Following the Color Line Part 32

The second-named party, which may best, perhaps, be considered first, is made up of the great ma.s.s of the coloured people both South and North; its undisputed leader is Booker T. Was.h.i.+ngton.

_The Rise of Booker T. Was.h.i.+ngton_

Nothing has been more remarkable in the recent history of the Negro than Was.h.i.+ngton's rise to influence as a leader, and the spread of his ideals of education and progress. It is noteworthy that he was born in the South, a slave, that he knew intimately the common struggling life of his people and the att.i.tude of the white race toward them. He worked his way to education in Southern schools and was graduated at Hampton--a story which he tells best himself in his book, "Up From Slavery." He was and is Southern in feeling and point of view. When he began to think how he could best help his people the same question came to him that comes to every Negro:

"What shall we do about this discrimination and separation?"

And his was the type of character which answered, "Make the best of it; overcome it with self-development."

The very essence of his doctrine is this:

"Get yourself right, and the world will be all right."

His whole work and his life have said to the white man:

"You've set us apart. You don't want us. All right; we'll be apart. We can succeed as Negroes."

It is the doctrine of the opportunist and optimist: peculiarly, indeed, the doctrine of the man of the soil, who has come up fighting, dealing with the world, not as he would like to have it, but as it overtakes him.

Many great leaders have been like that: Lincoln was one. They have the simplicity and patience of the soil, and the immense courage and faith. To prevent being crushed by circ.u.mstances they develop humour; they laugh off their troubles. Was.h.i.+ngton has all of these qualities of the common life: he possesses in high degree what some one has called "great commonness."

And finally he has a simple faith in humanity, and in the just purposes of the Creator of humanity.

Being a hopeful opportunist Was.h.i.+ngton takes the Negro as he finds him, often ignorant, weak, timid, surrounded by hostile forces, and tells him to go to work at anything, anywhere, but go to work, learn how to work better, save money, have a better home, raise a better family.

_What Was.h.i.+ngton Teaches the Negro_

The central idea of his doctrine, indeed, is work. He teaches that if the Negro wins by real worth a strong economic position in the country, other rights and privileges will come to him naturally. He should get his rights, not by gift of the white man, but by earning them himself.

"I noticed," he says, "when I first went to Tuskegee to start the Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Inst.i.tute, that some of the white people about there looked rather doubtfully at me. I thought I could get their influence by telling them how much algebra and history and science and all those things I had in my head, but they treated me about the same as they did before.

They didn't seem to care about the algebra, history, and science that were in my head only. Those people never even began to have confidence in me until we commenced to build a large three-story brick building; and then another and another, until now we have eighty-six buildings which have been erected largely by the labour of our students, and to-day we have the respect and confidence of all the white people in that section.

"There is an unmistakable influence that comes over a white man when he sees a black man living in a two-story brick house that has been paid for."

In another place he has given his ideas of what education should be:

"How I wish that, from the most cultured and highly endowed university in the great North to the humblest log cabin schoolhouse in Alabama, we could burn, as it were, into the hearts and heads of all that usefulness, that service to our brother is the supreme end of education."

It is, indeed, to the teaching of service in the highest sense that Was.h.i.+ngton's life has been devoted. While he urges every Negro to reach as high a place as he can, he believes that the great ma.s.ses of the Negroes are best fitted to-day for manual labour; his doctrine is that they should be taught to do that labour better: that when the foundations have been laid in sound industry and in business enterprise, the higher callings and honours will come of themselves.

His emphasis is rather upon duties than upon rights. He does not advise the Negro to surrender a single right: on the other hand, he urges his people to use fully every right they have or can get--for example, to vote wherever possible, and vote thoughtfully. But he believes that some of the rights given the Negro have been lost because the Negro had neither the wisdom nor the strength to use them properly.

_Was.h.i.+ngton's Influence on His People_

I have not said much thus far in these articles about Booker T.

Was.h.i.+ngton, but as I have been travelling over this country, South and North, studying Negro communities, I have found the mark of him everywhere in happier human lives. Wherever I found a prosperous Negro enterprise, a thriving business place, a good home, there I was almost sure to find Booker T. Was.h.i.+ngton's picture over the fireplace or a little framed motto expressing his gospel of work and service. I have heard bitter things said about Mr. Was.h.i.+ngton by both coloured people and white. I have waited and investigated many of these stories, and I am telling here what I have seen and known of his influence among thousands of common, struggling human beings. Many highly educated Negroes, especially, in the North, dislike him and oppose him, but he has brought new hope and given new courage to the ma.s.ses of his race. He has given them a working plan of life. And is there a higher test of usefulness? Measured by any standard, white or black, Was.h.i.+ngton must be regarded to-day as one of the great men of this country: and in the future he will be so honoured.

