Nearer and Nearer the Precipice
by VIRGINIUS DABNEY
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A SMALL, group of Negro agitators and another small group of white rabble-rousers are pushing this country closer and closer to an interracial explosion which may make the race riots of the First World War and its aftermath seem mild by comparison. Unless saner counsels prevail, we may have the worst internal clashes since Reconstruction, with hundreds, if not thousands, killed and amicable race relations set back for decades. There may also be far-reaching and heavily adverse effects upon the colored peoples of China, India, and the Middle East — peoples whose attitude can be of crucial importance to the Allies in the war.
Extremist Negro leaders and Negro newspapers in this country are demanding an overnight revolution in race relations. A. Philip Randolph, president of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and national organizer of the " March-on-Washington Movement,” continued to make plans for the march despite warnings that sanguinary encounters are to be expected if colored people converge on the national capital from all directions for the purpose of forcing concessions. Mr. Randolph said recently: —
“If the President does not issue a war proclamation to abolish Jim Crow in Washington, the District of Columbia, and all government departments and the armed forces, colored people are going to march; and we don’t give a damn what happens. . . . Rather that we die standing upon our feet fighting for our rights than to exist upon our knees begging for life.”
The author of this peremptory demand on Mr. Roosevelt, who has done more for the colored people than any other occupant of the White House in three quarters of a century, expanded his program to include the abolition of racial segregation throughout the United States, absolute enforcement of the Fifth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments, and elimination of the poll tax. He has now abandoned plans lor an “immediate” march on Washington in favor of a “pressure campaign to force the government to make some drastic changes in its treatment of the Negro.” For postponing the march he has been belabored by the Pittsburgh Courier, one of the most radical of the Negro newspapers.
Consider, too, the present position of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Roy Wilkins, its assistant secretary, said in the keynote address to the organization’s annual convention at Los Angeles in July that “we are determined to be forever through with the status quo.”He added that the Negro and the white must be placed “on a plane of absolute political and social equality.” Prolonged cheers and applause interrupted him.
Over against these and similar declarations from colored leaders, organizations, and newspapers in all parts of the United States may be placed those of such Southern whites as Governor Eugene Talmadge of Georgia and Governor Frank Dixon of Alabama. In his lately concluded and unsuccessful campaign for re-election, Talmadge deliberately fanned the flames of race prejudice for political purposes. The commander of the State Guard, a Talmadge appointee, publicly ordered that organization to be on the alert against racial disorders, saying that “an unusual number of assault cases and attempts to assault white ladies have been reported.”Neither the FBI nor any other responsible agency in Georgia had heard of the episodes referred to. Nor had any responsible person or agency been able to identify efforts in Georgia to have whites and Negroes educated in the same schools and colleges, although Talmadge sought to gain votes by alleging over and over that such efforts were being made by his political enemies. Talmadge’s henchmen organized in October a new secret society called “The Vigilantes, Inc.” Described by its founders as “purely eleemosynary, patriotic, social, and benevolent,” this society, restricted to “white males of sound health, good morals, and high character,” has certain earmarks of the Ku Klux Klan.
Governor Dixon of Alabama caused nation-wide dismay last summer by refusing to sign a contract for the manufacture in the Alabama prison system of cloth for the Federal government. He charged that the clause in the contract requiring no discrimination “against any worker because of race, creed, color, or national origin” wars designed to break down racial segregation and the “color line” in the South. His farfetched interpretation was promptly challenged by such leading Alabama newspapers as the Birmingham Age-Herald and Montgomery Advertiser, but the damage had been done. The Dixon manifesto came only one day after Horace Wilkinson, Birmingham attorney, announced a similar doctrine in an address to a civic club. Mr. Wilkinson said, in language which received tremendous publicity and was interpreted generally as an invitation to revive the Ku Klux Klan, that if there is a place in America for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, there is also a place for a “League to Maintain White Supremacy.”
In addition to the particularly tense situation in Georgia and Alabama, there was the emphasis lately given the Negro as a political issue in Arkansas, South Carolina, and Mississippi. In Arkansas a candidate for Congress was taunted loudly with the charge that he was opposed to racial segregation. In South Carolina an unsuccessful aspirant for the Senate proclaimed his undying devotion to the cause of “white supremacy” and his spiritual kinship with Talmadge on the race question. In Mississippi, the notorious Representative John Rankin has been arousing his constituents with dire warnings concerning the “ blood bank ” of the Red Cross. That organization’s opposition to mixing white and colored blood, and the Negro newspapers’ violent and oft-reiterated denunciation of its attitude, brought Mr. Rankin into the controversy. His alarmist predictions, that Communist agitators “are trying to mongrelize America . . . they want to pump Negro or Japanese blood into the veins of our wounded white boys regardless of the dire effect it might have on them or their children,” caused the Negro press to echo PM’s declaration that Rankin is the “leader of the white trash bloc” in Congress.
