A Social History of the American Negro Part 23

Those who left their homes in the South to find new ones in the North thus worked first of all in response to a new economic demand.

Prominent in their thought to urge them on, however, were the generally unsatisfactory conditions in the South from which they had so long suffered and from which all too often there had seemed to be no escape.

As it was, they were sometimes greatly embarra.s.sed in leaving. In Jacksonville the city council pa.s.sed an ordinance requiring that agents who wished to recruit labor to be sent out of the state should pay $1,000 for a license or suffer a fine of $600 and spend sixty days in jail. Macon, Ga., raised the license fee to $25,000. In Savannah the excitement was intense. When two trains did not move as it was expected that they would, three hundred Negroes paid their own fares and went North. Later, when the leaders of the movement could not be found, the police arrested one hundred of the Negroes and sent them to the police barracks, charging them with loitering. Similar scenes were enacted elsewhere, the South being then as ever unwilling to be deprived of its labor supply. Meanwhile wages for some men in such an industrial center as Birmingham leaped to $9 and $10 a day. All told, hardly less than three-fourths of a million Negroes went North within the four years 1915-1918.

Naturally such a great s.h.i.+fting of population did not take place without some inconvenience and hards.h.i.+p. Among the thousands who changed their place of residence were many ignorant and improvident persons; but sometimes it was the most skilled artisans and the most substantial owners of homes in different communities who sold their property and moved away. In the North they at once met congestion in housing facilities. In Philadelphia and Pittsburgh this condition became so bad as to demand immediate attention. In more than one place there were outbreaks in which lives were lost. In East St. Louis, Ill., all of the social problems raised by the movement were seen in their baldest guise.

The original population of this city had come for the most part from Georgia, Mississippi, Kentucky, and Tennessee. It had long been an important industrial center. It was also a very rough place, the scene of prize-fights and c.o.c.k-fights and a haven for escaped prisoners; and there was very close connection between the saloons and politics. For years the managers of the industrial plants had recruited their labor supply from Ellis Island. When this failed they turned to the Negroes of the South; and difficulties were aggravated by a series of strikes on the part of the white workers. By the spring of 1917 not less than ten thousand Negroes had recently arrived in the city, and the housing situation was so acute that these people were more and more being forced into the white localities. Sometimes Negroes who had recently arrived wandered aimlessly about the streets, where they met the rougher elements of the city; there were frequent fights and also much trouble on the street cars. The Negroes interested themselves in politics and even succeeded in placing in office several men of their choice. In February, 1917, there was a strike of the white workers at the Aluminum Ore Works. This was adjusted at the time, but the settlement was not permanent, and meanwhile there were almost daily arrivals from the South, and the East St. Louis _Journal_ was demanding: "Make East St.

Louis a Lily White Town." There were preliminary riots on May 27-30. On the night of July I men in automobiles rode through the Negro section and began firing promiscuously. The next day the ma.s.sacre broke forth in all its fury, and before it was over hundreds of thousands of dollars in property had been destroyed, six thousand Negroes had been driven from their homes, and about one hundred and fifty shot, burned, hanged, or maimed for life. Officers of the law failed to do their duty, and the testimony of victims as to the torture inflicted upon them was such as to send a thrill of horror through the heart of the American people.

Later there was a congressional investigation, but from this nothing very material resulted. In the last week of this same month, July, 1917, there were also serious outbreaks in both Chester and Philadelphia, Penn., the fundamental issues being the same as in East St. Louis.

Meanwhile welfare organizations earnestly labored to adjust the Negro in his new environment. In Chicago the different state clubs helped n.o.bly.

Greater than any other one agency, however, was the National Urban League, whose work now witnessed an unprecedented expansion.

Representative was the work of the Detroit branch, which was not content merely with finding vacant positions, but approached manufacturers of all kinds through distribution of literature and by personal visits, and within twelve months was successful in placing not less than one thousand Negroes in employment other than unskilled labor. It also established a bureau of investigation and information regarding housing conditions, and generally aimed at the proper moral and social care of those who needed its service. The whole problem of the Negro was of such commanding importance after the United States entered the war as to lead to the creation of a special Division of Negro Economics in the office of the Secretary of Labor, to the directors.h.i.+p of which Dr. George E.

Haynes was called.

In January, 1918, a Conference of Migration was called in New York under the auspices of the National Urban League, and this placed before the American Federation of Labor resolutions asking that Negro labor be considered on the same basis as white. The Federation had long been debating the whole question of the Negro, and it had not seemed to be able to arrive at a clearcut policy though its general att.i.tude was unfavorable. In 1919, however, it voted to take steps to recognize and admit Negro unions. At last it seemed to realize the necessity of making allies of Negro workers, and of course any such change of front on the part of white workmen would menace some of the foundations of racial strife in the South and indeed in the country at large. Just how effective the new decision was to be in actual practice remained to be seen, especially as the whole labor movement was thrown on the defensive by the end of 1920. However, special interest attached to the events in Bogalusa, La., in November, 1919. Here were the headquarters of the Great Southern Lumber Company, whose sawmill in the place was said to be the largest in the world. For some time it had made use of unorganized Negro labor as against the white labor unions. The forces of labor, however, began to organize the Negroes in the employ of the Company, which held political as well as capitalistic control in the community.

