Race Relations - Lectures at Fisk University

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FOREWORD.

The world is facing today the question of brotherhood as
never before in history. This world-wide conflict is, in part
at least, a battle between the races, due to misunderstanding.
It is proof of the fact that commerce, education, diplomacy
cannot insure peace; only a feeling of friendliness and broth-
erhood will finally bring the world together. :

Friendliness comes of knowledge and _ understanding.
Whoever, therefore, multiplies the opportunities of the dif-
ferent races to understand and know each other is a worker
in the cause of world peace and of world brotherhood. With
this thought in mind the Young Mens Christian Associations
and the Young Womens Christian Associations of the South
undertook to launch, during the spring of 1918, a great pro-
gram of study of Race Relations. The response of the
students was most remarkable; thousands enrolled in classes
for the study. These students included men and women
both in the white and the colored colleges.

The careful study of the present conditions and of possible
ways of mutual helpfulness cannot but result in very great
good for all concerned. It will necessarily mean that those
on both sides of the color line will have a fuller appreciation
of our need for co-operation and friendliness.

The lectures included in this publication arose out of this
effort to know the facts of life. They were delivered to large
and appreciative audiences at Fisk University, and brought
together the viewpoints of a number of different persons. It
is not hoped in any such series of lectures that all will see
exactly alikebut it is hoped and expected that all will be
frank, honest and tolerant. Out of such an exchange of
views and expression of attitude better ideals, and, hence, bet-
ter conditions will necessarily arise. Every such volume which
presents the viewpoint of those who are thoughtful about race
relations should be heartily welcomed by the public.

(Signed) W. D. WEATHERFORD.
International Y. M. C. A., Nashville. Tenn.

INTRODUCTION.

At the request of Dr. Weatherford, brought to us by Pro-
fessor S. L. Smith, Supervisor of Schools in Tennessee, Fisk
was glad to enter into the plan for a serious study of the
problem of the adjustment of race relations in the South. We
made this modification, however, in the plan: instead of organ-
izing a series of small classes, each to study the problem in
its own way, we decided to bring all our forces together to
listen to well prepared addresses by persons especially pre-
pared to speak with knowledge and authority. The interest
in the series was so great that the general public jomed in
and gave us audiences averaging about six hundred on the
seven successive Sunday afternoons. In the end the demand
was almost insistent that the addresses be published and given
wide circulation. Subscriptions taken that last day make it
possible to sell the book of addresses for twenty-five, cents each.
It is hoped that they will contribute to the real welfare of
the nation.

The seven speakers included four members of the Fisk

staff, four Fisk alumni, five colored persons, two white persons,
one woman, and one man without any special relationship to
the University. The address by Secretary A. M. Trawick,
of the International Y. M. C. A., will probably receive spe-
cial attention and commendation. No speaker was told what
to say. No one could bind the others to his own point of
view. Nevertheless, it is safe to say that all united in a
desire that the truth might prevail, and in a prayer that each
might be willing to do everything in his power to establish
peace in this southland of ours. es
F. A. McKENZIE.

June, 1918,
Fisk University, Nashville, Tenn.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS.

Page
THE FUNCTION OF EDUCATION IN THE ADJUST- :
MENT OF RACES IN THE UNITED STATES OF
AMERICA,

President Fayette Avery McKenzie,

POD a A NY AN ce eee ar >

THE FACTS OF MAL-ADJUSTMENT,
Dr. C. V. Roman,
Warhol ei ee a eee 15

THE HISTORY OF PROGRESS IN RACE RELATIONS,
Prof. John W. Work,
March 10

WOMAN'S PART IN RACE ADJUSTMENT,
Mrs. Booker T. Washington,
March 17

WAR TIMES WORK OF THE WHITE MAN IN RACE
ADJUSTMENT,

Mr. Aveh~M. Trawick,
March 24

WHAT THE NEGRO CAN CONTRIBUTE TO RACE
ADJUSTMENT,
Dr. George E. Haynes,

March 31

THE PRINCIPLES OF PEACE,

Isaac Fisher,
wp)

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THE FUNCTION OF EDUCATION IN THE AD-
JUSTMENT OF RACES IN THE UNITED
STATES OF AMERICA.

Not by might, nor by power, but by my spirit,
saith the Lord.

FAYETTE AVERY McKENZIE,
President, Fisk University.

WE are this afternoon engaged in one of the most unusual
and one of the most significant movements in the history of the
world. We have placed ourselves on the boundary line be-
tween two great groups of men. There is a great contro-
versy on between these groups, and we with 15,000 other
students are offering our services for the peaceful settlement
of their differences. The controversy is one so vitally affect-
ing the integrity of each group, and one so transcending the
usual possibilities of logic and argument, that former ages
would have found one side or both sides indifferent of the
claims of the other, while one side or the other would have im-
patiently waited the arbitrament of war.

For seven weeks we at Fisk University, together with our
friends, will continue to meet to ponder over these matters.
This afternoon I hope to suggest the basis upon which the
whole series of discussions must rest. The addresses on the
following Sundays will be increasingly concrete and interest-
ing. It is important, however, that we endeavor at the start
to know the peculiar character of the warfare in which we are
engaged. We must arm ourselves with the weapons ap-
propriate to the struggle.

_My topic, The Function of Education, will sound foolish
in the eyes of the man who believes adjustment impossible,
and even more foolish to the man who believes in the old Dar-
winian idea that the only final settlement of differences comes
through struggle, that physical force alone makes evident the
basis of peace. Any attempt to interfere with the struggle by
which the weak are eliminated and the strong are given domi-
nance and power is in their eyes futile save for the greater
misery which it entails. We cannot know the choice of nature

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for survival except as the struggle takes place. Many a white
man today and many a black hugs to his heart the hope that
force of one kind or another shall soon be invoked to deter-
mine the relationships of the two races in this country.

But I want to suggest that the great and critical contro-
versy between our races can be settled upon as an entirely
different basis, and in an entirely different way. It is not by
the conquest of one group by the other, but by the conquest
of the spirits of both groups, that peace shall come. The only
adjustment between the races that will amount to anything
will come through the education of the minds and hearts of
men. Our battle is to be fought out not on the field of can-
non, nor in legislative halls, but in the realm of the spirits of
men. Whosoever poisons the thinking of men and whosoever
embitters the hearts of men, he may rise to glory in the ranks
of battle, he may thrill the nation by his eloquence and his
control of government, but he will not solve this problem, he
will not win the fight for racial rights and interracial peace.
After the hurricane and after the fire, the still small voice,
and the still small voice alone, shall speak the presence of God
and the program of peace.

I shall hope this afternoon to speak (1) of this series of
studies as an unconscious testimonial both to the place of edu-
cation in the adjustment of races, and to the spiritual char-
acter of the problem we study. (2) I shall hope to show that
a successful solution of the problem depends upon co-opera~-
tive thinking. Capacity to think and willingness to think to-
gether, become imperative conditions. (3) Schools must there-
~ fore be increased in- number and improved in quality, even if
that involves federal aid for some of our schools. (4) Higher
education has a special significance in the critical adjustments
of race relations. (5) E.ducation is not true nor high except
as it develops the spirit of conciliation. The solution of the
problem depends upon Christian education, or, better, upon.
the educated men who are possessed of the spirit of Christ..

Why are hundreds of schools and thousands of students. all,
over this southland, representative of the most advanced train-
ing of two races, meeting in serious conference and study over.
the same subject every week for seven weeks? Is it for pleas-.
ure? Is it because of idle curiosity? No,-it is because we.
have a tremendous problem to solve, one involving not only the.
welfare of both races but the very existence of peace within:
our borders, and, even more, the, very possibility of the. per-,
petuation of the democracy we profess and. the religion we.
claim.

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Consciously and unconsciously, we are met at the com-
mand of religion and under the imperative obligations of citi-
zens. We are not here, our fellow students, white and black,
are not met out of free volition. Fidelity to religion and fidel-
ity to our citizenship compels us to seek peace, through duty
and justice and mercy and conciliation, ere it be too late. God
sent Moses to Pharaoh that the plagues might not come upon
his people. God is today offering the United States of Amer-
ica escape from dire evils through a leadership of 15,000 stu-
dents in our southern schools. If the leadership shall be faith-
ful, and if the sovereign people shall listen, wonderful will the
blessing be.

If this assertion seem too strong, I beg of you to think again
of the movement in which we are engaged. Where before in
the history of the world has there been such a mutual recog-
nition by both sides of so vital a controversy that there was a
genuine controversy requiring study and adjustment on both
sides? Where before has there been such a demand on both
sides that the controversy shall be settled by reason, concilia-
tion, and good will? Where before have two races of men
so nearly equal in numbers covering so large a territory as these
Southern States of ours permitted and encouraged their repre-
sentative youth to engage in simultaneous and united study of
the whole critical problem of their relationships? Where be-
fore has an endeavor been made on so vast a scale to submit
such a problem to the democratic forces of simple truth and
consecrated reason? Can we escape the fact that a power
greater than human engineering, that the power back of reli-
gion and democracy, has led us to this mount of conciliation?
Shall we not then catch the vision and return to the valley,
determined to hold on and to fight with the sword of the spirit
for the victory of a purified nation? - eae

The 15,000 youth, colored and white, engaged at this
time in the study of race relations are the most eloquent testi-
mony to the reality of the place that education must hold in
the adjustment of races. Without the schools, without the
training of the mind and the development of the conscienc
therein affected; the mighty aims apprehended by this. move-
ment would be impossible. Education is the basis upoh which
the movement rests, upori which a peaceful adjustment is alone
conceivable. AICS ORE a ee eT

This is true for two reasons. The schools ar the agencies
in which: the movement may find expression and *may formu-
late a program. The students who go ott from the schools
are:to be the living evangels of the message, the direct agents
in carrying out the prograni. * ' CE SOC te A Tee

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This movement represents the transfer of the struggles of

men from the realm of physical force to the realm of spir-
itual force. It is a recognition of the fact that before there
can be a true adjustment in the external relations of men
there must be an adjustment in the thinking of men. Ours is
a spiritual warfare. To be equipped we must be prepared to
think. We must know the facts of our problem, and the fac-
tors of our problem, in order that we may think to any use-
ful end.

It is important at this point to remember that no man can
think out a problem like this alone. To think truth men must
combine their thinking. Tyruth is a social product, rather than
an individual product. This is a necessary corollary of the
facts of joint efforts in any and every aspect of human action
and co-operation. Those who contribute effort have a moral
right and a moral obligation to contribute thought. We must
recognize their thought even as we expect them to recognize
ours. .

Dr. Moton, in his inaugural address, brought out this
thought in concrete form when he referred to the co-opera-
tion at Tuskegee, of the southern white man, the northern white
man, and the Negro, in the persons of Mr. Campbell, Gen.
Armstrong, and Dr. Washington, a co-operation destined to
command the respect and admiration, not only of this nation,
but also of the entire civilized world. This idea has been
emphasized anew in the first chapter of the recent federal re-
port on Negro Education, where it is held that democracys
plan for the solution of the race problem lies in the combina-
tion of the best thought and the deepest sympathy and the most
abiding faith of these three groups (mentioned above) work-
ing with mutual faith in one another.

These are prophetic words. Our problem cannot be solved
by a spirit less catholic, less charitable, less intelligent, or less
democratic than is here required. The program furnishes the
test of spirit for all those who would contribute to the great
end of racial peace and racial progress which we have in view.
Nor does it stop there, it defines the spirit essential to the per-
petuation of civilization and religion in the United States.
The destiny of the soul of the nation trembles in the balance
as we wait to see whether or not this truth shall be accepted.
The three factors in the working out of national peace and
national salvation stand, as it were, at the three points of a
triangle which is to symbolize our problem. The triangle of
peace may be made up of three persons as truly as it may be
made up of three groups. I hope at no distant date to see

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hundreds and thousands of these simplest of triangles linked
into the great triangle which shall then symbolize both the
problem and its solution.

Today I do not attempt to suggest the magnitude of the
problem requiring solution. That will come next Sunday. I
turn myself to the discussion of the contribution of the schools,
the needs of the schools, and the spirit to come out of the
schools, which will aid in the solution of the problem. Time,
however, is too limited to cover the whole topic, and I shall
limit myself in concrete details to the more needy situation,
and refer only to the Negro schools.

More than the white South knows, and much more than
the white North knows, the white leaders of educational
thought in the South are anxious over the educational needs of
the colored people. State and county superintendents, presi-
dents and teachers in the colleges, are telling the alarming truth
and demanding a more equitable opportunity for the educa-
tion of the Negro youth. Government reports show that Vir-
ginia spends $9.64 per child for white children and only $2.74
for colored children, Alabama $9.41 in the one case and
$1.78 in the other, South Carolina $10 for white children
and $1.44 for colored, Tennessee $8.27 for the one and
$4.83 for the other. In counties where Negroes constitute
75 per cent or more of the population $22.22 per capita
(white) is allotted for teachers salaries, while only $1:78 per
capita (colored) is allotted for teachers salaries. Only 58
per cent of all the Negro children between six and fourteen
years of age attend school at all. Ninety per cent of the youth
attending school old enough for the high school are still in the
elementary grades. In spite of many splendid exceptions it
nevertheless remains true that Negro schools are notoriously
insufficient in numbers, miserable in housing, lacking in equip-
ment, brief in term, inadequate in salaries, incompetent in teach-
ing force. It will require a revolution to make them reason-
ably tolerable, even for the elementary grades. One of the .
great grievances of the Negro people contributing to the migra-
tion from the South to the North is the lack of school oppor-
tunities. It is the imperative duty of both races, each accord-
ing to its ability, to bring the educational revolution to an
early head. Let the money and the services of both the white
and the Negro people be joined in carrying facilities and in-
spiration to the unprivileged, unenlightened masses, especially
in the rural districts of the South. So long as either race fails,
the condemnation of injustice will continue to rest upon that
race. The only valid excuse, if it be valid, that stands today

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in the way of adequate schooling in the South, is the excuse
of poverty. Overlooking for the present the fact that educa-
tion is not a burden, but a self-supporting and profit-bearing
investment, we are compelled to say that the nation cannot
afford to permit of the perpetuation of ignorance even in the
most poverty-stricken backwoods county in the country, any
more than a family can afford to overlook and neglect the
needs of the weakest and most dependent member.

The necessity of federal aid for Negro education is a sub-
ject very much in the air at the present time. A tiny fraction
of the sum we are spending in warfare to make the world safe
for democracy abroad would make democracy safe within the
nation by providing the mental training essential for citizen-
ship in any democracy. Democracy has no other foes so dan-
gerous as ignorance. Democracy has no handicap so costly
as illiteracy. The nation can afford to help. It cannot afford
not to help. And yet there are grave difficulties in the way.
It were better not to attempt national aid, unless these dan-
gers can be definitely foreseen and avoided, as I believe they
can be. Such aid should be only on certain definite bases of
proportionate expenditures from state and local treasuries, with
definite guarantees as to length of school terms, standards for
teachers, and adequacy of supervision.

All this is in perfect accord with the best thought of the
South. The Southern Education Association in 1909 made
the following unqualified demand: We insist upon such an
equitable distribution of the school funds that all the youth
of the Negro race shall have at least an opportunity to receive
the elementary education provided by the state. It is no
longer a question as to what is needed and desired. It 1s
merely a qusetion of the funds and the determination to do our
duty.

I have thus far spoken only of the elementary schools, be-

cause they furnish the foundation upon which to build any

educational system, because they afford the great opportunity
for the development of that universal intelligence which is es-
sential to harmonious race relations, and because they are the
sources of material for the secondary schools and colleges.
They are distinctively the field of southern responsibility and
southern opportunity. Of the two million of Negro youth be-
tween six and fourteen years of age, only a little over a million

are in school. Of the older youth only 25,000 are in second-.
ary schools (one-half of them in private schools)that is,

only two and a half per cent advance into the high school.
Ten per cent of. these latter enter college. Roughly speaking,

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this means that one out of 400 in the elementary grades lives
and enters college, or one out of 800 of the youthful popula-
tion. Not only is there no danger of overcrowding the ranks
of higher education, but there is a dangerous deficiency. We
ought to double the school term. We ought to increase our
high school and college attendance at least tenfold. The task
is stupendous. The cost of failure will be tremendous. The
gains from success will be glorious both to the communities
and to the nation as a whole.

The time has long since passed when the program here sug-
gested will find serious objection among educators or among
any people widely informed as to the results obtained from
the several grades and types of schools. But the maintenance
of opportunities beyond the elementary grades carries us into
the field of private effort and philanthropy. Half of the high
school and many more than half of the college students are the
beneficiaries of private schools. This is where northern philan-
thropy enters and finds it chief place. It has been the major
factor in Negro higher education during the last half century.
Today it is still indispensable. Its withdrawal would be a
catastrophe. The private schools are the main centers of that
joint co-operation and that mutual adjustment which are to
work out the ultimate solution of our problem. From this
point of view their importance cannot be overestimated. The
very processes of their existencethe commingling of effort
to secure the funds and to carry on the workcompels an ad-
justment of individuals and of groups that is typical of the
whole process throughout the nation, or perhaps better, it is
typical of the process that must and will occur before our
problem is solved.

But it is most important here to call attention to the spe-
cial significance of the work of these private schools. In one
way or another they are justly called schools of higher edu-
cation. Their graduates are. contributors to interracial ap-
preciation and approval as they make their way in the. indus-
trial, business and professional worlds, as they establish homes
of high quality, as they continue to demonstrate that education
means the elimination of crime. .Their greatest contribution,
however, at least their greatest possibility of contribution to
racial adjustments, is largely overlooked.

That contribution consists in a trained intelligence and in
an. enlightened social conscience. The more severe the mental
discipline. and the wider the range of knowledge and the deeper
the insight given into the processes of human development, the
harder will it be to set the graduates at odds with other people

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over things that are not so. If the knowledge of things that
are not so could be eliminated universally from the minds of
white people and of black, we should be far along the road
to race adjustment. The capacity to reason accurately and
to detect errors of statement and logic should place the
graduates from the schools well to the front in any program
of conciliation and adjustment. Knowledge of race difficul-
ties in the past among other peoples, and knowledge of the
slowness of human evolution generally, should give a patience
hard to acquire through experience alone. Again I revert to
the statement that the whole scheme of which we are at this
moment a part is conclusive evidence of the fact that education,
higher education, is the foundation of the hope that a peace-
ful adjustment can be effected between our races. Education
straightens the thinking and liberalizes the views to the point
where it is possible to listen to the other man, to understand
his position, and to consider his arguments. Education makes
it possible for differing men to stand face to face and thereby
to work out a real understanding.

