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238 THE CRISIS

The damning statements go on and on. Among the Negroes one finds a note sometimes of blank stark despair. John T. Stewart in the St. Louis Star draws a pathetic picture:

One aged Negro woman passed the police station carrying in her arms all that mob spirit and fire had left of her belongings. They consisted of a worn pair of shoes — she was barefooted — an extra calico dress, an old shawl and two puppies. Tears were streaming down her face and she saw neither soldiers nor her enemies as she passed beneath the lights of the City Hall, going she knew not where.

Saddest of all is Miss Gruening's account of the old woman whom she saw poking about in the desolate ruins of what had once been her home. Her family had escaped to St. Louis, but not a fraction of their possessions remained intact. The woman was old — sixty-five — not an easy age at which to begin life anew.

"What are we to do?" she asked Miss Gruening. "We can't live South and they don't want us North. Where are we to go?"

From the statements gathered by the investigators, many of these driven people seem to feel that the example of the South in dealing with Negroes is responsible for the methods of East St. Louis. Many of them express firmly their resolve, in spite of all, never to go back South. They will stay in St. Louis, they say, or push further North.

How does East St. Louis feel? According to all accounts she is unrepentant, surly, a little afraid that her shame may hurt her business, but her head is not bowed.

In this connection Miss Gruening supplies the statement of East St. Louis Postman No. 23, who said: "The only trouble with the mob was it didn't get niggers enough. You wait and see what we do to the rest when the soldiers go. We'll get every last one of them." 

And here follows a sort of composite statement of the best citizens, editors, and liberty-bond buyers of East St. Louis and its surroundings:

"Well, you see too many niggers have been coming here. When niggers come up North they get insolent. You see they vote here and one doesn't like that. And one doesn't like their riding in the cars next to white women — and, well what are you going to do when a buck nigger pushes you off the sidewalk?"

This last pathetic question was put to Miss Gruening by three different editors on as many separate occasions.

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch gives the views of District Attorney Karch on the attitude of the rioters. He says:

Those men have not left the city, and they have not repented of their excesses. They are just as bitter as they were, and the action of the Chamber of Commerce in forcing these Negroes down their throats is only inflaming the men who participated in the riot.

The District Attorney told of seeing a man on a street car exhibit a revolver openly Thursday night, and remark that "it had killed niggers, and would kill some more as soon as the damned militia leaves." Other men near by expressed similar sentiments, he added. They were laboring men, apparently going home from work.

Karch emphatically confirmed the statements made to the Post-Dispatch Tuesday by City Clerk Whalen, who is president of the Central Trades and Labor Union of East St. Louis, to the effect that large employers of labor had given marked and continuous preference to Negroes.

"Their attitude for some time has been that they would give jobs to white men when they couldn't get any more Negroes," Karch declared. "This, as Mr. Whalen said, is because the Negroes will not unionize. Before the tenseness of this situation is relieved, these employers must convince the laboring whites that they will be given preference over imported blacks in applying for work. Instead of doing that, they are declaring they will put all the Negroes back to work, and protect them, if they have to keep troops here indefinitely. That kind of flamboyant talk only angers the men who should be quieted.

"As long as the heads of these big plants break up strikes by importing Negro strikebreakers, so long can they expect to have race riots. This is no defense for the rioters; there is no defense for them. It is just a fact that when a man's family is hungry his sense of justice doesn't operate very accurately."

Prejudice is a bad thing. But prejudice in the hands of Organized Labor in America! The Central Trades and Labor Union of East St. Louis has perpetrated a grim jest. Its motto as one may see by glancing back at page 221, is "Labor omnia vincit." Latin is apt to be a bit obscure, so we translate: "Labor conquers everything." It does. In East St. Louis it has conquered Liberty, Justice, Mercy, Law and the Democracy which is a nation's vaunt.

And what of the Federal Government?



The Looking Glass 

LITERATURE.

"HIS OWN COUNTRY" (Bobbs-Merrill Co., $1.50), by Paul Kester, has too many characters, and is too long for such strenuous times as these, but it is completely absorbing. It tells of a slave-boy, Julius Caesar, who, after the Civil War, goes to Canada, marries a white woman, studies medicine, and becomes a successful physician. But "his own country," Virginia, calls him; he buys, through agents, the property which had once been his master's and returns to his home. Thence the story — a dire and terrible one of humiliation, suffering and blood-shed for both races. Mr. Kester offers no solution of the problem, but his work is, however, in spite of a leaning toward melodrama, significant in that he shows the increasing realization of the literary value of the relations between the two races. And again he directs attention to the crux of the whole situation when he speaks of the possession by Julius Caesar of "those blended qualities which resulted from the union of the white and black blood and which refused to be assigned to either, independent of the other."

Magazines for June and July have published articles of interest to us as follows: "Race Problems in South African Churches," Biblical World, June, 1917; "Black Music and its Future Translation into Real Art," Current Opinion, July 1, 1917; "Negro Vote in Old New York," D. R. Fox, Political Science Quarterly, June, 1917; "Farm Training for Negroes, Essential Factor in Colored Education in the South," Survey, June 23, 1917; "Negro Goes North," Ray Stannard Baker, World's Work, July 1, 1917; "Eugenics of the Negro Race," Kelly Miller, Scientific Monthly, June 1, 1917; "Negro Education," Nation, June 28, 1917.

We have received the following pamphlets: "The Farmer and the Single Tax," by Henry George; "The Mexican People and Their Detractors," by Fernando Gonzalez Roa; "The Truth About Lynching," by Asa Philip Randolph; "Whence Came the Negro Race?" by Rev. William St. Augustine Lynch, and "The Chinese Social and Political Science Review," by The Chinese Social and Political Science Association.

The following book has been received: "The Wolf Brother," by James R. Reynolds. We announce also an important new book: "Culture and Ethnology," by Robert H. Lowie, Ph. D. 

THE LESSON OF DETROIT 

DETROIT is meeting and solving with great success the problem of caring for its increasing colored population. If other northern towns would employ the same sensible and practical methods, race friction engendered by the migration upheaval would be greatly decreased. Mr. Forrester B. Washington, the Negro director of the Detroit League on Urban Conditions among Negroes, tells at length in the Survey of his city's philanthropy. He says:

The first prerequisite in the task of organizing a local community is the establishment of a vocational bureau which should strive to make itself acquainted with every possible industrial opening for Negroes in the city and, on the other hand, make its presence widely known so that the immigrant Negro will be directed to it immediately on arrival. The Detroit League on Urban Conditions among Negroes, therefore, has not been content merely with locating vacant jobs but has approached manufacturers of all kinds through distribution of literature and personal visits and has been successful during the last twelve months in placing 1,000 Negroes in employment other than unskilled labor. It has made itself known to immigrants by cards of direction placed in the hands of Negro employees about railway stations and intends, as soon as its funds permit, to station a capable, level-headed representative at each of the railway stations of Detroit to direct Negro immigrants to the league's office or to other responsible individuals and societies who will look after their welfare. It has persuaded the proprietor of a local moving picture theatre, which is a great gathering place for colored newcomers, to run lantern slides nightly announcing that employment and other services can be secured free at the office of the league.

In order to care for the women and girls who are beginning to appear in appreciable numbers, five cigar manufacturers in the city were induced to experiment in employing them, and a sixth has started a new plant employing only colored help. To solve the difficult problem of the first week's board, the league has arranged with certain factories a system of checks issued to guarantee payment for bills incurred at restaurants and boarding houses. Some direct arrangements previously made between certain factories and boarding-house keepers 

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