The Company then began to have Negroes arrested on charges of vagrancy, taking them before the city court and having them fined and turned over to the Company to work out the fines under the guard of gunmen. In the troubles that came to a head on November 22, three white men were shot and killed, one of them being the district president of the American Federation of Labor, who was helping to give protection to a colored organizer. The full significance of this incident remained also to be seen; but it is quite possible that in the final history of the Negro problem the skirmish at Bogalusa will mark the beginning of the end of the exploiting of Negro labor and the first recognition of the ident.i.ty of interest between white and black workmen in the South.

3. _The Great War_

Just on the eve of America's entrance into the war in Europe occurred an incident that from the standpoint of the Negro at least must finally appear simply as the prelude to the great contest to come. Once more, at an unexpected moment, ten years after Brownsville, the loyalty and heroism of the Negro soldier impressed the American people. The expedition of the American forces into Mexico in 1916, with the political events attending this, is a long story. The outstanding incident, however, was that in which two troops of the Tenth Cavalry engaged. About eighty men had been sent a long distance from the main line of the American army, their errand being supposedly the pursuit of a deserter. At or near the town of Carrizal the Americans seem to have chosen to go through the town rather than around it, and the result was a clash in which Captain Boyd, who commanded the detachment, and some twenty of his men were killed, twenty-two others being captured by the Mexicans. Under the circ.u.mstances the whole venture was rather imprudent in the first place. As to the engagement itself, the Mexicans said that the American troops made the attack, while the latter said that the Mexicans themselves first opened fire. However this may have been, all other phases of the Mexican problem seemed for the moment to be forgotten at Was.h.i.+ngton in the demand for the release of the twenty-two men who had been taken. There was no reason for holding them, and they were brought up to El Paso within a few days and sent across the line.

Thus, though "some one had blundered," these Negro soldiers did their duty; "theirs not to make reply; theirs but to do and die." So in the face of odds they fought like heroes and twenty died beneath the Mexican stars.

When the United States entered the war in Europe in April, 1917, the question of overwhelming importance to the Negro people was naturally that of their relation to the great conflict in which their country had become engaged. Their response to the draft call set a noteworthy example of loyalty to all other elements in the country. At the very outset the race faced a terrible dilemma: If there were to be special training camps for officers, and if the National Government would make no provision otherwise, did it wish to have a special camp for Negroes, such as would give formal approval to a policy of segregation, or did it wish to have no camp at all on such terms and thus lose the opportunity to have any men of the race specially trained as officers? The camp was secured--Camp Dodge, near Des Moines, Iowa; and throughout the summer of 1917 the work of training went forward, the heart of a hara.s.sed and burdened people responding more and more with pride to the work of their men. On October 15, 625 became commissioned officers, and all told 1200 received commissions. To the fighting forces of the United States the race furnished altogether very nearly 400,000 men, of whom just a little more than half actually saw service in Europe.

Negro men served in all branches of the military establishment and also as surveyors and draftsmen. For the handling of many of the questions relating to them Emmett J. Scott was on October 1, 1917, appointed Special a.s.sistant to the Secretary of War. Mr. Scott had for a number of years a.s.sisted Dr. Booker T. Was.h.i.+ngton as secretary at Tuskegee Inst.i.tute, and in 1909 he was one of the three members of the special commission appointed by President Taft for the investigation of Liberian affairs. Negro nurses were authorized by the War Department for service in base hospitals at six army camps, and women served also as canteen workers in France and in charge of hostess houses in the United States.

Sixty Negro men served as chaplains; 350 as Y.M.C.A. secretaries; and others in special capacities. Service of exceptional value was rendered by Negro women in industry, and very largely also they maintained and promoted the food supply through agriculture at the same time that they released men for service at the front. Meanwhile the race invested millions of dollars in Liberty Bonds and War Savings stamps and contributed generously to the Red Cross, Y.M.C.A., and other relief agencies. In the summer of 1918 interest naturally centered upon the actual performance of Negro soldiers in France and upon the establishment of units of the Students' Army Training Corps in twenty leading educational inst.i.tutions. When these units were demobilized in December, 1918, provision was made in a number of the schools for the formation of units of the Reserve Officers' Training Corps.

