLOR

boat, Garvey replied that he would be shown it to-
morrow. The Phyllis Wheatley was like the White
Queen’s jam, ‘‘jam yesterday and jam tomorrow—
but never jam today.’’ After staying a month with-
out setting foot on a ship’s deck, the wiser of the
delegates departed distrustful, worried. They had
thought this New York corporation, the Black Star
Line, a legitimate business. They found instead that
it was a blare of trumpets and a torrent of words.
“Hitch your hope to the stars,’’ the President had
declaimed to them. Apparently this was what they
had done, and they must look to the stars for any
money return.

The convention over, more and more people de-
manded of Garvey a detailed business statement. But
none was forthcoming. Stock-selling, such as the
Universal Negro Improvement Association and its
associate enterprises indulged in, he retorted, is
not a “‘mere cold business proposition.’? He may
have been sincere in saying this. He may have be-
lieved that money given to him for stock in a steam-
ship company could as well be used for the propaga-
tion of an idea. But as the New York Age, New
York’s oldest colored newspaper, pointed out in an
able editorial, December 10, 1921: ‘‘Despite all of
Marcus Garvey’s protestations, despite even the
faith which he may have in himself, his ventures are
found to impress many as neither realistic nor
sound. They are not commerce undiluted. They are
not combined policies. Nor are they passionately de-MARCUS GARVEY 27
voted to the idea undefiled. They are a dangerous
merger of all these elements, most dangerous of all
for Mr. Garvey, and for those individuals who are
moved to give their confidence and their funds. The
bill has not yet been presented to Mr. Garvey. It
may be a heavy one on the day of payment.”’

The day came soon. He was sued by one of the
stockholders and was brought to trial for fraudu-
lent use of the mails. During the proceedings the
members of the Universal Negro Improvement As-
sociation and all others interested learned that the
career of the Black Star fleet had been short and
phenomenally expensive. The Yarmouth made three
voyages to the West Indies in three years, losing
for the Black Star Company, according to the sworn
statement of its president, two hundred and fifty
thousand dollars the first trip and seventy-five thou-
sand the second. What it lost the third trip we do
not know, but the sum was described as disastrous.
The Maceo had made half a trip. It reached Santi-
ago and was there abandoned, its crew brought back
to New York by the United States government. The
Shadyside was an excursion boat that went up and
down the Hudson a few times one summer, and was
then left to rot on the beach at the foot of West 157th
Street. And the Phyllis Wheatley, the beautiful
Phyllis Wheatley, she that was to take a thousand
passengers to Africa—the Phyllis Wheatley never
existed. She never came into her own name, because
the Black Star Line, recipient of over half a million28 PORTRAITS IN COLOR

dollars, had not twenty-five thousand to pay on de-
posit for her. She remained the Orion and the prop-
erty of the United States Shipping Board.

“‘Tt seems to me that you have been preying upon
the gullibility of your own people,’’? Judge Panken
said at the end of the trial, ‘‘having kept no proper
account of the monies received for investment, be-
ing an organization of high finance in which the off-
cers received outrageously high salaries and were
permitted to have exorbitant expense accounts for
pleasure jaunts throughout the country. There is a
form of paranoia which manifests itself in believing
oneself to be a great man.”’

Garvey is now in prison. He took his defeat badly,
blaming everyone but himself. In April, 1922, the
Black Star Line went out of existence. But the ‘‘ Back
to Africa’? movement still lingers. From Atlanta
prison, messages go out to the Negro World. Garvey,
who is a model prisoner, ‘‘capable and intelligent,”’
the warden tells you, is permitted to receive visitors
and to discuss the problems of the race. He sees no
hope for the American Negro. For a space, his labor
was needed and he received a few priviliges, but this
is a white man’s country, and he will be pushed
harder than ever against the wall. In the British
West Indies there is more hope. There, some day, by
the force of his numbers, the Negro may dominate.
But Africa is still the one land where it is possible
to build up a Negro state. And the American Negro
should study to fit himself for this great task. He
should know how to build the bridges, how to clearMARCUS GARVEY 29

the land, how to found the cities that are to be.
Garvey can talk to you upon this theme hour after
hour. You feel that it is continually passing through
his mind as he goes about his monotonous prison
tasks, that it is his last waking thought.

At the Second International Conference of the
Universal Negro Improvement Association, the dele-
gates made a magnificent gesture. They sent a reso-
lution to the League of Nations. It ran as follows:

“We, the representative Negro people of the world, assembled
in this second annual international convention, DO: PROTEST
against the distribution of the lands of Africa by the Supreme
Council and the League of Nations of the World. Africa by
right of heritage is the property of the African races, and those
at home and those abroad are sufficiently civilized to conduct the
affairs of their own homeland. This convention believes in the
right of Europe for the Europeans, Asia for the Asiatics, and
Afriea for the Africans, those at home and those abroad. We
believe further, that only a close and earnest application of this
principle will prevent impending race wars, which will cast a
gloom over civilization and humanity.

“At this time when humanity is determined to reach a common
standard of nationhood, 400,000,000 Negroes demand a place in
the sun of the world.”

Perhaps it was only a gesture, this resolution.
There was no machinery with which to secure a
foot of African soil. But every nation ruling Africa
took notice of it. And it would be easier for the
proverbial camel to go through the eye of the needle
than for a professed Garveyite to enter Negro Af-
rica today. Indeed it is difficult for any American
Negro to visit his Motherland. For the call of race
is a real thing. And those who are holding a land by30 PORTRAITS IN COLOR

conquest, who squeeze the orange and hand the na-
tive the rind, may legitimately feel a little nervous
when, across the ocean in the richest country in
the world, a stocky black man, dressed in robes the
colors of which symbolize race, blood, and hope,
speaks to an illimitable multitude of black men, say-
ing:

“We cannot allow a continuation of these crimes against our
race. As four hundred million men, women, and children, worthy
of the existence given us by the Divine Creator, we are de-
termined to solve our own problem by redeeming our Mother-
land Africa from the hands of alien exploiters, and found there
a government, a nation of our own, strong enough to lend pro-
tection to the members of our race scattered all over the world,
and to compel the respect of the nations and the races of the
earth.”Max Yergan

In 1920, two American Negroes were preaching
widely different doctrines of the Negro’s duty to the
natives of Africa. One was a West Indian, a man of
little formal education, who for a time held the atten-
tion of the world by his ‘‘Back to Africa’’ program.
But while Marcus Garvey was proclaiming the soli-
darity of the African race, while he was declaring
that the white man ‘‘is becoming so vile that today
we cannot afford to convert him with moral, ethical,
and physical truths alone, but with that which is
more effective—implements of destruction,’’ another
Negro, born in the southern United States, with
equal fervor was urging his race to enter Africa
by the well-worn road of Christianity. The road was
a familiar one, and yet there was something modern
in the manner in which Max Yergan planned to
make his entry. He meant to go as a Young Men’s
Christian Association secretary, to bring to the
natives not only the story of the Christian God
but the welfare work for which this Association
stands. And while Garvey, in his robes of state,
was exhorting thousands in Liberty Hall to cap-
ture Africa for the Africans, Yergan was go-
ing up and down the country, speaking in Negro
colleges and churches, asking for money with which
he might start a Y branch among the natives

of South Africa, asking for the chance to try out
3132 PORTRAITS IN COLOk

with them the principles of practical Christianity in
the most perplexing Protestant colony in the world.

Garvey never reached Africa. He never made a
start. Yergan raised a modest ten thousand dollars,
and in 1921, with his wife and four-months-old baby,
knocked at South Africa’s gate. He was given a
late and grudging welcome. Conservative white
Americans had assured conservative white South
Africans that it was better not to allow an American
Negro to enter the mission field—he might teach
the natives the dangerous doctrine of equality. But
his passport had been viséed, and he was admitted
for three days. He understood this to be a formal
ruling, but he was relieved when at the end of the
three days he was given further permission to stay
for six months. After that there was no trouble.
His unquestioned ability, coupled with his tact and
kindliness, made him welcome. South Africa has now
become his home.

Max Yergan was born in Raleigh, North Carolina,
and educated at schools supported by white phil-
anthropy, St. Ambrose and Shaw University. He
was a brilliant student, leading his class. He played
football and wore his college letter. A good debater,
he won the prize for public speaking in his junior
year. He was graduated with honor.

But while Yergan is remembered at Shaw for his
scholarship, his prowess at football, and his debat-
ing, his religious earnestness was also a striking
characteristic. His classmates elected him president
of the college Young Men’s Christian AssociationMAX YERGAN 33

during his junior and senior years. In 1914, at a
Christian student conference at Atlanta, he an-
nounced publicly that he had decided to devote his
life to Christian service. There were many young
men present who have never forgotten the profound
conviction and at the same time the deep humility
with which this young and brilliant college graduate
told of his choice. With the intensity of his race, he
felt the ‘‘call’’ that still carries the ignorant but pas-
sionately earnest black field-hand out of the cotton
patch into the pulpit. But there could be no shouting
hallelujahs to wash away all doubt and care from
this young Christian. Instead there was the need of
wisdom in deciding how to be of most service in a
chosen work.

The unlettered field-hand, who, in denominations
under congregational government, is permitted at
once to enter upon a preacher’s work, has deterred
many educated colored men from entering the min-
istry. They know that in oratory they cannot com-
pete with these poets, ‘‘God’s Trombones,’’ whose
emotional appeal leaves their congregations breath-
less, exhausted; and unless they are orators they
are likely to be ignored when they attempt to turn
their hearers’ attention to questions of practical
ethies. Yergan, already deeply interested in the
Young Men’s Christian Association, decided to enter
that organization, and studied for a year at the
training school for workers at Springfield, Massa-
chusetts. From there he was sent as travelling sec-
retary into the South and Southwest. While Yergan34 PORTRAITS IN COLOR

was in this field, the National Secretary of War
Work in the Far Hast called for forty men to go to
parts of the world where soldiers were fighting and
where they would be ‘‘surrounded by every conceiv-
able danger to life known to man. The reward for
service was likely to be a body broken by disease,
or death.’’ Max Yergan volunteered. No question
was raised as to his color and he went with the white
men to be of whatever service was possible to the
fighting troops.

It was an exhibition of internationalism—an
American Negro going to a British dependency to
work among Indians. Yergan’s ability to deal with
students soon became evident, and he spent much of
his time with them instead of with the troops.
The American element is strongest in the Indian
Y.M.C.A., and to his surprise he found that many of
these Hastern students, who were often Christians,
were familiar with the race problem in America.
This was once brought home to him vividly, when,
arriving at Madras to address a student conference,
he entered an empty hall. The official in charge
offered his apologies. It seemed this day marked the
anniversary of the death of Booker T. Washington
and the young men were away commemorating the
event. They had read the Hindustani translation of
Up From Slavery and wished to honor this great
colored American. ‘‘Perhaps Mr. Yergan might be
able to visit them another time.”’

After some months in India, volunteers were
called for Mesopotamia and East Africa. YerganMAX YERGAN 30

at once asked to be sent to Africa. Despite the tales
he had heard of fever and of shocking discomforts,
he looked forward eagerly to setting foot on the
great continent from which his forefathers came.
There is much sentiment today among American
Negro youth regarding the ‘‘Motherland.’’ There is
an aching desire to visit these dangerous tropics,
to enter a native hut, to drink from a finely carved
cup, such as we see in museums, to hear the drums
beat, and under the great stars to see the Africans
dance. And besides the curiosity of the artist, there
is a genuine desire to become acquainted with the
original Negro stock whose qualities of mind and
spirit are receiving tardy recognition. It was with
a swiftly beating heart and a dry throat that Yergan
found himself upon African soil.

Kast Africa proved repellent in climate but ap-
pealing in population. Much of Yergan’s work was
among the troops, particularly among the large car-
rier corps. The war was on between England and
Germany. Long marches were necessary. The car-
riers bore upon their heads and shoulders guns, am-
munition, supplies. They were sturdy, dependable na-
tives. In order to communicate with them, Yergan
learned Swahili. Then there were the old-time fight-
ing men, the King’s African fighters, the troops
from the West Indies—thousands upon thousands of
black soldiers and one Y secretary to keep up their
morale.

Yergan was in Hast Africa only a year, but he suc-
ceeded in accomplishing much. Y huts were erected36 PORTRAITS IN COLOR

and six helpers came from America, two of whom
unfortunately died of fever shortly after their ar-
rival. Fifty Africans who had been trained in Mis-
sion schools were brought into service, were taught
to help with the religious work and with the enter-
tainments. The moving-picture outfit was eighteen
reels and a small cinema, and these were shown night
after night to eager audiences. All that Max Yer-
gan could humanly do, he did. He helped to train
orderlies for the hospitals, and in the midst of his
overwhelming duties, grew in understanding of the
African and the problem he presented. He was
young, overflowing with energy; but before long
the climate sucked the life out of him. Suffering
again and again from fever, he was at length forced
to return to America, stopping for a time in a hospi-
tal in India. Many despaired of his life. The National
Secretary of Near Hast Work under whom he went
out wrote of him:

“He has suffered the fever; he has been surrounded with ev ery
danger known to man in that region. He is now broken in health
and on his way home; but his story will be like that of Living-
stone... He went from hospital to hospital in his little Ford
machine in the spirit of Christ—sometimes near the coast, some-
times far in the interior under the shelter of Kilima-Njaro, the
tallest mountain in Africa, the summit of which is covered with
eternal snow. Many nights he was without shelter, with small
quantities of unhealthful food—yet the ring of his letters never
showed any sign of dissatisfaction with the discomforts, but joy
at the privilege of service.”

Back at home in America he recovered in two

months and was ready for new orders. This time
they sent him to recruit Y men for war service andMAX YERGAN 37

later to France to close up John Hope’s important
work of directing the colored Y secretaries. His war
duties at length over, he was prepared to give his
strength and enthusiasm to securing support for a
plan he desired to put through more than anything
else, a plan that had been in his mind since he had
left East Africa.

Among the reels that were so often displayed to
the black troops was one of the progress of the
Negro in the United States. It showed the colored
Americans’ homes, their schools, their churches. One
evening when Max Yergan had been exhibiting this
reel, telling his audience of Negro progress and
dwelling as he always did upon his brotherhood with
them, one of the boys, with a puzzled look upon his
face asked:

‘You say you have this thing called ambition,
hope, and then you say that you in America are our
brothers and sisters—that the same blood that flows
through us flows through you Ly

‘‘Yes,’’ the secretary said encouragingly.

“Then why,’’ the boy went on, ‘‘if this is so, why
have you remained so long in America? Why are
there so few of you here?”’

This question remained back in Yergan’s mind.
It was with him in France, and when at length he
was once more among colored Americans, he asked
it of them: ‘‘ Why is it that we, who better than any
others can understand the native African, have done
so little for him? Why have we given in other mis-
sion fields and left this neglected?’’38 PORTRAITS IN COLOR

He asked the question up and down the country,
telling of his desire to help his African brothers,
and slowly gained the support that he needed.
Enough money was raised to enable him to start the
enterprise to which he wished to consecrate himself.
Late in 1921, he sailed to England, and then on to
Cape Town, the first Y.M.C.A. secretary to go to
the black man’s Africa in times of peace.

In choosing South Africa as his field of work, Yer-
gan deliberately entered a country where he would
experience not only the difficulty of bringing his mes-
sage to a primitive people, but also constant racial
discrimination from the ruling class. South Africa
has all of America’s prejudice intensified. She
shunts the mass of her Africans into reservations as
we have shunted our Indians, and as with us, she
sees that the natives get the poorest land. If min-
eral resources develop, the native must get out.
The 5,210,000 natives oceupy 14 per cent of the land,
while the 1,700,000 whites occupy 86 per cent. The
native does the unskilled work in the mines and on
the farms and all the domestic service. For this he
is usually paid very small wages, and, at the mines,
where he receives a seventh of a white man’s pay,
is housed in wretched barracks. He must often beg
for bread. The white man’s phenomenally high wage
is made possible only by the Negro’s low one. Segre-
gation is everywhere, bad in Cape Colony, murder-
ous in the Transvaal. The ‘‘poor white,’’ that ele-
ment in every population mentally unfitted for any
but simple, unskilled labor, scorns to do a blackMAX YERGAN 39

man’s work and adds his venom and a serious un-
employment problem to the situation. Labor passes
a Color Bar Bill, making it legally impossible to
employ a Negro at skilled work. North Carolina,
his early home, doubtless discriminated against Max
Yergan in many ways, but to this newly-married Y
secretary, attempting to live in South Africa, it must
in retrospect have seemed idyllic.

Whatever diffculties he encountered, Yergan said
little, then or now. He wanted to settle in Johannes-
burg, but after a long search, he gave up the plan.
In a town of 300,000 inhabitants there was not a
decent house that he could rent. His search meant
enforced travelling in jim-crow cars, where the ver-
min crawled upon him from unkempt black laborers.
No hotel, however cheap, would receive him. Had he
been of a cynical nature he might have inquired,
those first days, which race it was that he had come
to lead to Christ. But had he been a cynic he would
not have gone upon his mission. With quiet fortitude
he accepted what he could not alter, and at length
got possession of a house at Alice, a little town in
northeastern Cape Colony, a hundred miles from
the coast, where Fort Hare, a college for native
youth, is situated.

At the end of five years, in the autumn of 1926,
Max Yergan came back to America to give an ac-
count of his work. There were three children now
with his attractive young wife. The figures he pre-
sented were imposing. Thirty associations had been
formed, with over four thousand members. At Alice,40 PORTRAITS IN COLOR

in connection with Fort Hare, a community centre
full of interesting activities had been organized.
Many leaders had been found in the native schools
and colleges who caught the vision of service to the
masses of their people, and during vacation would
go out to organize the play life of the children, to
teach the people as far as it was possible to make
homes more sanitary, to introduce new methods of
agriculture. Student conferences had been held, and
a teachers’ organization with a membership of over
a thousand had been formed. Religious work had
been quickened, brought to a fuller life. You saw
the association secretary swinging the circuit in
his Ford car—Natal, Zululand, Swaziland, Basuto-
land, Bechuanaland, Transvaal, Portuguese Hast Af-
rica, Orange Free State, Cape Colony, and home,
where his no-less-busy, courageous wife led so much
of her life without what we all crave, the companion-
ship of congenial minds.

Yergan painted a clear picture, but it was inade-
quate. It did not do justice to the man who drew
it. A deeply religious person cannot exploit himself.
He is a duffer at publicity. He cannot describe his
influence, and it is the influence of Max Yergan’s
personality that has been the most important ele-
ment in his sojourn im South Africa. By his extraor-
dinary tact, coupled with a quiet dignity, Yergan has
won his place.

“‘Kiverybody has confidence in him,’’ a member of
the South African government says. ‘‘He can go
anywhere. The white people use him increasinglyMAX YERGAN 41

at public meetings, especially among students. He is
too able a man to waste upon the uneducated. His
appeal is to the leader and he helps promote liberal
feeling. No one can listen to him and then say that
the Negro is not capable of development. Why, we
have so much confidence in him that we are willing
to hear his criticism.’’

The outlook in South Africa today is gloomy. The
pending legislation would strip the native of such
slender rights of suffrage as he has, would take the
homes from thousands of small property owners,
and force them into service. It is difficult to feel
hope. If you ask Max Yergan how he is able to go
back and face conditions, he will tell you simply be-
cause he has faith, faith that right will conquer in
the end. In dealing with these complicated race prob-
lems you must have a long view. And he will say also
that he can go on because he has a platform—the
gospel of Christ. Not a dogma—not for a moment
must you think of it in that way—but a platform.
And since South Africa is avowedly Christian, a
platform to which one ean point, and which, if car-
ried out, will cure the prejudices which so perplex
us. So, with the simple platform of loving one’s
enemies and believing in the infinite possibility
of love in mankind, Max Yergan goes back to
Africa.

““The man of me’’ is what the native calls this
colored American, the wonderful dark man who has
accomplished so much, and who, unlike the half-
breed ‘‘colored’’ of the Cape, does not scorn his42 PORTRAITS IN COLOR

primitive brothers, but rejoices in serving them.
They will welcome him back, we know.

Behind his home at Alice is a hill, and in the late
afternoon he and his wife climb through the sparse
vegetation to the top to see the view. The splendor
of the desert is in the clear air, in the purple of the
hills, in the indescribable beauty of the sunset’s
coloring. Here one may rest, not rasped by brutal
hostility, and ‘‘the offensiveness of the closed mind.”’

Is there any man in that far-away land to emulate
Max Yergan? We have heard of but one, for some
years a resident of South Africa, who lived in the
spirit of love to all mankind; and he, Gandhi, in old-
time parlance would be called a heathen. Has the
white race there become so masterful that a St.
Francis of Assisi is no longer possible to it? If he
were born would he be throttled as soon as he laid
his clothes at his father’s feet? Something baneful,
malignant, seems to overtake white Christians in
those communities where white rules black.

There is danger in the South African situation,
a danger of which Lord Olivier, authority on the
dark races, says: ‘‘It is not the natives who in the
long run will be defeated. It is not they, but the
white race who have shown the first symptoms of
degeneration—a degeneration entirely due to their
own perverse social theory.’’

We who live in America may be proud that we
have working in this difficult situation one of our
nation, with faith to move mountains, coupled with
the greater spirit of love.Mordecu W. Johnson

In July, 1926, a Negro, the Reverend Mordecai W.
Johnson, was called to the presidency of Howard
University, Washington. The invitation constituted
the highest academic honor America had paid to the
Negro race.

Howard University’s spacious campus is far
north of the Capitol on a high hill. The University
is made up of the college proper and the graduate
schools of theology, law, and medicine. Until re-
cently, owing to the lack of schools for Negroes in
the South, it was forced to carry on high school
work, but that is now discontinued.

The University was organized by a special act
of Congress in 1867, and, while designed primarily
for Negroes, draws no line as to race or sex. It has
a faculty of 160—professors, assistants, instructors.
Its plant is worth three million dollars. Its student
body numbers a little over two thousand. Its seven
thousand graduates are scattered all over the world.
To this impressive institution, for the post of presi-
dent, the trustees called a colored minister.

Mordecai Johnson was travelling in Europe with
Sherwood Eddy when the invitation came to him,
unexpected, startling. His host advised him to de-
cline it, and to remain in the ministry. But while
appreciating the difficulty of the task confronting
him, the thought of work among a great student

4344 PORTRAITS IN COLOR

body was inspiring, and the young minister accepted
the honor.

College opened September 30, with the president’s
address to the students. Every seat in the chapel
was filled long before the hour for opening. Never
before had Howard known such a crowd of students,
faculty, alumni, visitors. Few were acquainted with
the incoming head. What would he be like? Heaven
forfend that he have the revivalist, big-mouthed ora-
tory! Would he talk about himself and his achieve-
ments, an all too common fault among speakers? He
had always been a fine student, they knew that!
He had been graduated from two divinity schools,
Rochester and Harvard, and had done brilliantly
at both. He was something of a radical, was he not?
The miners in West Virginia had found him sympa-
thetic. And he had been president of the Charles-
ton Branch of the National Association for the
Advancement of Colored People. He was-very young
—only thirty-seven—for such a position as head of
Howard University. And while the waiting people
conjectured and thought many things, the new presi-
dent entered, well-built, handsome, with a light skin
but deep black hair and eyes, quiet and dignified in
his movements. There could be no criticism of his
presence. He spoke, and the dark-faced listeners
ceased to sit as judges, and found themselves up-
lifted and proud.

For, first of all, here was a scholar. The address,
only seven pages as it stands in printed form, was a
call to the student body to scholastic work. It spokeMORDECAI W. JOHNSON 45

of the faculty, men and women who had turned aside
from the things which brought the larger pecuniary
reward, to become teachers of youth and searchers
after knowledge. ‘‘They are your elder brothers,
your friends, and your servants.’’ It gave the pur-
pose of the University—not to be an efficient, mass-
producing factory of mediocre minds, but to train
each individual so that he might discover his own
powers and develop them to their uttermost capac-
ity. It spoke especially of research—believing that
there were some among the students capable of mak-
ing original and creative contributions to the knowl-
edge of human life. The sciences were still young.
“‘Some of them, especially those that concern the
human individual and human organization, are in
their swaddling clothes. The whole field of ethics
is in a state of confusion. Hverywhere in the western
world we are confused about fundamental things.”’’
It called upon the students to help in the mastery
of knowledge. They and their instructors were com-
rades in a great enterprise. Hach would profit by the
other. ‘‘We expect some of you, under our guid-
ance, to become our superiors in the very fields of
our specialties. We shall see this come to pass with a
great gladness. In you and through you we shall
find our fulfillment.’’ And it ended with an appeal
for unity of purpose and industry and patience ‘‘to
run the race set before us.”’

The scholar spoke and also the gentleman, persua-
sive, wholly sincere. And Howard University, which
had been bitter and disappointed with the old regime,46 PORTRAITS IN COLOR

took on new courage. The college had known devoted
service from its white presidents; but the time had
come when white leadership was no longer accept-
able. Under its new management all effort would be
toward advancement. The counter-currents of racial
irritation would disappear. The students would be
more rigorous with their self-government, since they
had heard the respect in which their new president
held them. And last, and very important hope, per-
haps Congress would look upon this, the school that
it had founded, with greater generosity, and would
give into the hands of the new administrator suffi-
cient funds to make a University capable of the
work of which he had spoken. The future had im-
mense possibilities.

How did this young man happen to receive an ap-
pointment of such importance, one that must have
been coveted by many race leaders? The events of
his life do not show any one startling accomplish-
ment, rather a steady preparation, in knowledge and
in character, for the work that was awaiting him
in the future. But preparation would not have made
him president of Howard. It is the quality of the
man himself, intellectual ability combined with in-
tegrity that makes it impossible to doubt him. What-
ever the new president undertakes to do, it will
be thought out with care and pursued with unswerv-
ing determination.

He is the only child of a marriage of two people
extraordinarily different in appearance and in dis-
position. At his birth, his father was an old man,MORDECAI W. JOHNSON 47

an ex-slave, stunted in his growth, but still powerful
in body, able to work six days as a stationary engi-
neer in a planing mill, and on the seventh to preach
to his little congregation in the small town of Paris,
Tennessee. He was honest, methodical, careful, si-
lent, stern; a man from whom to inherit sterling
qualities, but not one to whom a child would cling.

His other parent was beautiful, light of color, a
mixture of white, Indian, and Negro, an emotional,
energetic, loving woman. She could not do enough
for her clever, attractive boy. She sewed, and
washed, and ironed, and raised vegetables, and went
without the pretty clothes she wanted, that her son
might always look well dressed and might never lack
for what other boys had. She gave him the best
schooling to be obtained in that part of the South,
sending him at twelve to Roger Williams University
at Nashville, later to Howe, at Memphis, and last to
Morehouse College, Atlanta. When they were to-
gether, she woud tell him of her plans for his future
and strive to fill him with her spirit, her ambition,
her desire to serve the Negro race. He loved her
dearly and listened, and then went away to his boy-
ish interests and good times.

If she felt deeply concerning the big things of
life, she could be lenient when her son in high spir-
its broke a college rule. She saw him grow in earnest-
ness of purpose and in a sense of responsibility, saw
him graduate from Morehouse with honor, trusted
and liked by all. He was a scholar. She had been
right in working diligently to educate him. She saw48 PORTRAITS IN COLOR

him remain at Morehouse, first as a substitute in the
department of literature, then as a professor of eco-
nomics. When he was twenty-seven, beginning to
earn distinction in his chosen work, she died.

Her death brought her son to a sudden stop,
quivering, as a horse is jerked short by a cruel curb.
The future with her was gone; there was left only
the inadequate past. His grief was pathetic, but
through his suffering, for the first time he began
to inquire, steadily, methodically, as his father
would have done, upon the meaning of life. Every
morning his father had gone into an upper chamber
to pray. Now the son every night meditated on that
immortal question which comes to each imaginative
youth—what is the meaning of life? His mother had
striven to fill him with her purpose. He had gravi-
tated toward the teacher’s profession. But now he
must think things out, and alone.

He had a big, comfortable chair—her gift—that
rocked at the base on springs, and seated in it, night
after night, rocking back and forth, he asked himself
his great question.

‘‘Always,’’ he says as he recalls those nights,
‘“‘T started with my death. Before, I had looked
forward, now I looked back. If I were lying dead,
as I had seen my mother lie, what in life would
be worth while? What, of the many things that
Thad done, would justify my existence? What would
have meaning?

‘‘One night, as I rocked in my familiar seat, I had
a vision. I was lying on my death-bed in a roughMORDECAI W. JOHNSON 49

cabin, quite alone. The place was very still. Then,
silently, the door opened and people came in, poorly
dressed, plain people, who moved in line past my
bed. And as they passed, each had something to say
in affection and gratitude. I had helped one who
was in trouble. I had comforted another. I had given
wise counsel to a third. I saw the line distinctly,
coming in and passing out, while I lay there, dying,
on the coarse bed.

“‘Before I went to sleep that night, I knew that I
had found the meaning of life. It was service, serv-
ice to the poor and the afflicted. And I felt that I
could best render this service by leaving my scho-
lastice work and entering the ministry.”’

When Mordecai Johnson made this resolve, he
was twenty-seven years old, with a successful career
ahead of him. His friends were incredulous. ‘‘An-
other good man gone wrong,’’ one of the race’s
leaders is quoted as saying. Negro youth does not
turn to the church today. There are only sixty col-
ored college graduates in this year, 1927, getting
ready for forty-seven thousand pulpits. But John-
son followed his vision, studied at Rochester The-
ological Seminary, where he came in contact with
Walter Rauschenbusch, and felt more keenly than
ever the call to service. He could not have chosen
a theological school more sympathetic with his plan
for future work. Dogma was cast into the scrap-
heap, but the life and work of Jesus of Nazareth was
treated with deepest reverence. His brilliant mind
and steady application ranked him head of his class,50 PORTRAITS IN COLOR

at which he rejoiced. He wanted no white man to
feel that he could excel a Negro simply because he
was a white man. He took an A.B. at Chicago, work-
ing there during the summers. While many of his
friends had advised against the ministry, the ortho-
dox among them had told him he must beware of
the heresies of evolution and socialism. He stud-
ied both, amused at the idea that, if they were really
dangerous, he should combat them without knowing
what they meant. Well-equipped, his graduation
over, he turned to the practical work that he had
planned.

He did not secure his pastorate until after some
months of Y.M.C.A. work, following Max Yergan,
who was sent to India. But at length a call to a
Baptist church in Charleston was acccepted, and
there, with his young wife—he had married a gradu-
ate from Spelman, and one of his own students at
Morehouse—he made his home.

The work was ennobling, but like so many young
enthusiasts, he attempted more than could be put
into one life. There was the personal service which
he had seen in his vision, the contact with poor,
humble folk whom he tried to help and who gave him
much in return. But life is not so simple as it was
when the Apostles went out to preach. Should a
Christian today be able to perform the miracle of
the loaves and the fishes he would certainly find
some Charity Organization Society to oppose his
method, urging him to adopt its own. If he healed
the sick it must be through the medium of the PublicMORDECAI W. JOHNSON 51

Health League. The young minister performed mir-
acles of energy. Appreciating the value of the mis-
sion work of his church, he‘raised for it, in one year,
$14,000. He taught the Negroes to organize for
their rights. He did war work. Inevitably he was
drawn into organizations, but loving personal sery-
ice, he also made a rule never to deny any who
came to him in trouble. And his foremost duty was
to his church and his parish.

The colored people of West Virginia grew to
know this young clergyman, dignified, serious, but
full of energy and swift to understand conditions.
He went to the desolate mining towns where not
even a moving picture comes to entertain the men
who have spent their days underground; he saw
the slums of cities; he fought battles for his race.
He learned to dread that wall of adamant that the
whites, often kindly as individuals, erect against
the Negro when he seeks advancement. He met all
personal calls; and inevitably, he broke down. He
needed a mechanical body, like a Robot, not one of
flesh and blood.

After a short rest, he went to another seminary,
this time the Harvard Divinity School. He studied
under Fenn and Lapiana, and also under George
Foote Moore, who seemed to him to possess an
almost omniscient mind. Then, with a second the-
ological degree, again in sound health, he returned
to his Charleston pastorate. From there he was
called to Howard University.

In reviewing his life, one sees why he received52 PORTRAITS IN COLOR

this call. Howard could not find today for its chief
executive a colored man of broader theological train-
ing or one who had studied more deeply the needs of
his fellow man. And while he has studied, he has
also served, and his study and his service have
strengthened his faith in humanity. He voices his
belief in the common people with a conviction that
recalls Lincoln. As he loves people so he loves his
books, itching for leisure to dig deep into a sub-
ject again. His respect for the scholar is profound.
A year has given this executive only time to look
about him and to master the scope and the details
of his work. But at his formal inauguration in June,
1927, the anticipation that was aroused by his
opening address in October had become a happy
certainty. Men spoke with enthusiasm and affection.
They had felt his liberality, his keen insight into
difficult problems, and his unselfish spirit. They
loved his sincerity. If Congress generously supports
this university that it inaugurated, Howard will be-
come a great college. And Mordecai Johnson, by his
freedom of thought and wise administration, will be
known as one of America’s most successful and most
respected college presidents.Lucy Laney

Everysopy knows of Booker Washington and of how
he went out from Hampton Institute in 1883 and
founded a school for Negroes at Tuskegee. But only
a few know that three years later Lucy Laney,
graduate of Atlanta University, started in Augusta,
Georgia, what was to be known as Haines Institute,
a secondary school for Negro boys and girls. Wash-
ington was fired by the spirit of Hampton and Gen-
eral Armstrong. Lucy Laney was fired by the spirit
of Atlanta University and the Wares. Tuskegee
became the most famous school for industrial train-
ing in America. Miss Laney’s accomplishment was
less spectacular, but Haines Institute was long
known as the best school of its kind for Negroes
in Georgia. Its students, as they went out to teach, or
as they continued their education at college or pro-
fessional school, compared favorably with white
students in training and capability. Haines Institute
maintained a high standard of scholarship and recti-
tude.

