WHEN AFRICA AWAKES
The “inside Story” of the Stirrings and Strivings of the New Negro in the Western World

By HUBERT H. HARRISON, D.S.C.

Author of “The Negro and the Nation,” “Lincoln and Liberty,” and Associate Editor of the Negro World

COPYRIGHTED

By HUBERT H. HARRISON, 1920.

PUBLISHED BY

THE PORRO PRESS

513 Lenox Avenue

NEW YORK CITY

1920

THIS LITTLE RECORD
IS AFFECTIONATELY DEDICATED
TO THOSE WHO
STOOD BY MY SIDE
IN
LOVE, LABOR AND SACRIFICE
WHEN
THE FOUNDATIONS
WERE LAID

TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTORY

The Great War of 1914–1918 has served to liberate many new ideas undreamt of by those who rushed humanity into that bath of blood. During that war the idea of democracy was widely advertised, especially in the English-speaking world; mainly as a convenient camouflage behind which competing imperialists masked their sordid aims. Even the dullest can now see that those who so loudly proclaimed and formulated the new democratic demands never had the slightest intention of extending either the limits or the applications of “democracy.” Ireland and India, Egypt and Russia are still the Ithuriel’s spear of the great democratic pretence. The flamboyant advertising of “democracy” has returned to plague the inventors; for the subject populations who contributed their millions in men and billions in treasure for the realization of the ideal which was flaunted before their eyes are now clamoring for their share of it. They are demanding that those who advertised democracy shall now make good. This is the main root of that great unrest which is now troubling the decrepit statesmanship of Europe and America. But the rigid lines of the old regime will not permit the granting of these new demands. Hence the new war against democracy which expresses itself in the clever but futile attempt to outlaw the demands for fuller freedom as “sedition” and “Bolshevism.”

The most serious aspect of this new situation is the racial one. The white world has been playing with the catch-words of democracy while ruthlessly ruling an overwhelming majority of black, brown and yellow peoples to whom these catchwords were never intended to apply. But these many-colored millions have taken part in the war “to make the world safe for democracy,” and they are now insisting that democracy shall be made safe for them. This, in plain English, their white overlords do not intend to concede. “The undictated development of all peoples” was, at best, intended “for white people only.” Thus, white civilization is brought face to face with a crisis out of which may easily grow military conflicts of tremendous scope and, more remotely, the passing of international control out of the hands of a few white nations.

The tenseness of this new situation has been reflected here in the United States in the mental attitude of the Negro people. They have developed new ideas of their own place in the category of races and have evolved new conceptions of their powers and destiny. These ideas have quickened their race-consciousness and they are making new demands on themselves, on their leaders and on the white people in whose midst they live. These new demands apply to politics, domestic and international, to education and culture, to commerce and industry. It seems proper that the white people of America should know what these demands are and should understand the spirit in which they are being urged. Obviously, it is not well that they should be misrepresented and lied about. Futile fulminations about the spread of “Bolshevism” among Negroes by “agitators” will not help toward an understanding of this new phenomenon. They can but befog the issues and defer the dawning of a better day. On the other hand, the Negro people will profit by a clarified presentation of their own side of the case. It is to meet this dual need that this little book is launched. It is a compilation of some of the author’s contributions to Negro journalism between 1917 and the present year and consists of selected editorials, special articles and reviews written for The Voice, The New Negro, and The Negro World. I have selected for reproduction those only which could fairly be considered as expositions of the new point of view evolved during the Great War and coming into prominence since the peace was signed. So far, this point of view has not been fully presented-by the Negro. White men, like Messrs. Sandburg and Seligman, have essayed to interpret it to the white world. This little volume presents directly that which they would interpret.

It may seem unusual to put into permanent form the deliverances of this species of literature. But I venture to think that, as literature, they will stand the test; and I am willing to assume the risks. Besides, I feel that I owe it to my people to preserve this cross-section of their new-found soul. It was my privilege to assist in shaping some of the forms of the new consciousness; and to preserve for posterity a portion of its record has seemed a duty which should not be shirked.

It was in 1916 that I first began to hammer out some of the ideas which will be found in these pages. It was in that year that I gave up my work as a lecturer and teacher among white people to give myself exclusively to work among my own people. In the summer of 1917, with the financial aid of many poor but willing hearts I brought out The Voice, the first Negro journal of the new dispensation, and, for some time, the only one. The Voice failed in March, 1919; but in the meanwhile it had managed to make an indelible impression. Many of the writings reproduced here are taken from its files. The others are from The Negro World, of which I assumed the joint editorship in January of this year. A few appeared in The New Negro, a monthly magazine which I edited for a short time.

The account of the launching of the Liberty League is given here in the first chapter because that meeting at historic Bethel on June 12, 1917, and the labors of tongue and pen out of which that meeting emerged were the foundation for the mighty structures of racial propaganda which have been raised since then. This is a fact not generally known because I have not hankered after newspaper publicity.

It is hardly necessary to point out that the AFRICA of the title is to be taken in its racial rather than in its geographical sense.

HUBERT H. HARRISON.

New York, August 15, 1920.

CHAPTER I.
THE BEGINNINGS

Launching the Liberty League

(From The Voice of July 4, 1917.)

The Liberty League of Negro-Americans, which was recently organized by the Negroes of New York, presents the most startling program of any organization of Negroes in the country today. This is nothing less than the demand that the Negroes of the United States be given a chance to enthuse over democracy for themselves in America before they are expected to enthuse over democracy in Europe. The League is composed of “Negro-Americans, loyal to their country in every respect, and obedient to her laws.”

The League has an interesting history. It grew out of the labors of Mr. Hubert H. Harrison, who has been on the lecture platform for years and is well and favorably known to thousands of white New Yorkers from Wall Street to Washington Heights.

Two years ago Mr. Harrison withdrew from an international political organization, and, a little more than a year ago, gave up lecturing to white people, to devote himself to lecturing exclusively among his own people. He acquired so much influence among them that when he issued the first call for a mass-meeting “to protest against lynching in the land of liberty and disfranchisement in the home of democracy,” although the call was not advertised in any newspaper, the church in which the meeting was held was packed from top to bottom. At this mass-meeting, which was held at Bethel Church on June 12, the organization was effected and funds were raised to sustain it and to extend its work all over the country.

Harrison was subsequently elected its president, with Edgar Grey and James Harris as secretary and treasurer, respectively. At the close of this mass-meeting he hurriedly took the midnight train for Boston, where a call for a similar meeting had been issued by W. Monroe Trotter, editor of The Boston Guardian. While there he delivered an address in Fanueil Hall, the cradle of American liberty, and told the Negroes of Boston what their brothers in New York had done and were doing. The result was the linking up of the New York and the Boston organizations, and Harrison was elected chairman of a national committee of arrangements to issue a call to every Negro organization in the country to send delegates to a great race-congress which is to meet in Washington in September or October and put their grievances before the country and Congress.

At the New York mass-meeting money was subscribed for the establishment of a newspaper to be known as The Voice and to serve as the medium of expression for the new demands and aspirations of the new Negro. It was made clear that this “New Negro Movement” represented a breaking away of the Negro masses from the grip of the old-time leaders—none of whom was represented at the meeting. The audience rose to their feet with cheers when Harrison was introduced by the chairman. The most striking passages of his speech were those in which he demanded that Congress make lynching a Federal crime and take the Negro’s life under national protection, and declared that since lynching was murder and a violation of Federal and State laws, it was incumbent upon the Negroes themselves to maintain the majesty of the law and put down the law-breakers by organizing all over the South to defend their own lives whenever their right to live was invaded by mobs which the local authorities were too weak or unwilling to suppress.

The meeting was also addressed by Mr. J. C. Thomas, Jr., a young Negro lawyer, who pointed out the weakness and subserviency of the old-time political leaders and insisted that Negroes stop begging for charity in the matter of their legal rights and demand justice instead.

Mr. Marcus Garvey, president of the Jamaica Improvement Association, was next introduced by Mr. Harrison. He spoke in enthusiastic approval of the new movement and pledged it his hearty support.

After the Rev. Dr. Cooper, the pastor of Bethel, had addressed the meeting, the following resolutions were adopted and a petition to Congress was prepared and circulated. In addition the meeting sent a telegram to the Jews of Russia, congratulating them upon the acquisition of full political and civil rights and expressing the hope that the United States might soon follow the democratic example of Russia.

Resolutions Passed at the Liberty League Meeting

Two thousand Negro-Americans assembled in mass-meeting at Bethel A.M.E. Church to protest against lynching in the land of liberty, and disfranchisement in the home of democracy have, after due deliberation, adopted the following resolutions and make them known to the world at large in the earnest hope that whenever the world shall be made safe for democracy our corner of that world will not be forgotten.

We believe that this world war will and must result in a larger measure of democracy for the peoples engaged therein—whatever may be the secret ambitions of their several rulers.

We therefore ask, first, that when the war shall be ended and the council of peace shall meet to secure to every people the right to rule their own ancestral lands free from the domination of tyrants, domestic and foreign, the similar rights of the 250,000,000 Negroes of Africa be conceded. Not to concede them this is to lay the foundation for more wars in the future and to saddle the new democracies with the burden of a militarism greater than that under which the world now groans.

Secondly, we, as Negro-Americans who have poured out our blood freely in every war of the Republic, and upheld her flag with undivided loyalty, demand that since we have shared to the full measure of manhood in bearing the burdens of democracy we should also share in the rights and privileges of that democracy.

And we believe that the present time, when the hearts of ninety millions of our white fellow-citizens are aflame with the passionate ardor of democracy which has carried them into the greatest war of the age with the sole purpose of suppressing autocracy in Europe, is the best time to appeal to them to give to twelve millions of us the elementary rights of democracy at home.

For democracy, like charity, begins at home, and we find it hard to endure without murmur and with the acquiescence of our government the awful evils of lynching, which is a denial of the right to life; of segregation, Jim Crowism and peonage, which are a denial of the right to liberty; and disfranchisement, which is a denial of justice and democracy.

And since Imperial Russia, formerly the most tyrannous government in Europe, has been transformed into Republican Russia, whereby millions of political serfs have been lifted to the level of citizenship rights; since England is offering the meed of political manhood to the hitherto oppressed Irish and the down-trodden Hindu; and since these things have helped to make good the democratic assertions of these countries of the old world now engaged in war;

Therefore, be it resolved:

That we, the Negro people of the first republic of the New World, ask all true friends of democracy in this country to help us to win these same precious rights for ourselves and our children.

That we invite the government’s attention to the great danger which threatens democracy through the continued violation of the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments, which is a denial of justice and the existence of mob-law for Negroes from Florida to New York;

That we intend to protest and to agitate by every legal means until we win these rights from the hands of our government and induce it to protect democracy from these dangers, and square the deeds of our nation with its declarations;

That we create adequate instruments for securing these ends and make our voice heard and heeded in the councils of our country, and

That copies of these resolutions be forwarded to the Congress of the United States and to such other public bodies as shall seem proper to us.

The Liberty League’s Petition to the House of Representatives of the United States, July 4, 1917

We, the Negro people of the United States, loyal to our country in every respect, and obedient to her laws, respectfully petition your honorable body for a redress of the specific grievances and flagrant violations of your own laws as set forth in this statement. We beg to call your attention to the discrepancy which exists between the public profession of the government that we are lavishing our resources of men and money in this war in order to make the world safe for democracy, and the just as public performances of lynching-bees, Jim-crowism and disfranchisement in which our common country abounds.

We should like to believe in our government’s professions of democracy, but find it hard to do so in the presence of the facts; and we judge that millions of other people outside of the country will find it just as hard.

