THE BLACK MAN'S BURDEN ¹

Providence, according to Mr. Kipling, has been pleased to place upon the white man's shoulders the tremendous burden of regulating the affairs of men of all other colors, who, for the purpose of his argument, are backward and undeveloped — half devil and half child." When one considers that of the sixteen hundred million people living upon this earth, more than twelve hundred million are colored, this seems a truly staggering burden.

But it does not seem to have ocurred to the proponents of this pleasant doctrine that the shoe may be upon the other foot so far as the other twelve hundred million are concerned. It is easy to maintain an ex parte argument, and as long as we do not ask the other side to state their case our own arguments will appear not only convincing but conclusive. But in the court of common sense this method is not generally allowed and a case is not considered closed until both parties have been heard from.

I have no doubt but that the colored peoples of the world will have a word or two to say in their own defense. In this article I propose to put the case of the black man in America, not by any elaborate arguments, but by the presentation of certain facts which will probably speak for themselves.

I am not speaking here of the evidences of Negro advancement, nor even making a plea for justice. I wish merely to draw attention to certain pitiful facts. This is all that is necessary — at present. For I believe that those facts will furnish such a damning indictment of the Negro's American over-lord as must open the eyes of the world. The sum total of these facts and of what they suggest constitute a portion of the black man's burden in America. Not all of it, to be sure, but quite enough to make one understand what the Negro problem is. For the sake of clarity I shall arrange them in four groups: political, economic, educational and social.

I Political.

In a republic all the adult male natives are citizens. If in a given community some are citizens and others subjects, then your community is not a republic. It may call itself so. But that is another matter. Now, the essence of citizenship is the exercise of political rights; the right to a voice in government, to say what shall be done with your taxes, and the right to express your own needs. If you are denied these rights you are not a citizen. Well, in sixteen southern states there are over eight million Negroes in this anomalous position. Of course, many good people contend that they may be unfit to exercise the right of suffrage. If that is so, then who is fit to exercise it for them? This argument covers a fundamental fallacy in our prevailing conception of the function of the ballot. We think that it is a privilege to be conferred for "fitness." But it isn't. It is an instrument by which the people of a community express their will, their wants and their needs. And all those are entitled to use it who have wants, needs and desires that are worth consideration by society. If they are not worth considering, then be brutally frank about it; say so, and establish a protectorate over them. But have done with the silly cant of "fitness." People vote to express their wants. Of course, they will make mistakes. They are not gods. But they have a right to make their own mistakes — the Negroes. All other Americans have. That is why they had Ruef in San Francisco, and still have Murphy in New York.

But the American republic says, in effect, that eight million Americans shall be political serfs. Now, this might be effected with decency by putting it into the national constitution. But it isn't there. The national constitution has two provisions expressly penalizing this very thing. Yet the government — the President, Congress, the Supreme Court — wink at it. This is not what we call political decency. But, just the same, it is done. How is it done? By fraud and force. Tillman of South Carolina has told in the United States Senate how the ballot was taken from Negroes by shooting them— that is, by murder. But murder is not necessary now. In certain southern states in order to vote a man must have had a grandfather who voted before Negroes were freed. In others, he must be able to interpret and understand any clause in the Constitution, and a white registration official decides whether he does understand. And the colored men of states like Virginia, North Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississsippi and Louisiana who meet such tests as those states provide are disfranchised by the "white primary" system. According to this system only those who vote at the primaries can vote at the general elections. But the South Carolina law provides that: "At this election only white voters. . . and such Negroes as voted the Democratic ticket in 1876 and have voted the Democratic ticket continuously since. . .may vote." Of course, they know that none of them voted that ticket in 1876 or have done so continuously since. In Georgia the law says that: "All white electors who have duly registered. . . irrespective of past political affiliations are hereby declared qualified and are invited to participate in said primary election.