The remarkable record made by the Negro in the previous wars of the country was fully equaled by that in the Great War. Negro soldiers fought with special distinction in the Argonne Forest, at Chateau-Thierry, in Belleau Wood, in the St. Mihiel district, in the Champagne sector, at Vosges and Metz, winning often very high praise from their commanders. Entire regiments of Negro troops were cited for exceptional valor and decorated with the Croix de Guerre--the 369th, the 371st, and the 372nd; while groups of officers and men of the 365th, the 366th, the 368th, the 370th, and the first battalion of the 367th were also decorated. At the close of the war the highest Negro officers in the army were Lieutenant Colonel Otis B. Duncan, commander of the third battalion of the 370th, formerly the Eighth Illinois, and the highest ranking Negro officer in the American Expeditionary Forces; Colonel Charles Young (retired), on special duty at Camp Grant, Ill.; Colonel Franklin A. Dennison, of the 370th Infantry, and Lieutenant Colonel Benjamin O. Davis, of the Ninth Cavalry. The 370th was the first American regiment stationed in the St. Mihiel sector; it was one of the three that occupied a sector at Verdun when a penetration there would have been disastrous to the Allied cause; and it went direct from the training camp to the firing-line. Noteworthy also was the record of the 369th infantry, formerly the Fifteenth Regiment, New York National Guard. This organization was under sh.e.l.lfire for 191 days, and it held one trench for 91 days without relief. It was the first unit of Allied fighters to reach the Rhine, going down as an advance guard of the French army of occupation. A prominent hero in this regiment was Sergeant Henry Johnson, who returned with the Croix de Guerre with one star and one palm. He is credited with routing a party of Germans at Bois-Hanzey in the Argonne on May 5, 1918, with singularly heavy losses to the enemy. Many other men acted with similar bravery. Hardly less heroic was the service of the stevedore regiments, or the thousands of men in the army who did not go to France but who did their duty as they were commanded at home. General Vincenden said of the men of the 370th: "Fired by a n.o.ble ardor, they go at times even beyond the objectives given them by the higher command; they have always wished to be in the front line"; and General Coybet said of the 371st and 372nd: "The most powerful defenses, the most strongly organized machine gun nests, the heaviest artillery barrages--nothing could stop them. These crack regiments overcame every obstacle with a most complete contempt for danger.... They have shown us the way to victory."

In spite of his n.o.ble record--perhaps in some measure because of it--and in the face of his loyal response to the call to duty, the Negro unhappily became in the course of the war the victim of proscription and propaganda probably without parallel in the history of the country. No effort seems to have been spared to discredit him both as a man and as a soldier. In both France and America the apparent object of the forces working against him was the intention to prevent any feeling that the war would make any change in the condition of the race at home. In the South Negroes were sometimes forced into peonage and restrained in their efforts to go North; and generally they had no representation on local boards, the draft was frequently operated so as to be unfair to them, and every man who registered found special provision for the indication of his race in the corner of his card. Accordingly in many localities Negroes contributed more than their quota, this being the result of favoritism shown to white draftees. The first report of the Provost-Marshal General showed that of every 100 Negroes called 36 were certified for service, while of every 100 white men called only 25 were certified. Of those summoned in Cla.s.s I Negroes contributed 51.65 per cent of their registrants as against 32.53 per cent of the white. In France the work of defamation was manifest and flagrant. Slanders about the Negro soldiers were deliberately circulated among the French people, sometimes on very high authority, much of this propaganda growing out of a jealous fear of any acquaintance whatsoever of the Negro men with the French women. Especially insolent and sometimes brutal were the men of the military police, who at times shot and killed on the slightest provocation. Proprietors who sold to Negro soldiers were sometimes boycotted, and offenses were magnified which in the case of white men never saw publication. Negro officers were discriminated against in hotel and traveling accommodations, while upon the ordinary men in the service fell unduly any specially unpleasant duty such as that of re-burying the dead. White women engaged in "Y" work, especially Southern women, showed a disposition not to serve Negroes, though the Red Cross and Salvation Army organizations were much better in this respect; and finally the Negro soldier was not given any place in the great victory parade in Paris. About the close of the war moreover a great picture, or series of pictures, the "Pantheon de la Guerre," that was on a mammoth scale and that attracted extraordinary attention, was noteworthy as giving representation to all of the forces and divisions of the Allied armies except the Negroes in the forces from the United States.[1] Not unnaturally the Germans endeavored--though without success--to capitalize the situation by circulating among the Negroes insidious literature that sometimes made very strong points. All of these things are to be considered by those people in the United States who think that the Negro suffers unduly from a grievance.

[Footnote 1: On the whole subject of the actual life of the Negro soldier unusual interest attaches to the forthcoming and authoritative "Sidelights on Negro Soldiers," by Charles H. Williams, who as a special and official investigator had unequaled opportunity to study the Negro in camp and on the battle-line both in the United States and in France.]

