Following the Color Line — Following the Colour Line in the North - part 2

_Prosperous Negroes in Boston_ Several prosperous Negro business men have won a large white patronage.

One of the chief merchant-tailoring stores of Boston, with a location on Washington Street which rents for ,000 a year, is owned by J. H.

Lewis.

He has been in business many years.

He employs both white and Negro workmen and clerks and he has some of the best white trade in Boston.

Not long ago he went to North Carolina and bought the old plantation where his father was a slave, and he even talks of going there to spend his old age.

Another Negro, Gilbert H. Harris, conducts the largest wig-making establishment in New England.

I visited his place.

He employs coloured girls and his trade is exclusively white.

Another Negro has a school of pharmacy in which all the students are white; another, George Hamm, has a prosperous news and stationery store.

A dentist, Dr. Grant, who has a reputation in his profession for a cement which he invented, was formerly in the faculty of the Harvard dentistry school and now enjoys a good practice among white people.

The real estate dealer who has the most extensive business in Cambridge, T. H.

Raymond, is a Negro.

He employs white clerks and his business is chiefly with white people.

Two or three Negro lawyers, Butler Wilson in particular, have many white clients.

Dr. Courtney, a coloured physician from the Harvard Medical School, was for a time house physician of the Boston Lying-in-Hospital, in which the patients were practically all white, and has now a practice which includes both white and coloured patients.

Dr. Courtney has also served on the School Board of Boston, an important elective office.

The Negro poet, William Stanley Braithwaite, whose father took a degree at Oxford (England), is a member of the Authors' Club of Boston.

His poems have appeared in various magazines, he has written a volume of poems, a standard anthology of Elizabethan verse, and he is about to publish a critical study of the works of William Dean Howells.

Several of these men meet white people socially more or less.

I give these examples to show the place occupied by the better and older class of Boston Negroes.

Most of those I have mentioned are mulattoes, some very light.

It shows what intelligent Negroes can do for themselves in a community where there has been little or no prejudice against them.

But with crowding new immigration, and incited by all the other causes I have mentioned, these conditions are rapidly changing.

A few years ago no hotel or restaurant in Boston refused Negro guests; now several hotels, restaurants, and especially confectionery stores, will not serve Negroes, even the best of them.

The discrimination is not made openly, but a Negro who goes to such places is informed that there are no accommodations, or he is overlooked and otherwise slighted, so that he does not come again.

A strong prejudice exists against renting flats and houses in many white neighbourhoods to coloured people.

The Negro in Boston, as in other cities, is building up "quarters," which he occupies to the increasing exclusion of other classes of people.

The great Negro centre is now in the South End, a locality once occupied by some of the most aristocratic families of Boston.

And yet, as elsewhere, they struggle for the right to live where they please.

A case in point is that of Mrs. Mattie A. McAdoo, an educated coloured woman, almost white, who has travelled abroad, and is a woman of refinement.

She had a flat in an apartment house among white friends.

One of the renters, a Southern woman, finding out that Mrs. McAdoo had coloured blood, objected.

The landlord refused to cancel Mrs. McAdoo's lease and the white woman left, but the next year Mrs. McAdoo found that she could not re-rent her apartment.

The landlord in this instance was the son of an abolitionist.

He said to her: "You know I have no prejudice against coloured people.

I will rent you an apartment in the building where I myself live if you want it, but I can't let you into my other buildings, because the tenants object."

An attempt was even made a year or so ago by white women to force Miss Baldwin, the coloured school principal to whom I have referred, and who is almost one of the institutions of Boston, to leave Franklin House, where she was living.

No one incident, perhaps, awakened Boston to the existence of race prejudice more sharply than this.

_Churches Draw the Colour Line_ One would think that the last harbour of prejudice would be the churches, and yet I found strange things in Boston.

There are, and have been for a long time, numerous coloured churches in Boston, but many Negroes, especially those of the old families, have belonged to the white churches.

In the last two years increased Negro attendance, especially at the Episcopal churches, has become a serious problem.

A quarter of the congregation of the Church of the Ascension is coloured and the vicar has had to refuse any further coloured attendance at the Sunday School.

St. Peter's and St. Philip's Churches in Cambridge have also been confronted with the colour problem.

