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300 The Crisis [[image of toddler]] Alabama [[Image of toddler]] [[Image of toddler]] New York [[Image of toddler]] [[Image of two toddlers]] Texas [[Image of two toddlers]] to-day paying for the luxuries of Berlin, London, Paris and New York. For such luxuries of civilization have become ravenous beasts. Surely we can find in the faces of these children, not simply argument against war, but argument against the greatest modern cause of war, race prejudice. As for these children of the sun: The nation of which they and their fathers form a part or the individuals among whom they move may, in large measure, choose their future. If given a chance, these children may develop into social units of worth and value. With a continuation of the present methods of race proscription and restriction, the world will be the loser; and that just in so far as these babes of darker skin are denied the opportunities to reach the maximum in efficiency and service. THE LETTER BOX Mr. Oswald Garrison Villard. My Dear Sir:-I found your letter of May 21 awaiting me when I returned this morning from a ten-day's trip in various parts of South Carolina. I am grateful to you for a complete copy of you Baltimore address, and have read it carefully, letting some very urgent mattes wait until I had finished it. While it is masterful in its way, it merely hints at the awful condition of the Negro of the South. For six years I have been voting the Negro's abuse at the hands of the so-called polite "Knighthood of Dixie" and at times my blood runs cold and I am tempted to pray for the strength of a Samson, and instead of the jawbone of an ass, a modern machine gun. But the calmer second thought says that is not the way, and I am made to appreciate the calm patience of the down-trod-den black man who, in many instances, appears to think that patience is the panacea for the ills that a civilization that is only skin deep has thrust upon him. In memory I revert to the days of slavery, for I can remember them vaguely, and I recall how my grandfather was touched with the great wrong of the black man's bondage- toughed so deep, that in 1853 he gave seventy black men and their women their freedom, in so far as freedom could be given to them in those days. I recall the black mammy of my childhood, who with a kindliness akin to godliness, cared for me. But to-day I am told by the white tyrants of the South that that black mammy had no virtue, but was merely a lustful brute in human form. She taught me my first prayer, and I am sure that at that court where there is no color line nor the swagger of white supremacy by the right of might, she has met the reward that is promised to patient piety. * * * I have made notation of the time and place where the black man has been wantonly wronged, and in many instances where the tax he pays is used to educate the white children of his neighborhood. If I only had the chance to tell what I know, and feel secure while telling it! I have studied the problem psychologically, commercially, and at all its angles, and I am compelled to day that the abuse of the black man is the rot at the root of progress in the South. He is the great industrial force of the South. He does everything that is done on less than half rations and half pay. There is scarcely a fortune in the SOuth that has been accumulated within the las forty years that is not streaked with Negro blood. *** I want to get out of the shadow - yes, the withering [[Image of three adolescents]] William Pickens, Jr., and his sisters [[Image of three adolescents]]
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