CHAPTER II.
DEMOCRACY AND RACE FRICTION

The East St. Louis Horror

This nation is now at war to make the world “safe for democracy,” but the Negro’s contention in the court of public opinion is that until this nation itself is made safe for twelve million of its subjects the Negro, at least, will refuse to believe in the democratic assertions of the country. The East St. Louis pogrom gives point to this contention. Here, on the eve of the celebration of the Nation’s birthday of freedom and equality, the white people, who are denouncing the Germans as Huns and barbarians, break loose in an orgy of unprovoked and villainous barbarism which neither Germans nor any other civilized people have ever equalled.

How can America hold up its hands in hypocritical horror at foreign barbarism while the red blood of the Negro is clinging to those hands? so long as the President and Congress of the United States remain dumb in the presence of barbarities in their own land which would tip their tongues with righteous indignation if they had been done in Belgium, Ireland or Galicia?

And what are the Negroes to do? Are they expected to re-echo with enthusiasm the patriotic protestations of the boot-licking leaders whose pockets and positions testify to the power of the white man’s gold? Let there be no mistake. Whatever the Negroes may be compelled by law to do and say, the resentment in their hearts will not down. Unbeknown to the white people of this land a temper is being developed among Negroes with which the American people will have to reckon.

At the present moment it takes this form: If white men are to kill unoffending Negroes, Negroes must kill white men in defense of their lives and property. This is the lesson of the East St. Louis massacre.

The press reports declare that, “the troops who were on duty during the most serious disturbances were ordered not to shoot.” The civil and military authorities are evidently winking at the work of the mobs—horrible as that was—and the Negroes of the city need not look to them for protection. They must protect themselves. And even the United States Supreme Court concedes them this right.

There is, in addition, a method of retaliation which we urge upon them.

It is one which will hit those white men who have the power to prevent lawlessness just where they will feel it most, in the place where they keep their consciences—the pocket-book. Let every Negro in East St. Louis and the other cities where race rioting occurs draw his money from the savings-bank and either bank it in the other cities or in the postal savings bank. The only part of the news reports with which we are well pleased is that which states that the property loss is already estimated at a million and a half of dollars.

Another reassuring feature is the one suppressed in most of the news dispatches. We refer to the evidences that the East St. Louis Negroes organized themselves during the riots and fought back under some kind of leadership. We Negroes will never know, perhaps, how many whites were killed by our enraged brothers in East St. Louis. It isn’t the news-policy of the white newspapers (whether friendly or unfriendly) to spread such news broadcast. It might teach Negroes too much. But we will hope for the best.

The occurrence should serve to enlarge rapidly the membership of The Liberty League of Negro-Americans which was organized to take practical steps to help our people all over the land in the protection of their lives and liberties. —July 4th, 1917.

“Arms and the Man”

In its editorial on “The East St. Louis Horror” The Voice said:

How can America hold up its hands in hypocritical horror at foreign barbarism while the red blood of the Negro is clinging to those hands? So long as the President and Congress of the United States remain dumb in the presence of barbarities in their own land which would tip their tongues with righteous indignation if they had been done in Belgium, Ireland or Galicia?

And what are the Negroes to do? Are they expected to re-echo with enthusiasm the patriotic protestations of the boot-licking leaders whose pockets and positions testify to the power of the white man’s gold? Let there be no mistake. Whatever the Negroes may be compelled by law to do and say, the resentment in their hearts will not down. Unbeknown to the white people of this land a temper is being developed among Negroes with which the American people will have to reckon.

At the present moment it takes this form: If white men are to kill unoffending Negroes, Negroes must kill white men in defence of their lives and property. This is the lesson of the East St. Louis massacre.

To this, the New York Age makes reply in two ways. Its editor, in an interview given to the Tribune, declares that:

The representative Negro does not approve of radical socialistic outbursts, such as calling upon the Negroes to defend themselves against the whites.

And in its editorial of last week it insists that:

No man, or woman either, for that matter, is a friend to the race, who publicly advises a resort to violence to redress the wrongs and injustices to which members of the race are subjected in various sections of the country at the present time.

The Negro race is afflicted with many individuals whose wagging tongues are apt to lead them into indiscreet utterances that reflect upon the whole race. … The unruly tongues should not be allowed to alienate public sympathy from the cause of the oppressed.

Now, although The Voice seeks no quarrel with The Age, we are forced to dissent from this cringing, obsequious view which it champions. And we do this on the ground that cringing has gone out of date, that The Age’s view does not now represent any influential or important section of Negro opinion. The group which once held that view went to pieces when Dr. Washington died. The white papers in their news items of last week gave instance after instance showing that Negroes not only counselled self-defense, but actually practiced it. (And The Age, by the way, was the only Negro paper in New York City which excluded these items from its news columns.) If the press reports are correct, then The Voice told the simple truth when it spoke of the new temper which was being developed “unbeknown to the white people of this land.” And an outsider might conclude that The Voice was a better friend to the white people by letting them know this, than The Age was by trying to lie about it.

But the controversy goes much deeper than the question of candor and truthfulness. The Age and The Voice join issue on this double question: Have Negroes a right to defend themselves against whites? Should they defend themselves? (And this, of course, means violence.) The Voice answers, “Yes!” The Age answers “No!” Who is to decide? Let us appeal to the courts. Every law-book and statute-book, every court in the civilized world and in the United States agree that every human being has the legal as well as moral right to kill those who attack and try to kill him. Then the question for The Age to decide, is whether Negroes are human beings. To call our view “socialistic” is to call the courts “socialistic,” and displays an amazing ignorance both of Socialism and of human nature.

Before we leave this question, it is proper to consider the near and remote consequences of the radical view. The Age says that unruly tongues will alienate public sympathy from the oppressed. Good God! Isn’t it high time to ask of what value is that kind of sympathy which is ready to be alienated as soon as Negroes cease to be “niggers” and insist on being men? Is that the sort of sympathy on which The Age has thrived? Then we will have none of it.

And, as to the remoter consequences: neither we nor The Age has a lease on the future. We can but prophesy. But intelligent people reach the unknown via the known, and prophesy the future from the known past and present. And we do know that no race or group of people past or present ever won to the status of manhood among men by yielding up that right which even a singed cat will not yield up—the right to defend their lives. If The Age knows of any instance to the contrary in the history of the past seven thousand years, let it mention that instance. But The Age may ask:

“What will self defense accomplish?” Let us see first what the absence of self-defense accomplishes. In its news account of the St. Louis massacre, the Amsterdam News shows that whenever the white mobs found a group of Negroes organized and armed, they turned back; while The Age itself had this significant and pathetic sentence:

Since the massacre, which will go down in history alongside the atrocities committed in Brussels and Rheims, a delegation of Negroes has held a conference with Governor Lowden at Springfield, but the outcome of this meeting will not bring back the lives of those who, for no valid reason, were struck down and murdered in cold blood.

Taking the two things together the answer seems clear enough. When murder is cheap murder is indulged in recklessly; when it is likely to be costly it is not so readily indulged in. Will The Age venture to deny this? No? Then we say, let Negroes help to make murder costly, for by so doing they will aid the officers of the city, state and nation in instilling respect for law and order into the minds of the worst and lowest elements of our American cities. And we go further: We say that it is not alone the brutality of the whites—it is also the cowardice of Negroes and the lickspittle leadership of the last two decades which, like The Age, told us to “take it all lying down”—it is this which has been the main reason for our “bein’ so aisily lynched,” as Mr. Dooley puts it.

Whatever The Age may say, Negroes will fight back as they are already fighting back. And they will be more highly regarded—as are the Irish—because of fighting back.

We are aiming at the white man’s respect—not at his sympathy. We cannot win that respect by any conspicuous and contemptible cowardice; the only kind of sympathy which we may win by that is the kind of sympathy which men feel for a well-kicked dog which cringes while they kick it.

“Rights are to be won by those who are ready and willing to fight, if necessary, to have those rights respected.”

Who says this? Theodore Roosevelt. So does President Wilson. So does the U. S. Government. That is why we went to war with Germany. Our country always acts upon the best and highest principle and we Negroes have just begun to see that our country is quite right. Therefore, we are willing to follow its glorious example. That is all.

The Negro and the Labor Unions

There are two kinds of labor unionism; the A.F. of L. kind and the other kind. So far, the Negro has been taught to think that all unionism was like the unionism of the American Federation of Labor, and because of this ignorance, his attitude toward organized labor has been that of the scab. For this no member of the A.F. of L. can blame the Negro. The policy of that organization toward the Negro has been damnable. It has kept him out of work and out of the unions as long as it could; and when it could no longer do this it has taken him in, tricked him, and discriminated against him.

On the other hand, the big capitalists who pay low wages (from the son of Abraham Lincoln in the Pullman Co. to Julius Rosenwald of the Sears Roebuck Co.) have been rather friendly to the Negro. They have given their money to help him build Y.M.C.A.’s and schools of a certain type. They have given him community help in Northern cities and have expended charity on him— and on the newspapers and parsons who taught him. Small wonder, then, that the Negro people are anti-union.

Labor unions were created by white working men that they might bring the pressure of many to bear upon the greedy employer and make him give higher wages and better living conditions to the laborer. When they, in turn, become so greedy that they keep out the majority of working people, by high dues and initiation fees, they no longer represent the interests of the laboring class. They stand in the way of this class’s advancement—and they must go. They must leave the way clear for the 20th century type of unionism which says: “To leave a single worker out is to leave something for the boss to use against us. Therefore we must organize in One Big Union of all the working-class.” This is the type of unionism which organized, in 1911, 18,000 white and 14,000 black timber workers in Louisiana. This is the I.W.W. type of unionism, and the employers use their newspapers to make the public believe that it stands for anarchy, violence, law-breaking and atheism, because they know that if it succeeds it will break them.

This type of unionism wants Negroes—not because its promoters love Negroes—but because they realize that they cannot win if any of the working class is left out; and after winning they cannot go back on them because they could be used as scabs to break the unions.

The A.F. of L., which claims a part of the responsibility for the East St. Louis outrage, is playing with fire. The American Negro may join hands with the American capitalist and scab them out of existence. And the editor of The Voice calls upon Negroes to do this. We have stood the American Federation of Labor just about long enough. Join hands with the capitalists and scab them out of existence—not in the name of scabbery, but in the name of a real organization of labor. Form your own unions (the A.C.E. is already in the field) and make a truce with your capitalist enemy until you get rid of this traitor to the cause of labor. Offer your labor to capitalism if it will agree to protect you in your right to labor—and see that it does. Then get rid of the A.F. of L.

The writer has been a member of a party which stood for the rights of labor and the principle of Industrial Unionism (the 20th century kind). He understands the labor conditions of the country and desires to see the working man win out. But his first duty, here as everywhere, is to the Negro race. And he refuses to put ahead of his race’s rights a collection of diddering jackasses which can publicly palliate such atrocities as that of East St. Louis and publicly assume, as Gompers did, responsibility for it. Therefore, he issues the advice to the workers of his race to “can the A.F. of L.” Since the A.F. of L. chooses to put Race before Class, let us return the compliment.

Lynching: Its Cause and Cure

Last week we had occasion to comment on the resignation of Mr. John R. Shillady from the secretaryship of the N.A.A.C.P. Mr. Shillady’s statement accompanying his resignation contains these significant words:—

“I am less confident than heretofore of the speedy success of the association’s full program and of the probability of overcoming within a reasonable period the forces opposed to Negro equality by the means and methods which are within the association’s power to employ.”

That the N.A.A.C.P. is not likely to affect the lynchings in this land can be seen with half an eye by any one who will note that Governor J. A. Burnquist of Minnesota “is also president of the St. Paul branch of the association and one of the staunch supporters of its work”; that the Minnesota lynching of last week was one of the most cynically brutal that has occurred North or South in the last ten years, and that the association has offered and is offering to give the Governor all the assistance possible.