While the Negro soldier abroad was thus facing unusual pressure in addition to the ordinary hards.h.i.+ps of war, at home occurred an incident that was doubly depressing coming as it did just a few weeks after the ma.s.sacre at East St. Louis. In August, 1917, a battalion of the Twenty-fourth Infantry, stationed at Houston, Texas, to a.s.sist in the work of concentrating soldiers for the war in Europe, encountered the ill-will of the town, and between the city police and the Negro military police there was constant friction. At last when one of the Negroes had been beaten, word was circulated among his comrades that he had been shot, and a number of them set out for revenge. In the riot that followed (August 23) two of the Negroes and seventeen white people of the town were killed, the latter number including five policemen. As a result of this encounter sixty-three members of the battalion were court-martialed at Fort Sam Houston. Thirteen were hanged on December 11, 1917, five more were executed on September 13, 1918, fifty-one were sentenced to life imprisonment and five to briefer terms; and the Negro people of the country felt very keenly the fact that the condemned men were hanged like common criminals rather than given the death of soldiers. Thus for one reason or another the whole matter of the war and the incidents connected therewith simply made the Negro question more bitterly than ever the real disposition toward him of the government under which he lived and which he had striven so long to serve.

4. _High Tension: Was.h.i.+ngton, Chicago, Elaine_

Such incidents abroad and such feeling at home as we have recorded not only agitated the Negro people, but gave thousands of other citizens concern, and when the armistice suddenly came on November 11, 1918, not only in the South but in localities elsewhere in the country racial feeling had been raised to the highest point. About the same time there began to be spread abroad sinister rumors that the old KuKlux were riding again; and within a few months parades at night in representative cities in Alabama and Georgia left no doubt that the rumors were well founded. The Negro people fully realized the significance of the new movement, and they felt full well the pressure being brought to bear upon them in view of the shortage of domestic servants in the South.

Still more did they sense the situation that would face their sons and brothers when they returned from France. But they were not afraid; and in all of the riots of the period the noteworthy fact stands out that in some of the cities in which the situation was most tense--notably Atlanta and Birmingham--no great race trouble was permitted to start.

In general, however, the violence that had characterized the year 1917 continued through 1918 and 1919. In the one state of Tennessee, within less than a year and on separate occasions, three Negroes were burned at the stake. On May 22, 1917, near Memphis, Ell T. Person, nearly fifty years of age, was burned for the alleged a.s.sault and murder of a young woman; and in this case the word "alleged" is used advisedly, for the whole matter of the fixing of the blame for the crime and the fact that the man was denied a legal trial left grave doubt as to the extent of his guilt. On Sunday, December 2, 1917, at Dyersburg, immediately after the adjournment of services in the churches of the town, Lation Scott, guilty of criminal a.s.sault, was burned; his eyes were put out with red-hot irons, a hot poker was rammed down his throat, and he was mutilated in unmentionable ways. Two months later, on February 12, 1918, at Estill Springs, Jim McIlheron, who had shot and killed two young white men, was also burned at the stake. In Estill Springs it had for some time been the sport of young white men in the community to throw rocks at single Negroes and make them run. Late one afternoon McIlheron went into a store to buy some candy. As he pa.s.sed out, a remark was made by one of three young men about his eating his candy. The rest of the story is obvious.

As horrible as these burnings were, it is certain that they did not grind the iron into the Negro's soul any more surely than the three stories that follow. Hampton Smith was known as one of the harshest employers of Negro labor in Brooks County, Ga. As it was difficult for him to get help otherwise, he would go into the courts and whenever a Negro was convicted and was unable to pay his fine or was sentenced to a term on the chain-gang, he would pay the fine and secure the man for work on his plantation. He thus secured the services of Sidney Johnson, fined thirty dollars for gambling. After Johnson had more than worked out the thirty dollars he asked pay for the additional time he served.

Smith refused to give this and a quarrel resulted. A few mornings later, when Johnson, sick, did not come to work, Smith found him in his cabin and beat him. A few evenings later, while Smith was sitting in his home, he was shot through a window and killed instantly, and his wife was wounded. As a result of this occurrence the Negroes of both Brooks and Lowndes counties were terrorized for the week May 17-24, 1918, and not less than eleven of them lynched. Into the bodies of two men lynched together not less than seven hundred bullets are said to have been fired. Johnson himself had been shot dead when he was found; but his body was mutilated, dragged through the streets of Valdosta, and burned.

Mary Turner, the wife of one of the victims, said that her husband had been unjustly treated and that if she knew who had killed him she would have warrants sworn out against them. For saying this she too was lynched, although she was in an advanced state of pregnancy. Her ankles were tied together and she was hung to a tree, head downward. Gasoline and oil from the automobiles near were thrown on her clothing and a match applied. While she was yet alive her abdomen was cut open with a large knife and her unborn babe fell to the ground. It gave two feeble cries and then its head was crushed by a member of the mob with his heel. Hundreds of bullets were then fired into the woman's body. As a result of these events not less than five hundred Negroes left the immediate vicinity of Valdosta immediately, and hundreds of others prepared to leave as soon as they could dispose of their land, and this they proceeded to do in the face of the threat that any Negro who attempted to leave would be regarded as implicated in the murder of Smith and dealt with accordingly. At the end of this same year--on December 20, 1918--four young Negroes--Major Clark, aged twenty; Andrew Clark, aged fifteen; Maggie Howze, aged twenty, and Alma Howze, aged sixteen--were taken from the little jail at Shubuta, Mississippi, and lynched on a bridge near the town. They were accused of the murder of E.L. Johnston, a white dentist, though all protested their innocence.

