Viewing page 22 of 27

This transcription has been completed. Contact us with corrections.

shadow of men who resort to the practice of the South that is responsible for the blue-eyed Negro, and then shout themselves hoarse about the immaculate purity of the white man. I want to get away from the hypocracy of men who will steal to the Negro cabin under the cover of night and with beastial lustfulness ravish the colored woman or debauch ignorant black womanhood in the cotton field, and at the same time and in the face of such practices proclaim that the South is the place where the only mundane saints are grown, and that these are wll white saints. Yes, I want to get away from the places where the black man, in obedience to the blot on his brain, placed there by two hundred years of white lustfulness, is tried by Judge Lynch, and after he is dead and his body mutilated such gruesome trophies as severed fingers and ears are carried away as evidence of white justice in a so-called "white man's country." 
Yours very sincerely,

I must take off my hat to The Crisis as a medium of constant good in the work of Negro uplift. Its ability to marshall and present facts, its beautiful English, its cogent reasoning, its character, put it at the head of colored publications intrinsically as well as numerically. Then, again, its circulation among the whites -- worthy, worth-while white folk who never see a colored publication, enhances its value greatly. I wish it were celebrating its twentieth birthday rather than its fourth or fifth. 
R. B. LEMUS.
Boston, Mass.

[[Two photos]]
Illinois 

Editor of The Crisis:
Your account int he October CRISIS of Fred A. Houston, railway postal clerk of Sacramento, Cal., is interesting, because of its pathetic irony. I hope it will be the means of awakening a deep sympathy for the efficient and worthy colored men in the railway mail service who are now facing government inquisitions and volumes of vulgar abuse by jealous white clerks. 
The writer, who is in a position to appreciate Mr. Houston's narrative better than most of your readers, can put his finger on another young railway mail clerk who had to go through the same embarrassing ordeal, hundreds of miles from Mr. Houston, but with a parallel record and under different officials. 
Here is his examination record covering the short space of six moths in the same year:
                             PER CENT.
March .........................98.19
Forty days later...............97.86
The next day...................99.41
Four months and 18 days later..98.72
Thirty days later..............100.00
                               ______
          Average...............98.84
This clerk was a new man, having been in the service less than eight months, yet for five days each week he made an average of from twelve to fifteen hours, working hard trains and handling thousands of pounds of mail per day. He was responsible in part for the exact distribution, care and proper delivery of tons of mail in five different railway postoffices in the same day. Those who have never worked in a railway postoffice cannot possibly understand the physical and mental strain upon such a clerk, and that, too, when the few hours given him for rest had to be used in preparing these constant examinations. Yet his record never showed over four pieces of mail carried by, delayed or missent during any single month. (It is not unusual for the best clerks to make from one to one hundred errors per month, also some demerits for minor irregularities constantly occurring in the mail service.)
This clerk received a letter containing in part the same words as Mr. Houston's and further stating that he was not possessed of any requisite in the making of a clerk, and as a matter of mere form and additional embarrassment, was given the customary "ten days" to show good cause why he should not be remove. 
These officious letters with their patented official formality and unspecific charges victimize the clerk absolutely and leave him no grounds for defense; and it is just as impossible for the victimized clerk to make the "necessary reply" as it is for colored men in the South to interpret certain sections of the State constitutions to the satisfaction of the green-eyed, lynching-hearted pollholder, who is made the sole arbiter of the colored man's fitness for suffrage. The clerk's masterly reply to these letters is like waving the red flag before the enraged beast, and the finer vindication he makes, if he happens to be colored, the more is the beast enraged. 
Young Houston's excellent record and his account of himself and portrayal of the inward workings would show him to represent that class of colored young me of such extraordinary fitness and efficiency as to be intolerable. His record is far beyond scores of clerks of any race in my part of the country. 
It is such an unusual thing for a mail clerk to make 100 per cent. in any of the many examinations he must pass to remain in the service that when such does happen the particular clerk becomes the subject of honorable mention in the weekly bulletins issued from headquarters and distributed to the hundreds of clerks, officials and order books throughout his division.
"It is not a question of the colored clerks' education, qualifications and industry," said an editor recently of one of the journals devoted to the railway mail service; "it is a question of instinct."
When prejudice is God, how can merit win?
(Signed) HOUSTON'S FRIEND.

I felt lost without THE CRISIS this month, so sent to Chicago to get one. It is the meat of moral fibre to one so far from colored humanity. Nothing said against it by anyone about any of its integral parts should discourage that phase of the work. Let the truth be the light and idealism the goal for us as for all, and accept no compromise in this second emancipation, so much more necessary than Lincoln's.
ALONZO C. THAYER
Winona, Minn.