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42   THE CRISIS

"Why, I suppose they did not want to burn him alive on Lincoln's Birthday."

"But, why did they hang him? What did he do?"

"I dunno. I guess he was too free with his lip. The best nigger on earth is not as good as the worst white man. Niggers are all alike. There was a Negro in Indiana the other day."... And he told the usual story.

"Yes," agreed a Southerner. "The best nigger is not as good as the worst white man. But we don't lynch 'em in our corner of Virginia unless we know they're guilty. And, squinting up his eyes at the mob: "We don't leave the dirty work to the poor white trash."

I found myself able to stand and receive the congratulations of the company. "Now wash the blood off your head and hands, old man," continued the Southerner, "and we will go home with you and get you ready for the banquet yet."

Sure enough there was my laundry bundle on the table. I opened it. The shirt was not soiled in blood where it would show. We managed to dodge the crowd by using the side door. In my room I made a quick change. We were only fifty minutes late. The banquet had gone on with none of the other guests knowing what was happening outside.

The Southerner gracefully ended the evening by his speech on Lincoln as an example of the survival of the fittest, accompanied by a eulogy of Darwin. Like the rest of the speakers, he did not touch on the race question or the question of equality at all. But he had everything commendable to say of Lincoln, the self-made railsplitter and backwoodsman, the perfect pioneer type.

TWO BOOKS

"In Black and White: An interpretation of Southern Life." By L.H. Hammond.
F.H. Revel Co., N.Y.,1914. 244 pages.

MRS. HAMMOND has written an unusual book. It is the attempt of a southern white woman to apply the modern philanthropic attitude to the race relations of the South. All this is new. Usually the southern white woman is dumb and "pretty." When she has applied her intelligence to the race problem it has been to utter the most reactionary thoughts. It has been quite the fashion, too, to consider the southern race problem it has been to utter the most reactionary thoughts. It has been quite the fashion, too, to consider the southern race problem as so exceptional as the have practically nothing in common with problems of labor and uplift elsewhere. "You know we have no working class in the South," said one white girl student, innocently.

Mrs. Hammond speaks from curious vantage ground. Her husband is the souther white president of a colored school-an exceptional position and very trying. It was reported that when his acceptance of this position was announced, a large part of his fashionable Nashville audience arose and left the church.

Mrs. Hammond herself was the daughter of liberal parents, slaveholder, but not believers in slavery. She grew up with broad sympathies and saw the best side of slavery. One of the few debatable points in her book is the instance that "Thousands of slaveowners, like my own parents, thought slavery wrong, and confidently expected the time, not far distant, when the states would themselves abolish it. The South did not fight for slavery."

The book is composed of eight chapters. The first is a passionate call to the South for a humanitarian outlook:

"Are we the only folk on earth responsible for a 'submerged tenth?' But if the burden is not secular? If it is our part of a world-wide task? If everywhere men living under such conditions as do the majority of our Negroes are reacted upon by their environment just as the Negroes are? If we have mistakenly counted our poverty line and our color line as one?"

She insists on the essential humanity of all races:

"Skins differ in color, head are shaped differently; one man's mind runs ahead of his sympathies, perhaps, and another man's mind may creep while his emotional nature runs rampant. But under all outward differences their fundamental humanity is as much the same as is the earth under the mountain and the hill."

She says of "race pride":

"Life does not develop towards uniformity, 



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but towards richness of variety in a unity of beauty and service. Unless the Race of Man contradicts all known laws of the life it will develop in the same way; and whether white, or yellow, or black, in a spirit of brotherhood free from all other racial scorn, will most truly serve the Race to which all belong."

Other chapters take up specific evils: the injustice of southern courts and industrial relations, and the shame of the "Jim-Crow" car. Her husband tells her of his travel with a colored colleague. The white man was exhausted even with sleeping cars, dining rooms, and decent day coachers, but the colored man!

" 'How Gilbert stands it, physically or religiously, I cannot see,' he said. 'He goes half the time without lying down to sleep. If I were not with him, to dash into some white restaurant and buy him a cup of coffee and something to eat, he would often go hungry.' "

The author particularly emphasizes the need of better housing and surroundings for Negros and she slaps Mr. Washington's counsels of contentment with a ghetto full in the face with this:

"When by their own efforts a few Negros secure a respectable neighborhood, families of the better class building up a little community of their own, they are peculiarly liable to have saloons and houses of ill-fame thrust upon them by a low class of whites whom the upper classes do not restrain. The Negro owner of a city home, whatever his education or business success, whatever the sum invested in his property, cannot be sure, from month to month, of retaining for his family surroundings compatible with moral health and safety."

She goes on to say:

" 'If the white people could only understand, 'a Negro woman said to me not long ago, her face fired with feeling. 'We don't want our homes where we're not wanted. But we want to be decent, too. And it's the same all over the country-anything will do for a "nigger." You think we're all alike, and you don't care what happens to us just as we're out of your sight. My husband and I were living in Denver; and we had money to pay for a comfortable house. But there wasn't a place for rent to Negros that a self-respecting Negro would have. And how will my people ever learn to be decent if they must live in the white people's vice district?'"

"We have no right to treat people like that. In one large southern city, with high taxes and a big revenue and an expensive health department, a white friend of mine counted one morning twelve dead cats and dogs, in various stages of decomposition, in one short Negro alley. It was not an uncommon sight, except that the corpses were rather numerous. The outhouses are vile beyond description, a menace not merely to the Negroes but to the entire community. Yet if a Negro tried to buy a home in a healthful part of town we think his one motive is to thrust himself upon us, socially, just as far as he dares."

She touches the care of children and the awful canker of southern criminal methods. She calls for service and co-operation between white and black in social uplift work. She asks white and colored women to stand together in mutual defense and finally she visions the Great Adventure of those "who walk in love."

It is a fine book. It spells "Negro" with a capital:

"In obedience to the rule which requires all race-names to begin with a capital letter, e. g., Indian, Teuton, Zulu, Maori, AngoSaxon, Filipino, etc., etc."

The book has, of course, its little faults- a tendency to emphasize philanthropy rather than self-expression, and evident limited knowledge of the better classes of colored folk; but then these detract but little from an author whose earnestness and sincerity and human breadth stands out splendidly.

"Industrial Conditions Among Negros in St. Louis." By W.A. Crossland. (Washington University Studies in Social Economics, Vol. I, No. 1.) 75 cents.

Mr. Crossland's study of St. Louis' colored people, which inaugurates a series of social studies, is very well done. It is concise, readable, and the author knows his subject. We can best give an idea of the work by quoting his most important findings.

"There are five colored districts, two of them located in the very heart of the city. Housing conditions are bad, over-crowding is common, but to no greater extent than exists in districts peopled by other races living on the same economic plane. Two of the residence districts are very desirable, both as to their location and the character