In most of the other cases of lynchings it is assumed that all the officials were in collusion with the forces of violence, or were at any rate in acquiescence. In the present case, however, the Governor of the State is himself a high officer of the association. Yet we venture to prophesy that no more will be done in the case of the Minnesota lynchings than in the case of lynchings further south.

This leads us to a front face consideration of the problem of lynching. Why do white men lynch black men in America? We are not dealing here with the original historical cause; nor even with its present social application. We are considering merely the efficient cause. White men lynch black men or any other men because those men’s lives are unprotected either by the authorities of the commonwealth or by the victims themselves. White men lynch Negroes in America because Negroes’ lives are cheap. So long as they so remain, so long will lynching remain an evil to be talked about, written about, petitioned against and slobbered over. But not all the slobber, the talk or the petitions are worth the time it takes to indulge in them, so far as the saving of a single Negro life is concerned.

What, then, is the cure? The cure follows from the nature of the cause. Let Negroes determine that their lives shall no longer be cheap; but that they will exact for them as high a price as any other element in the community under similar circumstances would exact. Let them see to it that their lives are protected and defended, if not by the State, then certainly by themselves. Then we will see the cracker stopping to take counsel with himself and to think twice before he joins a mob in whose gruesome holiday sport he himself is likely to furnish one of the casualties.

CHAPTER III.
THE NEGRO AND THE WAR

[While the war lasted those of us who saw unpalatable truths were compelled to do one of two things: either tell the truth as we saw it and go to jail, or camouflage the truth that we had to tell. The present writer told the truth for the most part, in so far as it related to our race relations; but, in a few cases camouflage was safer and more effective. That camouflage, however, was never of that truckling quality which was accepted by the average American editor to such a nauseating degree. I was well aware that Woodrow Wilson’s protestations of democracy were lying protestations, consciously and deliberately designed to deceive. What, then, was my duty in the face of that fact? I chose to pretend that Woodrow Wilson meant what he said, because by so doing I could safely hold up to contempt and ridicule the undemocratic practices of his administration and the actions of his white countrymen in regard to the Negro. How this was done is shown in the first two editorials of the following chapter.]

Is Democracy Unpatriotic?

The present administration is all right. But it has its obstacles to success. As usual some of the worst of these are its injudicious “friends.” For instance, there are the people who are trying their best to “queer” us in the eyes of civilized Europe. These silly souls, when Negroes ask that the principle of “Justice in War Time”: be applied to Negroes as well as whites, reply, in effect that this should not be; that Negroes should not want Justice—in war time—and that any such demand on their part is “disloyalty.” On the contrary, it is the fullest loyalty to the letter and spirit of the President’s war-aims. To say that it isn’t is to presume to accuse the President of having war-aims other than those which he has set forth in the face of Europe.

Besides, no one can deny that freedom from lynching and disfranchisement and the ending of discrimination—by the Red Cross for instance—will strengthen the hand of the administration right now by strengthening its hold on the hearts of the Negro masses and will make all Negroes—soldiers as well as civilians—more competent to give effective aid in winning the war.

Let us assume that we consent to being lynched—“during the war”—and submit tamely and with commendable weakness to being Jim-crowed and disfranchised. Very well. Will not that be the proof of our spirit and of its quality? Of course. And what you call that spirit won’t alter its quality, will it? Now, ask all the peoples of all the world what they call a people who smilingly consent to their own degradation and destruction. They call such a people cowards—because they are cowards. In America we call such people “niggers.”

Is anyone unpatriotic enough to pretend that “cowards” can lick “Huns”? No, this great world-task can be accomplished only by men—English men, French men, Italian men, American men. Our country needs men now more than it ever did before. And those who multiply its reserve of men are adding to its strength. That is why the true patriots who really love America and want it to win the war are asking America to change its Negroes from “niggers” into men. Surely this is a patriotic request; and any one who says that it isn’t must be prepared to maintain that lynching, Jim-crow and disfranchisement are consistent with patriotism and ought to be preserved. Reading the President’s proclamations in reverent spirit, we deny both of these monstrous conclusions; and we believe that we have on our side the President of America, the world’s foremost champion of democracy who defined it as “the right of all those who submit to authority to have a VOICE in their own government”—whether it be in Germany or in Georgia. And we believe that the splendid spirit of our common country, which has buckled on its sword in support of “democracy” will support us in this reasonable contention. —July, 1918.

Why Is the Red Cross?

The Red Cross, or Geneva Association, was the product of a Swiss infidel. He saw how cruel to man were those who loved God most—the Christians—and, out of his large humanity and loving kindness, he evolved an organization which should bring the charity of service to lessen the lurid horrors of Christian battlefields.

A love that rose above the love of country—the love of human kind: this was the proud principle of the Red Cross. Its nurses and its surgeons, stretcher-bearers and assistants were supposed to bring relief to those who were in pain, regardless of whether they were “friends” or “enemies.” Discrimination was a word which did not exist for them: and it is not supposed to exist now even as against the wounded German aviator who has bombed a Red Cross hospital.

But, alack and alas! The splendid spirit of the Swiss infidel is seemingly too high for Christian race-prejudice to reach. Where he would not discriminate even against enemies, the American branch of his international society is discriminating against most loyal friends and willing helpers—when they are Negroes. Up to date the American Red Cross Society, which receives government aid and co-operation to help win the war, cannot cite the name of a single Negro woman as a nurse. True, it says that it has “enrolled” some. This we refuse to believe. But even if that were true, a nurse “enrolled” cannot save the life of any of our soldiers in France.

The Red Cross says that it wants to win the war. What war? A white people’s war, or America’s and the world’s? It this were a white people’s war, as some seem to think, colored troops from Senegal, India, Egypt, America and the West Indies would have been kept out of it. But they were not, and we are driven to conclude that this is a world war. Then why doesn’t the American Red Cross meet it in the spirit of the President—of world democracy? The cry goes up for nurses to save the lives of soldiers; yet here are thousands of Negro nurses whom the Red Cross won’t accept. They must want to give Europe a “rotten” opinion of American democracy. For we may be sure that these things are known in Europe—even as our lynchings are. And anyone who would give Europe a “rotten” opinion of America at this time is no friend of America.

The American Red Cross must be compelled to do America’s work in the spirit in which America has entered the war. There need be no biting of tongues: it must be compelled to forego Race Prejudice. If the N.A.A.C.P. were truly what it pretends instead of a National Association for the Advancement of Certain People, it would put its high-class lawyers on the job and bring the case into the United States courts. It would charge the American Red Cross with disloyalty to the war-aims of America. And if it does not (in spite of the money which it got from the “silent” protest parade and other moneys and legal talent at its disposal) then it will merit the name which one of its own members gave it—the National Association for the Acceptance of Color Proscription. Get busy, “friends of the colored people”! For we are not disposed to regard the camouflage of those who want nurses but do not want Negro nurses in any other light than that of Bret Harte’s Truthful James:—

Which I wish to remark—

And my language is plain—

That for ways that are dark

And for tricks that are vain

The Heathen Chinee is peculiar:

Which the same I am free to maintain.

A Hint of Our Reward

The wisdom of our contemporary ancestors, having decided that “We Negroes must make every sacrifice to help win the war and lay aside our just demands for the present that we may win a shining place on the pages of history,” it must be cold comfort to learn that the first after-the-war schoolbook of American history is out, that it is written by Reuben Gold Thwaites and Calvin Noyes Kendall, that it devotes thirty-one pages to the war and America’s part in the war, and that not one word is said of the Negro’s part therein.

Of course, sensible men should feel no surprise at this, for they will realize how little the part played by the Negro in the Civil War is known by the millions of white school children who read the school histories. Yet, if there is a spark of manhood left in the bosoms of our “white men’s niggers” who sold us out during the war they must feel pained and humiliated when the flood of after-the-war school histories, of which this is the first, quietly sink the Negro’s contributions (as chronicled by Mr. Emmett Scott and others) into the back waters of forgetfulness.

The times change, but we don’t change with them.

The Negro at the Peace Congress

Now that they have helped to win the war against Germany, the Negro people in these United States feel the absurdity of the situation in which they find themselves. They have given lavishly of their blood and treasure. They have sent their young men overseas as soldiers, and were willing to send their young women overseas as nurses; but the innate race-prejudice of the American Red Cross prevented them. They have contributed millions of dollars to the funds of this same Red Cross and scores of millions to the four Liberty Loans; and they have done all this to help make the world “safe for democracy” even while in sixteen States of the south in which nine-tenths of them reside, they have no voice in their own government. Naturally they expect that something will have to be done to remove their civil and other disabilities. This expectation of theirs is a just and reasonable one. But— —

Now that the world is getting ready for the Peace Congress which is expected to settle the questions about which the war was fought our Negroes want to know if the Peace Congress will settle such questions as those of lynching, disfranchisement and segregation. IT WILL NOT! And why? Simply because the war was not fought over these questions. Even a fool can see that. Lynching, disfranchisement and Jim-crowing in America are questions of American domestic policy and can be regulated only by American law-making and administrative bodies. Even a fool should be able to see this. And, since it was only by the military aid of the United States that the Allies were able to win the war, why should our people be stupid enough to think that the allied nations will aim a slap at the face of the United States (even if such things were customary) by attempting to interfere in her domestic arrangements and institutions?

We learn that various bodies of Negroes, who do not seem to understand the modern system of political government under which they live, are seeking to get money from the unsuspecting masses of our people “for the purpose of sending delegates to the Peace Congress.” The project is sublimely silly. In the first place, the Peace Congress is not open to anybody who chooses to be sent. A peep into any handbook of modern history would show that Peace Congresses are made up only of delegates chosen by the heads of the governments of the countries which have been at war, and never by civic, propaganda, or other bodies within those nations. Only the President of the United States has power to designate the American delegates to the Peace Congress.

Of course, if any body of people wish to send a visitor to Versailles or Paris at their expense, the government of the United States has nothing to do with that and would not prevent it. But such visitor, lacking credentials from the President, could not get within a block of the Peace Congress. They can (if they read French) get from the papers published in the city where the Congress meets so much of the proceedings as the Congress may choose to give to the press. But that is all; and for that it is not necessary to go to France. Just send to France for copies of Le Temps or Le Matin and prevent a useless waste of the money of poor people who can ill afford it in any case.

“But,” we are told, “such person or persons can make propaganda (in France) which will force the Peace Congress to consider American lynching, disfranchisement and segregation,” Passing over the argument that such person or persons would have to be able to write French fluently, we wish to point out that the public sentiment of even one French city takes more than a month to work up; that the sentiment of one French city can have but slight weight with the Congress, and that, if it could rise to the height of embarrassing them, the French authorities would sternly put it down and banish the troublesome persons. Karl Marx, Prince Kropotkin, Malatesta and Lenine are cases in point as showing what France has done under less provoking circumstances.

Let us not try to play the part of silly fools. Lynching, disfranchisement and segregation are evils HERE; and the place in which we must fight them is HERE. If foolish would-be leaders have no plan to lay before our people for the fighting HERE, in God’s name, let them say so, and stand out of the way! Let us gird up our loins for the stern tasks which lie before us HERE and address ourselves to them with courage and intelligence.

Africa and the Peace

“This war, disguise it how we may, is really being fought over African questions.” So said Sir Harry Johnston, one of the foremost authorities on Africa, in the London Sphere in June, 1917. We wonder if the Negroes of the Western world quite realize what this means. Wars are not fought for ideals but for lands whose populations can be put to work, for resources that can be minted into millions, for trade that can be made to enrich the privileged few. When King Leopold of Belgium and Thomas Fortune Ryan of New York joined hands to exploit the wealth of the Congo they did it with oiled phrases on their lips. They called that land of horrors and of shame “The Congo FREE State!”

