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114   THE CRISIS

Trilogy," have both been denounced by the colored people for reasons that I can not fathom. As far as I can see, they have not taken the trouble to read them through. The third section of "The Congo" is certainly as hopeful as any human being dare to be in regard to any race, and the "John Brown" is certainly not an unsympathetic poem; and "King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba" is a prophecy of a colored Utopia. Yet THE CRISIS took the trouble to skin me not long ago. This in the face of the fact that they had published with great approval my story of "The Golden-Faced People" in THE CRISIS of November, 1914. That is the index to all subsequent work.

I presume some of the men in your movement who have an intelligent angle on my intentions are responsible for my invitation to the Amenia Conference. When two or three of them get together sometime, I wish they would re-read "the Congo" (see volume of that name), the "Booker Washington Trilogy," in Poetry, A Magazine of Verse (543 Cass Street, Chicago), June, 1916, and also THE CRISIS article aforesaid. I would like to draw your attention also to pages forty-seven and forty-eight in the "Art of the Moving Picture," where I have discussed the Reverend Thomas Dixon.

And after you have read this letter, I would appreciate it if you will send a copy to the editor of THE CRISIS, to be printed, if he cares to do so. Personally, Mr. DuBois has been most courteous, but I can not understand his editorial attitude. Add a word to this letter If you care to do so.
Very sincerely,
NICHOLAS VACHEL LINDSAY.

Amenia, N.Y., Nov. 16, 1916.
My dear Mr. Lindsay:
I wish you had been able to attend the Amenia Conference, and perhaps then you would have understood the differences between a poet's pageantry and a people's despair.

No colored man doubts your good intentions, but many of them doubt your understanding of their hopes. You look about you and see a black world full of a strange beauty different from that of the white world; they look about them and see other men with exactly the same feelings and desires who refuse to recognize the resemblance. You look forward to a colored Utopia separate and different from the hope of the white man; they have only one overwhelming desire, and that is to share in a common civilization in which all distinctions of race are blurred (or forgotten) by common aspiration and common labors.

Your poetry is wonderfully beautiful, and the poems on black men and women are no less beautiful than the rest. How can we fail to be grateful for all this beauty? But somehow we feel (and I say "we" because in this I share the feelings of the colored race), somehow we feel that you do not write about colored humanity as you write about white humanity. We remember your poem on "John Altgeld" (to mention only one), and realize that your heart goes out to--
"The widow bereft of her crust, and the boy without youth,
The mocked and the scorned and the wounded, the lame and the poor"
but somehow we feel that for you, black men and women are not like others who have been mocked and scorned and wounded, but beings a little different from other sufferers who do not share the same ancestry and the same color of skin.
Faithfully yours,
J.E. SPINGARN.


ONE by one our friends of the early abolition group pass. The death of Francis Jackson Garrison, the son of William Lloyd Garrison, is announced. 

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EDITORIAL   115
[[column 1]]
[[drop-cap]] T [[/drop-cap]] HE CRISIS wishes to repeat its insistence that the working men from the South who can be assured of reasonably good employment in the North should without hesitation come to the North as a means of self-defense and as the most effective protest against Southern lynching, lawlessness, and general deviltry.
On the other hand, THE CRISIS recognizes what a pecu8lair responsibility rests upon the north in this new migration. It knows, however, one of instance where this responsibility is being splendidly recognized. In New Haven and Hartford Railroad imported a large number of Negro workers. They were collected without discrimination and they represented all kinds and conditions of men, but more especially the worst. They were housed in old box cars and generally neglected.

Here was the nucleus for a new Negro problem for New Haven. What did colored New haven do? The Reverend Edward goin, a leading colored minister, went to the authorities of the railroad and pointed out their duty. He succeeded in getting a decent box car fitted up for them as a social center. He got colored Yale students to work with him and began a campaign of social uplift which must in the long run solve the problem.

In addition to this, George W. Crawford, a colored lawyer, began negotiations with a great manufacturing firm looking forward carefully selected migration of colored workers who could enter positions where promotion was possible.

Thus, two sides of the problem were attacked. let the good work go on both North and South. [[/column 1]]
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FRAUD
[[drop-cap]] W [[/drop-cap]] E are now and then compelled to bring to the notice of the public, efforts to defraud the colored people. Some of these efforts are mentioned because of our personal interest. For instance, there is traveling in Virginia and North Carolina, a certain man named [[italics]] Thomas Hopkins [[/italics]], claiming to be of High Point, North Carolina, and of Watertown, new York, who is fraudulently taking subscriptions for THE CRISIS. Any information leading to knowledge of his present whereabouts and operations will be received in our office with great joy.

Also, the National Publication Company, of Montgomery, Alabama, is advertising an encyclopedia of the colored race and is announcing the editor of this magazine as one of its associate editors. This is a falsehood and the public is herewith so warned.

TWO FRIENDS
[[drop-cap]] I [[/drop-cap]] HAVE lost two friends, curious in their unlikeness, yet singularly alike. The one, Inez Milholland, viewed the world-scene with a certain clean-cut clearness.  Her passion was Truth and where its pitiless logic led, she walked with seeing feet, splendidly unafraid.

The other friend, William Alpheus Hunton, lift his groping hands to god and Good, and set his fine face for and prophet eyes toward yonder cloudy headlands where setting suns mistily disclose unproven wonders.

I think these two knew nothing of each other. Between them rose the wall of race and sex and all of Culture's queer convention. Yet, in the world's deep meaning, they were one hand-in-hand walked down its puzzling crag-strewn paths with hearts ablaze. They are dead. They have earned their entrance to the Court of Peace and today they dream their mighty Dreams. [[italics]] Amen. [[/italics]] [[/column 2]] [[/page 2]]

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