A climactic interracial crisis seemed to be brewing in Rankin’s district when the Reverend James Arthur Parsons, Negro pastor of four colored churches in Tupelo, Mississippi, was announced as a candidate in November against the white Congressman, with the support of the National Negro Council. The pastor left Tupelo for St. Louis, Missouri, soon after he had been proclaimed a candidate in Chicago by Earl G. Brown, head of the Council, because, he said, Tupelo citizens demonstrated “forcibly that they do not approve the idea of a Negro running for Congress.” Then the country was suddenly shocked by three Mississippi lynchings in a single week, and the plan to run Parsons against Rankin was abandoned.
Anybody familiar with the temper of the white people of Mississippi would have recognized the dire potentialities of this campaign which Northern Negroes were so gleefully hatching before the idea was finally dropped. One could only shudder at the prospect of a contest between white and colored Congressional candidates in that state — where the races are almost equal numerically; where memories of Reconstruction are fading but are nonetheless bitter; and where the record of lynchings, over the years, is the worst in the Union.
It is all very well to argue that Rankin is a tub-thumping demagogue of the first water; that this is a democracy; that a black man has as much right, under the Constitution, to aspire to Congress as a white man; and that if white Mississippians don’t know that Negroes are citizens, it is high time they were taught the facts of life. Such an argument is logical if one wishes to ignore all the human factors involved, but those factors cannot be ignored. The position of the National Negro Council in this matter was utterly unrealistic. Lethal and devastating clashes would have been only too probable if the plan had been carried through. It is difficult to conceive of a more dangerously inflammatory situation anywhere in America than the aggressively promoted candidacy of a black man against a white man in Mississippi.
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Are we to conclude then, you ask, that the white South today is unwilling to countenance a political contest between white and colored aspirants for office? Such, it must be said, is the case. What the ultimate posture of interracial relations in this sphere will be, it is impossible to tell. The most advanced thing of the kind in the South at the moment is the presence in the Kentucky legislature of a Negro of unusual poise and intelligence who represents a 95 per cent colored constituency in Louisville. It is likely that when other Negroes enter Southern legislatures they also will do so as representatives of districts which are overwhelmingly black. It is not possible to envision a Southern Negro’s being elected to Congress at any time in the measurable future. Congressional districts are so much larger than the districts from which state legislatures are chosen that it is unlikely a Congressional district could be found with a sufficiently solid black population to make election possible. If this seems the very negation of democracy, I can only say that I believe I am reflecting accurately the vast preponderance of white sentiment in this section. That sentiment will change in time as prejudices fade and new generations are born — but the South cannot be highpressured into submission on this issue.
Symptomatic of the tension in the whole South, if not in parts of the North, was the beating of Roland Hayes, the internationally famous Negro tenor, at Rome, Georgia. He had gone to a shoestore to inquire about an argument his wife had had with a clerk when he was suddenly attacked by white police, punched in the jaw and cuffed, thrown into a police car, slugged while lying on the floor, and hauled off to the police station with his wife and daughter. All were released soon afterward, but the episode served to heighten interracial animosities throughout the United States. True, Mr. Hayes at his last concert in Berlin had been forbidden by Reichsführer Hitler to sing German folk songs, on the ground that for a Negro to do so would insult the Nordic race; but that hardly made the ruffianly assault upon him in his native Georgia any more justifiable.
Spurred on by such episodes as this, the radical element of the Negro press, both North and South, is stirring up interracial hate. Few white people see the colored weeklies which are published in most large cities, but the lengths to which some of them are going are both astounding and alarming. It must be confessed that certain white newspapers are just as bad. Between them they manage to aggravate the situation immeasurably.
It is a nine days’ wonder when one of the more extreme colored papers plays up, or even publishes, any item which reflects credit upon the sincerity, the humanity, or the decency of the white race. Moreover, the news columns of even the conservative papers are filled almost entirely with the woes and grievances, real or imagined, of the Negroes, White newspapers which emphasize Negro crime and practically never have a good word to say for the black man’s constructive achievements have no right to object, but one can readily see how these two groups of publications are undermining stable race relations.
