Following the Color Line — An Ostracised Race in Ferment: The Conflict of Negro Parties and Negro Leaders over Methods of Dealing with Their Own Problem - part 1

AN OSTRACISED RACE IN FERMENT

THE CONFLICT OF NEGRO PARTIES AND NEGRO LEADERS OVER METHODS OF DEALING WITH THEIR OWN PROBLEM

One of the things that has interested me most of all in studying Negro communities, especially in the North, has been to find them so torn by cliques and divided by such wide differences of opinion.

No other element of our population presents a similar condition; the Italians, the Jews, the Germans and especially the Chinese and Japanese are held together not only by a different language, but by ingrained and ancient national habits.

They group themselves naturally.

But the Negro is an American in language and customs; he knows no other traditions and he has no other conscious history; a large proportion, indeed, possess varying degrees of white American blood (restless blood!

) and yet the Negro is not accepted as an American.

Instead of losing himself gradually in the dominant race, as the Germans, Irish, and Italians are doing, adding those traits or qualities with which Time fashions and modifies this human mosaic called the American nation, the Negro is set apart as a peculiar people.

With every Negro, then, an essential question is: "How shall I meet this attempt to put me off by myself?"

That question in one form or another--politically, industrially, socially--is being met daily, almost hourly, by every Negro in this country.

It colours his very life.

"You don't know, and you can't know," a Negro said to me, "what it is to be a problem, to understand that everyone is watching you and studying you, to have your mind constantly on your own actions.

It has made us think and talk about ourselves more than other people do.

It has made us self-conscious and sensitive."

It is scarcely surprising, then, that upon such a vital question there should be wide differences of opinion among Negroes.

As a matter of fact, there are almost innumerable points of view and suggested modes of conduct, but they all group themselves into two great parties which are growing more distinct in outline and purpose every day.

Both parties exist in every part of the country, but it is in the North that the struggle between them is most evident.

I have found a sharper feeling and a bitterer discussion of race relationships among the Negroes of the North than among those of the South.

If you want to hear the race question discussed with fire and fervour, go to Boston!

For two hundred and fifty years the Negro had no thought, no leadership, no parties; then suddenly he was set free, and became, so far as law could make him, an integral and indistinguishable part of the American people.

But it was only in a few places in the North and among comparatively few individuals that he ever approximately reached the position of a free citizen, that he ever really enjoyed the rights granted to him under the law.

In the South he was never free politically, socially, and industrially, in the sense that the white man is free, and is not so to-day.

But in Boston, and in other Northern cities in lesser degree, a group of Negroes reached essentially equal citizenship.

A few families trace their lineage back to the very beginnings of civilisation in this country, others were freemen long before the war, a few had revolutionary war records of which their descendants are intensely and justly proud.

Some of the families have far more white blood than black; though the census shows that only about 40 per cent.

of the Negroes of Boston are mulattoes, the real proportion is undoubtedly very much higher.

In abolition times these Negroes were much regarded.

Many of them attained and kept a certain real position among the whites; they were even accorded unusual opportunities and favours.

They found such a place as an educated Negro might find to-day (or at least as he found a few years ago) in Germany.

In some instances they became wealthy.

At a time when the North was passionately concerned in the abolition of slavery the colour of his skin sometimes gave the Negro special advantages, even honours.

For years after the war this condition continued; then a stream of immigration of Southern Negroes began to appear, at first a mere rivulet, but latterly increasing in volume, until to-day all of our Northern cities have swarming coloured colonies.

Owing to the increase of the Negro population and for other causes which I have already mentioned, sentiment in the North toward the Negro has been undergoing a swift change.

_How Colour Lines Are Drawn_ Now the tragedy of the Negro is the colour of his skin: he is easily recognisable.

The human tendency is to class people together by outward appearances.

When the line began to be drawn it was drawn not alone against the unworthy Negro, but against the Negro.

It was not so much drawn by the highly intelligent white man as by the white man.

And the white man alone has not drawn it, but the Negroes themselves are drawing it--and more and more every day.

So we draw the line in this country against the Chinese, the Japanese, and in some measure against the Jews (and they help to draw it).

So we speak with disparagement of "dagoes" and "square heads."

Right or wrong, these lines, in our present state of civilisation, are drawn.

They are here; they must be noted and dealt with.

What was the result?

The Northern Negro who has been enjoying the free life of Boston and Philadelphia has protested passionately against the drawing of a colour line: he wishes to be looked upon, and not at all unnaturally, for he possesses human ambitions and desires, solely for his worth as a man, not as a Negro.

In Philadelphia I heard of the old Philadelphia Negroes, in Indianapolis of the old Indianapolis families, in Boston a sharp distinction was drawn between the "Boston Negroes" and the recent Southern importation.