And, so, when Nations go to war, they never openly declare what they WANT. They must camouflage their sordid greed behind some sounding phrase like “freedom of the seas,” “self-determination,” “liberty” or “democracy.” But only the ignorant millions ever think that those are the real objects of their bloody rivalries. When the war is over, the mask is dropped, and then they seek “how best to scramble at the shearers’ feast.” It is then that they disclose their real war aims.

One of the most striking cases in point is the present peace congress. Already President Wilson has had to go to look after democracy himself. Already responsible heads of the Allied governments are making it known that “freedom of the seas” means a benevolent naval despotism maintained by them, and that “democracy” means simply the transfer of Germany’s African lands to England and the others. Africa at the peace table constitutes the real stakes which the winners will rake in. We may read in headlines the startling item “Negroes Ask For German Colonies,” but Negroes of sense should not be deluded. They will not get them because they have no battleships, no guns, no force, military or financial. They are not a Power.

Despite the pious piffle of nice old gentlemen like Professor Kelly Miller, the King-word of modern nations is POWER. It is only Sunday school “kids” and people of child-races who take seriously such fables as that in the “Band of Hope Review” when we were children that “the secret of England’s greatness is the Bible.” The secret of England’s greatness (as well as of any other great nation’s) is not bibles but bayonets—bayonets, business and brains. As long as the white nations have a preponderance of these, so long will they rule. Ask Japan: she knows. And as long as the lands of Africa can yield billions of business, so long will white brains use bayonets to keep them—as the British government did last year in Nigeria.

Africa is turning over in her sleep, and this agitation now going on among American Negroes for the liberation of Africa is a healthy sign of her restlessness. But it is no more than that. Africa’s hands are tied, and, so tied, she will be thrown upon the peace table. Let us study how to unloose her bonds later. Instead of futile expectations from the doubtful generosity of white land-grabbers, let us American Negroes go to Africa, live among the natives and LEARN WHAT THEY HAVE TO TEACH US (for they have much to teach us). Let us go there—not in the coastlands,—but in the interior, in Nigeria and Nyassaland; let us study engineering and physics, chemistry and commerce, agriculture and industry; let us learn more of nitrates, of copper, rubber and electricity; so will we know why Belgium, France, England and Germany want to be in Africa. Let us begin by studying the scientific works of the African explorers and stop reading and believing the silly slush which ignorant missionaries put into our heads about the alleged degradation of our people in Africa. Let us learn to know Africa and Africans so well that every educated Negro will be able at a glance to put his hand on the map of Africa and tell where to find the Jolofs, Ekois, Mandingoes, Yorubas, Bechuanas or Basutos and can tell something of their marriage customs, their property laws, their agriculture and systems of worship. For, not until we can do this will it be seemly for us to pretend to be anxious about their political welfare.

Indeed, it would be well now for us to establish friendly relations and correspondence with our brothers at home. For we don’t know enough about them to be able to do them any good at THIS peace congress (even if we were graciously granted seats there); but fifty years from now—WHO KNOWS?

“They Shall Not Pass!”

When heroic France was holding the Kaiser’s legions at bay her inflexible resolution found expression in the phrase, “Ils ne passeront pas!”—they shall not pass! The white statesmen who run our government in Washington seem to have adopted the poilu’s watchword in a less worthy cause. The seventy-odd Negro “delegates” to the Peace Congress who have got themselves “elected” at mass-meetings and concerts for the purpose of going to France are not going—unless they can walk, swim, or fly. For the government will not issue passports for them.

Of course, the government is not telling them so in plain English. That wouldn’t be like our government. It merely makes them wait while their money melts away. Day after day and week after week, they wearily wend their way to the official Circumlocution Office where they receive a reply considered sufficient for their child-minds: “Not yet.”

It is many weeks since Madam Walker, Mr. Trotter, Judge Harrison and other lesser lights were elected, but “They shall not pass!” says the government with the backing of Emmett Scott. THE VOICE holds no brief for these people: in fact it has taken the trouble to tell them more than once how silly their project was. But it is not out of order to inquire why the government will not let them go, and to find an answer to that question.

The government will not let them go to France, because the government’s conscience is not clear. And the government ordered that ludicrous lackey, Mr. R. R. Moton, to go—for the same reason. In fact, the creation of sinecures for Mr. Scott and the other barnacles is due largely to an uneasy conscience. How would it look to have Negroes telling all Europe that the land which is to make the world “safe for democracy” is rotten with race-prejudice; Jim-crows Negro officers on ships coming over from France and on trains run under government control; condones lynching by silent acquiescence and refuses to let its Negro heroes vote as citizens in that part of the country in which nine-tenths of them live. This wouldn’t do at all.

Therefore: They shall not pass! And if, finally, the government, nettled by such criticisms, should lift the ban when the Peace Congress is practically over, the Negroes of America may be sure that those permitted to go will be carefully hand-picked.

But what is the matter with America as a land for pioneer work in planting democracy? Are these Negro emigrés afraid to face the white men here in the Republican Party or any other and raise Hades until the Constitution is enforced? Is cowardice the real reason for their running to France to uncork their mouths? It looks very much like it. Ladies and gentlemen: don’t run. The fight is here, and here you will be compelled to face it, or report to us the reason why.

A Cure for the Ku-Klux

It was in the city of Pulaski in Giles County, Tennessee, that the original Ku-Klux Klan was organized in the latter part of 1865. The war had hardly been declared officially at an end when the cowardly “crackers” who couldn’t lick the Yankees began organizing to take it out of the Negroes. They passed laws declaring that any black man who couldn’t show three hundred dollars should be declared a vagrant; that every vagrant should be put to work in the chain-gang on the public works of their cities; that three Negroes should not gather together unless a white man was with them, and other such methods were used as were found necessary to maintain “white supremacy.” When the national Congress met in December, 1865, it looked upon these light diversions with an unfriendly eye and, noting that nothing short of the re-enslavement of the Negroes would satisfy the “crackers,” it kept them out of Congress until they would agree to do better. Finding that they were stiff-necked, Congress passed the 14th and 15th amendments and put the “cracker” states under military rule until they accepted the amendments. The result was that the Negro got the ballot as a protection from “the people who know him best.”

In the meanwhile, the Ku-Klux after rampaging around under the leadership of that traitor, General Nathaniel B. Forrest, was put down-for good, as it was thought. Today, after the Negro has been stripped of the ballot’s protection by the connivance of white Republicans in Washington and white Democrats at the South, the Ku-Klux dares to raise its ugly head in its ancestral state of Tennessee. This time they want to increase that fine brand of democracy which every coward editor knows that Negroes were getting when they were bidding them to be patriotic. The Ku-Klux means to shoot them into submission and torture them into terror before they get to showing their wounds and asking for the ballot as a recompense.

In this crisis what have the Negro “leaders” got to say on their people’s behalf? Where is Emmett Scott? Where are Mr. Moton and Dr. Du Bois? What will the N.A.A.C.P. do besides writing frantic letters? We fear that they can never rise above the level of appeals. But suppose the common Negro in Tennessee decides to take a hand in the game? Suppose he lets it be known that for the life of every Negro soldier or civilian, two “crackers” will die? Suppose he lets them know that it will be as costly to kill Negroes as it would be to kill real people? Then indeed the Ku-Klux would be met upon its own ground. And why not?

All our laws, even in Tennessee, declare that lynching and white-capping are crimes against the person. All our laws declare that people singly or in groups have the right to kill in defense of their lives. And if the Ku-Klux prevents the officers of the law from enforcing that law, then it is up to Negroes to help the officers by enforcing the law on their own account. Why shouldn’t they do it? Lead and steel, fire and poison are just as potent against “crackers” as they were against Germans, and democracy is as well worth fighting for in Tennessee as ever it was on the plains of France. Not until the Negroes of the south recognize this truth will anybody else recognize it for them.

“Hereditary bondmen, know ye not

Who would be free themselves must strike the blow?”

CHAPTER IV.
THE NEW POLITICS.

The New Politics for the New Negro

The world of the future will look upon the world of today as an essentially new turning point in the path of human progress. All over the world the spirit of democratic striving is making itself felt. The new issues have brought forth new ideas of freedom, politics, industry and society at large. The new Negro living in this new world is just as responsive to these new impulses as other people are.

In the “good old days” it was quite easy to tell the Negro to follow in the footsteps of those who had gone before. The mere mention of the name Lincoln or the Republican party was sufficient to secure his allegiance to that party which had seen him stripped of all political power and of civil rights without protest—effective or otherwise.

Things are different now. The new Negro is demanding elective representation in Baltimore, Chicago and other places. He is demanding it in New York. The pith of the present occasion is, that he is no longer begging or asking. He is demanding as a right that which he is in position to enforce.

In the presence of this new demand the old political leaders are bewildered, and afraid; for the old idea of Negro leadership by virtue of the white man’s selection has collapsed. The new Negro leader must be chosen by his fellows—by those whose strivings he is supposed to represent.

Any man today who aspires to lead the Negro race must set squarely before his face the idea of “Race First” Just as the white men of these and other lands are white men before they are Christians, Anglo-Saxons or Republicans; so the Negroes of this and other lands are intent upon being Negroes before they are Christians, Englishmen, or Republicans.

Sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. Charity begins at home, and our first duty is to ourselves. It is not what we wish but what we must, that we are concerned with. The world, as it ought to be, is still for us, as for others, the world that does not exist. The world as it is, is the real world, and it is to that real world that we address ourselves. Striving to be men, and finding no effective aid in government or in politics, the Negro of the Western world must follow the path of the Swadesha movement of India and the Sinn Fein movement of Ireland. The meaning of both these terms is “ourselves first.” This is the mental background of the new politics of the New Negro, and we commend it to the consideration of all the political parties. For it is upon this background that we will predicate such policies as shall seem to us necessary and desirable.

In the British Parliament the Irish Home Rule party clubbed its full strength and devoted itself so exclusively to the cause of Free Ireland that it virtually dictated for a time the policies of Liberals and Conservatives alike. The new Negro race in America will not achieve political self-respect until it is in a positon to organize itself as politically independent party and follow the example of the Irish Home Rulers. This is what will happen in American politics. —September, 1917.

The Drift in Politics

The Negroes of America—those of them who think—are suspicious of everything that comes from the white people of America. They have seen that every movement for the extension of democracy here has broken down as soon as it reached the color line. Political democracy declared that “all men are created equal,” meant only all white men; the Christian church found that the brotherhood of man did not include God’s bastard children; the public school system proclaimed that the school house was the backbone of democracy—“for white people only,” and the civil service says that Negroes must keep their place—at the bottom. So that they can hardly be blamed for looking askance at any new gospel of freedom. Freedom to them has been like one of

“those juggling fiends

That palter with us in a double sense;

That keep the word of promise to our ear,

And break it to our hope.”

In this connection, some explanation of the former political solidarity of those Negroes who were voters may be of service. Up to six years ago the one great obstacle to the political progress of the colored people was their sheep-like allegiance to the Republican party. They were taught to believe that God had raised up a peculiar race of men called Republicans who had loved the slaves so tenderly that they had taken guns in their hands and rushed on the ranks of the southern slaveholders to free the slaves; that this race of men was still in existence, marching under the banner of the Republican party and showing their great love for Negroes by appointing from six to sixteen near-Negroes to soft political snaps. Today that great political superstition is falling to pieces before the advance of intelligence among Negroes. They begin to realize that they were sold out by the Republican party in 1876; that in the last twenty-five years lynchings have increased, disfranchisement has spread all over the South and “Jim-crow” cars run even into the national capitol—with the continuing consent of a Republican Congress, a Republican Supreme Court and Republican President.