A trained and liberalized intelligence, however, does not
guarantee an attitude of peace. The ablest of intellects may
be put at the command of bitterness, or it may sharpen the
cruelties of indifference and contempt. Intelligence itself must
be subject to wisdom, if it shall bring forth its perfect, ripened
fruit. The spirit must be right, as well as the intellect keen.
Wisdom is compounded of intelligence and love. The schools
of higher education are contributing to harmony between the
races as they give not intelligence only but wisdomas they
instill into the hearts of their students those principles of love
and conciliation upon which the teachings of Jesus are based.
When the white race loves the black race as Christ loves it,
and the black race loves the white race as Christ love it, the
relationship of white and black will no longer be a serious
problem. When black men and white men love each other as
Christianity requires, there can be no serious: issues between
them.

Wisdom, then, the wisdom of love, is the perfect fruit and
the test of any school of higher education, as its possession
is the test of the educated man.

Does anyone object to my definition of education? Does
anyone think I exclude from a share in the solution of big
problems all those who have not had the privileges of formal
education? Not so, the schools are set to the task of giving
education, but they do not have a monopoly. One of the most
cultured, most highly educated men I know left school at thir-

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teen years of age. There are cobblers and day laborers all
over this country, without much, if any, school training, who
are more highly educated than some college graduates. The
definition of the educated man given by the illiterate locomo-
tive engineer is both true and false. He defined the educated
man as the man who is on to his job.. No man can claim
complete or satisfactory education who is not on to his job.
But something is necessary beside the power to make a per-
fect shoe or even to run an engine without accident or mis-
take. That ability will not enable a man to choose a presi-
dent for the United States, or to make race adjustments in
this country of ours.

And yet in another sense the simple definition 1s. correct.
Let us consider more carefully the meaning of the word job.
A mans job is something more than the running of an engine.
A man in this country of ours is more than a mechanic. A
man is also a citizen. A part of his job is to be a good and
efficient citizen. A man who is on to his job as a citizen 1s
an educated man. And it is as important to have perfect
civic engineers as well as civic laborers, as it is to have per-
fect locomotive engineers, as well as firemen and freight hand-
lers and track walkers.

If the locomotive of state is to travel smoothly and with-
out tremor on the track of national harmony and safety, and
not jump the track and plunge to catastrophe and disaster, we
must find, we must prepare consciously and speedily as many
civic engineers as we can. This is one of the main functions
of higher education. Testimony is borne by the present move-
ment to the reliance that is being placed upon the services of
our schools of higher learning, both white and colored. No
one can estimate the alarms in which we would be living, if
these schools were not in existence. And increasingly, as the
days go, the safety and the prosperity of the nation will de-
pend upon the leaven of wisdom, of the contributions to under-
standing and conciliation, which our graduates will make, per-
haps unheralded and unknown, in all parts of the country. _

And so it is that like many other schools, Fisk is brought
by the forces of history into this movement. The labors and
sacrifices of fifty years of devoted service no longer count sole-
lyperhaps they never did count solelyfor the advantage
of our students and graduates. Today Fisk in its traditions
and in its thousand graduates and in its thousands of former
students stands as an asset to the nation, as an agency of ad-
justment between races, as a guarantor of national peace. By
tradition and by fixed intention we stand for the highest edu-

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cational opportunities and for the highest intelligence coupled
to that spirit of love that thinketh no evil and that cannot be
bitter.

We are in this movement because of the forces of history.
And yet we are volunteering to do our share during these seven
weeks to reap the harvest already ripe, and to harrow the soil
for a new planting that shall bring forth a new harvest, some
thirtyfold, some sixtyfold, some an hundredfold. |

This is the prophecy of a new and better day. Shall the
prophecy come true? It all depends upon the spirit with
which we enter. It is holy ground upon which we stand. Let
us loose our sandals and kneel before the glory that shall be
revealed. Let us humble ourselves and wait the word of com-
mand. So shall we be prepared, whether white or black, to
stand ere long upon the mount of national transformation and
national transfiguration and see the promised land. So shall
we enter In. :

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FACTS OF RACIAL MAL-ADJUSTMENT.

C. V. Roman, M. D.
PhysicianAuthor.

SOMEWHERE adown the primrose path of scholastic dal-

- liance oer which my youthful footsteps lingered, I met the

phrase imitative harmony which reverberates like a distant
echo in the halls of memory. It is a species of rhetorical
legerdemain by means of which the sounds of words echo
their sense, and vice-versa. That is to say, words with pleas-

ant meanings have pleasant sounds and contrariwise, words

with unpleasant meanings have harsh sounds.
Milton describes the gates of Paradise as
On golden hinges turning
and the gates of the infernal region as
Grating harsh thunder.

Pope says:
Soft is the strain when zephyr gently blows,
And the smooth stream in smoother numbers flows;
But when loud surges lash the sounding shore,
The hoarse, rough verse should like the torrent, ROAR.

These reminiscences are called up by my theme whose very
title suggests inharmony. The nature of my subject will not
permit of the mellifluent consonance of the preceding discourse
of this series, nor suggest the eloquent rhetorical felicities of
those to follow. I shall therefore ask your indulgence while I
nothing extenuate nor set down aught in malice; but truth-

fully recount the

Facts oF MAL-ADJUSTMENT.

Perfectly adjusted machinery when properly oiled runs
smoothly. This is true literally as applied to our autos and
mills, or figuratively as applied to our social and civic inter-
ests. The primary thought of civilization is dwelling together.
To do this successfully, aspirations must harmonize, interests _
must blend and activities must co-operate, fit one into the other

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like cogs of a wheel; though the wheels turn in opposite direc-
tions there is both harmony and progress. Wrong adjustment
or improper oiling means immediate trouble. I got the choker
misadjusted on my carburetor. There was increasing difh-
culty of. operation. Finally, I could not start the car at all.
The crank case had become filled with gasoline until it was
oozing out the exhaust pipe. In vain did my starter turn the
engine over, not a sound could be elicited. The lubricating
oil had destroyed the volatility of the gasoline. Eventually
_ the pistons stuck and the engine not only would not run itself
but could not be turned over. The gasoline had destroyed the
lubricity of the oil. Conflict had superseded co-operation and
progress ceased. Mal-adjustment destroyed function.

That, today, is the trouble with the South. The moral
sense of the people has ceased to co-operate with the admin-
istrative forces. Murder stalks abroad in noontide, and cruelty
gloats in public places unafraid and unashamed. Color mad-
ness has superseded the traditional blindness of justice and a
tinge of African blood is sufficient to provoke a man hunt
without investigation as to the merits of the controversy. All
of the civilized notions of fair play are trampled underfoot.
Morality and religion seem to have lost every militant virtue.
Too cowardly to protest and too impotent to prevent the basest
and most inhuman practices, they are content to appear in the
pitiable role of apolgists for crime and defenders of iniquity.
WHAT IS THE MATTER? Is civilization bankrupt? Ten-
-nessee has had three burnings in less than a year.. The last on
Lincolns birthday and our governor says he cannot do any-
thing.

O Judgment, thou hast fled to bruitish beasts,
And men have lost their reason!

Departed spirits of the mighty dead,
Ye that at Marathon and Leuctra bled,
Return, restore your swords to man,
Fight in his sacred cause, and lead the van.

Stonewall Jackson, and Robert Lee,
Old Hickory, too, of Tennessee,
Come back, come back from the echoless shore:
Brood over the land your bravery hallowed
And revive the spirit of chivalry in Dixie!

Surely we are trampling out the vintage, where the grapes
of wrath are stored. Slavery redivivus is raping the fair
form of freedom. The Georgia distinction between citizens

pan | ois

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+

at

and persons of color still dominates the political, economical
and religious thought of the South. Injustice has found in
race-difference a successful camouflage and color-prejudice is
scuttling the Ship of Democracy.

_The race problem of the South, misnamed the Negro Prob-
lem, is basicly and intrinsicly economic and not ethnic. CGeo-
graphic propinquity is not a necessary cause of ethnic friction.
Before the war the South was a slave-holding oligarchy. The
po white trash and the niggahs mutually disliking and
mistreating each other were equally without the breastworks
of privilege and power. The transition to a free democracy is
a painful and tedious process that has been but indifferently
accomplished. The war broke the power of the cultured mas-
ters but did not give culture to the empowered trash. So
noblesse oblige became an unknown sentiment.

Politicians have made race difference a_ barricade for
tyranny. Human rights are confused with ethnic privileges

and the administration of justice is based upon a chromatic

scale, giving all power to white people, and all punishment
to colored people. The fundamental difficulty is the delu-
sion that crime and immorality change with race and color. A
white mans raping and murdering a respectable Negro woman
is a regrettable incident to be hushed up by hurrying the
white man away to safety and ignoring his victim. Any con-
troversy in which a white person gets the worst of it; becomes
a heinous crime and a cause for a man hunt.

The front page of last Sundays Tennessean and American .
contained the following press dispatch which tells the story of
Americas shame and of the Souths retrogression:

SOUTH CAROLINA MOB HANGS NEGRO.

Fairfax, S. C., Feb. 23.Walter Best, a Negro, was
taken from the sheriff and two deputies by a mob late today
and hanged to a tree by the roadside near here. Best had
killed William Wilson, a young white man, here a short time
before the mob hung him.

Sheriff J. B. Morris and his two deputies were taking the
Negro from Fairfax to the county jail at Barnwell. When
they had gone a short distance the mob stopped the automo-
bile in which they were traveling and demanded the prisoner,
who was immediately strung up to a tree and his body riddled
with bullets.

The slaying of Wilson occurred at a garage where he
was employed. Best is said to have gone to the shop with an
automobile tire, which he demanded should be repaired free

ney coe
of charge, on the ground that the proprietor of the place had
previously guaranteed it. Wilson is said to have disclaimed
responsibility and refused to make the repairs without being
paid for the work. The Negro, it is declared, thereupon used
insulting language to Wilson, and an altercation followed, in
which Best was said to have drawn a revolver and fired at
close range with fatal effect.

The Negro fled, but was soon captured by a policeman
and placed in the town guardhouse. The sheriff was notified
and, with two deputies, came for the prisoner. The journey
to the county jail was started, but had continued only about
a mile when the mob seized and lynched the prisoner.

Now, any one familiar with conditions knows that for a
Negro to contend even in the most respectful manner for his
rights against a white mans effort to cheat him is in some quar-
ters insulting language? which will be followed by an al-
tercation. Mob murder is not only to give vent to the baser
passions of the whites and to suppress the facts but to intimidate
the Negro. Not a single paper so far as I have seen has had
the courage to publish the cause of the killing which led to
the Estill Springs horror, though the Banner fearlessly de-
nounced the holocaust as savagery and published Bishop
Gailors assertion that the torturing was to break the spirit
of the colored boy who was the mobs victim. In other words,
the torture was salvery redivivus and white supremacy incar-

nate.

The race problem a the Sonth may be summed up in one
wordinjustice or unfairness. It is the spirit of slavery against
the spirit of freedomOligarchy against Democracy ; human
greed against human welfare; caste and privilege against equal
opportunity and fair play. Racial difference is made an ex-
cuse for injustice. Fundamentally the problem is moral and
-economic. Race difference is a complicating but not a causa-
tive factor. The man who robs another because of his color
is at heart a thief, and in the absence of color would find other
excuse.

The popular interpretation of the Died Scott Decision fits
the situation today*A Negro has no rights that a white man
is bound to respect. This is the popular interpretation of
the white superiority preachments of our so-called educated
classes. The editors reason for robbing the Negro of cour-
tesy becomes the hoodums justification for throwing a brick.
I have seen white boys standing on the corners in sight of
policemen and insulting colored passersby without a word of

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protest or warning from the policeman. This the Negro re-
sents, which resentment forms the chief fact of mal-adjustment.
Respectable colored people neither commit nor condone crime,
and yet while they are systematically denied all part in either
making or executing the law they are eternally lectured about
hiding criminals by people who lack the moral courage even
to tell the truth in favor of a colored defendant. Self-defense
and insanity are never considered when a Negro is accused by
whites. Even childhod makes no appeal to sympathy and
youthful inexperience offers no palliation.

- One of our most popular poems speaks of

Lesser breeds without the law.
(Kiplings Recessional.)

Science knows no intrinsically lesser breed. Religion
says one blood and democracy cannot survive if it place
any breed without the law. The law should protect the
virtuous as well as punish the viciousand this regardless of
color, race, condition, or sex. The present administration of
law in the South removes from the colored man the hope of
protection in the right and from the white man the fear of
punishment in the wrong. This is a fact of mal-adjustment
that double-crosses both races. A colored editor has thus
stated the case: x

What Negroes need more than alms, or occasional sermons
to them, is

1. Security of person: A sentiment in the community which
holds a Negros life as dear as a white mans.

2. Security of property: If a Negro works for property
he ought to hold it until he disposes ot it.

3. Equality before the courts: The scandal of America is
that the Negro cannot get justice, especially in the South,
when a white man is concerned.

4. Fair laws: The brains of the South have been too long
devoted to endeavoring to make laws to rob Negroes of their
rights.

5. The sanctity of the home: The Christian South has
never honestly faced the subject of racial interbreeding. It
has made a lot of fuss about inter-marriage, and thus encour-
aged the greatest moral scandal in our nation.

We might mention other things which the Christian church
should consider sincerely, frankly, honestly. When it con-

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siders these things honestly and ceases to evade there will cer-
tainly be improvement.*

The most serious fact of mal-adjustment is the disposition

of the white people to adjust the problem on the basis of white
ignorance and viciousness. This is a continual appeal to the
baser passions of both races, and gives carte blanche to evilly
disposed or prejudiced whites.

A noble-hearted, clear-brained Southern white man? said
recently:

A civilization cannot be progressive, safe and joyous, that
draws a color line through its civic conscience. . . . There
is not a more shameful page in the history of race-relations
than that which records the white mans treatment of the col-
ored woman. She alone of all the women of the civilized lands
has few defenders and but few to plead her cause. There
are colored men in large numbers who are courageously loyal
to the women dependents upon them, and white men not a
few, who allow no exceptions to their gentlemanly conduct.
But the blasting fact remains that the colored women may be
insulted without fear of rebuke, and men who do so do not
fall under social condemnation on account of it. The men of
her own race submit to her shame as part of their general humi-
liation, and men of the white race heap shame upon her be-
cause there is no one to champion her honor. It is not the
vicious and degraded women alone who are accosted by white
men, and it distinctly is not true that a Negro woman is not
annoyed until she gives evidence that she cares nothing for her
honor. The more modest, the more refined she is, the more
certain it is that she becomes the object of some white mans
pursuit. The average white man professes to believe that no
Negro woman possesses purity of character, and proceeding
from that assumption, he persuades himself that he is a gentle-
man when he maintains a courteous bearing toward sheltered
and protected: white women. Toward women whose fathers,
husbands and brothers happen to be Negroes, without the

_ shelter and protection of a similar code of honor, he may act

as he pleases and defy resentment.

The natural reaction from this sad state of affairs (always
ignored when white people discuss lynching) is a momentous
fact of mal-adjustment.

When these general facts of mal-adjustment are under-
stood, it is not necessary to go into details about wages, pub-
lic carriers, school-funds, public improvements, working hours,

*R. R. Wright, Jr., editor of Christian Recorder.
*Prof. A. M. Trawick, in Epworth League.

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suffrage, etc., etc. Suffice it to say, that everywhere the ten-
tacles of the slave-holding spirit strangle the aspirations of jus-
tice and fair play. The German doctrine of super-man and
super-nation holds sway under the guise of white supremacy,
and every phase of graft, greed and unholy ambition hides
safely behind race prejudice. In this year of grace 1918, the
colored people of the South are facing the spirit of the fugitive
slave law and the Dred Scott Decision. The ghost of the slave
driver is leading the mob. Legree is dead, but his soul is
marching on. If you are in doubt, this typical southern
news item from Saturday mornings press dispatches will help
you to a conclusion:

THREE NEGROES LYNCHED BY LOUISIANA MOB.

Rayville, La., March 1.Three Negroes whose names
were given as Jim Lewis, Jim Jones and Will Powell, were
lynched by a mob of white men near Delhi, La., in an isolated
section of Richland parish, last Tuesday as the outgrowth of
trouble between whites and Negroes near Delhi Sunday, when
a white farmer and a Negro were killed, according to reports
received here today.

The report of the lynching as received from Delhi this
afternoon stated that two of the Negroes were hanged by the
mob and the third was shot and killed as he attempted to
escape.

Fights between white farmers and Negroes pecuired last
Sunday near Delhi, when several Negroes, including Bolivar
Jones, were accused of stealing hogs in that section. In .the
exchange of shots between the white farmers and the Negroes
E. D. Ferguson, white, and Jones were killed.

Later it was reported the white farmers started out to
round up the Negroes who had been accused as leaders in
the trouble.

What is the matter with the South? Has she spiritual heart-
failure or mental blindness? In the fairest hour of her ex-
istence has she decided to scuttle the Ship of State and give
up the long and tedious journey from oligarchy to democracy ?
Has the devil of race-hate chained the spirit of progress to-hi
chariot wheels? President Wilson says that a world governed
by force and intrigue is not fit to live in. But what have we
here in the Southland?

A glance at history may help us to an explanation of pres-
ent conditions. Prior to the Civil War the slave-holding state
legislatures confined their activities mostly to legislating against

Con
the Negro. Carl Shurz tells us that as soon as the war was
over immediate efforts were made to re-establish the conditions
of slavery by contract and vagrancy laws, etc. These efforts
were not entirely futile as the history of peonage, convict leases,
etc., will show.

It was to counteract this cruel subterfuge that the freed-
men were enfranchised. Legal citizenship came like legal
emancipationa reaction from aggression of the spirit of
slavery. This is a phase of carpet bag rule and post-bellum
reconstruction that you do not hear much about. The political
thought of the South has never been weaned from this delu-
sion. The avaricious and criminal elements of the whites re-
gard the Negro as their legitimate prey and the ignorant and
poverty-stricken are made to believe that the Negro forms the
only obstruction to their hearts desires. Moral cowards and
political free-booters fan to flames these smouldering embers of
greed and hatred. The citizenship of the Negro has never
been accepted in good faith by the Southin fact, is openly re-
sented in many quarters. The following editorial from the
Nashville Tennessean and American, the leading morning

paper of Middle Tennessee, March 4, 1918, is illustrative:

UNUSUAL SPECTACLE.