There is no denying, of course, that the Negro is confronted by many forms of unfairness, injustice, and oppression. Nor can it be said that this state of things is confined to any section or sections of the country. For example, Federal Security Administrator Paul V. McNutt declared last year in an address in Philadelphia that prejudice against using Negroes in defense industries was much worse in Philadelphia and “generally north of the Mason-Dixon Line,” than in the South. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People issued a pamphlet not long ago, entitled “Food Costs More in Harlem,” showing that “Harlem families are victims of exploitation through the prices they pay for food.”
Yet most of the abuse emanating from the more radical colored leaders and newspapers is directed at the South, where about 75 per cent of the country’s 13,000,000 Negroes live. No informed person will argue that the South is guiltless, but there is such a thing as overdoing the criticism of any section, and the South is currently a victim of this. Senator George W. Norris of Nebraska said on the floor of the Senate in 1938 that “the people of the South have done a wonderful job” with the Negro problem, and that they have “made a record of which they have a right to be proud.” Even those who disagree with the great Nebraska liberal on the point can hardly justify the tirades against the South which are emanating from certain highly articulate Negro sources.
It would not be fair to intimate that the whole colored press is incendiary in its present attitude. All the papers harp constantly on racial grievances, but that has been going on for years. Many of them are reasonably restrained in their language, and careful not to indulge in vilification or abuse. But others are so extreme that riots probably would break out if they were widely read by the whites.
A highly disturbing thing about this group of colored papers is their unwillingness to grant sincerity of motive to the whites who disagree with their attitude, and who argue that this attitude will be much more harmful than beneficial to the Negroes in the end. The same papers are equally intolerant of Negro leaders who try to put on the brakes. Any colored person, especially in the South, who urges a more conservative policy upon the Negroes, on the ground that a continuation of demagoguery and abuse is bound to end in disaster, is promptly assailed as an apostate, an “Uncle Tom,” or a “handkerchief head.”
An example of the rule-or-ruin position of the radical colored press vis-à-vis friendly Southern whites who try to warn them against extremist policies is seen in the deluge of billingsgate which greeted the pronouncement on racial segregation made by Mark Ethridge in June at a hearing before the Committee on Fair Employment Practice, of which he is a member and former chairman. Mr. Ethridge, who is publisher of the Louisville Courier-Journal, has been defending the civil, political, and economic rights of the Negro in a distinguished newspaper career extending back over more than two decades. He has gone out of his way to be objective and fair, and as managing editor and chief editorial writer of the Macon [Georgia] Telegraph he was praised frequently by the Nation for his fearless exposés of anti-Negro movements in the deep South. More recently he served as first chairman of President Roosevelt’s Committee on Fair Employment Practice, and in that capacity devoted a great deal of time and effort to the difficult business of forcing or persuading war industries to hire Negroes.
But all this was tossed overboard by the leftist colored press when Mr. Ethridge, as a member of the Committee, declared at Birmingham that the South has no intention of giving up the legal segregation of the races. In saying that the South expects to continue the system of segregation — which applies chiefly in schools, colleges, and universities, and on transportation lines — he emphasized that “the Negro is entitled, as an American citizen, to . . . the right to vote, the right to justice in the courts, the right to share equitably in the tax burden and in the distribution of tax moneys for public health, for public education, for public improvements such as streets and sidewalks and parks.” He added that the Negro also must have the right to work according to his skill, and he declared that “the Southern white man can purchase his own security, his own happiness, and his own self-respect only in that measure in which he is willing to accord them to the Negro.”
More of what he said was concerned with affirmations of the white man’s obligations to the Negro, with denunciations of white Southern dervishes and mobsters, with exhortations to employers to give jobs to Negroes, than with warnings against efforts to break down segregation of the races. But he was firm in saying that the Southern people as a whole have no intention of lowering those barriers.
His reward was excoriation from the Negro press that could hardly have been more extreme if he had been caught heading a gang of lynchers. Mark Ethridge — who has done as much as any man in the South to deflate white Negrophobes, to unmask Ku-Kluxery, and to fight for justice for the colored man — was assailed as though he had been a common pickpocket. His words were distorted, his meaning was misrepresented, he was told to get off the President’s Committee on Fair Employment Practice, and he was bracketed with Gene Talmadge as an enemy of the Negro race!