The situation that preceded the lynching was significant. Major Clark was in love with Maggie Howze and planned to marry her. This thought enraged Johnston, who was soon to become the father of a child by the young woman, and who told Clark to leave her alone. As the two sisters were about to be killed, Maggie screamed and fought, crying, "I ain't guilty of killing the doctor and you oughtn't to kill me"; and to silence her cries one member of the mob struck her in the mouth with a monkey wrench, knocking her teeth out. On May 24, 1919, at Milan, Telfair County, Georgia, two young white men, Jim Dowdy and Lewis Evans, went drunk late at night to the Negro section of the town and to the home of a widow who had two daughters. They were refused admittance and then fired into the house. The girls, frightened, ran to another home.

They were pursued, and Berry Was.h.i.+ngton, a respectable Negro seventy-two years of age, seized a shotgun, intending to give them protection; and in the course of the shooting that followed Dowdy was killed. The next night, Sat.u.r.day the 25th, Was.h.i.+ngton was taken to the place where Dowdy was killed and his body shot to pieces.

It remained for the capital of the nation, however, largely to show the real situation of the race in the aftermath of a great war conducted by a Democratic administration. Heretofore the Federal Government had declared itself powerless to act in the case of lawlessness in an individual state; but it was now to have an opportunity to deal with violence in Was.h.i.+ngton itself. On July 19, 1919, a series of lurid and exaggerated stories in the daily papers of attempted a.s.saults of Negroes on white women resulted in an outbreak that was intended to terrorize the popular Northwest section, in which lived a large proportion of the Negroes in the District of Columbia. For three days the violence continued intermittently, and as the const.i.tuted police authority did practically nothing for the defense of the Negro citizens, the loss of life might have been infinitely greater than it was if the colored men of the city had not a.s.sumed their own defense. As it was they saved the capital and earned the grat.i.tude of the race and the nation. It appeared that Negroes--educated, law-abiding Negroes--would not now run when their lives and their homes were at stake, and before such determination the mob retreated ingloriously.

Just a week afterwards--before the country had really caught its breath after the events in Was.h.i.+ngton--there burst into flame in Chicago a race war of the greatest bitterness and fierceness. For a number of years the Western metropolis had been known as that city offering to the Negro the best industrial and political opportunity in the country. When the migration caused by the war was at its height, tens of thousands of Negroes from the South pa.s.sed through the city going elsewhere, but thousands also remained to work in the stockyards or other places. With all of the coming and going, the Negroes in the city must at any time in 1918 or 1919 have numbered not less than 150,000; and banks, cooperative societies, and race newspapers flourished. There were also abundant social problems awakened by the saloons and gambling dens, and by the seamy side of politics. Those who had been longest in the city, however, rallied to the needs of the newcomers, and in their homes, their churches, and their places of work endeavored to get them adjusted in their environment. The housing situation, in spite of all such effort, became more and more acute, and when some Negroes were forced beyond the bounds of the old "black belt" there were attempts to dynamite their new residences. Meanwhile hundreds of young men who had gone to France or to cantonments--1850 from the district of one draft board at State and 35th Streets--returned to find again a place in the life of Chicago; and daily from Was.h.i.+ngton or from the South came the great waves of social unrest. Said Arnold Hill, secretary of the Chicago branch of the National Urban League: "Every time a lynching takes place in a community down South you can depend on it that colored people from that community will arrive in Chicago inside of two weeks; we have seen it happen so often that whenever we read newspaper dispatches of a public hanging or burning in a Texas or a Mississippi town, we get ready to extend greetings to the people from the immediate vicinity of the lynching."

Before the armistice was signed the League was each month finding work for 1700 or 1800 men and women; in the following April the number fell to 500, but with the coming of summer it rapidly rose again. Unskilled work was plentiful, and jobs in foundries and steel mills, in building and construction work, and in light factories and packing-houses kept up a steady demand for laborers. Meanwhile trouble was brewing, and on the streets there were occasional encounters.

Such was the situation when on a Sunday at the end of July a Negro boy at a bathing beach near Twenty-sixth Street swam across an imaginary segregation line. White boys threw rocks at him, knocked him off a raft, and he was drowned. Colored people rushed to a policeman and asked him to arrest the boys who threw the stones. He refused to do so, and as the dead body of the Negro boy was being handled, more rocks were thrown on both sides. The trouble thus engendered spread through the Negro district on the South Side, and for a week it was impossible or dangerous for people to go to work. Some employed at the stockyards could not get to their work for some days further. At the end of three days twenty Negroes were reported as dead, fourteen white men were dead, scores of people were injured, and a number of houses of Negroes burned.