A proposition is now afoot to establish a Negro mission which shall gradually grow into a separate coloured Episcopal Church, a movement which causes much bitterness among the coloured people.

I shall not soon forget the expression of hopelessness in the face of a prominent white church leader as he exclaimed: "What _shall_ we do with these Negroes!

I for one would like to have them stay.

I believe it is in accordance with the doctrine of Christ, but the proportion is growing so large that white people are drifting away from us.

Strangers avoid us.

Our organisation is expensive to keep up and the Negroes are able to contribute very little in proportion to their numbers.

Think about it yourself: What shall we do?

If we allow the Negroes to attend freely it means that eventually all the white people will leave and we shall have a Negro church whether we want it or not."

In no other city are there any considerable number of Negroes who attend white churches--except a few Catholic churches.

At New Orleans, I have seen white and coloured people worshipping together at the cathedrals.

White ministers sometimes have spasms of conscience that they are not doing all they should for the Negro.

Let me tell two significant incidents from Philadelphia.

The worst Negro slum in that city is completely surrounded by business houses and the homes of wealthy white people.

Within a few blocks of it stand several of the most aristocratic churches of Philadelphia.

Miss Bartholomew conducts a neighbourhood settlement in the very centre of this social bog.

Twice during the many years she has been there white ministers have ventured down from their churches.

One of them said he had been troubled by the growing masses of ignorant coloured people.

"Can't I do something to help?"

Miss Bartholomew was greatly pleased and cheered.

"Of course you can," she said heartily.

"We're trying to keep some of the Negro children off the streets.

There is plenty of opportunity for helping with our boys' and girls' clubs and classes."

"Oh, I didn't mean that," said the minister; "I thought, in cases of death in their families, we might offer to read the burial service."

And he went away and did not see the humour of it!

Another minister made a similar proposition: he wanted to establish a Sunday School for coloured people.

He asked Miss Bartholomew anxiously where he could hold it.

"Why not in your church in the afternoon?"

"Why, we couldn't do that!"

he exclaimed; "we should have to air all the cushions afterward!"

But to return to Boston.

A proposition was recently made to organise for coloured people a separate Y. M. C. A.

, but the white members voted against any such discrimination.

Yet a coloured man said to me hopelessly: "It's only delayed.

Next time we shall be put off with a separate institution."

_Colour Line at Harvard_ Even at Harvard where the Negro has always enjoyed exceptional opportunities, conditions are undergoing a marked change.

A few years ago a large class of white students voluntarily chose a brilliant Negro student, R. C.

Bruce, as valedictorian.

But last year a Negro baseball player was the cause of so much discussion and embarrassment to the athletic association that there will probably never be another coloured boy on the university teams.

The line has already been drawn, indeed, in the medical department.

Although a coloured doctor only a few years ago was house physician at the Boston Lying-in-Hospital, coloured students are no longer admitted to that institution.

One of them, Dr. Welker (an Iowa coloured man), cannot secure his degree because he hasn't had six obstetrical cases, and he can't get the six cases because he isn't admitted with his white classmates to the Lying-in-Hospital.

It is a curious fact that not only the white patients but some Negro patients object to the coloured doctors.

In a recent address which has awakened much sharp comment among Boston Negroes, President Eliot of Harvard indicated his sympathy with the general policy of separate education in the South by remarking that if Negro students were in the majority at Harvard, or formed a large proportion of the total number, some separation of the races might follow.

And this feeling is growing, notwithstanding the fact that no Negro student has ever disgraced Harvard and that no students are more orderly or law-abiding than the Negroes.

On the other hand, Negro students have frequently made distinguished records for scholarship: last year one of them, Alain Leroy Locke, who took the course in three years, won the first of the three Bowdoin prizes (the most important bestowed at Harvard) for a literary essay, and passed for his degree with a _magna cum laude_.

Since then he has been accepted, after a brilliant competitive examination, for the Rhodes scholarship from the state of Pennsylvania.

Such feeling as that which is developing in the North comes hard, indeed, upon the intelligent, educated, ambitious Negro--especially if he happens to have, as a large proportion of these Negroes do have, no little white blood.

Many coloured people in Boston are so white that they cannot be told from white people, yet they are classed as Negroes.

Accompanying this change of attitude, this hesitation and withdrawal of the better class of white men, one finds crude sporadic outbreaks on the part of the rougher element of white men--who have merely a different way of expressing themselves.