The raising of money to support Tuskegee Insti-
tute was a tremendous task. Booker Washington
died in the fifties, worn out with the strain of it.
‘But I doubt if it was as difficult to secure the money
to run Tuskegee as it was to get support for Lucy
Laney’s school, though one had a budget very many
times that of the other. Those who gave to Tuskegee

53K

54 PORTRAITS IN COLOR

saw the Negro becoming a good laborer, of service
to the whites. They were doing well for him and
also for themselves. But to give money to teach
Negroes algebra and the classics was of no help
to the whites, and was considered ridiculous and
perhaps dangerous for a newly-emancipated race.

So, when Lucy Laney, dark-skinned, stocky, with
cropped hair and plain dress, taught her class to
decline Latin nouns and conjugate Latin verbs, she
was regarded as foolish and obstinate. But this did
not alter her purpose. She knew the value of the
education she had had at Atlanta, and she knew also
how extremely difficult it was for colored boys and
girls in the South to prepare for college. The pub-
lic grammar schools were few and inadequate and
high schools for Negroes, until quite recently, were
unknown. Of good colored teachers there was the
greatest need. She meant to send out from her
school graduates who would have had as good a
training as white graduates, and if her students
wished to go to college, they should enter thoroughly
prepared. This she accomplished. Her school main-
tained a high standard, though the cold lean years
were many and disaster lurked around the corner.

Haines Institute took some time to reach the place
where it was pointed to as one of the best schools
of its kind for Negroes in the South. Lucy Laney,
on graduating from Atlanta, taught for ten years
in the public schools of Augusta, Milledgeville, and
Savannah. She learned a great deal in those years,
and found that, despite her youth, she could handleLUCY LANEY 59

the worst hoodlum, keeping him at work and inter-
ested. But public-school teaching had its drawbacks;
it did not give full swing to her virile personality,
and she gladly accepted an invitation from the
Board of Missions for Freedmen to go to Augusta
and start a private school.

The Board of Missions for Freedmen (Presbyter-
ian), was doing educational as well as religious work
in the South. It did not see its way, however, to
maintaining the school, the opening of which it
had sanctioned, and Lucy Laney had to raise the
money alone. The school soon outgrew the church
lecture room in which it started, and the principal
moved it to a two-story house in Calhoun Street.
She had day scholars and boarding scholars. She had
boys and girls. At first she had meant to take girls
only, but when some boy, poor, ragged, looking at
her out of pathetic brown eyes, arrived on her door-
step, she took him in. In two years her school num-
bered three hundred pupils. There were children
in plenty, but no funds. She had counted on tuitions,
but the child who appealed to her most was the child
whose parents could do least, or who had no parents
at all. With her vivid imagination, she had only to
look at a ragged, dirty boy to see a well-set-up,
cleanly, clear-eyed figure in his place. Her imagina-
tion saw this; it was for her practical self to bring
about the metamorphosis. Sometimes she did refuse
destitute boys or girls of Augusta; but the boarding
pupil, ambitious, needing her help, she could not turn
away. She put all her savings into the school; she56 PORTRAITS IN COLOR

begged and borrowed and paid back when she could.
She went hungry and she slept cold. She prayed in
her chill room at night, trusting that somehow the
way would be made for her to pull through.

Her life before this had not been an easy one,
but it had not known real privation. Her parents
were Savannah people, and she had grown up in
that pleasant, kindly city. Her father was a
preacher, an exhorter, as such folk were called in
slavery days, who later became an ordained Presby-
terian minister. Her mother belonged to the Camp-
bell family and was personal maid to Miss Camp-
bell, a kindly mistress, who seeing her slave’s abil-
ity, taught her to read and write. On their marriage
her father and mother were allowed to live together
in a home of their own, to which they returned after
their day’s work. Here Lucy Laney grew up amid
many children, for besides their own large family,
the Laneys took in cousins and orphaned children
of friends. There was romping and fighting in which
this stocky girl held her own. But there was some-
thing else. Another world was opened to her in the
big house where her mother served.

When Lucy was four years old, she was taught to
read and write. Then, sometimes, her mother would
take her to the Campbells’, and while the mother
was dusting the library, the little girl would snug-
gle in a deep chair to wander through fairyland
with Dick Whittington or Jack-and-the-Beanstalk.
Miss Campbell chose books for her and was inter-
ested in her education. It was a fine background forLUCY LANEY 57

this teacher, who later was to gather children about
her. She knew the rough-and-tumble side of life,
but she knew also the quiet library and the friendli-
ness of great books. Not until she tried to bring this
friendliness to others, however, did she experience
grinding worry and real privation.

It was extraordinary, but under all this strain,
Lucey Laney built up a high-standard graded school.
She has always had excellent co-workers. A Miss
Mary Jackson worked with her for many years,
until she left to get married, to Miss Laney’s dis-
gust. New ideas in education appealed to her. She
had a kindergarten when they were scarcely known
in the South. She had manual training, laying great
stress on household knowledge—cooking, sewing,
laundering, carpentry. She got an elderly German
to organize a school orchestra that held concerts
in the city and outlying places. She kept up the reg-
ular curriculum. Little by little her graduates became
known throughout the country. Then, as today, if
you came from Lucy Laney’s school, you must have
character, discipline, and a great, unfailing belief
in your race. If you went on to college or profes-
sional school, you must make a record as a con-
scientious worker. These things were naturally ex-
pected, because they were so often found.

The school first felt solid ground beneath its
feet when Miss Laney took her cause to the Presby-
terian Assembly, meeting in Minneapolis. She was
strongly advised to go, but was pinched for means,
and she left home with only money enough for herkK

58 PORTRAITS IN COLOR

ticket one way. She endured the fatigue of day-
coach travel and was so tired when she arrived at
her destination, that, on reaching the hall, she fell
asleep. She woke with a start to hear someone call
her name. There was jealousy regarding her speak-
ing, fear that her eloquence might win friends that
were counted on for other causes. However, she was
given the floor. Tired and heartsick at having en-
countered jealousy, she presented the needs of the
school, and then asked only for money to take her
home. This was of course secured. Her earnestness
and her accomplishment in the face of such difficul-
ties, led to Haines Institute becoming a definite part
of the work of the Board of Missions for Freed-
men. This meant and means some financial backing
and the endorsement of an organization of impor-
tance. But still the school’s needs are great. And
they are so partly because of the temperament of
the principal. The tug of the homeless child upon
her heart is stronger than any hardly-acquired
wisdom in accounts.

The city of Augusta owes much to Lucy Laney.
It was she who introduced the trained nurse to
Augusta. The city authorities let her have an old
pest-house as a hospital. She brought a white gradu-
ate nurse from Canada, put her in charge, and then
sent ten girls to her as students. Today, the city
has a hospital with two hundred beds, over which
the Canadian nurse first presided, but which has
now a colored nurse as superintendent. Miss Laney
heads the colored section of the Interracial Com-LUCY LANEY 59

mittee, and has worked with the whites to secure
drainage in the Negro section, and, unsuccessfully
as yet, to obtain adequate schools for the colored
children. It is a great grief to this woman who has
given forty years to educating the children of
Augusta to see the niggardliness with which the city
matches her efforts.

Lucy Laney is a pioneer woman. She belongs with
Lucretia Mott, Frances Willard, Lillian Devereau
Blake. She was ahead of her time, and men, especi-
ally those in her profession, looked askance at her.
What busines had a woman at the head of a school?
As Haines Institute grew, as one dignified building
after another was erected on its campus, it was un-
seemly that she should be principal. Assistant
principal, perhaps, but surely not the head, who
should stand in the morning on the platform and
admonish the students and dismiss them to their
classes. This woman, too, had such an undignified
way of sweeping up the leaves in the yard, or mak-
ing biscuits in the kitchen, when she should have
been sitting at her desk receiving visitors in her of-
fice. No one looking at her would imagine that she
held a prominent position in the educational world.
She never spent anything on clothes or considered
any work beneath her dignity. So the conservative
might argue, but it made no difference to her. She
continued her work in her own way, spurred by
her indomitable will.

Since the colored race is put in a position of in-
feriority, life cannot be easy for a woman of mas-60 PORTRAITS IN COLOR

terful ability and temper. Lucy Laney never toad-
ies. She may have to hold her tongue, but she does
not pretend an acquiescence in what she believes to
be wrong. During the war, when the exodus from
the South was under way, and Southern employers
urged the Negro to stay at home, she would not
acquiesce in this doctrine.

“Tf T have done anything worth while, it is that
T have tried to make this place a home.’’ So Lucy
Laney speaks of her work. And it is a home, and
each child who enters is held by the principal as
a precious gift and a deep responsibility. There is
the body to be nourished and the spirit to be awak-
ened and taught its possibilities. Here is a teacher
who is quick to arouse ambition, and who trains
the child to thorough, conscientious work. Always
her affection and love brood over the school.

“‘T must leave this office,’’ she said to her stenog-
rapher one morning when the pile of letters had
been but partly cleared away. ‘‘I must go over to
my children and help them finish their doll’s house.”’
She went, and sat on the floor playing with them.

Her unstinted affection is returned in good meas-
ure. As one walks about the campus one finds con-
stant evidence in gifts the graduates have made.
Some years ago, feeling that Miss Laney was living
under too difficult conditions crowded in an always
overcrowded dormitory, the graduates gave her a
house, spacious, attractive, that should be all her
own. But only very recently, since her splendid vital-
ity has lessened, has she been willing to live in it.LUCY LANEY 61

It was across the street from the campus, and she
was lonely away from the hurry and laughter and
noise of her boys and girls. She has at length moved
in, but the house is overflowing with children whom
she is mothering. She can be a sharp disciplinarian,
but the chldren know that her love for them is as
fixed and sure as the ground on which they walk.

A Southerner of the old school is not able to make
a speech on the Negro question without bringing in
his old mammy. There is no affectation, though there
is sentimentality, in the praises that he heaps upon
her. His love is deep and genuine and he cherishes
her memory. Few Northerners ever look upon the
nursemaids of their childhood with such affection
and reverence. But when one remembers the eco-
nomic position of the Negro in slavery, one under-
stands the difference. Lucy Laney was born of slave
parents. If emancipation had not come, she could
have had no possible place higher than that of nurse
for the white children of her mistress. The finest
product of her race, all that would have been open
to her would have been the position of nursemaid.
How she would have filled it! The children would
have loved and respected her, and even the elders
would have held her a little in awe. Her personality
is so strong that in bondage she must have domi-
nated the small sphere in which she would have
moved. But a splendid spirit would have gone
through life with clipped wings. Instead, she grew
up in that inspiring period for the black boy and
girl when education was a consecrated thing. She62 PORTRAITS IN COLOR

 

studied under men and women who had accepted
ostracism in an unfriendly land because they be-
lieved that she was a child of God. ‘‘And if chil-
dren, then heirs.’’—Their discipline was narrow, but
their underlying confidence in her was profound. As
one sees the older graduates of Atlanta and kindred
schools, one feels that those boys and girls were
stirred to the depths of their beings, that they were
called with unremitting insistence to use all their
powers. And they did. In the long roll there are
many honored names. But no name shows a life of
greater, more uninterrupted service than that of
this woman, whose portrait it is so difficult to paint,
to give in all its glowing reality.

““She loves persons,’’ someone hag said of her,
“because she herself is a person.”’’

Her life has been lived in narrow limits. Her
imagination must have pictured many lands of which
she read, but she has never felt that she could leave
her work to visit them. She has moved about the
state of Georgia, begging for help from the colored
churches, occasionally coming North. When the
fiftieth anniversary of her class came around, she
was unable to go to Atlanta. Poor health and the
demands of her school made her feel the trip to be
impossible. She has lost energy, they say; but to-
day she seems to have the energy of half-a-dozen
women. Her spirit is joyously young.

One of the pleasantest sights in a colored school
is the march of the boys and girls into chapel. The
rhythm of the music moves through their bodies andLUCY LANEY 63

gives them a splendid bearing. Sometimes they sing
as they come. The principal of Haines Institute,
sitting alone, if she ever sits alone, must see the long
procession of her children marching past her. For
forty-three years the line has marched, new children
joining with each year. As they come swinging by,
each child is named. How well they have done—how
glad they have made her by their successes. Nothing
was too good for them. Her only regret is that she
might have done more and better.

The Negro audience is blamed for remaining un-
responsive when the white man weeps over the loss
of his colored mammy. But the reason is obvious.
The Negro knows that its womanhood was drawn
away from the service that it owed its own, that it
was confined, contorted. Now the dam is broken and
the maternal spirit released. What that stream can
accomplish when it is allowed to rush unobstructed
is shown by this colored woman’s life.Robert Russa Moton

Ir a vote were to be taken today among the white
people to determine the best-loved Negro in the
United States, the choice would fall upon Robert
Russa Moton, principal of Tuskegee Institute. The
successor to Booker T. Washington has not his pred-
ecessor’s ready wit, but he is a man rich in kindli-
ness, ready to see the best in everyone. He can be
counted upon not to utter a tactless remark. He will
not expect too much of white men who are making
their first concerted attempt to consider the Negro’s
needs. ‘‘Moton is chockfull of common sense,”’
Booker Washington once said of him. And again:
“‘He is just as ready to assist and show kindness to
the white as to the colored, to the Southerner as to
the Northerner.’’ When he goes North, again like
his predecessor, he pleases his audience by his kindly
optimism.

The Southerner, among other reasons, likes him
because he is black, in feature and in build an Afri-
can. His maternal grandmother, when he was a little
child, used to tell him of his great-great-great-grand-
father, an African prince, who was tricked into going
on a slave ship (he had sold a number of blacks to
the captain), was drugged, and awoke to find himself
in the hold shackled to one of his own slaves. He
must have been in strength a companion to Cable’s

“Bras Coupé,’’ but he did not refuse to work. He
6465

      
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
    

ROBERT RUSSA MOTON

kept many of his African traditions, however, and
unlike his great-great-great-grandson, never trusted
the whites. Moton’s grandmother on his father’s
side came directly from Africa. She lived to be one
hundred and eight years old—sturdy, primitive
stock.

In 1870, when Robert was three years old, the
Moton family went to the Vaughan plantation in
Prince Edward county. Here the boy lived much as
he might have lived in slavery, with training at the
big house in manners and waiting on table, and with
surreptitious teaching at night from his mother, who
somehow had learned to read and write. The
Vaughans were kindly, popular people, interested in
his welfare. When he had outgrown his mother’s
teaching, he attended a newly-opened school in the
community, the result of a political bargain between
colored and white voters. School finished, he took to
lumbering, and later became interested in politics.
He was very popular with the Negroes, and was
urged to run for the state legislature. Had his
mother not stood out against falsifying his age (he
was not yet twenty-one), he might have gone to Rich-
mond and represented his people in the capitol. In-
stead he dropped politics, deciding to continue his
education. His father wanted him to attend a college,
but an industrial school was cheaper, and at nine-
teen he entered Hampton Institute.

From then on his life seems to have been deter-
mined for him. General Armstrong was principal of
Hampton, and he soon saw in Moton an able, useful66 PORTRAITS IN COLOR

helper. He was popular, and he had much common
sense. He guided a serious student uprising at
Christmas time, warding off a general strike. After
graduation he was made assistant to the comman-
dant of the school cadets; and in 1891, Armstrong
made him commandant, the head of the Department
of Discipline and Military Instruction. It was a posi-
tion of great responsibility, and one that formerly
had been held by a white man. Armstrong believed
Robert Moton the man for the place, and he put him
into it.

Moton had had other plans for himself. He had
thought of doing educational work near his own
home. He had also leaned toward the practice of law.
During his holidays he had studied in a lawyer’s
office, and had been given a licence to practise. But
any desire he might have had for the legal profession
or for a school of his own was brushed aside by Arm-
strong, who had the general’s attitude of command.
He was valuable to Hampton, and there he was to
stay. He wanted to do what would be of greatest
service to his race, didn’t he? Very well, then Hamp-
ton was the place for him. He would enter upon his
duties in a few weeks. And he did.

He worked but a short time under his general.
After he had been at Hampton for six months, in
November, 1921, he learned that Armstrong, while
lecturing in Boston, had been stricken with paralysis.
The principalship fell upon Hollis B. Frissell, for-
merly chaplain. He and Moton had always been good
friends, the older man showing deep interest in theROBERT RUSSA MOTON 67

younger. They worked together in harmony for
twenty-four years.

One cannot understand Moton and his public
career without understanding something of Hamp-
ton Institute. General Armstrong put his stamp upon
the institution, and his ideal of service dominates it.
The students are taught that when they graduate
they shall go out to lead their people. But this leader-
ship is to be constructive, not destructive. They are
to take conditions as they find them, recognizing that
while the South may not see straight on the Negro
problem, they can best change its attitude by doing
good work under adverse conditions. Not the rights,
but the duties of the Negro should be emphasized.
Leadership is one thing taught, another thing is
optimism. No pessimistic word should come from
Hampton’s platform. However terrible the lynching
of yesterday, it must not be mentioned except in
terms of hope for the morrow. Resentment must
never be aroused. [f it is felt, it must be suppressed.

With this spiritual background, the school gives
its boys and girls strong, hard work with hand and
head. Its fine plant for teaching the trades is its
greatest asset in securing benefactors. Industrial
training is looked upon with awe, almost with rever-
ence, by the man who cannot split a piece of wood
or drive a nail straight.

Major Moton (this was his rank as commandant
and this his friends still love to call him), found him-
self at the age of twenty-four a part of this institu-
tion. He had been trained in its atmosphere, and all68 PORTRAITS IN COLOR

his good humor, his companionableness, his belief in
human nature responded to it. He went North and
made friends for the school. They tell of how, once,
in his travels, he was in a day-coach, and a white
Southerner ordered him to go to the tank and get him
a drink of water. Moton quietly obeyed, brought the
water, engaged the man in conversation, and made a
friend for Hampton. This was in part, doubtless,
Hampton’s teaching, but it was also his natural
kindliness, his sense of humor, that kept him from
resentment. He liked people and liked to talk with
them, if not on his own, then on their terms. He loved
his native state, and he knew the Virginia gentleman.
He knew the poor white, too, and did not forget that
his father had knocked down an overseer who had
‘dared to strike him. After running away and being
taken back again, his father won his point and the
overseer left. The son had early learned of the dif-
ferent classes of whites.

‘Moton wore the uniform of the school and looked
the saldier. Above his spotless white regimentals,
his black face stood out—broad nose, full, strong
mouth, broad forehead. He led the singing on Sun-
day evenings, giving the Spirituals with a simplic-
ity that is rarely heard today. Visitors were grateful
for the dimly-lighted hall that did not reveal their
emotion. He helped his boys over many difficulties.
With few exceptions, the faculty at Hampton was
white, but the major ranked as high in esteem as any
member. Here he married ar 1 knew the tragedy of
his wife’s early death, and here, after some years,ROBERT RUSSA MOTON 69

he married again. Here children were born to him.
If sometimes, this strong, magnificent African, de-
scendant of a ruler of men, felt discontent at his cir-
cumscribed life; if, riding in. the jim-crow car, he
ever clenched his great fist at the lyncher sleeping
in the Pullman behind him, we have no record of it.
The gospel of optimism preached at his school may
at times have seemed like Pollyanna’s, but he ac-
cepted it. His task was to train his boys to man-
hood and endurance. Compared with many of his
race he was in a backwater, but if so, it was a safe
and pleasant one.

Then, in 1915, Booker Washington died, and the
principalship of Tuskegee was placed upon his
shoulders.

The honor was great, but the responsibility was
prodigious. Washington had been able to live from
hand to mouth, but a school with an expenditure of
from three to four hundred thousand a year and
only a small endowment, was an appalling burden
for a new man. And with the entrance of this coun-
try into the World War, Moton had double duty, that
of a principal of a school, and that of an American
citizen, whom the President and his advisors con-
sidered the official leader of his race.

Tuskegee co-operated in every possible way with
the government. It gave up some of its best men for
war service, notably Emmett Jay Scott, who be-
came a special assistant to the Secretary of War. It
changed itself into a technical training school for
twelve hundred and twenty-nine men. It enteredcreer aa

   
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
  
 
   

70 PORTRAITS IN COLOR

whole-heartedly into food conservation, and through
Professor George Carver contributed important in-
formation on that subject to the whole country. Its
principal was called hither and yon, and after the
armistice was signed, was sent to France by the
President and the Secretary of War to look into con-
ditions among Negro soldiers. Moton was of service
in proving the falsity of the charges of rape brought
against Negroes. He found only twelve charges en-
tered against the 92nd Division (more than twelve
thousand men), and of these twelve, only two sol-
diers who had been found guilty. Of these two con-
victions, one had been turned down at headquarters.
To put this evidence before the President was a tri-
umph. He was able to be of service to the labor bat-
talion at Brest. He talked to both white and colored
troops, urging upon the colored, sanity when they
returned home, and upon the whites, fair play. He
was away only a few weeks.

On his return, he was at once drawn into the In-
terracial Movement. It was no new thing to him,
since in the Hampton days he had worked with
Frissell in bringing white and colored together in
Virginia. But the movement, started in Atlanta in
1919, became national in its scope. Race riots North
and South made the whites realize that they could
not possibly attack the subject of race relations
properly without the help of the Negroes themselves.
Hence such important bodies as the Race Relations
Committee in Chicago, formed after that city’s dis-
graceful riot. The people of ‘Atlanta had had anROBERT RUSSA MOTON 71

Interracial Committee before the War, and the first
meeting of the new organization was in that city.
Moton was the only colored person invited to the
first conference. He declined to go under those con-
ditions, but he was on the long-distance wire most
of the time, and the completed resolutions were
brought to him for his approval. The work of the
Interracial Committees, especially in the South,
where the black man is disfranchised, has grown to
considerable proportions. Questions of health, edu-
cation, recreation, as they relate to the Negro, come
before representatives of the two races and receive
careful consideration. It is impossible to measure
the value of the work. It is often most important in
the prevention of a lynching or a riot. It has done
much in the courts, securing justice for the colored
man. Kspecially have the Southern women shown
courage in demanding justice for the individual
Negro, who was not getting a fair trial. In such a
movement, Moton would unquestionably occupy a
prominent position. He had those qualifications
which T. J. Woofter, in his book on racial adjust-
ment, counts most valuable in the Negro leader—he
matches bitterness with diplomacy, and prejudice
with a demonstration of worth.

But. Moton’s popularity among the whites carried
with it unpopularity, suspicion, among the colored.
The more aggressive felt him a compromiser. The
colored soldiers who saw him in France wanted sym-
pathy, not advice. The young officers, seething with
discontent, wanted him to curse with them at the raw72 PORTRAITS IN COLOR

deal they had had. He expressed no indignation, how-
ever much he may have felt. On the contrary, shortly
after his return to America, when the Negro press
was exposing peonage and the horrors of lynching,
Moton in a public speech protested at the intense
feeling which the colored cherished against the white.
He himself had not known a time when there was less
reason for this feeling. The lawless element might be
at its worst, but the intelligent Southerner had never
been so eager to do the right thing.

Whoever is familiar with the Negro world knows
of its conservative and radical groups, those who be-
lieve that the cause of the black man is best served
by demanding his full rights as a citizen, and those
who believe it is best to ask for what there is some
chance of getting in the near future—that so long
as white and colored must live together, it is wiser
to placate than to antagonize. The difference is as
old as man’s struggle against injustice. At the ex-
treme of one group are the fanatics, at the extreme
of the other, the timeservers. And it is the lot of the
conservative that if he work with the oppressor he
cannot escape suspicion. He may be a true Christian,
desiring only good will; he may practise all his life
the returning of good for evil; but he will be judged
by the results of his statesmanship. So the radicals
have watched jealously Moton’s interracial activ-
ities, questioning whether they brought more than a
modicum of social welfare to a semi-enslaved people,
and afraid lest they blind the real issues.

The first few years after the close of the War wereROBERT RUSSA MOTON 73

difficult for everyone. Certainly, the principal of
Tuskegee had his difficulties. The Institute’s many
bills must be met. That was the first responsibility,
and a nation-wide drive for an endowment was to
make a supreme demand upon his strength. But in
1923 a new and most serious situation arose at the
gate of the Institute itself, a situation that was to
show his world how far he would compromise, and
when he would refuse to yield. He was to play the
chief part in the controversy over the conduct of the
hospital for Negro Veterans of the World War.

The United States government decided that in-
stead of treating the Negro soldiers with the white
soldiers, they should be segregated and all placed in
a single hospital. The location was fixed at Tuskegee,
and President Harding assured Moton that he would
be consulted before anything was done regarding the
personnel of the staff. It was expected by the
Negroes that the staff would either be colored, or, if
mixed, with Negroes as well as whites in responsible
positions.

The hospital carried a payroll of $65,000. Before
it was completed, the white residents of the town of
Tuskegee made up their minds that they should con-
trolit. While there was a law in the state of Alabama
that a white nurse should in no ease take care of a
colored man, this was to be overcome by having
white nurses on full pay, and colored nurse-maids
on small pay doing the work in contact with the pa-
tients. The townspeople managed so well that the
hospital opened under this arrangement.74 PORTRAITS IN COLOR

Moton saw the President again, but found that he
could not be relied upon to stand by his word. The
principal of Tuskegee was willing to accept a mixed
staff, but it must be a staff that gave opportunity to
the Negro doctor and nurse—not one that put all
colored workers in an inferior class. Harding let the
matter slide, and the hospital continued under white
domination.

But not without great protest both within Tuskegee
and without. The civil service examinations were
open to both races, and Negroes were taking them.
Were they to have no part in the conduct of a hos-
pital designed for their race? The Veterans’ Bureau
was asked to look into the matter. In return, the Ku
Klux paraded the hospital grounds, and from the
signs of mud and axle-grease, even used for their
paraphernalia sheets from the hospital storeroom.
A Negro who had passed the civil service examina-
tion and had been sent to the hospital as chief ac-
countant, was threatened with death if he did not
leave. Three colored nurses, who had protested at
their loss of rank, had been dismissed and given
twenty minutes to get out of the hospital. How the
veterans fared is not told us, except that one man,
far gone with tuberculosis, who had complained to
the authorities, was dismissed and given free trans-
portation to Arizona.

But while the white regime might seem to be estab-
lished securely in its wonderful hospital quarters,
the people of Tuskegee knew that the man whose
word counted in this situation was Robert R.ROBERT RUSSA MOTON 75

Moton. He was trusted by presidents. He was
principal of Tuskegee Institute at their door. He
must be secured on their side. So they went to
Moton and besought and then demanded that he
sign a paper accepting the hospital management.

The private office of the principal of Tuskegee is a
dignified, commodious room. Here the delegation
from the town of Tuskegee sat day after day, wait-
ing for the Negro, in his chair before his desk, to
sign their paper. Sometimes they talked hour after
hour. Sometimes they remained silent. Some of them
were armed. They were many men against one, and
the one was black.

Moton was ready to listen to them. He was not
sure himself whether the hospital should be manned
wholly by colored or not. It might be difficult to get
Negro physicians with large practices to make the
financial sacrifice that entering government service
meant. He was ready to compromise on the extent
of the white personnel; but he was insistent that
Negro physicians be on the staff. From this he would
not swerve.

He did not talk much. As, day after day, the men
came to him, demanding, persuading, threatening,
he was silent. He did not have Washington’s ready
wit. They had adored Washington, and he had led
them without their realizing it. He had stood on the
courthouse steps and cracked jokes with them and
gotten his own way. They meant to have their way
now. The hospital, with its white personnel, would
be a great asset to their town. They saw their76 PORTRAITS IN COLOR

daughters dancing with the young doctors; and in
the physicians’ pretty homes, their wives finding
new partners in the afternoons for bridge. Tuskegee
Institute had everything. It was their turn to get
something.

The feeling at the Institute grew very tense.
Everyone feared for Moton’s life. Students guarded
his house. Through the still nights, his wife listened,
hour after hour. But her husband slept.

“‘Gentlemen,’’ he said, on one of the first days
when he was commanded to sign or take the con-
sequences, ‘‘all my life, gentlemen, I have believed in
the Southern white man. IJ have believed that white
and colored Southerners could work together. That
has been the meaning of my life. Perhaps I was mis-
taken. And if I was mistaken, the best thing that can
happen to me is to die.’? When he went home that
night and for succeeding nights, he slept peacefully.

He did not die. His Southern white friends of the
Interracial Committee loved his bravery and swung
opinion his way. And after General Hines of the
Veterans’ Bureau had gone to Tuskegee and looked
into the whole situation, the hospital was handed
over to the colored and manned by them. And if
there is a better-run hospital for veterans today in
the United States, it must be superlatively good.
The interest and enthusiasm of the doctors and the
colored nurses is all the greater for the struggle that
preceded victory.

The strain of the long campaign for an endowment
fund and the anxiety of the hospital situation brokeROBERT RUSSA MOTON 77

Moton’s health. He was ill in Johns Hopkins for
many months. To regain his strength, he went, in the
autumn of 1926, with his wife and oldest daughter
on a trip around the world. He returned well, and
was glad to resume work.

“‘Moton loves people,’’ one of his firmest Southern
white friends says. ‘‘He really loves mankind. It is

because of this that when he sits down to talk, he
can say anything he likes to the Southerner. He can
say more than I can. Why, he has more faith in the
white man than I have.’’

It is good when people have faith in us. No one
can gauge the influence of the spirit that believes in
its fellow man.W. E. Burghardt Du Bois

Amonce the distinguished Negroes in America, none
is so hated by the whites as Burghardt Du Bois.
And for an excellent reason. He insists upon making
them either angry or miserable. So great, more-
over, is his genius, that it is impossible to read him
and not be moved. Anger or misery, according to the
disposition of the reader, comes from his merciless
portrayal of the white man’s injustice to the black.
He exposes a system of caste that eats into the souls
of white and black alike. Booker Washington was so
beloved during his long and busy life because he
made the white world happy. Never at a loss to tell
them of their good points, or, if he blamed, using a
kindly wit, he was a favorite North and South.
He always left his hearers with a feeling that things
were fast growing better, and that each, in some
good way, was responsible for the improvement.
Not so Du Bois. He never cajoles. In his speech he
argues, persuasively, relentlessly. In his writing he
moves with an immense sorrow or he flays. He is a
master of invective. He pours his wrath upon the
sins of the whites. But he has a mass of facts be-
hind him. No white man who reads can doubt that
the punishment is deserved. The more reason to hate
him who gives it.

In his earliest book, The Souls of Black Folk, is

found his greatest piece of writing, a mere eight
78W. E. BURGHARDT DU BOIS 79

pages, The Passing of the First Born. It is the story
of his own sorrow at the loss of his little son. It has a
beauty and a pain unspeakable. And through the
pain moves the ‘‘awful gladness’’ that the child has
escaped from the maddening taunt, from the bitter-
ness that might have choked or deformed his spirit.

I once heard a young man attempt to read this
story aloud. He struggled somehow until he came
to the ‘‘awful gladness.’’ Then, sobbing, he flung the
book across the room. ‘‘No man,’’ he swore, ‘‘should
dare to write like that.’’

What manner of man is this brown-skinned hater
of caste who can so move his readers? ‘‘A flood of
Negro blood,’’ he says in the short sketch of his life
in Dark Water, ‘‘a strain of French, a bit of Dutch,
but, thank God, no Anglo-Saxon.’’? One can amuse
oneself, perhaps footlessly, in tracing these national-
ities in him, the French as shown in his clarity of
thought and his distinction of manner, the Dutch in
a certain doggedness. But the passion of his genius
is surely African. That ‘‘flood of Negro blood’’ sings
through his lines as it sings through the Spirituals,
the ‘‘Sorrow Songs,’’ as he christened them thirty
years ago. Music, sometimes too persistently, beats
through his prose.

He was born at Great Barrington in the Berkshire
Hills of Western Massachusetts. Through grammar
and high school his schoolmates were white. For the
most part he was accepted by them without comment.
A brilliant student, his teachers were pleased to have
him in their classes. When, because of his color, an80 PORTRAITS IN COLOR

affront came, as it would now and again, he fought
with the boy, or if, unusual event, it were a girl, he
went home to build castles in Spain inhabited only
by the colored race. High school over, he turned
South and entered Fisk University.

At Fisk he was in the world of colored youth. He
was intoxicated with it. On his first night he found,
opposite him at supper, ‘‘two of the most beautiful
beings God ever revealed to the eye of seventeen.’’
He was deliriously happy, so happy that his supper
was neglected! As he moved about the broad, pleas-
ant campus in Nashville, he had a poet’s delight in
the world about him. He loved the warmth of color,
the high spirits, the melodious voices. Reared among
the drabness of a New England village, he found
here a gamut of color, a diversity of type that one
could find only in a Negro school in America where
everyone with a trace of Negro ancestry is dubbed
colored. Here he was among his own, and here he
studied hard and came under the influence of Fisk’s
white teachers, whose fine missionary spirit flamed
high.