In the New York American of February 27 appears a re-
port of a Negro campaign meeting in that city, which was
addressed by Mrs. Howard Gould, ex-wife of the well-known
capitalist. If the meeting was correctly reported, it would
seem to every right-thinking person in the country, North, East,
West and South, that Mrs. Gould is not in her right mind.
She made an appeal for the votes of the people for Reverdy
C. Ransom, a Negro, whom she called Mr. Ransom, urg-
ing support of this Negro for a seat in the lower house of the
Congress of the United States.

In the course of her address, Mrs. Gould said:

We call people blacks and whites now, but some day
we'll call them United States Americans. On March 5 you
will have a chance to help President Wilson in his fight for
democracy.

* Black men are now fighting side by side with white men
in the trenches. They are fighting for the world democracy.
And they are fighting for the democracy of a country which
at one time boasted a king whose atrocities surpassed any of
those committed on black men in history.

This woman, who claims to have been born in the South,
evidently has grown away from the teaching of her mother and

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from all traditions of the southland. In the closing portion
of her speech she is reported to have said:

Any colored man in this district who votes against Mr.
Ransom is a traitor to his race and to democracy. If the white
man, the Republican captain; tries to insist on your voting for
his man, he is beguiling you and is not your friend.

* Now that the black women of the North have political
power, they must band together for the black women of the

South. You black people must strangle the Solid South.

Aside from the few newspaper men in attendance on the
meeting, and who were there for the purpose of attending to
the business of the papers for which they worked, Mrs. Gould
was the only white person in the hall. She is said to have been
not in the leased embarrassed by her unusual situation. She
was reported to have been gorgeously attired, and to have dis- _
played a peculiar enthusiasm in the cause of the black aspirant
for Congressional honors.

The attitude assumed by this woman, who claims the
South as her birthplace, is in direct conflict with all principles
of the white race in all sections of the country. And even the
Negroes as a race do not seek equality with the white race.
There are but few who have such ambition, and it seems it is
to this class that sensationalists like Mrs. Gould would wish
to pander. There is not a white woman, nor man, for that
matter, in the entire country who will feel that Mrs. Gould
is doing that which is becoming a Caucasian, and particularly
a woman. :

Any woman who would attempt such a stunt should be
taken in hand by some of the saner members of her family and
held in leash until such time as this unnatural inclination shall
have passed.

The net result of all this repressive effort against the black
man has been to lessen the influence of intelligence and the de-
sire of progress on the part of the whites. All sense of fair play

has been lost and a belief has arisen that the sole function of

law is to repress the Negro and enable the white man to do
as he pleases. Thus the doctrinaire ebullitions of college pro-_
fessors and editors about race inequality, have lured the com-
mon people of their own (so-called s&perior) race into the
quagmires of savagery and self-destruction. ~The EDUCATED
South, not the IGNORANT South, is responsible for the mob,
Their teaching initiated it and their defense encouraged it. The
remedy is in their hands, which is, honest, whole-hearted teach-
ing of the fundamental principles of democracy and justice.

23
Mal-adjustment of race conditions in the South arises from
the following causes:

A. Fundamental misconceptions.
B: Misinterpretation of evidence and facts.
C. Ignorance and prejudice.

It is a fundamental error in the thought of the South to
consider slavery and the presence of the Negro as one subject.
They are entirely different subjects of different import and
require different treatment. This confusion of thought is the
sin of the educated but has proven a harvest of opportunity to
the politicians and a pitfall to the white electorate. The tenac-
ity with which the educated South adheres to this confusion of
ideas is at once the puzzle and despair of students the world
over. :

Another fundamental misconception of the educated South
is the belief in the unchanging and unchangeable su-
periority of the white man. This doctrine were a harm-
less bit of racial chauvinism did it not take the practical
turn of insisting that regardless of qualifications or character,
everywhere and under all circumstances, the white man must
be boss; and nowhere, under no circumstances, must any
Negro resent anything that any white person does. This of
course means serfdom, pure and simple. The colored man
cannot accept this, yet the white man insists. Here we have
what the diplomats call an impasse. Either this doctrine

must die or Christianity and. democracy must both fail. Char-

acter and attainment and merit and service must all count for
naught if this Moloch of heredity is to dominate society.

A third misconception of the educated South is the belief
that the aspirations and capabilities of a race are to be learned
by contact with the submissive and ignorant elements only.
The heart-breaking tragedy of the race situation is the southern
white mans insistence that he knows the Negro, whose papers
and books he will not read, and whose educated classes he
will not converse with except to hector. |

This takes the practical turn of persistent misrepresentation
of the hopes and aims of the educated colored people. Every
effort to obtain the decencies and comforts of modern civiliza-
tion is construed into a desire to associate with white people.
This doctrine not only deludes ignorance but inflames preju-
dice. :

Lastly, it is fundamentally erroneous and practically mis-
chievous to treat the colored people as a class instead of treat-
ing them as individuals. This degrades conduct and belittles

By eo

character. This attitude not only obstructs progress and de-
stroys peace but makes democracy impossible.

These fundamental misconceptions make facts futile and
evidence unavailing. Ignorance and prejudice are complemen-
tary follies that sustain and strengthen each other. It Is a
distressing fact that about 20 per cent of the white people in
Tennessee are classed as semi-illiterate and 14 per cent are
wholly so.-(Nashville Banner, Feb. 28, 1918, Editorial.)

Men must know what is true before they can do what is
right.. Here is the closing paragraph of a letter written in
defense of the Estill Springs lynching: '

Did you ever see the Skeleton of a negro and the Skele-
ton of an ape place together? I have, and you cant tell one
from the other if you did not know. The bones of each is
red and the Negro has no bone in his nose at all. Ive got one
in mineand Surely if the Negro is an Image of God the
white man is not, for surely he hasnt got two Images. So
Thanks to Estill Springs for taking interest enough in their own
race to go and get the Negro.(Nashville Banners Edi-
torial Column, Feb. 28, 1918.)

This is the intelligence that transmutes white supremacy
and unchangeable superiority doctrines into mob murder.

The educated South must accept the demonstrated prin-
ciples of democracy and the authenticated facts of history be-
fore racial mal-adjustment can be placed on process of remedial
solution. The Negro must become a party to the privileges
and responsibilities of citizenship as character and conduct
merit. In other words, if the good people do not pull to-
gether, bad people will involve us all in ruin.

Law and Order Leagues to be successful must include the
law abiding citizens of both races. Purely white organiza-
tions mean intensification of the trouble by arming all the whites
and disarming all the colored. The spirit of the mob soon
dominates the organizations. Atlanta and East St. Louis are
illustrations. No fact of human nature is better known than
that helplessness invites aggressionand desperation invokes
destruction. Frederick Douglass said he was but a mere boy
when he discovered that the slaves most frequently whipped
were not those most deserving it but those nyost easily whipped.
This discovery made him incorrigible as Jie So the con-
tinual raiding.of Negro games encourages gambling by demon-
strating the unfairness of the officersthe feeling becomes
general that the raids are directed against Negroes not against
criminals. The whites are usually not molested, except where
politics or personal feelings enter in. Sampson pulling: down

25
the pillars of the temple of his oppressors, though it involved
his own ruin is a familiar reaction of desperation. Mobs sup-
press justice and increase crime. By abandoning the Negro
to the criminal whites the law abiding white people place the
respectable law-abiding Negroes at the mercy of the lawless
blacks also, and pave the way for the ruin of the colored
people.

It is a fatuous delusion that the respectable white man
will long survive the respectable Negro. Belgium is now
struggling with the fate she imposed on Congo. Equality be-
fore the law is the only safe rule. As democracy is every
mans opportunity, so this ideal should command every mans
effort. Nothing that has been said must be construed as ab-
solving the black man from responsibility or blame. He cannot
escape the obligations of the former nor evade the consequences
of the latter. We must make every honorable effort to get
control of the criminal elements of our own race and win the
respect and co-operation of the law-abiding elements in the
white race. We should respond whole-heartedly and enthu-
siastically to the invitation for co-operation issued by the Law
and Order League organized in this city last Sunday. The
victim of injustice is apt to be unjust and the man frequently
denied a chance oft overlooks his opportunity when it comes.
Let us avoid, these dangers. The hour of our opportunity is
at hand. The teachings of the Gradys and the Murphys, the
Weatherfords and the Trawicks are bearing fruit. The atti-
tude of the Nashville Banner in this crisis is a harbinger of a
better day.

erin, Seen

HISTORY OF PROGRESS IN RACE
RELATIONS.

JoHN W. Work,
Professor History and Latin,
Fisk University.

THE conclusion that there has been or has not been any
progress in our race relations plainly depends upon viewpoint
and upon the individual drawing the conclusion. To the white

man who does not know and who cannot conceive of any |

Negro above the criminal and the worthless, and to the Negro
whose knowledge of, and acquaintance with the white man are
limited to the vicious and the lawless, race relations grow more
and more hopeless as time passes. Even the well disposed _
and well intentioned white man who knows the Negro race
through hearsay and the fair-minded black man who sees the.
white man through a glass dimly, see nothing promising
in our race relations. lo the white man who knows that his
race has not cornered the market of virtue, and to the Negro
who knows that his race has no monopoly on goodness, to the
white man and to the black man who are broad-minded enough
to recognize and respect the humanness of each other, the rela-
tions between the races offer the hope that most of the apparent-
ly irreconcilable differences will some day be adjusted fairly,
justly and amicably, and in fact even now their elimination is
in progress. [hese broad-minded men of both races are more
and more entering into a co-operation which gives each a bet-
ter knowledge and understanding of each other, thereby quite
appreciably lessening race friction in many quarters. It is
a fact that knowledge generates interest, interest begets: sym-
pathy and sympathy promotes helpfulness.

Whence spring these unhappy and regrettable relations?
They are born of prejudice and ignorance. Prejudjce is anti-
thetical to reason and has no sympathy with it, Id conse-~
quently any attempt to reason with prejudice is a sad waste
of time, effort and energy.

American prejudice is peculiarly interesting. It is inborn,
inbred, inculcated and communicated; and one great difh-
culty in the problem of our race relations is that a large,
influential number of people demand with complacency that

To eS
this monstrous thing be respected. It is a position, untenable
and absurd, that the unreasonableness of one race, which works
unmerited hardships upon another race, and inflicts almost
intolerable woes upon it, should be regarded and respected.
To respect race prejudice is to give moral support to injustice
and oppression.

During the Worlds Fair in St. Louis one of the white
Congregational churches made an engagement with the Fisk
Jubilee Singers, who were at that time in St. Louis in the
celebration of Fisk University Day at the Fair, to sing in
the Sunday evening service. Upon arriving at the church the
leader of the company was informed that the organist of the
church had served notice upon the officers that if those Negroes
came into that church to sing, he would leave at once. He
was allowed to leave, and the services were conducted with-
out a hitch. The next day he had an interview in one of
the daily papers, in which he stated that the ministers and
officers of the church knew his prejudice, and ought to have
respected it, and ought to have kept those Negroes out of that
choir loft. |

Now I think that I could understand his prejudice, and
found no bitterness or resentment in my heart because of it
in fact, I could have patience with it, and with him, also;
but, for the life of me, I could not then, and cannot now,
understand how, in any degree of earnestness or seriousness,
he could ask that such utter unreasonableness be respected.
To respect the objections of one man who, through them,
would fetter the aspirations of another; to respect the preju-
dice of one man who, through it, would prescribe, circumscribe
and limit another man in his endeavors to develop his own
life, is superlative injustice.

Slavery, war and reconstruction intensified unfavorable race
relations, and for a long time we have been aware, as Pres-
ident Cleveland said in discussing the tariff, that, This is
a condition and not a theory we are facing, and it has been
our problem to render opposition inoperative, to eliminate fric-
tion and to create interracial amity and good will.

The idealist who knows and tells us. what is right would
solve the problem as a gentleman in Boston once said to me.
The question of race relations was suggested by an editorial
in one of the Boston papers, stating some unpleasant facts.
He said: Those fellows down there ought to be roundly
scored; they ought to put down their prejudice and go on and
act fairly with the Negro. I believe every word he said.
That is a fine formula, but it is in the realm of the ideal,

oe) ee

beyond the boundaries of the practical. He overlooked the
human element in the case; he overlooked the three elements
the world, the flesh and the devil. These are not so easily
overcome as some people would have us believe.
Prejudice is a cruel, unreasonable destructive superfluity
which cannot be extracted from a race within a day or month
or a year. It is to be condemned as a blighting curse, but
still it must be recognized and treated as a real live force
which colors, influences and powerfully directs our lives.

Prejudice can be overcome and abolished only through
education and interracial contact. We must know each other
better. When the white man learns, and in his heart believes,
that the Negro is really aspirimg to be something, striving to
do something, and is succeeding in his effortsthat he has
aspirations for the best in life, and that he is appropriating
unto himself the uplifting forces of lifeI say when the white
man knows this, do you think he can have any such attitude
toward such a Negro as he plainly has toward the Negro so
faithfully and so unremittingly described in the press of our
country ? :

The white man must know the great facts of Negro char-
acter. He must not remain in ignorance of them. He
must make an effort to learn them. He must give them their
true values. There must be interracial contact.

It is up to the Negro to show that he is not what he is
generally reported to bethat he is what he is generally re-
ported not to be. It is an abnormality of universal jurispru-
dence that before the judgment bar of the world the Negro
stands guilty; he must prove himself innocent. It is cruel and
shameful, but it is a fact, and he must meet it. However, he
can meet the fact and establish his innocence; he can prove
his right to an honorable discharge, but he must be given the
opportunity, and that opportunity can come only through in-
terracial contact. Racial relations cannot be improved by
long-distance communications. As long as we are apart, with
common grounds of meeting and of conference, there will
be misunderstandings, misgivings and misjudgings. The diffi-
culties in the way of this contact are only apparent, notwith-
standing many, both white and colored, find it well nigh im-
possible to meet on common grounds.

However, there is an ever increasing number of white
men in this country who have caught the significance of this
fact and have made possible this contact under very favorable
conditions. These are the leaders of thought in the churches
and colleges.

0.
This is the hopeful sign in the situation, and we may
now confidently expect to see appreciable and ever increasing
progress in race relations. These men search for and find the
truth, and the truth makes them free. Ye shall know the
truth, and the truth shall make you free.

One of the foremost organizations for the purpose of bring-
ing about better race relations is the Southern Sociological
Congress, originated by Nashville men. It has. on its pro-
gram the foremost thinkers of both races, both of the North
and of the South. The sentiments and attitudes of these men
are crystallizing into a force which is having more and more
influence in our American life, and is most assuredly leading
us toward the acceptance of the blessed principle of brother-
hood. The Fisk Singers attended the meeting of this Congress
in New Orleans, La., April, 1916, and upon invitation made
a visit to the Confederate Soldiers Home. After the singing
of some of the Negro folk songs, and after some remarks,
one of the veterans arose and said: I want to say to these
colored men that I was born in Louisiana and fought under
Robert E. Lee. Yes, I am a southerner, and fought for the
Confederacy, but I want you men to know that we are proud
of Fisk University and schools like it, that are making Amer-
ican citizens. You have our best wishes, and I speak for all
the best people of the South.

All through that meeting there was the spirit of fair play
and co-operation. So clear and strong was it that it brought
a new, beautiful vision of hope.

This same Congress is this year meeting in Birmingham,
Ala.; and among the speakers are ex-President Taft, Mr.
Samuel Gompers, Dr. Henry Van Dyke, Hon. Wm. Jennings
Bryan and Miss Jane Addams. The Governor of Arkansas

is the president of the organization. ,

Not long ago one of the groups of Fisk singers sang folk
songs for the white people in one of the villages of our state
in the interest of a Liberty Loan campaign. In introducing
the singers, the minister said: Ladies and gentlemen: I am
glad to welcome these men here. These men are our brothers!
The time has come when men are to be judged not by their
color, but by their hearts. We must judge men as God judges
them. I take great pleasure in introducing these singers.
He was applauded to the echo. These are instances some-
what separated by distance and time, but they express an atti-
tude and a condition big with hope and encouragement.

Those splendid letters of Dr. Edwin C. Mims, of Van-
derbilt University, and of the Rt. Rev. Thos. F. Gailor, of

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A

the diocese of Tennessee, published recently by the Nashville
Banner, were the inspiration for the organization of the Law
and Order League in Nashville, looking toward the inclusion
of the whole state in a league for making the law supreme.
As we know, this organization was brought to life through
the barbarous torturing and killing of a Negro at Estill
Springs, Tenn.

Now speaks the real power in our state. If these men
mean that the law shall be supreme, supreme the law shall be!

The mob never could nor never can rule this class. This is

the right thinking, powerful, but silent South, which up to
this time, for reasons best known to itself, has not openly de-
clared itself, its convictions and its determinations upon this
question of the races. I have hoped and prayed for this day.
With me, it has always been as sure as fate that whenever
this class of white men determined to put a stop to lynchings
and other forms of lawlessness, the end of mob violence is in
sight. It is hoped that the sentiments of these letters of Dr.
Mims and Bishop Gailor will remain and continue to be the
foundation, inspiration and guide of this magnificent organi-
zation. The theme of these letters was justice and righteous-
ness, which give permanence and irresistible power. It is to
be hoped that this league has determined to wipe out anarchy,
and put a stop to lynchings and mob violence, not simply be-
cause they disgrace the State of Tennessee, and advertise us
unfavorably to the world, but because they disgrace justice
and right.

To be sure, the damage to the states reputation and eco-
nomic loss are not to be looked down upon and spurned as
reasons for putting a stop to mob violence, but they are not
the worthiest reasons, and as motives, they are not so powerful,
and the reforms springing therefrom are not so sure and last-
ing as the motive of justice is powerful and, in consequence
is sure and lasting. Regarding this organization and the
men who compose it, however, we may feel sure that there
need be no fears concerning either motive, purpose or accom-
plishment.

Tennessee furnishes both the high water and low water
marks in race relations. When we recall Memphis, Dyers-
burg and Estill Springs, we shudder and wonder! | Then,
when we contemplate race relations here in Nashville and in
some other localities, we wonder again, but for a different
reason. In the first place, we fearfully wonder how the best
people of Tennessee could remain passive in the face of the
awful dangers that threaten democratic government when the

oe ae
mob reigns, and then we wonder in joy how Tennessee, espe-
cially Nashville, could be so beautifully and gloriously dif-
ferent from the rest of the South!

Some years ago a member of the Tennessee state legislature
offered a bill which, if passed, would have worked great
damage to our schoolsFisk, Central Tennessee College and
Roger Williams University. The purpose was to prevent any
white person from teaching in these schools. The white peo-
ple of this city, led by Bishop E. E. Hoss, of the M. E.
Church, South, who declared himself to be a southerner of
southerners, killed that bill aborning.