_Dr. Du Bois and the Negro_

The party led by Was.h.i.+ngton is made up of the ma.s.ses of the common people; the radical party, on the other hand, represents what may be called the intellectuals. The leading exponent of its point of view is unquestionably Professor W. E. B. Du Bois of Atlanta University--though, like all minority parties, it is torn with dissension and discontent. Dr. Du Bois was born in Ma.s.sachusetts of a family that had no history of Southern slavery. He has a large intermixture of white blood. Broadly educated at Harvard and in the universities of Germany, he is to-day one of the able sociologists of this country. His economic studies of the Negro made for the United States Government and for the Atlanta University conference (which he organised) are works of sound scholars.h.i.+p and furnish the student with the best single source of accurate information regarding the Negro at present obtainable in this country. And no book gives a deeper insight into the inner life of the Negro, his struggles and his aspirations, than "The Souls of Black Folk."

Dr. Du Bois has the temperament of the scholar and idealist--critical, sensitive, unhumorous, impatient, often covering its deep feeling with sarcasm and cynicism. When the question came to him:

"What shall the Negro do about discrimination?" his answer was the exact reverse of Was.h.i.+ngton's: it was the voice of Ma.s.sachusetts:

"Do not submit! agitate, object, fight."

Where Was.h.i.+ngton reaches the hearts of his people, Du Bois appeals to their heads. Du Bois is not a leader of men, as Was.h.i.+ngton is: he is rather a promulgator of ideas. While Was.h.i.+ngton is building a great educational inst.i.tution and organising the practical activities of the race, Du Bois is the lonely critic holding up distant ideals. Where Was.h.i.+ngton cultivates friendly human relations.h.i.+ps with the white people among whom the lot of the Negro is cast, Du Bois, sensitive to rebuffs, draws more and more away from white people.

_A Negro Declaration of Independence_

Several years ago Du Bois organised the Niagara movement for the purpose of protesting against the drawing of the colour line. It is important, not so much for the extent of its members.h.i.+p, which is small, but because it represents, genuinely, a more or less prevalent point of view among many coloured people.

Its declaration of principles says:

We refuse to allow the impression to remain that the Negro-American a.s.sents to inferiority, is submissive under oppression and apologetic before insults. Through helplessness we may submit, but the voice of protest of ten million Americans must never cease to a.s.sail the ears of their fellows, so long as America is unjust.

Any discrimination based simply on race or colour is barbarous, we care not how hallowed it be by custom, expediency, or prejudice.

Differences made on account of ignorance, immorality, or disease are legitimate methods of fighting evil, and against them we have no word of protest, but discriminations based simply and solely on physical peculiarities, place of birth, colour of skin, are relics of that unreasoning human savagery of which the world is, and ought to be, thoroughly ashamed.

The object of the movement is to protest against disfranchis.e.m.e.nt and Jim Crow laws and to demand equal rights of education, equal civil rights, equal economic opportunities, and justice in the courts. Taking the ballot from the Negro they declare to be only a step to economic slavery; that it leaves the Negro defenceless before his compet.i.tor--that the disfranchis.e.m.e.nt laws in the South are being followed by all manner of other discriminations which interfere with the progress of the Negro.

"Persistent manly agitation is the way to liberty," says the declaration, "and toward this goal the Niagara movement has started."

The annual meeting of the movement was held last August in Boston, the chief gathering being in Faneuil Hall. Every reference in the speeches to Garrison, Phillips, and Sumner was cheered to the echo. "It seemed," said one newspaper report, "like a revival of the old spirit of abolitionism--with the white man left out."

Several organisations in the country, like the New England Suffrage League, the Equal Rights League of Georgia, and others, take much the same position as the Niagara movement.

The party led by Dr. Du Bois is, in short, a party of protest which endeavours to prevent Negro separation and discrimination against Negroes by agitation and political influence.

_Two Negro Parties Compared_

These two points of view, of course, are not peculiar to Negroes; they divide all human thought. The opportunist and optimist on the one hand does his great work with the world as he finds it: he is resourceful, constructive, familiar. On the other hand, the idealist, the agitator, who is also a pessimist, performs the function of the critic, he sees the world as it should be and cries out to have it instantly changed.

Thus with these two great Negro parties. Each is working for essentially the same end--better conditions of life for the Negro--each contains brave and honest men, and each is sure, humanly enough, that the other side is not only wrong, but venally wrong, whereas both parties are needed and both perform a useful function.

[Ill.u.s.tration: DR. W. E. B. DU BOIS of Atlanta University

Photograph by Purdy]

The chief, and at present almost the only, newspaper exponent of the radical Negro point of view is the Boston _Guardian_, published by William Monroe Trotter. Mr. Trotter is a mulatto who was graduated a few years ago with high honours from Harvard. His wife, who is active with him in his work, has so little Negro blood that she would ordinarily pa.s.s for white.

Mr. Trotter's father fought in the Civil War and rose to be a lieutenant in Colonel Hallowell's Ma.s.sachusetts regiment. He was one of the leaders of the Negro soldiers who refused to accept $8 a month as servants when white soldiers received $13. He argued that if a Negro soldier stood up and stopped a bullet, he was as valuable to the country as the white soldier. Though his family suffered, he served without pay rather than accept the money. It was the uncompromising spirit of Garrison and Phillips.