He earned money in the summer by teaching
school among the rural Negroes. He has told the
story of one of those summers in The Souls of Black
Folk. For the first time he saw dire poverty and
learned a little of the South’s rural problem. Later
he did much research on this subject, some of it for
the government, but the sketch in The Souls of
Black Folk, of the schoolhouse with its one chair to
be returned to the owner at night, its benches ofW. E. BURGHARDT DU BOIS 81

boys and girls, ‘‘shading from a pale cream to a
deep brown, the little feet bare and swinging, the
eyes full of expectation,’’ will be the contribution
that will remain with us. ‘‘Hunting a school’’ be-
came a new and important summer pastime.

After graduation from Fisk he was in the white
world again, to Germany for a year’s study, and
back to Harvard for his doctorate. Then came the
decision of how and where to earn a living.

There was really not much choice. Teaching
seemed the only thing open to him, and after a short
time at Wilberforce College, and a year of research
work on the Negro in Philadelphia, he accepted a
call from Atlanta University. He was to head the
Departments of History and Economies, with the
understanding that some of his time was to be given
to research upon Negro problems of the moment. It
was in 1896 that he went to the University that he
made famous by his scholarship, and here he spent
thirteen years, years full of hard work and of con-
genial companionship. Whites and Negroes are on
the faculty of Atlanta. The color line is not merely
not drawn, it is not felt there.

Opinions on the Negro question flew about like
snowflakes at that time, but there was a modicum of
fact. Du Bois, in connection with his work in Hco-
nomics, published the first extensive studies on the
Negro in the United States. Each year a new volume
appeared—on the church, or labor, or housing, or
education. In all, thirteen bulletins were published.
They got into libraries, not only in America, but82 PORTRAITS IN COLOR

in Europe, and Atlanta’s Sociological Congress, held
annually, attracted social workers and scholars.
While never reaching a tithe of the fame of Tuskegee
Institute, nevertheless Atlanta University was put
on the map by the work of Du Bois.

It was a situation for a satirist. The color line
is drawn more rigorously in Atlanta, with more
gusto, than in the less commercial Southern cities.
And yet Atlanta had to endure the knowledge that
its most distinguished citizen was black. Of course, as
few as possible knew it. No contact was ever per-
mitted with an educated black man. He must not
touch the white world. If he entered a street car,
he would be assigned a rear seat away from the
whites. He might not enter the public library, he
whose private library added dignity to the city.
Drama and music were closed to him save on the
most humiliating terms. He was never invited into
a Southern white man’s home. He, on his part, de-
spised the city’s terms and lived almost as though
it did not exist. He never entered a street car; he
walked or took a cab. He never crossed the threshold
of theatre or opera house. His world was on the
University campus, and there among his friends he
did his work. Occasionally he came North to lecture,
always strongly presenting the cause of civil rights
and of higher education. Occasionally friends and
admirers from the North and from abroad came
down to see him. They stopped at a hotel into whose
lobby he might not step. They saw a caste system
as rigid as if a Brahmin had laid out the city. AndW. LE. BURGHARDT DU BOIS 83

to acquire wisdom they went up the hill to see this
colored ‘‘untouchable.”’

People continually say that Du Bois is bitter. To
understand him they must take to heart two things.
In the first place, this Negro believes almost fanati-
cally in his race. He loves it, its beauty, its gay
spirits, its music. He dislikes the sharp-nosed,
sallow-faced, shrill-voiced Anglo-Saxon. ‘‘Surely
thou too art not white, O Lord,’’ he cries in A Litany
of Atlanta, ‘‘a pale, bloodless, heartless thing!’’ He
wrote the Litany in a jim-crow car hurrying to the
city that was in the hands of a murderous mob, and
that he knew was threatening the University where
were his wife and child. Bitterness is hardly the
mood that gives to the world A Litany of Atlanta.
It is something bigger, a passionate hatred of caste.
Bitterness too much implies the personal. This young
man, who had had a happy life on the continent,
never considered turning his back on the problem
of race. He voluntarily entered a city in the South
where caste was supreme, but he hated it and ab-
horred the spirit of the people who maintained it.
Bitterness alone would not probe a spirit to rebel-
lion, and Du Bois grew with each year more rebel-
lious.

The whites were not the only people he must rebel
against. Among the Negroes there was a growing
tendency to give up the battle for civil rights and to
accept segregation and disfranchisement. Frederick
Douglass, escaped slave and abolition agitator, had
been the leader of the older Negroes. But with the84 PORTRAITS IN COLOR

failure of reconstruction there came a new leader,
this time out of the South itself. Booker T. Washing-
ton, educated at Hampton Institute, preached the
doctrine of industrial training, and at Tuskegee,
Alabama, in the very heart of the old South, built
up a school that rivalled Hampton itself. And as he
went over the country, appealing for funds, he
stressed continually the Negro’s duties and said as
little as possible of his rights. For rights the Negro
must wait. His present salvation lay in learning to
be a better workman.

Against this doctrine, Du Bois wrote a well-
reasoned, quiet article, published in 1903, in The
Souls of Black Folk. No magazine would have printed
it. Indeed, at this time only the sheer force of his gen-
ius ever got him access to a magazine. It was called
Of Mr. Washington and Others, and ended with
these words: ‘‘So far as Mr. Washington preaches
Thrift, Patience, and Industrial Training for the
masses, we must hold up his hands and strive with
him, rejoicing in his honors and glorying in the
strength of this Joshua called of God and of man
to lead the headless host. But so far as Mr. Washing-
ton apologizes for injustice, North or South, does
not rightly value the privilege of voting, belittles the
emasculating effects of caste distinction, and op-
poses the higher training and ambition of our
brighter minds,—so far as he, the South, or the Na-
tion, does this,—we must unceasingly and firmly op-
pose them.”’

Du Bois was fortunate that he was at this timeW. LE. BURGHARDT DU BOIS 85

working under a college president who stood uncom-
promisingly for the Negro’s full rights. His quiet
criticism brought the wrath of the white world upon
him and upon the University as well. To criticize
Booker T. Washington at this time was like making
a pacifist speech during the progress of a war. The
man’s power was enormous. It is little exaggeration
to say that there were not a half-dozen Negroes in
the country in positions of educational or political
importance who did not owe their jobs to Washing-
ton. The white man asked his advice on every con-
ceivable subject, from appointing a minister to
Haiti to putting in bathtubs in a new colored
Y.M.C.A. His famous Atlanta speech had placed
him upon a strong footing with the intelligent South,
and the North, sick of the Negro problem, well-nigh
worshipped him. Yet a young professor of Hco-
nomics had the temerity to say that in some vital
respects his leadership was dangerous and unsound.

It seemed to many who cared for this iconoclast
that his opposition to Washington would be his un-
doing. On the contrary it was his making. For he
brought together the colored men and women of
the country whose opinions he had voiced. They had
been inarticulate, but here was one who said what
they had wanted to say, but had not known how
or had not dared.

Past issues often appear trivial, and looking back
now it must seem that there should have been no
break in the Negroes’ rank, no dissension within the
race itself since it had much to battle against from86 PORTRAITS IN COLOR

without. But Washington was opposed to any bat-
tling, and it would have been a disgrace to the col-
ored race if it had not produced a counter leader-
ship that demanded constant opposition to the spirit
of caste. This battle, however, had to be fought in
the North. In the South it was so dangerous as to
be impossible. No wonder the principal of Tuskegee,
surrounded by white rulers, held his peace. And
while the professor of Economics in Atlanta re-
mained in that city until 1910, he was ready, at the
call, to come to New York to become Director of
Publications and Research of the newly-organized
National Association for the Advancement of Col-
ored People. Here he began his career as Hiditor of
The Crisis, the organ of the Association. His schol-
ar’s work was for the most part over. He became an
editor of a strikingly successful magazine, a propa-
gandist for a new social world.

There is a cruel look in Du Bois’s sensitive, poet’s
face. It lurks somewhere about the mouth—a half-
sneer, a scorn. Perhaps it was well that he early
learned to know the suffering of the despised. Life’s
greatest spiritual gift to him may have been his
dark face. His passion has been turned against the
most glaring of America’s sins, the sin that com-
menced when the first slaves were landed at James-
town, and that continues today in the countless
forms of discrimination against the descendants of
those slaves. Du Bois counts these discriminations
one by one, and then hurls his scorn at those who per-
petrate them. And his aim is straight.W. E. BURGHARDT DU BOIS 87

As editor of The Crisis he has educated the colored
world, and the white world that has felt interest
enough to read his magazine, in the happenings of
importance among the Negro population. For it is
a part of his creed that the colored world should con-
tinually be spurred on by a realization of its accom-
plishments. Through articles and through illustra-
tions, through bits of biography and through news
items, Crisis readers have learned of the achieve-
ments of the Negro in America. The Educational
number, published in July for the past fourteen
years, attempts to give the names of the many Negro
graduates from colleges and universities, North and
South. As the years have gone on, any complete
story of the graduates is impossible, but the Kdu-
cational number is printed as a confutation of the
claim of the white man to racial superiority. This
Educational number, one must realize, was started
only eight years after Prof. W. B. Smith of Tulane
University had published The Color Line, in which,
among a multiplicity of arguments in favor of main-
taining a strict caste system in the South, he said,
‘<The movement of the Afro-American average in
the last generation has been down and not up, back-
ward and not forward.’’ Smith, and Thomas Dixon,
with his Leopard’s Spots and The Clansman, held
the stage. Against their attacks and others like them,
Du Bois’s magazine monthly reared its head, spit-
ting out sneers and invective, but also showing
beauty and charm and progress.

In 1911, there was given in Washington and New88

 

PORTRAITS IN COLOR

York to almost wholly colored audiences (the more
the pity), a pageant written and staged by Du Bois.
It was descriptive of the black man, his savage state,
his ascendancy over the Pharoahs in Egypt, his
life as a slave in America, his achievements of to-
day. And before each scene a herald came upon the
stage and announced triumphantly: ‘‘These be the
deeds of the greatest and wisest of men whose faces
are black.’’ It was a gloriously beautiful pageant,
and one can guess the stimulating effect it must have
had upon the hearts of a people who were being
described in the current press as ‘‘dying of disease,
vice and profound discouragement.’’

From national affairs Du Bois turned to interna-
tional. When the treaty of Versailles was in the
making, he was in France. He had gone for a two-
fold object. First he was to gather data regarding
the treatment of the Negro soldiers in the American
Expeditionary Force, especially with reference to
discrimination. The story that he sent back to The
Crisis was the most dramatic and the most tragic
that the magazine has ever printed. One dirty trick
after another that the soldiers had been obliged to
endure just because of their color was retailed. It
sent the Crisis sales up to 125,000, and exhausted
the edition in a few days. It made Du Bois a hero to
the youths whose cause he espoused. It also caused
the government to suspend for a time the publica-
tion of the magazine. His second object in going to
France was the calling of the Pan-African Congress.
The Pan-African Congress was a dream of DuW. LE. BURGHARDT DU BOIS 89

Bois’s, a dream in which he found it difficult to in-
terest Americans, and which was never carried out
as it might have been for lack of funds. This was at
the close of the war, when every sort of cause seemed
to be represented at Geneva or Paris, each intent
upon making itself heard. Why, under these circum-
stances, Du Bois felt, should not the Negro be heard?
Surely the scores of millions in Africa and the mil-
lions in the New World should receive recognition
and should begin to bargain when favors were being
passed around. So, after much difficulty, the consent
of Clemenceau was secured, and the first Pan-
African Congress met in Paris with Du Bois as its
secretary.

While his French was not impeccable, the Secre-
tary looked a Frenchman as he stood among the
forty delegates who were casually brought together
to settle the affairs of the Negro throughout the
world. There was Diagne, president of the Congress,
distinguished Senegalese member of the French
Chamber of Deputies. There were cultivated schol-
ars and statesmen from Haiti, the British West
Indies, North and South America, Africa. The only
person who quite surely knew what it was all about
was the American Negro editor, and it was he who
drew up the resolutions that were given to the press.
They contained two important demands. First, when-
ever persons of African descent are civilized and
able to meet the tests of surrounding culture, they
shall be accorded the same rights as their fellow citi-
zens. And second, whenever it is proven that African90 PORTRAITS IN COLOR

 

natives are not receiving just treatment at the hands
of any state, it shall be the duty of the League of
Nations to bring the matter to the attention of the
civilized world. Scarcely revolutionary doctrine, but
sufficiently revolutionary not to be acceptable to the
imperialist. When in 1921 a second Pan-African Con-
gress was held, meeting in London, Brussels and
Paris, only in London was any free expression of
opinion allowed. French imperialism emasculated
the Pan-African Congress, Diagne taking it out of
Du Bois’s hands, who alone would keep it aggressive.
Diagne is a Frenchman first and a Negro second.
Small wonder, when one realizes the honor accorded
him in the land of his adoption.

With the close of the second Pan-African Con-
gress, Du Bois’s hope of an international Negro com-
mittee that should be a power in polities was at an
end. The Oganization, however, has had two con-
ferences since the Paris one—in London and Lisbon
in 1923 and in New York in 1927. The Lisbon Con-
gress led Dr. Du Bois to turn to his Motherland and
to visit Africa’s west coast.

Years ago, in 1907 to be exact, two years before
the National Association for the Advancement of
Colored People was born, a group of Negroes, under
Du Bois’s leadership, met at Harper’s Ferry, the
scene of John Brown’s raid. They were banded to-
gether to secure the full rights of the colored people
in the United States. They were few in number, poor,
with little leisure. But they told of civil rights suits
carried through the courts, once to victory, and theyW. LE. BURGHARDT DU BOIS 91

sang’, meeting after meeting, the one great anthem of
America, ‘‘John Brown’s Body.’’ It opened and
closed every session.
“John Brown’s body lies a-mouldering in the grave,
But his soul goes marching on.”

And John Brown’s soul is marching where Du
Bois leads. It is a most trying soul to deal with.
Often it overturns the best-laid plans. It believes
that wrongs should not be covered up. It is intolerant.
It cannot wait. But it stirs the spirit that is in men.
For we do love liberty, however unfaithful we may
be to our love.

Du Bois has seen much happen since he left col-
lege and went to Atlanta to teach. He has seen a
prodigious change in public opinion. No magazine of
repute would publish the malicious articles that
were so common a score of years ago. Then the Negro
was described as close to the beast, without genius
save such as he inherited from his white ancestors.
It was folly to educate him. Now it is the excep-
tion to see any but favorable books and articles upon
the race. His music, his poetry, his scholarship, are
all noted with enthusiasm. Caste still rules, but one
can see its inevitable break-up. Many have helped to
bring this about. But no man in this century has
done more to secure the white man’s reluctant ges-
ture of respect for the Negro’s attainments than
Burghardt Du Bois.Scipio Africanus Jones

A err of ten was waving her arms in front of her
astonished brother. ‘‘Justice!’’ she cried, her voice
rising in excitement. ‘‘All I ask of you, gentlemen
of the jury, is justice.’’

“‘Shut up,’’ the small boy said unsympathetically,
but she continued to call for justice and to raise one
hand and then another to heaven. Suddenly, she re-
laxed and dropped into a chair. ‘‘Can’t you guess
who I was?’’ she said reproachfully, ‘‘I was Scipio
Jones.”’

That was thirty-odd years ago. The little girl had
been taken by her mother to court to hear the young
colored lawyer, already becoming famous, defend a
Negro client. His eloquence had roused her imagina-
tion. She had recognized his power.

Scipio Jones is an Arkansan who has lived most of
his life in Little Rock. He was educated in the public
schools and at two of the city’s private institutions,
Philander Smith and Shorter colleges. He early
wanted to study law, and tried his best to get into
the state law school. His color barred his admittance.
He thought that he might pick up crumbs of learning
if he were janitor, and offered his services for
nothing; but his plan may have been suspected, for
he was refused the job. He ended by reading law in

the offices of various white lawyers in the city, and
92SCIPIO AFRICANUS JONES 93

was admitted to the bar in 1889. He opened his office
and began his legal practice.

The career of a colored lawyer in Arkansas was
not unlike that of a white lawyer, save that he prac-
tised only among Negroes. But Scipio Jones was
recognized as having unusual ability. With a clear
mind and a tenacious memory he combined an ora-
tor’s persuasiveness. The court began to appoint
him as counsel when the accused had no lawyer.
Much of this work was without compensation, but it
was valuable experience. Many a man’s life depended
upon his acumen and eloquence. His reputation for
success grew, and with it his practice. In 1915 he was
admitted to practise in the Federal Courts, and in
April of the same year he was elected a special judge
in the municipal court of Little Rock. A number of
secret societies, prominent among them the Masonic
Order, retained him as their counsel. He was
trusted by the Negroes and esteemed and respected
by the whites.

Arkansas had some ugly scandals regarding the
treatment of its convicts. The county handed over
prisoners to contractors, who paid their fines, hold-
ing them until the fines were worked off. This might
be for an indefinite period. Jones defended many
convicts, charging the contractors with false im-
prisonment and cruelty. In one case he sued a planter
for $75,000 in the Federal Court. Finding how ex-
pensive the suit was becoming, the planter set all his
convict labor loose and went back to Mississippi, his
former operating place. The Negro lawyer learned to94 PORTRAITS IN COLOR

 

understand the helplessness of the prisoner, who at
times had committed no greater offense than ‘‘loiter-
ing,’’ and the power of the planter equalling that of
the master under slavery.

It is given to some people to do their best work
early in life. They ripen quickly and their energy is
soon exhausted. It was not so with Scipio Jones. He
steadily increased his practice. He grew to be re-
garded by the white lawyer as an opponent to be
reckoned with. Tactful, with a psychologist’s under-
standing of people, he overcame any latent prejudice
against him. He did not fail in his respect to the
white man, whether witness or legal opponent, but
he also did not fail to make his point. One of his
white acquaintances tells of how he corrected a judge,
who was about to condemn a man on his own un-
corroborated confession of guilt. Jones pointed out
to the judge that there was a statute forbidding the
conviction of a man on his unsupported statement.

“‘Ts there?’’ the judge said. ‘‘Find it for me.’’

This the Negro lawyer did, and the judge dis-
missed the case. One can see this dark man, small
of stature, well-dressed—he was something of a
dandy in his youth—courteously setting the judge
right on a matter of law. His pleasant smile and
respectful manner robbed the occasion of any judicial
irritability.

So Scipio Jones’s life went on, full of useful work,
successful, secure. And then, quite suddenly, he was
called upon to enter ir‘to a lege” battle that would
last for four years, that would call for all his skill,SCIPIO AFRICANUS JONES 95

that would test his standing with the white world,
that above all would be dangerous. In November,
1919, he became counsel for the farmer tenants ac-
cused of murder in the Elaine rioting.

The story of the Elaine riots, like many other
stories of labor uprisings, has been forgotten or
lingers vaguely in the memories of a few. One needs
to recall it to understand the part that Scipio Jones
played in its aftermath of litigation.

In eastern Arkansas there is rich bottom land
that is held in large plantations and operated by
Negroes. The Negroes are not paid wages, but are
furnished with house and tools and promised a cer-
tain share in the fall crop. Receiving no wage, and
usually having nothing when they start in, these
tenant farmers live for months on credit, trading at
the store, which is frequently the property of the
owner of the plantation. Often they are too illiter-
ate to read statements of their accounts should they
be rendered. It is possible to keep them continually
in debt, their fall crop never equalling the amount
that they owe. This is a condition that came about
after the Civil War, when the Southern planter had
no capital.

In the summer of 1919, cotton was high, and the
Negroes in Phillips County, Arkansas, started an
organization known as the ‘‘Progressive Farmers
and Household Union of America.’’ They were ig-
norant; many could not read and write, but they
knew that something was wrong when there was no
money coming to them and cotton higher than it had96 PORTRAITS IN COLOR

been for years. Toward the end of September they
went to a white lawyer of Little Rock, U.S. Bratton,
who was known as having attacked peonage in Roose-
velt’s time. They asked him if he would take up their
case. He said he would consider the matter if they
would bring him an initial fee, and he appointed a
place of meeting at a wayside station near their
work. On the evening of September 30 a meeting was
held in a church at Hoop Spur to raise the needed
fee. A group of white men, suspecting that some-
thing was afoot, fired into the church, putting out the
lights. Panic ensued. There was firing on both sides
and a white man was killed. The next morning, all
over the United States came word that the Negroes
of Phillips County had organized to kill their land-
lords and seize their property. Rioting began. A
few whites and many Negroes were killed. Bratton’s
son, who went in his father’s place to meet the tenant
farmers, only escaped lynching by being thrown into
jail. When matters had quieted down, ninety-two
Negroes were arrested, speedily tried and convicted
at the circuit court in Helena, November 3.

Scipio Jones had no part in this trial, which was
conducted entirely by white men. The mob wanted a
lynching, but were held back by United States
troops. A committee of seven prominent white men
had been appointed to investigate the situation by the
Governor. They assured the mob that rioting was un-
necessary; that the Negroes would be punished to
the full extent of the law. So the trial proceeded at
top speed. The counsel appointed by the court pre-SCIPIO AFRICANUS JONES 97

pared no defense, and did not consult with the pris-
oners. The jury were out five minutes. Twelve men
were condemned to death and sixty-seven to im-
prisonment of from one to twenty-one years. The
date of execution set for the twelve Negroes was
December 27.

Thus far the situation had been in the control of
the planters. The committee of seven felt that it had
reason for congratulation, since it had prevented a
lynching. The execution of the twelve men would be
an object lesson. Whether or not they were guilty of
the crime of murder, they had been guilty of con-
spiring against their masters. But it was this labor
side of the situation that made it of interest to the
country at large, and an appeal for funds for earry-
ing on the eases was sent out in November by the
National Association for the Advancement of Col-
ored People and met with a generous response. The
Klaine riots were not to be disposed of as quickly
as the first trial seemed to indicate.

Scipio Jones, with Colonel Murphy, ex-confeder-
ate soldier, entered an appeal to the supreme court
of Arkansas and a new trial was granted. This post-
poned the execution. The case came up in March,
1920, with the result that six men, headed by Ed
Ware, were given a new trial; but in the case of the
other six, headed by Frank Moore, the judgment of
the cireuit court was confirmed.

Scipio Jones now entered upon a stupendous piece
of work. Colonel Murphy was a man of the highest
integrity, esteemed by all in the community, but he98 PORTRAITS IN COLOR

was advanced in years and in poor health. He, with
Jones, prepared the brief that was presented to the
court of appeals, but he was taken ill during the
trial at Helena and died shortly after. His firm,
Murphy, McHaney, and Dunaway gave further
assistance and stood back of Scipio Jones; but the
burden and the anxiety were with the colored lawyer.
At Helena, after Murphy’s sickness, he was alone.

Little Rock is a progressive, liberal Southern city;
but life took on a different aspect when Scipio Jones
dropped south to Helena. The day coach on the Yazoo
and Mississippi road moves through woodlands, the
trees sometimes so close to the train that one
scarcely sees the sun. During the recent rioting,
four Negroes, all professional men, had been shot in
woods like this. They had gone out squirrel hunting
and had been potted by the ‘‘nigger’’-hunting
whites. No one was indicted for their murder. In
Phillips County a white man would not be held re-
sponsible for the death of a colored man. The
colored lawyer, as he journeyed to the circuit court,
knew that the security of the capital city was gone.
The town of Helena, when it was reached, seethed
with race bitterness. Even a man of Colonel Mur-
phy’s high social position was treated with rude-
ness.

The cases lasted a week. Soon deprived of
Murphy’s help, Jones argued them alone. The court
met early and late, and he had little time for further
preparation. But his cross-examination was mas-
terly. When the day at court was over, he wouldZ cv
oe Fes} p.

a

a aria hd ab

SCIPIO AFRICANUS JONES 99

enter a drug store in the colored section, and there
talk with the men who dropped in. As it came time to
go to bed, he went out, and walking to a colored home,
knocked at the door. Though he was not expected,
the door always opened and the home sheltered him.
He slept and left early the next morning. No two
nights were spent in the same house. No one knew
where Scipio Jones put up. The last night he went
into the country and walked three miles from where
he had left the car. So he went through the week in
safety.

The case was lost. Again the men were convicted
and sentenced to death. Again their counsel appealed
to the Supreme Court.

But there were the six other men who had been
condemned to die. Their cases had been left in abey-
ance pending the outcome of the Helena trial. An
effort had been made to carry them directly to the
Supreme Court of the United States on a writ of
certiorari, but without success. On the day that writ
was denied, Colonel Murphy died. ‘‘I think,’’ Jones
says, ‘‘that he died on the very hour.’’ The cause of
his death was obscure. Probably in those last months
he lived too intensely for an enfeebled body.

To those in the East who were watching the cases,
advising when possible, giving financial support, it
was difficult to know which to admire most in Scipio
Jones, his courage or his persistency. He did not
allow himself to be discouraged, and he exhausted
every legal resource. The cases of the Ed Ware
group that had been tried at Helena, grew to be the100 PORTRAITS IN COLOR

less immediately demanding. The Supreme Court, to
which they had again been appealed, again reversed
the decision of the cireuit court, this time on the
ground that no Negroes had been on the jury. When
for the third time they came to trial in the Phillips
County court, a change of venue was granted. Trial
was next to take place in the Lee County court.

But while the lives of Ed Ware and his five com-
panions were for a time in no immediate danger, the
second set of men were in desperate straits. After
the writ of certiorari was denied, the date of execu-
tion was set by Governor McRae for June 20, 1921.
There was a strong sentiment in Phillips County
that at least six of the men must suffer death. The
promise that had been made must not be forgotten.
An American Legion Post in Helena passed a resolu-
tion calling on the governor for the execution of the
six men. The Rotary Club of the city approved this
action. The press was insistent that the execution
should not be stayed.

But it was stayed. A formal application for a writ
of error from the Arkansas Supreme Court to the
Supreme Court of the United States was filed and
heard. But the motion was denied. The time for the
execution drew very near. An over-zealous Chicago
paper printed the full account of the electrocution
of the prisoners on Friday morning, the day they
were to be executed. But on Wednesday afternoon,
their counsel petitioned for a writ of habeas corpus
in the chancery court, and presented it to Chancellor
John Hj. Martineau. Judge Martineau, after graveSCIPIO AFRICANUS JONES 101

consideration, issued a writ and injunction restrain-
ing the keeper from executing death sentence. The
execution was postponed.

The Supreme Court of the State decided that the
court of chancery did not have criminal jurisdiction,
and Governor McRae again fixed a date for execu-
tion, September 23. But on the presentation of new
evidence, a writ of habeas corpus was granted by the
United States District Court, eastern district of
Arkansas, and on September 27, an appeal was
granted to the Supreme Court of the United States.

They say that Frank Moore and his companions
never doubted the outcome. Their confidence in their
counsel was complete. Twenty-four hours before the
last day set for their execution, they were brought
from their cells and shown the six coffins in which
they were to be buried. Their white accusers were
rejoicing in the certainty of vengeance. But the men
believed that their lawyer would find some way to
save their lives. The way came in the writ of habeas
corpus granted by Martineau.

In 1922, the case came before the Supreme Court
of the United States. It was argued by Moorfield
Storey, whose brief incorporated material that
Jones had used in his appeal. New evidence of two
white men, a deputy sheriff and a district railroad
agent, had been introduced in the course of the long
legal proceedings, and the brief gave their account
of the torturing of Negroes before the trial to ter-
rify them into testifying against their fellows. One
of the white men had himself beaten and tortured.102 PORTRAITS IN COLOR

The Supreme Court heard the argument. The case
rested.

Before the United States Supreme Court had
rendered its verdict, the other six Negroes were
released from custody by the Supreme Court of
Arkansas. Their cases were not prosecuted and they
were ordered discharged. Their final freedom had a
humorous aspect. The sheriff of Lee County was or-
dered by the judge of that district to take the men to
the State penitentiary at Little Rock. The officials at
the penitentiary refused to receive them. They told
the sheriff he might take the men to a jail in Little
Rock for the night. The sheriff refused to do this,
saying that he had obeyed the court, and he went
away, leaving the men outside the prison. There they
stood, bewildered, not knowing whether they were
free men or prisoners. Of course their counsel,
Scipio Jones, was at hand. Realizing that the out-
skirts of a city was not a safe place for six Negroes
as notorious as they, he hired automobiles and
guards, and carried them swiftly to Little Rock,
where he found homes for them. Thus the Hd Ware
group became free men.

On February 19, 1923, the Supreme Court ren-
dered its decision. It found that the court, at the
first trial at Helena, had been so paralyzed by mob
domination that but one verdict could have been pos-
sible. Under these circumstances the men could not
have had a fair trial, and the cases were remanded
to be retried. The men were again to be brought be-
fore the Federal District Court, but the governor in-SCIPIO AFRICANUS JONES 103

stead commuted their sentences to twenty years im-
prisonment, and on January 13, the day before Goy-
ernor McRae’s term of office expired, Scipio Jones
presented to him a petition for pardons. Conditional
pardons were granted all six men, and they were
released from imprisonment. This was on January
14, 1924, four years and two months from the time
they were first condemned to die.

I have a photograph of the twelve men sitting in
their lawyer’s office. They look like hard-working
black farmers, men of sufficient intelligence to at-
tempt to better their condition. The story goes—I do
not vouch for it—that the seventy-nine Negroes con-
victed were those who would not sign up with the
planters and sell themselves into slavery. They were
not criminals. That the feeling against them has
changed is seen in the appointment of McHaney, of
Colonel Murphy’s firm, as Associate Justice of the
Supreme Court of Arkansas, and still more in the
election as Governor of the state of John H. Martin-
eau, who, at the last hour, granted the writ that saved
the six men’s lives.

‘“‘How does Scipio Jones stand in this commu-
nity?’’ I asked Mr. McHaney, after we had had a
talk regarding the ease.

‘The white man leaned back in his chair and said
with real conviction: ‘‘Scipio Jones is respected by
everyone in this community whose respect is worth
anything, white or black. He stands ace high.’’Walter White

Txousanps of people are born into the colored world
today, who, to all appearances, are white. Some of
the thousands, after they reach maturity, ‘‘pass’’—
that is, they enter the white world. After saying
goodbye to their kin, or perhaps without a word of
warning, they usually migrate to a distant state
where their antecedents are never likely to be traced.
There they marry white and rear white families,
occasionally families that attain importance, even
renown. But the great majority of these thousands
stay where they were born, held by affection and by
loyalty to their race. The parents of Walter White
are among this latter goup. Both are light enough in
coloring to pass, Mrs. White having not only light
hair and eyes, but sharp, New-Eneland-like features.
Among their seven children was a blond baby, born
July 1, 1893, who grew into a very blue-eyed, red-
cheeked, tow-headed boy. The parents lived, and still
live, on Houston Street, Atlanta, at the edge of a
Negro section, and the boy studied and romped and
fought his way among colored playmates. But he felt
a difference. When they walked east, toward Pied-
mont Avenue and down into Darktown, as the poorer
Negro section was called, they were all colored. But
when they walked west, toward Cortlandt Street
where the white people lived, the others remained

colored, but Walter was white. Passersby were
104WALTER WHITE 105

amazed to see him playing with black children. If
he went west alone on an errand, he was unmistak-
ably white. White women smiled at him—he was
such a rosy-cheeked little boy; and in the shop the
clerk served him with all the celerity due a white
customer. If he had the requisite pennies, no soda-
water fountain in the city was closed to him. He was
white, too, when he went shopping with his mother ;
but when he drove with his father, who was a mail-
carrier, sometimes he was white; but again some-
times people on the route knew that his father was
colored, and then he became colored, too. It was
rather like a game.

He worked summers, as he grew older, and one
season was bell-boy in a fine hotel. The other bell-
boys were white. He had asked for the job, not realiz-
ing that he was crossing the color line in taking it,
but as the summer advanced and he was given in-
creased responsibilities, he appreciated that his race
was not known. When on leaving he was offered the
position of key-room clerk, he felt he had better dis-
close his identity. The proprietor, bowing to preju-
dice, reluctantly (for Walter was an alert, bright
boy) withdrew his offer. So the boy turned back on
Houston Street toward Piedmont Avenue, and the
following summer sold life insurance to Negroes.
But even at this job, when he jim-crowed from prin-
ciple, now and then he would oddly find himself in
the white world.

If, when he was a boy, he had any doubt where he
really stood, it was dispelled in September, 1906, at106 PORTRAITS IN COLOR

the time of the Atlanta riots. Then he was conse-
erated to the service of his kindred and his race.
The city had been inflamed with accounts, the major-
ity of them, it was later learned, fictitious, of attacks
upon white women by colored men. At length, one
September afternoon, when a particularly terrible
erime had been written up, a mob of white men
scught vengeance. They tore through the streets,
striking at random at any dark face. Among those
whom they passed was a mail-carrier, driving his
wagon, his boy at his side. Walter White was out
with his father helping him collect the mail. They
often worked this way together on a Saturday, start-
ing at three and finishing at eleven. It was dark when
the mob approached them, but had anyone peered in
their faces they would both have been taken for
white. Walter saw a great crowd rush down a street
pursuing a black man, saw a knife flash and the black
man fall dead. Then the mob rushed on, out of sight.