_White Gangs Attack Negroes_ In Indianapolis the Negro comes in contact with the "bungaloo gangs," crowds of rough and lawless white boys who set upon Negroes and beat them frightfully, often wholly without provocation.

Although no law prevents Negroes from entering any park in Indianapolis, they are practically excluded from at least one of them by the danger of being assaulted by these gangs.

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

Professor R. R.

Wright, Jr. , himself a Negro, and an acute observer of Negro conditions, tells this personal experience: "I came out on the car from the University of Pennsylvania one evening in May about eight o'clock.

Just as the car turned off Twenty-seventh to Lombard Street, a crowd of about one hundred little white boys from six to about fourteen years of age attacked it.

The car was crowded, but there were only about a dozen Negroes on it, about half of them women.

The mob of boys got control of the car by pulling off the trolley.

They threw stones into the car, and finally some of them boarded the car and began to beat the Negroes with sticks, shouting as they did so, 'Kill the nigger!'

'Lynch 'em!'

'Hit that nigger!'

etc. This all happened in Philadelphia.

Doubtless these urchins had been reading in the daily papers the cry 'Kill the Negro!'

and they were trying to carry out the injunction."

While I was in Indianapolis a clash of enough importance to be reported in the newspapers occurred between the races on a street car; and in New York, in the San Juan Hill district, one Sunday evening I saw an incident which illustrates the almost instinctive race antagonism which exists in Northern cities.

The street was crowded.

Several Negro boys were playing on the pavement.

Stones were thrown.

Instantly several white boys sided together and began to advance on the Negroes.

In less time than it takes to tell it thirty or forty white boys and young men were chasing the Negroes down the street.

At the next corner the Negroes were joined by dozens of their own race.

Stones and sticks began to fly everywhere, and if it hadn't been for the prompt action of two policemen there would have been a riot similar to those which have occurred not once but many times in New York City during the past two years.

Of course these instances are exceptional, but none the less significant.

_Bumptiousness as a Cause of Hatred_ Some of the disturbances grow out of a characteristic of a certain sort of Negro, the expression of which seems to stir the deepest animosity in the city white boy.

And that is the bumptiousness, the airiness, of the half-ignorant young Negro, who, feeling that he has rights, wants to be occupied constantly in using them.

He mistakes liberty for licence.

Although few in numbers among thousands of quiet coloured people, he makes a large showing.

In the South they call him the "smart Negro," and an almost irresistible instinct exists among white boys of a certain class to take him down.

I remember walking in Indianapolis with an educated Northern white man.

We met a young Negro immaculately dressed; his hat-band was blue and white; his shoes were patent leather with white tops; he wore a flowered waistcoat, and his tread as he walked was something to see.

"Do you know," said my companion, "I never see that young fellow without wanting to step up and knock his head off.

I know something about him.

He is absolutely worthless: he does no work, but lives on the wages of a hard-working coloured woman and spends all he can get on his clothes.

I

know the instinct is childish, but I am just telling you how I feel.

I'm not sure it is racial prejudice; I presume I should feel much the same way toward a Frenchman if he did the same thing.

And somehow I can't help believing that a good thrashing would improve that boy's character."

I'm telling this incident just as it happened, to throw a side-light on one of the manifestations of the growing prejudice.

One more illustration: Miss Eaton conducts a social settlement for Negroes in Boston.

One day a teacher said to one of the little Negro boys in her class: "Please pick up my handkerchief."

The boy did not stir; she again requested him to pick up the handkerchief;

then she asked him why he refused.

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

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

In certain towns in Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, on the borders of the old South, the feeling has reached a stage still more acute.

At Springfield, O.

, two race riots have occurred, in the first of which a Negro was lynched and in the second many Negroes were driven out of town and a row of coloured tenements was burned.

There are counties and towns where no Negro is permitted to stop over night.

At Syracuse, O. , Lawrenceburg, Ellwood, and Salem, Ind.

, for example, Negroes have not been permitted to live for years.

If a Negro appears he is warned of conditions, and if he does not leave immediately, he is visited by a crowd of boys and men and forced to leave.

A farmer who lives within a few miles of Indianapolis told me of a meeting, held only a short time ago by thirty-five farmers in his neighbourhood, in which an agreement was passed to hire no Negroes, nor to permit Negroes to live anywhere in the region.