A short while ago segregation was attempted in Nashville.
The white people prevented it. Look at our tuberculosis
hospital, our Carnegie library, our school system; note the in-
terest taken by white people in the Negroes and their affairs.
They preach to us in our churches, they lecture to us in our
schools and clubs; they greatly help us in our endeavors,
and, in a measure, they request and receive reciprocity of
service from us.

Considering that both parties concerned in these race ad-
justments are human, it seems that the conditions here in Nash-
ville are as near to what they should be as could reasonably
be expected at this time.

This condition is attributable to education. The influence
of our schools and colleges cannot be overestimated. This
fact supports the proposition that the differences are least and
the friction is slightest between the intelligent classes of the
races. It is a fact, too, that the greatest difficulties lie be-
tween the illiterate class of whites and the educated class of
Negroes. Often do we hear the pronouncement that the white
man must lift up the black man in self defense. The white
man must see that the Negro is well housed, and his surround-
ings sanitary, or, since he does the domestic work, he will
endanger the health of the white race. There is a great
measure of truth in this, but this also is equally trueit is of
vital importance to the Negro that the white man be educated.
The educated man knows the meaning of tolerance, justice,
reason and righteousness; he knows the value of contact and
co-operation; he knows that there are two sides to every ques-
tion, and that he must look on both sides of the shield. The
most potent factor in the solution of the problem of race rela-
tions would be a universal compulsory education law, forcibly
applied to the white race.

The progress of better relations is like a journey in a deep
snow. The traveler steps three feet and slips back one, but

aoe yell

still he is moving forward. Notwithstanding the gloom which

darkens the path, the tremendous difficulties which beset the
waythough the journey leads over rugged mountains and
through deep valleysthough they are leaving bloodstains
along the rocky road, still these two, one white, the other black,
are travelmg toward the promised land of brotherhood.

WOMANS PART IN RACE ADJUSTMENT.

Mrs. Booker T. WASHINGTON,
Tuskegee Institute, Alabama.

We hear the phrase almost daily nowat least since the
entrance of our country into war, Democracy safe for the
worldthe world safe for democracy. To the average per-
son I imagine the phrase is only a play on words, but to
you and to meto thinking people of all races and classes
it can have but one meaning: Justice to every man. Every
man shall have the right to live and to grow as it seems best
to him.

A few weeks ago in a New York paper there appeared a
letter written by a white woman in which she commented on
the way she was working in her garden, doing her bit for the
country, and finally she asked the question: Why cannot the
Negro man and woman be made to work for me> Why are
they allowed to loiter on the streets, while I and my friends
toil on? I am not quoting the entire letter.

Certainly we all agree that in these tremendous times, when
our country is stirred from its very depths by what is consid-

ered to be one of the cruelest wars the world has ever fought,

the Negro should not be idle. Every one of them should
work and work hard; but why work for this particular lady
and her friends? Why not for himself and his own friends?
The Negro is to often thought of in terms only of his value
as an ordinary laborer, not to his state or country, but rather
to some particular individuals needs, just as the horse or the
ox is regarded.
There can be no real democracy in the world, nor can
there be any safety in a democracy as long as one individual

Ae cataie
or race [is permitted to maltreat another] simply because one is
up.and the other is down; because one has had every oppor-
tunity for growth for centuries and the other has not; because
one has been master and the other servant. There can be
no middle ground for the Negro. He must be trained and
then permitted to take his place in the citizenship of his coun-
try, or he will be dragged down to the level of the serf. In
the words of a great preacher, It is only the appreciation
of the gospel of love and common sense that can place each
race in the proper attitude to the other.

In this question of adjustment there are, to be sure, two
sides. Each of usthe Negro and the white manshould
make up his mind to do his part in making it more possible
and more profitable for the two races, differmg im some re-
spects because of different opportunities, and alike in others,
to live on the same streets, in the same neighborhood, and to
have the same interest in all civic affairs without trying to
hinder the progress of the other materially or otherwise. The
man who spends his time in trying to hinder and hold down
another never gets very high himself.

More than seventy years ago the great Irish liberator,
Daniel OConnel, not only opposed slavery himself, but was
so dead in earnest about it that the stand he took was demon-
strated by a memorial in the form of an address from all
Ireland to their friends in this country. OConnels name not
only headed the list, but he secured 60,000 other names plead-
ing for justice for the American Negro. It is not enough
that you and I should do our part in trying to settle racial
differences of not only the brutal and the barbarous sort,
which so often throws such a black shadow over our country
that the very soul of the Negro becomes a pot seething with
hatred, but we owe it to ourselves, each race equally, to influ-
ence 60,000 more men and women to help bring the masses
of the people to that standard of right thmking where justice
will get a hearing and will be meted out alike to all; where
each individual, whether he is black or white, educated or un-
educated, rich or poor, will be given an equal chance. This
is the high ground which a democracy must take if it is to
remain such in the eyes of the world. This is the position
the races must take if there is to be any permanent settlement,
and therefore any peace and harmony amongst us.

Surely we have come now, if not before, to the place where
we must recognize the rights and privileges of others. Where
we are willing to see that these may be granted without in any
way interfering with racial independence. It is not fair to

be) ak

suppose that a race of people who, a little more than fifty years
ago, have come up with every odd against it, from the depths
of ignorance and poverty to a literacy increased from five to
sixty-five per cent; a people who have made wealth to the
amount of $980,000,000; a race whose hands you rarely see
stretched out on the streets for alms; a race who as far back
as 1866, poverty burdened, gave $80,000 for its own educa-
tion, and who in 1916 gave $1,600,000 for the training of
its children; a race that gave to the world a Frederick Doug-
lass, a Paul Lawrence Dunbar, would want to maintain its
racial independence, its racial life and separateness? I think
I can assure you that we do.

In this question of adjustment woman must play her part,
and may I here state that now, as never before, both white |
and colored women are meeting each other on a common
ground of interests and are learning the common sense of
human life.

Nearly twenty years ago, in the neighborhood of the Tuske-
gee Institute, there was organized a mothers class. Its object
was to teach women how to care for themselves, for their
homes and their children. The question of sufficient rooms
in the home of the family; the decencies of the streets where
the children played; the feeding of the children; as related to
their conduct at home and at school; their attendance at school
and Sunday worship, and the relation of the women and men
in the community were all vital questions discussed in their
one-day-a-week class.

The class opened with six women; today it has more than
a thousand enrolled. The families represented by this class
today live in better homes; their surroundings are cleaner, and _
many of them are not only well kept, but flowers and shrub--
bery abound everywhere. A majority of these women own
their own homes, and so have lifted themselves out of the mire
of unwholesome living into the clean atmosphere of wife and
mother. One white woman in the beginning was brave
enough to come into these meetings and help these neglected
mothers to see their first duty they owe to themselves. Slowly

but surely others have come, and do come. These white

women have gone so far that they insist upon better things for
the colored family. There is rarely ever a movement for
civic improvement in the town but that the same is not brought
to the attention of the colored women. Last summer in the
town there was a great fight made on the fly. The crusade
went into the homes, public eating houses, the churches; and
everywhere the fly was followed up. Prizes were offered in

Ee eu
the schools for the largest number of this little mischievous
creature caught. In the very beginning colored women and
white women took up the conflict, each working in her own
territory, except where their territories were so close the one
to the other, as is often the case, that they had to work
together, and both take an actual part in ridding the town of
dirt, and consequently the fly, thus mutually lessening the dan-
ger of diseases to all the homes in the town. The fly knows
no color.

A few years ago in this same town the colored women be-
came displeased with the condition of the two waiting rooms
at the two railway stations which are set aside for their use.
They secured permission from the station masters to improve
these rooms. They cleaned the rooms, put in chairs and
other seats, placed papers and books on the tables and hung
pictures on the walls. They looked through the windows and
saw that the waiting rooms for the white people were not a
great deal cleaner than their own. They entered and did
quite as much for these rooms as they had done for their own.
In their own waiting rooms they hung the pictures of Mr.
Washington, Mr. Douglass and Abraham Lincoln; in those
for the white people they hung the pictures of Robert E. Lee,
Abraham Lincoln and Mr. Cleveland.. One white woman,
on going into her waiting room, remarked to a colored woman,
after thanking her for the care she had given the womens
rooms, Abraham Lincoln freed me and my people quite as
much as he freed you and yours. No country can grow
unless all the people are free.

Fifteen years ago thirty colored women in the state of Ala-
bama came together and decided that something must be done
for the small boys of the race. They sought and found a
sympathetic listener and adviser in the sister of a man who
was at that time the governor of the statea woman who
had taken the lead in making it possible for the small criminals
of her own race to be protected from the influences of the
hardened men in the prisons of this state.

Not once does a single one of these thirty colored women
remember appealing to a single white woman anywhere in
the capital of the southern Confederacy (Montgomery), for
that is where the work began, and being turned away empty-
handed or bitter-hearted. It was a common interest, a human
interest, that made these women willing to help in the cause of
childhood.

From twenty acres of land, one small house of four rooms,
one teacher and forty small boys support it, by the constant

256 es

wear and tear on the energies and purse of a few women,
there is now a farm of more than a hundred acres of land,
well cultivated, and yielding everything which nearly three
hundred small boys and ten teachers can use, to say nothing
of the feeding of their cows, their hogs, their chickens, their
horses and their stock of all sorts.

The state of Alabama now owns the place, and allows
sufficient clothing for each boy. Houses and barns have been
built for the stock. Bath houses have been built for the boys.
A regular course of study has been maintained, which is under
the direct supervision of the State Superintendent of Education.
The first teacher of this reformatory still maintains his position
as headmaster; two of these first thirty colored club women
occupy seats and have a controlling vote in the governor's
staff meetings for the care and conduct of the school. I
rather suspect that this is the only case of its kind in the coun-
trycertainly south of the Mason and Dixon line. White
women, including the wife and friends of more than one gov-
ernor, have visited and continue to visit the reformatory, giving
to the children of the streets and alleys a glimpse of a life built
on opportunity, and thus saying to them, not necessarily, uncon-
sciously, every boy in this state, black as well as white, shall
have a chance to be a man, to be a citizen. Here one sees
these three hundred boys, well fed, well clothed, well housed,
given the states course of study, reciting their academic lessons
in the forenoon under competent teachers; going out in the aft-
ernons to the farms and to the shopsfor blacksmithing and
shoemaking are both taught. Standing four abreast at their
daily inspection, dressed in their khaki suits, saluting the flag
which will say in the near future, even more emphatically than |
it does today, An equal chance, my boy, for you, an equal
opportunity for an education, an equal chance to make a
living, an equal show in the citizenship of your country, and
an equal chance to make democracy safe for all people.

Listen to the words of a prominent white club woman in
the state of Mississippi: The Federated Club women of Mis-
sissippi are organizing the Negro women into civic clubs and
are passing on their literature and helps to them. They, the
colored women, are the greatest help in the city beautiful
city. Frequently the club women go to the colored schools
and give health talks. The Negroes are helping us through
the civic clubs to fight tuberculosis, typhoid fever and other
diseases. We find in every community an intelligent colored
woman to act as the leader for her people. One club, in its
paper, gives space to the activities of the colored Civic League.

coe) ee
We have found wherever we have a Negro club there is uplift
and a reaching out for more knowledge in sanitation and
health. Your humble servant is a native of this great com-
monwealth of the South, and takes pride in all that pertains to
its interests and growth. She believes that Mississippi, through
its brave white women and determined colored ones will re-
deem herself.

In 1916, at Atlanta, Ga., the white club women carried
on for some weeks a class in cooking, six or eight hundred
colored women attending these classes. They. were not the
cooks of these white women; they were the colored home-
makers of the city of Atlanta, and the white women recognized
them as such.

At Augusta, Ga., a year or so ago, one of the depart-
ments of a white club interested itself in securing playgrounds
for the children of the city irrespective of color or race.

Not more than eight or ten years ago the white women of
Birmingham, Ala., became interested in the condition of one
of its slums. It was naturally occupied by its poorest people,
who were colored. A careful investigation was made, and
they were shocked at their findings. They woke up the city
officials, and the result was a $60,000 industrial school build-
ing which in the last few years has made new the entire neigh-
borhood. These women have brought in doctors and nurses
to give health talks. They keep in touch with the head teach-
er of the school, who is the natural interpreter of one race to
the other.

Both in Georgia and in Florida colored public nurses,
as well as district nurses, have been added to the school sys-
tem. Through the efforts of white women, improvement in
home sanitation is urged. Baby week is used as a means
to inspire colored women to take better care of themselves,
so as to have better babies. Here in your own city, Nash-
ville, the educational pride of the South, you have your social
service courses at Fisk University, your field work being done
under the direction of white women, your lecturers coming
often from Vanderbilt University. You have your public
library, secured partly through the Public Welfare League.
You have your probation officers, you have your playgrounds
all, in part, at least, through the same agencies.

With white and colored women meeting each other so
far, do you not think we have all come a long way since
1863, when the Boston Courier said: As no white man
ought to consent to be a slave, so in our opinion, no Negro
ought to desire to be a free man in the United States.

a ee

.
ry

Freedom to them can have no other meaning than misery,
degradation and final extermination.

Let us come nearer, and we shall see that our differences
are even growing less within the past few years since one of
our own governors in his message of 1913, said: I warn you
today, passing, as I am rapidly from state politics, that if I
go up higher it will be a broader and national field, where
I will fight the education of the Negro. God Almighty never
intended that he should be educated, and the man who at-
tempts to do what God Almighty never intended shall be a
failure. God made that man to be your servant. The Negro
was made to be a hewer of wood and a drawer of water.
This gentleman never disconcerted the Negro by his threats,
for, in the words of one of our best students, Dr. C. V
Roman, we are willing to rest our case in the [courts] of
civilization, and we know that the white man will be influ-
enced by the ideals of civilizations choicest men and women,
rather than by the few without the pale represented by this
particular governor.

Racial difficulties and perplexities can be settled only by
leaders of both sides, white and colored, those who will stand
squarely on the platform of justice to every man, not be-
cause he is white, not because he is colored, but because he
is a human being. We see a growing increase in the number
of Christian white women here in the southland.. Mrs. Ham-
monds has courageously said to her own women in public
print: Our great obstacle to better racial adjustment has been
the retention by many of us of the viewpoint of a day that is
past. Our ideal of a good, free Negro has been too much
like the one that fitted a good slave. Every misfit action has
a misfit ideal at its roots; and our anomalous crop of racial
relations, with its fruitage of lynchings and migrations, is the
result of trying to grow the Negros life today on the past
ideals. Usefulness to his master is a slaves chief virtue; that
of a free man is his usefulness to the human race. Material
progress waits on moral progress; and the full prosperity
of southern industry and commerce waits in a most vital
sense upon the moral status of the Negro home. It is the
privilege of white women who can alone fix this status for
the entire community, building it up in white life and help-
ing the better class of colored women, to build it up in colored
life.

Mrs. Cole, who gives her money and likewise her influence
in helping to perfect the Southern Sociological Congress, an
organization which has already done sufficient good to go

a ae
down in history as a great ally to democracy, is among those
white women who are helping to bring about mutual trust,
mutual good will and mutual respect. White women of such
character are being met by colored women of like character
and determination to settle things on a just basis, among whom
are Mrs. Nettie Langston Napier, Miss Eva Bowles, Mrs.
Eugene Hope, Mrs. Haynes and a host of us scattered all
over this country. We are not waiting for a better day; we
are trying to bring it to pass now.

Unaffrighted by the forces around us,
And undisturbed by the sights we see,
Self-poised we'll live;

Bounded by ourselves, and regardful

In what state Gods other works may be,
In our own tasks all our powers pouring,
And thus attain our citizenship.

The teachers of the youth of today of both races are almost

entirely women. Not all of them are in the profession be-
cause of the money they get out of it, but the larger number
are there because they want to see their ideals developed in
and through these boys and girls of their respective races.
Here is an opportunity which no one else has except, perhaps,
the mother. White schoolboys and girls should be encour-
aged to regard the rights of colored boys and girls as they
pass to and fro on the streets of our cities or roads from school.
Colored children should not be encouraged to fill their pockets
with rocks as they start from home or school, ready to dig out
one the moment they see a white face.

Two county school teachersone colored and the other
whitepassed each other for months with their little broods,
going their way each day. They never spoke. It was a tiny
country town, where everyone is supposed to say Good morn-
ing or Good evening to each other. Finally one day one
little colored tot ran to his teacher and, catching her by the
hand, said: Why dont the white people speak to us? The
teacher was quiet for a few moments and then said: We
forgot to speak to them. The next morning the two crowds
met as usual, and the colored teacher said, Good morning;
the white teacher pleasantly said the same. When the colored
school closed the white teacher sat on the platform and gave
words of cheer and goodwill.

Out in a Texas town the girls of a white college, influenced
by the older women of their church and school, carried out
a splendid program in a colored church for the benefit of the

Ag

a)

a

missionary work in that church. In Auburn, Ala., the home
of the state technical school, officered and controlled entirely
by southern men and women, the students entered into the
school and Sunday school life of the colored people in a most
emphatic way, and through them an excellent school has been
built. Through them a well regulated Sunday school has
been established, and through these teachers the young white
students have been taught to respect colored people in general.
A story is related of these young men to the effect that a few
years ago a number of them went to a certain colored school.
They entered a building where they were to take their lunch
with cigars in their mouths and their caps on their heads.
They so antagonized the colored girls of the school who had

been called to serve the lunch that they quietly left the build-

ing, and the women teachers did the waiting.
Young men from that same institution go now to that same

colored school every little while. Their caps are off uncon-

sciously, their cigars are thrown aside, and they are most cor-
dially received. They are most manly in their conduct and
general bearing.

Woman is a natural educator of the countrys youth, and
her opportunity in bringing about peace and harmony, which
means justice and fair play, cannot be measured by words.
It is our great opportunity. Let us not be indifferent to it.
Let us have the biggest share in making democracy safe for
all the girls and the world safe for democracy.

The educated colored woman has a tremendous burden,
if you wish to call it such. It is she who must do the lifting,
sometimes the actual pulling. She is doing her best, but she
must not be hindered. Yes, more than this, she must have

substantial help and encouragement from the women whose

chances have been greater than hers.

Public sentiment must be turned in the direction of the col-
ored woman. It must be made to see that she is to be pro-
tected by the law. She can lay claim to no justice. She
lives in a world where the white man may work his will on her
without let or hindrance, outside of law, outside of social code
and moral restraint which protects the white woman, and
should protect every woman. Equality of condition, of pro-
tection, are imperatives of the moral life and growth of the col-
ored woman of the country.