He saw seven Negroes killed that night, one a
crippled bootblack whom he knew, a mild, hard-
working fellow. He also saw—as it happened by
Grady’s monument—a white man driving an old-
fashioned carriage in which crouched two Negroes.
The man, high in the driver’s seat, held the reins
in his left hand, while with his right he slashed at
the mob with his whip, cursing them for cowards.
Whether he rescued his freight the boy never knew,
for the carriage, still mob-pursued, disappeared
down a side street. It was neai.y midnight when heWALTER WHITE 107

and his father turned into Houston Street and
home.

Sunday was a time of terrific tension in black At-
lanta. White Atlanta was arming itself, buying rifles
and pistols when it had the money and taking them
when it was penniless. Where the mob would strike
next, no one knew. Negroes were distril puting such
arms as they had, making every preparation possible
for self-defense.

Walter White’s father went to work as usual, but
this day his hours were only from twelve to three.
When he returned, he was armed. He had urged his
women-folk to go from the city to a place of safety,
but they had refused to leave him. His elder son was
‘na distant state. He and Walter were left to guard

the house.

The afternoon seemed endless. The family were
gathered on the third floor, father and son stationed
at the window. At length darkness settled down. The
street was unlighted, and strangely quiet. Then came
the sound for which they had been listening, the
ery of the mob.

They could hear it from a great distance, yelling,
shrieking. The women were enna to go re

the back of the room. The street grew lighter, for
the crowd, thousands strong, carried torches. Some-
one yelled White’s name, and cried out to burn the
house—that it was too good for a nigger.

The father had two pistols. He handed one to his

excited boy, and in his quiet voice said, “You and108 PORTRAITS IN COLOR

IT must protect the women, son. Don’t shoot until
one of them sets his foot upon the lawn, and then,
don’t you miss.”’

That moment set its seal upon Walter White’s
life. His peace-loving, deeply religious father called
upon him to die in defense of his home and his race.
He took the pistol with a boy’s eagerness for action,
but clumsily, for he was not used to firearms.

Then the mob swerved aside. Further down the
street, colored men, barricaded in a brick house,
were firing, tempting the invaders to come on. So
the men rushed past, screaming, waving torches, for-
getting the house that a second before they had
meant to destroy. They were headed for Darktown
and a big fight.

“‘And they got it,’? Walter White will let you
know. (He loves to speak of the courage of his race.)
‘““Don’t you believe all they tell you. It wasn’t the
militia that stopped the Atlanta riots. It was the
defense the Negroes put up themselves. ’’

Except for this time of tense excitement, life was
fairly monotonous for young White, who went to
Atlanta University, where his quick mind was dis-
ciplined to thoroughness and persistency, and where
he entered athletics with an enthusiasm that re-
sulted in overstrain and placed him in class D when
examined at the outbreak of the war. The summer
he travelled for the Standard Life Insurance Com-
pany introduced him to the small rural and city
community, and gave him an insight into the prob-
lems facing the Negroes there. Laurence Stallings,WALTER WHITE 109

himself a Georgian, counts Central City, the scene
of White’s novel, The Fire m the Flint, an unusu-
ally true picture of a Southern town. After gradua-
tion, White worked for the Standard Life for over
a year, rising from clerk to cashier. Then came a
letter from New York, offering him the assistant
secretaryship of the National Association for the
Advancement of Colored People. He was thoroughly
familiar with the aims of the organization, having
acted as secretary of the Atlanta Branch. It ap-
pealed to his fighting spirit. And while his friends
told him he was giving up a business certainty for a
doubtful social welfare venture, he took the risk and
wrote his acceptance. On February 1, 1918, he en-
tered upon his new work.

“<T dread to have you go to New York,”’ his mother
said as she bade him goodbye. ‘‘It’s such a wicked
place.’ To which White likes to add today, ‘‘Of
the scores of cities I have visited in this country,
New York is the most decent. It’s the small town
that flaunts vice.”’

His duties as assistant secretary, first to John R.
Shillady, and later to James Weldon Johnson, have
been multitudinous. Appeals for legal aid come to
his desk to be examined and reported on; branches
write inviting him to address them; city clubs and
church forums demand his presence at discussions
of the Negro problem; immediate cases of segrega-
tion or discrimination may be put into his hands;
but among the many tasks that he has performed for
the Association, none have been so important as his110 PORTRAITS IN COLOR

investigations of lynchings. For these he will be
remembered long after this crime ceases to be com-
mitted against the American Negro. He has written
and talked so much on the subject; for the sake of
the mob’s victims he has been obliged so often to
tell their pitiful and terrible stories, that, especially
among colored people, he will stand as the avenging
spirit showing to the world the charred bones and
the riddled bodies of these unprotected, sometimes
innocent black men and women.

Charles Lindbergh flew alone across the Atlantic.
It was a supreme risk, but when Walter White
travels alone in the enemy country, he, too, flirts
with death. And while death by drowning is soon
over, when White went to Valdosta and Hlaine he
risked slow death and torture. He was restless, how-
ever, to take the risk. Indeed, it was well-nigh im-
possible for a cautious Board to hold him back.

His methods of investigation were simple. Just as
in the old days he had been white when he went west
on Houston Street, so when he left his home in Har-
lem and took a sleeper to Georgia or Arkansas, he
became a white man. Sometimes he posed as a real-
tor from Atlanta; but more frequently he was a
newspaper man from Chicago or New York. In this
latter case there was no role to play and his stories
appeared later in the dailies; but always there was
the supreme danger of ‘‘passing.’’ He travelled in
comfort; he went to good hotels and got into con-
versation with his neighbors. He was young and in-
teresting. Nature had given him a pleasing way, andWALTER WHITE 111

his mother had taught him formal manners that he
made charming. It was easy to open up conversation
with such a man.

The Association for which he worked was deter-
mined to present the true facts of lynching to the
world. It believed, and years have shown that it was
correct in its belief, that once the American people
knew how trivial were many of the offenses for
which Negroes were lynched, once they knew that in-
nocent and guilty suffered alike from mob violence,
they would cease their apathetic attitude and cry
out against lawlessness. It was White’s job for the
first years of his secretaryship, before he was sut-
ficiently well known in the South to make his methods
no longer possible, to get at facts. It was for him to
learn why eleven innocent Negroes had been lynched
in Brooks and Lowndes county, and what was the
true story of the uprising of tenant farmers at
Elaine, Arkansas.

These two cases represent his most dangerous
work. The first was undertaken when he had been
with the Association but twelve days. He went into
Brooks and Lowndes county, where Mary Turner,
a pregnant mother, had been strung up, her dress
set on fire, her body riddled with bullets and then
mutilated. At Valdosta, the city near the rioting, he
learned, first from whites, then from colored, the
details of a week of mob orgy. The whites never sus-
pected that he was colored; but they thought him a
Federal agent, wanted to pot him, but did not dare.
However, when he had left, and they had found out112 PORTRAITS IN COLOR

the truth regarding his color, they invited him down
to be lynched. He accepted the invitation to Valdosta,
but escaped the lynching. Among the Negroes who
had helped him obtain his evidence, was one whom
the Association wanted greatly to bring to Washing-
ton. His testimony would help them as nothing else
could. White, when in the southern part of Georgia,
on his own account took a ear and drove at night to
this man’s home in Valdosta. For the first and only
time he went armed. The car was, he thinks, the
first one Mr. Ford ever made. It lacked a tire and
it had a death rattle. Valdosta goes to bed early, and
everything was quiet when the car jerked down the
street and stopped at the Negro’s door. Telling his
driver, a colored man of course, to wait, White en-
tered the house. The Negro was sick with the flu,
but he rose up in bed and said in a fearful whisper,
“‘Man, what yo’ doin’ here? Is yo’ pinin’ to lose yo’
life???

White sat down and talked for hours. He assured
the man if he would come North, work should be
provided for him. He offered every inducement; but
the Negro would not leave. It was a matter of his
kin, he said. Should he turn evidence against white
men of the town, not a relative that he had would be
safe. He could not so jeopardize the safety of others.
Doubtless when he looked at White, he felt that
one daredevil was enough for the race.

What Walter White himself counts as his narrow-
est escape was at Hlaine, Arkansas, where he went in
October, 1919. He had a glorious time at the capital,113

 

WALTER WHITE

hobnobbing with the governor, whose autographed
picture is among his most prized possessions; for
there is much of the boy in this young investigator,
playing today the part of the ingratiating white man,
tomorrow that of the passionately earnest Negro. It
was all right at Little Rock, but when White got off
the train at Helena, where the twelve Negroes sen-
tenced to death were in jail, he found a hostile at-
titude. The place was small, and every stranger was
looked upon with suspicion, especially if, like this
one, he asked questions about the recent uprising.
Before he had been in the town an hour suspicion
became certainty. Word was received from Little
Rock that a Negro, masquerading as a white man,
had gone to Helena.

Knowing nothing of this, White started to walk
down the street in the direction of the jail. His bag
was still in his hand. West Cherry Street, on which
he was walking, runs parallel to the railroad track.
He had gone a short way when a tall, heavily built
black man passed him, saying under his breath,
““Tnrn to the right at the next corner.’’ White
obeyed instructions. The black man had also turned,
and when the two were out of sight of passersby, the
Negro said, ‘‘I don’t know who you are, but I think
you must be friendly to colored people. These folks
here are fixing to do you harm. Get away as soon as
you can.”’

The turn to the right had brought them near the
railroad track and station. White jumped on a train
just pulling out for Memphis. When the conductor114 PORTRAITS IN COLOR

came for his ticket and he was obliged to pay in cash,
he explained that he had an important engagement
at Memphis and delays in Elaine had not left him
time to buy his ticket. The conductor condoled with
him.

“‘Yo’re leavin’ just as the fun is beginnin’,’’ he
said. ‘‘There’s a damned yeller nigger down here
paradin’ for white and meddlin’ in our affairs. He
won’t pass for white any more when the boys get
through with him.’’

“It isn’t when you’re playing the game that
you’re afraid,’’ White says. ‘‘It’s when you’re at
home and wake up at night; or when, as that day,
you’re on a train that moves, oh, so slowly, through
a hostile land, and there is nothing to do but wait.”’

White has investigated eight race riots and the
lynchings of forty-one persons. He has been sworn
in as a deputy sheriff at Tulsa, and been told by a
fellow sheriff, ‘Now you can go out and shoot any
nigger you see and the law’ll be behind you!’’ He
even started to join the Ku Klux Klan, of which,
again a case of mistaken identity, he was invited to
become a member. His experiences have not made
him friendly to the average Southerner. Sitting in
the smoker of the Pullman, he has heard the men
of his race, and worse still, the women of his race,
spoken of so brutally and so nauseatingly as to force
him to leave the smoker or betray himself. The young
man’s judgments are hard.

But he has had his humorous experiences. Once aWALTER WHITE 115

Southerner explained to him how he could not pos-
sibly be a Negro.

‘“‘A nigger,’’ the man said (and usually, south
of Mason and Dixon’s line they say ‘‘nigger,’’ even
in the Pullman smoker), ‘‘A nigger can always be
told by his fingernails. Now your nails,’’ picking up
White’s hand, ‘‘have got moons to them, see? But
if you were a nigger you wouldn’t have the moons.’’

White thanked him for his interesting informa-
tion.

Out of his many experiences, out of the intensity
of his sympathy and his appreciation of the difficul-
ties surrounding his race, he has written a striking
novel, The Fire in the Flint. It was struck off in a
few weeks, intense weeks of getting on paper what
had for a long time pressed upon his spirit. The book
has been published in French, German, and Russian
and has recently been translated into Danish. It tells
the story of two brothers and a sister, able, am-
bitious, living their lives among their own people,
and because of their very ability killed by the whites.
In the one race is sensitiveness, education, a desire
to serve. In the other is what White’s many trips
to the South have so often shown him—coarseness,
ignorance, brutality, and power. And this class the
better whites permit to rule. To those who like their
Negro stories served 4 la Roy Cohen or Irvin Cobb,
this novel is not recommended.

New York has dealt kindly with this young in-
vestigator and novelist, this public speaker, and very116 PORTRAITS IN COLOR

efficient assistant secretary. He has made many
friends in the white race, men who like him for him-
self and who also are never embarrassed by being
in company with a Negro of so fair a complexion.
His apartment in Harlem is a meeting place for dis-
tinguished men and women who love their glimpse
into a new social world. His walls are hung with
good etchings, and his bookshelves filled with the
autographed books of friends. His colored wife,
Spanish in her beauty, sits at her grand piano and
interprets music that her hearers love. His little
daughter moves among the guests swiftly, like a
spark of fire.

One of the Guggenheim scholarships has been
awarded to Walter White for creative writing in
prose, which shall depict Negro life as it is. The
scholarship is for residence in France. It will be an
unusual experience to be able to write without hurry
amid beautiful surroundings. We shall look eagerly
to the result of his year of work. But France should
not influence him. He is distinctly American. His at-
tempt, in his second novel, Flight, to attack his sub-
ject in a new manner, met with indifferent success.
He will always be loved as the reckless, impetuous
youth, who could flick the ash from his cigarette
when a deputy sheriff and a member of the Ku Klux
Klan told him that he was out to fight ‘‘this damned
nigger Advancement Association,’’ whose every of-
ficer the Klan watched. ‘‘And what is that to me?”’
White answered, looking the sheriff straight in the
eyes.WALTER WHITE 117

Adventure is in his blood, adventure and high
courage. He will tell you in all honesty that he is
profoundly glad he was born east, not west, of Cort-
landt Street. He is glad that in Atlanta, that Sunday,
his part was to defend the colored race. Worthwhile,
dangerous work has been given him to do. It has
brought him reputation as a writer, and many cher-
ished friends. Whittier said that he could ask noth-

ing finer for a youth than to be part of a noble and
unpopular cause. It is the wine of the spirit. Walter
White has been drinking of this wine since he stood
by his father’s side, waiting, listening, for the on-
coming of the mob.Robert S. Abbott

Tux story of Robert S. Abbott is the story of a
successful newspaper. The Chicago Defender, of
which he is owner and editor-in-chief, is the best-
known and the most widely circulated colored news-
paper in the United States. To this paper Abbott
has given his life. It is the result of his technical
training, his business acumen, his ability to choose
able men. He has built up a newspaper, important
not only in itself, but also in its education of the
Negro newspaper world.

The Chicago Defender claims a circulation of a
quarter of a million. For any weekly, even for a
short time, to secure such a circulation is an achieve-
ment, and when the paper caters only to a fraction
of the country’s population, the achievement becomes
phenomenal. Newspapers for the foreign-born can
quote larger figures, but they are printed in a
foreign tongue and thus do not compete with the
regular press. The colored paper, however, has the
white daily jealously watching its growth. Let it
work up a large circulation and some evening sheet
will go after its local news and draw from its clien-
tele. Many an enterprising Young Negro editor has
seen his field thus taken from him. To be able to meet
this competition and to dash on ahead with a deri-
sive wave of the hand, has been given to this Negro
118ROBERT 8. ABBOTT

119

journalist. The Defender has outdistanced any Chi-
cago competition.

The paper travels today into all the continents.
It is read by the missionary in Africa, and the exiled
black American in Brazil or the Argentine. It drops
into the post office of the remote Southern hamlet,
and rolls westward across the United States. Its
plant runs on train time. The Defender goes to press
Wednesday afternoon and on Saturday morning it
is on sale in Los Angeles. Its distribution in those
cities where there is a large colored population is
as regular as that of the Saturday Evening Post.
Enterprising colored boys leave the weekly sheet
from door to door. It is an institution.

The Defender plant would not exist an hour south
of Mason and Dixon’s line. One can see it go up in
smoke before its first edition reaches its first reader.
For the Defender plant knows no color line. It is
not in the South, however, but in Chicago, on In-
diana Avenue, and its workers are selected, not pri-
marily because of their color, but because of their
ability. As one enters the large hall, lighted by im-
mense, shining plate-glass windows, one notices a
white man before the cashier’s cage. He is a printer
receiving his pay from a colored girl. There are some
colored printers, but the majority are white; so is
the proof-reader, a man of former experience on
the New York Times. No careless proof-reading,
such as formerly was common to the Negro press,
is permitted on the Defender. The crashing presses
and the linotype machines represent a large invest-120 PORTRAITS IN COLOR

ment. The editorial offices are occupied by Negroes,
as are the business offices. The paper has a theatrical
page noting the movements of colored troupes, an
art page, a sporting page, many pages of news re-
garding the doings of colored society. And on the
first floor in his spacious office is the owner, guiding
the business.

The editor of the Chicago Defender is a black
man. According to the conception at present in
vogue, he should be primitive, emotional, probably
with musical or artistic talent. Instead, the first
thing one is impressed with in seeing his work is
his practicality. He has won in competition with the
white world because of his business acumen. Per-
haps Mary Kingsley was right when she said that
the Negro is essentially practical, a clever man of
business. If the colored men of America have not
shown this side conspicuously, it may be because
they have never had proper training.

Robert S. Abbott, born and reared in Savannah,
Georgia, while negroid in heritage, had the oppor-
tunity of a technical education in the white world.
His stepfather who brought him up was a mulatto,
the child of a German immigrant and a colored
woman. The old German is buried in the white ceme-
tery in Savannah, while his wife and children are
in the colored one. His son, Abbott’s stepfather, was
a well-educated man, a linguist, and the growing
boy knew something of books and the world of
thought. He was apprenticed to the printer’s trade,
and, through his stepfather’s influence, worked inROBERT 8. ABBOTT 121

the shop of the Savannah News. He had two years
at Claflin University, and later went to Hampton,
where he was graduated a thorough master of his
trade of printing. He could have stayed on at Hamp-
ton as an instructor, but he turned North, and in
1896 settled in Chicago.

He knew enough about the conditions of his trade
to want to join a trade union, and he applied for
membership. The printers’ union can talk glibly of
brotherhood, but it is one of the most difficult for a
colored man to enter. He was not wanted as a mem-
ber. Confidentially he was advised that he would be
wasting his time and money if he joined. But he
persisted. The union did not like to have on its
records that he had been refused, so they gave him
a card and he went to work in a union shop. After a
day he was dropped. He sought another shop with
the same result. Then he learned through a friend
within the ranks that word had gone out ‘‘not to
allow the nigger to work more than a day a week.”’
These instructions were not literally carried out—
sometimes he remained three or even four days in a
place, but dismissal always came before the week’s
end. He began to think that he would know the inside
of every important shop in Chicago. It was humiliat-
ing and maddening after leaving a shop to find a for-
eigner, who knew only a few hundred words of Eng-
lish, occupying his place. After a year or so of this
treatment, he ceased to pay union dues and worked
in open shops, but he could never earn money enough
to support himself by his trade. He managed to live122 PORTRAITS IN COLOR

somehow and evenings he studied law at Kent Col-
lege. This profession, however, did not attract him.
He wanted to be in the newspaper world, and since
the white world cared nothing for his skill, he decided
to start a paper of his own. Certainly he knew the
mechanical end of the job, and his moving from plant
to plant had given him a chance to peep into the in-
side of Chicago’s newspaper offices. Work on the
Savannah News had also been of service. He under-
stood headlines and layout, when a story was hot and
when it should be killed. He understood the need of
discipline. He meant to give Chicago a paper worthy
of his long experience and training.

This was in 1905, nine years after his coming to
Chicago. He entered his new business with knowl-
edge and experience, but with no cash. He quotes his
money on hand as twenty-five cents. A friend allowed
him the use of her basement. He had a chair and a
desk. He wrote, solicited advertisements, printed,
and peddled the paper himself. He rejoiced at a
good week’s sale and he hung on and went without
proper food when the returns were bad. At the end
of five years, he found that he had something tan-
gible, a real news-sheet that was his own.

It was at this time that his paper began to use
headlines. The colored sheet in the United States
had been nothing if not dignified. It had imitated the
religious weekly, rather than the morning daily. To
use bold headlines placed the Defender among the
yellow journals, and tue contin. il featuring of crime
among Negroes added to its misdeeds. But AbbottROBERT 8. ABBOTT 123

saw that if he would succeed he must use the methods
employed by the successful white journal. He did
not have a highly educated, intellectual clientele.
His paper went among city people of small means
and among a rural population that would be more
likely to respond to a striking caption, perhaps in
flaming red, than to a sedately printed editorial. So
he employed methods common enough in the white
press, and was called yellow and an imitator of
Hearst and continued to add to his heavy circula-
tion. His advertisements grew in number. The large
amount of good advertising is, today, one of the
most striking features of the Chicago Defender.
With the entrance of the United States into the
World War, colored publications that knew how to
take advantage of the situation experienced a period
of prosperity. Negroes wanted to know more of the
action of their troops at the front and of the dis-
crimination practised against them in the rear than
they could read in the strictly censored daily press.
Then the war was accompanied by the exodus of
Negroes from the South, another important feature
to capitalize. Perhaps few people today realize the
unrest in the Southern States with the return of the
Negro troops. News gradually filtered to the city and
the country of the large wages and greater free-
dom awaiting the Negro who went North. On the
plantations, in the bottomlands where peonage was
an everyday matter, the black men and women
learned that there was a land of freedom and oppor-
tunity which would be theirs if they could get the124 PORTRAITS IN COLOR

money to take the Northern train. Before this, the
North had meant freedom, but too often no remuner-
ative work. Now, with the cutting off of immigra-
tion, there was work in plenty. Negroes who had
gone along the magic rails wrote back of the money
they were making and of the many wonderful ways
in which they could spend it. They told of the public
schools and of the free hospitals. Newspapers,
prominent among them the Chicago Defender, pub-
lished booster articles in which Northern advantages
were contrasted with Southern persecution. So
serious did the propaganda of the colored newspaper
seem to the South that in Somerville, a town of
Tennessee, an order was issued in February, 1919,
that no colored newspapers could be circulated in
the town. For the South also needed labor and did
not want to lose this important supply.

The efforts of the Elaine tenant farmers result-
ing in days of rioting and disorder were laid to the
charge of the Defender and the Crisis by Governor
Brough of Arkansas. They had told of prosperity
in other parts of the country and encouraged the
tenant class to demand better conditions. Brough
declared that he would write the postmaster general
to have these publications refused the use of the
mail. Nothing of the sort happened; but there are
places in the South where it is not well to have the
Chicago paper on sale.

The Defender has an excellent news-service. All
over the country men and women are gathering mate-
rial for it. Here again it draws no color line. NewsROBERT 8. ABBOTT 125

items derogatory to the present regime come to it
from the Southern whites. It wants news and it pays
for news, and publishes once a week a mass of mate-
rial relating to the Negro. It has no policy beyond
that of giving facts as correctly as it can. It criti-
cizes the colored race as well as the white. It shows
up Negro crime. It recites with applause the efforts
of the two races to get together. The early colored
papers (the colored press is a hundred years old)
were read largely for their editorials. They were
pamphlets arguing a cause. Today the editorial is
still often the most important feature in the Negro
paper. In the Chicago Defender it is subordinate.
The emphasis of the paper is not upon opinion, but
upon news.

Robert 8. Abbott has worked hard for what he has
achieved. His finely appointed home, his Rolls-Rdyce
car, are in marked contrast to his early surroundings
in the city of his adoption. And he still works hard.
Only once has he taken any protracted vacation. A
few years ago he went to Brazil and saw a new land.
Brazil gave him a welcome he did not know existed
in the white world. He entered the best hotels with-
out question. He went where he pleased. If, occasion-
ally, the omnipresent, race-prejudiced American
tried to stop him, Brazil stood by her guest. His
money opened to him what was almost a new exist-
ence. For it is in travelling that the dark-skinned
man or woman suffers most in the United States.
He suffers spiritually from rebuffs and intimidation.
He suffers physically. He sits up all night on the126 PORTRAITS IN COLOR

 

train or in the railroad station. Sometimes, literally,
he has not where to lay his head. To Abbott, Brazil
was a fairy land, a place of courtesy and pleasant
comfort. And it was gratifying to learn that the
Defender was read there and that its owner was
known by reputation.

The Chicago riot was a terrible experience for
the Negroes who loved that city. Race hatred flamed
fiercely and danger threatened all the colored popu-
lation. Abbott saw the tragic persecution. But he did
not fail to make use of the experience in increasing
his paper’s circulation, which reached its peak at
that tumultuous time.

After the riot came the Chicago Race Commis-
sion, of which the editor of the Defender was a mem-
ber. Among the Commission’s unpublished notes is
a story that Abbott must count as his finest word
of encouragement. It recites a conversation between
a white Northern woman living in Florida and her
colored maid. The maid was a woman of education
and refinement. Her mistress asked her if she would
tell her what she considered the worst thing in her
life. The colored woman replied that it was the reali-
zation that all hope of advancement was cut off.

*“And what,’’ came the second question, ‘‘is the
best thing in your life?”

To this the colored woman answered, ‘‘The best
thing in my life is the Chicago Defender.’’Maggie Lena Walker

Bustness success comes seldom to the American
Negro. His color debars him from the training that
is essential if he is to compete with the white busi-
ness firm. This accounts for the lack of shops
operated by Negroes even in their own quarters.
Were the colored boy who runs errands for the Ger-
man butcher or the Italian grocer permitted to go to
market or to stand behind the counter, he might in
time outrival his foreign competitor; but he is not
promoted from his unskilled tasks. Consequently,
if he invests his savings in a business of his own he
usually comes to grief. It would be extraordinary
‘f it were otherwise. But once in a while a Negro is
born with such pronounced business acumen that no
obstacle can prevent its manifestation. Such a per-
son was the late Mme. C. J. Walker, who saw the
immense possibilities of the ‘“beauty parlor’’ for the
colored. Along a wholly different line, insurance and
banking, Maggie Lena Walker, of Richmond, Vir-
ginia, has made a name for herself in the business
world. She is today one of the very few women bank
presidents of the country. Her insurance business is
in connection with the fraternal Order of St. Luke,
which she found an insignificant society, and trans-
formed into a prosperous institution that in June,
1927, had insurance in force amounting to $8,662,000 ;
had paid death claims amounting to $1,639,000 ; had
127128

 

PORTRAITS IN COLOR

issued 226,000 policies to adults and juveniles; and
had assets in stocks, bonds, first mortgages, real
estate and cash amounting to $450,000. Chartered
under the laws of Virginia, the Order operates in
twenty-eight states.

This is no mean accomplishment for any woman.
And it was done despite race prejudice. A white
woman, with Mrs. Walker’s ambition, would have
started to learn the banking or insurance business
from the ground floor up, but a colored woman could
not get on this ground floor—except as, scrubbing-
brush in hand, she cleaned out the offices! Mrs.
Walker had no chance to learn from any firm the
methods proper for the business she now leads. She
could get into no bank or insurance office. Instead
she had to work everything out for herself. She read
banking laws and insurance laws, she studied re-
ports and statements, and then applied her knowl-
edge to her own problems. Her progress was not
spectacular, but it was steady, constant.

In 1889, the Independent Order of St. Luke,
started twenty-two years before by a colored woman
in a church in Baltimore, was in need of a competent
secretary. The national headquarters had moved to
Richmond, but the man who headed the organization
had little time to give to it. So the Order proceeded
upon an old-time policy, that knows no race, and,
continuing the man in the position of honor, elected
a woman, Maggie Walker, to do the work. Mrs.
Walker continued executive secretary for ten years,
when the Order, realizing her extraordinary abilityMAGGIE LENA WALKER 129

and desiring to profit more fully by it, put her in
entire charge of its finances, electing her Secretary-
Treasurer. This position she has held for twenty-
eight years.

Only the poor, and especially the poor who drift
alone into the cities, understand the significance of
the fraternal organization. It provides for two great
catastrophes: sickness, with its need of a physician
and a friendly visitor; and death, with its demand for
decent burial. The Potter’s Field and the lonely bed-
side, these inspire terror. So men and women get to-
gether and pool their resources that when the catas-
trophe comes they may not be helpless. There are of
course commercial companies that solicit and often
obtain patronage, but the fraternal Order gives
both money and a friend. If, therefore, such an Order
is run with business precision as well as with frater-
nal kindliness, it has an unusual chance of success.
Mrs. Walker thoroughly understood both these de-
mands and set to work to build up an organization
that should meet them. Her success was immediate.

Maggie Lena Mitchell was a Richmond girl who
graduated from the Armstrong Normal School, of
which Richmond is proud, and then turned to the
usual woman’s pursuit, teaching. After three years
she married Armistead Walker. Two sons were born
to them. Mrs. Walker took courses at a commercial
school and it was with this and her high and nor-
mal school education that she entered upon her St.
Luke duties. She was a smart girl, the Negroes who
were paying their nickels and dimes into the St.130 PORTRAITS IN COLOR

Luke collection plate said. They wanted her to take
care of their money. She could read and write and
cipher while many of them could only make their
marks! She, on her part, was glad to serve them.
She had known poverty. Her mother, a widow, had
worked hard to keep her and her sisters in school.
Simple and direct in manner, she was friendly to all,
ready to meet all on the common basis of service.
And she was remarkably clear-headed.

“‘The Order has grown,”’ its friends love to say,
“from a ten-cent split basket holding all its posses-
sions and (not discernible in the basket) four hun-
dred dollars’ worth of debts, to an organization
worth half a million.’’ Most of this growth has been
since 1899. It was then in a small frame building
with the secretary’s desk under the stairs and only
one clerk. Today it occupies a hundred-thousand-
dollar, four-story brick building, and has sixty
clerks. It is quite a show place in Ricnnenal There
are not many offices anywhere more attractive than
that on its upper floor, with windows on three sides,
with all the latest desks, and filing cabinets, with
great safes for the policies, and about ever ane the
air of having been scrubbed that very morning.
Many thousands of dollars have been put into the
equipment. The clerks are nearly all women, all
colored of course. They wear a white uniform which
they don after they arrive in the morning. Order is
everywhere evident and work moves with expedition.
The meter mailing machine sometimes registers as
high as two thousand letters a day. Below the officesMAGGIE LENA WALKER 131

are lodge rooms and auditorium and on the first
floor the St. Lwke Herald is printed and published.
The linotype machines and the presses are of new
design. Here as elsewhere all the workers are
Negroes. Across the hall is a shop where regalia is
made and sold to the local Orders. The headquarters
meet every demand that can be anticipated.

The Order issues death policies for one hundred,
three hundred and five hundred dollars. This is the
business conducted at the national headquarters. The
sick benefit money is administered by the local council
and varies with the state of the local treasury. Dues
are fifty cents a month, twenty cents going to the
national body while thirty cents is retained by the
local. There is a semi-annual assessment of fifty
cents on each member for the expenses of the na-
tional office.

To the layman the thought of all those twenty-cent
payments arriving monthly, each to be credited to
its proper policy, is bewildering. It would seem as
though the expense of carrying a member would ex-
ceed the amount he sent in. Then, continual ques-
tions of policy and expediency must arise when deal-
ing with 1700 locals. We like to say that business is
business, but when business is conducted by volun-
teers (the local councils cannot afford to pay sal-
aries) it demands from its executive tact and insight
into character and infinite patience, as well as the
ability to balance books. New locals are encouraged
(the more locals the more people who can have
titles) and one city will have a dozen or more sepa-132 PORTRAITS IN COLOR

rate subordinate councils. All send their reports to
Richmond and receive their monthly assessments.
All have to be remembered, held to the mark in their
business transactions and yet treated with fraternal
consideration. It is a vast undertaking.

The Order goes on steadily increasing in mem-
bership. About it is that loved element of secrecy
that makes the Masons and the Odd Fellows and
the Hlks, the Eastern Star and the Daughters of
Ruth and many other nobly titled Orders so dear to
the child-spirit in man. It has its entertainments, its
anniversaries. Its members visit the sick and the
afflicted. But it has grown to its present proportions
because its life insurance policies have been man-
aged ably and honestly by its chief executive, a col-
ored woman.

St. Luke is a religious organization. You can get
a hundred dollar policy without a doctor’s examina-
tion (this is not true of three and five hundred dollar
policies) but you cannot be insured unless you be-
lieve in the existence of a Supreme Being. It is made
up of church members. ‘‘Love, Purity and Charity”?
are its watchwords. Its fraternal feeling is its
greatest element. And its members like to tell you
that its woman secretary has never lost her sense of
comradeship with the Order. ‘‘She isn’t one of those
who ease away from the people who make them.”’
Or as a local clergyman put it picturesquely at her
twenty-fifth anniversary, ‘‘Whoever found it neces-
sary to borrow his neighbor’s ladder or hire an
aeroplane to go up to say good-morning to thisMAGGIE LENA WALKER 133

princely character, Mrs. Maggie L. Walker?’’ She
is the true ‘‘servant’’ in the sense that her religion
gives to that word; and while she has had to suffer
from jealousy and political intrigue, the mass of the
people in the Order have always loved her and be-
lieved in her. When she goes to address a meeting
she has a crowd such as Booker Washington knew.

In 1902, Mrs. Walker came before her Grand
Council with a plan for a St. Luke Penny Savings
Bank. The bank should be separate from the Order
but should bear its name. She argued the case well,
and the bank was started with Maggie L. Walker as
president. She had to learn banking, as she had to
learn insurance, from books and reports; but the
bank has prospered and is now the St. Luke Bank
and Trust Co. It is a depository for gas and water
accounts of Richmond City and for city taxes. It is
a small bank, naturally, since the Negro has little
chance to grow wealthy in Richmond; but its re-
sources are half a million and it has been of in-
estimable value to the race. Its president is well
spoken of among the city’s financiers.