Under the new suffrage law of Mr. Booker T. Washington's state of Alabama. Montgomery county, which has 53.000 Negroes, disfranchises all but one hundred of them. In 1908 the Democrats of West Virginia declared in their platform that the United States Constitution should be so amended so as to disfranchise all the Negroes of the country. In December, 1910, the lower house of the Texas legislature, by a vote of 51 to 34, instructed its federal Senators and Congressmen to work for the repeal of the two amendments to the national constitution which confer the right of suffrage upon Negroes. But the funniest proposal in that direction came from Georgia, where J. J. Slade proposed an amendment to the state consituation (sic) to the effect that colored men should be allowed to vote only if two chaste white women would swear that they would trust them in the dark. But, however it has been effected, whether by force or fraud, by methods wise or otherwise, the great bulk of the Negroes of America are political pariahs to-day. When it is remembered that they once had the right of suffrage, that it was given them, not upon any principle of abstract right, but as a means of protection from the organised ill-will of their white neighbors, that that ill-will is now more effectively organized and in possession of all the powers of the state,— it can be seen at a glance that this spells subjection certain and complete.

II Economic.

Political rights are the only sure protection and guarantee of economic rights. Every fool knows this. And yet, here in America to-day we have people who tell Negroes that they ought not to agitate for the ballot so long as they still have a chance to get work in the south. And Negro leaders, hired by white capitalists who want cheap labor-power, still continue to mislead both their own and other people. The following facts will demonstrate the economic insecurity of the Negro in the South.

Up to a few years ago systematic peonage was wide-spread in the South. Now, peonage is slavery unsanctioned by law. In its essence it is more degrading than mere chattel slavery. Any one who doubts this may look to modern Mexico for proofs. This peonage in the South had reduced many black men to slavery. And it isn't stamped out yet. It was on January 3, 1911, that the Supreme Court, in the case of Alonzo Bailey, declared unconstitutional the Alabama peonage law, which had been upheld by the state Supreme Bench. About the same time W. S. Harlan, a nephew of the late Justice Harlan of the United States Supreme Court, and manager of a great lumber and turpentine trust, doing business in Florida and Alabama, was sentenced to eighteen months' imprisonment and fined $5,000 for peonage. He has since been pardoned and had his fine remitted by President Taft.

One of the forms of this second slavery is the proprietary system, according to which the Negro laborer or tenant farmer must get his supply at the proprietor's store — and he gets it on credit. The accounts are cooked so that the Negro is always in debt to the modern slave-holder. Some of them spend a life-time working out an original debt of five or ten dollars.

But peonage isn't all. The professional southerner is always declaring that whatever else the south may not do for the Negro it supplies him with work. It does — when he works for some one else. When he works for himself it is very often different. For instance, there was the Georgia Railroad strike of May, 1909. The Negro firemen were getting from fifty cents to a dollar a day less than the white firemen, they had to do menial work, and could not be promoted to be engineers. They could be promoted, however, to the best runs by the rule of seniority. But the white firemen, who had fixed the economic status of the black firemen, objected to even this. They went on strike and published a ukase to the people of the state in which they said: "The white people of this state refuse to accept social equality."

On the eighth of March, 1911, the firemen of the Cincinnati, New Orleans & Texas Pacific Railroad did the same thing. In the attacks made on the trains by them and their sympathizers many Negro firemen were killed. Occurences of this sort are increasing in frequency and they have a certain tragic significance. It means that the Negro, stripped of the ballot's protection, holds the right to earn his bread at the mere sufferance of the whites. It means that no black man shall hold a job that any white man wants. And that, not in the South alone. There is the case of the Pavers' Union of New York City. The colored pavers, during the panic of 1907, got behind in their dues. The usual period granted expired on Friday. On Monday they sent in their dues in full to the national organization. The treasurer refused to receive the dues and at once got out an injunction against them. This injunction estopped them from appealing to the National Executive Committee or to the national convention. They are still fighting the case.