Let us of a new generation, white and black alike, stop
and find our balance in this race conflict. Shall I not say,
in this race struggle, not for white supremacy, nor for black
supremacy? This will take care of itself. Let us all insist

ey ae

=
upon fair play and justice. Let every man, woman and youth
of both races dedicate him or herself anew, now, today to
seeing that this country, which is rich in resources and all the
worlds goods, shall also be rich in the brotherhood of hu-
manity. Civilization means justice; justice means fair play
even to the most humble. True democracy estimates a mans
-yalue as a.man. Upon this hinges all racial differences,
hindrances and their settlement for all time to come. In the
words of Wendell Phillips, let us remember that the capital
of injustice is marble, but the pulse of every human man 1s
beating against it. God will give us time and the pulse of
man shall beat it down. Take the minds, take the fishing
skiff, take the mines, take all the corn and cotton; still the
day must be ours, thank God, for the heartsthe hearts are
on our side!

42

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fe

WAR TIMES WORK OF WHITE MAN IN RACE
- ADJUSTMENTS.

Mr. Arco M. TRAWICK,
Nashville, Tenn.

(Delivered also to a group of white students. )

George Bernard Shaw declares that those who can, do;
those who cant, teach. We might return the sarcasm by
saying that those who cant do either, spend their time writing
essays criticising those who try. We have not enttrely failed
in all our efforts at race adjustments, neither have we escaped
some very bungling performances. But we have reached the
point where we are willing to lay bare in each others presence
our deepest motive and spirit, and surely that is no small gain.

The war has not only shaken us out of our old roads, but
clear out of our old ruts. In a score of ways we can see
victory where a few years ago we did not even see a chance
for argument. There is a tonic quality of achievement in the
atmosphere, and not one of us would willingly confess that
we have set any arbitrary limits to our determination to banish
unrighteousness from the earth. We have deliberately set
our hands to the task of bringing in a new era in the worlds
history, and we have the power to make our part of the world
just as safe and free from petty tyranny as we want it to be.

Our entrance into the world war was marked by these
words of our President: We are glad to fight thus for the
ultimate peace of the world and for the liberation of its peo-
ples, the German people included; for the rights of nations,
great and small; and the privilege of men everywhere to choose
their way of life and of obedience; the world must be made
safe for democracy; its peace must be planted upon the tested
foundations of political liberty.

Democracy safe in the whole world! That means simply
that we have determined to make the world a good place to
live in. Shall we preach to others, and ourselves be found
counterfeit? Shall we offer a boon to the races of Europe,
and deny its application to our next-door neighbors? The
white mans first work in securing racial adjustments in Amer-

43
ica is to make himself a true exponent of the democracy for
which we are fighting in Europe. He must elevate himself
to that high level of friendship and goodwill where he can
say also, with our President: We shall ourselves observe,
with proud punctilio, the principles of right and fair play we
profess to be fighting for.

A democrat is one who is never bored by the presence
of anybody, no matter how long he may stay. He may be
an aristocratthat is, one who is too proud to do a mean
act; but he is also too proud not to help another man who
may have gone wrong. In fact, he sets so high a value upon
sheer, unadorned manhood that he cannot despair of the
glory of any individual. St. Paul was an aristocrat, but he
declared to alien races: We are members of one another.
Lord Macaulay was an aristocrat, but he saw im the hard
hands and drab clothing of European working men the saviors
of civilization in Europe. Sir Walter Scott was an aristocrat,
but he elevated the peasant maiden of Perth to the pinnacle
of beauty in English literature, and made her stand before
queens and princes. President Wilson is an aristocrat, but
he said: We are but one of the champions of the rights of
mankind.

The true opposite of democracy is despotism. A despot is
a driver, not a leader, of men. He prefers to accomplish by
compulsion that which may better be achieved by persuasion
and example. He has great admiration for his own skill in
wielding the whip, and he loves to push and shove and slash
and whack his fellow human beings along the road they ought
to travel. There may be a forward movement under such
treatment, and the despot may argue that he has caused it all.

Uncle Eben disposes of the situation in a sentence. Says
this black philosopher: Many a man thinks he is a good mule
driver because the mule trots on the way home. But the
truth is the mule is hurrying up to get his feed. Now the
difference between the mule and the man is evident; the mule
endures the beating in the hope of a full fodder rack; the man
had rather miss his goal entirely than be driven towards it like a
beast. Men will die for democracy, but after a while they
will turn against despotism and kill it.

If the white men of the South thoroughly believe that
democracy is good for the whole earth, they will fight and die
to make it safe among the races of America. And the col-
ored man will fight for the same doctrine, shoulder to shoulder
with the white man, a true comrade in the struggle against race
despotism.

SAGs

Our white men will make these principles the guiding pur-
poses of their lives if they are able to conquer two hitherto
untamed fears.

The first fear is that the Negro, if encouraged to exercise
his rights as a citizen, will assert political domination in the
South. Do we not discover in this fear an unconscious con-
fession that the white man has himself mistaken the noble voca-
tion of politics? The purpose of politics is to get worth while
things done in citizenship. Whence comes the fear that polit-
ical power means dominating somebody? Does the white man
really fear that the colored man, who has learned the game of
American politics at his instruction, will better the teaching
when the cards stack up in his favor?

There is always danger that an untrained, illiterate elec-
torate will muddle the uses of political power. But the peda-
gogy of politics is the same as the pedagogy of walking; we
learn how by the trial and failure method. The right to cast
an untrammeled vote is an indispensable element in the tuition
of a patriotic citizenship. We are agreed that there ought to
be a limitation on the right to vote and hold office; but we
ought also to agree that whatever limitation is imposed should
appeal to the sense of exact justice and fairness of all the
persons involved. Without this display of justice, politics be-
comes not a method of getting the will of the people expressed
in the government, but a scheme of rewards and punishments,
a chance to get a few things done the holders of power want
done. The southern white man will never purify the politics
of the South until he recognizes the colored man as a fellow
citizen equally interested with himself in getting best things
accomplished for all the people.

Have we not arrived at the time when we can look upon
the colored man as in every sense an American? Disregard
for a moment his deeds of fifty years, and consider his record
in war times. He volunteers, he answers the draft, he makes
a patriotic soldier, he observes meatless, wheatless, heatless,
wasteless days that the Allies may be fed and clothed, he buys
Liberty Bonds and Thrift Stamps, he contributes money to
the Red Cross, the Y. M. C. A. and the Salvation Army,
he speaks no word of comfort to the enemy, he labors hard
and gives advice at the nations council table, he goes over
the top to take whatever is necessary in order that victory
may finally be won.. What more is any man doing? If
anyone is blind to the colored mans loyalty to our institutions
during fifty years of freedom, can his blindness persist in the
face of his unflinching citizenship in war times? Let us do

ey eae
away with unreasonable fears concerning the Negros misuse of
political rights, and let us employ the present war times chal-
lenge to set our own political house in order.

The second unconquered fear of the white man is that

democracy expressed in kindness and fairness to the colored,

man will result in an infusion of blood through marriage be-
tween the members of the races.

Like produces like. Every tree brings forth fruit wherein
is the seed thereof, after its kind. Hate breeds hate; kindness
is the mother of kindness. Race problems are not compli-
cated by justice and fairness; prejudice, cruelty, lust issue
m a debauch. The white race outnumbers the colored race
three to one in the South, ten to one in the nation. At whose
invitation, then, and at whose willingness will race interfusion
be accomplished ?

Intermingling through marriage would be a social disaster.
Each race possesses gifts and potencies needed to build up
the great civilization which is destined to appear in our bor-
ders. Races are a device of our Creator to produce friendly
rivalry, and develop men of genius, a necessary prerequisite
to all progress. We are so constitutionally disposed that ex-
ploration, discovery, invention and the progressive enlargement
of our intellectual and moral horizon would scarcely take place
at all but for the impact of race upon race. So far as we
know, there has never been a disappearance of a race from
the earth without catastrophe and consequent loss to ages fol-
lowing. The commingling of race blood in the South would
not only fail to cure existing evils, but would raise new ones
and entail infinite loss to civilization. We need the best traits
of all races to make the best social and moral order.

But who is clamoring for racial interfusion? Not the
Negro, except a voice now and then, which finds no echoing
response from his own people. Says Dr. C. V.. Roman:
Democracy does not involve the fusion of the races any more
than it involves the fusion of the creeds or the fusion of the
arts. It does not imply that the finality of civilization is in
the man who is white or the man who is black, but in the
man, white or black, who is a man. Says Dr. Robert R.

Moton: We can be brothers in Christ without being brothers-

in-law.

Negroes are not ashamed of their identity, and have no
need to be. The strong ones among them are asking the
white men to give them a fair opportunity in our western in-
stitutional life to make the best of their manhod privileges.

ae

v

He wants us to help the weak ones of the race, to quote again
from Dr. Roman, to pass the zone of incapacity.

And this the white man may do by showing honor to
Negro homes and courtesy to Negro women. The developing
genius of the race has no secure foundation to rest upon, ex-
cept an honored, well-protected home life. Let the white
man take advantage of his own fear of race interfusion to
guard the integrity of both races against those who do not dis-
criminate between lust and love, and who do not know a color |
line when personal license is involved.

Let us do away with all irrational fears and let us demon-
strate the eternal worth of our democratic ideals by giving the
Negro a fair deal in politics, and an honorable recognition in
his home life.

If we have demonstrated our thesis that true democracy 1s
a sure foundation upon which race questions may be adjusted,

a few corollaries will follow.

First, all mob violence and every form of tolerated lawless-
ness must cease. We can no longer endure an unchecked and
unpunished scheme of murder and violence which stalks among
us, hiding its ghostly features behind such convenient expres- _
sions as race hatred, retributive justice, a white mans
civilization. We can have but one judgment to pronounce
against organized contempt of courts and juries, against weak
and cringing officers of the law, and against a complacent
public sentiment. We shall reassert the dignity of the law
and the majesty of the public conscience. The man hunt shall
cease, and the arch enemy of our social order shall find no
longer standing room in our society.

Second, the best white men of the South are good enough
and brave enough to do their whole part in the friendly ad-
justment of racial relationships; they are big enough to recog-
nize the colored man as a fellow citizen, and they are high-
minded enough to subdue all those who make trouble by their
evil deeds and defiance of justice. This is no time for boast-
ful talk about race superiority. There is real work to do, and
the reactionary, the man who thinks things are well enough as
they are, is as dangerous to our peace as an alien enemy.
Let us face the truth, and then cheerfully and bravely set about
the task of making up for lost time. ;

yy nee
WHAT THE NEGRO CAN CONTRIBUTE TO
RACE ADJUSTMENT.

GeorcE E. HAyYNEs,*
Professor of Social Science, Fisk University.

The Negro has been the occasion of some of the greatest
changes in American life. Only within the past decade or
so, however, have many white people asked what the Negro
is thinking and doing in these tremendous matters of race re-
lations. On the other hand, the Negro himself has not always
thought of his acts in their influence upon the interests of
white people. Each of these races has been looking at the
question of relations and adjustments largely from its own
standpoint. At the beginning, then, of this paper, with your

indulgence, I shall refer to two matters which seem to me of |

fundamental importance to the whole discussion of what the
Negro has to contribute to race adjustment.

In the first place, the presence of the Negro in America
has greatly altered American life and civilization. The effect
of the Negros presence has been second only to the effect of
the great wealth resources with which our country has been
so richly endowed. Brought to this country in an effort to
solve its labor problems in the felling of its forests, the drain-
ing of its swamps, the cultivation of its staple crops and the
obtaining of its control over nature, the Negro, from the early
days of the colonies down to this present hour has been the
cause of fundamental changes in the principles and practices
of American life.

Our fundamental political institutions have been profoundly
altered by the Negros presence in the commonwealth. At the
very birth of our nation Thomas Jefferson saw the grim dan-
gers growing out of the enslavement of black people, and the
Civil War was fought to cure those ills which he foresaw.
During all that period, the economic, political, religious, educa-
tional and other issues of our country moved forward or back-
ward upon the question of African slavery and the presence of
persons of African descent.

* Dr. Haynes has been lent to the Government, and is at pres-

ent Director of Negro Economics in the United States Department
of Labor.

4

ey

a

The voyage of our ship of state has not been very different
since the Civil War. What was the meaning of the division
of the Democratic and Republican parties> Why are the
great coal and iron districts of Alabama, Kentucky and Ten-
nessee behind the development of those of Pennsylvania, Mich-
igan and Ohio? The Negros presence is an answer. .

Again, take some of the great names which shine like stars
in our national skies. What were the great issues which make
the names of Henry Ward Beecher, Horace Greeley, Charles
Sumner, Wendell Phillips, Frederick Douglass, Robert E.
Lee, U. S. Grant, Abraham Lincoln and numbers of other
great names stand out in such shining splendor? It was the
issues growing out of the presence of the Negro in America.

In a few lines, my friends, this question of race adjust-
ment and the Negyos part in it is a matter not simply for
the South alone, not simply for the Negro alone. This is a
matter involving every vital interestNorth, South, East and
West; and every racial interestblack, white, red and brown
of the nation. Though silently, often without voice or vote,
with little control of business and industry, nevertheless the
Negro has played an important part in determining the very
fabric of the life of the whole people.

In the second place, we should look beyond the horizon of
our American shores; we should see in this question of race
adjustment in America a vital part of the larger problem of
racial adjustments that are now open on the front page of
world politics. Race problems in other parts of the world
have been thrust forward by this world war, and must be set-
tled. Adjustments must be made after the war, whenever the
war ends. Adjustments must be made not only in America,
but in Africa, in Asia, in South America and in the isles of
the sea. It is no longer a question merely for academic dis-
cussion. It is a problem of settling our minds about some
theory. It is a question of settling our plans for action
in the world drama that is taking place before our eyes in the
war today. It is not only a problem of the war drama today
it is a problem of the greater drama that is to come in world
reconstruction tomorrow. We must do more than make up
our minds as to principles of race adjustmentwe must make
up our plans and programs for action in bringing about those -
adjustments.

Recently Bishop Bashford, Methodist Episcopal bishop of
China, issued a statement about a possible war between the
white and darker races. He said: Those of us who have
studied conditions, over the world see it is of no avail to declare

poling | 9 panic
that such a race war is impossible. Civilization thought such
a war as the present was out of the question. With the col-
ored races outnumbering the white races of the earth, with
South America, one of the great unoccupied regions of the
world, filling up with a mixed white and colored population,
with Malaysia, the other great unoccupied region of the world,
filling up with the Oriental races, which will number three or
four hundred million before the close of the present century
who doubts that if the white races continue to dominate every
continent by military power and to exclude the yellow races
from five of the six great continents and to limit their countless
millions to a small portion of the world, there will arise a
race war in comparison with which our present struggle will
prove a skirmish?

The only solution of the problem is the multiplication of

Christian missions to win the yellow and black races to Chris-.

tianity.

Those peoples whom Kipling has condescended to call the
lesser breeds without the law? are awakening. The thou-
sands of thundering cannon in France are arousing them from
their sleep. Whether we wish it or not, we must be mindful
of the startling truth and pressing importance of race contacts
and necessary race adjustments the world over.

In these great world problems of race adjustment is our op-
portunity. You and IJ here this afternoonyou and I here
in this Southlandyou and I as Negroes and Caucasians
over America, have probably the greatest opportunity of any
people on earth today to demonstrate that race adjustments can
be made on the basis of brotherhood instead of on the basis
of brutal force. We can help to save the world from the
possible dangers pictured in the graphic statement of Bishop
Bashford.

Let us not think that the Bishop has heralded only a piece
of sensational gossip. John R. Mott, Robert E. Speer and
a number of other observers of eastern life have said in sub-
stance the same thing, and have pleaded for brotherly con-
duct instead of exploitation by force as a means of these race
adjustments.

African leaders have also been expressing themselves on
this point, and wishing for such a brotherly solution. Mr.
Duse Mohamed Ali, editor of the African Times and Orient
Review, said lately: Germany, and, for that matter, other
Europeans, have no equitable claims whatever in Africa. We
have accepted the rule imposed by Europeans, and in the old
days Europeans were just, but of late years we have become

oe (ye

rather tired of European aggression, restrictions and segrega-

- tions.

He expresses satisfaction with the stand taken by the British
Prime Minister, who: recently stated that the German colonies
tare held at the disposal of a conference whose decision must
have primary regard to the wishes and interests of the native
inhabitants of such colonies. Mr. Ali points out, that

Mr. Lloyd George has clearly stated that the matter must
be left in the hands of the natives, who, through their chiefs,

have, and have had for centuries, the machinery for dealing

with so small a matter as a plebiscite.

The Lagos Standard, the leading newspaper in Southwest
Africa, said recently:

German aggressive influence, checked in Europe, must nec-
essarily and logically be nipped in the bud in Africa. De-
prived of her colonies, as she is now, what else could Ger-
manized Africa hope for but what Germanized Europe is
made to hope for?

We hope reason and justice may be considered as pledged
to Africa, whose peoples are the most wronged, most op-
pressed, and decidedly the weakest peoples inhabiting this
planet. Will this right and claim be denied us?

Some one may ask how can this be> What has our prob-
lem in America to do with Asia? What has our race ad-
justment here to do with South America and Africa? | Some
indications of what it may mean are shown in three books pub-
lished by two Englishmen who have made probably the first
comparative studies of the adjustments of white and colored
race relations. I refer to Maurice Evans two books, Black
and White in Southeast Africa? and Black and White in
the Southern United States, and to Sir Sydney Oliviers book,
White Capital and Colored Labor. Evans books aim to
make comparative studies for America and for Africa and to
carry from America the lessons of race adjustment to serve the
cause of race adjustment between the white and black peoples
of Africa, and vice versa. Oliviers book is an analysis of
conditions of labor in the West Indies and the United States,
showing how not to make the adjustments.

In a recent letter from a friend in Southeast Africa occurred
these words: Now let us take a bit of America. Again you
and I may differ. I claim, for pure democracy for all races,
you cannot find a better country. Am I indulging in a hasty
generalization? Judging from surface conditions, I am, but
you should hear the reports of conservative menand they are
men who have seen much of the world.

2a Te
In view of these race problems over the world, we should
frame our discussion, as well as our program and plans of
action, so as to help pave the way toward peaceful adjust-
ments. We should keep ever before us the fact that the race
adjustments we make in America will have consequences for
race adjustments in Europe, in Asia, in Africa, in South
America, wherever white and black and yellow and brown
meet to settle their differences and adjust their interests.

