Stephen Graham

“ To-day in America, and especially in the South, there is a hereditary taint in the mind derived from slavery and it is to be observed in the descendants of the masters as much as in the descendants of the slaves. It would be a mistake to think of this American problem as exclusively a Negro problem. It is as necessary to study the white people as the black. The children of the owners and the overseers and the slave drivers are not the same as the children of families where no slaves were ever owned. Mastery of men and power over men have been bred in their blood. ”

“ As I walked along the red road betwixt the fluffy cotton fields from village to village and from mansion to mansion, those stately farmhouses of the South, I was always on the lookout for the oldest folk along the way. The young ones knew only of the war that was just past, the middle-aged thought of the old Civil War as somewhat of a joke, but the only thing the old folks will never laugh over is the great strife which with its before and after made the very passion of their lives. ”

“ Thus the great flag is flouted, and it is possible to imagine the cynical mirth with which the ecstasy of the Negroes following the Army of Liberation in 1864 might be compared with the hilarity of the Southern mob in 1920 watching the ex-slave slowly burning to death on their accusation and yelling for mercy when there was no merciful ear to hear.
I suppose nothing begets hate so readily as cruelty. That is why in all wars there is so much mongering of atrocities: one side tries to find out all the cruelties and barbarities committed by the other just to stir up its own adherents. ”

“ Are there not numbers of honest, law-abiding citizens of Georgia who know that I am telling God’s truth, and who will protest against this injustice to the Negro? Is there not a just and fearless man on the bench in this State who will have the courage to announce that there shall be no difference in his court between the white man and the colored man? ”

“ War hate still bred hate, and the lust of cruelty called into being its monster progeny of revenge.
The fanatic who murdered Lincoln in doing so struck the whole of his own people. The planters who burned the runaway slaves, the soldiers who during the war put to death the Negro prisoners who fell into their hands, the actions generally of the embittered, brought the calamity of retaliatory spite not only upon themselves but upon the innocent and the just and the kind. A policy of punishment and not of reconciliation ruled at Washington, and the white South suffered. ”

“ And in America one has to reckon, not only with the Puritan fervor of New England, but with the determination and turbulence and group instinct of the more cavalier spirit of the South. Though heat makes the Southern women languid and the Southern men fiery and quick of temper, it does not seem to make them weaker. On the whole, the Southerner seems to have a stronger will than the Northerner, and despite the exuberance of North and West, and a flood of contrary ideas and sentiments, the Southerner remains, as it were, eternally incapable of being suppressed. ”

“ The ballot box with all its absurdity seems nevertheless our only means of carrying on in freedom. It would be wrong to grant the suffrage to the millions of savages under British rule in Africa, because they could not use it. And it was wrong to enfranchise Negrodom in America with a stroke of the pen after the Civil War. It has done the Negroes more harm than good.
To have such a grievance as to be legally enfranchised and yet physically denied the use of the vote is, of course, great harm. It affects the social mind. It makes bitterness and brews agitation. ”

“ I do not think the white South will be able to avert the wrath of God by machine guns, nor will it quell the Negro by force once the Negro moves from the depths of his being. Better than believe in meeting the great wrath is to be advised betimes and mend one’s ways. Was not the Civil War a sufficient bloodletting? Could not the lesson be learned?
It is certainly in vain to work directly against Du Bois when his power as a leader of revolt could be removed utterly by stopping the lynching. ”

“ The black vote was exploited by political charlatans; Negroes did not vote, they were voted, and then a way was made out of injustice to put the white man and ex-master of slaves in the right again. For wrong though the South had been, the war should still have left the educated white man in authority and not put him under the heel of the illiterate. The poor slaves just freed, but not educated, not blown upon by the winds of culture, not sunned in America’s bright moral sun, were in no position to vote upon America’s destiny or to take a directing hand in her affairs. ”

“ First of all the American Negro is the élite, the aristocracy of Liberia. He is taking upon himself the immense task of educating the Negro masses of the interior. In this and in commerce and in the establishment of law and order, Liberia is very successful. America and American ideals are a gospel to the Liberian Negroes. Never a word is said of the injustices and sufferings which attend Negro life in the States, but on the contrary America is regarded as a Negro Paradise. When America declared war on Germany it was the joy of Liberia to declare war also, and her war effort was remarkable. ”

“ Before concluding, I wish to ask Jean Gordon just why it is she and the women of the South are so bitterly opposed to giving suffrage to Negro women? Do they fear us? Yea, they need to fear us, for we have made up our minds that we are going to help our men of the South get their rights, and Jean Gordon, being a woman, is fully aware that when a woman wills a thing, it is as good as done. The Negro men are going to come out on top, and their women are going to see to it. ”

