Following the Color Line Part 19

The street cars are free in all Northern cities, but the Negro nevertheless sometimes finds it dangerous to ride with white people.

Professor R. R. Wright, Jr., himself a Negro, and an acute observer of Negro conditions, tells this personal experience:

"I came out on the car from the University of Pennsylvania one evening in May about eight o'clock. Just as the car turned off Twenty-seventh to Lombard Street, a crowd of about one hundred little white boys from six to about fourteen years of age attacked it. The car was crowded, but there were only about a dozen Negroes on it, about half of them women. The mob of boys got control of the car by pulling off the trolley. They threw stones into the car, and finally some of them boarded the car and began to beat the Negroes with sticks, shouting as they did so, 'Kill the n.i.g.g.e.r!'

'Lynch 'em!' 'Hit that n.i.g.g.e.r!' etc. This all happened in Philadelphia.

Doubtless these urchins had been reading in the daily papers the cry 'Kill the Negro!' and they were trying to carry out the injunction."

While I was in Indianapolis a clash of enough importance to be reported in the newspapers occurred between the races on a street car; and in New York, in the San Juan Hill district, one Sunday evening I saw an incident which ill.u.s.trates the almost instinctive race antagonism which exists in Northern cities. The street was crowded. Several Negro boys were playing on the pavement. Stones were thrown. Instantly several white boys sided together and began to advance on the Negroes. In less time than it takes to tell it thirty or forty white boys and young men were chasing the Negroes down the street. At the next corner the Negroes were joined by dozens of their own race. Stones and sticks began to fly everywhere, and if it hadn't been for the prompt action of two policemen there would have been a riot similar to those which have occurred not once but many times in New York City during the past two years. Of course these instances are exceptional, but none the less significant.

_b.u.mptiousness as a Cause of Hatred_

Some of the disturbances grow out of a characteristic of a certain sort of Negro, the expression of which seems to stir the deepest animosity in the city white boy. And that is the b.u.mptiousness, the airiness, of the half-ignorant young Negro, who, feeling that he has rights, wants to be occupied constantly in using them. He mistakes liberty for licence.

Although few in numbers among thousands of quiet coloured people, he makes a large showing. In the South they call him the "smart Negro," and an almost irresistible instinct exists among white boys of a certain cla.s.s to take him down. I remember walking in Indianapolis with an educated Northern white man. We met a young Negro immaculately dressed; his hat-band was blue and white; his shoes were patent leather with white tops; he wore a flowered waistcoat, and his tread as he walked was something to see.

"Do you know," said my companion, "I never see that young fellow without wanting to step up and knock his head off. I know something about him. He is absolutely worthless: he does no work, but lives on the wages of a hard-working coloured woman and spends all he can get on his clothes. I know the instinct is childish, but I am just telling you how I feel. I'm not sure it is racial prejudice; I presume I should feel much the same way toward a Frenchman if he did the same thing. And somehow I can't help believing that a good thras.h.i.+ng would improve that boy's character."

I'm telling this incident just as it happened, to throw a side-light on one of the manifestations of the growing prejudice. One more ill.u.s.tration: Miss Eaton conducts a social settlement for Negroes in Boston. One day a teacher said to one of the little Negro boys in her cla.s.s:

"Please pick up my handkerchief."

The boy did not stir; she again requested him to pick up the handkerchief; then she asked him why he refused.

"The days of slavery are over," he said.

Now, this spirit is not common, but it exists, and it injures the Negro people out of all proportion to its real seriousness.

In certain towns in Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, on the borders of the old South, the feeling has reached a stage still more acute. At Springfield, O., two race riots have occurred, in the first of which a Negro was lynched and in the second many Negroes were driven out of town and a row of coloured tenements was burned. There are counties and towns where no Negro is permitted to stop over night. At Syracuse, O., Lawrenceburg, Ellwood, and Salem, Ind., for example, Negroes have not been permitted to live for years. If a Negro appears he is warned of conditions, and if he does not leave immediately, he is visited by a crowd of boys and men and forced to leave. A farmer who lives within a few miles of Indianapolis told me of a meeting, held only a short time ago by thirty-five farmers in his neighbourhood, in which an agreement was pa.s.sed to hire no Negroes, nor to permit Negroes to live anywhere in the region.

_Story of a Northern Race Riot_

I stopped at Greensburg, Ind., on my way East and found there a remarkable ill.u.s.tration showing just how feeling arises in the North. Greensburg is a comfortable, well-to-do, conservative, church-going old town in eastern Indiana. Many of the residents are retired farmers. The population of 7,000 is mostly of pure American stock, largely of Northern origin. And yet last April this quiet old town was shaken by a race riot. I made careful inquiries as to conditions there and I was amazed to discover how closely this small disturbance paralleled the greater riot at Atlanta which I have already written about. Negroes had lived in Greensburg for many years, a group of self-respecting, decent, prosperous men and women.

They were known to and highly regarded by their white neighbours. One of them, named Brooks, owned a barber shop and was janitor for the Presbyterian Church and for one of the banks. Another, George W. Edwards, whom I met, has been for years an employee in the Garland Mills.

"There isn't a better citizen in town than Edwards," a white lawyer told me; and I heard the same thing from other white men.

Another Negro, George Guess, is an engineer in the electric light plant.

