CHAPTER IX
Conclusion

A new little boy came two years ago into our story-book world. When Miss North, taking Ezekiel by the hand, led him into her school-room,[1] we met a child full of what we call temperament; dreaming quaint stories, innocently friendly, anxious to please for affection's sake, in his queer, unconscious way something of a genius. We saw his big musing eyes looking out upon a world in which his teacher stood serene and reasoning, but a little cold like her name; his friend, Miss Jane, kind and very practical; his employer, Mr. Rankin, amused and contemptuous; all watching him with the impersonal interest with which one might view a new species in the animal world. For Ezekiel, unlike our other story-book boys, had a double being, he was first Ezekiel Jordan, a little black boy, and second, a Representative of the Negro Race.

Ezekiel was too young to understand his position, but the white world about him never forgot it. When he arrived late to school, he was a dilatory representative; when, obliging little soul, he promised three people to weed their gardens all the same afternoon, he was a prevaricating representative. He never happened to steal ice-cream from the hoky-poky man or to play hookey, but if he had, he would have been a thieving and lazy representative. Always he was something remote and overwhelming, not a natural growing boy.

Ezekiel's position is that of each Negro child and man and woman in the United States today. I think we have seen this as we have reviewed the position of the race in New York; indeed, the very fact of our attempting such a review is patent that we see and feel it. We white Americans do not generalize concerning ourselves, we individualize, leaving generalizations to the chance visitor, but we generalize continually concerning colored Americans; we classify and measure and pass judgment, a little more with each succeeding year.

Now if we are going to do this, let us be fair; let us try as much as possible to dismiss prejudice, and to look at the Ezekiels entering our school of life, with the same impartiality and the same understanding sympathy with which we look upon our own race. And if we are to place them side by side with the whites, let us be impartial, not cheating them out of their hard-earned credits, or condemning them with undue severity. Let us try, if we can, to be just.

When we begin to make this effort to judge fairly our colored world, we need to remember especially two things: First, that we cannot yet measure with any accuracy the capability of the colored man in the United States, because he has not yet been given the opportunity to show his capability. If we deny full expression to a race, if we restrict its education, stifle its intellectual and æsthetic impulses, we make it impossible fairly to gauge its ability. Under these circumstances to measure its achievements with the more favored white race is unreasonable and unjust, as unreasonable as to measure against a man's a disfranchised woman's capabilities in directing the affairs of a state.[2]

The second thing is difficult for us to remember, difficult for us at first to believe; that we, dominant, ruling Americans, may not be the persons best fitted to judge the Negro. We feel confident that we are, since we have known him so long and are so familiar with his peculiarities; but in moments of earnest reflection may it not occur to us that we have not the desire or the imagination to enter into the life emotions of others? "We are the intellect and virtue of the airth, the cream of human natur', and the flower of moral force," Hannibal Chollup still says, and glowers at the stranger who dares to suggest a different standard from his own. Hannibal Chollup and his ilk are ill-fitted to measure the refinements of feeling, the differences in ideals among people.

This question of our fitness to sit in the judgment seat must come with grave insistence when we read carefully the literature published in this city of New York within the past two years. Our writers have assumed such pomposity, have so revelled in what Mr. Chesterton calls "the magnificent buttering of one's self all over with the same stale butter; the big defiance of small enemies," as to make their conclusions ridiculous. Ezekiel entering their school is at once pushed to the bottom of the class, while the white boy at the head, Hannibal Chollup's descendant, sings a jubilate of his own and butters himself so copiously as to be as shiny as his English cousin, Wackford Squeers. Then the writer, the judge, begins. Ezekiel is shown as the incorrigible boy of the school. He is a lazy, good-for-nothing vagabond. Favored with the chance to exercise his muscles twelve hours a day for a disinterested employer, he fails to appreciate his opportunity. He is diseased, degenerate. His sisters are without chastity, every one, polluting the good, pure white men about them. He is a rapist, and it is his criminal tendencies that are degrading America. The pale-faced ones of his family steal into white society, marry, and insinuate grasping, avaricious tendencies into the noble, generous men of white blood, causing them to cheat in business and to practise political corruption. In short there is nothing evil that Ezekiel is not at the bottom of. Sometimes, poor little chap, he tries to sniffle out a word, to say that his family is doing well, that he has an uncle who is buying a home, and a rich cousin in the undertaking business, but such extenuating circumstances receive scant attention, and we are not surprised to find, the class dismissed, that Ezekiel and the millions whom he represents, are swiftly shuffled off the earth, victims of "disease, vice, and profound discouragement."

