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38  THE CRISIS

political equality with the tiger. In a speech at Poplarville, Miss., in April, 1907, Governor Vardaman said "How is the white man going to control the government? The way we do it is to pass laws to fit the white man, and make the other people come to them. * * * If necessary every Negro in the State will be lynched, and it will be done to maintain white supremacy. * * * The Fifteenth Amendment ought to be wiped out!" Here are the tiger's claws! Here is something worse than economics, race hatred and prejudice that utters itself in bestial threats of blood and slaughter subversive of the very foundations of civilized society.
  
It will go down, however, as slavery went down. The very stars in their courses will fight against it.
   
"Right forever on the scaffold, wrong
forever on the throne;
Yet that scaffold rules the future, and
behind the dim unknown
Standeth God within the shadow keeping watch above His own."

WHAT TO READ

The Autobiography of an ex-Colored Man.
Boston. Sherman, French & Company,
1912.

"This vivid and startling new picture of
conditions brought about by the race question in the United States makes no special appeal for the Negro, but shows in a dispassionate, though sympathetic, manner conditions as they actually exist between the whites and blacks to-day. Special please have already been made for and against the Negro in hundreds of books, but in these books either his virtues or his vices have been exaggerated. This is because writers, in nearly every instance, have treated the colored American as a whole; each has taken some one group of the race to prove his case. Not before has a composite and proportionate presentation of the entire race, embracing all of its various groups and elements, showing their relations with each other and to the whites, been made."

The preceding paragraph quoted from the
opening lines of the preface to this very interesting book gives in a way a resume of it. It is indeed an epitome of the race situation in the United States told in the form of an autobiography. The varied incidents, the numerous localities brought in, the setting forth in all its ramifications of our great and perplexing race problem, suggests a work of fiction founded on hard fact. The hero, a natural son of a Southerner of high station, begins his real life in a New England town to which his mother had migrated, runs the whole gamut of color-line experiences, and ends by going over on the other side.

The work gives a view of the race situation in New England, in New York City, in the far South, in city and country, in high and low society, with glimpses, too, of England, France and Germany. Practically every phase and complexity of the race question is presented at one time or another. The work is, as might be expected, anonymous.

The South and the Negro. Negroes in the Urban Movement. The Negro in New York. Outlook, June 29, 1912.

The Negroes in the South are, according
to one of these articles, flocking to the cities. And the reason for this is due, not to the call of city life, but largely to the "avidity with which Negroes are seizing educational opportunities. They insist on being in the towns where good schooling is possible."

Also a commission of Southern university
professors has decided to deal with the Negro from an educational point of view. Eleven State universities are to furnish one professor each. The article goes on to remark: "The formation of this commission is a manifestation not only of the vital work which Southern men are doing in social economics, but of their real leadership in matters of education, for the primary function of education is to enable men to learn how to live in right relations with one another, whatever their race and whatever their country." 

All this sounds very well and encouraging. But it is to be hoped very earnestly and in no spirit of carping that the work of these
leaders "in matters of education" will be carried on in a manner far more scientific than that employed recently by one Mr.
Charles Stelzle. 

NATIONAL ASSOCIATION FOR THE ADVANCEMENT OF COLORED PEOPLE

MEMBERSHIP.
SIXTEEN new members have been added to the association, and this month we also welcome a new branch - St. Louis - to membership. We now have ten branches. The constitutions of two more are under consideration and we are in daily receipt of applications from all parts of the country.
 
May we not especially urge on persons in sympathy with our work the necessity of personally joining this association? We need your names, your influence and your money. As one friend writes, "The clock is not going fast enough!" Let us make time, and fast time, between now and January 1.

MEETINGS.
MISS MARTHA GRUENING, the assistant secretary, on September 15 addressed a meeting at the Harlem Zion Church on the work of the association. October 7 Miss Gruening spoke before an enthusiastic meeting of the Washington branch at the Shiloh Baptist Church.
 
The Boston branch held the first of a series of meetings Wednesday October 9, with the Hon. Albert E. Pillsbury and Dr. Francis H. Rowley as speakers.

FUNDS.
IN the campaign for funds the association is now making we need the active cooperation of every member. Although the work of the year has been most encouraging, we must have larger resources at our disposal if we are to cope successfully with the almost daily demands made upon us to fight the increasing violence and discrimination which are spreading to such an alarming degree in this country. Even the aged, insane women and morally defective children are not exempt, as was evidenced recently by the fate of Anne Bostwick in Georgia, Virginia Christian in Hampton, Va., and the lynching in West Virginia of a probably innocent colored man. The association makes a special appeal to each member to help in this work by securing two $5 members or the equivalent, $10, in memberships in some form. Literature for free distribution and membership blanks will be furnished upon request. Checks should be drawn to Mr. Walter E. Sachs, treasurer, 60 Wall Street, New York City.

LEGAL REDRESS.
THE association's investigation of one of the most horrible lynchings of 1911 has been completed. An account of this will appear in one of the leading popular magazines, of which an exact notice will be given later in THE CRISIS.

In response to an anonymous appeal from a correspondent in Bluefield, W. Va., the association secured the services of Mr. James Oppenheim, the well-known journalist and novelist. Mr. Oppenheim made a careful investigation of the situation, the results of which appeared in The Independent of October 10.

MEMORIAL FUND.
AT the last meeting of the board of directors it was voted that the Mary Dunlop Maclean memorial fund, or so much of it as may be necessary, be devoted to the publication of literature in the interest of the association, each publication to bear the name of the fund. The memorial notice which appeared in the August CRISIS has been reprinted. The memorial committee consists of the following: Miss Mary White Ovington, secretary; Dr. W.E.B Du Bois, Miss Mary Moseley, Mrs. Frances R. Keyser, Prof. E.R.A Seligman, Willoughby Walling, Martha Gruening and Margaret Wycherly Veiller.