With these two ideas before usviz., the Negros influence
on the principles and practices of American life and the influ-
ence of the race adjustments we make in America upon race
adjustments in other parts of the world, let me present for your
consideration some of the things that seem to me the Negro
can contribute to the solution of these great questions:

First, the Negro can contribute to race adjustment a re-
markable power of humor and sense of the dramatic. This is
the power of seeing oneself in difficult situations, of appreciat-
ing the dramatic character of the situation, and of being ready
to smile with the world, in spite of ones own predicament.
This idea is clearly stated by Bert Williams, Americas ac-
knowledged greatest living comedian, in the January number of
the American Magazine, in an article on The Comic Side of
Trouble.

He states that much of his material for his work, that has
carried him before thousands both in American and Europe,
has been drawn from everyday life of Negroes. No one can
question the high art which Bert Williams himself has per-
fected.

This same quality has shown itself in many a Negro actor
and orator. It is evident in almost every gathering of Negroes.
As one travels over the South, this buoyancy of spirit may
be seen reflected in the faces of the Negro crowds at the rail-
way stations. Their faces are such a contrast to those of the
white crowds that one sees gathered there. The Negro sees
too much of the dramatic side of life ever to believe that,
like Atlas of old, he is bearing the world upon his shoulders.
It is that overflowing good humor which smiles at trouble,
mocks of restrictions, enables one not to take himself or his
race too seriously. It is a contribution this old world,
troubled with its race problems, sorely needs.

Let me at once guard against a possible misunderstand-
ing. I do not mean a happy-go-lucky attitude. I do not
mean buffoonery of chicken stories and the like. I have ref-
erence to an appreciation of the cheerful side of even uncheer-
ful situations.

ny aoe

The second contribution which the Negro can make to race
adjustment is a philosophy of personal relations rather than
property relations as a basis of life and business connections.
With the great rank and file of Negroes, the term brother
and sister is as common today as thee and thou among
Quakers. Sydney Olivier, in his book, White Capital and
Colored Labor, mentioned a few minutes ago, says that the
Negro will work more for someone he likes as an employer
or boss than for the dollars and cents that fill his pay envelope.
He can be held to tasks and induced to perform labor other-
wise very disagreeable, often because of personal treatment
by the foreman or employer, even when wages are smaller than
he can secure elsewhere. Sometimes he will give up fine in-
dustrial prospects because personally he does not like or does
not fancy the employer.

This attitude of friendly relations of persons instead of
property relations may be corroborated all over our south-
land by any one who carefully studies Negro laborers and
their problems. Some of our great corporations in the South
have recognized this fact and have picked fair-minded white
men or intelligent Negroes as foremen to handle their labor in
order to satisfy this attitude of the Negro laborer. Exam-
ples of this are very clearly shown by the management of the
American Cast Iron Pipe Company in Birmingham, Ala., and
in the Newport News Shipbuilding & Dry Dock Company,
Newport News, Va. In the latter firm Mr. Ferguson, the
president, is very popular with the rank and file of 5,000 or
more Negro men employed there, because they like him as a
just and kindly man, who believes in and depends upon them.
When he is advertised to speak, usually there are more men
outside than inside the place where he is to address them.

Now what is true of Negro laborers is true of others.
Negroes feel that warm connection of personal likes and con-
tacts. It is more powerful than a cash relationship based
upon property. If they develop that feeling for a man or a
race they will follow to the ends of the earth. This is a most
valuable contribution we can make to a world so bent on
business that the touchstone of most of its relations is money.

Again, let me guard against a possible misunderstanding
of the point. Someone may say, Yes, you expect the white
man to play upon this softness of the Negros heart in order
to exploit his labor and potential wealth. To any such ob-
jection, I reply that I am not advocating the idea expressed
in the old Negro song, You may take all this world and its

NOLL ae
goods and give me Jesus. I do not believe such a choice is
necessary or demanded of any race or individual.

But, my friends, my eyes, like yours, are fixed upon the
battlefields of Europe. We see millions of the worlds choic-
est men, including our own boys, being drawn into that hell
of blood and iron and fire. And why? In the final ,analysis,
what is the occasion for it? Fundamentally, because Ger-
many repudiated the idea that human relations based upon the
sacred rights of persons was the proper basis for business and
life connections. Germans have dreamed of gold pouring in
from Africa, from India and from other parts of the world.
They chose property relations instead of personal relations.
They made race adjustments with the Turks because it, was
to their advantage in the conquest of lands and wealth. Any-
one who has studied the transition of ideals in Germany
during the past fifty years knows that they gradually changed
to this basis of race adjustments. What is the result? It
has led Germany and the world into worse than: hell!

What I am trying to point out is that Negroes have hap-
pily a decided attitude in the other direction. We are in-
terested in persons and our friendly relations with them more
than in property. The thing I crave is that, as we learn the
ways of the world, we shall not lose this priceless heritage!

There is a third contribution which the Negro people can
make to peaceful race adjustment. It is an intellectual and
emotional product. I refer to music, painting, poetry and
oratory. The Jubilee songs have probably done as much as
anything else to tame the savage beast of race prejudice.
Mrs. Ella Sheppard Moore, one of the first Fisk singers,
related how a mob in Kentucky which threatened the timid
little company on its first trip was held at bay by their plaintive
songs. Prof. John W. Work, who probably knows more
about these songs than any other man, says that in studying,
singing and setting to score some five hundred of them, he did
not find one which breathed a sentiment of revenge or hate
or malice. They are filled with hope, joy, sorrow, love, faith,
forbearance.

Harry Burleigh, Coleridge Taylor, James Reese Europe,
Rosemond Johnson and a number of others have paved the
way to racial understanding by their music. Tanner, Brown
and a number of lesser lights have dissolved the social pig-
ment of their skins by their genius in mixing and displaying the
marvels of color on canvass. Paul Lawrence Dunbar not
only displayed the racial possessions of humor I mentioned a

Aaa

while ago, but his Warriors Prayer, Dawn, and other
gems of English verse help to draw the races together.
Braithwaite, Johnson, Corothers and others have convinced the
white world that race adjustment on the basis of equal oppor-
tunity for all will bring distinct prizes from Negro brain and
heart to enrich their world. ;

What further examples are needed? Time would fail
me to speak of contributions to race adjustment made by
Phyllis Wheatley, by the oratory of Sojourner Truth,
Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, by the literary
power of Alexandre Dumas, Burghardt DuBois and Kelly
Miller; by Crummel and Tubman and Langston and Bruce
and Williams and Fortune and a long list of others. These
men and women, by their intellectual gifts, helped to break
the chains of slavery, helped to stop the charging lions of re-
construction, charmed savage prejudice, silenced grumbling dis-
criminations and laid the foundations in mutual racial self-
respect, hope and faith upon which today we are trying to
build the temple of peaceful race relations.

A fourth contribution whicn we as Negroes may make to
the problem of race adjustment is to demonstrate the power
of faith over force, whether that force be greater strength of
wealth or of numbers. Every great man is a man of faith.
Every great people is a people of faith, By the power of
faith, I have reference to three things: First, our faith in our-
selves: second, our faith in the white people with whom we
live, and third, our faith in the ultimate triumph of a democ-
racy that shall include all men, irrespective of race or color.

Let us consider these three things in the order named. We
can contribute faith in and respect for ourselves as a people.
No people can rise higher than their own belief in them-

selves. This does not mean self-conceit. It does not mean

a self-centered race consciousness. It does not mean false
pride. It does mean a deep-rooted conviction of our ability
to be independent and self-supporting: it has reference to racial
self-confidence and racial self-respect. It means that we
believe in our mental ability to learn all that civilization has
to offer; that not only can we acquire it, but use it in solving
further problems of our common life. It means a belief in
the inherent goodness of our own moral and spiritual natures.
Let me enlarge upon this faith in ourselves. So often pri-
vately as individuals or collectively when we are by ourselves,
we Negroes are in the habit of disparaging and criticising and
blaming each other. We are in the habit of believing that

Lew oe
we can never be as successful as any other people in business
or in the professions or in politics or otherwise. We regard
the success of such a people as the Japanese as a wonder of
wonders beyond our possibilities. We have heard it said over
and over pete when the intellectual shortcoming of some
Negro has been mentioned, Well, you could expect nothing
more; he has done well for a colored man. Mr. Newbold,
rural school supervisor of North Carolina, said last summer
that one of the hardest and most subtle things he has to deal
with is the idea among both white and colored people that in
building a new schoolhouse any kind of a rough house is con-
sidered good enough for Negro children.

What I plead for is that we ourselves should set no spirit-
ual, intellectual or material limit based upon race or color.
We should contribute the idea to America that the Negro can
measure up to the very highest, most exacting standards of a
man. We should ask no special considerations because our
skins are of a darker hue or our hair is of a curlier texture.

I believe we must contribute this element of belief in our-
selves especially in the great field of moral and spiritual life.
During the past year or two I have been inquiring into the
failures of the Penny Savings Bank of Birmingham and the
thirteen banks of Mississippi. Frequently in discussing the
matter, I have heard someone say, Well, what would you ex-
-pect of those Negroes? My friends, we can make no great-
er contribution to this cause than to expect and exact of our-
selves the highest standards and to demand of friend and foe
alike that he treat with us on that basis. No man can offer
me a greater insult than to question my integrity or my honor
because God made my skin brown!

On the other hand, the other day I was talking with a .

Negro business man, and he said: If I were going away on
a long journey, from which I might not return, and I had ten
to twenty thousand dollars, I would confidently place it in
As hand (naming a Negro business man), tell him what I
wanted him to do with it should I not return, and go upon
my journey with the confidence that my wishes would be car-
ried out in the most faithful manner.

This is the point where we ourselves can do most toward
bringing the white people to the same belief. How can we
expect the white world to come to a full faith in us unless
we first contribute to the white world this element of belief in
ourselves? This faith must be known by its works, not simply
by its talk. There is plenty of talk by men who at every turn
show by their acts their lack of faith. I mean the sort of

ae

faith which founded Fisk University, when there were prob-
ably very few freedmen who could rank with our senior pre-
paratory class of today.

Of course, this faith should not take the turn of insisting
that we accept professional, business and other types of race
members for what they profess to be simply because they are
Negroes. But we should hold up the ideal that if a Negro
is to be a doctor, a lawyer, a mechanic, or anything else,
we shall expect him to be and firmly believe he can develop
to be as able as anybody else.

Until we come to the place where we shall be ready to
speak at every occasion with confidence in our own racial
integrity and self-respect before whites and blacks alike, we
shall not be ready to make this contribution to race adjust-
ment. The white world will be in no position and we cannot
expect them to accord us the full faith and confidence of free-
men and citizens until our firm faith has made the world see
that we believe it ourselves.

This power of faith in ourselves will work wonders for us.
It is more powerful than reeking tube or iron shard; than
segregation laws; than mob law; stronger than money or
other forms of wealth. It makes for racial solidarity, for
group integrity, which is absolutely essential if these two races
are to find a just adjustment of their interests.

The second thing in the power of faith which we may
contribute to race adjustment is a faith in the ultimate good-
ness and justice of the great white world by which we are sur-
rounded. JI do not mean that we should shut our eyes to the
facts of mob violence, lynch law, Jim crow legislation and
the like. This does not mean that we should ignore the fact
of our limited educational opportunities and of our limited op-
portunities for enjoying the larger benefits of our democratic
life. It does call, however, for a firm conviction that scat-
tered throughout the rank and file of the broad life of white
people there are individuals in whom flows the milk of human
kindness and the red blood of human justice. Let us also
recognize that the character of these individuals is not deter-
mined by the geographical location of their birthplace. They
have come from the North, from the South, from the East
and from the West. Many have probably not always
been as prompt as they could have been to voice the convictions
of their conscience. Many have at times failed to do what
the occasion demanded for democratic justice and right, but
our faith must see beyond such failures of judgment and con-

LBs
~

science. We must see deep enough to perceive their sound-
ness of heart and goodness of nature. _ '

This type of faith has so often in the past brought action
when a lack of it would have resulted in harm to us and to
the cause of democracy in America. There is what I may
call a compelling power of an abiding faith in human nature.
This applies as between individuals and it applies as between
racesthe compelling power of an abiding faith in human
nature. It is absolutely essential for race adjustment be-
cause unless two races or individuals of two races have faith
in each other it is idle vaporing to talk of race adjustment.

One of our modern writers tells the story of a convention of
dogs, which resolved not to chase cats any more. The meet-
ing adjourned. As they were leaving the convention hall,
two members of the feline tribe crossed the street in haste.
All the canine resolutions were torn to shreds by the chase of
the cats up a nearby tree. Racial adjustments call for racial
faith!

Let us Negroes send forth the word to the white world that
we fully believe and expect justice and fair play and full
opportunity from them. In spite of irritation, in spite of dem-
agogues to the contrary, in spite of weakness in the efforts of
some in whom we may put our trust, in spite of faltering cour-
age of others, let us build upon the examples of those who
have proven true. Let us cling to our faith that deep down
in the hearts of American white people there are chords of
justice and right which will some day vibrate with the full
melody of democracy for all men.

I have seen the sentiment of a whole white southern com-
munity changed from one of indifference and hostility to one
of enthusiastic support of Negro education and community bet-
terment by the action of one Negro leader, who had a firm
belief that with contact and enlightenment as to their obliga-
tions to the Negro, this white community would respond. And
it did!

A last phase of this power of faith which we can contribute
to race adjustment is our faith that ultimately democracy is a
safe form of organization and life for all of us, irrespective
of color; that it will triumph in America, and especially in
the southland.

Let each of us ask himself if he believes that our people
will enjoy real democracy in America. Do we really be-
lieve that we, as a people, are going to enjoy full privileges of
citizenship, the privilege to vote, to ride on the railroads un-
cursed by color, freedom of speech, equal pay for equal work,

ogg

ample provision for education of all kinds unlimited by finan-
cial and other restrictions, the opportunity to avail ourselves
of everything that the nation offers for development?

I ask this question in all seriousness. For, during the past
eight years, as I have discussed this matter with seniors in
college and with Negro citizens in various parts of the South,
it has been the exception rather than the rule to find one or
two individuals out of a whole company who did not receive
the idea with doubt and sometimes with laughter and ridicule.
When I have asserted this probability I have seemed to be
talking as a man out of his mind. ' When I have said that
I believe that here in our southland we shall have a democ-
racy where the rights and privileges of every man shall stand
on the same plane before the law, it has been regarded as

an academic theoryas a far-off Utopian dream. On the

other hand, do we not hear a great deal said about this being
a white mans country? :

My friends, I believe this afternoon that one of our great-
est contributions to race adjustment is to hold fast to this faith
in the future of democracy in the South and in America. Our
whole national existence is a failure and all our great pro-
fessions of liberty and democracy have been vain if this is
not true. Is it less true today than it was when Abraham
Lincoln made his great speech at Springfield? If I may para-
phrase his words, this nation cannot remain half serf and half
free. A house divided against itself cannot stand. We
must either go on toward full citizenship or backward toward
slavery. Race adjustment must be made on that basis, or we
are of all men most miserable! We are sending our boys to
fight and die in France and Flanders to establish these prin-
ciples over there. Are we not lost if they do not apply
over here?

We will not go back; we will shake off this incubus from
our liberty. We are true Americans with an unshakable faith
that America must at no distant period be the land of the free
and the home of the brave for every human being. We must
continue to organize law and order leagues and urban leagues
and advancement associations and political clubs; we must con-
tinue to publish articles and do all other things that need to
be done in order that government of the people, for the people
and by the people shall include the black people as a part
of we, the people. If this type of democracy is to live,
you and | can make no greater contribution to it than to keep
burning in our souls that eternal lamp of hope that here in this

He GO
southland shall be fully established for every human being the
full right of life, liberty, property and the pursuit of happi-
ness.

In addition to a sense of the dramatic in music, art and lit-
erature, to the philosophy of personal relationship instead of
property relationship and of faith in ourselves, in our white
fellow citizens and in the future of democracy, we may add
a fifth thing as the contribution the Negro can make to race
adjustment. For want of a better name, I shall call it the
spirit of tolerant education and friendly co-operation. It calls
for a real, sympathetic understanding of the other fellow and
the other race, and their understanding of us, to create a basis
for good will instead of hostility, and to give ground for hope
of peaceful adjustment.

Many white people generally assume their indifferent or
prejudiced attitudes largely because they have a misconception
of us or a fear of us. Last Sunday Mr. Trawick mentioned
two fears that they have. I might add a thirdthe fear of
economic competition. White men want the more desirable
economic advantages in skilled industry, in business and in
commerce. There is a fear that if Negroes of ability are given
chances for desirable places it will mean so many chances less
for them.

Now, all these fears are based upon a lack of understand-
ing of us. One of our great contributions, therefore, is to
show these people in a tolerant spirit that they are mistaken,
that their fears are based upon misinformation about us. On
the other side, we often misunderstand them. Sometimes
what is plain stupidity or ordinary meanness leads white per-
sons to act in unsympathetic ways toward Negroes, who in-
terpret it as race prejudice. On the contrary, I do not mean
to ignore the fact of blind racial ill-will. It exists in many
sections of the white world. But I do not believe that scath-
ing denunciation and excited sentences serve to meet such a
condition. Negroes who abuse white folk or white folk who
blame Negroes may appear smart, but they do not profit either
race anything. A tolerant effort to show the real truth is
the quickest way to change attitudes. It may at times be
come necessary to stand as firm as Gibraltar on matters of
principle. Yet this may be done while maintaining the atti-
tude of tolerance.

There are many white people, however, who are open-
minded and want to do us good. Some of them are not
always free from their fears; nor are some of them always

6a

fully informed about us, but they have a large fund of good
will and wish to express it in service and co-operation. For
these we have a part to perform. We should meet them
halfway; we should show them the spirit of co-operation.

Does some one say this is not a real contribution? Well,
let me ask what will happen if we say we will not co-operate.
Last year a white friend went to one of our leaders to tell him
that some of the southern people were doing all they could
to help make conditions down here better. He pleaded with
him to hold out the olive branch to such persons of the white
South. This leader replied that he would not do so; he would
not speak or write a line in commendation of the South. In
a word, he could, but he would not, contribute to the spirit of
co-operation.

We may go even further in co-operation. Our white
friends are seeking our help in community betterment leagues
and clubs, in Red Cross work, for the Liberty Loan com-
mittees and Thrift Stamp campaigns, in the councils of defense,
in church programs and in many other concrete efforts. Our
people are joining in these activities in many localities. We
can effectively contribute to race co-operation by joining in
all these efforts to meet common dangers and. provide for
common needs.

The sixth contribution I present for your consideration is
that of Negro leaders. After all, race adjustments must be
made between men and women. Also the rank and file must
have those who can speak and negotiate that which they desire.
The white people have their able, devoted leaders who want
to deal with similar Negro leaders. We need ours. I do
not mean self-appointed leaders; nor leaders that have been
chosen for us. I mean leaders we have ourselves acknowl-
edged and have entrusted with the authority to speak and act
for us.