Even in Chicago, where there is nothing old, I found the same spirit.

In short, it is the protest against separation, against being deprived of the advantages and opportunities of a free life.

In the South the most intelligent and best educated Negroes are, generally speaking, the leaders of their race, but in Northern cities some of the ablest Negroes will have nothing to do with the masses of their own people or with racial movements; they hold themselves aloof, asserting that there is no colour line, and if there is, there should not be.

Their associations and their business are largely with white people and they cling passionately to the fuller life.

[Illustration: DR. BOOKER T.

WASHINGTON

Photograph by Dimock] "When I am sick," one of them said to me, "I don't go to a Negro doctor, but to a doctor.

Colour has nothing to do with it."

In the South the same general setting apart of Negroes as Negroes is going on, of course, on an immeasurably wider scale.

By disfranchisement they are being separated politically, the Jim Crow laws set them apart socially and physically, the hostility of white labour in some callings pushes them aside in the industrial activities.

But the South presents no such striking contrasts as the North, because no Southern Negroes were ever really accorded a high degree of citizenship.

_Two Great Negro Parties_ Now, the Negroes of the country are meeting the growing discrimination against them in two ways, out of which have grown the two great parties to which I have referred.

One party has sprung, naturally, from the thought of the Northern Negro and is a product of the freedom which the Northern Negro has enjoyed; although, of course, it finds many followers in the South.

The other is the natural product of the far different conditions in the South, where the Negro cannot speak his mind, where he has never realised any large degree of free citizenship.

Both are led by able men, and both are backed by newspapers and magazines.

It has come, indeed, to the point where most Negroes of any intelligence at all have taken their place on one side or the other.

The second-named party, which may best, perhaps, be considered first, is made up of the great mass of the coloured people both South and North; its undisputed leader is Booker T. Washington.

_The Rise of Booker T. Washington_ Nothing has been more remarkable in the recent history of the Negro than Washington's rise to influence as a leader, and the spread of his ideals of education and progress.

It is noteworthy that he was born in the South, a slave, that he knew intimately the common struggling life of his people and the attitude of the white race toward them.

He worked his way to education in Southern schools and was graduated at Hampton--a story which he tells best himself in his book, "Up From Slavery."

He was and is Southern in feeling and point of view.

When he began to think how he could best help his people the same question came to him that comes to every Negro: "What shall we do about this discrimination and separation?"

And his was the type of character which answered, "Make the best of it;

overcome it with self-development."

The very essence of his doctrine is this: "Get yourself right, and the world will be all right."

His whole work and his life have said to the white man: "You've set us apart.

You don't want us.

All right; we'll be apart.

We can succeed as Negroes."

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

Many great leaders have been like that: Lincoln was one.

They have the simplicity and patience of the soil, and the immense courage and faith.

To prevent being crushed by circumstances they develop humour; they laugh off their troubles.

Washington has all of these qualities of the common life: he possesses in high degree what some one has called "great commonness."

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

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

_What Washington Teaches the Negro_ The central idea of his doctrine, indeed, is work.

He teaches that if the Negro wins by real worth a strong economic position in the country, other rights and privileges will come to him naturally.

He should get his rights, not by gift of the white man, but by earning them himself.

"I noticed," he says, "when I first went to Tuskegee to start the Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute, that some of the white people about there looked rather doubtfully at me.

I thought I could get their influence by telling them how much algebra and history and science and all those things I had in my head, but they treated me about the same as they did before.

They didn't seem to care about the algebra, history, and science that were in my head only.

Those people never even began to have confidence in me until we commenced to build a large three-story brick building; and then another and another, until now we have eighty-six buildings which have been erected largely by the labour of our students, and to-day we have the respect and confidence of all the white people in that section.

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

In another place he has given his ideas of what education should be: "How I wish that, from the most cultured and highly endowed university in the great North to the humblest log cabin schoolhouse in Alabama, we could burn, as it were, into the hearts and heads of all that usefulness, that service to our brother is the supreme end of education."

It is, indeed, to the teaching of service in the highest sense that Washington's life has been devoted.

While he urges every Negro to reach as high a place as he can, he believes that the great masses of the Negroes are best fitted to-day for manual labour; his doctrine is that they should be taught to do that labour better: that when the foundations have been laid in sound industry and in business enterprise, the higher callings and honours will come of themselves.

His emphasis is rather upon duties than upon rights.

He does not advise the Negro to surrender a single right: on the other hand, he urges his people to use fully every right they have or can get--for example, to vote wherever possible, and vote thoughtfully.

But he believes that some of the rights given the Negro have been lost because the Negro had neither the wisdom nor the strength to use them properly.