In January 1911 the several walking delegates of the Painters' Plumbers', Masons,' Carpenters', Steam Fitters', Plasterers' and Tinsmiths' Unions compelled the Thompson & Starrett Construction Co., the second largest firm of contractors in New York, to get, rid of the colored cold painters who were engaged on the annex to Stearns' department store. They would not admit them to membership in the union; they merely declared that colored men would not be allowed to do this work. And these are the same men who denounce Negro strik-breakers. They want them out of the unions and also want them to fight for the unions. Presumably they would have them eating air-balls in the meanwhile.

In February 1911 the New York Cab Company was dropping its Negro cab drivers, because, it said, its patrons demanded it. In November 1911 the white chauffeurs of New York were trying to terrorize the colored chauffeurs by a system of sabotage in the garage, because they, too, believed that these jobs were white men's jobs.

It is but a short step from the denial of the right to work to the denial of the right to own. In fact, the two are often linked together, as in the next case. In the latter part of 1910, land speculators in Hominy Okla., sold some land for cotton farms to Negroes. The Negroes paid for this land, took possession, and were getting along splendidly when— "the local whites protested." "Night-riders (i. e., Ku Klux) around Hominy, several days before, served notice that all Negroes must leave the town at once, and to emphasize the warning they exploded dynamite in the neighborhood of Negro houses." So the Negroes fled, fearing for their lives. At Baxterville, Miss., the same thing happened in March 1912. In November 1910, a colored man named Matthew Anderson in Kansas City was having a fine $5,000 house built. But the jealousy of the white neighbors prevented its completion. It was blown up by dynamite when it had been almost finished. In Warrenton, Ga., notice was sent to three colored men and one widow, who had prospered greatly in business, to the effect that they must leave immediately because the white people of Warrenton "were not a-goin' to stand for rich niggers." One of them has been forced to sell out his business at a loss. Another never answers a knock and never leaves his house by the front door. All through these things Mr. Washington told his race that if it would work hard, get property and be useful to a community it would not need to strive for a share in the government!

III Educational.

Education is the name which we give to that process of equipment and training which, in our day, society gives the individual to prepare him for fighting the battle of life. We do not confer it as a privilege, but it is given on behalf of society for society's own protection from the perils of ignorance and incompetence. It is a privilege to which every member of society is entitled. For without some equipment of this sort the individual is but half a man, handicapped in the endeavor to make a living. Here in America, we subscribe to the dangerous doctrine that twelve million of the people should receive the minimum of education. And in order to reconcile ourselves to this doctrine, we deck it in the garments of wisdom. Because of the serf idea in American life, we say that the Negro shall have a serf's equipment and no more. It is the same idea that the aristocracy of Europe evolved when the workers demanded that their children should be trained better than they themselves had been. "Why", said the masters, "if we give your children schooling they will be educated out of their station in life. What should the son of a carpenter need to know of Euclid or Virgil? He should learn his father's vocation that he may be well equipped to serve in that station of life into which it has pleased God to call him. We need more plowmen than priests, more servants than savants."

In our own land, when Negroes demand education, we say, "Why, surely, give them industrial education. Your race has a great opportunity — to make itself useful. It needs trained craftsmen and workers and, perhaps, a few parsons. Teach your sons and daughters to work. That is enough." And we dexterously select leaders for them who will administer the soothing syrup of this old idea with deftness and dispatch. The General Education Board which disburses millions of dollars annually in the South for education has, so far, given to forty-one Negro schools the sum of $464,015. Only in two instances has any money been given to a real college. Practically all of it went to the labor-caste schools. Why? Because the dark degradation of the Negro must be lightened by no ray of learning. That would never do. We need them as "hewers of wood and drawers of water." And in the meanwhile, this is what the richest country on earth offers to ruthlessly exploited people as a training for life:

Before the Twelfth Annual Conference for Education in the South (1910) Mr. Charles L. Coon, superintendent of schools in North Carolina, read a paper on Negro Education in the South. His investigation extended over eleven states : Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas, Arkansas and Tennessee. In these states the Negroes make up 40.1 per cent of the population, but receive only 14.8 per cent of the school fund. He showed that even if the school fund as disbursed were apportioned to each race according to taxes paid the colored people of Virginia should receive $507,305 instead of the $482,228 which they now receive; in North Carolina they should get $429,127 instead of $402,658, and in Georgia $647,852 instead of $506,170. So that these three states expend for Negro education $93,278 less than what the Negroes themselves pay for — and that sum is contributed by Negroes to the white children of the state! But, as a matter of fact, in no modern country is education made to depend upon the tax-paying power of the parents. If that were so, the children of 40,000,000 American proletarians would live and die without schooling. So that the case is really much worse than it seems.

South Carolina spent in 1910 $10.34 for the education of each white child and $1.70 for the education of each colored child. In Lawrence county the state gave to each colored child 97 cents worth of education that year; in Lexington county, 90 cents; in Bamberg, 89 cents; in Saluda, 68 cents, and in Calhoun, 58 cents worth. The smallest sum spent on a white child for education that year was $4.03. In Georgia it was quite as bad. One county of this state owned 19 of the 27 school houses for Negroes. The valuation of the entire 19 was $2,500; that is, $131.58 for each school house for Negroes! The annual cost of the education of a Negro child in six counties of this civilised state was 39 cents. Meanwhile the whites of Baltimore were protesting against the building of a new Negro school! In Louisiana the report of the Department of Education shows that the average monthly salary of white male teachers is 75.29, while that of colored male teachers is $34.25. The average monthly salary of white female teachers is $50.80 and that of the colored female teachers is $28.67. The average length of the annual school term for white children is eight months and a quarter; for icolored children, four months and a half.

In Wilcox County, Alabama, where there are 2,000 white children and 10,758 colored children, $32, 660.48 is devoted to education. Of this amount the 10,758 colored children receive one-fourth — $6,532.09, or sixty cents each per annum — while the 2,000 white children receive the remaining four- fifths— $26,128.13, or about $13 each per annum. Mr. Booker Washington, who lives in this state sends his own children to the best colleges and to Europe while advising the rest of his people to "make your condition known to the white people of the state." Now, if education— of any sort— is a training for life, is it not evident here that black children are being robbed of their chance in life? Why? Is it to be supposed that their fathers are so stupid as to allow this if they could vote their own needs? Yet Mr. Washington decries the agitation for the ballot as unwise and never loses an opportunity of sneering at these who see something of value in it. But to continue. The number of white children of school age in Alabama is 364,266; the number of colored children of school age is 311,552. But the teachers of the white children receive in salaries $2,404,062.54, while the teachers of the colored children receive $202,251.13. The value of all schoolhouses, sites and furniture for white children is $6,503,019.57; for colored children, $273,147.50.

In South Carolina there are 316,007 Negro childen of school age and 201,868 white children; but the state spends on its Negro children $368,802, and on its white children $1,684,976. Thus does America keep knowledge from Negroes. She is afraid of the educated black man. Of such are the people who taunt Negroes with ignorance.

IV Social.

When a group has been reduced to serfdom, political and economic, its social status become fixed by that fact. And so we find that in "the home of the' free and the land of the brave" Negroes must not ride in the same cars in a train as white people. On street-cars, certain sections are set apart for them. They may not eat in public places where white people eat nor drink at the same bar. They may not go to the same church (although they are foolish enough to worship the same god) as white people; they may not die in the same hospital nor be buried in the same grave-yard. So far as we know, the segregation ends here.

But why is segregation necessary? Because white Americans are afraid that their inherent superiority may not, after all, be so very evident either to the Negro or to other people. They, therefore, find it necessary to enact it into law. So we had the first Ghetto legislation in an American nation last year, in Baltimore. Hard on the heels of this followed legislative proposals along the same line in Richmond Va., Kansas City, Mo., St. Louis, Mo., and Birmingham, Ala. In Memphis, Tenn. Negroes pay taxes for public parks which they are not allowed to enter. A year ago they petitioned for a Negro park and were about to get it when 500 white citizens protested against it. That settled it with the park.