Ever since the Brownsville affair, but more clearly since Taft declared and put in force the policy of pushing out the few near-Negro officeholders, the rank and file have come to see that the Republican party is a great big sham. Many went over to the Democratic party because, as the Amsterdam News puts it, “They had nowhere else to go.” Twenty years ago the colored men who joined that party were ostracized as scalawags and crooks. But today, the defection to the Democrats of such men as Bishop Walters, Wood, Morton, Carr and Langston—whose uncle was a colored Republican Congressman from Virginia—has made the colored democracy respectable and given quite a tone to political heterdoxy.

All this loosens the bonds of their allegiance and breaks the bigotry of the last forty years. But of this change in their political view-point the white world knows nothing. The two leading Negro newspapers are subsidized by the same political pirates who own the title-deeds to the handful of hirelings holding office in the name of the Negro race. One of these papers is an organ of Mr. Washington, the other pretends to be independent—that is, it must be bought on the installment plan, and both of them are in New York. Despite this “conspiracy of silence” the Negroes are waking up, are beginning to think for themselves, to look with more favor on “new doctrines.” [¹]

Today the politician who wants the support of the Negro voter will have to give something more than piecrust promises. The old professional “friend to the colored people” must have something more solid than the name of Lincoln and party appointments.

We demand what the Irish and the Jewish voter get: nominations on the party’s ticket in our own districts. And if we don’t get this we will smash the party that refuses to give it.

For we are not Republicans, Democrats or Socialists any longer. We are Negroes first. And we are no longer begging for sops. We demand, not “recognition,” but representation, and we are out to throw our votes to any party which gives us this, and withhold them from any party which refuses to give it. No longer will we follow any leader whose job the party controls. For we know that no leader so controlled can oppose such party in our interests beyond a given point.

That is why so much interest attaches to the mass-meeting to be held at Palace Casino on the 29th where the Citizens’ Committee will make its report to the Negro voters of Harlem and tell them how it was “turned down” by the local representatives of the Republican party when it begged the boon of elective representation. All such rebuffs will make for manhood-if we are men and will drive us to play in American politics the same role which the Irish party played in British politics. That is the new trend in Negro politics, and we must not let any party forget it. —1917.

A Negro for President

For many years the Negro has been the football of American politics. Kicked from pillar to post, he goes begging, hat in hand, from a Republican convention to a Democratic one. Always is he asking some one else to do something for him. Always is he begging, pleading, demanding or threatening. In all these cases his dependence is on the good will, sense of justice or gratitude of the other fellow. And in none of these cases is the political reaction of the other fellow within the control of the Negro.

But a change for the better is approaching. Four years ago, the present writer was propounding in lectures, indoors and outdoors, the thesis that the Negro people of America would never amount to anything much politically until they should see fit to imitate the Irish of Britain and to organize themselves into a political party of their own whose leaders, on the basis of this large collective vote, could “hold up” Republicans, Democrats, Socialists or any other political group of American whites. As in many other cases, we have lived to see time ripen the fruits of our own thought for some one else to pluck. Here is the editor of the Challenge making a campaign along these very lines. His version of the idea takes the form of advocating the nomination of a Negro for the Presidency of the United States. In this form we haven’t the slightest doubt that this idea will meet with a great deal of ridicule and contempt. Nevertheless, we venture to prophesy that, whether in the hands of Mr. Bridges or another, it will come to be ultimately accepted as one of the finest contributions to Negro statesmanship.

No one pretends, of course, that the votes of Negroes can elect a Negro to the high office of President of the United States. Nor would any one expect that the votes of white people will be forthcoming to assist them in such a project. The only way in which a Negro could be elected President of the United States would be by virtue of the voters not knowing that the particular candidate was of Negro ancestry. This, we believe, has already happened within the memory of living men. But, the essential intent of this new plan is to furnish a focussing-point around which the ballots of the Negro voters may be concentrated for the realization of racial demands for justice and equality of opportunity and treatment. It would be carrying “Race First” with a vengeance into the arena of domestic politics. It would take the Negro voter out of the ranks of the Republican, Democratic and Socialist parties and would enable their leaders to trade the votes of their followers, openly and above-board, for those things for which masses of men largely exchange their votes.

Mr. Bridges will find that the idea of a Negro candidate for President presupposes the creation of a purely Negro party and upon that prerequisite he will find himself compelled to concentrate. Doubtless, most of the political wise-acres of the Negro race will argue that the idea is impossible because it antagonizes the white politicians of the various parties. They will close their eyes to the fact that politics implies antagonism and a conflict of interest. They will fail to see that the only things which count with politicians are votes, and that, just as one white man will cheerfully cut another white man’s throat to get the dollars which a black man has, so will one white politician or party cut another one’s throat politically to get the votes which black men may cast at the polls. But these considerations will finally carry the day. Let there be no mistake. The Negro will never be accepted by the white American democracy except in so far as he can by the use of force, financial, political or other, win, seize or maintain in the teeth of opposition that position which he finds necessary to his own security and salvation. And we Negroes may as well make up our minds now that we can’t depend upon the good-will of white men in anything or at any point where our interests and theirs conflict. Disguise it as we may, in business, politics, education or other departments of life, we as Negroes are compelled to fight for what we want to win from the white world.

It is easy enough for those colored men whose psychology is shaped by their white inheritance to argue the ethics of compromise and inter-racial co-operation. But we whose brains are still unbastardized must face the frank realities of this situation of racial conflict and competition. Wherefore, it is well that we marshal our forces to withstand and make head against the constant racial pressure. Action and reaction are equal and opposite. Where there is but slight pressure a slight resistance will suffice. But where, as in our case, that pressure is grinding and pitiless, the resistance that would re-establish equal conditions of freedom must of necessity be intense and radical. And it is this philosophy which must furnish the motive for such a new and radical departure as is implied in the joint idea of a Negro party in American politics and a Negro candidate for the Presidency of these United States. —June, 1920.

When the Tail Wags the Dog

Politically, these United States may be roughly divided into two sections, so far as the Negroes are concerned. In the North the Negro population has the vote. In the South it hasn’t. This was not always so.

There was a time when the Negro voters of the South sent in to Congress a thin but steady stream of black men who represented their political interests directly. Due to the misadventures of the reconstruction period, this stream was shut off until at the beginning of this century George White, of North Carolina, was the sole and last representative of the black man with a ballot in the South.

This result was due largely to the characteristic stupidity of the Negro voter. He was a Republican, he was. He would do anything with his ballot for Abraham Lincoln—who was dead—but not a thing for himself and his family, who were all alive and kicking. For this the Republican party loved him so much that it permitted the Democrats to disfranchise him while it controlled Congress and the courts, the army and navy, and all the machinery of law-enforcement in the United States. With its continuing consent, Jim-crowism, disfranchisement, segregation and lynching spread abroad over the land. The end of it all was the reduction of the Negro in the South to the position of a political serf, an industrial peon and a social outcast.

Recently there has been developed in the souls of black folk a new manhood dedicated to the proposition that, if all Americans are equal in the matter of baring their breasts to foreign bayonets, then all Americans must, by their own efforts, be made equal in balloting for Presidents and other officers of the government. This principle is compelling the Republican party in certain localities to consider the necessity of nominating Negroes on its local electoral tickets. Yet the old attitude of that party on the political rights of Negroes remains substantially the same.

Here, for instance, is the Chicago convention, at which the Negro delegates were lined up to do their duty by the party. Of course, these delegates had to deal collectively with the white leaders. This was to their mutual advantage. But the odd feature of the entire affair was this, that, Whereas the Negro people in the South are not free to cast their votes, it was precisely from these voteless areas that the national Republican leaders selected the political spokesmen for the voting Negroes of the North. Men who will not vote at the coming election and men who, like Roscoe Simmons, never cast a vote in their lives were the accredited representatives in whose hands lay the destiny of a million Negro voters.

But there need be no fear that this insult will annoy the black brother in the Republican ranks. A Negro Republican generally runs the rhinoceros and the elephant a close third. In plain English, the average Negro Republican is too stupid to see and too meek to mind. Then, too, here is Fate’s retribution for the black man in the North who has never cared enough to fight (the Republican party) for the political freedom of his brother in the South, but left him to rot under poll-tax laws and grandfather clauses. The Northern white Democrats, for letting their Southern brethren run riot through the Constitution, must pay the penalty of being led into the ditch by the most ignorant, stupid and vicious portion of their party. Even so, the Northern Negro Republican, for letting his Southern brother remain a political ragamuffin, must now stomach the insult of this same ragamuffin dictating the destiny of the freer Negroes of the North. In both cases the tail doth wag the dog because of “the solid South.” Surely, “the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether!” —July, 1920.

The Grand Old Party

In the early days of 1861, when the Southern Senators and Representatives were relinquishing their seats in the United States Congress and hurling cartels of defiant explanation broadcast, the Republican party in Congress, under the leadership of Charles Francis Adams of Massachusetts, organized a joint committee made up of thirteen members of the Senate and thirty-three members of the House to make overtures to the seceding Southerners. The result of this friendly gesture was a proposed thirteenth amendment, which, if the Southerners had not been so obstinate, would have bridged the chasm. For this amendment proposed to make the slavery of the black man in America eternal and inescapable. It provided that no amendment to the Constitution, or any other proposition affecting slavery in any way, could ever be legally presented upon the floor of Congress unless its mover had secured the previous consent of every Senator and Representative from the slave-holding States. It put teeth into the Fugitive Slave Law and absolutely gave the Negro over into the keeping of his oppressors.

Most Negro Americans (and white ones, too) think it fashionable to maintain the most fervid faith and deepest ignorance about points in their national history of which they should be informed. We therefore submit that these facts are open and notorious to those who know American history. The record will be found slimly and shame-facedly given in McPherson’s “History of the Rebellion”; at indignant length in Blaine’s “Twenty Years of Congress” and Horace Greeley’s “The Great American Conflict.” The document can be examined in Professor Macdonald’s “Select Documents of United States History.” These works are to be found in every public library, and we refer to them here because there are “intellectual” Negroes today who are striving secretly, when they dare not do so openly, to perpetuate the bonds of serfdom which bind the Negro Americans to the Republican party. This bond of serfdom, this debt of gratitude, is supposed to hinge on the love which Abraham Lincoln and his party are supposed to have borne towards the Negro; and the object of this appeal to the historical record is to show that that record demonstrates that if the Negro owes any debt to the Republican party it is a debt of execration and of punishment rather than one of gratitude.

It is an astounding fact that in his First Inaugural Address Abraham Lincoln gave his explicit approval to the substance of the Crittenden resolutions which the joint committee referred to above had collectively taken over. This demonstrates that the Republican party at the very beginning of its contact with the Negro was willing to sell the Negro, bound hand and foot, for the substance of its own political control. This Thirteenth Amendment was adopted by six or eight Northern States, including Pennsylvania and Illinois; and if Fort Sumter had not been fired upon it would have become by State action the law of the land.

The Republican party did not fight for the freedom of the Negro, but for the maintenance of its own grip on the government which the election of Abraham Lincoln had secured. If any one wants to know for what the Republican party fought he will find it in such facts as this: That thousands of square miles of the people’s property were given away to Wall Street magnates who had corrupted the Legislature in their effort to build railroads on the government’s money. The sordid story is given in “Forty Years in Wall Street,” by the banker, Henry Clews, and others who took part in this raid upon the resources of a great but stupid people.