Now this is not an exaggerated picture of much that has recently been printed in newspaper and magazine, and does it not make us feel the paradox that if we are to judge the Negro fairly, we must not judge him at all, so little are we temperamentally capable of meeting the first requirement?

"My brother Saxons," says Matthew Arnold, "have a terrible way with them of wanting to improve everything but themselves off the face of the earth." And he adds, "I have no such passion for finding nothing but myself everywhere." Among our American writers a few, like Arnold, do not care to find only themselves everywhere, and these have told us a different story of the American Negro. They are poets and writers of fiction, men and women who are happy in meeting and appreciating different types of human beings.[3] If these writers were to instruct us, they would say that we must individualize more when we think of the black people about us, must differentiate. That, too, we must remember that when we pass judgment, we need to know whether our own standard is the best, whether we may not have something to learn from the standards of others. Supposing Ezekiel is deliberate and slow to make changes or to take risks; are we who are "acceleration mad," who acquire heart disease hustling to catch trains, who mortgage our farms to buy automobiles, who seek continually new sensations, really better than he? Is it not a matter of difference, just as we may each place in different order our desires, the one choosing struggle for power and the accumulation of wealth, the other preferring serenity and pleasure in the immediate present? And lastly, after having praised our own virtues and our own ideals, must we not beware that we do not blame the Negro when he adopts them, that we do not turn upon him and fiercely demand only servile virtues, the virtues that make him useful not to himself but to us?[4]

No one can talk for long of the Negro in America without propounding the all-embracing question, What will become of him, what will be the outcome of all this racial controversy? It is a daring person who attempts to answer. We, who have studied the Negro in New York, may perhaps venture to predict a little regarding his future in this city, his possible status in the later years of the century; whether he will lose in opportunity and social position, or whether he will advance in his struggle to be a man.

Looking upon the great population of the city, its varied races and nationalities, I confess that his outlook to me begins to be bright. New York is still to a quite remarkable extent dominated socially by its old American stock, its Dutch and Anglo-Saxon element. Few things strike the foreign visitor so forcibly as that despite its enormous European population, American society is homogeneous. But this is not likely to continue for very long. When the present demand for exhausting self-supporting work becomes less insistent, we shall feel in a deeper, more vital way the influence of our vast foreign life. With a million Jews and nearly a million Latin people, we cannot for long be held in the provincialism of to-day. I suspect that to many Europeans New York seems still a great overgrown village in "a nation of villagers," pronouncing with narrow, dogmatic assurance upon the deep unsolved problems of life. But in the future it may take on a larger, more cosmopolitan spirit. Its Italians may bring a finer feeling for beauty and wholesome gayety, its Jews may continue to add great intellectual achievements, and its people of African descent, perhaps always few in number, may show with happy spontaneity their best and highest gifts. If New York really becomes a cosmopolitan city, let us believe the Negro will bring to it his highest genius and will walk through it simply, quietly, unnoticed, a man among men.

APPENDIX

The federal census in 1900 contained a volume on the Negro in the United States, a source of information quoted by nearly every writer on the American Negro. The tables in that volume, however, do not classify by cities, and any one desiring information regarding the Negro in some especial city must search through other volumes. As this is a lengthy task, I am affixing a list of the tables in the census of 1900, treating of the Negro in New York City, believing that it may also be a guide to students of the new census of 1910, who wish to find New York Negro statistics.

Population. Vol. I, Part I. Published 1901.

Page 868, Table 57. Aggregate, white, and colored population distributed according to native or foreign parentage, for cities having 25,000 inhabitants or more: 1900.

Page 934, Table 81. Total males twenty-one years of age and over, classified by general nativity, color, and literacy, for cities having 25,000 inhabitants or more: 1900.

Vol. II. Published 1902.

Page 163, Table 19. Persons of school age, five to twenty years, inclusive, by general nativity and color, for cities having 25,000 inhabitants or more: 1900. Also, pages 165 and 167, Tables 20 and 21.

Page 332, Table 32. Conjugal condition of the aggregate population, classified by sex, general nativity, color, and age periods, for cities having 100,000 inhabitants or more: 1900.

Page 397, Table 54. Negro persons attending school during the census year, classified by sex and age periods, for cities having 25,000 inhabitants or more: 1900.

Page 737, Table 111. Persons owning and hiring their homes, classified by color, for cities having 100,000 inhabitants or more: 1900.

Vital Statistics. Vol. III. Published 1902.