I believe firmly that a part of our present hard condition
is the result of poor leadership. Our leaders have often been
earnest but ignorant of the American way of doing things.
No people were ever led to liberty by ignoramuses. The Bol-
shevik catastrophe in Russia and the devastation of that coun-
try by Germany are the latest and most gigantic illustrations
of that fact. Again, frequently our leaders have been coura-
geous, but hot-headed. No people has ever made permanent
progress that did not possess wise leaders. The history of
the Jews furnishes examples of both kinds. When their kings
and prophets were wise men they prospered. When they were

C's ae
rash and unwise, the people hung their harps upon the willows
as captives in foreign lands.

Furthermore, no people ever achieved its independence whose
leaders were looking out for their own selfish ambitions of
wealth, or power, or honor, to the detriment of the interests
of their race. The pages of history are strewn with the ex-
amples from the days of the betrayal of the Greeks to Phillip,
in spite of Demosthenes, down to the selling out of the Ne-
groes during the reconstruction days and the recent rifling of
the thirteen Negro banks in Mississippi.

We need leadersintelligent, sane and unselfish. We
need them with ideals and ideas; we need men and women
who will lose neither their heads, their temper nor their honor
in the face of disappointments and difficulties. We want men
whom the lust of lucre does not kill; whom the spoils of
office cannot buy; men who have honor; men who will not lie.
Tall men, who live above the fog in public duty and in pri-
vate thinking.

We should agree upon these leaders. We should com-
mission them to act for us in every one of our communities.
We should loyally support them with our voice, our service
and our meager means. And, by the grace of God, we
should turn our righteous wrath upon any one who overrides,
betrays or sells them out!

The last statement about protection for our leaders has a
further phase that comes under the seventh and last contribu-
tion I shall mention. It is loyalty. No adjustment can be
made on any other basis than that the Negro should be loyal
to his leaders, white and black. This, of course, demands
that their chosen leaders should be loyal to the trust imposed
in them.

In this matter of loyalty to all persons and causes with
which he is allied, I believe that the Negro has demonstrated
that he has a contribution to make which is unique. Am |
not correct in saying that there are few, if any other, records
of a great body of people held in bondage which remained
at home and loyally performed the duties committed to their
hands, while their masters were away fighting battles to make
that bondage more secure? Yet that was done not by a few
Negro slaves, but by thousands of them scattered all over this
southland.

They went even further. When the heat of battle was
over and their former masters were no longer their masters,
many of them remained upon the land to help their former

gy 7s

masters struggle through the days of hardship and privation.
Many of them remained to take care of families of masters
who never returned. Recently, here at our statehouse, at the
state meeting of the Law and Order League, a prominent
citizen made a most fervent and eloquent pledge before that
body. You recall that he recited the story of the freedmen
on his fathers plantation. They were loyal to the trust left
by his father; they cultivated the farm; they took care of the
family and made it possible for him to go away to college
for an education. The speaker wound up his story by de-
claring that under no circumstances would he be so ungrateful
as to leave any stone unturned to secure for those people every
privilege and right which law and democracy could offer. As
he reached his climax that audience of three hundred men not
only applauded, but broke forth in a spontaneous yell of ap-
proval of his sentiments. This example is typical of many
after the Civil War over the South. Similar cases of
loyalty are on record not simply from slavery and recon-
struction days, but from many a big and little enterprise in
many parts of the South today. In homes and elsewhere all
over this section Negroes are showing a loyalty which will
compel a grateful response no less than that called forth by
the speaker at the recent law and order meeting. It will
ultimately bear more substantial fruit than the applause of
audiences. |

But the fidelity of slaves and newly made freedmen is the
smaller part of the Negros contribution of loyalty. He has
shown the same spirit toward his country and his flag. When
the colonists fought the Indians for possession of early settle-
ments the Negro was there. When the colonial lovers of
liberty faced the British redcoats on Boston Common, Negroes
were there. When Washington and his men, with bleeding
feet, were treading Valley Forge and fighting the battles for
independence, the Negro was there. When the death struggle
was on to abolish slavery and preserve the union, lo! with
Shaw and Higginson, he was there.

In Cuba, in the Philippines, in Mexico and now, in France,
Negro men have shared every hardship, borne part of every

_ burden, and furnished their quota of lives that have lain

down in their last sleep in valiant soldiers graves.

Let us call history to witness the unique quality of this
Negro loyalty. These thousands of the best Negro men
have marched forth into the jaws of death and into the
mouth of hell to defend the liberty of their country, when
they knew full well that they and theirs had been repeatedly

poy ea
denied the full benefits of that very liberty they were trying
to defend. Thou angel of truth, when and where will
human kind outstrip such loyalty ?

Wait a moment! It is now being outdone! Not only
in the past have they rejoiced to fight and to die, but last
summer we had the unusual sight of men of this racemen
who by their excellence in physical examinations broke the
records of the War Departmentwe had the unusual sight
of these men and their friends conducting .a heated agitation
in order to be accorded the privilege of offering their bodies
and their brains upon the altar of their Country. Oh, muse
of history, scribe of human records, will you not find space
in the clear blue of our national skies to write the annals of
such a contribution to race adjustment?

These are some of the things which seem to me the Negro
can contribute for a peaceful, just adjustment of race rela-
tions. They are not all that may be named. But they
seem to me the most vital just now. They are what I would
call the seven angels of peace in race adjustments.

We are living today in a grand and awful time. No man
can be unmindful of how his every act affects the world. A
wild socialist murders a prince in Serbia and it furnishes the
torch which sets fire to the powder magazine of the armed
nations of the world.

Great opportunity, my friends, brings great responsibility
and calls for real contributions. The Negro has contrib-
uted in the past, he is contributing in the present, he can
contribute in the future. The sense of humor and the dra-
matic will help the world smile in the face of its troubles,
racial and otherwise. The philosophy of personal relations
instead of property relations will be a great gift in the ad-
justments of group interests and differences. The intellectual
and emotional products of music, poetry, essay and oratory
may lubricate the adjusted cogs and prevent race friction.
Faith in himself, faith in his white fellow citizens and faith
in the triumph of real democracy in America, and especially
in the South, is an indispensable contribution the Negro must
make. The spirit of tolerant enlightenment and co-operation
are hardly less important to enable the two races to go in and
out together in the brotherly walks of life. And we must
have leaders, intelligent leaders, well balanced and truly de-
voted to the cause of our achievement of a mans chance in
all the affairs of America. Above all, we must be loyal.
Loyalty to our leaders is indispensable.

ge

No man can ask more loyalty than the Negro has shown
the white man in the past. No country could expect more
loyalty than Negroes have shown in the past and are show-
ing in the present. We are confident of their loyalty in the
future.

The old order is changing, giving place to the new. God
is treading out the vintage of a new liberty. Let us re-
joice that the old relations of master and man, of king and
subject, of Kaiser or Caesar and people, is passing. We are
at the dawn of a new era. There will be better practice of
the equality of opportunity to all men. A mans a man, for
a iat.

In my closing paragraphs, I appeal to the strong white
race for a full, free chance for the Negro to make his full
contribution. What he has done so far has been under the
heaviest of handicaps. The ample page of knowledge rich
with the spoils of time has not been properly unrolled before
his eyes. The potential genius of his soul has been frozen
by the frigid currents of poverty and proscription. I plead
that the doors of economic and educational opportunities now
ajar be thrown wide open to him, that he may pour out these
latent gifts he possesses. Who knows but that he may take
his place as one of the ambassadors of peace and good will
to white and black and yellow and red and brown men in
South America, in Europe, in Asia, in Africa and in the
isles of the sea? The contributions the Negro has made are
only a prophecy of greater ones he can make to race adjust-
ment.

THE: PRINCIPEES: OF PEACE.

IsAAC FISHER,
University Editor, Fisk University.

There is a peace of the individual and there is a peace of
society. The individual has peace when he is free from the
disturbances of passions such as fear, terror, anger, hatred or
anxiety, and when he has that quiet conscience which gives
the beautiful peace of God.

The public has peace when there exists in the social body
that quiet, that order and that security which are guaranteed
by the laws of civilized society. Indeed, the law books de-

a es

&

fine peace as being public order, freedom from war, violence
or public disturbance.

It Is clear, from these definitions, that while the individual
may rid himself of the passions which disturb him, and be
at peace, he cannot of himself compel a single one of his
neighbors to refrain from the commission of acts which move
men to wrath, nor to perform any of the deeds which make
for harmony. If these results are accomplished at all, the
combined force of society must achieve them; for no one ies
no one social group, no one race alone can preserve sublig
order if several races dwell together. As a result of this
fact, man long ago began erecting governments to preserve
public peace; and Macauley was summarizing the views of

the leading philosophers when he declared that government

99

exists for the purpose of keeping the peace.

PUBLIC PEACE PRECEDES RACIAL PEACE.

And here we have the first requisite of peace in a civilized
community. To have harmony between clashing races in St
Petersburg, in Rome, in London, in Paris, or in Estill Gorince:
Tennessee, the governments existing in those places must Keep
the public peace, must preserve public order, must be. willing
and able to stand at the crossroads where law and order
meet anarchy and, with the upraised hand of organized gov-
ernment, say to any man about to commit crime, whatever his
standing, whatever his race or power, In the name of the
people and the majesty of the law, I command you to halt!

Tf this is not done, the forces of righteousness cannot mo-
bilize themselves rapidly enough to-check the more powerful
group before it strikes terror into the heart of the weaker
group and engenders such hatred and bitterness that the weaker
group finds it difficult to forget the past, accept conciliation
in the present, and in perfect tranquility prepare itself to
trust the future. Let us take the smoked glasses down from
our eyes so that we may see the facts as they are. If we
are discussing the adjustment of races in civilized communities
let us honestly and courageously face the truth that if Ane
persons, white people or black people, stand in fear of their
lives from any other more powerful race group, there can be
neither individual peace nor public tranquility until order is
restored and every man rests content in the belief that organ-
ized government with stern and impartial hands will repress
every attempt to override the majesty of the law. This is

fundamental, if we are discussing racial peace under civilized

government already established.

Legs

Let me illustrate this by a concrete example: One of the
most successful and respected colored citizens in Davidson
county was expressing the pleasure he felt in knowing that
at least some of the finer white citizens of Nashville have
taken steps to check the spread of mob rule. But, he said,
all of my very small children will be old men and women
before the time comes when officers of the law in the South
will refuse to surrender a Negro accused of crime to a
white mob which demands his life, or when a white jury
will acquit a Negro for protecting the honor of his home
if a white man wishes to despoil it. And just because I cannot
trust conditions here, I am going to leave the South just as
soon as I can dispose of my real property. I am afraid for
the future of my children. Here is a man who can be
convinced by nothing short of the actual triumph of law
over mob rule. There is no use to talk to him about the
reasons why the mob is master. He believes that his life is
not secure, and he plans to make it secure by moving.

IF NO PUBLIC PEACE, THERE IS NO GOVERNMENT.

But suppose the government of a community cannot keep
the peace; suppose the community is made up of such race
elements that when the wrath of one group waxes hot against
the other all the floodgates of social control break down and
the forces of organized government prove powerless to check
the angry uprising of one of these groups. What then?
Perhaps the answer will carry more weight if it is given in
the language of the United States Supreme Court. In Ex
Parte Siebold (100 U. S., 371, 395), the court answered
the argument that in certain cases the federal government was
powerless to compel respect for its authority, by using the fol-
lowing language:

We hold it to be an incontrovertible principle that the
government of the United States may, by physical force, ex-
ercised through its official agents, execute on every foot of
American soil the powers that belong to it. This necessarily
involves the power to command obedience to its laws, and
hence, the power to keep the peace to that extent. And then
the court added the following words, which answer the ques-
tions already asked: It must execute its powers, or it is no
government.

Let us keep the darkened glasses down from our eyes a little
while longer so that we may face this fact and conclusion:
If the organized forces of a community fails to execute its
powers and keep the peace, it is no government, and there

ayy as
will be little need to discuss the immediate question of racial
peace, for this cannot come so long as any two or more
races are permitted to vent their spleen against each other
unrestrained by the power of society operating through gov-
ernment; for the history of the world records no instance of
a community in which either different race groups or similar
race groups respected each others rights without being forced
to do so by the organized forces of society.

Public order and safety, then, are the first principles of
racial peace. I am not likely to attend a peace meeting
nor to subscribe and pledge my personal efforts to the pro-
gram constructed there if I fear that on my way thereto I
may be beaten with stripes and have no recourse at law; and
I am pretty certain to be beaten if all men know that it is
considered no breach of the peace to chastise me. These
are facts in China, where the yellow man rules; in Japan,
where the brown man rules; in Liberia, where the black man
controls, and these are facts in Memphis, Tenn., where the
white man is at the head of government.

BASIS OF GOOD GOVERNMENT.

If the government is weak, if the people have not the self-
control which is the basis of democratic government, the
remedy is pointed out in the bills of rights of the constitutions
of many of the American states. The famous ordinance of
1787 for the government of the Northwest Territory summed
up in a few words the remedy which a community must employ
when its government fails or refuses to function in public peace.
That ordinance contained these words: Religion, morality,
and knowledge being necessary to good government and the
happiness of mankind, schools and the means of education
shall forever be encouraged.

Since there can be no racial peace unless the government
functions well and keeps the public peace; and since the gov-
ernment will not function well unless knowledge and wisdom
and virtue are widely diffused throughout a commonwealth,
the next important principle of racial peace must be said to
be the education of all the people so that they may come into
the heritage of that knowledge and wisdom and virtue which
underlie efficient government. A concrete application of this
conclusion would be for the forward-looking citizens of any
state in which the machinery of law is repeatedly broken
down by the people to go to the legislature at every once
of its sessions and ask for more schools, and more schools, and
more schools, and a higher grade of educationone which con-

pale | aes

/

tains a more pervasive ethical element than is now true. They
should not let the lawmakers rest until provisions have been
made to force every white child into a school and to see that
every Negro child and every other child have equal chances
with all the rest for the education which every democratic
state owes to every child within its territory, and to its own
safety.

DIGEST OF PRINCIPLES OF PEACE-THE TWO *GOLDEN
RULES.

We are ready, now, to rise to the higher ground on which
peace can be promoted and the efforts of governments to se-
cure it rendered less difficult and trying. The formulas for
racial peace are found in the Golden Rule of the Old
Testament and in the Golden Rule of the New Testa-
ment. In Micah, the sixth chapter and the eighth verse, the
first rule is given as follows:

Eye hath shewed thee, O man, what is good: and what
doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justly, and to love
mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God. The Revised
Version changes justly to justice and mercy to kind-
ness: but the first version given is sufficient for the uses of
man.

Git of ike mouth of the Prince of Peace Himself there
fell the words of the second Golden Rule:

Therefore, all things whatsoever ye would that men should
do to you, do ye even so to them.

Summarizing now, and rearranging the order, we have
here the following principles of peace: (1) To walk humbly
with God; (2) to do justly; (3) to love mercy; and (4)

to do unto others as we wish to be done by.

RESULT OF BANISHING BIBLE FROM SCHOOLS.

All of the American commonwealths have been at great
pains to see that the religious element in their populations shall
never gain the ascendancy in matters of government. In the
early seventies this determination crystallized into a definite
movement to banish the Biblethe Book which contains the
most perfect rules of justice and equityfrom the public
schools of the land. The movement has been especially suc-
cessful, and although a few of the states resisted the propa-
ganda, we have come to such a state of ignorance of the
teachings of the Book divine that today lawmakers build their
statutes on man-made codes, because they do not know the

ae 0 ee
divine law, and because, as they say, that law is out-of-date
and is unsuited to the needs of civilized and progressive
races, although it is a very beautiful story book (>) for weaker
and belated races. The lawmakers feel especially grieved
that any great nation like Germany or Great Britain or the
United States should be expected to look into the Bible for
rules of conduct, when they are able to work their own sweet
will upon other peoples without let or hindrance, in spite of the
objections of some mythological God (>) who is said to
hate injustice and oppression, but who delivers the weak into
the hands of the strong.

THE MAN WHO FEARS GOD.

God knew that all peoples and all nations, as they come
to power, adopt such reasoning as that above, and so He
told Micah to stand before the sons of men and say to them,
Walk humbly with thy God. But what has this to do
with peace? This: When a man loves God and fears Him,
he tries to keep His commandments; and when his own con-
ceptions of what is right seem to be at fault, he turns to
the laws of God for guidance. No man who fears God can
ever feel safe in oppressing another man after reading these
words out of Gods Book: And I will come near to you
to judgment: and I will be a swift witness against . . .
those that oppress the hireling in his wages, the widow and
the fatherless, and that turn aside the stranger from his right,
and fear not me, saith the Lord of hosts (Malachi 3:5).
No man who loves God and fears Him can fail to be satis-
fied with this promise, made through Malachi to the right-
eous: Then they that feared the Lord spake often one to
another: and the Lord hearkened, and heard it, and a book
of remembrance was written before him for them that feared
the Lord and that thought upon His name. And they shall
be mine, saith the Lord of hosts, in that day when I make
up my jewels; and I will spare them as a man spareth his

own son that serveth him (Malachi 3: 16, 17).

All men desire immortality. No white man, no black
man, wants to be blotted out at the threshold of the grave.
It follows, then, that any man who hates his neighbor for
any cause either does not believe the Word of God or he
believes that the race to which he belongs is greater than God;
for, in language true and plain, it is written in the Scriptures
that whosoever hateth his brother is a murderer: and ye
know that no murderer hath eternal life abiding in him (1

John 4:15).
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FEAR OF GOD IS BASIS OF RACIAL PEACE.

Let us have the end of the whole matter right here in the
heart of the discussionthe basic principle of peace between
the races is the fear of God.

If a Negro does not fear God and believe that every white
persons life is sacred in the sight of his Maker and was
put here to attain most perfect development, and that he must
not seek to arrest the growth of that life, you cannot argue
that belief into him; you cannot shoot it into him; you cannot
hang it into him; nay, as God liveth, you cannot burn nor tor-
ture it into him; but, in full accord with his opportunities and
powers, he will harrass and obstruct the Caucasian whenever
and wherever he can, and go to his death, dying as the fool
dieth.