In the face of this disaster the great soul of Chicago rose above its materialism. There were many conferences between representative people; out of all the effort grew the determination to work for a n.o.bler city; and the sincerity was such as to give one hope not only for Chicago but also for a new and better America.

The riots in Was.h.i.+ngton and Chicago were followed within a few weeks by outbreaks in Knoxville and Omaha. In the latter place the fundamental cause of the trouble was social and political corruption, and because he strongly opposed the lynching of William Brown, the Negro, the mayor of the city, Edward P. Smith, very nearly lost his life. As it was, the county court house was burned, one man more was killed, and perhaps as many as forty injured. More important even than this, however--and indeed one of the two or three most far-reaching instances of racial trouble in the history of the Negro in America--was the reign of terror in and near Elaine, Phillips County, Arkansas, in the first week of October, 1919. The causes of this were fundamental and reached the very heart of the race problem and of the daily life of tens of thousands of Negroes.

Many Negro tenants in eastern Arkansas, as in other states, were still living under a share system by which the owner furnished the land and the Negro the labor, and by which at the end of the year the two supposedly got equal parts of the crop. Meanwhile throughout the year the tenant would get his food, clothing, and other supplies at exorbitant prices from a "commissary" operated by the planter or his agent; and in actual practice the landowner and the tenant did not go together to a city to dispose of the crop when it was gathered, as was sometimes done elsewhere, but the landowner alone sold the crop and settled with the tenant whenever and however he pleased; nor at the time of settlement was any itemized statement of supplies given, only the total amount owed being stated. Obviously the planter could regularly pad his accounts, keep the Negro in debt, and be a.s.sured of his labor supply from year to year.

In 1918 the price of cotton was constantly rising and at length reached forty cents a pound. Even with the cheating to which the Negroes were subjected, it became difficult to keep them in debt, and they became more and more insistent in their demands for itemized statements.

Nevertheless some of those whose cotton was sold in October, 1918, did not get any statement of any sort before July of the next year.

Seeing no other way out of their difficulty, sixty-eight of the Negroes got together and decided to hire a lawyer who would help them to get statements of their accounts and settlement at the right figures.

Feeling that the life of any Negro lawyer who took such a case would be endangered, they employed the firm of Bratton and Bratton, of Little Rock. They made contracts with this firm to handle the sixty-eight cases at fifty dollars each in cash and a percentage of the moneys collected from the white planters. Some of the Negroes also planned to go before the Federal Grand Jury and charge certain planters with peonage. They had secret meetings from time to time in order to collect the money to be paid in advance and to collect the evidence which would enable them successfully to prosecute their cases. Some Negro cotton-pickers about the same time organized a union; and at Elaine many Negroes who worked in the sawmills and who desired to protect their wives and daughters from insult, refused to allow them to pick cotton or to work for a white man at any price.

Such was the sentiment out of which developed the Progressive Farmers and Household Union of America, which was an effort by legal means to secure protection from unscrupulous landlords, but which did use the form of a fraternal order with pa.s.swords and grips and insignia so as the more forcefully to appeal to some of its members. About the first of October the report was spread abroad in Phillips County that the Negroes were plotting an insurrection and that they were rapidly preparing to ma.s.sacre the white people on a great scale. When the situation had become tense, one Sunday John Clem, a white man from Helena, drunk, came to Elaine and proceeded to terrorize the Negro population by gun play.

The colored people kept off the streets in order to avoid trouble and telephoned the sheriff at Helena. This man failed to act. The next day Clem was abroad again, but the Negroes still avoided trouble, thinking that his acts were simply designed to start a race riot. On Tuesday evening, October 1, however, W.D. Adkins, a special agent of the Missouri Pacific Railroad, in company with Charles Pratt, a deputy sheriff, was riding past a Negro church near Hoop Spur, a small community just a few miles from Elaine. According to Pratt, persons in the church fired without cause on the party, killing Adkins and wounding himself. According to the Negroes, Adkins and Pratt fired into the church, evidently to frighten the people there a.s.sembled. At any rate word spread through the county that the ma.s.sacre had started, and for days there was murder and rioting, in the course of which not less than five white men and twenty-five Negroes were killed, though some estimates placed the number of fatalities a great deal higher. Negroes were arrested and disarmed; some were shot on the highways; homes were fired into; and at one time hundreds of men and women were in a stockade under heavy guard and under the most unwholesome conditions, while hundreds of white men, armed to the teeth, rushed to the vicinity from neighboring cities and towns. Governor Charles H. Brough telegraphed to Camp Pike for Federal troops, and five hundred were mobilized at once "to repel the attack of the black army." Worse than any other feature was the wanton slaying of the four Johnston brothers, whose father had been a prominent Presbyterian minister and whose mother was formerly a school-teacher. Dr. D.A.E. Johnston was a successful dentist and owned a three-story building in Helena. Dr. Louis Johnston was a physician who lived in Oklahoma and who had come home on a visit. A third brother had served in France and been wounded and ga.s.sed at Chateau-Thierry.