If this sort of thing keeps up, it can have but one result. The white leaders in the South who have been responsible for much of the steady progress of the Negro in the past, and who can bring about a great deal more such progress in the future, will be driven into the opposition camp. Some of the foremost of them are being assailed as “bigmouthed white Southerners,” as “spiritual kinsmen of Hitler,” and so on. No matter how liberal they are with respect to the Negro’s needs in other directions, if they subscribe to the view that racial segregation cannot be done away with, as the price of an all-out Negro effort in the war, they are attacked as traitors to democracy who ought to be fighting beside the Nazis.
An organization which has done much for the progress of the colored citizens of the South is the Commission, on Interracial Cooperation, with headquarters in Atlanta. Dr. Howard W. Odum of the University of North Carolina is its president; Dr. Charles S. Johnson of Fisk University (Negro) is first vice-president; Dr. Will W. Alexander, now with the Federal government in Washington, is executive director; and Mrs. Jessie Daniel Ames is editor of the Commission’s monthly organ, the Southern Frontier. It seems logical to suppose that unless the support of this influential and widely connected commission can be gained for any given reform in interracial relations, that reform has slight chance of winning Southern approval. As an indication of the Commission’s attitude toward segregation, consider the fact that the full text of Mr. Ethridge’s address was distributed with the July issue of the Southern Frontier, which also contained a note of high commendation.
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The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People is much more radical than the Atlanta commission, but it is responsible for important and deserved advances on the part of the Negro in all sections of the country. Its intervention on behalf of colored men who were being railroaded to the electric chair, such as the Scottsboro defendants; its fight against lynching; its battle for better educational facilities and higher salaries for teachers; and its other similar victories for the colored race are genuine contributions to the building of a fairer and more equitable civilization on this continent. But President F. D. Patterson of Tuskegee Institute in Alabama spoke wisely when he declared that, while the Association deserves all credit for such accomplishments as these, it “fails miserably” in the “realm of practical adjustment of Negroes in American life.”
The N. A. A. C. P. now is not only for “ absolute political and social equality,” but it has declared war to the death on all forms of racial segregation. Dr. William Pickens, one of the organization’s principal officials for more than twenty years, was summarily discharged when he uttered words of praise some months ago for the squadron of Negro aviators at Tuskegee. Why? Because the squadron is entirely colored, and the Association does not concede that a unit which contains only Negroes can be praised by an N. A. A. C. P. spokesman under any circumstances. It wants mixed units of both whites and blacks, with Negro officers commanding some of them. The Association also objects to the operation of war industries exclusively by Negroes. The Sun Shipbuilding and Dry Dock Company recently put to work some thousands of colored men in an all-Negro shipyard at Chester, Pennsylvania. Every skilled, semi-skilled, and unskilled worker in the plant was to be colored, it was announced. To many this seemed a great opportunity for the Negro to demonstrate what he can do in this highly competitive field, and to disprove the argument that he cannot equal the industrial and mechanical efficiency of the white man. But to the N.A.A.C.P. this is a “Jim Crow shipyard ... a wartime application of ‘Keeping the Negro in his place.’”
Thus the agitation goes on and on, in an ever mounting crescendo. Negro leaders who see where all this is leading and say so are attacked scurrilously in the more advanced organs of colored opinion. President James E. Shepard of the North Carolina College for Negroes declared recently that in times like these the blacks should be thinking of their duties rather than their rights. He was assailed as “a throw-over from the Reconstruction period,” one of the “weasel-minded gentry who put property rights above human rights” and who are seeking “to curry favor” with the dominant race. Dr. Gordon B. Hancock of Virginia Union University remonstrated not long ago with the Negroes who spend all their time denouncing Southern whites, and who refuse to take cognizance of the genuine progress made by the colored citizens of this country since Appomattox, with the aid of these same whites. He was assailed as a Charlie McCarthy for the advocates of segregation, a friend of Negro haters, who is full of “scatterbrained ideas.”
Fortunately these and other leading Southern Negroes have taken matters into their own hands. In one of the most encouraging developments in years they have held a conference at Durham, North Carolina, for the purpose of drafting “a new charter for race relations in the South.” This representative gathering, with delegates from ten states, was presided over by P. B. Young, publisher of the Norfolk Journal and Guide, one of the sanest and best-edited colored newspapers in the United States. The charter for Southern race relations to be formulated after all the deliberations of these able men have been completed is to take the form of “articles of coöperation,” which will state just what Southern Negro leaders with their feet on the ground expect of the post-war South and nation. These college presidents, editors, businessmen, and professional men can be counted on to produce something which will appeal to forward-looking white Southerners as in the best interests of the whole South and the whole United States and as a long-needed antidote for the inflammatory agitation by Negro extremists.