Page 458, Table 19. Population, births, deaths, and death rates at certain ages, and deaths from certain causes, by sex, color, general nativity, and parent nativity: census year 1900.

Occupations. Published 1904.

Pages 634 to 642, Table 43. Total males and females, ten years of age and over, engaged in selected groups of occupations, classified by general nativity, color, conjugal condition, months unemployed, age periods, and parentage, for cities having 50,000 inhabitants or more: 1900.

Supplementary Analysis. Published 1906.

Page 262, Table 87. Per cent Negro in total population, 1900, 1890, and 1880, per cent male and female in Negro population, per cent illiterate in Negro population at least ten years of age, and among negro males of voting age, and per 10,000 distribution of Negro population by age periods.

Women at Work. Published 1907.

Page 146, Table 9. Number and percentage of breadwinners in female population, sixteen years of age and over, classified by race and nativity, for cities having at least 50,000 inhabitants: 1900.

Pages 147 to 151, Table 10. Number and percentage of breadwinners in the female population, sixteen years and over, classified by age, race, and nativity.

Pages 266 to 275, Table 28. Female breadwinners, sixteen years of age and over, classified by family relationship, and by race, nativity, marital condition, and occupation, for selected cities: 1900.

Pages 354 to 365, Table 29. Female breadwinners, sixteen years of age and over, living at home, classified by the number of other breadwinners in the family, and by race, nativity, marital condition, and occupation, for selected cities: 1900.

Mortality Statistics. Published 1908.

Page 28. Number of deaths from all causes per 1,000 of population.

Page 376, Table 2. Deaths in each registration area, by age: 1908.

Pages 566 to 568, Table 8. Deaths in each city having 100,000 population or over in 1900, from certain causes and classes of causes, by age: 1908.