“ On each side Atlanta’s skyscrapers climb heavenward in severe lines, and where heaven should be the sky signs twinkle. Every volt that can be turned into light is being used. The shops and the stores and the cinemas are dazzling to show what they are worth. The sidewalks are thronged with Southern youth whose hilarious faces and gregarious movements show a camaraderie one would hardly observe in the colder North. Jaunty Negro boys mingle with the crowd and are mirthful among themselves—as well dressed as the Whites, sharing in the “record trade” and the boom of the price of cotton. ”

“ It is a curious anomaly that a very short while after the Declaration of Independence the land from which America separated became free of slavery, and the British flag pre-eminently the flag of freedom. But America, freed though she had become from political interference on the part of Britain, nevertheless inherited Negro slavery; and the economic prosperity of at least one-half of the country was founded on the most hideous bondage in world history. Those who had fled Europe to escape tyrants had themselves, under force of circumstances, become tyrants. ”

“ For while a man is a slave he is learning in one way to be a master. A slave’s children are more ready to be tyrannous than the children of one who never has been a slave. When a slave is being flogged he is learning racially how to flog when he gets a chance. His children will have a flogging spirit in them. When he is being tortured he is learning how to torture.
The Anglo-Saxon looks upon animals as friends and equals. He loves his horse and his dog, he honors the fox and the bear. Not so the Negro, the Russian peasant, the Jew. They have an attitude toward the animals which is quite other. ”

“ Vicksburg is a beautiful city, built on a steep cliff, continually in sight of the broad, brown, passive streams of the Delta and the strips of forest which break up the waters. Above it all are the beautiful lawns and terraces of the National Cemetery rising from the Mississippi shore, and the dead lie in view, as it were, of the broad loveliness of the river. Sixteen thousand Americans hallow the soil. ”

“ I was on South Street, in Philadelphia; watched the well-paid artisans and laborers at the docks of Baltimore, visited there the polite homes of the colored working class, cleaner, richer, cozier than that of the average British workman on Tyneside or London Docks. I climbed the Lincoln Heights to talk to Nanny Burroughs and see her good training college for colored women there; was at Howard University and talked with black and gentle Professor Miller and with the pale and intellectual Emmett Scott. ”

“ It has a glamour; it lures. There the orange grows and there are palms; there is a hotter sun and brighter flowers. Human beings there, one surmises, have a more romantic disposition and warmer imagination. Reposing on the vast feudalism of Negro labor there is a more stately way of living, life is more spacious. And at the resorts on the coast of Florida and the Gulf of Mexico a great number of people live for pleasure and happiness, and not for business and ambition. ”

“ It is appalling to hear a Negro say to a horse struggling with a heavy load: “I’ll take a stick and beat you to death,” and to realize that the voice of the tyrannous master is being repeated as by a human phonograph. If the American Negroes are more cruel to animals, though quick to understand their ways, it is because they conceive of themselves as masters and the animals as their slaves. ”

“ The first Negro slaves were brought up the James River in Virginia before the Mayflower arrived, and as Negro orators say to-day, “If being a long while in this country makes a good American, we are the best Americans that there are.” Slavery had grown to vast proportions by the time of the war against Britain. New America in 1783, standing on the threshold of the modern era, inherited a most terrible burden in her millions of slaves. It was a burden that was growing into the live flesh of America, and no one dared face at that time the problem of getting free of it. ”

“ I set off to study the ex-slave because the civilized world is threatened by what may be called a vast slaves’ war. In Russia the grandchildren of the serfs have overthrown those who were once their masters, and have taken possession of the land and the state; in Germany Spartacus has arisen to overthrow the military slavery of Prussianism; and the wage slaves are rising in every land. There is a vast resentment of lower orders against upper orders, of the proletarians, who have nothing and are nothing, against those who through inheritance or achievement have reached the ruling class. ”

“ It is not the lynching crowd on whom vengeance will ultimately be taken. The Negro mob, when it rises, may easily join with the lynchers and make common cause against those who should have administered the law, and against those who have stood idly by. In those days we may see the ugly crowd making its way to the Pilate governors, who so often wash their hands, and beating them to death and burning their wives. That is the real movement. There is nothing very reasonable in it, but the risen mob is not guided by logic. ”

“ He said, “I think the time has come for the Negro to amass wealth; it’s the only thing that counts in America.” He thought the League of Nations might help the Negro if its representatives ever met at Washington. There would be Frenchmen and Englishmen and Italians, and, being so near to the South, it would be a shame to America if lynchings took place while they were sitting. As it was, the Negro South was a sort of skeleton cupboard which must not be exposed. ”