Of the local Negro boys, Robert Lewis, the first coloured graduate of the local schools, is now teaching engineering at Hampton Inst.i.tute. Oscar Langston, another Negro boy, is a dentist in Indianapolis. These and other Negroes live in good homes, support a church and have a respectable society of their own. I found just such a body of good coloured people in Atlanta.

Well, progress brought an electric railroad to Greensburg. To work on this and on improvements made by the railroad hundreds of labourers were required. And they were Negroes of the ignorant, wandering, unlooked-after sort so common in similar occupations in the South. When the work was finished a considerable number of them remained in Greensburg. Now Greensburg, like other American cities, was governed by a mayor who was a "good fellow," and who depended on two influences to elect him: party loyalty and the saloon vote. He allowed a Negro dive to exist in one part of the town, where the idle and worthless Negroes congregated, where a murder was committed about a year before the riot. Exactly like Decatur Street in Atlanta! A rotten spot always causes trouble sooner or later.

Good citizens protested and objected--to no purpose. They even organised a Good Citizens.h.i.+p League, the purpose of which was to secure a better enforcement of law. But the saloon interests were strong and wanted to sell whiskey and beer to the Negroes, and the city authorities were complaisant.

"Who cares," one of them asked, "about a few worthless Negroes?"

But in a democracy people _must_ care for one another.

_A Negro Crime in the North_

One day last April a Negro labourer who had been working for Mrs. Sefton, a highly respected widow who lived alone, appeared in the house in broad daylight and criminally a.s.saulted her. His name was John Green, a Kentucky Negro; he was not only ignorant, but half-witted; he had already committed a burglary and had not been punished. He was easily caught, convicted, and sentenced. But the town was angry. On April 30th a crowd of men and boys gathered, beat two or three Negroes, and drove many out of town. They never thought of mobbing the city officials who had allowed the Negro dives to exist. And, as in Atlanta, the decent Negroes suffered with the criminals: a crowd broke windows in the home of George Edwards, and threatened other respectable coloured men. As in Atlanta, the better white people were horrified and scandalised; but, as in Atlanta, the white men who made up the mob went unpunished (though Atlanta did mildly discipline a few rioters). As in Atlanta, the newspaper reports that were sent out made no distinction between the different sorts of Negroes. The entire Negro population of Greensburg was blamed for the crime of a single ignorant and neglected man. I have several different newspaper reports of the affair from outside papers, and nearly all indicate in the headlines that all the Negroes in Greensburg were concerned in the riot and were driven out of town, which was not, of course, true. As a matter of fact the respectable Negroes are still living in Greensburg on friendly terms with the white people.

_Human Nature North and South_

In fact, the more I see of conditions North and South, the more I see that human nature north of Mason and Dixon's line is not different from human nature south of the line.

Different degrees of prejudice, it is true, are apparent in the two sections. In the South the social and political prejudice the natural result of the memories of slavery and reconstruction, of the greater ma.s.s of Negro population and of the backward economic development, is stronger.

In the North, on the other hand, comparatively little social and political prejudice is apparent; but the Negro has a hard fight to get anything but the most subservient place in the economic machine.

Over and over again, while I was in the South, I heard remarks like this:

"Down here we make the Negro keep his place socially, but in the North you won't let him work."

This leads me to one of the most important phases of race-relations.h.i.+p in the North--that is, the economic struggle of the Negro, suddenly thrown, as he has been, into the swift-moving, compet.i.tive conditions of Northern cities. Does he, or can he, survive? Do the ma.s.ses of Negroes now coming North realise their ambitions? Is it true that the North will not let the Negro work?

These questions must, perforce, be discussed in another chapter.

CHAPTER VII

THE NEGROES' STRUGGLE FOR SURVIVAL IN NORTHERN CITIES

One of the questions I asked of Negroes whom I met both North and South was this:

"What is your chief cause of complaint?"

In the South the first answer nearly always referred to the Jim Crow cars or the Jim Crow railroad stations; after that, the complaint was of political disfranchis.e.m.e.nt, the difficulty of getting justice in the courts, the lack of good school facilities, and in some localities, of the danger of actual physical violence.

But in the North the first answer invariably referred to working conditions.

"The Negro isn't given a fair opportunity to get employment. He is discriminated against because he is coloured."

Professor Kelly Miller, one of the acutest of Negro writers, has said:

"The Negro (in the North) is compelled to loiter around the edges of industry."

Southern white men are fond of meeting Northern criticism of Southern treatment of the Negro with the response:

"But the North closes the doors of industrial opportunity to the Negro."

And yet, in spite of this complaint of conditions in the North, one who looks Southward can almost see the army of Negroes gathering from out of the cities, villages and farms, bringing nothing with them but a buoyant hope in a distant freedom, but tramping always Northward. And they come not alone from the old South, but from the West Indies, where the coloured population looks wistfully toward the heralded opportunities of America. A few are even coming from South Africa and South America. In New York, Boston, and Philadelphia, thousands of such foreign Negroes know nothing of America traditions; some of them do not even speak the English language.

And why do they come if their difficulties are so great? Is it true that there is no chance for them in industry? Are they better or worse off in the North than in the South?

In the first place, in most of the smaller Northern cities where the Negro population is not increasing rapidly, discrimination is hardly noticeable.

Negroes enter the trades, find places in the shops, or even follow compet.i.tive business callings and still maintain friendly relations.h.i.+ps with the white people.