Amongst her race, Mrs. Walker is accounted a
rich woman. She is known as a generous one. Her
activities in her state are many. President of the
state branch of the National Association of Colored
Women, Member of the Board of the state farm for
delinquent girls, trustee of Hartshorn College, these
are a few of her responsible positions. A tall, large
woman, brown skinned, with clear eyes and strong
nose and mouth. A religious woman—devotional134 PORTRAITS IN COLOR

services are held each morning before her clerks go
to their tasks. A wise woman. Many people daily
visit her in her spacious office, and she says the right
word to each, evaluating men and women swiftly,
seeing through sham and recognizing worth. Her
home is on Leigh Street, the ‘‘West End’’ of Rich-
mond’s colored world. On her walls are pictures of
Washington and Du Bois and of Garvey in his regi-
mentals, Provisional President of Africa. Maggie
Walker understands all types and knows their value
in this helter-skelter civilization of ours.

In 1924 a testimonial was given her in commemora-
tion of her twenty-fifth anniversary as Right Worthy
Grand Secretary-Treasurer of the Independent Or-
der of St. Luke. Many fine things were said at this
time. There was a tribute to her capacity to choose
good workers and then to give them responsibility.
“Tf I go out of the office never to return,’’ she was
quoted as saying, ‘‘I know everything is there and
the work will go on.’’ Another spoke of the co-opera-
tive character of the Order: ‘‘Not a great business
privately owned, but one owned by many and helping
the multitude.’’ But the most dramatic tribute was
that of His Excellency, E. Lee Trinkle, Governor of
the Commonwealth of Virginia, who at a mass meet-
ing at the city auditorium declared: ‘‘If the State of
Virginia had done no more, in fifty years, with the
funds spent on the education of the Negroes than
educate Mrs. Walker, the State would have been
amply repaid for its outlay and efforts.’’Eugene Kinckle Jones

Ir is examination time at Cornell University. A
young colored student is sitting in his room thinking
of his future. He is tall and thin, with a yellowish-
brown skin and extraordinarily deep black eyes. His
hair is black, too, and his,features Caucasian rather
than Ethiopian. He is in the engineering depart-
ment, and has done so well that he is exempted from
examinations. A year before he has been graduated
from Virginia Union College for Negroes at Rich-
mond. His father is down there now, teaching the-
ology, and nearby, at Hartshorn College, his mother
is teaching music. But he has always loved mathe-
matics, and came to Cornell to pursue his bent. Now
however, at this successful end of his first year, he
wonders whether he has made a mistake. Can a
colored man secure a job as an engineer? Even if he
goes on getting high marks and graduates with
honors, will there be work for him when he leaves?
He begins to fear the future. He does not want to
spend weary months tramping through the cities,
meeting with curt refusal when he offers all he has.
What an awful thing race prejudice is, anyhow. Does
anyone know anything about this question of em-
ployment? Why not take up a practical subject like
that, something that will be of service to the race?
It would be a real accomplishment if some day he
might be able to get better jobs for Negroes. That
135136 PORTRAITS IN COLOR

 

might lead somewhere, while engineering probably
will bring him up against a blank wall.

This happened in 1906. The Negro was Eugene
Kinckle Jones. His questionings and misgivings car-
ried him after a few days to Professor Walter F.
Wilcox, well known for his knowledge of Negro con-
ditions and his sympathy with the race’s advance-
ment. After talking the matter out, Jones decided
to drop his engineering and to take economics and
sociology. Professor Wilcox arranged that he should
enter the graduate school and gave him two years
and a half to get his M.A. He proved as able a
scholar in the new field as the old, and took his de-
gree in two years. Then he looked about for work.

Had the time been 1918 instead of 1908, the Urban
League, which he more than anyone else has created,
would have seized him as his master’s degree was
put in his hand. But the Urban League did not yet
exist, and nothing offered itself but teaching. He
went to Louisville and taught, first in a private, next
in a public, school for Negroes. In 1911, George EH.
Haynes, ‘Professor of Social Science at Fisk Uni-
versity, found this disappointed young sociologist
instructing a class in mechanical drawing. He asked
him to come to New York and help in the newly-
organized League on Urban Conditions among Ne-
groes. Jones got off his stool and went North, met
the board of directors and accepted a job, in interest
and importance beyond anything he could have
dreamed of in his days at Cornell. In three years heEUGENE KINCKLE JONES 137

was at the head of the National work, Haynes find-
ing himself unwilling to give up his professorship
at Fisk. Jones was able to repay the compliment
paid him in 1911, when his argument, more than any
other, led to Haynes’s appointment during the War
as Director of Negro Economics in the Department
of Labor.

The National League for Urban Conditions among
Negroes covers two large fields—social welfare and
economic advancement. It started with the union
of three committees in New York working for these
ends. The city had several large Negro sections that
were sometimes overlooked by charitable agencies.
This was not so much because of prejudice as be-
cause the Negroes themselves did not always under-
stand where to go for help or what was expected of
them. Moreover, these colored folk were sensitive to
the adverse criticism often heaped upon them, and
did not like to disclose their wretchedness. Conse-
quently, when the New York Urban League made
careful investigations and exposed the high death
rate, the high criminal record, the overcrowded tene-
ments, they felt resentment. The League had not
only to battle for better conditions, but had also to
convert the colored people themselves to its work.

It was rather hard sledding the first few years
that the Cornell M.A. went about the city, endeavor-
ing to get the support of whites and colored. But in
time opposition vanished and results accumulated.
The League especially won the admiration of theSeer heaeiiod

138 PORTRAITS IN COLOR

Negroes when it began to put through the second
part of its programme—the placing of colored peo-
ple in better economic positions.

In 1914, when Jones became executive secretary,
the outlook for the Negro in America was dark. The
Birth of a Nation had proved immensely popular and
kad inoculated the entire country with race hatred.
Lynchings were many and terrible. Most important,
remunerative work was scarce. The country was
faced with a serious unemployment problem. The
bread-line stretched for blocks in the Bowery. Sta-
tions were opened in New York to furnish temporary
employment for people on the verge of starvation.
Jones made his first spectacular record, when the
Negro station for unemployed in Harlem proved on
investigation to secure better results for less money
than any of the agencies run by whites. He also
opened up a seasonal occupation in the North. The
tobacco industry in Connecticut wanted more sum-
mer workers. They were supplied through the Urban
League with Negro college students, who found,
when the summer was over, that they had earned
more than formerly when they had worked on boats
and trains. So excellent had been their record, that
some of the tobacco-raisers experienced disappoint-
ment when they sent South for Negro families, who,
on arrival, fresh from their country farms, showed
less intelligence than the League’s college men. But
no organization could give to the ambitious colored
boy the opportunity ‘hat he . aved. Outside the
professions, there was little he could enter but un-EUGENE KINCKLE JONES 139

skilled work or domestic service. He went into a job
a ‘‘boy’’ and he stayed a ‘‘boy’’ until he died. He
was a bell boy, an elevator boy, a hall boy, an office
boy, a Red Cap; he was “‘George,’’ the Pullman
porter. That was all. He might leave school in high
spirits, one of the best students in his class; but he
found the places in shops and offices open to his
white school friends always closed to him. A college
graduate sometimes did no better. Among the por-
ters on the chair cars going out of New York, was
one who always had a well-thumbed copy of Horace
in his pocket. A Phi Beta Kappa key was found in
a Pullman wreck, and on investigation was shown
to be the property of the porter, dead some rods
from his empty honor. Negroes did unskilled work
because they must or starve.

And then came opportunity. The World War shut
out immigration. At the same time, along certain
lines of industry, especially the manufacture of muni-
tions, there was an increased demand for labor. The
white unemployed who were employable were soon
placed. More labor was wanted and the Negro found
himself invited to enter the factory by the front
door.

This was not anticipated in the Urban League re-
port for 1914. There was then talk of retrenchment.
A skeleton organization must be kept up, but money
would unquestionably be very difficult to get. In 1915,
the report read more encouragingly. The Chicago
Branch was doing excellent work. A branch had
been started in Detroit. The fear of lack of support140 PORTRAITS IN COLOR

was dissipated. But it was not until 1916 that one
read of the change in the labor outlook for the
Negro, and of the immense task before this young
secretary, only eight years out of college. He must
find and train men to place in the industrial centres
where Negro labor was an important factor, and he
must somehow, through their help, tackle the pro-
gramme that the League had originally laid out so
quietly and easily. But if the task was difficult, the
fact that there was such a task was reason for pro-
found thanksgiving. The days of discouragement
were over. The Huropean nations certainly did not
start their fight with any thought of aiding the Amer-
ican Negro, but perhaps when they pointed their
guns at each other they did more for the advance-
ment and emancipation of that race than they did
for any other people in the world.

“‘For the past eighteen months,’’ Jones wrote in
his report for 1916, ‘‘there have been coming by
thousands into the industrial centres of the North,
and are still coming, Negroes of all ages and both
sexes; single, married, and with families; penniless
or with the meagre savings of years; Negroes who
have spent their lives unused to the ways of a town;
others who have picked up the ways of shiftlessness
and crime on the street corners; a few who have
learned trades; all lured North by the fabulous tales
of wealth to be had for the asking. These Negroes,
several thousand of them, are at once both the hope
and the despair of any Northen city.’? It was the
task of the Urban League to make them the hope.141

    
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
   
  

EUGENE KINCKLE JONES

This was a formidable undertaking for a few
young colored men and their volunteer helpers
backed by an efficient, appreciative board. All the
Urban League secretaries were colored; that was a
part of the programme, as was the second part—
that all local boards, as well as the National, should
be made up of representatives of both races. The
Negro, especially the newcomer, would confide in his
own race and take suggestions from his own race
better than from the white, no matter how tactful
the latter might be. The point had been proved too
often to be debatable. Somewhere colored men must
be found for the many positions that were opening
up to them. That, among others, such men as Arnold
Hill and Forrester Washington, James Hubert and
Charles Johnson were found, and that they made
good in their extremely important positions, was
proof positive of the race’s innate ability, so long
denied expression. But more were needed, and more
money for the League’s support must be secured,
lest the horde of Negro immigrants become not the
‘‘hope’’ but the ‘‘despair.”’

The boll weevil and the single-crop system had
taken the best out of the soil in many parts of the
old South. Since the beginning of the century there
had been a steady Negro exodus, not only to the
North, but to the Southwest, to Texas and Arkansas.
Now, with the fabulous wages offered in the manu-
facturing plants, the trend was strongly North. New
York received the town Negro; but up the Tllinois
Central came the farmer. The representative of the142 PORTRAITS IN COLOR

Urban League who met the incoming train in
Chicago or Cleveland or Detroit, had no difficulty in
spotting the newcomer. He saw overalls and long,
print dresses, country hats and bandannas, broken
shoes and even bare feet. One man had a pig under
his arm. Another hugged a crate of poultry. Many
carried their most cherished possessions tied up in
an old quilt. Some were going to family or friends.
Others stood bewildered. All were in a new, un-
charted land.

Some day the epic of the exodus of the Negro
from the country of his fathers will be written. It
should be as dramatic as the story of the flight of
the Israelites out of Egypt. Who shall sing the story
of the flight from Hattiesburg, Mississippi? How the
marvels of the North fired the imaginations of the
black dwellers in alleys and on farms. How the flame
of enthusiasm grew until it swept through the church
meeting and carried the minister along with it—a
black Moses to lead the way with his children. Hew
the day was set for the disposal of possessions and
what a pitiful price was received for beds and chairs
and cherished household goods. How trains were
boarded and crowded to suffocation. How, through
all the discomfort, there burned the glorious hope
of a great deliverance, of a land ahead overflowing
with milk and honey. How, the Ohio river crossed,
men and women got out, kissed the ground and re-
turned to the train, to sing of ‘‘Beulah Land.’’ How,
Chicago reached at last, the townsfolk clung to-
gether, took possession of four blocks, opened theirEUGENE KINCKLE JONES 143

church again, and brought Mississippi en masse to
Chicago’s South Side. The Negro poet has yet to
come who shall recite this song.

It was well for the Urban League at this exciting,
tumultuous time, that it had at its head a man of
quiet temper, with an almost exasperating fondness
for facts. The mathematician was still present. The
idealist was there also—the deep, glowing eyes
showed it—but no task should be undertaken, no
new responsibility assumed, without the careful
weighing of its importance and the understanding
of obligations that went with it. Hugene Kinckle
Jones is no orator. He does not make a striking im-
pression on a great audience; but give him an hour
with a group of men whom he wishes to interest, and
he pours out facts and shows possible results and
determines to a nicety necessary costs, until his
hearers are compelled to pull out their check books
and meet his demands.

An example is his experience in starting a branch
of the League in Detroit. Detroit had been friendly
to the Negro, and in spite of the overwhelming in-
flux of Negroes from the South (the population had
been increased six hundred per cent), the older
residents liked to persuade themselves that it was
friendly still. Everything, they assured Jones, was
going on all right. But a group of young men and
women asked him to come in and help. They knew
that the ignorant immigrant had created a serious
problem, that deaths were many, that sanitation was
execrable, that there were labor difficulties among144 PORTRAITS IN COLOR

the workers in some of the factories. The League’s
secretary learned the name of the man who could
best assist him, if he could be convinced of the Ne-
groes’ need, and tried to see him. Unsuccessful,
he wrote out his story and mailed it. No answer
came for six months. Then, when he supposed he had
been forgotten, he received a telegram, asking him to
be in Detroit the next morning at ten. Jones took the
night train, but was held up by a wreck. It was one
o’clock instead of ten when he reached Detroit. He
hurried to his appointment and found his group, a
Judge in the midst, waiting for him. ‘‘Don’t ex-
plain,’’ his great man said. ‘‘We know why you’re
late. The judge must go to court at two. He has
given up his luncheon for this meeting. State your
case.’’ Jones stated it, presenting fact after fact,
and got his budget.

There has been much opposition to the black man’s
invasion of the North. Chicago had its riot, Detroit
its bombing of Dr. Sweet’s home; every large city,
except perhaps New York, in some way showed an-
tagonism. But it was because, on the whole, the
Negro made good. Not the criminal, but the indus-
trious Negro caused the greatest friction. The trade
unions did not want him in the plants where they
were well-organized, and where the white man meant
to keep control. The white people who did not sell
their homes did not want him in the sections that
were growing unfashionable. The Northern Negroes
did not want so many of their color, sometimes un-
couth and dirty, crowding the cars and herding inEUGENE KINCKLE JONES 145

the tenements. But as the years have gone on, the
newcomers are settling into their places and becom-
ing old-comers. Much of the adjustment that has
taken place has been due to the patience and per-
spicacity and wise administration of the Urban
League.

Hugene Kinckle Jones has a pleasant home at
Flushing, Long Island, with wife and children; but
there have been years when he could spend little of
his time there. The oversight of the immense field
for which he, as executive secretary, was responsi-
ble, kept him a busy traveller. He visited plants to
learn of their welfare work; he attended labor union
councils to insist that the black man be given the
same privileges as the white. He saw employers of
labor and presented the black man’s case. He made
reports of the work that the Negro was doing. He
weighed each new proposition that presented itself
to him, giving it careful consideration. He worked
prodigiously. The Harlem cabarets failed to see his
tall, well-set-up figure gyrating to jazz music. When
he danced, it was a jig at home with his children,
and when he wanted syncopated music, he could
make it himself. He kept fit, when the warm weather
came, by playing tennis, and bore away many
trophies. For the rest, he was on his job, a job that
could occupy his every hour and yet never be done.

“‘There’s nothing much to say about me,”’ he will
tell you. ‘‘I have no ‘Up from Slavery’ story. My
father owned the house in which I was born. I had a
good education in schools supported by the North,146

 

PORTRAITS IN COLOR

and where white and colored teachers mingled. I’ve
worked summers on boats and trains, that’s all. I
had the greatest respect for my white teachers, and
a good deal of contempt for the white world that I
saw when I left the school walls. My mother’’ (one
should see his mother, an exquisite lady in her black
satin with a bit of fine lace at the throat) ‘‘was a
musician, and is still teaching music. Everyone at
the school respected her, and my father, who held
the chair in theology. I still judge the white world
by what I saw when I was a boy. We met on a plane
of hard work and respected each other. Our religious
teaching went down deep. It wasn’t any Nigger
Heaven cheap contact between black and white. How
I hate the picture of us in that book!

‘‘Here in the North we’re getting now where it
is possible to make the capitalist consider seriously
the importance of employing colored labor. We can
show when it’s made good. We’ve got the facts. So,
when we learn that a new factory will be put up in
a city where there is a colored population, we go to
the manager before the place opens and ask him to
employ a certain percentage of Negroes. When he
protests that the whites may not like it, we can show
him place after place where the arrangement is ac-
ceptable, and we can get him to agree to do what we
want. Not always, but often. People don’t seem to
realize it, but the Negro is getting into factories
in numbers, and not as formerly, only as Sweepers
and porters and elevator men, but as skilled work-
men. Why, here in New York, we no longer place inEUGENE KINCKLE JONES 147

domestic service, and we have found employment
for as many people in the past six months as we did
the year before when we made domestic service
placements. And don’t think that the migration from
the South has stopped. It is going on all the time. Go
to the Pennsylvania Station if you want to find out,
and look at the black men and women and children
streaming from the trains. Read about it in Oppor-
tunity,’’ he adds, holding out the Urban League’s
artistic and important magazine.

To be able to place not a few, but tens of thou-
sands of black people in positions, to be consulted by
owners of steel mills and munition plants, and coal
mines, to see a budget grow in fifteen years from
three thousand to four hundred thousand dollars, to
know that the work of Negro economic advancement
is only beginning, this is a fine outlook for any man
still in his youth. What he might have accomplished
had he decided differently at that time of examina-
tion at Cornell we shall never know, but he certainly
would not have been of the service to his race that
he is today. He turned to the right subject at the
right time and met with signal success.Wright

New York is rapidly becoming a city of great build-
ings. Its people not only work in immense business
edifices, but at night go home to sleep in towering
castles and battlemented fortresses, or they seek
humbler tenements where only thirty or forty fam-
ilies are under the same roof. Along the street one
stolid brick building follows another, expressing
nothing to the passerby, who finds each window ex-
actly like the next, the occasional flat doorway re-
vealing little of the life going on within.
Occasionally, however, amid this new, standard-
ized, efficient construction, one runs upon a beautiful
city block where pleasant houses convey an air of
distinction. Such a block is in Negro Harlem on
West 139th Street. The houses were designed by
Stanford White, the city’s greatest architect. They
are set a little back, three-story and basement, with
long French windows and charming iron balconies.
All the ironwork is beautiful, and at intervals there
are tall gateways leading into private garages. One
should view the street in early May when the trees
are in their fresh, not fully opened leaf, when the
shrubs behind the iron gateways are starting to
blossom and the English daisies and hyacinths bloom
in the many window-boxes. The white people who
first lived on this block could not have kept it in

better condition than its present occupants. Among
148

Louis TompkinsLOUIS TOMPKINS WRIGHT 149

this line of houses is the office and residence of Dr.
Louis Tompkins Wright.

You see the name on the brass doorplate. Mount-
ing the short flight of steps and ringing the bell, you
are shown by a pleasant maid into the waiting-room.
The table is covered with magazines, among them
the American Mercury in its green cover. You have
arrived early and at once are ushered into Dr.
Wright’s office.

You feel as though you had stepped into the sur-
gical ward of a hospital. And yet, not quite that, for
there are four bookcases against the walls all filled
with ponderous volumes. But your chair is of iron
and across from where you sit is a ease filled with
surgical instruments. An examining chair is close at
hand. The floor is tiled and the furniture spotless.
The young doctor who rises to greet you, brown
skin, clear, shining eyes, is a part of his room, com-
petent, businesslike. When he starts to talk you feel
the careful weighing of his words—the accuracy of
a man whose knife has given life back to many, yet
who knows the danger of a slip.

While you are in his office interruptions over the
telephone occur. ‘‘No, I would not let her get up to-
day.’’ “‘You understand what your diet is, Mrs.
Gray. I cannot be responsible if you fail to follow
instructions.’’ ‘‘The baby not feeling so well? I’ll be
in late this afternoon. In the meantime, don’t make
any change.’’ But you have a most satisfactory talk,
and when at length you leave and go past the
waiting-room you are amazed at the number of peo-190 PORTRAITS IN COLOR

ple sitting patiently until their names are called.
They fill the front room and half fill the rear one. It
is half past one, and an operation is scheduled for
this afternoon.

Louis Wright is a graduate of the Harvard Medi-
eal School. A Georgia boy, he received his educa-
tion at Clark University, Atlanta, where his mother
was a teacher. His father died when he was four,
and eight years later his mother married Dr. W. S.
Penn of Atlanta, now surgeon at the Negro Veterans’
hospital at Tuskegee. Dr. Penn inspired the boy to
study medicine. At twenty, after graduation from
Clark University, Wright entered the Harvard Med-
ical School.

His four years in Boston were spent in hard study
and he graduated fourth in his class of over a hun-
dred. He met with some discrimination because of
his color, failing to be awarded the Alpha Omega
Alpha key though he won it by his scholarship. He
secured all the hospital advantages that belonged
to the students of his class, but after graduation was
unable to get a Boston interneship. The Massa-
chusetts General, the Peter Brigham, the Boston
City Hospital refused him.

*““We’ve not taken Negro nurses and we’re not go-
ing to take Negro doctors,’’ they said at the Massa-
chusetts General.

‘“We’ve got troubles enough without adding the
race problem,”’ came from the others. So the young
Negro doctor left abolition Boston, and took his in-
terneship at Freedman’s (colored), Washington,LOUIS TOMPKINS WRIGHT 151

where, among others, Dr. Walter Van Sweringen
speaks of him in highest praise.

After his interneship, Wright took medical exami-
nations in three states, making record marks. In
Maryland, he had the highest mark (94 per cent) of
the fifty-three men examined, ten of them Johns
Hopkins graduates. In Georgia, he passed 95.7 per
cent, the highest mark made by anyone that year
and one of the highest marks ever made in the state.
And when he took his New York state examinations,
perhaps the stiffest in the country, he stood 92%.
He has a brilliant mind and a retentive memory. He
has also had the opportunity which is only just com-
ing to the youth of colored America to study without
continual financial worry. He won a scholarship each
year at the medical school. For the rest he was un-
hampered, and able to give his whole strength to
his work.

He had been practising a short time with his step-
father, Dr. Penn, when the war came. Before long
he was in the officers’ training camp at Des Moines,
and next a lieutenant at Camp Upton. Here he found
the medical work decidedly monotonous, lacking in
absorbing problems. Oversight of the removal of
garbage and examination of soldiers’ feet were not
inspiring occupations. But it was at Camp Upton that
he made his first, and thus far, his most important
original contribution to the medical world.

The soldier has to be vaccinated and, as we all
know, often the vaccination does not take. Lieuten-
ant Wright experimented with an intradermal or152 PORTRAITS IN COLOR

intracutaneous method, not unlike the Schick test for
diphtheria. When this method is used, the vaccine
virus is diluted with a normal saline solution and
about 0.1 cubic centimeter is injected with the needle
not through the skin but into it. This form of vac-
cination was used with considerable success, the num-
ber of cases taking proving much greater in pro-
portion than by the usual method. Dr. Wright never
went on with his experiments, but he has been quoted
as the authority on intracutaneous vaccination,
among others by Zinsser of Harvard and Kolmer
of Pennsylvania.

Life at Upton changed to the more demanding,
dangerous life at the front. Lieutenant Wright was
attached to the Medical Corps of the 367th Infantry,
92nd Division. Colonel Moss, a regular army man,
commanded the regiment, trained it thoroughly and
christened it the ‘‘Buffaloes,’’ a name given the
colored men ‘by the Indians in the early pioneer
days. The regiment landed at Brest, in June, 1919,
and after some weeks of intensive training in trench
warfare, was ordered to the Vosges sector. Harly
in August, Wright was sent to make a medical sur-
vey of the sector which the 367th was to occupy, and
which was then occupied by the 61st Infantry. He
studied the disposal of garbage, the water supply,
the method of handling food, ete. On August 22,
the 367th took over its first trenches.

The Vosges was high, mountainous country. The
moving of the wounded through the ravines and over
the rough paths was difficult. This was a quiet sector,LOUIS TOMPKINS WRIGHT 153

comparatively, the troops on each side having held
the same position for three years. But artillery raked
the territory over which the First Aid men and the
doctors worked. We should remember that during
the war the casualties of the medical service were
second only to those of the infantry. After a few
weeks of very responsible work, Wright was gassed
and sent to a hospital, where he remained for a
short time.

Wright went back to his regiment when it was on
the offensive at Marbache in the Metz sector. The
day before the armistice was signed, two of the
367th machine gun units covered themselves with
glory in the rescue of the 56th infantry. The bat-
talion was cited in glowing terms by a French gen-
eral and awarded the Croix de Guerre. This was
November 10. The next day the regiment continued
the attack. We remember how the fighting went on
and young men were killed until the moment the
armistice was signed. How much the 367th might
have done we fortunately do not know, as the firing
ceased at half-past eleven, November 11.

The 92nd Division had four hospitals which were
all among the first ranking hospitals in France. The
personnel of the medical department was colored.
The hospital at Millery to which Wright was at-
tached received high commendation from Colonel
C. R. Reynolds, chief surgeon, 2nd Army, A.E.F.
Among other things, he wrote: ‘“The transportation
and hospitalization of the battle casualties and re-
spiratory diseases have been accomplished in accord154 PORTRAITS IN COLOR

with military surgery and preventive medicine,
which reflects the intelligence and training on the
part of the medical department of the 92nd Division,
in which pride may be justly felt.’’? And the Division
Surgeon of the 92nd said of it: ‘‘This hospital was
visited almost daily by French and American medi-
cal authorities to observe and comment on the very
thorough and painstaking care that is being given
to the sick of this command.’’

Wright was made captain shortly after the armi-
stice. (He is now major in the reserve.) He expected
to return with his hospital, but his regiment com-
mander wanted him and he did not get back to this
country until April. Those of us who saw him in his
uniform, his brown skin still darker with the tan
of out-of-door life, his eyes brilliant, alert, wondered
what he would do next. It did not seem likely that he
would content himself with a practice in the South,
even in so important a city as Atlanta. Nor did he.
New York offered the best opportunity for the col-
ored physician, and he settled in Harlem with his
wife and two little girls, babies, for whom he had al-
ready planned serious careers. He opened his office
and from the start success came to him. The repu-
tation he had won at medical school, at Freedman’s,
and in the war followed him, led men and women to
trust themselves to his hands. Everyone saw that
he was a great worker, caring little for society,
giving himself whole-heartedly to his profession.
His waiting room overflowed with patients. His diag-LOUIS TOMPKINS WRIGHT 155

nosis was careful, correct. His surgical skill became
more apparent with each year.

A man of this calibre was needed for hospital serv-
ice. The Negroes have a sanitarium in Harlem at
which a group of colored physicians operate. Wright
had his share of practice at this well-equipped, well-
run private institution. But before long he was called
into public work—first with the Department of
Health, and next with the Harlem Hospital.

Those who are interested in the struggle that the
Negro is making in those states where a Civil Rights
Law gives him some ground upon which to stand,
would enjoy the story of the entrance of colored men
and women to positions in Harlem Hospital, a branch
of Bellevue and Allied City Hospitals. But it would
take long to tell. It was carried on, year after year,
by colored physicians and public-spirited Negro
citizens, and by their white friends. It ended in vic-
tory. Colored nurses took the places of white nurses ;
some colored medical graduates who passed satis-
factory examinations were accepted as internes, and
Dr. Louis T. Wright, with Dr. Douglas B. Johnson,
now deceased, was put on the staff, Dr Wright
moved from assistant physician in the female out-
patient ward, to the male out-patient surgical ward,
until finally, in June, 1925, he was put on the regular
staff of the indoor surgical service, where he is to-
day. The hospital is one of the best examples New
York has to show of the harmonious working to-
gether of two races in a common cause.156 PORTRAITS IN COLOR

You should visit it on a hot summer day, or bet-
ter, if you are permitted, on a hot summer night.
The hospital is badly crowded. In the past five years
its work has doubled. Pretty much everything but
contagious diseases is brought to it. You see the
young mothers, and, more fascinating, the young
babies, some only two and three days old, lying in
their adorable little white cribs—every shade of
color man is heir to, black, brown, yellow, white.
Medical male ward, medical female ward, children’s
ward. And moving among the colored and white
patients, colored nurses and white superintendent,
colored internes and white internes, the house sur-
geon today a Jew, in the near future in the line of
sucession, a Negro. All thinking about anything but
the extraneous matter of the color of a man’s skin.

The receiving room is crowded to the door. First-
aid cases are being attended to, fingers are bound,
bruised heads cared for. But more serious cases
come. A child has been run over by an automobile, its
leg crushed; a man comes with a great razor slash.
On a summer night a city hospital, dropped down in
the midst of thousands of tenement dwellers, sees
strange and terrible things.

One incident. The nurses and doctors have heard
pisto] shots. At length a man, sticky with blood, is
brought in by the police. He has committed a mur-
der in a cabaret on account of one of those little
dancing girls that Langston Hughes writes so
vividly about. The police have shot him as he tried
to escape. The hospital will strive in every way toLOUIS TOMPKINS WRIGHT 157

save his life, while the police stand guard, that he
may not escape to commit suicide. Day and night
an officer will be outside the ward, sitting in the hall-
way where he sees the patient on his bed. The black
man, in a strange place in a strange city, knows days
of healing and care—always with the consciousness
that as he regains health, he moves a day nearer to
the custody of the man who sits outside the door.

On this night, Dr. Wright is in the operating room.
It is his six months’ period of night service. He was
summoned to a case at nine o’clock. It is now four.
While he does not know it, still another operation
is ahead of him.

He stands in the white room in his white garb, the
mask over his mouth, his eyes tired but still bril-
liant, bringing health back to a sick body. He works
for the city of his adoption. It entrusts him with the
most difficult of operations, knowing his conscien-
tiousness and his intelligent slull.

Harlem is a grade-A hospital. At the top of the
staff is the surgeon-in-chief. Then come the assistant
surgeon and the adjuncts. Dr. Wright is in the low-
est grade, which at times may mean the hardest
work. For when a call comes, the chief may turn it
over to an assistant, and the assistant may call up
the adjunct. There being no one lower than the ad-
junct, he goes to the case. With his hospital work
and his practice, Wright is a tremendously busy
man. And he is called upon for social service. The
Uptown Medical Centre Association, to bring the up-
town neighborhood in helpful relationship with the158 PORTRAITS IN COLOR

new Medical Centre whose massive buildings over-
look Riverside Drive, secured him as a secretary,
and he squeezes time out of his day for this work.
His progress has been swift since 1919, when he re-
turned from the battlefields of France.

In his library, among the heavy volumes, are
pamphlets bearing his name: ‘‘The effect of alcohol
on the rate of discharge from the stomach’’; ‘‘The
treatment of gonorrheal epididymitis with intra-
venous injections of sodium iodide’’; ‘‘Ainhum,”’
printed in the Urologic and Cutaneous Review, St.
Louis, and quoted in other medical journals. The
surgeon-in-chief of the American Hospital in Chi-
cago quotes him as an authority on this last sub-
ject.

“Tf you could do just what you wanted, what
would it be?’’ you might be audacious enough to
ask him.

“Tf I could do just what I wanted—and I shall
some day,’’ he would answer, ‘‘I should go abroad
and knock around at hospitals until I found the man
I liked and who liked me, and then I’d link up with
him and study with him and learn new things. A
private medical practitioner who is also a surgeon
with public as well as private hospital work, has
little time for research. I’ve got the equipment; I
could do some things here in my office; but I haven’t
the time. But some day, when we’ve saved enough—
and my wife and I are modest in our ideas—we’ll
go abroad and I can find out what there isn’t time
to find out now. Meanwhile, I do a little occasionalLOUIS TOMPKINS WRIGHT 159

research, and life is always interesting and busy.”’

The creative spirit is strong in the Negro, mani-
festing itself in drama, or poetry, or music; or, as
with this physician, in medical research. The fire of
genius crackles, throws out bright sparks of light.
There is glowing achievement, not the smouldering,
sullen resentment of our cruel past. The city of
New York has helped Dr. Wright, recognizing his
ability; and his own people have helped him, for
the colored professional man advances as his race
builds up a substantial middle class.

Still prejudice and poverty would have found it
hard to keep this youth down. As one of his friends
says, ‘‘Louis Wright is able to put a thing through
better than any man I know.”’Hrnest Everett Just

On February 12, 1915, at Ethical Culture Hall, New
York City, the Spingarn medal was first awarded.
The medal, of gold, is given annually by J. E.
Spingarn ‘‘to the man or woman of African descent
and American citizenship, who shall have made the
highest achievement during the preceding year or
years in any honorable field of human endeavor.’’
The committee of award in 1915 was Bishop John
Hurst, chairman, ex-President William H. Aautty,
John Hope, president of Morehouse College, James
H. Dillard, and Oswald Garrison Villard. After con-
sidering thirty nominations, they chose as the first
recipient of this honor, Ernest Everett Just, Pro-
fessor and Head of the Department of Physiology
in Howard University Medical School, for research
in physiology and biology.