If a white man does not fear God and believe that every
Negro was put into this world neither to serve him nor to be
his footstool, but to have, like himself, most complete develop-
ment in keeping with divine plan; if a white man does not
believe that his power to rule comes from a power greater
than himself; if he does not believe God when He declares
that by Me kings reign, and princes decree justice; by Me
princes rule, and nobles, even all the judges of the earth;
if he does not believe God when He speaks through Isaiah
and says, The Lord will enter into judgment with the an-
cients of His people and the princes thereof, and that He
will ask these rulers, What mean ye that ye grind the faces
of the poor? and that in pronouncing judgment upon a city
in which such wickedness ruled He declared, Her gates
shall lament and mourn; and she, being desolate, shall sit
upon the ground; I say, if a white man does not believe
these things, you cannot legislate them into his belief; you
cannot reason them into his understanding; you cannot condi-
tion his daily conduct with weaker peoples upon these teach-
ings; but, like the whole tribe of man from the most ancient
of days, he will continue to exercise power without equity,
and, looking about him at his own great success, will ask:
Ts not this great. Babylon that I have built? until God,
moving in His own good time, as He always does, after
man has had his chance to be righteous, rebukes the arrogant
question by saying to him, as he said to the great ruler of
Babylon: O king, thy kingdom is departed from thee .
until thou know that the Most High ruleth in the kingdom
of men! ;

Take the gloves off, and let us have the truth. If the
Negro and the white man do not fear God, you might just

eee Fe
as well burn all of your schoolhouses and your libraries and
dissolve all of your world legislatures, for there never will
be racial peace in any part of the earth. The world war
in Europe is the complete answer to all hopes of peace built
upon any principle, upon any achievement, upon any wealth,
upon any power without resting them all upon the rock of all
peacethe fear of God. But if a man fears God and walks
humbly before Him, we are not disturbed by thoughts of
injustice; for we know that when such a man comes into
controversy with his neighbor and does not exactly perceive
the course of duty, he will turn to the law of God, where are
written these words: Whatsoever ye would that men should
do to you, do ye even so to them.

What a simple rule of conduct for all men in all times!
How shall I deal with the white man dext door? I have
not all the facts. Very well; I must treat him in this case
as I would wish him to treat me. What is the extent of
the mercy, the consideration, the courtesy which the white
man should extend to the Negro? Just what the white man
would want the Negro to extend to him were the conditions
reversed.

JUSTICE.

Let us examine the matter of justice in just one case. I[
believe that I am safe in saying that ten out of every five
NegroesI mean ten out of every five, whatever that means
feel that the majority of their white neighbors are conscious-
ly unjust to them. I do not believe that even the majority
of white people deny that there is good ground for this belief.
I further believe that those who practice injustice to the Negro
justify it on the ground that the interests of the white race
are more precious before God and more necessary to the prog-

ress of the world than are the interests of the Negro. The

colored people, of course, do not believe this. What are we
to do with such a clash of opinions?

INIQUITY OF THE JIM CROW CAR.

Take the Jim Crow car, particularly on the railroads.
I take this because it is the perfect representation of the spirit
of caste in America. If we omit the insecurity with which
a Negro holds his life, nothing has caused so many colored
people to sin and curse in their hearts as the patent injustice
with which this system operates. Under it a twenty-dollar
ticket means to any white person the right to ride in the
finest day coach on the Southwestern Limited to Washington,
the right to have meals properly served at meal times, and

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not after all other passengers of another race have been served;
the right to purchase the right to have all of his family pro-

vided with a comfortable place in which to sleep and rest

at night; and the protection of every employee on the train
and of every peace officer in each of the states through which
this train passes from Florida to Washington.

The Negros twenty-dollar ticket means the right to use
the worst day coach on the train; the right to be bullied and
annoyed by the train butcher; the right to have his women
insulted without redress; the right to be ejected from a dining
car or a sleeping car; the right to be fined for disorderly con-
duct if he objects to having his wife sleep doubled up on a
seat in a day coach, or to purchasing cold, concentrated dirt
for food along the road; and the right to have every employee
of the train and every peace officer of the states through which
the train passes between Florida and Washington enforce both
the spirit and letter of the caste system under which these in-
justices are done. And to further embitter the colored peo-
ples cup, practically all of the organs of publicity seek to
convince the world that the Negro has no desire for the com-
forts of travel; he doesnt get tired, he doesnt get hungry,
he does not love his wife and children and desire to procure
comforts for them; he simply wants to be in the car with
white folks and have social equality. And then there is
a swearing by all the gods at once that heaven and earth
shall pass away before he shall have social equality.

The Negro says that this is not only an injustice, but it is
an attempt to write him down to infamy by showing that he
is so degraded that he cannot share the decencies of travel
without polluting his fellow white travelers, although the Negro
servant-nurse, if it is clear that she is a servant, will not pol-
lute white people and may ride in the Pullman with her
mistress. I would misuse this opportunity and be false to
the principles of peace if I did not pause here and say that
so long as the Jim Crow car continues to be operated, there
may be calm and quiet in the relations between the races, but
the two never will be at peace. I wish I could tell the truth
and report here that peace can be purchased while the system
I mention continues in force. As I travel backward and forth
through the states and hear the Negroes pour out the
concentrated bitterness and hatred against all those who stand
back of the Jim Crow car and all that it stands for, and
note the angry impatience with which they listen to any Negro
who tries to soften their resentment against this system, I know
that I make the highest contribution that I can make to the

ay ea
cause of peace when | speak to my white friends of the South,
with whom I have lived all my life, and say that there will
never be any peace in the Negros heart so long as the caste
system here, of which the Jim Crow car is an expression,
bespeaks the contempt and disdain of the white people for the
colored people.

The Negro will keep the law, but each generation of his
children will grow more embittered. Ye shall know the
truth, and the truth shall make you free. This is the dis-
couraging truth, much as I regret to state it here; but let us
pray God that its statement will help to free us from race
turmoil and hatred.

Touching the Jim Crow car, a great numberthe ma-
jority of white people here, I believesay that they have no
ill-will against the Negro; but that the enforced separation
on trains and in other public places is necessary to preserve the
mental attitudes which will discourage the social familiarity
which they feel will lead to a breaking down of the bars
which separate the two races; and they claim that since it
is clear to them that God made the Caucasian superior to the
Negro, the mixing of their blood would be a world calamity.
I believe this is a fair statement of the position of many of
our white friends.

Now here are two rather decent race groups holding an-
tagonistic views on a very delicate question, which makes men
bitter and brutal. How can justice be done? The white
mans logic leads to the conclusion above, which makes the
Negro hate him; and the Negros logic leads to his contrary
conclusion, and makes the white man hate the Negro for not
cheerfully accepting the white mans logic. How can we
have peace? Apparently, a very successful way is to have
the stronger race force acceptance of its logic through physical
power. But such acquiescence is not peace; it is not that state
in which individuals are free from the disturbance of passions;
but it is the calm and quiet of the inactive volcano in whose
bowels, through the years, there smoulder the bitter fires of
resentment.

Neither the white man nor the black man wants that kind
of peace. There is but one other remedynamely, that each
race look into the law of God and refer the question of the
**Jim Crow car and all that it stands for to the rule, What-
soever ye would that men do unto you, do ye even so unto
them; and if personal and racial reasons will not incline one
to follow this law, let the race so halting read again the words,

Walk humbly with thy God. 6
Mau) alate

THE NEGRO NOT FREE FROM BLAME,

The Negro, while not armed with the instrument which
makes injustice easyi. e., the power of civil government
commits most frequently the sin of injustice in his thoughts.
He has come to the point where he is altogether too suspicious
of all white people. For example, while he refuses to believe
that the majority of his white neighbors who segregate him,
lynch him, and deny him the right of suffrage have any real
goodwill for him, he does not even trust the smaller number

- whom he knows as God-fearing people, who have personally

interested themselves in his welfare. And, in his heart of
hearts, he is inclined to set them out of his confidence. In a
large measure, he assumes the same attitude to many of those
who come from the North to work with him, to grieve with
him, to rejoice with him and to share his segregation with him.
For a long time he restricts them to the zones of suspicion.
He asks the southern white man who is fair and kind to enter
into warfare with those white neighbors who are not; he asks
the northern white man to have no fellowship with his south-
ern brother so long as injustices continue in the South, forget-
ting that the northern white man who casts his lot with the
Negro, even though it be under the imperative commands of
Christianity, voluntarily stamps himself as a socially undesira-
ble among many of his own people. Very unkindly we want
the southern white friend to go the whole distance in fighting
for racial justice, even though it means the ostracism of his wife
and children; we want the northern white man to go the whole
distance in opposing a view of race relations different from
his own, although it will mean greater social isolation for him
and, perhaps, personal danger.

I ask the Negro today to be just to the white man, also,
and observe the rule: Whatsoever ye would that men should
do to you, do ye even so unto them.

RACES MUST CEASE FROM EVIL-FORGET THE PAST.

This Golden Rule requires as a condition of peace that
if the Negro is doing evil to the white man, he refrain from
his evil ways; it demands that if the white man is wronging

the Negro that he cease to do evil. There is no need to

discuss peace if acts which disturb the peace continue to be
committed.

In the next place, there must be a willingness to forget the
past, and let bygones be bygones. But this will never be
unless the two races cease from doing evil.

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SOWING DISRESPECT TO REAP RESPECT ?

Again, there must be mutual confidence and mutual respect.
Neither will ever be possible until there is a cessation from
evil; and there will be no cessation from evil until and unless
the white man and the Negro learn to fear God.

In the matter of respect, let us take the gloves off again and
remark that under our present social system, however desirable
it may be, and however well it functions in preventing social
familiarity, the two races in the South never will respect each
other. However ethically desirable it may be to secure this
respect, it is a psychological impossibility. Any system which
trains a Negro boy to keep his seat in a street car while a
white woman with a baby is forced to stand, but which
permits him to offer his seat to any colored woman, teaches
that boy that white motherhood, white womanhod, is not one
of the things to which his respect must flow; and unless this
boy is one of the fortunate few colored youth to have splendid
home training, and a much better education than is genevally
given to the colored children of the South, he will carry into
manhod this lack of fundamental respect, this mental attitude
which makes him feel that there can be nothing in a white
womans helplessness nor in her womanhod which makes any
claim upon his respect; andlet me repeat itif he is igno-
rant, you cannot shoot this respect into him, you cannot burn
it into him. I am not talking about the brand of respect
which springs from fear. I am talking about the respect
which makes one man appreciate the fine qualities of another
man and wish him happiness and contentment. If the Negro
is to have this kind of respect, he must be trained to acts of
gentleness, not only to the women of his own race, but to
all women of all races. This statement rests upon the sound-
est psychological principles.

Let us pass on. No system which teaches a white boy
through the impressionable years of his life to sit while a
colored mother or any other colored woman stands in a car,
but which regards it as an unpardonable sin for him to do
so while a white woman stands, can be expected to produce
very many men with the kind of respect for colored woman-
hood which would move them to vote in a jury to send a
white man to the penitentiary for violating the age of consent
if the victim happened to be a colored girl.

Here are a few fundamentals: If there is no respect, there
will be. no consideration; if no consideration, there will be no

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justice; if no justice, there will be hatred; and if there 1s
hatred, there will be retaliation and, hence, there can be no
peace.

INDIVIDUAL PEACE.

There is a peace which we have not discussed, but which
bears directly on this whole subject of racial peacenamely,
the peace of the individual. It comes from a good conscience
and a sense of ones own excellence.

The Negro who strives to be a Christian gentleman, who
lives in communion with the thoughts of God, who makes him-
self the heir and respository of the accumulated knowledge and
culture and beauty and fineness of the world, comes, after a
while, to a position of lofty character where he feels superior
to any restrictions of caste and can look down with pity upon
anyone who attempts to make him think meanly of himself.
Such a man is beyond the power of caste laws to humiliate,
for he is above the things which are petty and little and mean
and, being so elevated, has the perfect peace of God which

passeth all understanding. Such a man can never become

so bitter that he would refuse to give bread to a hungry white
child, although its father was a leading segregationist; that
he would withhold assistance from a white woman in distress,
although she was an exponent of caste; that he would refuse
shelter to a storm-tossed white man. Such a man grieves in
his heart for the future and the happiness of every white child
who, through law, custom or precept is taught to be less than
his highest: self to every Negro with whom he deals. Such a
man has the perfect peace of God, which passeth all under-
standing. Such a man any one of us can become. Such a
man will help to bring racial peace, because he lives in an
atmosphere higher than that of race hatred, and, knowing that
it will be better bye and bye, will continue to work for peace
without losing his faith and embittering his heart. ace dis-
criminations may annoy such a man; petty insults may some-
times grieve his soul, but they cannot break his spirit; for he
belongs to the eternal ages and is high above all things that
are petty and mean.

Let us pass on. The white man who lives as in the pres-
ence of God, walking humbly before His throne, trying to
keep the Golden Rule by acts of kindness and justice to ally
who looks behind him and sees a record of worth-while achieve-

ments: who remembers how great is the power which he wields -

from pole to pole; and who believes that God will punish him
for a misuse of that powersuch a man cannot be unjust to
a Negro; for he has the perfect peace of God which passeth

ONG Gees
all understanding; and he is too big to be small, too gentle to
be cruel, too civilized to be barbarous, too much of a Chris-
tian gentleman to be anything else, and too sympathetic to close
up the bowels of his mercy when he deals with a race which
cannot strike back. Such a white man can work for peace,
for he is higher than the fear that the Negro will outstrip him
in the race set for the sons of men. He, too, belongs to the
eternal ages of God.

BRIDGING THE CHASMS OF RACE.

Men like these will stretch their hands acress the chasms.

of race and will learn to know each other and, knowing each
other, they will appreciate each other, and, appreciating each
other, they will want to stand close to each, and, standing close
they will help each other.

If there is to be any peace, it will come neither through the
fear which the blasting wrath of the white mans physical
power creates nor through the soul-destroying hatred in which
the Negro often sits down and wishes to curse the day of his
birth. Let us have the truth. It cannot come this way. It
will come, if it come at all, through an increase in the number
of Negroes and whites who have this inward peace which
springs from good consciences and belief in their own personal
excellence, and who live in a higher moral atmosphere than
that in which their neighbors dwell. Hate solves no problems;
revenge solves no problems; but love, good will, and the
justice which they beget will make peace wherever the sons
of men dwell.

Some day the angel of love will touch us allwhite people
and black people alikewith the wand of understanding and
mutual forbearance, and sympathy and justice; and we shall
know each other better when the mists of fear and suspicion
roll away, as roll away they must when white people and
their darker brothers who live on earth but think with the
infinite decree that the day of bitterness and injustice is past.

THE CONCLUSION OF THE WHOLE MATTER.

What are the principles of peace? To do justly, to love
mercy, to walk humbly with God, to do unto others as we
would have them do unto us. But men are not inclined to
follow any such high ideals of conduct. I am not talking
about what men are inclined to do. I am laying down the
principles which underlie peace. [hey are principles for
white men; they are principles for black men. But will it
not be better to have men agree to accept a less acceptable

78 ,

P .

code of conduct, since they are unwilling to follow the ones
laid down by the Judge of the world? -I was not asked to
discuss the temporary measures which produce calm and quiet
for a while. My subject is the principles of peacethe prin-
ciples which white men and black men must finally accept if
they are not to hate and fight each other to the end of time.
Let us hear the conclusion of the whole matter: Fear God
and keep His commandments, for this is the whole duty of
man. If the white man plans to do his duty by doing
less than this, he will not accomplish peace, but will set up and

.foster conditions which will force him to live always with the

sword in his hand. If the Negro expects peace without going
the whole distance in doing his duty by the white people, he
will fail to increase the peace of the land.

AN INVITATION TO HIGHER GROUND.

But will a day ever come when man will do unto his
brother as he would be done by, when man will fear God
and keep His commandments? I do not doubt it in the least.
I shall be gone and my dust forgotten before the world sees
the dawning of the morning of that bright and happy day
when all the people shall have justice; but as I look about me
and see the world-changes which betoken a new order and
a new day, when I look me back over the stubbornness and
arrogance of the various races of the world and see how mirac-
ulously God has breathed upon those peoples and nations who
defied His commands: that they deal equitably with their
neighbors and how their glory has departed, and how they
live today only in the memories of men, their power broken,
their pomp a desolationas I see how God has ridden glo-
riously in the earth, vindicating His justice and avenging those
who trust Him, I feel certain that the perfect day is certain
to comethat day when the principles of Jesus shall condition
the conduct of men; for of the Prince of Peace who came to
teach men the gospel of love and equity, the Prophet Isaiah
declares that He shall not fail nor be discouraged, till he have
set justice in the earth; and the isles shall wait on his law.

To the Negro who grovels in the mire and valley of re-
sentment and hatred and discouragement, I say: The morn
is bright with promise. Leave the past behind. Look up and
trust. Do you whole duty every day. Keep pure in thought;
and put your hands in the Masters hands, as did your slave
parents who, through 250 years, while many believed that God
had forgotten the race to which they belonged, waited patiently
on Him until a day when their cries moved Him on His throne,

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and He girded on His armor and rode gloriously in the earth
and broke the chains of the defenseless slaves and liberated
the souls of their powerful masters. Wait, I say, on God.

To the white people of the South, I say, come up with us
as we strive to climb to the mountain top of goodwill and love
and justiceup where the air of brotherhood is pure and
wholesome. The prophets of the ages gone, given by your
- race to human history, bid you to come up; the poets whose
songs have sweetened the world call you to come; the painters
and musicians and all the rare souls whom you have con-

tributed to the happiness of mankind are beckoning you to the

high ground on which peace is natural and normal; and Jesus
begs you to come up.

We have walked together here in Dixie Land; weve toiled
together; we have grieved together; we have made mistakes
and dragged each other down together; we have achieved less
than our highest selves together; and yet our dead sleep their
last sleep in the common soil of the South together; the mira-
cle of birth continues to be wrought out for the two races to-
gether, and, as individuals, we have had some beautiful con-
verse and conversation together. As your hearts beat true,
as our hearts respond to yours, as the dear heart of God
throbs for all the children of the world, we can come to per-
fect peace together if only we will.

In the last analysis, the white people of the South hold the
key to racial peace, although the Negro must do his full duty
in every way, in every direction. To the strong white people
of the South, let me remark that the heart of the Negro longs
to be at peace with them; and if the darker race can feel that
they are to share the rights of life, liberty and the pursuits of
happiness right here in the South, where the race has lived so
long, where their labors have help to enrich the soil and
where they are bound with ties as strong as the graveif this
confidence ever comes into their hearts, we shall find them
saying, as did the beautiful Ruth to the mother-in-law, who
had been kind to her: Entreat me not to leave thee, or to
return from following after thee: for whither thou goest, I
will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge; thy people shall
be my people, and thy God my God. Where thou diest will
I die, and there will I be buried: the Lord do so to me, and
more also, if aught but death part thee and me.

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