Because of the prevailing interracial tension on many fronts, growing out of the current agitation by both Negroes and whites — basically traceable, it must be admitted, to the fact that the Negroes have been the victims of oppression and adverse discrimination over a long period — the country is sitting on a volcano. Moreover, the most fantastic rumors find ready believers. In various Southern cities it has been reported, on the eve of blackouts, that all the ice picks and “switch blades” in town were being bought up by the Negroes, with a view to a general massacre of the whites under cover of darkness. Nearly everybody below the Potomac has heard of the “Eleanor Clubs,” or the “Daughters of Eleanor,” and thousands believe that they actually exist. These imaginary organizations are supposed to be composed of colored cooks and maids who have vowed to abandon domestic service as degrading, and who have adopted some such slogan as “Every white woman in her kitchen by Christmas.”
While the Negroes are overwhelmingly patriotic, too many of them have been indoctrinated with the belief that since the Japanese are a colored race the blacks might be more equitably treated by Tokyo than by Washington, and that consequently the Negroes have little to fear from a Japanese victory over the United States. The oft-repeated story of the colored sharecropper who observed last December, “I hear dem Japanese done declare war on you white folks,” illustrates the point. Like the natives of Malaya and Burma, the American Negroes are sometimes imbued with the notion that a victory for the yellow race over the white race might also be a victory for them. These ideas and attitudes may or may not be planted by Axis agents. Certainly they are seriously disruptive of morale.
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If all this tension and misunderstanding leads to armed violence, there can be little doubt that the Negroes will be the worst sufferers. They always are. Such is the history of the riots which occurred during and after the First World War. At Houston, Texas, for instance, Negro soldiers “shot up the town,” killing seventeen whites, some of whom seem to have been at fault. The colored soldiers had been “goaded and insulted,”says Dr. W. E. B. Du Bois, but nineteen of them were hanged and fifty-one were imprisoned for life. At East St. Louis, Illinois, white strikers on war work mobbed Negro workingmen, killing no fewer than one hundred and twenty-five. For this wholesale massacre, during which, “ for the greater part of thirty-six hours, Negroes were hunted through the streets like wild animals,” twenty white men and ten colored men were imprisoned. The heaviest sentence any of the whites got was fifteen years.
Riots like these and the other bloody interracial clashes which occurred both in the North and in the South during and after the last war — including a Chicago riot in which thirty-six persons were killed, and five separate riots in New York City — are likely to occur again. Only this time they may be much worse. The tension is more widespread, and the apprehension in responsible quarters is much greater.
Do the Negroes think the Federal authorities will order the nation-wide abandonment of segregation? If so, they are mistaken; for however sympathetic the Roosevelt administration is to the aspirations of Negro citizens, it would not attempt anything so surely calculated to provoke sanguinary encounters on both sides of the Mason and Dixon Line. Reforms in this sphere cannot be forced by executive fiat but are the fruit of gradual evolutionary development.
No decent white American expects any colored American to remain unprotesting in wartime, or at any other time, when Negroes are lynched, beaten, or persecuted; and certainly the maintenance of segregation connotes a definite obligation upon the whites to provide absolutely equal facilities for the two races, something which obviously is not now being done. But it is a foregone conclusion that if an attempt is made forcibly to abolish segregation throughout the South, violence and bloodshed will result.
It is argued that unless all discriminations against the American Negro are instantly brought to an end, the cause of the United Nations in China, Malaya, Burma, India, and the Middle East will be damaged. The answer is that the damage will be much greater if widespread armed clashes on American soil are provoked by ill-considered action. Only impractical idealists will contend that deep-rooted feelings and attitudes, acquired over centuries of usage, can be suddenly done away with. To attempt such a thing in the middle of a global war is the height of folly. It could plunge us into the bitterest and most disastrous fratricidal strife in eighty years, and fatally weaken us in our battle for survival. But if the disturbing elements on both sides of the color line can somehow be muzzled for the duration, and if the slow but certain processes of evolutionary progress can function, then better interracial relations and accelerated Negro advancement will go hand in hand — and we shall be able to get on with the war.