INDEX

• Aldridge, Ira, 137.
• Amalgamation, 168.
• Andrews, Charles, civil rights of Negroes, 214.
• Andrews, Chas. C., on education, 14;
• on industrial opportunity, 27.
• Archer, William, 172.
• Arnold, Matthew, 224.
• Arthur, Chester A., 23.
• Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor, 159.
• Athens, Ga., 207.
• Atlanta, Negroes in occupations in, 77, 91, 93;
• proportion of Negro women to men in, 148;
• suffrage in, 206.
• Baker, Ray Stannard, on suffrage, 205.
• Benefit societies, 175.
• Birthplaces, 35.
• Boese, Thomas, 15.
• Brokers, real estate, 45, 108.
• Brown, William, 14.
• Bulkley, W. L., 161.
• Burke v. Bosso, 215.
• Burleigh, Harry, 126.
• Businesses, 106-112.
• Cahill, Marie, 133.
• Charity Organization Society, 158.
• Chesnutt, Charles W., 181.
• Chesterton, Gilbert K., 222.
• Churches:
• Baptist, 20, 116, 123;
• Catholic, 116;
• Congregational, 20;
• Episcopal, 20, 113, 116, 120;
• Methodist, 20, 116.
• City and Suburban Homes, 41.
• Civil rights:
• state bill, 213;
• violations of, 209, 210.
• Clarkson, Thomas, 32.
• Cleveland, Grover, 17.
• Clinton, De Witt, 14.
• Cole and Johnson, 127, 133.
• Constitutional conventions, state, 11-13.
• Cook, Will Marion, 136.
• Cooke, Grace MacGowan, 224.
• Court:
• children's, 66;
• magistrate's, 202-204.
• Craig, Walter A., 126.
• Crime:
• among children, 66-68;
• among adults, 189.
• Dahomeyans, 131.
• District Nursing Association of Brooklyn, 159.
• Dix, Morgan, 25.
• Domestic Service, 80-83, 149-153.
• Downing, Thomas, 27.
• Du Bois, W. E. B., 183.
• Dudley, S. H., 128.
• Dunbar, Paul Lawrence, 71, 83, 131.
• East Side, 42-44.
• Education:
• colored teacher, 17, 18;
• private colored schools, 14;
• public colored schools, 15-19.
• Emancipation, 8.
• Ewing, Quincy, 190.
• Fall River, mortality among infants, 59.
• Finley, H. M., 32.
• Frazier, S. E., 18.
• Gaynor, William J., 201.
• Government service, Negroes in, 88.
• Greenwich Village, 33-35.
• Hale, Edward Everett, 119.
• Hamilton, Alexander, 14.
• Hampton Institute, 110, 119, 193.
• Hansell, George H., 20.
• Haynes, George E., 112.
• Health Department, 40, 53, 197.
• Held, Anna, 133.
• Hell's Kitchen, 37, 85.
• Hogan, Ernest, 134.
• Horsmanden, Daniel, 7.
• Housing, 34, 36, 40, 45-51.
• Hunt, John H., against Negro suffrage, 13.
• Janvier, Thomas, 8, 33.
• Jay, John, on emancipation, 8;
• interest in education, 14.
• Jay, Peter, on Negro suffrage, 11.
• Jennings, Elizabeth, 21.
• Jonas, Rosalie M., 224.
• Jones, Edward, 14.
• Kean, Edmund, 137.
• Kent, Chancellor, favors Negro suffrage, 11.
• Kidd, Dudley, 52.
• King v. Gallagher, 16.
• Kingsley, Mary, 70, 113.
• Lanier, Sidney, 31.
• Lincoln, Charles Z., 13.
• Lincoln Hospital:
• attitude towards Negro doctors, 114;
• graduates of, 157.
• Livingston, against Negro suffrage, 11.
• London, Jack, 63.
• MacGowan, Alice, 224.
• Manhattan Trade School, 161, 162.
• Manumission society, 14.
• Middle West Side, 35-38.
• Miller, Kelly, 86, 147.
• Morris, Gouverneur, on emancipation, 8.
• Mortality:
• among infants, 53-60;
• death rate by diseases, 192.
• Municipal service, Negroes in, 197.
• Music, 125-127.
• New York Conspiracy, 7.
• New York Milk Committee, 54.
• Newman, G., infant mortality, 55, 58.
• Nurses' Settlement, 159.
• Olivier, Sidney, 226.
• Palmer, A. Emerson, 18.
• Patten, S. N., 38.
• People v. King, 213.
• Phillips, Ulrich B., 101.
• Phipps, Henry, 41.
• Phipps tenement, 42, 51, 125.
• Pittsburg Survey, 225.
• Police department, 198-201.
• Poole, Ernest, 84.
• Population, Negro, 9;
• total, 31.
• Pratt, Lucy, 218.
• Prostitution, 155, 156.
• Ray, Charles B., 24.
• Reason, Patrick, 27.
• Religion (see Churches).
• Riots:
• draft riots, 25;
• riot of 1900, 199;
• riot of 1905, 199-201.
• Roosevelt, Theodore, 18.
• Rubinow, I. B., relation of death rate to poverty, 193.
• Russell, John L., 12.
• Russell, Lillian, 133.
• Russia, infant mortality in, 54;
• mortality and poverty, 193.
• Russworm, John B., 14.
• Sanger, William W., 153.
• San Juan Hill, 39-42.
• Schools (see Education).
• Scottron, Samuel R., on industrial opportunities, 26;
• on occupations, 78.
• Segregation:
• churches, 19;
• dwelling-places, 48-50;
• schools, 15-19.
• Shirtwaist makers' strike, 163.
• Simmons, William J., 137.
• Slave ships, 32.
• Slaves, brutality towards, 5;
• insurrections of, 6-8.
• Smith, Gerritt, 24.
• Smith, James McC., 27.
• Smith, William G., 14.
• Stage, 127-137.
• Stevenson, Robert Louis, 215.
• Stone, Alfred Holt, on Negro in occupations in South, 75;
• color line in South, 89, 92;
• irresponsibility of Negroes, 102.
• Straus, Nathan, 59.
• Street cars, discrimination, 21-23.
• Suffrage:
• past, 11-13;
• present, 196;
• Negro's use of suffrage, 204-208;
• in Athens, Ga., 207.
• Tanner, Henry, 126.
• Tenements (see Housing).
• Thomas, W. I., 221.
• Trade-unions, 95-99.
• Trinity Church, 25.
• Tucker, Helen, on Negro craftsmen, 96, 98.
• Underground Railroad, 24.
• Upper West Side, 45-48.
• Varick, James, 20.
• Walker, Aida, 157.
• Washington, Booker T., 184, 194.
• Waterbury, Daniel S., 12.
• West Indies, arrivals from, 48.
• Wheeler, B. F., 20.
• White, Philip A., 27.
• Williams, Peter, 20.
• Williams and Walker, 129-133.
• Wilson, H. J., 124.
• Wilson, J. G., 8.
• Winterbottom, 25.
• Wright, Richard R., on the city Negro, 100, 104.
• Wright, Theodore S., 14.
• Zangwill, Israel, 137.