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282 THE CRISIS

elected the co-operation of T.M. Haynes, a bright, intelligent and industrious colored man, in the work of gathering a community of Negroes for the proposed new town.

"It was not difficult to get a company of colored men together to start the enterprise, and in honor of the originator of the idea they named the town Boley. That was a little over seven years ago.

"To-day Boley has a population of 2,000 people; it is thoroughly organized and as well governed as any town of its size in Oklahoma. It has its own municipal water works, fire department, electric-light plant, telephone exchange—in fact, everything that any other town of 2,000 would be expected to have. There are three miles of concrete sidewalks—ten feet wide in the main street, on which there is not a foot of boardwalk. There are five aldermen and they have high ideals of civic righteousness. It is a dry town; it is a model town; it is a clean town.

"To give an idea of the morality of the people, I need but relate an incident of a few days ago. A traveling salesman accosted an attractive young colored woman; she accepted his advances so promptly his suspicions were not aroused until he found she had led him into the police headquarters. That experience cost him $42. 

"The people of Boley are high grade, if they are colored. The white man who comes here cannot but be so impressed. Men and women are well dressed and all seem kindly disposed toward each other and exceptionally courteous.

"I went up to the Farmers' and Merchants' Bank. The assistant cashier, a man named Jones, came here from Wheeling, W. Va., where he was a schoolteacher. He is enthusiastic over Boley.

"'You should be here on a Saturday,' he said. 'The town is black; yes,' he laughed, 'literally black with people. They come by hundred from the farming districts, and a more orderly lot of people you never saw. The streets ring with their laughter and jokes. They are happy. And I tell you it is fortunate the colored people are of this disposition. If they were not they would be most miserable and lost. I have never seen a serious quarrel here, and there has never been a killing in the town. We have a police force, but very little need of one. Just now we are having a little difficulty to keep bootleggers out.'"

THE NEGRO IN NEW YORK AND LONDON.

The New York World publishes a page on what it means to be a Negro in New York:

"'The Negro in New York is under a ban. In this great city, where the gates of opportunity stand open wide to all men of all other races, nearly every field of honest employment is closed to any one—man, woman or child—who has Negro blood. Not only that. It is very difficult, if not impossible, for us to get many of the ordinary conveniences—I had almost said necessaries—of life. We are not treated as human. That is the cold, hard fact!'

"The Rev. Charles Martin, a Protestant clergyman of pure African descent, had been telling me how heavily a black skin handicaps a man right here in New York City fifty years after the abolition of slavery in the United States. I had asked him for facts—for specific instances of the disabilities to which he had referred. He said:

"'Just to take one case. When a Negro is downtown and wants something to eat there is no place he can get food. Very few men realize how unrelenting this rule is enforced. On one occasion when "Joseph's Brethren" was being played at the New Theatre a Jewish rabbi who was anxious that I should see the play had invited me to go with him. He had had nothing to eat, and so we stopped at a lunchroom in the neighborhood of Columbus Circle. We sat down at a table, but no one came to serve us. No more attention was paid to our presence than if we had suddenly become invisible, and after waiting some time in vain there was nothing left for us to do but to walk out.

"'Outside of domestic employment there is very little opportunity for either the men or women of my race except within the limited circle of their own people. A woman can get employment to do washing and a man can get a job as elevator boy or store porter, but that is about all. Only the other day a large department store which had employed quite a few Negro girls ever since it opened dismissed all of them at once for no other reason than their color. No fault was found with their work, but they were Negroes, and probably some customers had objected, and so they were thrown out of employment.

"'The attitude of the community toward the Negro is this: So long as he is down and willing to remain down and does not try to enter into any of the higher activities he is all right, but the moment he aspires to better himself he is not all right. So long as the Negro is of useful service—useful to the white man—he is tolerated; the moment he seeks to enter the field of lucrative endeavor—lucrative to himself—the whole weight of the community is exerted to keep him down. It is almost impossible for a Negro to obtain commercial or professional employment in any firm of good standing in New York. Let me give you a couple of instances:

"'There was a young fellow who had just been graduated from Cornell. If I am not mistaken, he had won the French medal there. He was an excellent linguist, and some white people who were interested in him recommended him strongly to the Standard Oil people. They wanted a young man to travel for them—some one speaking French and Spanish. This young fellow had all the necessary qualifications and had an interview with the head of the foreign department, but was told plainly that he could not be employed because he had Negro blood in him.

"'Another case which was even harder—the young fellow knelt down and prayed with me in church over it; he was a graduate pharmacist. He had his London diplomas and had passed the State examination here. I tried to get him employment at a colored institution—that is, an institution for colored patients, but run by white folks—and when he put in an appearance they told him point blank that they could not take him in their prescription department as a druggist, but they wanted some one to wash the bottles and they would be willing to give him that.

"'I could give you countless such cases No matter how good a printer a Negro is, no matter how good a carpenter, or painter, or electrician, he can get no employment in New York in the open market. The great injustice is that there is nothing against these men except that they are Negroes. No white firm will give them a place any more than it would think of employing a Negro bookkeeper or Negro shipping clerk. Unless he is willing to give up his trade and become an elevator boy or a store porter, he must confine his activities solely to the restricted area where Negroes lives and where the field is so poor that many skilled workmen in it can barely make a living.'"

This revelation causes the Southern papers great satisfaction and glee, while the foolish report of the capture of London by black folk arouses them; but the Louisville Courier-Journal says: 

"'A colonial woman in London is agitating against the admission of 'men of color' to social equality in London.

"The term 'men of color' in London means Mongolians, American, and African Negroes. West Indians, Turks, Egyptians, brown-skinned Aryans from India, Berbers from the Atlas Mountains, Arabs from beyond the Red Sea, straight-haired blacks of the South Sea islands, Malays, Australians, New Zealanders, Kanakas, Somalis, Singhalese, Afghans, Abyssinians, Filipinos and men of other divisions of the human race, all of whom are held by the protesting idealist to be brothers under their skin."

The Boston Transcript adds:
"The explanation of the alleged invasion is credible to the British. It is that Negroes are so well treated that Great Britain is a most attractive country to them, and London in particular is the colored man's paradise. Herein we find a little trace of British self-satisfaction, but it is only a trace after all, for unquestionably Negrophobia is compelled to lurk in secret corners in Great Britain and would not dare to manifest itself in lynching. The British have learned tolerance of foreign races by the long experience of their nation as a great colonial power. There are under the British rule millions of British subjects who, if not black, are certainly not white. In Lindon every colony, black, brown and white or yellow, is represented. At times and in particular localities the streets seem a moving picture of the ethnology of the empire. The Hindoo, the Negro and Malay and the Hongkong native may be seen passing along the thoroughfares of what is to them the metropolis of a great protecting empire.

"Possibly if the United States were not one of the newest apprentices to the art of ruling alien peoples it might exhibit the same toleration to those whose skins and ways are different from ours. It is not alone this toleration, however, that makes the Negro feel particularly comfortable while under the British flag. A most powerful contribution to his comfort and safety is found in the general determination of the British people