But the Civil War phase of the Republican party’s treason to the Negro is not the only outstanding one, as was shown by the late General Tremaine in his “Sectionalism Unmasked.” Not only was General Grant elected in 1868 by the newly created Negro vote, as the official records prove, but his re-election in 1872 was effected by the same means. So was the election of Rutherford B. Hayes in 1876. Yet when the election of Hayes had been taken before the overwhelmingly Republican Congress this shameless party made a deal whereby, in order to pacify the white “crackers” of the South, the Negro was given over into the hands of the triumphant Ku-Klux; the soldiers who protected their access to the ballot box in the worst southern states were withdrawn, while the “crackers” agreed as the price of this favor to withdraw their opposition to the election of Hayes. For this there exists ample proof which will be presented upon the challenge of any politician or editor. As a Republican Senator from New England shamelessly said, it was a matter of “Root, hog, or die” for the helpless Negro whose ballots had buttressed the Republican party’s temple of graft and corruption. So was reconstruction settled against the Negro by the aid and abetting of the Republican party.

And since that time lynching, disfranchisement and segregation have grown with the Republican party in continuous control of the government from 1861 to 1920—with the exception of eight years of Woodrow Wilson and eight years of Grover Cleveland. With their continuing consent the South has been made solid, so that at every Republican convention delegates who do not represent a voting constituency but a grafting collection of white postmasters and their Negro lackeys can turn the scales of nomination in favor of any person whom the central clique of the party, controlled as it has always been by Wall Street financiers, may foist upon a disgusted people, as they have done in the case of Harding. So long as the South remains solid, so long will the Republican delegates from the South consist of only this handful of hirelings; so long will they be amenable to the “discipline” which means the pressure of the jobs by which they get their bread. Therefore the Republican leaders will know that the solidarity of the South is their most valuable asset; and they are least likely to do anything that will break that solidarity. The Republican party’s only interest in the Negro is to get his vote for nothing; and so long as Negro Republican leaders remain the contemptible grafters and political procurers that they are at present, so long will it get Negro votes for nothing.

Through it all the Republican party remains the most corrupt influence among Negro Americans. It buys up by jobs, appointments and gifts those Negroes who in politics should be the free and independent spokesmen of Negro Americans. But worse than this is its private work in which it secretly subsidizes men who pose before the public as independent radicals. These intellectual pimps draw private supplementary incomes from the Republican party to sell out the influence of any movement, church or newspaper with which they are connected. Of the enormity of this mode of procedure and the extent to which it saps the very springs of Negro integrity the average Negro knows nothing. Its blighting, baleful influence is known only to those who have trained ears to hear and trained eyes to see.

And now in this election the standards will advance and the cohorts go forward under the simple impulse of the same corrupting influence. But whether the new movement for a Negro party comes to a head or not, the new Negro in America will never amount to anything politically until he enfranchises himself from the Grand Old Party which has made a political joke of him. —July, 1920.

1. The first part of this editorial is reprinted from an article written in 1912.[↩︎]

CHAPTER V.
THE PROBLEMS OF LEADERSHIP.

[In all the tangles of our awakening race consciousness there are perhaps none more knotty than the tangles relating to leadership. Leadership among Negro Americans, as among other people, means the direction of a group’s activities, whether by precept, example or compulsion. But, in our case, there is involved a strikingly new element. Should the leading of our group in any sense be the product of our group’s consciousness or of a consciousness originating from outside that group? What the new Negro thinks on the problem of “outside interference” in the leadership of his group is expressed in the first and sixth editorials of this chapter, one of which appeared in The Voice and the other in The Negro World.

“A Tender Point” formulates one part of the problem of leadership which is seldom touched upon by Negro Americans who characteristically avoid any public presentation of a thing about which they will talk interminably in private; namely, the claim advanced, explicitly and implicitly, by Negroids of mixed blood to be considered the natural leaders of Negro activities on the ground of some alleged “superiority” inherent in their white blood.

“The Descent of Du Bois” was written at the request of Major Loving of the Intelligence Department of the Army at the time when Dr. Du Bois, the editor of The Crisis, was being preened for a desk captaincy at Washington. Major Loving solicited a summary of the situation from me as one of those “radicals” qualified to furnish such a summary. This he incorporated in his report to his superiors in Washington, and this I published a week later in The Voice of July 25, 1918, as an editorial without changing a single word. I was informed by Major Loving that this editorial was one of the main causes of the government’s change of intention as regards the Du Bois captaincy. Since that time Dr. Du Bois’s white friends have been fervidly ignoring the occurrence and the consequent collapse of his leadership. “When the Blind Lead” was written as a reminder to the souls of black folks that “while it is as easy as eggs for a leader to fall off the fence, it is devilishly difficult to boost him up again.” “Just Crabs” was a delightful inspiration in the course of defending, not Mr. Garvey personally, but the principles of the New Negro Manhood Movement, a portion of which had been incorporated by him and his followers of the U.N.I.A. and A.C. L. It was the opening gun of the defense, of which some other salvos were given in the serial satire of The Crab Barrel—which I have been kind enough to omit from this record. This controversy also gave rise to the three first editorials of chapter 6.]

Our Professional “Friends”

This country of ours has produced many curious lines of endeavor, not the least curious of which is the business known as “being the Negro’s friend.” It was first invented by politicians, but was taken up later by “good” men, six-per-cent philanthropists, millionaire believers in “industrial education,” benevolent newspapers like the Evening Post, and a host of smaller fry of the “superior race.” Just at this time the business is being worked to death, and we wish to contribute our mite toward the killing-by showing what it means.

The first great “friend” of the Negro was the Southern politician, Henry Clay, who, in the first half of the nineteenth century organized the American Colonization Society. This society befriended the “free men of color” by raising funds to ship them away to Liberia, which was accepted by many free Negroes as a high proof of the white man’s “friendship.” But Frederick Douglass, William Still, James McCune Smith, Martin R. Delaney, and other wide-awake Negroes were able to show (by transcripts of its proceedings) that its real purpose was to get rid of the free Negroes because, so long as they continued to live here, their freedom was an inducement to the slaves to run away from slavery, and their accomplishments demonstrated to all white people that the Negro (contrary to the claims of the slave-holders) was capable of a higher human destiny than that of being chattels—and this was helping to make American slavery odious in the eyes of the civilized world.

Since that time the dismal farce of “friendship” has been played many times, by politicians, millionaires and their editorial adherents, who have been profuse in giving good advice to the Negro people. They have advised them to “go slow,” that “Rome was not built in a day,” and that “half a loaf is better than no bread,” that “respect could not be demanded,” and, in a thousand different ways have advised them that if they would only follow the counsels of “the good white people” who really had their interests at heart, instead of following their own counsels (as the Irish and the Jews do), all would yet be well. Many Negroes who have a wish-bone where their back-bone ought to be have been doing this. It was as a representative of this class that Mitchell’s man, Mr. Fred R. Moore, the editor of The Age, spoke, when in July he gave utterance to the owlish reflection that,

The Negro race is afflicted with many individuals whose wagging tongues are apt to lead them into indiscreet utterances that reflect upon the whole race. … The unruly tongues should not be allowed to alienate public sympathy from the cause of the oppressed.

It was as a fairly good representative of the class of “good white friends of the colored people” that Miss Mary White Ovington, the chairman of the New York Branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, sent to The Voice the following bossy and dictatorial note:

My dear Mr. Harrison,

I don’t see any reason for another organization, or another paper. If you printed straight socialism it might be different.

Yours truly,

MARY W. OVINGTON.

These “good white people” must really forgive us for insisting that we are not children, and that, while we want all the friends we can get, we need no benevolent dictators. It is we, and not they, who must shape Negro policies. If they want to help in carrying them out we will appreciate their help.

Just now the white people even in the South—have felt the pressure of the new Negro’s manhood demands, in spite of the fact that backward-looking Negroes like The Age’s editor condemn the inflexible spirit of these demands. All over the South, the white papers, scared by the exodus of Negro laborers who are tired of begging for justice overdue, are saying that we are right, and friendlier legislation has begun to appear on Southern statute books. Mr. Mencken and other Southern writers are saying that the Negro is demanding, and that the South had better accede to his just demands, as it is only a matter of time when he will be in position to enforce them. One should think, then, that those who have been parading as our professional friends would be in the van of this manhood movement. But the movement seems to have left them in the rear. Now, that we are demanding the whole loaf, they are begging for half, and are angry at us for going further than they think “nice.”

It was the N.A.A.C.P. which was urging us to compromise our manhood by begging eagerly for “Jim Crow” training camps. And the same group is asking, in the November Crisis, that we put a collective power-of-attorney into their hand and leave it to them to shape our national destiny. The N.A.A.C.P. has done much good work for Negroes—splendid work—in fighting lynching and segregation. For that we owe it more gratitude and good will than we owe to the entire Republican party for the last sixty years of its existence. But we cannot, even in this case, abdicate our right to shape more radical policies for ourselves. It was the realization of the need for a more radical policy than that of the N.A.A.C.P. that called into being the Liberty League of Negro Americans. And the N.A.A.C.P., as mother, must forgive its offspring for forging farther ahead.

Then, there is the case of the New York Evening Post, of which Mr. Villard is owner. This paper was known far and wide as “a friend to Negroes.” But its friendship has given way to indifference and worse. In the good old days every lynching received editorial condemnation. But the three great lynchings this year which preceded East St. Louis found no editorial of condemnation in the Post. It was more than luke-warm then. But, alack and alas! As soon as the Negro soldiers in Houston, goaded to retaliation by gross indignities, did some shooting on their own account, the Evening Post, which had no condemnation of the conduct of the lynchers, joined the chorus of those who were screaming for “punishment” and death. Here is its brief editorial on August 25th:

As no provocation could justify the crimes committed by mutinous Negro soldiers at Houston, Texas, so no condemnation of their conduct can be too severe. It may be that the local authorities were not wholly blameless, and that the commanding officers were at fault in not foreseeing the trouble and taking steps to guard against it. But nothing can really palliate the offence of the soldiers. They were false to their uniform; they were false to their race. In one sense, this is the most deplorable aspect of the whole riotous outbreak. It will play straight into the hands of men like Senator Vardaman who have been saying that it was dangerous to draft colored men into the army. And the feeling against having colored troops encamped in the South will be intensified. The grievous harm which they might do to their own people should have been all along in the minds of the colored soldiers, and made them doubly circumspect. They were under special obligation, in addition to their military oath, to conduct themselves so as not to bring reproach upon the Negroes as a whole, of whom they were in a sort representative. Their criminal outrage will tend to make people forget the good work done by other Negro soldiers. After the rigid investigation which the War Department has ordered, the men found guilty should receive the severest punishment. As for the general army policy affecting colored troops, we are glad to see that Secretary Baker appears to intend no change in his recent orders.

We ourselves cannot forget that while the question of whether the Post’s editor would get a diplomatic appointment (like some other editors) was under consideration during the first year of Woodrow Wilson’s first administration, the Post pretended to believe that the President didn’t know of the segregation practiced in the government departments. The N.A.A.C.P., whose letter sent out at the time is now before us, pretended to the same effect.

After viewing these expressions of frightful friendliness in our own times, we have reached the conclusion that the time has come when we should insist on being our own best friends. We may make mistakes, of course, but we ought to be allowed to make our own mistakes—as other people are allowed to do. If friendship is to mean compulsory compromise foisted on us by kindly white people, or by cultured Negroes whose ideal is the imitation of the urbane acquiescence of these white friends, then we had better learn to look a gift horse in the mouth whenever we get the chance. —November, 1917.

