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218 THE CRISIS unparalleled devastations of the war. How plain it is then that the farms offer the best chances for these people who have grown up in the South, away from cities, in country homes, and with the habit of working in the ground and handling stock. Surely they must find themselves more at home there than in the Ghetto of New York, Philadelphia, Cincinnati or Chicago. They must find the occupations more to their mind, such as they can take up readily and learn thoroughly, till they excel and get the best wages for this sort of work. Here on the farms, too, are the finest prospects for accumulating property and becoming independent landowners. Of course, it will be the best way to begin as a hired farm hand, for this is the path to acquaintance with the methods of northern farming and to friendly relations with the neighborhood where one is at work. But one should not rest satisfied with being a mere farm hand. He should make up his mind at the start to buy some land as soon as he has the money to pay for it, and this should be kept steadily in view, till he has a farm and a home of his own, legally made over to him and with no mortgage on it. And this is no wild hope for a frugal, industrious man to entertain. There are today thousands of good farms in the back districts of the North under cultivation and having decent buildings on them that can be bought for half what it would cost to put up the buildings alone. Bargains without number can be found all over the North when you go from the villages a few miles. They are farms that were cultivated by influential well-to-do people twenty or thirty years ago, and men and women were brought up there who are now in positions of responsibility and power far away from their old birth place. But the chance is great for those who are willing and have had a training in farm work to fit them for it. What finer opportunity could be offered to these Negro farmers who are coming up from the cotton fields out of which they have been pushed by the boll weevil and other things worse? The laws will protect them here. No one will question their right to vote. There will be no threats of lynching in these farming districts, however it may be in some northern cities. They will find their children welcomed in school and themselves welcomed at church, side by side with other Christian families. Is not this a ripe opportunity for the continued and enlarged activities of the Association for the Advancement of Colored People? G. S. DICKERMAN. PRIZES A READER complains that after offering a prize for an article of two hundred words on the "Best Summer I Ever Spent" we gave it to an article of six hundred words. We did. The reason was that on the day the competition closed there had been no two hundred word articles submitted that were at all worth publishing. We deemed it, therefore, better to break our rule of length than our literary standards. The prizes, which were four in number, were awarded as follows: First prize, H. H. Thweatt, Thomasville, Ga. His essay was published in the August CRISIS. Second prize, Walter Edward Tibbs, Industrial College, Georgia. Third prize, Carrie Jameson, Milestown, Md. Fourth prize, U. Simpson Garnes, Washington, D. C. National Association for the Advancement of Colored People [[image - black and white photo of injured man on the street]] [[caption]] THE MASSACRE OF EAST ST. LOUIS. [[/caption]] THE NATIONAL ASSOCIATION FOR THE ADVANCEMENT OF COLORED PEOPLE, 70 Fifth Avenue, New York, sent Martha Gruening and W. E. Burghardt Du Bois to East St. Louis, as special investigators of the recent outrages. These two collected in person the facts and pictures from which this article is compiled. ON the 2nd of July, 1917, the city of East St. Louis in Illinois added a foul and revolting page to the history of all the massacres of the world. On that day a mob of white men, women and children burned and destroyed at least $400,000 worth of property belonging to both whites and Negroes; drove 6,000 Negroes out of their homes; deliberately burdered, by shooting, burning and hanging, between one and two hundred human beings who were black. Such an outbreak could not have been instantaneous. There must have been something further reaching even than an immediate cause to provoke such a disaster. The immediate cause usually given is as follows: On the evening of July 1, white "joy riders" rode down a block in Market Street, which was inhabited by Negroes, and began to fire into the houses. The Negroes aroused by this armed themselves against further trouble. Presently a police automobile drove up containing detectives and stopped. The Negroes thinking that these were the "joy riders" returning opened up fire before this misunderstanding was removed, and two of the detectives were killed. Some of the policemen were in plain clothes. One naturally wonders why should the white "joy riders" fire in the first place. What was their quarrel with the Negroes? In answering that question we get down to 219