Altogether one thousand Negroes were arrested and one hundred and twenty-two indicted. A special committee of seven gathered evidence and is charged with having used electric connections on the witness chair in order to frighten the Negroes. Twelve men were sentenced to death (though up to the end of 1920 execution had been stayed), and fifty-four to penitentiary terms. The trials lasted from five to ten minutes each.

No witnesses for the defense were called; no Negroes were on the juries; no change of venue was given. Meanwhile lawyers at Helena were preparing to reap further harvest from Negroes who would be indicted and against whom there was no evidence, but who had saved money and Liberty Bonds.

Governor Brough in a statement to the press blamed the _Crisis_ and the Chicago _Defender_ for the trouble. He had served for a number of years as a professor of economics before becoming governor and had even identified himself with the forward-looking University Commission on Southern Race Questions; and it is true that he postponed the executions in order to allow appeals to be filed in behalf of the condemned men.

That he should thus attempt to s.h.i.+ft the burden of blame and overlook the facts when in a position of grave responsibility was a keen disappointment to the lovers of progress.

Reference to the monthly periodical and the weekly paper just mentioned, however, brings us to still another matter--the feeling on the part of the Negro that, in addition to the outrages visited on the race, the Government was now, under the cloak of wartime legislation, formally to attempt to curtail its freedom of speech. For some days the issue of the _Crisis_ for May, 1919, was held up in the mail; a South Carolina representative in Congress quoted by way of denunciation from the editorial "Returning Soldiers" in the same number of the periodical; and a little later in the year the Department of Justice devoted twenty-seven pages of the report of the investigation against "Persons Advising Anarchy, Sedition, and the Forcible Overthrow of the Government" to a report on "Radicalism and Sedition among the Negroes as Reflected in Their Publications." Among other periodicals and papers mentioned were the _Messenger_ and the _Negro World_ of New York; and by the _Messenger_ indeed, frankly radical in its att.i.tude not only on the race question but also on fundamental economic principles, even the _Crisis_ was regarded as conservative in tone. There could be no doubt that a great spiritual change had come over the Negro people of the United States. At the very time that their sons and brothers were making the supreme sacrifice in France they were witnessing such events as those at East St. Louis or Houston, or reading of three burnings within a year in Tennessee. A new determination closely akin to consecration possessed them. Fully to understand the new spirit one would read not only such publications as those that have been mentioned, but also those issued in the heart of the South. "Good-by, Black Mammy," said the _Southwestern Christian Advocate_, taking as its theme the story of four Southern white men who acted as honorary pallbearers at an old Negro woman's funeral, but who under no circ.u.mstances would thus have served for a thrifty, intelligent, well-educated man of the race. Said the Houston _Informer_, voicing the feeling of thousands, "The black man fought to make the world safe for democracy; he now demands that America be made and maintained safe for black Americans." With hypocrisy in the practice of the Christian religion there ceased to be any patience whatsoever, as was shown by the treatment accorded a Y.M.C.A. "Call on behalf of the young men and boys of the two great sister Anglo-Saxon nations." "Read! Read! Read!" said the _Challenge Magazine_, "then when the mob comes, whether with torch or with gun, let us stand at Armageddon and battle for the Lord." "Protect your home," said the gentle _Christian Recorder_, "protect your wife and children, with your life if necessary. If a man crosses your threshold after you and your family, the law allows you to protect your home even if you have to kill the intruder." Perhaps nothing, however, better summed up the new spirit than the following sonnet by Claude McKay:

If we must die, let it not be like hogs Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot, While round us bark the mad and hungry dogs, Making their mock at our accursed lot.

If we must die, let it not be like hogs So that our precious blood may not be shed In vain; then even the monsters we defy Shall be constrained to honor us, though dead!

Oh, kinsman! We must meet the common foe; Though far outnumbered, let us still be brave, And for their thousand blows deal one deathblow!

What though before us lies the open grave?

Like men we'll face the murderous, cowardly pack Pressed to the wall, dying, but--fighting back!

