Viewing page 7 of 27

This transcription has been completed. Contact us with corrections.

12     THE CRISIS

FOREIGN.

A MEMORIAL meeting on the death of the late Dr. E. W. Blyden has been held in Lagos, West Africa, and the Blyden memorial committee was formed. The Hon. C. A. Sapara Williams, of the legislative council, presided. The Right Rev. Bishop Johnson was the principal speaker. The meeting decided upon a life-sized portrait and a scholarship or technical school.

¶ The free Negroes of the Gulf Coast of Africa and of the German colony of Kamerun are raising and exporting over 40,000 tons of cocoa each year. This whole development is said to be the result of mission schools.

¶ The first blue book on native affairs published by the Union government of South Africa forms a volume of 400 pages. The report shows that while $1,500,000 is raised from native taxation, only $55,000 is spent on native education

THE GHETTO.

Atlanta, GA., is trying to register and tax its colored washerwomen. Colored people are protesting.

¶ Difficulties are continually arising on the "Jim Crow" street cars in the South. Recent fights are reported in Houston, Tex., Louisville, Ky., and Mobile, Ala.

¶ A white woman ran away from he hospital in Cincinnati, O., because a colored woman was on a cot next to her.

¶ In Kansas City, Mo., a Negro clerk in the city treasurer's office was discharged because he was black. The civil-service commission decided the colored man had been unjustly removed, but had no power to reinstate him.

¶ The appointment of a colored teacher in the Sexton School, Chicago, has led to a strike on the part of some of the white pupils.

¶ A local paper reports: "Hatred of the Negro and those who employ Negroes has been carried to an outrageous extreme in Briartown, Okla. Three farmers have been shot there because they employed Negro cotton pickers in violation of local sentiment. It is thought that two of the farmers will die. Heretofore, Negroes never have been allowed to stay in the Briartown section. When it became known that the three farmers had imported Negro help armed mobs formed and marched to the farms. The farmers were shot when defending themselves, their families, the Negro and the farm property against the mobs. Certainly, if the officials of Oklahoma have any respect for themselves and their State, they will ferret out and punish the assailants of the three men and their employees."

¶ White Southerners in Newburgh, N. Y., tried to start a row because colored people were eating in the same Chinese chop suey restaurant.

¶ When Negro property owners of Harlem met to discuss the colored "invasion," Mr. John E. Nail, a colored real-estate agent, addressed the meeting and declared that property depreciation following the coming into the neighborhood of a Negro family was due to panic on the part of the white owners.

"If a Negro family gets in a house on your block," said he, "don't run away. If your tenants move out don't rent to Negroes at a lower rate. Just get together and stick and the chances are you will find your houses will fill up with white families who will learn that the Negro family is minding its own affairs and is above the average in intelligence. If you get scared and throw your property on the market or put in Negro tenants you lose money, because Negro tenants do not pay as much as white ones."

¶ In Summit Township, Kansas, there is trouble over the local school. There are a larger number of Negro families in the district than white families, but there are more white children to attend the school than colored children. The Negroes own the most land and pay a greater amount of the taxes and they, standing on their constitutional rights, elect Negroes as members of the school board. To this the white patrons object, but it does little or no good. The school board employed Mrs. Rosa Johnson, a colored teacher of Alma, Kan., to teach the school, but county superintendent W. E. Connelly refused to indorse her teacher's certificate and she is therefore debarred from taking charge of the school officially. She appeared there one morning, but the white people were at the schoolhouse and Mrs. Johnson did not call school to order.

Two or three white teachers have been sent to the district to get the job, but the board did not employ them, saying they had already employed a teacher. Just when the school will begin cannot be told at this time, and what the outcome of the trouble in No. 67 will be is also a mystery. 


ALONG THE COLOR LINE     13

¶ A Boston woman living in Washington has discovered that her husband has colored blood.

¶ Kansas City firemen recently refused to rescue workmen who were entombed beneath a burning building. "Why risk our lives? We know of only two there; they are dead, undoubtedly-and Negroes."

¶ The city of Macon, Ga., has removed its "red-light" district to the vicinity of a Negro church. The church has protested and is preparing to move.

¶ A mob in Dawsonville, Ga., has burned a Negro church and run a Negro tenant away from his home.

¶ A Buckingham County, Va., jury brought in such a curious verdict to deprive colored people of 342 acres of land that appeal has been made to the Supreme Court of Appeals in this case.

¶ In Guthrie, Okla., two colored women with their little girls drew water with their own cups from a public fountain. For this they were told that "Niggers" were not allowed there, and one of them was knocked down by a policeman.

CRIME.

THE following lynchings have taken place since our last report:

¶ At Bakersfield, Cal., an unknown Negro accused of attacking a child. At Cullings, Ga., "Bob." Edwards, suspected of complicity in attacking a girl. He was shot, dragged through the streets and mutilated. At Americus, Ga., a Negro, Yarborough, accused of attacking a girl. In Rawlins, Wyo., a colored man, Wigfall, was lynched by the convicts. He was charged with the assault of an old woman. At Shreveport, La., fifty men killed a half-witted Negro, "Sam." Johnson. He was accused of killing a white lawyer.

¶ The governor of Georgia declared martial law and sent 167 soldiers and officers to protect six Negroes who were being tried for criminal assault in Forsythe County. Two of the Negroes were sentenced to be hanged. 

¶ An unusual number of colored men have been murdered this month:

One at Swaynesboro [[Swainsboro]], Ga., supposed to have been killed by unknown white men. At Bristol, Va., a steward of a hotel killed a Negro bellboy. At Huntsville, Ala., a white man killed a colored laborer. At New Orleans an old colored man was killed by a white man. In Marion County, Ala., Willis Perkins was killed by a party of white men for no apparent cause. In Homer, La., a prominent farmer shot and killed a Negro, John Woods. At Fitzgerald, Ga., a prominent dentist accused a Negro of stealing and shot him dead when the Negro tried to run away. Forest Boland of Lucedale, Miss., was recently killed because he had testified against white liquor sellers.

¶ A white man in York, Pa., shoved a colored man roughly off the sidewalk. He was stabbed three times with a knife.

¶ Governor Donaghey has given absolute pardon to Robert Armstrong, a Negro convicted and sentenced to be hanged for attacking a white woman. The governor says:

"My reason for granting this pardon is that I have become thoroughly convinced of Armstrong's innocence. Feeling this way about it, there can be no middle ground so far as my action is concerned. He is either guilty or innocent, and believing him innocent, I have pardoned him.

"I have given the case careful thought and study, have read the transcript of the evidence and have considered it in an unbiased and unprejudiced manner. The evidence as disclosed by the transcript does not show the identification of Armstrong by the prosecuting witness to be of such a nature as to convince me of its absolute certainty. The opportunity for her to identify her assailant was limited to the flare of a match as he stood by the bureau in the dark room and to a dim light from a possible street lamp that might have shown through a crack in the window curtain. There is some evidence that she had stated the party might have been a dark-skinned Greek or a mulatto Negro.

"I have every confidence in her honesty and sincerity in this matter, but under all conditions connected with the case I feel that she is bound to be mistaken in her identification.

"Armstrong's defense was an alibi. True, it was Negro testimony, but to prove where a Negro is at night, after working hours, one would ordinarily have to resort to Negro testimony,

Transcription Notes:
Do not break words across pages. I have added the rest of the final word "testimony," from the following page.