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130 THE CRISIS

at least 21 years of age, of whom nearly 70,000 could read and write, there were in 1908 only 1,743 registered as voters and these were disfranchised by the "white primary" system. In the face of these facts does it pay deliberately to misrepresent the truth?

"Oh, well," sighs the reader, "it is too bad for colored folk." But is it bad for colored folk only? The St. Louis Globe-Democrat said in 1911: "In electing last fall nine congressmen, all Democrats, according to the automatic system, Alabama cast a total vote of 96,303, an average of about 10,700 votes to a district. The last census gives Alabama a population of 2,138,093. Only one Alabaman in twenty-two goes to the polls. In Northern States the average of voters in proportion to population is one in five. An examination of the vote of the Alabama congressional districts in detail is interesting. In six of the nine districts the Democratic candidate ran without opposition, and in one of these less than 6,800 votes were cast. In the district of Mr. Underwood, Democratic leader in the House, the total of votes was but 10,114. In Mr. Underwood's district also the proportion of voters to population is only one in twenty. Why the great preponderance of absentees? The disfranchised colored vote accounts for only a part. More than half the white voters of Alabama also are disfranchised somehow, or else disfranchise themselves."
Of such material are the foundations of this republic.

FRAUD AND IMITATION.
As the colored people become more and more a self-conscious, self-directing group, with organs of intelligence and moving representatives, it is becoming difficult to deceive them as to men and movements. On the other hand, there is still opportunity for unscrupulous colored men to play on the ignorance of the white world as to what is going on in the colored group. If a man announces himself to be of a certain position in the white world, he is immediately looked up carefully. But the colored impostor is taken on blind faith and his lies and peculations when discovered are credited to the whole black race. In Atlanta there is a colored preacher who is making a living and some notoriety by vilifying his people; he has been repudiated by his own church and school, but has an institution of his own which he is promoting. His latest bid for white Southern support is this:

"Our training in the college, university and grammar school has been too much of the theoretical, showy kind, more for name than reality. How many of our boys and girls, who are said to be well educated, are almost helpless for the reason that they can do nothing that really pays or that somebody wants done. This is illustrated by the large army to be seen at our depots, poolrooms and street corners in the red-light districts of the communities and cities where we are so largely congested."

This is a contemptible lie. The graduates of Southern Negro schools and colleges are not loafing in the "red-light" districts and this man knows it. But what difference does that make so long as the white world of Atlanta praises him, uses his words to traduce and cripple worthy colored schools, and gives him letters with which to raise money from gullible Northerners for an institution that exists chiefly on paper?

Another method of deception has been discovered in promoting conventions. There is a National Association of Teachers in colored schools, which is now nine years old. Seeing its success, some colored men in Kansas City have been promoting in the last two years a "Negro National Educational Congress." They have advertised widely,

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induced governors to appoint "delegates" and sought to make it appear that they had the support of some body of worthy teachers. 

In fact they are nothing but a private set of promoters, many of whom are said to be of of doubtful reputation, and not one of them of any considerable standing in the colored educational world. Their "convention" at Denver last year barely missed being a fiasco, and we trust that the worthy colored citizens of St. Paul will see to it that this "convention" does not parade in that city under false colors, and bring ten million people into contempt.

ORGANIZED LABOR
The crisis believes in organized labor. It realizes that the standard of living among workers has been raised in the last half century through the efforts and sacrifice of laborers banded together in unions, and that all American labor to-day, white, black and yellow, benefits from this great movement. 

For such reasons we carry on our front cover the printer's union label to signify that the printing and binding of this magazine is done under conditions and with wages satisfactory to the printers' union.

We do this in spite of the fact, as well known to us as to others, that the "conditions satisfactory" to labor men in this city include the deliberate exclusion from decent-paying jobs of every black man whom white workingmen can exclude on any pretense. We know, and all men know, that under ordinary circumstances no black artisan can to-day work as printer, baker, blacksmith, carpenter, hatter, butcher, tailor, street or railway employee, boilermaker, bookbinder, electrical worker, glass blower, machinist, plumber, telegrapher, electrotyper, textile worker, upholsterer, stone cutter, carriage maker, plasterer, mason, painter - or any other decent trade, unless he works as a "scab," or unless in some locality he has secured such a foothold that the white union men are not able easily to oust him. 

This policy is not always avowed (although there are a dozen unions affiliated with the American Federation of Labor who openly confine admission to "white" men), but it is perfectly well understood.  Some unions, like the printers and the carpenters, admit a lone colored man here and there so as to enable them the more easily to turn down the rest. Others, like the masons, admit Negroes in the South where they must, and bar them in the North where they can. 

Whatever the tactics, the result is the same for the mass of white workingmen in America; beat or starve the Negro out of his job if you can by keeping him out of the union; or, if you must admit him, do the same thing inside the union lines.

What then must be the attitude of the black man in the event of a strike like that of the white waiters of New York? The mass of them must most naturally regard the union white man as their enemy. They may not know the history of the labor movement, but they know the history of white and black waiters in New York, and when they take back the jobs out of which the white waiters have driven them, they do the natural and sensible thing, howsoever pitiable the necessity of such cutthroat policies in the labor world may be. So long as union labor fights for humanity, its mission is divine; but when it fights for a clique of Americans, Irish or German monopolists who have cornered or are trying to corner the market on a certain type of service, and are seeking to sell that service at a premium, while other competent workmen starve, they deserve themselves the starvation which they plan for their darker and poorer fellows. 

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