Shillady Resigns

Mr. John R. Shillady, ex-secretary of the N.A.A.C.P., states in his letter of resignation that “I am less confident than heretofore of the speedy success of the association’s full program and of the probability of overcoming within a reasonable period the forces opposed to Negro equality by the means and methods which are within the association’s power to employ.” In this one sentence Mr. Shillady, the worker on the inside, puts in suave and serenely diplomatic phrase the truth which people on the outside have long ago perceived, namely, that the N.A.A.C.P. makes a joke of itself when it affects to think that lynching and the other evils which beset the Negro in the South can be abolished by simple publicity. The great weakness of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People has been and is that, whereas it aims to secure certain results by affecting the minds of white people and making them friendly to it, it has no control over these minds and has absolutely no answer to the question, “What steps do you propose to take if these minds at which you are aiming remain unaffected? What do you propose to do to secure life and liberty for the Negro if the white Southerner persists, as he has persisted for sixty years, in refusing to grant guarantees of life and liberty?” The N.A.A.C.P. has done some good and worth-while work as an organization of protest. But the times call for something more effective than protests addressed to the other fellow’s consciousness. What is needed at present is more of the mobilizing of the Negro’s political power, pocketbook power and intellectual power (which are absolutely within the Negro’s own control) to do for the Negro the things which the Negro needs to have done without depending upon or waiting for the co-operative action of white people. This co-operative action, whenever it does come, is a boon that no Negro, intelligent or unintelligent, affects to despise. But no Negro of clear vision, whether he be a leader or not, can afford to predicate the progress of the Negro upon such co-operative action, because it may not come.

Mr. Shillady may have seen these things. It is high time that all Negroes see these things whether their white professional friends see them or not. —July, 1920.

Our White Friends

In the good old days when the black man’s highest value in the white man’s eye was that of an object of benevolence especially provided by the Divine mind for calling out those tender out-pourings of charity which were so dear to the self-satisfied Caucasian—in those days the white men who fraternized with black people could do so as their guides, philosophers and friends without incurring any hostility on the part of black folk. Today, however, the white man who mixes with the black brother is having a hard time of it. Somehow Ham’s offspring no longer feels proud of being “taken up” by the progeny of Japhet. And when the white man insists on mixing in with him the colored brother will persist in attributing ulterior motives.

What is the cause of this difference? The answer will be found only by one who refuses to wear the parochial blinkers of Anglo-Saxon civilization and sees that the relations of the white and black race have changed and are changing all over the world. Such an observer would note that the most significant fact of the growing race consciousness is to be found in the inevitable second half of the word. It isn’t because these darker people are motivated by race that their present state of mind constitutes a danger to Caucasian overlordship. It is because they have developed consciousness, intelligence, understanding. They have learned that the white brother is perfectly willing to love them—“in their place.” They have learned that that place is one in which they are not to develop brains and initiative, but must furnish the brawn and muscle whereby the white man’s brain and initiative can take eternally the products of their brawn and muscle. There are today many white men who will befriend the Negro, who will give their dollars to his comfort and welfare, so long as the idea of what constitutes that comfort and welfare comes entirely from the white man’s mind. Examples like those of Dr. Spingarn and Mr. E. D. Morel are numerous.

And not for nothing does the black man balk at the white man’s “mixing in.” For there are spies everywhere and the agent provocateur is abroad in the land. From Chicago comes the news by way of the Associated Press (white) that Dr. Jonas, who has always insisted in sticking his nose into the Negro peoples’ affairs as their guide, philosopher and friend, has been forced to confess that he is a government agent, presumably paid for things which the government would later suppress. Dr. Jonas is reported to have said that he is connected with the British secret service; but since the second year of the European war it has been rather difficult for us poor devils to tell where the American government ended and the British government began, especially in these matters. In any case, we have Dr. Jonas’ confession, and all the silly Negroes who listened approvingly to the senseless allegations made by Messrs. Jonas, Gabriel and others of a standing army of 4,000,000 in Abyssinia and of Japanese-Abyssinian diplomatic relations and intentions, must feel now very foolish about the final result.

How natural it was that Jonas, the white leader, should have gone scot free, while Redding and his other Negro dupes are held! How natural that Jonas should be the one to positively identify Redding as the slayer of the Negro policeman! And so, once again, that section of the Negro race that will not follow except where a white man leads will have to pay that stern penalty whereby Dame Experience teaches her dunces. Under the present circumstances we, the Negroes of the Western world, do pledge our allegiance to leaders of our own race, selected by our own group and supported financially and otherwise exclusively by us. Their leadership may be wise or otherwise; they may make mistakes here and there; nevertheless, such sins as they may commit will be our sins, and all the glory that they may achieve will be our glory. We prefer it so. It may be worth the while of the white men who desire to be “Our Professional Friends” to take note of this preference.

A Tender Point

When the convention of turtles assembled on the Grand Banks of Newfoundland it was found absolutely impossible to get a tortoise elected as leader. All turtles, conservative and radical, agreed that a land and water creature, who was half one thing and half another, was not an ideal choice for leader of a group which lived exclusively in the water. Whenever a leader of the Irish has to be selected by the Irish it is an Irishman who is selected. No Irishman would be inclined to dispute the fact that other men, even Englishmen like John Stuart Mill and the late Keir Hardie, could feel the woes of Ireland as profoundly as any Irishman. But they prefer to live up to the principle of “Safety First.”

These two illustrations are to be taken as a prelude to an important point which is not often discussed in the Negro press because all of us—black, brown and parti-colored—fear to offend each other. That point concerns the biological breed of persons who should be selected by Negroes as leaders of their race. We risk the offense this time because efficiency in matters of racial leadership, as in other matters, should not be too tender to these points of prejudice when they stand in the way of desirable results. For two centuries in America we, the descendants of the black Negroes of Africa, have been told by white men that we cannot and will not amount to anything except in so far as we first accept the bar sinister of their mixing with us. Always when white people had to select a leader for Negroes they would select some one who had in his veins the blood of the selectors. In the good old days when slavery was in flower, it was those whom Denmark Vesey of Charleston described as “house niggers” who got the master’s cast-off clothes, the better scraps of food and culture which fell from the white man’s table, who were looked upon as the Talented Tenth of the Negro race. The opportunities of self-improvement, in so far as they lay within the hand of the white race, were accorded exclusively to this class of people who were the left-handed progeny of the white masters.

Out of this grew a certain attitude on their part towards the rest of the Negro people which, unfortunately, has not yet been outgrown. In Washington, Boston, Charleston, New York and Chicago these proponents of the lily-white idea are prone to erect around their sacred personalities a high wall of caste, based on the ground of color. And the black Negroes have heretofore worshipped at the altars erected on these walls. One sees this in the Baptist, Methodist and Episcopal churches, at the various conventions and in fraternal organizations. Black people themselves seem to hold the degrading view that a man who is but half a Negro is twice as worthy of their respect and support as one who is entirely black. We have seen in the social life of some of the places mentioned how women, undeniably black and undeniably beautiful, have been shunned and ostracised at public functions by men who should be presumed to know better. We have read the fervid jeremiads of “colored” men who, when addressing the whites on behalf of some privilege which they wished to share with them, would be, in words, as black as the ace of spades, but, when it came to mixing with “their kind,” they were professional lily-whites, and we have often had to point out to them that there is no color prejudice in America—except among “colored” people. Those who may be inclined to be angry at the broaching of this subject are respectfully requested to ponder that pungent fact.

In this matter white people, even in America, are inclined to be more liberal than colored people. If a white man has no race prejudice, it will be found that he doesn’t care how black is the Negro friend that he takes to his home and his bosom. Even these white people who pick leaders for Negroes have begun in these latter years to give formal and official expression to this principle. Thus it was that when the trustees of Tuskegee had to elect a head of Tuskegee and a putative leader of the Negroes of America to succeed the late Dr. Washington, they argued that it was now necessary to select as leader for the Negro people a man who could not be mistaken by any one for anything other than a Negro. Therefore, Mr. Emmett Scott was passed over and Dr. Robert R. Morton was selected. We are not approving here the results of that selection, but merely holding up to Negroes the principle by which it was governed.

So long as we ourselves acquiesce in the selection of leaders on the ground of their unlikeness to our racial type, just so long will we be met by the invincible argument that white blood is necessary to make a Negro worth while. Every Negro who has respect for himself and for his race will feel, when contemplating such examples as Toussaint Louverture, Phyllis Wheatley, Paul Laurence Dunbar and Samuel Ringgold Ward, the thrill of pride that differs in quality and intensity from the feeling which he experiences when contemplating other examples of great Negroes who are not entirely black. For it is impossible in such cases for the white men to argue that they owed their greatness of their prominence to the blood of the white race which was mingled in their veins. It is a legitimate thrill of pride, for it gives us a hope nobler than the hope of amalgamation whereby, in order to become men, we must lose our racial identity. It is a subject for sober and serious reflection, and it is hoped that sober and serious reflection will be given to it.

The Descent of Du Bois

In a recent bulletin of the War Department it was declared that “justifiable grievances” were producing and had produced “not disloyalty, but an amount of unrest and bitterness which even the best efforts of their leaders may not be able always to guide.” This is the simple truth. The essence of the present situation lies in the fact that the people whom our white masters have “recognized” as our leaders (without taking the trouble to consult us) and those who, by our own selection, had actually attained to leadership among us are being revaluated and, in most cases, rejected.

The most striking instance from the latter class is Dr. W. E. Du Bois, the editor of the Crisis. Du Bois’s case is the more significant because his former services to his race have been undoubtedly of a high and courageous sort. Moreover, the act by which he has brought upon himself the stormy outburst of disapproval from his race is one which of itself, would seem to merit no such stern condemnation. To properly gauge the value and merit of this disapproval one must view it in the light of its attendant circumstances and of the situation in which it arose.

Dr. Du Bois first palpably sinned in his editorial “Close Ranks” in the July number of the Crisis. But this offense (apart from the trend and general tenor of the brief editorial) lies in a single sentence: “Let us, while this war lasts, forget our special grievances and close our ranks, shoulder to shoulder with our white fellow-citizens and the allied nations that are fighting for democracy.” From the latter part of the sentence there is no dissent, so far as we know. The offense lies in that part of the sentence which ends with the italicized words. It is felt by all his critics, that Du Bois, of all Negroes, knows best that our “special grievances” which the War Department Bulletin describes as “justifiable” consist of lynching, segregation and disfranchisement, and that the Negroes of America can not preserve either their lives, their manhood or their vote (which is their political life and liberties) with these things in existence. The doctor’s critics feel that America can not use the Negro people to any good effect unless they have life, liberty and manhood assured and guaranteed to them. Therefore, instead of the war for democracy making these things less necessary, it makes them more so.

“But,” it may be asked, “why should not these few words be taken merely as a slip of the pen or a venial error in logic? Why all this hubbub?” It is because the so-called leaders of the first-mentioned class have already established an unsavory reputation by advocating this same surrender of life, liberty and manhood, masking their cowardice behind the pillars of war-time sacrifice? Du Bois’s statement, then, is believed to mark his entrance into that class, and is accepted as a “surrender” of the principles which brought him into prominence—and which alone kept him there.

Later, when it was learned that Du Bois was being preened for a berth in the War Department as a captain-assistant (adjutant) to Major Spingarn, the words used by him in the editorial acquired a darker and more sinister significance. The two things fitted too well together as motive and self-interest.

For these reasons Du Bois is regarded much in the same way as a knight in the middle ages who had had his armor stripped from him, his arms reversed and his spurs hacked off. This ruins him as an influential person among Negroes at this time, alike whether he becomes a captain or remains an editor.

But the case has its roots much farther back than the editorial in July’s Crisis. Some time ago when it was learned that the Crisis was being investigated by the government for an alleged seditious utterance a great clamor went up, although the expression of it was not open. Negroes who dared to express their thoughts seemed to think the action tantamount to a declaration that protests against lynching, segregation and disfranchisement were outlawed by the government. But nothing was clearly understood until the conference of editors was called under the assumed auspices of Emmet Scott and Major Spingarn. Then it began to appear that these editors had not been called without a purpose. The desperate ambiguity of the language which they used in their report (in the War Department Bulletin), coupled with the fact that not one of them, upon his return would tell the people anything of the proceedings of the conference—all this made the Negroes feel less and less confidence in them and their leadership; made them (as leaders) less effective instruments for the influential control of the race’s state of mind.