“ It seems rather strange that lynching crowds allow themselves to be photographed. Men and women and children in hundreds are to be seen in horrible pictures. One sees the summer mob all in straw hats, the men without coats or waistcoats, the women in white blouses, all eager, [224] some mirthful, some facetious. You can upon occasion buy these photographs as picture postcards. The people are neither ashamed nor afraid. ”

“ The rightness of the action can be argued. But what of the state of heart of a mob of a thousand, watching a Negro burning to death, listening happily to his yells and crying out to “make him die slow”? It is an appalling revelation of the devil in man.
And despite the fact that such cruelty agonizes the mind of the tender-hearted and sympathetic, [16] we must remain tolerant in judgment. We must not tolerate intolerance; in all other respects we must be tolerant. ”

“ As long as America with her ideals was enough unto herself the Negro question was strictly her affair. But when she takes the moral leadership of the civilized world it becomes to a certain extent every one’s affair.
The point is that America as a whole cannot afford to tolerate what is done locally in particular States. It is not a matter of non-interference from Washington in the local affairs of Georgia and Mississippi and the rest. The baleful happenings in these States rob Americans in other States of their good name, and spoil America’s reputation in the world. ”

“ As their orators are proud to declaim—the only civilized man to accompany Peary to the actual North Pole was his trusted servant, Matt Henson, a Negro. To some delicate Negroes, no doubt, a severe climate would be fatal, but that is true for Whites as well as Negroes. On the whole, the Northern air seems to be good for the Negro if he can stand it. The Negroes of New York and Chicago and Boston, and the Canadian Negroes, are firmer in flesh and in will than those who live in the South. And they are certainly more energetic. They yield more hope for the race as a whole than do the others. ”

“ Every large city in America has its Negro theatre or music hall or cinema shows. The drama could become an organ of racial self-expression, [80] and could give voice to the hopes and aspirations and sorrows of the colored people in a very moving way. I think such a drama would prove highly original. Comedy would be conceived in a different spirit. So far from the Negro imitating the white man, we should all be found imitating him—as we already imitate him in our dances and music. The new Negro humor would infect the whole Western world. ”

“ Cruelty is in man. The planters did the natural thing with the slaves who came into their power. The white South would slip into the same way of life again to-day if slavery could be introduced. What is more, you and I, and every man, unless he were of an exceptional nature, would succumb to the system and disgrace ourselves with similar cruelty. A demon not altogether banished still lurks in most of us and can easily be brought back. ”

“ In viewing the whole situation one is apt to underestimate the unhappiness of slavery and to magnify the unhappiness of the present era of freedom. It is blessed to be free. Even to be the worst possible peon is far removed from slavery. The great significance of the Emancipation is that the Negro slaves were set free—free for anything and everything in the wide world. In the prison house of a national institution of slavery there was no hope, no sense of the ultimate possibilities latent in a man. [186] But with freedom every baby became a potential Alexander. ”

“ A long plank is thrown out, and then commences the cakewalk of the Negro “rousters” carrying out all manner of goods—in one place it is materials for the building of a church—and bringing back cotton bales or whatever else may be waiting for us. It is a sight at which one could gaze spellbound for hours; for the Negroes keep in step and seem listening to an inaudible music. ”

“ As for having anything to fear from the educated Negro vote, there is of course one matter of anxiety. The Negro would be bound to fight for social justice, and violence would be done to racial prejudice.
The South is, however, determined that the Negro shall never vote again. Year by year the colored people as a whole grow in intelligence, in capacity, and in the number of its intelligentsia, but the South is not moved. It sees no explosion in the future, and makes no provision for one—will not, till the explosion comes. ”

“ When a General Dyer uses the machine-gun argument, or a mob of dockers fall foul of Negro immigrants at Cardiff or Liverpool, America smiles and says, “You also?” When there are reports of constant trouble in South Africa someone else says, “So you cannot get on with them either?” and when one is burned to death in Georgia, South Africa says, “So you burn them to death, eh?”
Out of a cycle of happenings is derived the thought: No one can afford to feel virtuous about the Negro. ”

“ America is a living reproof of Europe, and it has been generally conceived of as a land where men should suffer no encroachment upon their personal liberty, where they should reap duly the fruits of their labors, where no man should sap their rugged independence or infringe upon the sovereign equality of their social rights, where government should be entirely by consent of the governed, not handed down from above as from superior beings or masters, but controlled from below, from the broad base of toiling humanity. ”

“ It never occurred to them that one who doubted the wisdom of lynching might be actuated by sympathy or at least apprehensive for them.
I felt sorry for the white women of the South; there will some day be a terrible reckoning [226] against them. Their honor and safety are being made the pretext for terrible brutality and cruelty. Revenge, when it gains its opportunity, will therefore wreak itself upon the white woman most. Because in the name of the white woman they justify burning Negroes at the stake to-day, white women may be burned by black mobs by and by. ”