_Story of a Northern Race Riot_ I stopped at Greensburg, Ind.

, on my way East and found there a remarkable illustration showing just how feeling arises in the North.

Greensburg is a comfortable, well-to-do, conservative, church-going old town in eastern Indiana.

Many of the residents are retired farmers.

The population of 7,000 is mostly of pure American stock, largely of Northern origin.

And yet last April this quiet old town was shaken by a race riot.

I made careful inquiries as to conditions there and I was amazed to discover how closely this small disturbance paralleled the greater riot at Atlanta which I have already written about.

Negroes had lived in Greensburg for many years, a group of self-respecting, decent, prosperous men and women.

They were known to and highly regarded by their white neighbours.

One of them, named Brooks, owned a barber shop and was janitor for the Presbyterian Church and for one of the banks.

Another, George W. Edwards, whom I met, has been for years an employee in the Garland Mills.

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

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

Of the local Negro boys, Robert Lewis, the first coloured graduate of the local schools, is now teaching engineering at Hampton Institute.

Oscar Langston, another Negro boy, is a dentist in Indianapolis.

These and other Negroes live in good homes, support a church and have a respectable society of their own.

I found just such a body of good coloured people in Atlanta.

Well, progress brought an electric railroad to Greensburg.

To work on this and on improvements made by the railroad hundreds of labourers were required.

And they were Negroes of the ignorant, wandering, unlooked-after sort so common in similar occupations in the South.

When the work was finished a considerable number of them remained in Greensburg.

Now Greensburg, like other American cities, was governed by a mayor who was a "good fellow," and who depended on two influences to elect him: party loyalty and the saloon vote.

He allowed a Negro dive to exist in one part of the town, where the idle and worthless Negroes congregated, where a murder was committed about a year before the riot.

Exactly like Decatur Street in Atlanta!

A rotten spot always causes trouble sooner or later.

Good citizens protested and objected--to no purpose.

They even organised a Good Citizenship League, the purpose of which was to secure a better enforcement of law.

But the saloon interests were strong and wanted to sell whiskey and beer to the Negroes, and the city authorities were complaisant.

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

But in a democracy people _must_ care for one another.

_A Negro Crime in the North_ One day last April a Negro labourer who had been working for Mrs. Sefton, a highly respected widow who lived alone, appeared in the house in broad daylight and criminally assaulted her.

His name was John Green, a Kentucky Negro; he was not only ignorant, but half-witted; he had already committed a burglary and had not been punished.

He was easily caught, convicted, and sentenced.

But the town was angry.

On April 30th a crowd of men and boys gathered, beat two or three Negroes, and drove many out of town.

They never thought of mobbing the city officials who had allowed the Negro dives to exist.

And, as in Atlanta, the decent Negroes suffered with the criminals: a crowd broke windows in the home of George Edwards, and threatened other respectable coloured men.

As in Atlanta, the better white people were horrified and scandalised; but, as in Atlanta, the white men who made up the mob went unpunished (though Atlanta did mildly discipline a few rioters).

As in Atlanta, the newspaper reports that were sent out made no distinction between the different sorts of Negroes.

The entire Negro population of Greensburg was blamed for the crime of a single ignorant and neglected man.

I have several different newspaper reports of the affair from outside papers, and nearly all indicate in the headlines that all the Negroes in Greensburg were concerned in the riot and were driven out of town, which was not, of course, true.

As a matter of fact the respectable Negroes are still living in Greensburg on friendly terms with the white people.

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

Different degrees of prejudice, it is true, are apparent in the two sections.

In the South the social and political prejudice the natural result of the memories of slavery and reconstruction, of the greater mass of Negro population and of the backward economic development, is stronger.

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

Over and over again, while I was in the South, I heard remarks like this: "Down here we make the Negro keep his place socially, but in the North you won't let him work."

This leads me to one of the most important phases of race-relationship in the North--that is, the economic struggle of the Negro, suddenly thrown, as he has been, into the swift-moving, competitive conditions of Northern cities.

Does he, or can he, survive?

Do the masses of Negroes now coming North realise their ambitions?

Is it true that the North will not let the Negro work?

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

CHAPTER VII THE NEGROES' STRUGGLE FOR SURVIVAL IN NORTHERN CITIES