‘‘My contributions have been meagre,’”’ Dr. Just
wrote to the secretary of the National Association
for the Advancement of Colored People, who had
the meeting in charge. ‘It rather upsets me to learn
that I am expected to be present at the award, doubt-
less in the presence of a large audience. I feel deeply
that I ought not to court publicity, since such court-
ship ought to be incompatible with scientific en-
deavor.”’

He came despite his disinclination; but it was a
most unassuming, embarrassed young man who,

160ERNEST EVERETT JUST 161

with a whispered Thank-you, took the beautiful
medal from the hands of Charles Seymour Whitman,
governor of New York. The stage was set, the gov-
ernor’s staff in full uniform had accompanied him,
some of the men of the distinguished committee of
award were on the platform. But the young biolo-
gist, while appreciating the honor, while feeling the
birth of a new determination to meet the future,
shrank from receiving a reward. Sinclair Lewis’s
Arrowsmith would have looked with glad approval
had he been present that night.

Dr. Just’s life has been uneventful. He was born
in Charleston, South Carolina, and educated in the
public school for Negroes at Orangeburg. In 1900,
when he was seventeen years of age, he left the south
with five dollars in his pocket and an extra pair of
shoes. He worked his way to New York on the Clyde
Line, where he left the shabbier pair of the shoes,
and with the five dollars still intact, hunted for
work. In four weeks he had made enough money to
take a train further north to a school of which he
had read in the Christian Endeavour World, Kim-
ball Academy.

Kimball Academy is at Meriden, New Hampshire.
Just had already sent in an application for admis-
sion, and to his delight and relief, he was received
and started in with his school work. But it was in
the lowest class. He was seventeen and had been
for six years studying at Orangeburg. All his time
there seemed to have been thrown away. Four years
of the academy stretched ahead of him before he162 PORTRAITS IN COLOR

would be prepared for college. He gave all his
strength to his study, however, and was able to do
four years’ work in three.

He was diffident, unfamiliar with the North and its
ways. But before he left Kimball he had learned
to enjoy the school and his ability was recognized.
He was made editor of the school paper and presi-
dent of the debating society.

From Kimball he went to Dartmouth. He had
been inclined to choose Bowdoin, but the school had
urged Dartmouth. This young Negro, who was sup-
porting himself by scholarships, occasionally sup-
plemented by a loan, felt that in going to college he
was entering upon the scholar’s life. He looked for-
ward to intellectual companionship, believing he
would find congenial spirits with whom he could dis-
cuss by the hour all sorts of interesting problems.
He saw himself with boon companions tramping
over the countryside, tearing to bits some profes-
sor’s favorite theory; or in the evening by the open
fire, reading aloud from loved books. That was what
college would be like. He had not been a week on the
campus of Dartmouth before he felt keen disappoint-
ment. Men talked absorbingly, intensely enough; but
they had only one topic—football. Dartmouth had
just beaten Harvard. The college stood high in the
world of athletics. Its students were indifferent as to
the place it held in scholarship, and they believed
that a freshman was a traitor who did not root for
the team.

Ernest Just was terribly disappointed. He was soERNEST EVERETT JUST 163

disappointed that he came near losing out. His im-
patience was all too evident. Not only was there no
one to talk to—the work itself did not inspire him to
scholarship. For a time he was interested in Greek
and started a bit of research on Demosthenes’ vocab-
ulary, only to find that a German had already written
an immense tome on the subject. In the middle of his
sophomore year he was about ready to quit. And
then, in his first course in biology, he read an essay
on the biological problem of the day, the develop-
ment of the egg. From that time on his absorbing
topic was found. He took all the courses in biology
that the college offered him, in his senior year doing
some work in research. At commencement, he was
graduated magna cum laude, the only member of the
class with this honor and the only one also to have
taken special honors in two subjects. He received the
Phi Beta Kappa key.

Ernest Just went from Dartmouth directly to How-
ard University, where he is still a teacher. But the
interest that was aroused in his sophomore year is
as keen as ever and the development of the egg is
still his subject. During the twenty years since his
graduation he has been teacher and also research
scholar, spending part of his time at Howard and
part at the biological station at Woods Hole. There,
in collaboration with Professor Lillie of the Uni-
versity of Chicago, he brought out his best-known
work, a pamphlet on Fertilization, one of the series
of treatises published by the Borntraeger Press. Pro-
fessor Just was asked by Professor Paul Buchner of164 PORTRAITS IN COLOR

the Zoological Institute, Griefswald, Prussia, to con-
tribute this treatise for his volume upon the cell
theory. Just’s other contributions to biological jour-
nals have been many, and his international reputa-
tion as a biologist is secure. In 1915, Howard Uni-
versity gave him a year’s leave of absence that he
might study at the University of Chicago, where he
received his Ph.D. in 1916.

Opportunity, today, is sometimes given to re-
search workers of acknowledged skill and original-
ity, and opportunity has come to Ernest Just. For
some years his work was financed by the National
Research Council. Today he has a five-year arrange-
ment with the General Education Board.

He has been able, according to a recently pub-
lished statement, to change the chromosome numbers
of animals by means of ultra-violet rays. This is an
important finding because of the stability of chromo-
somes as the bearers of heredity and because in those
cases where numbers are found to be different from
the normal species number, no one knows how to
account for this difference. Just can not only change
the number experimentally but can control the
change and can explain the mechanism of the change.
This work is also important for its bearing on sex
determination since sex is an expression of chromo-
some numbers and chromosome balance. Finally, the
work may throw some light on the mechanism of
mitotic cell division and so on the cancer problem.
This last, Professor Just feels, is now more than aERNEST EVERETT JUST 165
hope. In addition the work leads to an analysis of
the physical organization of living substance.

Just has published recently results that show how
living cells take up and hold water. In other words
he has made an approach to explaining the most
fundamental problem of protoplasm—the structural
relations of water to the colloids of the cell and to
the electrolytes. He has been able to trace water as
such into and out of living cells without injuring
them. This work has important implications not only
for biology but for medicine.

“Tf you would only give all your time to re-
search.’’ That is what his friends say, and they plan
that he shall go abroad, see the famous laboratories
of Europe, work in one of them. Or, if he does not
want to travel, they beg him to keep his eye glued to
the microscope at home, and not to waste his time
in teaching girls and boys.

‘They have it all planned for me,’’ Just says,
‘cand then, when they think they have my future
assured, I kick over the traces. I refuse to leave my
post at Howard University.’’

This scientist, now at the height of his power, dif-
fidently, awkwardly, but with unquestioned sincerity,
tries to show you the two conflicting impulses of his
life—the love of inquiry into biological phenomena
and the desire to serve his race. It is the latter that
holds him to Howard and his professorship. It has
even made him change his teaching work, dropping
the courses that he gave at the medical school and166 PORTRAITS IN COLOR

devoting himself wholly to the undergraduate. His
conviction of the necessity of his continuing to teach
is very real and no one has been able to change it.

Ernest Just is a Negro in outward appearance
and in many of his traits. But he is able to look at
his race dispassionately, scientifically. His steady,
seeing eyes, that hour by hour can follow the changes
of the spermatozoa, watch also the boys and girls
who come to college. From his contact with the stu-
dent and his knowledge of his people, he believes
that nothing is so much needed by the Negro as
scientific training. The race is too emotional, too sub-
jective. Persecution has made it view life with a
personal bias. The boy who has been rebuffed by
some member of the white race sees the world from
the standpoint of his suffering. He has the inferior-
ity complex that makes him shrink, or, more often,
show boastfulness. Self-glorification is common. But
a knowledge of science should alter or at least mod-
ify this.

“‘Tf I can give the boys and girls a scientific start,’’
Professor Just says, ‘‘it will help them in whatever
they may do later. It will clarify life. They will see
the proportion in things. Our young people who en-
ter college today have more than their fathers had,
and they have come by it more easily. They study
the wonderful things that the race has done, but
they need also to learn of something unrelated to
themselves, something the laws of which are definite,
unalterable. I endeavor to give them that in their
science. I doubt if I’d leave here,’’ he declares, ‘‘toERNEST EVERETT JUST 167

go into the best research laboratory in the world.
I believe in mass action, and I’m here to help raise
the general level of race attainment.’’

The biologist lays stress on heredity. It is not
strange that this biologist should have a strong im-
pulse to social service. His father, a builder of
wharves, who with his father’s father before him
had erected some of the biggest docks in Charles-
ton, died when Ernest Just was four years old, the
eldest of a family of three. His mother was quite
young. She had some education, and she turned to
teaching school, both in summer and in winter. In
winter she was at the phosphate fields, three miles
from Charleston, a rough place where the men were
considered a hard lot. After a time she gave up the
Charleston school, and devoted herself wholly to the
community at the phosphate fields. There was no
church, so she turned the schoolhouse into a church.
She got the men together and they formed the set-
tlement into a town, naming it Maryville. By the
sale of her own property she started an industrial
school at Maryville, where, after her day’s teaching,
she taught sewing and millinery and dressmaking.
She persuaded the farmers to sell the moss, which
is used so much in the South, co-operatively. Instead
of each man carrying his small load to the factory,
the group purchased a truck and began to receive
a good price. It was her hope to make of the settle-
ment at Maryville a model community, with an edu-
cated, prosperous Negro population.

She failed. The schoolhouse burned in 1899. Men168 PORTRAITS IN COLOR

cheated her. The executors of her husband’s will
had taken the property that should have been hers.
In the end she gave up, her strength and courage
gone, and came North. But her spirit manifests it-
self in her son, though to the casual observer there
would seem to be no connection between founding
the Maryville experiment and teaching science at
Howard. But Dr. Just knows, and his Northern wife
knows, that he has lived in prejudice-bound Wash-
ington and leaves the most fascinating pursuit given
to any man on this earth—the learning of new truth
through minute study of vital phenomena—to toil
with often uninspired college youth, because his in-
heritance from his mother and her tragic failure
impel him to it.

““T feel as if I ought to do something for my race
in the South,’”’ he says quietly, and quietly, but un-
swervingly, goes about the task.

This sketch will annoy him. He hates publicity. He
hates that we should go into eestasy because a Negro
does something. Why make much of him? ‘‘A thon-
sand white men are doing better than I,’’ he says,
and turns back to his laboratory table. His life is
passed at Washington and Woods Hole. New York
is a city where he passes from one station to another.
Harlem is a name to him, a place he has not taken
the time to visit. His life is ordered. As a discoverer
in the field of biology, and as a teacher striving to
show Negro youth the true values of life, he carries
out his ideal—an achievement, surely, in this dis-
tracting, twentieth-century world.George Washington Carver

Grorce Wasuincton Carver, Director of Agricul-
tural Research and Professor of Chemistry at
Tuskegee, 1922 recipient of the Spingarn Medal,
Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts of Great Brit-
ain, was born in 1864 in a one-roomed eabin at Dia-
mond Grove, Missouri. He did not stay there long
unmolested, for a band of marauders from Arkan-
sas stole him and his mother. His master, Moses
Carver, a German by birth, greatly regretted the in-
cident, and sent a trusted messenger with a fine-
jlooded horse and some money to buy his slaves
back again. His mother could not be found—she
never was found. George was a puny infant, half
dead with whooping-cough, and his new owners were
glad to exchange him for a race- -horse. So ie got
back to Diamond Grove and the log cabin.

But he was sadly alone. His father, the slave of
a nearby planter, was dead, and so were his little
sisters. Only a brother, nine years his senior, was
left to him. The two grew up together on the Mis-
souri plantation.

George Carver had a kindly master and mistress,
but he had little training and lived much by himself.
He would wander away alone through the woods
and fields, noticing the many things he saw at his
feet. Loving flowers, he made for himself a secret

garden, where he brought fading plants back to
169170 PORTRAITS IN COLOR

strength. He watched the trees send out their new
leaves in the spring; he examined the insects among
the twigs; and he asked searching child-questions
that no one could answer. He could not turn to books,
since the teaching of reading was not a part of edu-
cation at Diamond Grove. So he continued to look
and examine and make friends with the life about
him. He would fill his pockets with toads that, unfor-
tunately, were not welcome as household pets. Know-
ing this strange taboo, he would line them against a
tree, and with small black finger upraised, order
them to stay still and wait for his return. With wide-
open eyes, eyes still fed with a hidden fire, the little
boy moved through the friendly woods, dug among
the pine needles, looked long at the wriggling roots,
the scurrying insect life, the form and color and mo-
tion that he found about him. ‘‘They murder a
child,’’ he says, ‘‘when they tell it to keep out of the
dirt. In the dirt is life.’’

His brother, at nineteen, left Missouri, to go into
Kansas, and George, his only relative gone, decided
himself to seek his fortune. He longed for an educa-
tion, and with the consent of the Carvers, went to a
small settlement, eight miles distant, that boasted a
school for colored children. He was without posses-
sions, and for two years existed as best he could.
The Negroes, poor like himself, were kind to him ;
but many times he slept hungry on his loved earth
under the stars. He soon mastered what the primi-
tive school had to give him, a..d at twelve, deter-
mined on further knowledge, got a lift in a wagon toGEORGE WASHINGTON CARVER 171
Fort Scott, Kansas. It was now that his formal
education began.

This was in 1876, when he was twelve years old. It
took him eighteen years to graduate from the Iowa
State University, and two years more to get his
master’s degree. During these eighteen years of
study, while he made many friends, he never took
money for his support. He earned every mouthful
he ate, the roof that covered him, the clothes upon
his back, the books and the college fees. And he had
no easy avenues open to him but only hard, time-
consuming domestic service. All this physical and
mental work was a great drain upon his boyish
strength. At nineteen, returning to Diamond Grove
for a visit, he was thought only a little boy by the
conductor, who let him travel on half fare and com-
mented on his family’s allowing him to be away
alone. He must have shot up soon, for he isa tall man
now. It was on this visit that he learned of the
recent death of his brother. Left quite alone, he went
back to his struggle for bread and knowledge.

His quest took him to Minneapolis, Kansas, where
he graduated from the high school. Seeing an ad-
vertisement of a college in Iowa, he applied and
was told he would be admitted. When he reached
the place, however, and the principal saw his black
face, he was turned away. This meant working for
nearly a year before another college could be sought
Simpson, at Winterset, Iowa. Here he was ad-
mitted, but after he had paid his matriculation fee
and bought his necessary supplies, he had only ten172 PORTRAITS IN COLOR

 

cents left. With characteristic good sense he bought
five cents’ worth of corn meal and five cents’ worth
of suet, and lived upon it for a week. By that time
the students had found out that he wanted clothes
to wash, and thereafter they kept him supplied. He
supported himself through Simpson College by
laundry work. Besides his regular course, he studied
music and art. The artist was strong in him. He had
a voice of rare quality, and he studied zealously
musical composition. He could paint and loved to
draw the world that he saw about him. But if he
might not interpret the earth with an artist’s brush,
he would at least stay close to it. From Simpson,
he went to Iowa State University, and graduated
from the agricultural department. After securing his
master’s degree, he was given a place at the Uni-
versity. He did laboratory work in bacteriological
and systematic botany, and ‘took charge of the green-
houses. It was here a year later that Booker Wash-
ington found him, and asked him to come to Tuske-
gee. He accepted and he is at Tuskegee still.

Booker Washington had a passion for the things
that are at hand, for life as you found it where you
lived. He despised the youths—how many of them
we used to have—who rhapsodized over Keats’s
nightingale, and did not recognize a meadowlark
when it gave its sweet prolonged note from the
grass. He enjoyed the earth and the things that
lived upon it. He used to delight in going about
among the farm animals. In George Carver he found
much that was congenial. They both loved homelyGEORGE WASHINGTON CARVER 173

things, the soil and the growing crops. They both
loved Tuskegee. They both rejoiced in the day’s
work; and the light never lasted long enough for
them to accomplish all to which they had set their
hands. Washington may not have appreciated the
artist in Carver, but he gave him a room for a
laboratory and time in which to do his work.

Carver was at Tuskegee for practical service. His
students were not far enough advanced to enter
his loved field of research; but he proved an inspir-
ing teacher. He served the community through bul-
letins and exhibits that soon made Tuskegee’s agri-
cultural work well-known in the South. In 1908 he
added impetus to his food studies, since substitutes
was telling of new uses for the cow-pea. The War
for wheat were in demand. He wrote of the use of
the peanut as a food, and gave one hundred appetiz-
ing recipes, beginning with soup and running
through the courses. His former experience in self-
support had made him familiar with domestic food
problems. He showed the farmers the way to make
sweet-potato flour, and the excellence of the meal
when mixed with wheat; it was used to some extent
during the war. He described how to corn and pickle
and smoke meats. He tried to bring to the Negroes
a realization of the wealth of material about them.
If they continued to plant only corn and cotton and
to remain at the mercy of the country storekeeper,
it was not through any lack of effort on his part.
His bulletins are written in simple style and with an
occasional quaint turn of phrase. He has written,174 PORTRAITS IN COLOR

too, an elementary course in nature work for teach-
ers in the lower grades.

But while faithful to the principles of Washing-
ton in writing homely tracts for uneducated people,
he was becoming, year by year, a master in his field
of chemistry. And in his advanced, extremely techni-
cal studies, he was also true to Tuskegee’s principal,
following out the famous injunction to ‘‘Let down
your buckets where you are.’’ He threw the wealth
of his spirit, his learning, his keenness of insight into
the study and utilization of things at hand, things
growing on the land about him. By technical proc-
esses, quite beyond the understanding of the layman,
he produced one product after another from two
crops, the peanut and the sweet potato. In his at-
tractive laboratory, one sees a long line of peanut
products. Among the food stuffs, Professor Carver
has shown that from peanuts he can secure a fine
quality of milk. He has made ten varieties. He de-
scribes this milk as ‘‘rich, creamy, and palatable, and
containing three times as much carbohydrates, three
times as much protein, twelve times as much fat as
cow’s milk, and only one-tenth as much water.”’ For
culinary purposes its possibilities are practically un-
limited. From peanuts he can serve us five kinds of
breakfast-food, two grades of flour, ice cream of all
flavors, cheese, candy, salad oil, instant coffee.
Among non-edible products, he names face powder,
leather, dyes of nineteen shades, metal polishes,
axle grease, toilet and laundry soaps, ink, glyce-
rine, medicine. And peanuts, we must realize, areGEORGE

 

WASHINGTON CARVER 175

grown on sandy soil, unsuited to the staple crops.

When the Ways and Means Committee of the
South was considering the tariff on peanuts, Pro-
fessor Carver was asked to be one to speak on the
value of the crop to the United States. He remained
in the background while the Committee yawned
through a presentation of familiar tariff arguments.
Then Carver spoke for his allotted ten minutes, and
the Senators woke up. They kept him for an hour
and a half, asking questions and growing increas-
ingly enthusiastic over peanuts.

The second vegetable to which Professor Carver
has given many years of research is the sweet po-
tato. Among other things, he has made from it dyes,
tapioca, crystallized ginger, and flour. His peanut
products now number about two hundred, his sweet
potato over one hundred. It has been said of him
that he has taken the lead in adopting for the sweet
potato the methods that the Germans have used for
the Irish potato.

Out of the red clay of the South he has made
water-color paints, producing a blue of a depth that
has not been seen since the days of the Egyptian
blue. There are those who count his paints from
clay his greatest discovery.

This genius, who, out of the earth and the common
things at his feet, has brought forth year after year
new and important products, could not remain alto-
gether unknown. Tuskegee is a long way from any
centre of industry, but after a time Professor Car-
ver’s discoveries began to be talked about. Offers176 PORTRAITS IN COLOR

came from commercial firms, offers noting large
salaries and richly equipped laboratories. But he
continued at his first post. There, if you rise early
enough, you can see him at seven entering his office.
He is a very dark man, with no appearance of white
blood. He stoops a little, and his coat is a bit frayed
at the sleeve, but there is a flower in his buttonhole
and he puts a bunch of flowers in a vase on his desk.
Over an old secretary hangs a hornets’ nest, and
papers lie all about. It is an old-fashioned office with
an air of homeyness, and the man who greets you is
old-fashioned, too, singularly lacking in the business
man’s brusque ‘‘What can I do for you’’ attitude,
as he seats himself in his swivel chair. When Pro-
fessor Carver seats himself to talk to you at his
old desk, you know there will be no pressing a button
te call in a smart office boy and to deliver impressive
orders for the day.

And yet this is a business office. Many problems
are here for the chemist to solve. A letter comes
from a factory, asking how to remedy a difficulty
encountered in making peanut butter. The oils
saponify in the process. It will be answered, telling
how the trouble may be avoided. There is another
letter regarding the coating of peanuts with choco-
late. Word comes that a box, weighing about a hun-
dred pounds, has arrived and has been placed in
the laboratory. It contains samples of clay sent by
the Southern Development Division of the Louisville
and Nashville Railroad. They will be separated, Pro-
fessor Carver tells you, into paint clays, china clays,GEORGE WASHINGTON CARVER 177

bauxites, ochres, brick, tile, and ornamental clays,
as well as some of the minor uses for industrial
clays. A report will be made to the railroad com-
pany.

Perhaps you inquire as to whether the reports are
used. If so, you will learn that they are not followed
up. It would mean another bookkeeper. Professor
Carver has patent rights on his discoveries, and a
recently-formed company of Southern men hopes to
do something with at least a few of them, but on this
matter you cannot get Carver greatly interested. The
business side is not what he cares about. An artist,
when he needs money, if he can, sells a picture. But
it is the picture that is important to him. ‘‘'The mone-
tary side interests me least,’’ Carver, the artist,
says. And he adds, ‘‘I believe that the biggest con-
tribution my work will make is that of education.”’

And this leads to one of the most interesting things
that this interesting man is doing today—his educa-
tion of the white people, and especially of the young
white students of the South. He has discovered the
value of Southern products, and even the Rotary
Clubs and the Daughters of the Confederacy want
him to tell them about it. They take pride in the
black man, who has examined patiently their loved
soil, and who shows them its wonders. They ask him
to lecture and they are delighted with his modesty
and quiet bearing. And if he is popular with the older
generation, he is fairly worshipped by the college
boys. When he lectures in chemistry the boys flock
to hear him. One of the first times he spoke at a178 PORTRAITS IN COLOR

Southern university to white students its chemistry
professor, not wanting any dissension, told the stu-
dents that attendance was not compulsory. He gave
Carver a small lecture room and tried tactfully to
keep him from feeling hurt if few boys attended. But
when the bell rang for change of classes, the aston-
ished professor saw the place crowded with students.
It was necessary to move to the largest hall in the
building. When Carver had finished, the boys
crowded around him, leaning over his shoulders,
asking excitedly interested questions.

“‘T’m just one of the average, chemistry-hating,
first-year students,”’ one of the boys wrote him after-
ward, “‘but you have made chemistry a living sub-
ject for me.”’

The Interracial Committee, with its headquarters
in Atlanta, is striving to bring about better condi-
tions between whites and Negroes. They could use
Professor Carver every day in the year, had he the
time to give them. And his propaganda is all the
stronger, because he says no word regarding race.
The students love him for himself, and for what he
has to give them, and in their minds the differences
between black and white begin to disappear. Science
as brought to them by this scholar and friend makes
them free.

“T have a picture that Professor Carver made of
the view from my home in the Blue Ridge Moun-
tains,’’ one of his staunch white friends says. ‘‘He
had been off climbing with my boys, who adore him.
hey say he can answer all their questions. On theirGEORGE WASHINGTON CARVER 179

return the valley was flooded with the afternoon
light, and Carver, from his own clay paints, made
my picture. It gives more of the spirit of the Blue
Ridge—and there’s nothing else so beautiful in
America—than anything I have yet seen.’’

“‘Do you know what a musician Professor Carver
is?’’? another says. ‘‘His technical knowledge of mu-
sic is extraordinary.’’ ‘‘He’s a regular old house-
wife,’? someone whispers. ‘‘He can do anything—
wash, clean, and sew.’’ ‘‘And why not?’’ another
says in answer. ‘‘If a crochet needle helps him to
solve a problem, why isn’t it as good a thing to have
in his hand as a ecigarette?’’

In the meantime, he goes on his way unostenta-
tiously, from his classroom to his laboratory, and
home, to wake up in the morning and go his round
again. He moves with seeing eyes and understand-
ing heart, and with an unfaltering faith in the
universe.

For religion is close to this scientist’s heart. The
baby that was traded for a race-horse might easily
have coughed its life out by the roadside. Instead it
was brought back to its home. And it believes, now
that it has seen some sixty-odd years of life, that
there is purpose in all things. The world is not a
mere bunch of matter, spinning helplessly in the
universe, to drop down at length on its side, life
cone, cold, worthless. It is under the guidance of
its Creator, who speaks daily to those who listen.
So when he goes into his laboratory, he goes prayer-
fully, with heart open for revelation. And it comes.180 PORTRAITS IN COLOR

<‘When I see the end,”’ he says, ‘‘I see the means to
the end.’’? He was called harsh names when, some
five years ago, in a New York Presbyterian church,
he declared that he took no books into his laboratory.
His books are outside; he has studied the great
chemists; but when he goes to create, he goes alone.

Science is an inspiration. ‘‘I will lift up mine eyes
unto the hills, from whence cometh my help,”’ is the
psalm that sends him to the red clay. The Bible is
as close to him as the complicated formula that, once
discovered, gives him the color that he seeks.

Tn the agriculture bulletins published from Tuske-
gee, this artist tells of what the South might be. By
dissolving the clay at their feet, the farmers might
make as lovely colors for the walls of their homes as
the peasants have in Italy—soft cream ochres, um-
ber, and red. With terracing, ugly gullies might dis-
appear, and about the homes, instead of the bare
earth, could be a multitude of flowers. So the artist
pictures his loved section. Then, as he talks with
the boys who visit him from Vanderbilt and the Uni-
versity of North Carolina, and other liberal col-
leges, he builds with them a world free from brutal-
ity, humane, at peace. They will all help to bring it
about. They all know they will when they leave him.
He enters his laboratory, his temple, to begin a piece
of research. And as he works with his test tubes and
sees the matter change beneath his hands, pride and
humility are his, and with Kepler of three hundred
years ago, he can say, ‘‘I think thy thoughts after
thee, O God!”’Jame Porter Barrett

JANIE Porter Barrerr is superintendent of what in
former years would have been called a state refor-
matory. Now in our more enlightened and kindly
times, the place is named an industrial school for
colored girls. She receives those girls under seven-
teen committed to her by the courts—girls whom
no one else wants,.who, but for the school, would go
to jail. At the state farm, in the little town of
Peake’s Turnout, Virginia, fifteen miles from Rich-
mond, one hundred girls are living under her super-
vision in what is not only a school, but also a kindly,
though carefully disciplined, home.

Among the distinguished graduates to whom it
can point with especial pride, Hampton Institute
counts Janie Porter. Unlike many of its former stu-
dents, she did not come from severe poverty. She
was reared in Macon, Georgia, in the home of a
white woman, a New Yorker, married to a South-
erner, who employed her mother as housekeeper and
seamstress. She grew up in a beautiful house, her
playmates her mistress’s three children. Janie stud-
ied with these children, was strong in literature
but weak in mathematics, had her own pretty room
and dainty things, ate of the best food, grew to love
beauty and refinement. Then came a break between
mother and mistress, the two having diametrically

181182 PORTRAITS IN COLOR

different views as to the girl’s future. The mother
felt that the time had come for her to be among her
own people, and decided to send her to Hampton.
‘‘ Janie,’’ her mistress said, tears in her eyes, ‘‘I’ve
ruined your life. That’s a work school. They’ll re-
quire rough work such as you’ve never done, and
there are rough students there such as I have never
meant you to know.’’ The child was torn between
two emotions—the one love for all she must leave,
the other fear and yet a fascinated curiosity for the
new experiences in store for her. She followed her
mother’s bidding, and left the white home forever
to drop into what, for a time at least, was an alien
world.

She will tell you laughingly that her manner of
reaching Hampton was unfortunate. Light enough
in color to pass for white, she was put on a Pullman
and rode in a sleeper to Norfolk. According to the
best Hampton tradition she should have walked!
Those students were most welcome who dared most
for an education. But Janie did the work required
of her, some of it as rough as her mistress had pre-
dicted it would be, and grew in favor with her
teachers and classmates. Often she was homesick
for the old surroundings, she hated the heavy food
and bare dormitory, she had no especial sympathy
for the poor and ignorant of her race. But while
she did not at first respond to the call to service, so
fine a part of Hampton’s curriculum, she was a
sunny child with a keen sense of humor, and a
friendly disposition. So she grew daily in strengthJANIE PORTER BARRETT 183

and in understanding of the value of the strenuous
daily education of hand and brain.

Then one day she read Walter Besant’s All Sorts
and Conditions of Men. The ideal of service turned
from drab to roseate. She glowed with the thought
of what she might do. Doubtless she identified her-
self with the more courageous of the two girls in
the story. Giving her imagination full play, she re-
solved to work as Besant’s heroine had worked for
her Palace of Delight, where all beautiful things
that she had known and others more beautiful should
belong to the people. In her dream they would belong
to the colored people, the poorest and most perse-
cuted among Americans. These would enter the en-
chanted grounds. Where her palace would be she
had no idea, but she believed that it would be reared
in good time.

After graduation she taught for a year in the far
South, to return in the autumn to Hampton, where
she was wanted as an instructor. Before long, she
and Harris Barrett, cashier of Hampton Institute,
fell in love and were married in 1889, to have twenty-
one years of deep happiness together, each in accord
with the other in the ideal of service to the family
and to the community.

‘Don’t spend any money on a trousseau,’’ she
wrote to her mother; ‘‘I want only the simplest
clothes, but give me fine linen and sterling silver
to set upon my table. If I have only two forks and
two spoons I want them of the best. My table must
have beautiful linen and fine silver and flowers.”184 PORTRAITS IN COLOR

Her house was furnished slowly. Nothing should
come into it that was not entirely paid for, and
everything should be good of its kind. It grew in
charm and homeyness and children were born to
bless it.

Those were the days when we believed that to be
of service to a community we must live in it, become
veritably a part of it. Arnold Toynbee went down
from Oxford to the east side of London and dwelt
among the laborers about whom he had studied at
college. Jane Addams took up her residence on Chi-
cago’s interminable, frowsy, windswept Halsted
Street and opened Hull House. Mrs. Barrett did
something simpler than that. She opened her home
just as it was and invited in her neighbors. She real-
ized quite suddenly that this was the Palace of De-
light of which she had dreamed; and that it belonged
not only to herself and her husband and children,
but to all the neighbors who cared to step within
its door.

The story of this house beautiful in the town of
Hampton is a volume in itself. Not only the children
but the mothers came in numbers. Many had had no
advantages, some were rough and ignorant. But they
came to talk over their troubles, and the example set
by the ‘‘Palace of Delight’’ was irresistible. They
went home to imitate what they had seen. It was
their readiness to learn that made the Barretts give
up a much-coveted bathroom. They had saved for
it, hundreds of dollars; the plans were agreed upon,
when Mrs. Barrett decided that it would not do; itJANIH PORTER BARRETT 185

would destroy their influence. ‘‘When the neighbors
see my tub and my faucets,’’ she explained to her
husband, ‘‘they will think there is no use in trying
to keep as clean as we do. We shall have too much the
advantage.’’ So the bathroom was given up. A little
practice house was put on the lawn with the money,
a veritable doll’s house, that the girls cared for as
they would a loved toy.

Then, after many years of happiness, sickness
came into the home and death followed, leaving the
wife to face difficult responsibilities that shared had
been only joys.

During her husband’s illness, Mrs. Barrett had
been active in the philanthropic work of the National
Association of Colored Women. This corresponds
to the National Federation of Women’s Clubs of
the whites. The colored women, however, from the
first have engaged primarily, not in cultural, but
in philanthropic work. Mrs. Barrett was president of
the Virginia State Federation when it decided to
undertake work for the most neglected girls in the
state—those under seventeen committed by the court
to jail. A judge had actually committed a little girl
of eight, whom Mrs. Barrett rescued and placed in
an asylum. It was necessary that the colored women
themselves should raise money to start the approved
reformatory of today—a school and a farm.

In three years the women had bought four hundred
acres at Peake’s Turnout, and had installed a far-
mer and his wife there. A few girls were in their
charge. The State of Virginia gave them an ap-186 PORTRAITS IN COLOR

propriation, and not long after this Janie Barrett
found herself at the head of the school.

“‘T, go to Peake!’’ she had exclaimed when the
idea was first presented to her. ‘‘I, give up my pretty
home to live in a dormitory and eat from thick plates
with a tin fork?”’

But she went, and the plates are not so thick and
the forks are better than at other places of its kind.

The Industrial School is now under State manage-
ment, and for eleven years Mrs. Barrett has been
its superintendent. It is managed by a board of
colored and white. Too much credit cannot be given
to the white women who first entered upon the work
at the plea of the colored women, and who now hold
their positions as appointees of the governor. They
are no figureheads, but hard, devoted workers. The
colored women who make up the majority of the
board members, in conjunction with the State Fed-
eration of Colored Clubs, have given thousands of
dollars to the school. They started it, and they can be
justly proud of their achievement. The school is
rated A among state reformatories. ‘‘One of the best
five reformatories in the country,’’ Hastings Hart
is quoted as saying, and adds, ‘‘In spirit it has the
highest rating of them all.’’