But discrimination goes even further and declares that Negroes shall not possess even their lives if any white perons should want them. And so we have the institution called the lynching-bee. The professional southerner seems to love a lie dearly and continues to assert that Negroes are lynched for rape committed upon white women. Why not? It is perfectly American. If you want to kill a dog, call it mad; if you want to silence a man, call him an Anarchist, and if you want to kill a black man, call him a rapist. But let us see what the facts actually are.

In the two decades from 1884 to 1904 there were 2,875 lynchings in the United States. Of these 87 per cent, or 2,499 occurred in the South. The national total was grouped as follows :

1. For alleged and attempted criminal assault, i. e., rape: 564
2. For assault and murder and for complicity: 138
3. For murder: 1,277
4. For theft, burglary and robbery: 326
5. For arson: 106
6. For race-prejudice: 94
7. For unknown reasons: 134
8. For simple assault: 18
9. For insulting whites: 18
10. For making threats: 16

The causes for the remainder wer(sic): slander, miscegenation, informing, drunkenness, fraud, voodooism, violation of contract, resisting arrest, elopement, train wrecking, poisoning stock, refusing to give evidence, testifying against whites, political animosity, disobedience of quarantine regulations, passing counterfeit money, introducing smallpox, concealing criminals, cutting levees, kidnapping, gambling, riots, seduction, incest, and forcing a child to steal.

Yes, there are courts in the South; but not for black people — not when the mob chooses to relieve civilization of the onus of law and order. At Honeapath, S. G, a Negro was lynched in November 1911, charged, of course, with "the usual crime." The charge had not been proven, or investigated; but the man was lynched. The howling mob which did him to death was composed of "prominent citizens'' who had made up automobile parties to ride to the affair. Among those present was the dis-honorable Joshua Ashley, a member of the state legislature. He and his friends cut off the man's fingers as souvenirs and were proud of their work. Why shouldn't they? You see, it helps to keep "niggers" in their place. And then, besides, isn't this a white man's country?

Gov. Blease of South Carolina was also proud of the event and said that instead of stopping the horrible work of the mob he would have resigned his office to lead it. In Okemeah, Oklahoma, last June, a band of white beasts raped a Negro woman and then lynched her and her fourteen-year-old son. Nothing has been done to them. And it is not that the facts are unknown. At Durant, Okla., and elsewhere, the savages have posed around their victim to have their pictures taken. One man, from Alabama sent to the Rev. John Haynes Holmes, of Brooklyn, N. Y., a post-card (by mail) bearing a photograph of such a group. "This is the way we treat them down here," he writes, and, after promising to put Mr. Holmes' name on his mailing list declares that they will have one, at least, each month.

In Washington, Ga., Charles S. Holinshead, a wealthy white planter, raped the wife of T. B. Walker, a decent, respectable Negro. As his wife returned to him dishevelled and bleeding from the outrage perpetrated on her, Walker went to Holmshead's store and shot him dead. For this he was tried and condemned and, while the judge was pronouncing sentence, Holinshead's brother shot Walker in the court-room. They held his head up while the judge finished the sentence, inen he was taken out and lynched— not executed. Nothing was done to the other Holinshead.

The New York Evening Post, on Octoer 23rd, said in an editorial that "there has hardly been a single authenticated case in a decade of the Negroes rising against the whites, despite the growing feeling, among them that there should be some retaliation since no tribunal will punish lynchers or enforce the law." I am glad that the Post noticed this. I had begun to notice it myself. When President Roosevelt discussed lynching some years ago, he severely reprobated the Negro for their tendency to shield their "criminals" and ordered them to go out and help hunt them down. So was insult added to injury.

But, putting my own opinion aside, here are the facts as I have seen them. In the face of these facts, the phrase, "the white man's burden," sounds like a horrid mockery.