Now Du Bois was one of the most prominent of those editors “who were called.” The responsibility, therefore, for a course of counsel which stresses the servile virtues of acquiescence and subservience falls squarely on his shoulders. The offer of a captaincy and Du Bois’s flirtation with that offer following on the heels of these things seemed, even in the eyes of his associate members of the N.A.A.C.P. to afford clear proof of that which was only a suspicion before, viz: that the racial resolution of the leaders had been tampered with, and that Du Bois had been privy to something of the sort. The connection between the successive acts of the drama (May, June, July) was too clear to admit of any interpretation other than that of deliberate, cold blooded, purposive planning. And the connection with Spingarn seemed to suggest that personal friendships and public faith were not good working team-mates.

For the sake of the larger usefulness of Dr. Du Bois we hope he will be able to show that he can remain as editor of the Crisis; but we fear that it will require a good deal of explaining. For, our leaders, like Caesar’s wife, must be above suspicion. —July, 1918.

When the Blind Lead

In the February issue of the Crisis its editor begins a brief editorial on “Leadership,” with the touching reminder that “Many a good cause has been killed by suspected leadership.” How strikingly do these words bring back to us Negroes those dark days of 1918! At that time the editor of the Crisis was offering certain unique formulas of leadership that somehow didn’t “take.” His “Close Ranks” editorial and the subsequent slump in the stock of his leadership have again illustrated the truth long since expressed in Latin: “Descensus Averni facilis; sed revocare gradus,—hoc opus est,” which, being translated, might mean that, while it’s as easy as eggs for a leader to fall off the fence, it is devilishly difficult to boost him up again. In September, 1918, one could boldly say, “The Crisis says, first your Country, then your Rights!” Today, when the Negro people everywhere are responding to Mr. Michael Coulsen’s sentiment that “it’s Race, not Country, first,” we find the “leader” of 1918 in the position described by Lowell in these words: “A moultin’ fallen cherubim, ef he should see ye’d snicker, Thinkin’ he warn’t a suckemstance.”

How fast time flies!

But the gist of Dr. Du Bois’s editorial is the moral downfall of another great leader. “Woodrow Wilson, in following a great ideal of world unity, forgot all his pledges to the German people, forgot all his large words to Russia, did not hesitate to betray Gompers and his unions, and never at any single moment meant to include in his democracy twelve million of his fellow Americans, whom he categorically promised `more than mere grudging justice,’ and then allowed 350 of them to be lynched during his Presidency. Under such leadership what cause could succeed?” He notes that out of the World War, with the Allies triumphant, have come Britain’s brutal domination of the seas, her conquest of Persia, Arabia and Egypt, and her tremendous tyranny imposed on two-thirds of Africa.

But we saw these things, as early as 1917, to be the necessary consequences of the Allies’ success, when the editor of the Crisis was telling his race: “You are not fighting simply for Europe; you are fighting for the world.” Was Dr. Du Bois so blind then that he couldn’t see them? And if he was, is he any less blind today? In 1918 the lynchings were still going on while Dr. Du Bois was solemnly advising us to “forget our grievances.” Any one who insisted then on putting such grievances as lynchings, disfranchisement and segregation in the fore-ground was described by the Crisis’ editor as seeking “to turn his country’s tragic predicament to his own personal gain.” At that time he either believed or pretended to believe every one of the empty words that flowed from Woodrow Wilson’s lips, and on the basis of this belief he was willing to act as a brilliant bellwether to the rest of the flock. Unfortunately, the flock refused to follow the lost leader.

“If the blind lead the blind they will both fall into the ditch.” But in this case those being led were not quite so blind as those who wanted to lead them by way of captaincies in the army. Which was why some captaincies were not forthcoming. The test of vision in a leader is the ability to foresee the immediate future, the necessary consequences of a course of conduct and the dependable sentiments of those whom he assumes to lead. In all these things Dr. Du Bois has failed; and neither his ungrateful attack on Emmett Scott nor his belated discovery of Wilsonian hypocrisy will, we fear, enable him to climb back into the saddle of race leadership. This is a pity, because he has rendered good service in his day. But that day is past. The magazine which he edits still remains as a splendid example of Negro journalism. But the personal primacy of its editor has departed, never to return. Other times, other men; other men, other manners.

Even the Negro people are now insisting that their leaders shall in thought and moral stamina keep ahead of, and not behind, them,

“It takes a mind like Willum’s [fact!] ez big as all outdoors

To find out thet it looks like rain arter it fairly pours.”

The people’s spiritual appetite has changed and they are no longer enamoured of “brilliant” leaders, whose chorus is:

“A marciful Providence fashioned us holler

O’purpose that we might our principles swaller;

It can hold any quantity on ’em—the belly can—

An’ bring ’em up ready fer use like the pelican.”

And this is a change which we commend to the kindly consideration of all those good white friends who are out selecting Negro “leaders.” It is a fact which, when carefully considered, will save them thousands of dollars in “overhead expense.” The Negro leaders of the future will be expected not only to begin straight, take a moral vacation, and then go straight again. They will be expected to go straight all the time; to stand by us in war as well as in peace; not to blow hot and cold with the same mouth, but “to stand four-square to all the winds that blow.” —1920.

Just Crabs

Once upon a time a Greedy Person went rummaging along the lagoon with a basket and a stick in quest of Crabs, which he needed for the Home Market. (Now, this was in the Beginning of Things, Best Beloved.) These were Land Crabs—which, you know, are more luscious than Sea Crabs, being more Primitive and more full of meat. He dug into their holes with his stick, routed them out, packed them on their backs in his basket and took them home. Several trips he made with his basket and his stick, and all the Crabs which he caught were dumped into a huge barrel. (But this time he didn’t pack them on their backs.) And all the creatures stood around and watched. For this Greedy Person had put no cover on the barrel. (But this was in the Beginning of Things.)

He knew Crab Nature, and was not at all worried about his Crabs. For as soon as any one Crab began to climb up on the side of the barrel to work his way toward the top the other Crabs would reach up, grab him by the legs, and down he would come, kerplunk! “If we can’t get up,” they would say—“if we can’t get up, you shan’t get up, either. We’ll pull you down. Besides, you should wait until the barrel bursts. There are Kind Friends on the Outside who will burst, the barrel if we only wait, and then, when the Great Day dawns, we will all be Emancipated and there’ll be no need for Climbing. Come down, you fool!” (Because this was in the Beginning of Things, Best Beloved.) So the Greedy Person could always get as many Crabs as he needed for the Home Market, because they all depended on him for their food.

And all the creatures stood around and laughed. For this was very funny in the Beginning of Things. And all the creatures said that the Reason for this kink in Crab Nature was that when the Creator was giving out heads he didn’t have enough to go around, so the poor Crabs didn’t get any.

And the Greedy Person thanked his lucky stars that Crabs had been made in that Peculiar way, since it made it unnecessary to put a cover on his barrel or to waste his precious time a-watching of them. (Now, all this happened long ago, Best Beloved, in the very Beginning of Things.)

—

The above is the first of our Just-So Stories—with no apologies to Rudyard Kipling or any one else. We print it here because, just at this time the Crabs are at work in Harlem, and there is a tremendous clashing of claws as the Pull ’Em Down program goes forward. It’s a great game, to be sure, but it doesn’t seem to get them or us anywhere. The new day that has dawned for the Negroes of Harlem is a day of business accomplishment. People are going into business, saving their money and collectively putting it into enterprises which will mean roofs over their heads and an economic future for themselves and their little ones.

But the Subsidized Sixth are sure that this is all wrong and that we have no right to move an inch until the Socialist millennium dawns, when we will all get “out of the barrel” together. It does not seem to have occurred to them that making an imperfect heaven now does not unfit any one for enjoying the perfect paradise which they promise us—if it ever comes. Truly it is said of them that “the power over a man’s subsistence is the power over his will”—and over his “scientific radicalism,” too. But we remember having translated this long ago into the less showy English of “Show me whose bread you eat, and I’ll tell you whose songs you’ll sing.” Surely this applies to radicals overnight as well as to ordinary folk. And if not, why not?

But when the reek of the poison gas propaganda has cleared away and the smoke of the barrage has lifted it will be found that “White Men’s Niggers” is a phrase that need not be restricted to old-line politicians and editors. Criticism pungent and insistent is due to every man in public life and to every movement which bids for public support. But the cowardly insinuator who from the safe shelter of nameless charges launches his poisoned arrows at other people’s reputation is a contemptible character to have on any side of any movement. He is generally a liar who fears that he will be called to account for his lies if he should venture to name his foe. No man with the truth to tell indulges in this pastime of the skulker and the skunk. Let us, by all means, have clear, hard-hitting criticism, but none of this foul filth which lowers the thing that throws it. In the name of common sense and common decency, quit being Just Crabs.

CHAPTER VI.
THE NEW RACE CONSCIOUSNESS.

The Negro’s Own Radicalism

Twenty years ago all Negroes known to the white publicists of America could be classed as conservatives on all the great questions on which thinkers differ. In matters of industry, commerce, politics, religion, they could be trusted to take the backward view. Only on the question of the Negro’s “rights” could a small handful be found bold enough to be tagged as “radicals”—and they were howled down by both the white and colored adherents of the conservative point of view. Today Negroes differ on all those great questions on which white thinkers differ, and there are Negro radicals of every imaginary stripe—agnostics, atheists, I.W.W.’s Socialists, Single Taxers, and even Bolshevists.

In the good old days white people derived their knowledge of what Negroes were doing from those Negroes who were nearest to them, generally their own selected exponents of Negro activity or of their white point of view. A classic illustration of this kind of knowledge was afforded by the Republican Party; but the Episcopal Church, the Urban League, or the U. S. Government would serve as well. Today the white world is vaguely, but disquietingly, aware that Negroes are awake, different and perplexingly uncertain. Yet the white world by which they are surrounded retains its traditional method of interpreting the mass by the Negro nearest to themselves in affiliation or contact. The Socialist party thinks that the “unrest” now apparent in the Negro masses is due to the propaganda which its adherents support, and believes that it will function largely along the lines of socialist political thought. The great dailies, concerned mainly with their chosen task of being the mental bellwethers of the mob, scream “Bolshevist propaganda” and flatter themselves that they have found the true cause; while the government’s unreliable agents envisage it as “disloyalty.” The truth, as usual, is to be found in the depths; but there they are all prevented from going by mental laziness and that traditional off-handed, easy contempt with which white men in America, from scholars like Lester Ward to scavengers like Stevenson, deign to consider the colored population of twelve millions.

In the first place, the cause of “radicalism” among American Negroes is international. But it is necessary to draw clear distinctions at the outset. The function of the Christian church is international. So is art, war, the family, rum and the exploitation of labor. But none of these is entitled to extend the mantle of its own peculiar “internationalism” to cover the present case of the Negro discontent—although this has been attempted. The international Fact to which Negroes in America are now reacting is not the exploitation of laborers by capitalists; but the social, political and economic subjection of colored peoples by white. It is not the Class Line, but the Color Line, which is the incorrect but accepted expression for the Dead Line of racial inferiority. This fact is a fact of Negro consciousness as well as a fact of externals. The international Color Line is the practice and theory of that doctrine which holds that the best stocks of Africa, China, Egypt and the West Indies are inferior to the worst stocks of Belgium, England and Italy, and must hold their lives, lands and liberties upon such terms and conditions as the white races may choose to grant them.