Peake’s Turnout is in flat farming country, with
some few bits of forest among the cleared lands. As
you drive up to the farm, you see no sign of a prison.
The school windows have no bars and the door is not
locked. The fences are of wire and are no higher
than the farmers’ fences. Yet in eleven years onlyJANIE PORTER BARRETT 187

eight girls have escaped and are still at large. The
country is flat, and one could see a figure for a con-
siderable distance, but to the south and east is wood-
land. The school is under-manned. And yet the girls
do not slip away.

There are many reasons for this. One is the con-
stant vigilance on the part of the teachers. When
the girls are at play, or marching back and forth to
school, or running upon errands, someone is always
conscious of where each child is. You watch and yet
do not seem to watch. Another reason is the careful
manner in which work and play are planned and
the discipline that keeps the girls in groups; but
the chief reason is Janie Porter Barrett. Again she
has given her community, this time a community of
neglected, undisciplined girls, a beautiful home.

You see it as soon as you enter the office. It is
there as you go through the dormitories and look at
the clean, well-made beds, at the closets where the
girls hang up their clothes, at the dining-room where
a bunch of violets stands on each table, even in the
individual lockers, each with its own key, where
prized possessions can be put away in safety. It
is in the flowers about the buildings, the mile and a
half of violets edging the roads, the half-mile of iris,
the dozens of rose bushes. It is in the schoolroom
and the poultry-yard and on the ball field. Here are
a hundred girls sent to Peake’s for wrong-doing.
They will be sullen at first, perhaps intractable.
But they will soon see that the past is never re-
ferred to. It lies behind them. Ahead are increasing188 PORTRAITS IN COLOR

privileges if they lead an ordered life. Here are
teachers interested in their welfare, ready to help
them. Here is a home, and presiding over it a woman
who demands much, but who never fails them when
they need sympathy in the ascent of the Hill Diffi-
culty. Home is where she is and her love is a
stronger force than any wall, however high, that
might be built.

The discipline at Peake’s is that of the best re-
formatories—the honor system, the credits that
place the winner among the honor girls, the loss of
credits the chief punishment. No one is ever struck
at Peake’s. There is no dark cell. The nearest to such
a chamber is the ‘‘thinking room.’’ This is a little
room under the eaves, with a window at either end,
where one goes to meditate and if possible to get
straight with the world. This is best done on a pallet
with little and simple food. Many torn nerves are
rested here; but after a few days no child wants to
be shut out of the bright, talking world, and the
thinking results in a change of heart. Then the girl
comes out to win back her credits. Mrs. Barrett has
a system of extra credits, an innovation in such
work, whereby a girl may supplement the slow build-
ing up of good-conduct marks that in a brief period
of passion may be ignominiously lost.

‘When a girl enters here her past is forgotten,”’
the superintendent says; and you are base indeed if
you ask how this pleasant-faced child with pretty
manners ever got into court. Incidentally you learn
that many crimes are represented—murder, theft,JANIE PORTER BARRETT 189

down to simple waywardness. But after all, they are
children who for the first time are receiving the
training of a good school. They learn the right way
to make a bed and to scrub a floor, to care for poul-
try, to gather in sweet potatoes, to make a pretty
dress (the gingham of their own choosing), and, the
dress made, to launder it. Busy children like this
have no time for morbidness or recrimination. When
they go to bed they are so deliciously weary that
they drop off to sleep, and, with rare exceptions, are
no further responsibility until morning.

‘We are trying hard to speak good English,’’
Mrs. Barrett tells you. ‘‘We listen carefully to our
own and to others’ mistakes. Sometimes, however,
we have an example like this: ‘That girl,’ a new
pupil declares, pointing to a classmate, ‘made this
mistake. She said, ‘‘I’s gwine ter school.’? She
should have said, ‘‘I is fur ter gwine ter school.’’ ’ 2

The pronunciation of ‘‘potatoes’’ instead ot
‘« *taters’? was gained in short time by the promise
that when every girl should say it correctly, sweet
potatoes would be served three times on one day.
The girls give recitations and even plays in which
they use their newly-acquired, correct speech.

The work to acquire character and knowledge is
accompanied by equally important health work. A
colored physician holds a clinic at the school, seeing
that each child has a clean bill of health before she
goes out on parole. There have been but three deaths
during the eleven years that the school has been
established.190 PORTRAITS IN COLOR

After a girl is seventeen, she is eligible for parole.
The State has not yet provided a parole officer, and
the work of investigating the homes to which a girl
may be sent has to be done largely by correspond-
ence.

“Such a terrible creature as I am thought to be,”’
Mrs. Barrett says, looking unusually mischievous.
““You see, I must know where my children are going,
since until they are twenty-one they are under my
care. Consequently, I have to demand that the em-
ployer give me references. At first, the women were
angry at this. They couldn’t understand the de-
mands I made upon them. They must assure me that
Lindy, when she went out to work, would be given
a bed with two sheets and sufficient bedding; that
she have facilities for taking a bath; and that she
must sleep in her employer’s home. You know the
little outhouses where colored servants sleep, with-
out protection from anyone who may happen along?
Lindy must also be given some time to herself, and
encouraged to go to church. I insist also that she
have a wage. My girls are not to be paid in board
and old clothes only. I could never have succeeded
as I have in my demands, except that my Board has
stood loyally back of me. Such wonderful white
women! You know,’’ Mrs. Barrett says this with all
the emphasis in her power, ‘‘we cannot do the best
social welfare work unless, as in this school, the two
races undertake it together.’’

‘‘A new teacher is afraid at first of these chil-
dren,’’ Mrs. Barrett went on, ‘‘but after a little sheJANIE PORTER BARRETT 191

forgets what they have done. Sometimes they have
committed terrible crimes. There was the Virginia
Christian case. A girl, represented as fifteen, killed
a white woman by jabbing a towel down her throat
and strangling her. How I wanted to have that girl
on this farm! But she was proved later to be over
seventeen and she suffered capital punishment. You
see, a white woman had struck Virginia, and you
must realize that is a dangerous thing to do. From
the time she can understand anything, the Negro
mother dins into her daughter, ‘Don’t never let a
white woman touch you.’ Virginia was beside her-
self, and before she knew it she had killed the puny
woman who struck her. One of my girls on parole
knocked down a man who slapped her and then
threw a pail of garbage over him. He was in his Sun-
day clothes. But if a colored woman used corporal
punishment, it would be accepted. It is not used
here, however. If it produced virtue to be whipped,
these children would be angels. They’ve had little
but that sort of discipline at home. Here, they are
praised for their good deeds, and if they err, they
lose privileges. These privileges can always be won
again. It’s amazing how much they care for their
good standing. I have extra credits that can be used
not only in restoring good standing, but as money to
buy pop-corn and candy at our festivals. But almost
invariably they go for eredits, if credits are low.”’

There are many stories to tell about the girls
when they leave school. Occasionally failure comes,
but more often success. Rebecca is married and liv-192 PORTRAITS IN COLOR

ing happily with her husband and family. Hazel has
a really lovely home in Richmond, and a hard-work-
ing, devoted husband. There is no excuse for dwell-
ing overmuch on tragedy in writing of the girls who
go out into the world after their training at Peake’s
farm. The successes far outnumber the failures.
That is part of what keeps Janie Barrett so engag-
ingly young. Work is life-giving when one can wit-
ness such attainment.

It was when Janie Porter was thirteen that her
mother and her white mistress fought for her future.
The white woman had a carefully thought out plan.
The girl should go North and receive a thorough
education. And then she should escape from her race.
She was light enough to pass for white, at least in
the North. It was unendurable to think of her spend-
ing her days among the blacks, an ignorant, despised
people. The child was lovely, gay, refined. She should
be among her equals.

Her mother had a different conception. She wanted
her child for her own, but above all she wanted her
to be honest. She was colored and she should go out
into the colored world.

In the battle, the colored woman won. Janie went
to Hampton to learn to sweep and to dust and even
to make a garden—degrading work, according to the
feeling at that time. And she has been able to turn
all this, every subject that she studied, to the finest
use. She has had a happy married life, and has two
brilliant daughters at college. Of course she has met
with insult, but her mistress armed her against that.JANIE PORTER BARRETT 193

She understands the differences within the white
race. What she might have achieved as a white
woman we can never know, but there is little likeli-
hood that she would have been given the impulse
to service that came from Hampton Institute. She
has achieved much, and I love to think of her as she
sits among her girls, never nervous or fidgeting, a

serene, happy presence, filled with a beautiful and
practical love of humanity.Clean the spitoons, boy.

Detroit,

Chicago,

Atlantie City,

Palm Beach.
Clean the spitoons.
The steam in hotel kitchens
And the smoke in hotel lobbies,
And the slime in hotel spitoons:
Part of my life.

Hey, boy!

A nickel,

A dime,

A dollar,
Two dollars a day.

Hey, boy!

* * * * *

Langston Hughes

* *

A bright bowl of brass is beautiful to the Lord.
Bright, polished brass like the cymbals

Of King David’s dancers,
Like the wine cups of Solomon.
Hey, boy!

A clean spitoon on the altar of the Lord.
A clean, bright spitoon all newly polished—

At least I can offer that.
Com’mere, boy!

194

Tuts is Langston Hughes, polishing the brass
spitoons when he is not running errands for loungers
in the hotel lobby ; and when his polishing is finished,
finding a cymbal of King David’s dancers or Solo-
mon’s wine-cup.

Hughes is the vagabond of Negro poets. He lovesLANGSTON HUGHES

the untrodden road, the joy of the unexpected,
whether it be in the open country or in and out of
bright city streets. But the vagabond has little
chance to gratify his roving spirit in this day of
organized society save as he works his eight or ten
or twelve hours. So Hughes, handsome, charming of
manner, takes such a job as a colored boy can get—
waiter with tray on uplifted palm, omnibus boy,
dropping pats of butter on diners’ plates, porter—

I must say

Yes, sir,

To you all the time.

Yes, sir!

Yes, sir!

All my days

Climbing up a great big mountain

Of yes, sirs!

‘ ’

Klevator boy, ‘‘goin’ up an’ down, up an’ down,’

until he decides

 

I been runnin’ this

Elevator too long.

Guess I’ll quit now.
Truck gardener’s helper, errand boy, always among
people, and always seeking to avoid monotony.

Such a lad as this would surely run away to sea.
He tried his luck three times. Once he was cabin
boy on a freighter that carried him past the Azores
and the Canary Islands to Africa itself, the ‘‘ Mother-
land,’’ the coast ‘‘long, low, bare, rocky.’’ He saw
Senegal and the Gold Coast, the Kru boys bathing
naked on the deck, the market place of Lagos, the
delta of the Niger, the little black girls with henna-196 PORTRAITS IN COLOR

dyed nails and bare feet. Sailor-like, he brought
home a monkey, which his mother had difficulty in
disposing of. Another time he was in Paris, vaga-
bonding, until, all his money gone, he secured a posi-
tion as doorboy, and earned enough to wander on.
He had a heavenly month at Lake Garda visiting
Italian acquaintances. Later he lost his money and
passport and joined the beachcombers at Genoa wait-
ing for the ship that would take him home. It soon
arrived. What officer could resist his pleasant smile
and readiness to do whatever came up? He was a
sailor again, painting the ship’s woodwork. He
cruised among the islands of the Mediterranean
and touched at Spanish ports. In Valencia he and
his buddy went on a glorious spree, and drank thirst-
ily of the sweet wine. In the autumn of 1924 he was
back in New York, his voyage ended. He began,
more seriously than before, to offer his brass bowls,
his bits of verse that seemed so slight and revealed
so much.

Instead of running errands for a ship’s steward,
Langston Hughes might have worked his way
through the University of Kansas as he supposed he
would when as a boy he went to school in Lawrence.
Or the Italian family at Lake Garda might have
known him as a student of some foreign university,
as his father planned his future. But he would not
expatriate himself; and Kansas middle-class re-
spectability as he grew up was not enticing. He went
his own way in his own manner as a poet should.

He is a Westerner, born in Missouri and educatedLANGSTON HUGHES 197

in Kansas, Illinois, and Cleveland, Ohio. His father
and mother early separated, Langston remaining in
his mother’s charge. While her work at domestic
service demanded much of her time, she saw to it
that he was well cared for, sent him to public school,
and, if any discrimination crept in, went herself
to protest against it. The small colored world in
Lawrence was alert on the race question, discussed
the relative virtues of the Washington and Du Bois
policies, and took the Crisis. In school there was little
prejudice, though the boy noted that he was not in-
vited to the children’s parties. He accompanied his
mother to church when she could manage it, but he
hated to go. He enjoyed revivals, however, and with
his grandmother, a non-conformist like himself, went
to the camp-meetings, joining in the shouting. One
summer his father appeared, picked him up, and
took him for the school vacation to Mexico, where
he saw strange things and felt very homesick. He
was graduated from the Central High School in
Cleveland and was class poet. (He obstinately re-
fuses to recall any lines of the class poem.) Then his
father came again and persuaded him to live with
him, for a time at least, in Mexico.

Langston Hughes found himself far up in the
mountains, at Yoluca, the highest habitable valley
in Mexico. The place was beautiful, but very cold.
And the father was cold, a business man, who meas-
ured life in terms of money and profit. He was as-
sistant manager in an electric light plant, and was
also in charge of a number of estates, abandoned by198

 

PORTRAITS IN COLOR

their owners in the revolution. He himself had lost
a good deal because of the unstable government. A
prodigious worker, he could keep at his tasks
eighteen hours a day without diversion. He wanted
his son to be interested in the business, offering to
educate him if he would go abroad away from race
prejudice. While in Yoluca, Langston taught English
in a Mexican school, and to his disgust grew pedantic
in his own speech. Despite the romantic surround-
ings, the life in Mexico was hard, drab. Two tempera-
ments were clashing; two Negroes were showing op-
posing attitudes on the color problem. The father
wished his handsome, clever son to abandon America
and his race. He should study abroad and then re-
turn to Mexico, where the two would grow prosper-
ous together. The son wanted something quite dif-
ferent. If he went to college, it should be in America.
If he worked, it should not be at the blinding pace
that left no energy for the gay, youthful things of
life. Moreover, he had no desire to separate himself
from the race to which his mother belonged. He was
devoted to his mother—worker in white women’s
kitchens but valiant fighter against race prejudice.
His father was alien to him. So after a year they
compromised, the son returning to the United States
to study at Columbia and receiving some financial
help.

Hughes chafed at Columbia. He did not have
enough money to live without worry, and he was
critical of his instructors and of the value of uni-
versity training. He was beginning to write verse,LANGSTON HUGHES 199

verse that was finding its way to the colored publi-
cations, especially to the Crisis. His life, he felt,
was his own. No university should possess it, no busi-
ness. In the spring of his first college year, he
definitely broke with his father, and with thirteen
dollars in his pocket went on the open road. After
his voyagings he returned in 1924, twenty-two years
of age, to New York. Here he met Carl Van Vechten,
who took a keen interest in his verse. The next year
his first volume of poems appeared, The Weary
Blues. It received warm praise from the critics and
had a remarkable sale. His second volume, Fine
Clothes to the Jew, was printed early in 1927.
Some months before his first volume was pub-
lished, he was in Washington with his mother. He
did clerical work for a time, but he grew unutterably
weary of sorting cards and putting them into boxes,
and left to take a job as ’bus boy in a hotel. Vachel
Lindsay, stopping where he was employed, happened
to hear of him, and that The Weary Blues was com-
ing out in a few days, and read some of the poems at
a fashionable Washington gathering. The news-
papers featured the reading and showed a picture
of Langston Hughes with a waiter’s tray. The cul-
tured colored world of Washington was indignant,
not only at the picture, but at the contrariness of a
poet who would rather work at domestic service
than at cataloguing. But they forgave him, and pre-
pared a banquet at which he was to be the chief
guest. He failed to attend because his mother was
not invited. ‘‘Shortly after that,’’ he says, ‘‘I made200 PORTRAITS IN COLOR

my first speech. I had been asked to talk to the
students at the Dunbar (colored) High School. *I
told them that they ought to go out and make money
where they were paid a living wage, no matter what
the work was. I was truly eloquent upon the dignity
of labor.’’ Washington is filled with poorly paid gov-
ernment officials, white and colored, and Hughes’s
speech may have stirred the boys and girls to think-
ing a little differently of the future. His friends
would not let him remain at his hotel task, however ;
college was insisted upon; and at length he was per-
suaded to go on with his studies, whimsically choos-
ing, not Harvard or Chicago, but Lincoln, a small
Negro college in Pennsylvania. Here the young men
are all pretty much on an equal basis; whatever hard
work is to be done they all do; and they are taught
by men devoted to their subjects and to the Negro
race. At Harvard he would have needed to work
for his support, and he had had enough of that at
Columbia. ‘‘If you go to a white college,’’ he says,
“‘you should go as an equal of the other students. It
is bad psychology to rush from the classroom to wait
at some restaurant.’’ He lives simply, and studies,
and writes bits of verse and seems to have no regrets
for the foreign university that he might have at-
tended.

Langston Hughes’s verse deals principally with
the life of the Negro. His years of wandering have
but slightly touched his poetic imagination. He has
some verses of the sea, ‘‘a wilderness of waves,LANGSTON HUGHES 201

a desert of water’’; but for the most part he sings
of the people of his race. And of the humble peo-
ple, the boy playing at craps, the little girl of the
cabaret, the black farm laborer toiling with his bun-
dle on his back along the Northern road. He has been
much criticized by the intelligentsia of his race for
not writing of them; to which he is quoted as answer-
ing: ‘‘The only true and lasting art that an artist
an. produce is that based upon what he himself
knows best. I know the humble side of Negro life
and that is what I have written about in my way.
At least two-thirds of our people belong to the lower
class, and I myself belong to that class, so why
should I not write about it? Let some of those who
know the upper class write about the upper class.”’
No other Negro writer has done so much to reveal
the humble people of his race as Langston Hughes,
unless we except Paul Laurence Dunbar. But Dun-
bar’s rhymes were of the happy, plantation blacks
of whom his mother told him; the blacks who went
to spelling bees, and fiddled, and picked the banjo,
and swung their partners right and left in the dance.
He drew happy pictures of Melindy singing, of
Mammy cooking apple dumplings, of love-making
under the moon, with the frogs croaking from the
nearby pond. His philosophy, when the Negro stole
his master’s chicken, was summed up in two im-
mortal lines:
Folks ain’t got no right to censuah othar folks about dey habits;
Him dat give de squir’ls bushtails made de bobtails fu’ de rabbits.202 PORTRAITS IN COLOR

Dunbar lived in another age than Langston Hughes
and wrote of another Negro, but the two were alike
in their love for humble folk.

When hard luck overtakes you

Nothin’ for you to do,

When hard luck overtakes you

Nothin’ for you to do.

Gather up yo’ fine clothes

An’ sell ’em to de Jew.

So Langston Hughes sings of hard luck, using the
“‘blues’’ form, to which he often returns. For the
most part his pictures are of city Negroes, dwellers
in tenements where the jazz band sounds across the
street, and victrola and radio repeat their monoto-
mous machine-music. Here is the man dressed up,
‘*clothes cleaned just like new,’’ who yet

Ain’t got nobody
For to call me sweet.

Around the corner is
That crazy little yaller girl
With blue-green eyes,
who cries in the cabaret. A poor boy complains

Since I come up North de
Whole damn world’s turned cold.

And trudging up the road from the South comes the
migrant with all his possessions on his back, needing
someone to help him carry his load. Gin Mary is

again before the judge without friend to speak for
her. Ruby Brown wasShe entered the sinister, shuttered house, where she
was paid more than in the white man’s kitchen. ‘‘A

    
 
   
 

LANGSTON HUGHES

Young and beautiful
And golden like the sunshine
That warmed her body.

Ruined Gal’’ stands by the river:

The gipsy often shows his hard-luck card to
Langston Hughes, but sometimes happiness peeps
around the corner. He finds Joy, slim, dancing Joy,

Standin’ by de lonesome riverside,
After de boat done gone,

Po’ weary me
Won’t be nobody’s bride,

Cause I is long gone wrong.

Standin’ by de weary riverside
When de boat comes in,

Po’ lonesome me
Won’t meet nobody,

Cause I ain’t got no friend.

gay, laughing Joy

And in the cabaret the girl dancing with her man

tells you

ealls

Driving the butcher’s cart
In the arms of the butcher boy.

When mah man looks at me
He knocks me off my feet.

He’s got those ’lectric-shockin’ eyes, an’
The way he shocks me sho is sweet.

With poignant note the little bastard black boy

I am your son, white man.204

 

PORTRAITS IN COLOR

And reminiscent of camp-meeting days that he knew,
are poems of The Judgment Day, Prayer Meeting,
Angel Wings, and, most beautiful of all, Feet o’
Jesus:

At de feet o’ Jesus,
Sorrow like a sea.

Lordy, let yo’ merey

Come driftin’ down on me.
At de feet o’ Jesus,

At yo’ feet I stand,

O, ma little Jesus,

Please reach out yo’ hand.

Langston Hughes is a very young man still. It
would be showing temerity to predict his future. In
a verse often modern in its form, yet touched with
the melody and rhythm of his people, he has given
us unforgettable pictures. Better than any other
Negro writer today he shows us the hearts of hum-
ble, sensitive, erring colored folk. Will his verse
continue to improve as it has thus far with each
year? Will he turn to some other field? Drama, per-
haps? We shall watch with eagerness. In the mean-
time, if he ever grows discouraged, we would tell
him to remember his own words, in Mother to Son:
So, boy, don’t you turn back.

Don’t you set down on the steps

Cause you find it’s kinder hard.

Don’t you fall now,—

For U’se still goin’, honey,

se still climbin’,

An’ life for me ain’t been no crystal stair.Paul Robeson

Pauw Rossson, before he was twenty, won national
fame at Rutgers College in football. He was chosen
by Walter Camp in 1918 for the ‘‘All-American
Team.’’ In 1924 he again achieved fame, this time
in the leading roles of two of Eugene O’Neill’s plays.
He was acclaimed ‘‘a superb actor, extraordinarily
sincere and eloquent.’’ In 1925 he captured the New
York and London concert stage. There were musical
critics bold enough to rank his singing of the Negro
Spirituals with Chaliapin’s interpretation of Rus-
sian folk-songs. Certainly, few young men of any
race or color have stood, in seven years, so many
times in the limelight, have received such unstinted
praise.

Robeson was born in 1898 at Princeton, New Jer-
sey. He early lost his mother. The other children
were much older than he and soon left home, and
he became the close companion of his elderly father.
The Reverend William D. Robeson had been born
a slave in North Carolina. He had run away from his
master at fifteen, had managed to put himself
through Lincoln University, and had entered the
ministry. He was a man of high principles, possessed
of great dignity and of a wonderful voice. At his
wife’s death, his sisters came up from North Caro-
lina to keep house for him, and Paul grew up in
Southern surroundings, though the latitude might
205206 PORTRAITS IN COLOR

 

say otherwise. His mother had been a Philadelphian
from an old colored family, the Bustills. But his
childhood surroundings were of the South, and in
his home he heard the soft intonations that he re-
produces so well.

If, however, he lived in the atmosphere of North
Carolina at night, he was in the boisterous, hustling
North during much of the day. Educated in the pub-
lie schools among white boys, he joined them freely
and had a good time. The color line did not trouble
him much. The boys liked him and his attention to his
studies made him popular with his instructors.
Teachers like to have good students in their classes,
whatever the race. It is the dull colored child who
runs danger of race discrimination in the mixed
school. Robeson was good-natured, friendly, and
stood high in his studies.

When he was thirteen, the family moved to Som-
erville, New Jersey, where his father ministered to
a small group of rural Negroes. He heard their sing-
ing at revival meetings and learned to bring to the
Spirituals the simplicity and sincerity that makes
him so important a figure on the concert platform.
He was in high school at Somerville and after his
graduation won in open competition a Rutgers state
scholarship, entering college in 1915.

At Rutgers he became a great man. Indeed he
achieved a greatness which, to the mass of Ameri-
cans, will always outstrip his artistic triumphs. The
halo about the hero of the sporting page is of a
greater brilliance than any aura the theatrical pagePAUL ROBESON 207
can offer. And Paul Robeson was again and again in
the headlines of the sporting news. He brought Rut-
gers from comparative obscurity into the brightest
limelight. Even today the memory of his glory makes
him a hero whenever he goes back to New Bruns-
wick. If he enters a shop to buy a necktie, the shop-
keeper begs him to accept it. On the campus he is
adored. Did he not play end on the Rutgers team
that defeated Cupid Black’s Naval Reserves in the
season of 1917?

The Naval Reserves was an attempt at an All-
American team, an eleven made up of star players
from Cornell, Yale, Syracuse, Dartmouth, and other
colleges. It played Rutgers at Ebbets Field, Brook-
lyn, and was defeated, fourteen to nothing. Sporting
writers sent in pages of copy concerning ‘‘a tall,
tapering Negro in a faded crimson sweater,’’ “‘a
blaze of red and black,’’ ‘‘a veritable Othello of
battle,’? who played left-end on the Rutgers team
and saw to it that in forty-four minutes of play the
Naval Reserve aggregation made exactly two first
downs. ‘‘A grim, silent and compelling figure,”’ the
Negro met every offensive play and stopped it,
whether it was led by Charlie Barrett of Cornell
and All-American fame, by Gerrish or by Gardner.
He was everywhere, seldom playing in his own posi-
tion, ‘‘opening up holes for his backs, providing
interferences, handling forward passes, tackling,
diagnosing plays, and getting quickly to danger
points. His ability to look ahead in a game was un-
canny; not a maneuvre but he saw it in advance,208 PORTRAITS IN COLOR

 

not a play but he was in it.’’? He carried the ball
only once, but then it was from receiving a faultless
forward; pass, and he went over the line for a
touchdown. ‘‘His main job was drilling holes for his
backs, and if ever a backfield was presented with a
fine, clear avenue of daylight, it was that of Rutgers
following in the wake of Robeson’s carving.’’ The
newspapers called him the ‘‘rover.’’ ‘‘He seemed
to have carte blanche to wander over the field at will,
and at the same time he managed to be in the precise
centre of every play.”’

There are two types of successful football men.
One plays with a smashing, bulldog singleness of
purpose. His mind is set on the line behind the goal-
posts; he clinches the ball under his arm, sets his
jaw, and woe betide any tackler that gets in his way.
The other is the strategist. He plays the game with
his mind as well as with his muscles. He looks ahead
and anticipates manceuvres, and sees the weak spot,
just before, not just after, the opposing team breaks
through.

Robeson belonged to the latter class. Six feet three
inches in height, two hundred pounds in weight, pos-
sessed of a phenomenal length of arm—these things
alone would have made him a player above the aver-
age; but he had a football genius’s brain. And the
combination has only once or twice been equalled
in the whole history of the gridiron. He was uni-
versally chosen All-American End for 1918, Men like
Walter Camp and Louis Lee Arms said he was thePAUL ROBESON 209

greatest player of the year. Some even said he was
the greatest player that ever chased a football.

Robeson received praise like this, and more praise
those years he was at college. Of course he enjoyed
it, but he never learned to look upon the winning of
a football game as the most important thing in life.
He loved sport and was a four-letter man—football,
basketball, baseball, and track athletics. A game was
a glorious thing, but you played it for the love of
it, not with murder in your heart.

His father had much influence with him during
those college years. Together they talked over mathe-
matics and Latin and football. The elder Robeson
was not willing that his son should neglect his studies
for his athletics. Nor did he. His first-year marks
were phenomenal—seven A’s and one B. In his
Junior year he won the Phi Beta Kappa key. He
was awarded first prize in every speaker’s competi-
tion that he entered. The college was proud to have
its leading athlete a scholar as well. He had a fine
mind and a strong, healthy body, and when he
graduated in 1919, it was with honor.

What next? His father, who had died in 1918, had
hoped that he would go into the ministry, but his
son could not agree to this. So together they had de-
cided upon the profession of law, and after gradua-
tion, Robeson entered the Columbia Law School.
Here he studied under great teachers, held a fine
record for scholarship, and on graduation was taken
into the office of Louis W. Stotesbury, a Rutgers man210 PORTRAITS IN COLOR

and a New York lawyer of prominence. But when
he was preparing to take his state bar examinations,
something happened that changed the tenor of his
life—he fell in with that great genius, Hugene
O'Neill.

The Provincetown Playhouse that O’Neill made
famous, had already produced one of his Negro
plays, The Emperor Jones, with Charles Gilpin in
the title réle. Now O’Neill had written another with
a bolder theme, All God’s Chillun Got Wings. It
dealt with intermarriage between the races, and it
needed a colored man, not only with dramatic power,
but with sensitiveness and with the intelligence to
interpret a difficult theme. Robeson had been on the
New York boards a few matinees in a play called
Taboo which had a short run on Broadway. Someone
suggested his name at the Provincetown; he was
given O’Neill’s text and learned the part of Jim
Harris. To his friends there was something amusing
in his depicting a Negro who always failed when he
came into competition with whites; but Robeson
showed himself an actor from the start. He gave a
tender and beautiful performance of the Negro youth
defending the white girl who had been his sweetheart
when they were children together. There was much
controversy regarding the play, but it met with mod-
est success at the Provincetown and later at the
Greenwich Village Theatre.

Robeson revealed his dramatic talent in All God’s
Chillun Got Wings, but it was in a revival of The
Emperor Jones, a less subtle but more spectacularPAUL KOBESON 211

drama, that he took the theatrical world by storm.
Again one could quote pages of exuberant praise.
ven so difficult a critic to please as George Jean
Nathan described Paul Robeson as one of the most
eloquent, impressive and convincing actors he had
seen for twenty years. The Emperor Jones was taken
to London, and while it had a short run, since Lon-
don today will not tolerate a gloomy play, the Eng-
lish erities were as enthusiastic over Robeson’s art as
the American ones. ‘‘An amazing individual achieve-
ment, a breathless exhibition of power and pathos.”’
So the Westminster Gazette said, and one feels the
breathlessness of the English audience, as this black
man of magnificent physique stands up before them
and gives O’Neill’s powerful lines in his deep, reso-
nant voice, a voice that makes their careful speech
insignificant. Robeson’s London season was an ar-
tistic triumph.

That summer he decided to give up the practice
of the law. He had married a woman of Spanish-
Negro descent, beautiful, capable, a worker in the
bacteriological department of the Presbyterian Hos-
pital. She proved a true helpmate. He had enjoyed
his legal training, but the outlook was not alluring.
He had left Mr. Stotesbury’s office, and he saw little
ahead but petty cases of litigation or a politician’s
career. As a lawyer, limitations stared him in the
face, but in his art there was no limitation except
that of his own power. So he cast his lot with the
drama and closed his office.

But no drama was at hand. Plays had to be writ-212 PORTRAITS IN COLOR

ten for this towering black man. While he was wait-
ing for a réle and a producer, he turned to another
art, music. :

The rendering of Negro Spirituals was becoming
popular in New York. Robeson had heard these
songs in his boyhood as the older generation had
given them, simply, without diminuendo tail-pieces
or a conductor’s pounding of time at each new line.
His friend, Lawrence Brown, a distinguished musi-
cian, had written accompaniments for some of the
songs, and together they planned to give a Sunday
concert at the Greenwich Village Theatre. Three
days before the evening had arrived, when the sale
of the tickets was discouragingly slow, Walter White
asked them to his home to meet a few of his friends.
There, with Lawrence Brown at the grand piano,
head thrown back, Robeson in a voice of remarkable
depth and beauty gave the ‘‘Sorrow Songs.’’? He
sang, too, Water Boy:

You Jack o’ Di’monds,
You Jack o’ Di’monds,
Ah knows yo’ of old, boy,
Ah knows yo’ of old.

Yo’ rob ma pocket

Yo’ rob-a ma pocket

Yo’ rob-a ma pocket

Ob silber an’ gold.

Heywood Broun was among those who listened
and the next morning he told his thousands of read-
ers of the new singers. So successfully did he de-
scribe the harmony and aching loveliness of the
previous night’s music, that when Sunday eveningPAUL ROBESON 213

came, men and women were turned away from the
Greenwich Village Theatre, and the concert had to
be repeated a few weeks later. Thus Robeson came
to his third triumph as a singer of the Spirituals.

He gave concerts in a number of cities of the
East and his success was immediate. Again the
critics showered praise upon him. ‘‘He combined
with a rich and mellow voice a dramatic restraint
and power that seemed to hold unheard thunder be-
hind each song. Here was bedrock, fundamental,
primitive.’? Here was a man who provided a thrill
to be equalled only by Chaliapin when he sang
Moussorgsky.

Athlete, actor, singer. It is the year 1927. Paul
Robeson is not yet thirty, and three times he has
kicked a goal.

The Negro has been accused, and not without
some warrant, of vanity. Those colored men who
first succeeded, whose attainments placed them
above their enslaved fellows, measured themselves
by the Negro standard and boasted of their advance.
Later the successful Negro used as his measure the
attainment of the white, and bruited abroad his
equality. When praise came from the dominant race
it was difficult to receive it without strutting. But
Paul Robeson has been fairly buried in encomiums
and yet has retained his natural modesty, his unas-
suming manner. The football cheers and the prac-
tised throwing of laurel wreaths by the critics has
not spoilt his quiet simplicity. Above all, it has not
dimmed his keenness of insight. He can look at his214

 

PORTRAITS IN COLOR

work impartially. He can realize that today Negro
art is the ‘‘craze,’’? and that whereas, formerly, the
ability of the race was underestimated, now the nov-
elty of its genius leads to the overrating of its
achievements. He believes that the only way prop-
erly to evaluate his own work is to measure it by
his highest possibilities.