5. _The Widening Problem_

In view of the world war and the important part taken in it by French colonial troops, especially those from Senegal, it is not surprising that the heart of the Negro people in the United States broadened in a new sympathy with the problems of their brothers the world over. Even early in the decade that we are now considering, however, there was some indication of this tendency, and the First Universal Races Congress in London in 1911 attracted wide attention. In February, 1919, largely through the personal effort of Dr. DuBois, a Pan-African Congress was held in Paris, the chief aims of which were the hearing of statements on the condition of Negroes throughout the world, the obtaining of authoritative statements of policy toward the Negro race from the Great Powers, the making of strong representations to the Peace Conference then sitting in Paris in behalf of the Negroes throughout the world, and the laying down of principles on which the future development of the race must take place. Meanwhile the cession of the Virgin Islands had fixed attention upon an interesting colored population at the very door of the United States; and the American occupation of Hayti culminating in the killing of many of the people in the course of President Wilson's second administration gave a new feeling of kins.h.i.+p for the land of Toussaint L'Ouverture. Among other things the evidence showed that on June 12, 1918, under military pressure a new const.i.tution was forced on the Haytian people, one favoring the white man and the foreigner; that by force and brutality innocent men and women, including native preachers and members of their churches, had been taken, roped together, and marched as slave-gangs to prison; and that in large numbers Haytians had been taken from their homes and farms and made to work on new roads for twenty cents a week, without being properly furnished with food--all of this being done under the pretense of improving the social and political condition of the country. The whole world now realized that the Negro problem was no longer local in the United States or South Africa, or the West Indies, but international in its scope and possibilities.

Very early in the course of the conflict in Europe it was pointed out that Africa was the real prize of the war, and it is now simply a commonplace to say that the bases of the struggle were economic. Nothing did Germany regret more than the forcible seizure of her African possessions. One can not fail to observe, moreover, a tendency of discussion of problems resultant from the war to s.h.i.+ft the consideration from that of pure politics to that of racial relations, and early in the conflict students of society the world over realized that it was nothing less than suicide on the part of the white race. After the close of the war many books dealing with the issues at stake were written, and in the year 1920 alone several of these appeared in the United States. Of all of these publications, because of their different points of view, four might call for special consideration--_The Republic of Liberia_, by R.C.F. Maugham; _The Rising Tide of Color_, by Lothrop Stoddard; _Darkwater_, by W.E. Burghardt DuBois, and _Empire and Commerce in Africa: A Study in Economic Imperialism_, by Leonard Woolf. The position of each of these books is clear and all bear directly upon the central theme.

The _Republic of Liberia_ was written by one who some years ago was the English consul at Monrovia and who afterwards was appointed to Dakar.

The supplementary preface also gives the information that the book was really written two years before it appeared, publication being delayed on account of the difficulties of printing at the time. Even up to 1918, however, the account is incomplete, and the failure to touch upon recent developments becomes serious; but it is of course impossible to record the history of Liberia from 1847 to the present and reflect credit upon England. There are some pages of value in the book, especially those in which the author speaks of the labor situation in the little African republic; but these are obviously intended primarily for consumption by business men in London. "Liberians," we are informed, "tell you that, whatever may be said to the contrary, the republic's most uncomfortable neighbor has always been France." This is hardly true. France has indeed on more than one occasion tried to equal her great rival in aggrandizement, but she has never quite succeeded in so doing. As we have already shown in connection with Liberia in the present work, from the very first the shadow of Great Britain fell across the country. In more recent years, by loans that were no more than clever plans for thievery, by the forceful occupation of large tracts of land, and by interference in the internal affairs of the country, England has again and again proved herself the arch-enemy of the republic. The book so recently written in the last a.n.a.lysis appears to be little more than the basis of effort toward still further exploitation.

The very merit of _The Rising Tide of Color_ depends on its bias, and it is significant that the book closes with a quotation from Kipling's "The Heritage." To Dr. Stoddard the most disquieting feature of the recent situation was not the war but the peace. Says he, "The white world's inability to frame a constructive settlement, the perpetuation of intestine hatreds and the menace of fresh civil wars complicated by the specter of social revolution, evoke the dread thought that the late war may be merely the first stage in a cycle of ruin." As for the war itself, "As colored men realized the significance of it all, they looked into each other's eyes and there saw the light of undreamed-of hopes.

The white world was tearing itself to pieces. White solidarity was riven and shattered. And--fear of white power and respect for white civilization together dropped away like garments outworn. Through the bazaars of Asia ran the sibilant whisper: 'The East will see the West to bed.'" At last comes the inevitable conclusion pleading for a better understanding between England and Germany and for everything else that would make for racial solidarity. The pitiful thing about this book is that it is so thoroughly representative of the thing for which it pleads. It is the very essence of jingoism; civilization does not exist in and of itself, it is "white"; and the conclusions are directly at variance with the ideals that have been supposed to guide England and America. Incidentally the work speaks of the Negro and negroid population of Africa as "estimated at about 120,000,000." This low estimate has proved a common pitfall for writers. If we remember that Africa is three and a half times as large as the United States, and that while there are no cities as large as New York and Chicago, there are many centers of very dense population; if we omit entirely from the consideration the Desert of Sahara and make due allowance for some heavily wooded tracts in which live no people at all; and if we then take some fairly well-known region like Nigeria or Sierra Leone as the basis of estimate, we shall arrive at some such figure as 450,000,000.

In order to satisfy any other points that might possibly be made, let us reduce this by as much as a third, and we shall still have 300,000,000, which figure we feel justified in advancing as the lowest possible estimate for the population of Africa; and yet most books tell us that there are only 140,000,000 people on the whole continent.