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64 THE CRISIS

GHETTO.
 
A SPLENDID fight is being made in North Carolina by the Colored Teachers' Association for better railway accommodation. They have sent out over 3,000 pamphlets and recently had a hearing before the corporation commission.
Separate colored schools are appearing here and there in the North in response to demands by colored people. A new one has recently been started in Cincinnati and also one in Ypsilanti, Mich. In the latter place a colored principal with white teachers has been appointed. 
The "Full Crew Bill" has just been defeated in Missouri by popular vote. It was an attempt of the white railway unions who will not admit colored members, to do away with colored porters on railway trains. Similar laws have been successfully passed in Ohio, New York and other states. 
The Louisville and Nashville Railroad is trying to better its service for colored people by giving them two toilets and a smoking room and arranging for meals. It promises to be careful with regard to section hands but has been unable to settle the question of sleeping cars.
White cap raids on Negro cotton pickers have been made in northern Texas. 

THE COURTS.

The Supreme Court at Pretoria, South Africa, has delivered a decision adverse to the attempt of municipalities to run separate street cars for Europeans alone.
The Superior Court of Fulton County, Ga., has sustained the right of colored Shriners to use the titles, emblems and rituals of the order.
In the celebrated John Clement case in Richmond, Va., where a colored man was arrested for an attack on a white woman, the white jury has finally acquitted the man. As the Richmond Planet says:
"When a Henrico county jury acquits a colored man of a charge of criminal assault upon a white woman, he is not only innocent, but there is not even the grounds for a suspicion of guilt."
The New York Supreme Court recently upheld the municipal court of the city of New York in the ruling that a saloon is a place of public accommodation, and that there must be no discrimination. This decision was the result of a case brought against Elsinger, a white saloonkeeper, by A. C. Babb, who was charged 50 cents for a drink because he was colored. The municipal court gave him a verdict of $100, and the case was appealed, upon the contention that the saloon was not a place of public accommodation, with the above result.

CRIME.

The following nine lynchings have taken place since our last record:
At Percy, Ill., an Italian because he asked for a cigarette.
At Hernando, Miss., Tom Burns, colored, for attacking a white merchant. 
At Lake City, Fla., Tom Junior, colored, for an alleged assault on a white woman.
At Aberdeen, Miss., Maysho Miller, an 18-year-old colored boy, for an alleged assault on a white woman.
At Newport, Ark., Howard Davis, a colored man, for killing a marshall after the marshall had shot him in attempting to arrest him.
At York, Ala., an unknown Negro porter, charged with pushing white women off the sidewalk.
At Osceola, Ark., two Negroes have been killed in the chase after a third one who had killed a plantation manager. The third Negro has not been caught. 
At Angelton, Tex., Joe Durfee, a Negro, convicted of murdering a white woman, was respited by the governor for thirty days. A mob took him from the jail and lynched him.
A young white woman, in order to shield her Indian lover by whom she had been badly beaten, claimed to have been assaulted by a colored porter in the St. Regis Hotel, Tulsa, Okla. The colored man was arrested but the landlady, who knew all the facts in the case, went to the police station and told the true story.
When William Dwyer, a colored man of Philadelphia, insisted that he had a perfect right to unfurl a flag on Memorial Day, he was severely beaten by two white men, David Keith and Frank McShane, who were disputing his right to do so.

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MEN OF THE MONTH

AN ESSAYIST. 

ISAAC FISHER, editor of the Negro Farmer, which is published at Tuskegee Institute, has a remarkable gift of expression which has resulted in his winning about $1,500 in prizes during the last four years. Mr. Fisher was born in East Carroll Parish, La., in 1877, and was the sixteenth child of former slaves. He started his career in Vicksburg, Miss., and as an orphan at nineteen blacked boots, sold papers, and ran errands. He was a close student of the Hebrew scriptures, and in this way gained a remarkable command of English.
He heard of Tuskegee Institute in 1893 and immediately went there to work his way through, raising his railroad fare by a lecture. Graduating from Tuskegee he has taught in South Carolina and in Alabama, and was for nine years president of the Branch Normal College of Pine Bluff, Ark. He has a wife and a daughter of twelve years. 
His larger prizes are as follows: $100 from the St. Louis Post-Despatch on "The Ten Best Reasons Why People Should Come to Missouri;" $400 on "German-American Methods of Regulating Trusts," given by Hart, Schaffner and Marx, and judged by leading economists of the United States including Laughlin, Clark, Gay and Horace White; $100 for "A Plan to Give the South a System of Highways," given by the Manufacturers' Record of Baltimore; $500 given by Everybody's Magazine for an essay on "What We Have Learned About Rum."

[[two portrait images side by side]]

MR. ISAAC FISHER
THE LATE MAJOR C. A. FLEETWOOD