When he went home at the end of his first college
year and told his father of his phenomenally high
rating, seven A’s and one B, the older man asked:
‘‘What’s the idea of the B?’”’ That is, if Paul Robe-
son could get seven A’s he could get eight. Whether
or not he outranked his classmates was irrelevant.
It was his job to get from himself all of which he
was capable.

With this standard before him Robeson makes us
feel that we have many wonderful hours to antici-
pate. He has within him an immense reservoir of
power, and he has only begun to use it. Great plays
must be written for him, plays that will show many
phases in the life of the black man. Black Boy, a
tawdry drama, in which he appeared for a few weeks
in 1926, gave him some new experience. He refused
the leading réle in In Abraham’s Bosom, the Pultizer
Prize play, weary of depicting the frustrated Negro.
But something new will come. And in the meantime
there are the songs of his race to interpret. With
each year he will gain in technique, while losing
nothing of his native power.

William Dean Howells became interested in Paul
Dunbar’s poems before he ever saw the poet. WhenPAUL ROBESON 215

at length it was arranged that the two should meet,
and the novelist from his window watched the col-
ored youth walk up his path, he exclaimed, ‘‘Thank
God, he’s black!’’ Howells felt that no Nordic could
claim this youth’s genius. So those who believe in
the genius of the Negro look with satisfaction at
Paul Robeson, black, his strong shoulders set, his

big, firm mouth smiling, as he comes down the path.
Back of him is notable achievement, and ahead, un-
measured heights. To have great artistic and dra-
matic power, and at the same time a clear, steady
mind that can criticize and evaluate, is given to few
artists of any race.Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller

On September 30, 1899, a young colored girl, small,
with‘a golden-brown skin and pleasant but serious
expression, sailed for Paris. She was a graduate of
the Philadelphia School of Industrial Arts, where
she had studied for three years. Philadelphia was
one of the first cities in the country to give serious
consideration to artistic talent in the public schools,
and she had benefited by its generosity, had been
to Liberty Tadd’s, where one student from each
class might enter, and had later gone into the In-
dustrial Arts School. Modest by nature, she had
hoped for nothing more than this, but her talent,
especially in modelling, was considerable, and the
principal of the school had told her she ought to go
to Paris. She suspected that he had told the same
thing to her mother, for when she had said, with a
little gasp at the audacity, ‘‘I think I’ll go to [amish
her mother had acquiesced. There would be little
money to spend, they were sacrificing at home to
send her, but she had been promised a cheap room at
the American Girls’ Club, and for the rest, she could
go without things. A great instructor and a place to
work—this was the limit of her desire.

The day we land from a ship is not the most cheer-
ful in the world. She made the trip from the boat
to the city in the early morning and reached Paris

and the club house, hungry and tired, at breakfast
216META VAUX WARRICK FULLER 217

time. The secretary of the Club seated comfortably
before her coffee and rolls looked up with a smile
when Mlle. Warrick was announced. Instantly the
smile disappeared and the secretary said curtly:
‘You did not write me that you were colored.”’
That was America’s welcome to Paris. She learnt
swiftly that it was not to white Americans that she
was to turn for sympathy or assistance. Of course,
she was not permitted to remain at the Club House,
and after the secretary had placed her in a hotel
some of whose guests, while kindly, were not above
suspicion, she saw that she must start out to fend
for herself. She made the acquaintance of two Eng-
lish girls who wanted to get rid of their studio lease
and was able to sublet from them. This gave her
the right place to work for which she had always
longed. As her French improved, she made French
acquaintances. One Paris girl was especially devoted
because her little American friend—quite uncon-
scious of what she was doing—had brought about
a reconciliation between her and her former fiancé.
Meta had thrown the two together and their affec-
tion had done the rest. But life in Paris was very
busy and rather uneventful. The day’s work done,
the café in favor for the time being was sought,
and over excellent food for which a phenomenally
low sum was paid, one met acquaintances and had
the social good time of the day. Occasionally, Henry
Tanner, the famous Negro artist, would drop in,
glad to meet this talented girl from his own city.
There was no money for pleasure, and the Paris

 

PRM eed218 PORTRAITS IN COLOR

across the Seine of the tourist, with its theatres
and opera and Great White Way, was unvisited.
Night brought the end of a hard day’s work and
sleep that should refresh one to start in on the mor-
Tow.

But it was slow getting started. Meta Warrick
went to St. Gaudens, who told her that all Ameri-
cans needed drawing and advised her to go to
Raphael Collin or Bouguereau. She discarded the
thought of Bouguereau, but studied for a time under
Collin, then a popular teacher. With another student
she would go to the Ecole des Beaux-Arts to hear
lectures on anatomy, and there were the museums
to visit and revisit. But she wanted to get clay into
her hands again. In her second year she was at
Colarossi’s, modelling, receiving criticism from Rol-
lard and Injalbert. It was interesting but slightly
disappointing. Hach man wanted to put his tag upon
her. The criticism of the students was more exhil-
arating. They could be terribly severe but they re-
Joiced in originality.

In the summer of 1899 the Paris Exposition brought
many colored Americans to the city. One met them
at the exhibition under the charge of Thomas J. Cal-
loway of Washington and arranged by Burghardt
Du Bois depicting the progress of the Negro in the
United States. This meant a small commission to
Meta Warrick, for some of the models had been
badly broken and she was charged with putting them
together. With a colored girl who had come over to
study music, she took another studio. Here she en-META VAUX WARRICK FULLER 219

tertained her friends from America, showing them
with pride what a Paris studio was like. One of her
visitors remembers vividly such an evening at her
home, when she was again with her Negro friends.
They all had so much to tell one another. Then, when
conversation lagged, Meta picked up a small stringed
instrument, a guitar perhaps, and strumming the ac-
companiment sang a little French song, a gay theme,
that repeated itself with fascinating variation. Her
eyes sparkled and she was very happy. Two French
girls came in, students, who joined the company.
The evening was full of music and good times. But
when the Exposition was over, life went on its very
quiet way again.

Before her second year had ended she became
troubled. Her progress had not been sufficient to war-
rant her having come to Paris at all if she must re-
turn now. But could she ask for more time? She
had promised to be away from home no longer than
two years. At the beginning of the twentieth century
it was not as usual for young girls to abandon the
responsibilities of home as it is today. And two
years, in anticipation, had seemed an eternity. Now
she knew that to master a difficult and exacting art,
it was just nothing at all. So she plucked up her cour-
age and asked for one year more, assuring her
mother that she would positively return at the end of
that time. Consent was secured to stay on another
year.

While Meta Warrick was small and gentle her
work was cast in different mould. Everything she220 PORTRAITS IN COLOR

did in those Paris days was powerful and often
weird. She would depict some terrible struggle
against fate or some gruesome fear in a small model
not a foot high. ‘‘Mlle. Warrick nous étonne par
l’audace de ses petites compositions,’ a French
critic wrote of her after her first exhibition. She had
been brought up on ghost stories. Her grandfather
would take her in his lap and by the firelight tell
her thrilling tales; and if sometimes she was fright-
ened she enjoyed the fear, snuggled safely against
his friendly coat. Poe was a favorite author. As she
grew older she read him often and learned his poetry
by heart. In her studio one found Gdipus just after
he had blinded himself, and Les Malheureux,
poverty-stricken men and women trudging along
the road. A cadaverous, crouching figure, only five
inches high, represented A Man Eating His Heart.
In some magazine she had seen a poem of Stephen
Crane’s that furnished her inspiration.

In the desert,

I saw a creature, naked, bestial,

Who, squatting upon the ground,

Held his heart in his hands,

And ate of it.

To look at this figure and then at the young woman
who had created it, was to understand the astonish-
ment of the French critic.

At the beginning of her third year in Paris Meta
Warrick went to Rodin with her work. She carried
the little piece of statuary, A Man Eating His
Heart. Her own heart was in her mouth as sheMETA VAUX WARRICK FULLER 221

stood by the great sculptor. Rodin took it and exam-
ined it in silence for what seemed many minutes.
Again and again he moved his hand slowly down
the back of the crouching figure. At length he spoke.
‘‘Mademoiselle,’’ he said to the excited girl, “vou
are a sculptor. You have the sense of form in your
fingers.”’

After that things moved gloriously. Rodin told
her to bring him anything that she did for criti-
cism, ‘‘And,’’ he added, ‘‘if your work is too cum-
bersome to bring, I will come to you.’’ Her audacity
was admired. She was accounted one of the new
school, bold in conception and execution. She began
to sell her work. A Mr. Bing, with a new gallery,
gave her an exhibition and bought himself three
of her pieces. Two of them he later had cast in
bronze, Les Malheureux and A Man Eating His
Heart. He sent them both, after she had left Paris,
to the new salon where they were exhibited. The
third was in different vein, a gay litle statuette of
a dancing girl. A few years ago Meta Warrick
Fuller read that Loie Fuller had given a statuette
of a dancing girl by Meta Warrick to the Cleveland
museum. Doubtless Mr. Bing had sold it to her. Her
patron encouraged her to the utmost. She was be-
ginning to be known. Everything was favorable.
. . . But the three years were up, she packed her
models, closed her studio, and returned home.

She returned to Philadelphia. With high hopes
she began to do new work, and went to the dealers
with her creations. But there was no Mr. Bing to222 PORTRAITS IN COLOR

 

encourage her. Hveryone said the same thing. ‘‘We
do not buy domestic work. All our art is imported.”’
She took earlier work, impressing upon them that
it had been recently made in Paris, but it was of
no use. There was no foreign paster upon her goods.
And goods were judged by the paster, not by their
lmnaginative appeal.

In 1907 she had one large commission, again se-
cured for her by her friend, Mr. Calloway. The
Jamestown Exhibition held in commemoration of
the landing of the first English settlers at James-
town, Virginia, in 1607, gave her an order for a se-
ries of Negro groups. She signed a contract on Feb-
ruary 27, for fifteen groups with one hundred and
fifty figures, to be delivered May 10. They were to
occupy 150 feet of space. The figures were in the
nature of models, to be dressed in historic costume.
The work was completed and delivered on time.

In 1909, Meta Warrick became Meta Warrick
Fuller, marrying Dr. Solomon C. Fuller of Fram-
ingham, Massachusetts, by birth a Liberian. Dr.
Fuller was at that time neurologist at the Massa-
chusetts state asylum for the insane, situated at
Westboro. He had already built up a reputation
which has increased with the years, and that has
surmounted the prejudice of race. Both his hospital
and private practice today are large.

No home could have been more charming than
that to which the doctor took his artist bride. Here
in three years she found herself -he mother of two
boys, a busy housewife with no chance for her cher-META VAUX WARRICK FULLER 223

ished art. Her tools and her statuary had been left
in storage in Philadelphia. Each month a resolution
would be made to return and pack them, but they
remained in a clutter of boxes and excelsior until
one night the building in which they were stored
took fire and they were burned to ashes. All the Paris
possessions, piano, some cherished furniture, every-
thing but one sculptured head of a young French-
man, were lost.

The loss amounted to tragedy. For a time it blotted
the creative spirit out of the young artist. Her won-
derful hands with their feeling for form, turned only
to housekeeping tasks. But in 1913, a letter came
from Burghardt Du Bois, now in New York editing
the Crisis, asking, even demanding, that she make a
colossal figure of The Spirit of Emancipation. The
Negroes in New York were to celebrate the fiftieth
anniversary of the Emancipation proclamation in
one of the city’s armories. A pageant, written by
Du Bois, was to be given for a number of nights,
and Negro painting, sculpture and handicrafts were
to be on exhibit. Her work should unify the whole,
showing the meaning of emancipation.

The appeal wakened the artist. She bought tools
and in the cellar of her home moulded a statue of
emancipation. It depicted a Negro boy and girl,
inspired by the spirit of light to go forth into the
world. Imagination, power, vigor, returned to her
again.

Since Meta Warrick Fuller has resumed her mod-
elling in a new environment, her themes have224. PORTRAITS IN COLOR

changed. The weird no longer fascinates her. Her
imagination moves rather among the problems of
her race. The gruesome has given place to the sym-
bolic. Frequently, the Negro is her model. At the
Y.M.C.A. in Atlanta, is a bas relief, a medallion, of a
young Negro boy, beginning to feel his strength.
The boy is half sad, half sullen, but beautiful, ap-
pealing. At the Harlem library in New York is a
Negro girl. This model, called Ethiopa Awakening,
is Egyptian in its lines, the awakening as though a
lily began to move from its sheath. The swathed
clothes, and the motion behind them, as the girl
feels her young life, is worthy of the praise that
Rodin gave.

When Meta Warrick Fuller’s work was exhibited
two years ago at the Boston Public Library to il-
lustrate James Weldon Johnson’s lecture on the
creative genius of the American Negro, one of the
art critics wrote, ‘‘She has a flair for symbolic
sculpture, delicately conceived.’’ She at times still
uses the small figure. A baptismal font, made in
memory of the daughter of a minister, is her most
recent work. The font will be placed in a church in
Maine. Moorfield Storey, famous lawyer and friend
of the Negro race, recently sat for her, and the
admirable bas-relief portrait which she modelled,
portraying the fine, delicate features, the look of
kindliness and of high courage, is among the best
things she has done. It has been cast in bronze and
presented to Mr. Storey by tue National Associa-META VAUX WARRICK FULLER 225

tion for the Advancement of Colored People whom
he serves as president.

Life in a Boston suburb carries with it pleasant
contacts. Mrs. Fuller is a member of the Woman’s
Club of Framingham and is on the Art Committee
of the National Federation of Women’s Clubs. She
is one of those who are trying to make sculpture
more friendly and intimate. Why always associate
it, she says, with some colossal soldier or sailor
on a massive pediment? Sculpture should be in the
home. Instead of the line of silver cups that the
champion wins, each one like the other, why not
reward him with some statuette portraying the
sport that he loves? It would indeed be a delight to
own one of her small figures, cast in bronze, of the
swimmer or golfer or tennis player. But the silver
cup represents America’s passion for standardiza-
tion. If the club women can knock off even a chip
of this standardizing we shall be grateful. Mrs.
Fuller is also prominent in the Framingham dra-
matic club, and her studio spills over with costumes
made and in the making. The costuming and lighting
of plays show her knowledge of color as well as of
form.

I once heard a college professor say to a Radcliffe
student when she had completed her course and was
leaving college, ‘‘I am giving you an A. Not so much
for the work that you have done as for the work
that I hope later you are going to do. But,’’ and he
looked her over carefully, ‘‘I fear you will become226 PORTRAITS IN COLOR

involved in domestic complications.’’ Mr. Bing, who
for a time followed his protegée’s career after she
had left Paris, might have echoed the professor’s
fear. Meta Warrick became involved in domesticity,
at first in the old home, later in the new. Had she
stayed on in Paris, cutting loose from her people
and America, she might have attained international
fame, as Tanner did, and there would be no need of
introducing her to intelligent readers. Her artistic
feeling was and is great. She has in her finger tips
a sense of form and within her mind intelligence
and imagination. But like most women of her gener-
ation she has compromised, and doubtless been
glad of it. To have created three strong, able boys
is no mean achievement. But her boys are fast grow-
ing up and we may look forward to new work, con-
ceived with the vigor and imagination that charac-
terized her Paris period, coupled with a deeper
knowledge of life and of the sorrows of her race.Roland Hayes

No other Negro living is so well-known to the public
of America and Europe as Roland Hayes. For ten
years the colored people of this country had listened
with appreciation to his singing, but it was not until
after his English and continental success half-a-
dozen years ago that he became a great figure in
white America. Now he travels across this continent
and back, stopping in our cities North and South,
receiving warm praise from the musical critics and
unstinted applause from the music-loving audiences
who pack the halls to hear him sing. He takes his
place beside the great tenors of the century.

Roland Hayes has won this extraordinary success,
not alone because of his voice, but because of his in-
telligence as well. Nature endowed him with a beauti-
ful musical instrument and she also gave him a fine
mind. Steadily, conscientiously, he has used his mind
in the interpretation of his art. He does not rely on
sentimentality or the inspiration of the moment in
the rendering of a song. Back of his rendition are
patient study and long thought. Not that one thinks
of this. Whistler said that the way to get rid of the
signs of work was more work. So, out of Hayes’s
unstinted toil, comes his gift to us, spontaneous,
effortless.

With his mastery of music is also a mastery of
language. His English, French, German, and Italian

227228 PORTRAITS IN COLOR

satisfy severe critics. Only one with ear attuned to
the delicate differences of sound could so success-
fully speak the vowels and consonants of each
tongue. And with his culture of speech is culture of
manner. King George commanded him to sing for
him a second time, not only that he might hear his
music, but that he might engage him in conversa-
tion.

So much stress is laid today upon the importance
of race and standardized education, that one takes
a sly pleasure when nature raps the knuckles of the
solemn Anglo-Saxon booster. Had such a man seen
Roland Hayes at fifteen, with his mother and two
brothers, one older and one younger, trudging along
the road from Curryville, Georgia, to Chattanooga,
Tennessee, he would have consigned him to the
group of undesirable citizens. The family were too
poor to take a train and wearily carried their few
household possessions. The boy was unmistakably
black. There was no white blood to furnish brains or
talent. If an automobile, speeding down the road,
had crushed out his life, it would have been regret-
table, but no great loss to the country. America had
too many Negroes. Or if one of our educational
standardizers, happening by, had measured child-
hood on the rack of an intelligence test, the shy black
boy, with only a few scattered months of schooling,
unaccustomed to the white man’s ways, would have
been tagged sub-normal, an example of race inferior-
ity.

But no white man noticed him as, with the others,ROLAND HAYES 229

he tramped the fifty miles to their new home. They
had entered upon a great adventure. Curryville was
a settlement in name, but it boasted no centre of
population, was miles from the railroad, and one
scarcely knew where it ended or began. Its ill-
equipped school was open but a few weeks in the
year. Both father and mother, ex-slaves, had farmed
the ten acres of land assigned them at the close of
the Civil War. The father had been dead three years,
and crippled before that, so that the mother had
plowed and planted and cooked and scrubbed and
washed and ironed, while the children, as soon as
they were big enough, helped at many tasks. Their
education had been meagre. They could barely read
and write. But now all this was over. They were go-
ing to a city where there would be graded schools
and where work was paid for in money. All the boys
should be educated at Chattanooga, the little one for
the whole school year, the others interchanging, one
term at school, the next term supporting the family.
With this high future ahead, they climbed up and
down the long hills out of Georgia, north into Ten-
nessee.

Chattanooga furnished Roland Hayes with oceupa-
tion that paid wages, higher even than had been
imagined. In a year he was foreman of the core
department in a sash-weight factory, earning three
dollars a day. His business success, however, was
so valuable to the family that it kept him from ro-
tating at an education, as his mother had planned.
After one term at school, he stayed on his foreman’s230 PORTRAITS IN COLOR

job. Evenings he studied with a colored teacher, add-
ing a little to his small store of learning. He was a
good son and a dependable workman. His mother
took pride in her decision to leave unprogressive
Curryville, and rejoiced at the end of the week in
the money that her son brought her to spend and
to save.

Of course Hayes went to church and sang with
the congregation the Spirituals and the lusty gospel
hymns; but no one commented especially on his
voice. One evening, however, he was given a small
solo part in an anthem rendered by the chureh choir.
The concert was arranged by a young Negro, Arthur
Calhoun, an Oberlin student. Calhoun was impressed
by Roland Hayes’s voice, and after the entertain-
ment was over, walked home with him and suggested
that he should study to be a singer. The words had
no meaning to Hayes. Singing as a profession he
associated only with a dance hall or a music show.
He forgot the conversation, but Calhoun was per-
sistent and arranged one night that the boy should
hear some fine records. He should be shown the pos-
sibilities in music, should listen to noble composi-
tions interpreted by highly-trained voices. Together
they heard some of the world’s great singers—Sem-
brich, Emma Hames, and last, Caruso.

“Tt was as though a bell rang in my heart,’’ Ro-
land Hayes says, as he looks back upon that night.
We who have seen his sensitive face, can picture the
emotion that must have flowed over it—joy, pain, theROLAND HAYES 231

mystery of beauty,—these were revealed in an art
that was to be his own. Arthur Calhoun did more
than even he expected that night.

After this for some years Roland Hayes’s life was
a struggle for an education both in music and in
books. He was a long time securing his mother’s con-
sent to leave the factory. To her it was tomfoolery
to turn a good workman who was earning three dol-
lars a day, into a useless, impoverished singer. But
she let her boy go, handing him fifty dollars, his
share of their savings. After some weeks of travel,
giving concerts at ten cents admission, he reached
Nashville, where he entered the academic depart-
ment of Fisk University. Though nineteen, he was
ready only for the sixth grade, but in music he soon
stood in the first rank. He remained four years at
Fisk. He then spent some months as waiter at the
Pendennis Club in Louisville, where he was able
to save a little money. In 1911, twenty-four years
old, he went Hast with the Fisk Jubilee Singers and
found himself in the city of Boston.

The Jubilee singers gave their programme, were
cordially received, and then went their way. But
they left Roland Hayes behind. He had found a
white friend in the city, a Mr. Putnam, who had
heard him sing at the Pendennis Club, and through
this gentleman he made arrangements to study un-
der Arthur Hubbard, one of the best teachers in the
East if not one of the best in the world. Hubbard
gave Roland Hayes his musical education. The hun-232 PORTRAITS IN COLOR

dreds of thousands who have listened to this tenor’s
beautifully cultivated voice cannot be too thankful
that he fell into such hands.

From nineteen to twenty-five, Hayes had worked
for the education that should have been his in child-
hood. Now came that more nervous, intense struggle,
that few artists can escape, the struggle for public
recognition. And with it went long hours of unskilled
labor. Once he was bell-hop in a hotel, again he was
errand boy in an office. Only a man with unusual
powers of concentration, through those eight years
in Boston, could have kept his art so elevated and
so pure. It was to him then, as it is today, a precious
gift bestowed by his Creator, and ordained to be
given to the world.

Boston was kindly, and Hayes made friends there.
The white men for whom he worked liked him, and
would have helped him more had he approached
them, but he always earned his way, and no concert
of his was subsidized. Occasionally he sang in a
private home. Once he was at a funeral of one of
the Hallowells, and his exquisite rendering of the
Spirituals brought courage to the sorrowful and to
Roland Hayes friends for life. He sang for Dr.
Charles Fleischer at his crowded Sunday services.
Arthur Hubbard, his teacher, writing of him in
Musical America in 1914, said: ‘‘I haven’t had a pu-
pil in my classes for whom I have had a more genu-
ine affection than for this lad, nor have I one who
possesses a keener intelligence or a surer musicalROLAND HAYES 233

feeling and taste.’’ Philip Hale spoke highly of him.
He grew to have local fame, chiefly as a singer of
Spirituals.

Such support as the whites gave could not pos-
sibly have kept Hayes alive, or have given him the
experience that he desired. Colored Boston and
colored America did that. Year after year colored
newspapers and magazines noted where Roland
Hayes was singing—at Howard University, at
Tuskegee, at Atlanta, at Louisville, at the Methodist
church in Orangeburg. Many a colored church gave
him a concert, the two sharing the profits. Debarred
from concert halls except under humiliating condi-
tions, Negroes have built up routes of their own, and
in the smaller cities of the country for many years
have listened to better music than have the whites.
The late Azalia Hackley, Jean De Reszke’s pupil,
Clarence White, violinist, Maud Cuney Hare, author-
ity on Creole songs, Roland Hayes, Marian Anderson
—each has been given a warm reception at colored
churches and halls, while around the corner Negro
ragtime has amused the whites. Roland Hayes would
not amuse, and for the most part the white world
ignored him. But giving concerts on his way, often
for colored, occasionally for whites, he crossed the
continent. In the East he now and then risked a
concert, lost, spent a long time recuperating, risked
again, and made enough to break even. In May, 1915,
he was at Carnegie Hall, at a Music School Settle-
ment benefit. He was the same Roland Hayes then234

 

PORTRAITS IN COLOR

as now, with the same method of singing and beauty
of tone. But Europe had not assured America that
he was great.

Hight years he struggled for recognition. He had
brought his mother to live with him, and at times
the two knew hunger and cold, as in the old days.
In 1918, he decided to take a gamble on a concert
in Symphony Hall. If he were to succeed he must
for a time leave America. He had a dream of Africa,
where he would study the music of his race at its
source. But first he must go to England and see a
little of the world, singing on his way. He was grow-
ing older with every year. If he were to attain suc-
cess it must be soon. He could not afford any longer
to wait.

Against the advice of all the white friends whom
he consulted, he engaged Symphony Hall for a con-
cert. His standing as a musician in Boston was at-
tested by the Boston Symphony Society’s renting
him its auditorium; and while his white friends had
warned him against the risk, they were eager to help
once the step was taken. Colored Boston and its
vicinity rallied also to his support. He went through
nights of anxiety, but the end was triumphant. The
hall was filled and seven hundred people were turned
away. The evening netted him two thousand dol-
lars.

There are people in Boston today who love to
boast that they were patrons and patronesses of
that concert. Reverently they will show you their
programmes. William Lawrence, who has contrib-ROLAND HAYES 235

uted much to Hayes’s success, was there as his ac-
companist. White and colored sat together in the
audience and were enthusiastic in their applause.
‘Critics wrote of the beauty of the Negro tenor’s
voice and the ease with which its lightest note filled
the great hall. The risk had been great, but the tri-
umph was complete.

The spring of 1920 found Roland Hayes in London,
and on May 31 he gave his first concert. Recent up-
risings in British possessions had made the colored
face temporarily unpopular, and while white musi-
cians welcomed Hayes, his success was not imme-
diate. It was a year before he became well-known;
but after King George commanded him to sing at
Buckingham Palace, his public concerts were at-
tended by immense crowds. Why did we not go to
hear him before? was asked on all sides. Fame over-
took him with a rush. The rest of his concerts in
London were packed; he went to Scotland and Ire-
land, and finally was swept off to Paris, where he
gave his first recital at the home of Joseph Salmon,
celebrated violoncellist. He sang forty times in Paris
salons. In 1922, hearing that his mother’s health was
failing, he returned to America. His stay was short.
His mother’s health improved; he could give her
everything she needed, now; and after a concert at
Symphony Hall, January 7, 1923, where, with some
justice, Boston took credit for his recent success, he
returned to Hurope.

Berlin, where they were first distrustful and then
proclaimed him a worthy singer of the ‘‘lieder”’236 PORTRAITS IN COLOR

   

whose diction, whatever language he used, ‘‘ninety-
nine out of a hundred white people might profitably
take as an example’’; Vienna, where incredulity
changed to admiration; Prague, where his first ac-
companist, a German, aroused nationalist feeling
and ‘‘queered’’ his concert, but where, with Law-
rence at the piano, he was received with great ap-
plause; all these cities gave him the intelligent
appreciation for which he had striven so long. At
first his black skin made them regard him as some-
thing exotic, but his musical knowledge, that feeling
for his art which had set him upon his difficult way
since he had heard the voices of Sembrich, Eames,
and Caruso, showed that he was one with them-
selves. They conceded him worthy to sing even their
own Schubert and Schumann.

When Roland Hayes returned to this country in
the autumn of 1923, he was yet unknown in New
York. Before his departure for Europe he had given
a concert in Aolian Hall which was poorly attended
and received scant notice. At this concert one colored
woman was heard to say to another, ‘‘His voice is
not what it was a few years ago. I fear his best
days are over!’’ Success in Boston was gratifying,
but success in New York was necessary. His admir-
ers awaited anxiously his debut, December 1, at
Town Hall.

Shortly before this event a few friends gave him
a dinner at the Civic Club. It was a modest affair,
with quiet words of congratulation on his achieve-
ments. When Roland Hayes himself spoke, diffi-ROLAND HAYES 237

dently, a little haltingly, it was with a depth of feel-
ing that none will forget. He showed us his belief in
the supreme beauty of his art, a beauty that must
transcend the individual and the race. We under-
stood why persecution from which a sensitive spirit
must shrink, had affected him so little. That for
which he strove was above the barriers placed to
handicap the Negro race. We all wished him the best
of luck as we said goodbye.

There will never be another concert like that first
one at Town Hall. The place is intimate, friendly,
not a great auditorium such as a conquering hero
must now enter. Many in the audience knew one an-
other. To the colored, the singer was familiar, to
the whites he was a revelation. We heard him sing
Berlioz’ Flight into Egypt; of the Holy Family,
resting a little in a meadow among the flowers and
birds. His voice was soft, pure, appealing, like the
holiness of the Child. It was then for the first time
we heard The Crucifixion—‘‘He never said a mum-
bling word.’’ Tears were on men’s faces, and as we
looked at the figure on the platform, the head thrown
back, the eyes closed, the dark, sensitive face as well
as the voice showed us the suffering of man’s spirit
upon the cross. This was indeed one of those ‘‘Sor-
row Songs”’ heard by many in the audience for the
first time. It was late that night before Hayes was
permitted by an enraptured audience to leave the
hall.

After this the heavens opened and a voice of thun-
der proclaimed him a great artist. America, with238 PORTRAITS IN COLOR

characteristic enthusiasm, had nothing too extrava-
gant to say of her new genius. Honor succeeded
honor. Under the management of the Boston Sym-
phony Society, his songs were heard and his praises
sung in Los Angeles and Seattle, in the Middle West,
in Canada, and in the South. The white South
claimed him as its own, and he sang to mixed au-
diences in auditoriums that had heretofore been
closed to Negroes. He was often soloist for the Bos-
ton Symphony. One season he had six engagements
with great orchestras. Musical critics throughout the
country praised his flawless diction, the mellowness
and richness of his voice, his profound emotional
feeling. Every city wanted him.

America has worked Roland Hayes harder, since
that night at Town Hall, than even the superintend-
ent of the sash-weight factory did, who gave him
ladles filled with molten iron to carry. In his season
of 1924-25 he sang sixty-eight times and in fifty-four
cities. It would be heartbreaking to calculate the
number of miles he must have travelled. When, in
1925, at the end of his American season, he was pre-
sented, on the ship Aquitania, that was to take him to
Kurope, with the Spingarn medal, he looked as
though he would not live to return to New York.
But in June he sang by royal command before the
Queen Mother of Spain, and in the autumn returned
to the United States full of energy, his voice as
beautiful as ever. In these days, when, with every
second, news is flashed or hoarsely announced aroundROLAND HAYES 239

the world, to be a celebrity is marvellous, but it has
its price.

In what way is his singing so extraordinary? men
ask. Deems Taylor, musical critic of the World, says
that the people who fill Carnegie Hall to the brim,
packed in rows upon the platform itself, are there,
not because Roland Hayes is a Negro singing the
tragedy of his race, but because he is a great artist;
and when ‘‘art leaves the lowlands of mere polished
excellence and rises toward the peaks of greatness,
it appeals to something universal, something beyond
the emotions, and something far beyond the intellect,
something you may be pleased to call the soul. And
somewhere, concealed, oddly enough nearly every-
body has one.’’ Hayes gives this himself as the ideal
toward which he is working. Not that he is not proud
of his race, but that he serves it best as his appeal
becomes universal. But what are the songs that he
sings superlatively well, so well that as we hear
them we know that they could not be better done?
The Crucifixion, and a few of the most poignant
Spirituals, as ‘‘Bye and bye, I’s gwine ter lay down
my heavy load’’; musie with the exquisiteness of a
dream, as Le Réve in Manon,—“‘it is one of those
dreams come true,’’ a critic says, ‘‘to hear Hayes
sing it with his lovely French, seductive and full of
Celtic magic’’; and last Schubert—‘‘there is nobody
at all who can sing Schubert with such absolute sin-
cerity, with the certainty that his songs are the most
beautiful things on earth.’’ Pathos, delicacy, that is240 PORTRAITS IN COLOR

witchery, profound understanding of the great com-
posers—these are some of the things that make the
music lover scan his newspaper day after day, and
when at length he sees the date when Hayes is com-
ing, throw everything aside that he may listen to him
again.

Hayes lost his mother in 1924, and he has seemed
since then more than ever engrossed in his art. He
has not married. He bought a home in Brookline,
but he has had little time to occupy it. His friends,
some very close to him, see him seldom. At the rare
times when he comes to them his companionship is
precious. He digs within, and, as Marcus Aurelius
prophesied, the fountain of good bubbles up. He has
much of the mystic in his makeup. The religion of
his forebears reveals itself in his fatalism, his con-
fidence that his life is ordered. Therefore he must
not be too eager to determine each turn in the road.

With his religious mysticism is a deep concern for
his race and for humanity. The hope that his art is
contributing something toward kindlier relations be-
tween men is precious to him. In an interview
in the Copenhagen Politiken, he best expresses this.
And it is a hope that actuates each of these Negro
men and women, who in their portraits show various
talents, but who are one in their desire for service, a
service that shall bring together the races of men.

This is what Roland Hayes said: ‘‘We all have
the same divine spark, whether our skin is white
or black or yellow or brown. I want to show that with
my singing. And I think myself fortunate when IROLAND HAYES 241

feel that people understand for what I am striving.
Only by keeping my purpose firmly before me, only
by feeling that I am the instrument of a great idea,
shall I be able to give real art, that art that goes
to people’s hearts, that leads to my life’s goal: the
end of race hatred with no difference between the
colors of the skin, Peace and Brotherhood all over
the world.”’Sree

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