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272 THE CRISIS
servatory of Music is making the Sunday-evening concerts a new feature of this season's work.
The second public concert was given on March 1. The choral society presented Miss Daisy Tapley, of New York, in the comic opera "Mikado." The dances were under the direction of Miss Theresa Lee.
A Victrola has been purchased by the Teachers' Choral Society of Louisville, Ky. The instrument will be used in all of the schools of the city as a medium of acquainting the pupils with the best music.
Dr. W. E. B. Du Bois gave a lecture on American Negro folk songs, assisted by Mr. Harry T. Burleigh, baritone, on Sunday afternoon, February 23, at the Ethical Culture meeting house. The lecture was given under the auspices of the Music School Settlement for Colored People.
Miss Clarice Jones, pianist, of Washington, D. C., and Mr. Roland W. Hayes, tenor, of Boston, Mass., presented a program at Andrew Rankin Memorial Chapel, of Howard University, Washington, D. C., which is deserving of mention. Mr. R. Wilfred Tibbs, the excellent pianist, was the accompanist. Miss Jones is a graduate of the Ithaca Conservatory of Music, in New York.
Since there are no library facilities for the colored people at Paris, Tex., the Gibbons colored high school of that city, through concerts and lectures, has provided for the school a well-chosen library of 1,400 volumes, a piano and eighteen instruments for the use of the boys' brass band.
"Majors and Minors," one of the earliest of Paul Laurence Dunbar's books, is quite rare and is being quoted by dealers at $7.50.
The musical and historical pageant, celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of emancipation, was given at Carnegie Hall, New York. It was entitled "Historic Scenes at Hampton."
FOREIGN
DR. LEO. FROBENIUS, of the German Central African exploration expedition, has obtained some remarkable terracotta work from West Africa and has found some unknown ruined cities.
Prof. Carl Pearson, lecturing in London, declares that all white races are evolved from colored races.
The financial report of the island of St. Lucia, B. W. I., shows a prosperous condition. The revenue amounts to $360,000, which was $15,000 more than the expenditure.
THE GHETTO.
CLEVELAND G. ALLEN has been unearthing discrimination in the navy against colored sailors. He reports that colored men who enlist in the navy are barred from all social life aboard the ships; as, for instance, smokers, entertainments and the privilege of the libraries and reading rooms. Colored men are only received for enlistment in the messmen branch and get no chance for promotion except to stewardship—and the steward does not rank as a petty officer. The Negro is deprived of the regular system of shore leave and in other ways so treated that the few that enlist desert whenever opportunity offers. There are a very few colored petty officers and seamen who enlisted during the time of the Spanish-American War. They are for the most part isolated in out-of-the-way places.
None of the new set of intermarriage bills have yet been passed in the North, but all sorts of desperate expedients are being used. Forged petitions from alleged colored organizations have been distributed in Ohio; defeated measures have been reintroduced in Kansas and Iowa, and a bill was sneaked through the national House of Representatives during the absence of two-thirds of the members. In the State of Washington a bill prohibiting intermarriage between white and colored races, except where both are citizens of the United States, has been passed. It is aimed at Asiatics.
The colored fire company of Durham, N. C., was disbanded as soon as the new fire-engine house was finished.
"Jim Crow" street cars have been proposed in Illinois and Delaware.
A segregation ordinance is proposed in Atlanta, Ga.
COURTS.
THE case of Dr. W. J. Thompkins, of Kansas City, Mo., against the railroad company for ejection from a Pullman car is to be carried to the United States Circuit Court.
In Atlanta, when six Negroes were called to trial, it was found that the warrants upon which they were arrested were forged. They
ALONG THE COLOR LINE 273
had all paid bogus bonds. Ten men have been arrested in connection with the scandal.
The public service commission of Maryland has ordered that the B., C. and A. Company provide, on its trains operated from Claiborne to Ocean city and on its trains operated elsewhere in the State, accommodations for colored passengers which shall make no difference or discrimination in quality or convenience of accommodations in the cars or compartments set aside for white and colored passengers.
That whenever a car is set aside for colored passengers the same may be divided by a substantial partition so as to furnish a smoking compartment for colored men, provided that the number of colored passengers is not sufficiently large to give them a just claim to an entire smoking car instead of such a smoking compartment.
In Alabama it is solemnly declared that a white officer with a Negro prisoner can ride either in the white car or the colored car.
In Massachusetts it has been decided that an owner has a right to advertise his property as for sale to colored people.
CRIME.
THE following lynchings have taken place since our last record:
At Elysian Fields, Tex., two colored men, for horse stealing.
At Andalusia, Ala. (where several Negroes have been lynched in the past and postcards with the scenes published), a colored man was lynched for shooting a white woman.
At Cornelia, Ga., two colored men were lynched for killing a policeman.
At Manning, S. C., a Negro boy was shot to death for assault and battery on a white man.
At Drew, Miss., a Negro was lynched (by a mob said to be colored people) for murder.
At Lyrtis, La., a colored preacher was lynched. He owed a white merchant $10. The merchant demanded his pay, but the colored man did not have it. The merchant's friends attempted to whip him. The man resisted and was killed.
At Clay City, Ky., one of four Negroes charged with murder is believed to have been lynched.
One of the lynchers of the mob that lynched the wrong man at Houston, Miss., has committed suicide.
A bill to legalize lynching has been introduced into the South Carolina legislature.
On account of the race riots at Collierville, Tenn., one white man and two colored men are dead.
A white man in Memphis, Tenn., has been found guilty of wantonly murdering a Negro. He was sentenced to twelve years in the penitentiary.
In Augusta, Ga., a prominent white man remonstrated with another white man who was whipping a Negro. The prominent white man was killed.
The reign of terror in North George continues. The homes of three Negroes were recently dynamited.
Frederick L. Hoffman, who distinguished himself some years ago by predicting dire calamities to the colored race, has declared in a letter to the New York Times that lynching is decreasing. He bases his conclusions upon these figures:
| Number of Lynchings | Lynchings per 1,000,000 Population
1885-1889 | 762 | 2.58
1890-1894 | 944 | 2.88
1895-1899 | 702 | 1.95
1900-1904 | 537 | 1.36
1905-1909 | 385 | 0.88
1910 | 74 | 0.80
1911 | 71 | 0.76
1912 | 64 | 0.67
1885-1912 |3,539| 1.69
He adds the following table:
LYNCHINGS BY STATES.
1908-1912
States | Number of Lynchings | Rate per 1,000,000 Population
Florida......... | 40 | 10.63
Georgia......... | 74 | 5.67
Mississippi..... | 46 | 5.12
Louisiana....... | 33 | 3.98
Alabama......... | 30 | 2.81
Arkansas........ | 22 | 2.81
Texas........... | 45 | 2.31
Tennessee....... | 23 | 2.11
South Carolina.. | 15 | 1.98
Kentucky........ | 22 | 1.92
Oklahoma........ | 14 | 1.69
West Virginia... | 3 | 0.49
Virginia........ | 4 | 0.39
Missouri........ | 6 | 0.36
North Carolina.. | 3 | 0.27
Illinois........ | 4 | 0.14
Ohio............ | 2 | 0.08
Ten other States have each had a single lynching in this period.
