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122     THE CRISIS

the sums among the county chairmen in each district "in proportion to their needs." His chief lieutenant, according to Collier's, is a colored man, Benjamin J. Davis. Collier's goes into the matter of some indictment brought against him awhile ago and says:

"Six indictments were found against Davis, and he is still out on bond. For years he has obtained a series of 'continuances'--that is, postponements of trial. These postponements amount to granting this criminal immunity. He is the most valuable asset which the Republican party of Georgia possesses. With these indictments held as a club over his head, he can be forced into line, he and all his State-wide power." And the magazine also describes his "abject flattering of those white men he is shaping to his own clever purposes."

As the campaign drew nearer to the great day at Chicago, a discussion of the manners and morals of the colored delegates filled columns of newspapers which ordinarily close their pages to all mention of the black man unless he has been very spectacularly lynched. Manager McKinley said he had "proof" that Ormsby McHarg, Roosevelt's campaign manager, had bribed colored delegates who were pledged to support Taft. In retaliation the Roosevelt headquarters gave out a letter from Charles Banks of Mississippi, in which he returns to McKinley money given him "to defray traveling expenses of some of the delegates." Mr. Banks says he has turned to Roosevelt as a protest against conditions in his State.

"When I was in Washington a few weeks ago looking after the new Federal Court bill from Mississippi," he writes, "and called at your headquarters, your assistant, without any suggestion from me whatever, brought up the matter of expenses for delegates from my State. I told him then and there, in your presence, that so far as I was concerned I would not accept any expense money for me whatever. You then proposed that I take enough for the rest of the delegates. I stated to you that they were all men who could get to Chicago, and you could look after the matter; here both of you, however, proposed that the matter be closed then, to which I agreed.

"On my arrival at Chicago Wednesday, I found that you, or someone connected with you, had informed the delegates that you had given me a lot of money for them as well as myself. I am only confirmed in what I suspected then, and I am returning you herewith the money, and you can do as you see fit.

"The insinuations that I can be or have been bought are known to be untrue and unfounded by no one better than those connected with your campaign as well as those of four years ago. I have never asked any of you for one cent, and never applied for an office."

The Roosevelt managers regard this letter as "proof" of their contention while the Taft men say it is "proof" of theirs. To pay the traveling expenses of delegates who could not afford to defray them out of their own pockets has, apparently, been a political custom on both sides.

While this merry recrimination went on the colored delegates for the most part proved to be an unusually high class of men and for the most part unbribable. The only weak part about them is that the mass of their constituents remain disfranchised and are helpless, of their own initiative, to remedy such evils as exist.

THE LOGICAL WHITE MAN

The Rev. Horace Bumstead, who lived in the South for thirty-five years teaching black boys and girls, reviews in the Congregationalist Raymond Patterson's "The Negro and His Needs," a work commended in a "Foreword" by President Taft. Dr. Bumstead finds sincerity of purpose in the volume and then points out a few of Mr. Patterson's contradictions, which are so typical of the muddle-headed condition of even the average well-intentioned man in regard to the Negro question that we cannot forbear to quote them:

"Among his conclusions," says Dr. Bumstead, "are such as these: 'Put a little black schoolhouse within sound of ever plantation bell,' and yet, 'stop Negro education with the grammar school'--forgetting that it is the high schools and colleges that have furnished nearly all the competent Negro teachers for the elementary schools and have never been able to furnish enough. 'Stop the colored university just where it is,' and yet, 'plant industrial schools of the Tuskegee and Hampton type in every black county'--ignoring the dependence of such schools on the higher institutions for their teachers and managers, to say nothing of the proper preparation of pupils fitted to enter

OPINION     123

industrial schools. 'Keep the Negro out of politics in the South'--without the ballot, educational and economic opportunity are inevitably restricted--'until the average of the race is at least equal to that of the European immigrant of to-day'--unaware of the fact that in the Louisiana sugar district, where Negroes and Italians work together, the work demanding the highest efficiency is given not to the immigrants but to the Negroes. 'Do this by any means satisfactory to the rough and ready Anglo-Saxon mind and patch up the constitution afterward'; and 'lynch no Negro for anything except crimes against women, and then be sure you have the right Negro;' and then, on the same page with the foregoing prescriptions of lawlessness for the dominant race to practice, 'teach him morality and justice by the example of the white man!' "

THE GENTLEMAN FROM GEORGIA

The Hon. S. A. Roddenbery of Georgia nobly waved the banner of the Empire State of the South, where Negroes pay taxes on over $34,000,000 worth of property, on the occasion of a recent debate in Congress. The question before the House was whether Spanish War pensions should or should not be increased, but the gifted Roddenbery did not become really eloquent until he struck the Negro question. Then he said, as reported in the Congressional Record: "If you really want to do something for these good Spanish War boys join with me and go down here to this Pension Office and take out the Africans, turn them out of their jobs, and give the places to our Spanish War soldiers, and keep them there as long as they are able to work and labor. Let them administer a Caucasian government supported by Caucasian taxpayers. When they get too old, if they are indigent, then consider pensioning them; then go down Pennsylvania Avenue to this massive War and Navy Building, walk up and down the aisles, and take those black sons of the cocoanut region who sit there with big brown drops of sweat coming out of their foreheads, kick them out, and put these old veterans of the Civil War there by those tables, at those telephones under those electric fans, and as long as they are able to labor let them have the benefit of the nation's offices and gratitude. Let not the old pioneer of this country at 90 years of age be felling a tree in the forest, where by reason of his infirmity he drops dead beneath its shock. Give him and his kind a quiet and easy position now enjoyed by a 'kinky head.'

"Put the Anglo-Saxon in. They are honorable; they are our blood. They helped save this country, if saved it was. They have made this country and will perpetuate it. Do something for them now. Turn Africa out and let America in. Go down to the Bureau of Printing and Engraving where there stands a pure white girl working day by day and next to her a black Negro working day by day---

"The Speaker. 'The time of the gentleman has expired.'

"Mr. Roddenberry. 'Fire them out! Fire them out! Fire them out! (Laughter.) If you have got Caucasian blood in your veins kick them out.' "

WHAT'S THE MATTER WITH WHITE MEN?

"With an Indian first in the Olympic Pentathlon trial," remarks the New York Evening Post, "Theodore Cable, Jr., Harvard's colored athlete, the individual star of the Harvard-Yale track meeting, and Drew, the colored sprinter of the Springfield High School, carrying off the honors in the Yale interscholastic meet at New Haven, all on Saturday last, it is plainly time to draw the color line in athletics. How else will it be possible to maintain that the darker races are totally lacking in stamina and strength? Then these colored athletes have a bad habit of becoming prominent later in life.

"For instance, William H. Lewis, the Assistant Attorney-General, whom the officials of the might American Bar Association are now laboring to expel from membership, used to be a star athlete at Amherst, and was later the 'brainiest' center rush that the Harvard football team ever possessed. Mr. Matthews, who has now succeeded him as Assistant United State District Attorney in Boston, was a remarkable end rush, and an equally conspicuous baseball player at Harvard. Who knows what Theodore Cable, Jr., may not aspire to, and what trouble he may not make for us all in the future? Let us scotch him now by ruling that he should not take part in any further intercollegiate competitions--to discourage the others. Since athletic gatherings are distinctly social events, the reason to be given