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OPINION
[[image - drawing of two men discussing papers]] 

Mr. Woodrow Wilson. It would seem to be dimly dawning upon the consciousness of the President of the United States and his distinguished advisers that the 10,000,000 colored people of this country cannot be wholly ignored and that a policy which hurts them has at least to be explained. Many persons seek to show that Wilson's anti-Negro policy is a mistake of the head and not of the heart. 

Mr. Oswald Garrison Villard, in a speech in Baltimore, said:

"I have known the present President of the United States personally for approximately twenty years and I take this opportunity to say that although I have complete respect for the sincerity of his motives and believe that at heart he really desires to do something big and fine for the colored people, yet in this segregation matter I feel him to be wholly wrong.

"His philosophy is wrong, his democracy greatly at fault. He has given us beautiful and worthy sentiments in his book called 'The New Freedom.' But nowhere do we find any indication that his democracy is not limited, both by the sex line and the color line. He is far behind the times in his steadfast opposition to woman's suffrage."

The New York Evening Post has this editorial comment:

"The whole undertaking to separate the races at Washington was gratuitous, with the result that the Wilson administration finds itself between two fires and certain to alienate the colored voters in the Middle Western pivotal States, while Wilson himself appears to have been faithless to his pre-election promise to stand 'for everything by which I could assist in advancing the interest of that race in the United States.' We do not doubt that Mr. Wilson meant those words when he uttered them, or that he still means to be President of the whole country, and not merely the representative of its white citizens. But the terrible fact is there that, without protest from him, the hateful spirit of caste has been introduced into the departments to a degree never known before, though attempted previously, and that this does not help, but gravely injures, the race. Perhaps later on the President may see his way clear to some statesmanlike measure which may relieve the race tension and inure to the benefit of the nation's colored wards. But it will have to be prompt and far reaching to offset the mischief and injustice already done."

The New Haven Register declares that Mr. Wilson "is a President with ideals, and an apparent desire to deal fairly with all sorts and conditions of men in the nation over which he presides. His success in accomplishing this is erratic. Occasionally it amounts to a marked failure. Of nothing is this more conspicuously true than in his dealing with the Negro officeholding problem.  Mr. Roosevelt erred on the side of protesting too much friendship for the Negro, and apparently lacking in real regard for him. Mr. Taft made few professions of this sort, but seems to have treated the Negro as fairly as any President in recent years. Mr. Wilson started unfortunately by permitting Secretary Bryan to make the needless mistakes of replacing a Negro with a white man in the position of minister to Hayti, a position held, and most fittingly, by Negroes for years. He did not make the matter any better by losing the opportunity which long precedent gave him of filling the position of Register of the Treasury with a Negro.

"But the most stupid and un-American blunder was this building a fence between white and Negro employees in the Federal departments, poetically called 'segregation.'


OPINION

There was no need of it. The only demand for it was from a few persons with foolish prejudices. The President might have disregarded them, as other Presidents have done. He has, by the action which he has permitted, done irreparable injury to the spirit of race harmony. For in spite of pessimism and ignorant prejudice, right handling will soften the lines of race prejudice, in time. The whites, more than the Negroes, need right educating in this, and the President has contributed to error. It is unfortunate, for he is a man of justice at heart. He seems to have been led either by his own prejudice or that of others, into a serious mistake for which he cannot, however, escape the responsibility."

Senator Moses E. Clapp, speaking in Boston, said:

"When men educated, cultured, refined, who possess capabilities to do things. are humiliated and struck a blow like this, they are putting back on the black man the bloody shackles which four years of bloody warfare struck from his ankles.

"The American people might just as well know to-night as not. It is not the question of the Negro but that of the progress of our great nation. The moment you have thoroughly forced into the consciousness of the black or white man that there can be no progress, you have laid the foundation for class distinction. It is the very keynote of it all."

BALTIMORE. 

"For the third time," says the New York Evening Post, "Baltimore has passed a segregation ordinance. The first two were thrown out by the State courts when taken to them by protesting colored people. It now looks as if the matter would have to be adjudicated by the United States courts, for the ordinance of yesterday was drawn in accordance with the advice of the Court of Appeals, given when it declared the second one unconstitutional. This was a rather unusual procedure, and showed clearly where the sympathies of the court lay. In its essence the ordinance provides that no Negro shall move into a block which has a majority of white residents, and no white person shall buy or rent in a block if the majority of residents are black. It remains to be seen whether the Supreme Court of the United States will find such a restriction consistent with the guarantees of the Federal Constitution. Economically, this legislation puts iron bands on the real-estate development of Baltimore, and will, we believe, prove irksome to whites and blacks alike. It is utterly absurd in this day and generation to return to the ghetto of the middle ages, abandoned by Europe long ago, and it cannot now be tolerated in a community which calls itself democratic. It is contrary to every modern ideal and aspiration. Why, if it is successful, should similar legislation not be undertaken against Jews or Slavs or Italians or any other group in our cities?"

The full opinion of the Maryland Court of Appeals on the former segregation act has been handed down. It says among other things:

"If then the legislature could pass a statute, under the police power of the State, providing for the segregation of the races, as we think it could, there would seem to be no doubt that the mayor and city council of Baltimore can pass a valid ordinance having the same end in view. It is true, however, that some distinction is made between statutes passed by the legislature and ordinances passed by the municipality under the police power, as the court must undoubtedly take into consideration reasonableness of the ordinances and determine whether any of these are so unreasonable or oppressive that the legislature did not intend to empower the municipality to enact them as they stand."

It then goes on to discuss various difficulties in drawing up a proper ordinance and finally says:

"We do not understand why, in section 3, the exception was limited to domestic servants or just how comprehensive that term was intended to be.

"It would be difficult to include caretaker, chauffeur or janitor in the term 'domestic servants,' but as the validity of the ordinance is not thereby affected we will not discuss that further.

"As the case before us does not involve the provisions of sections 6, 7, 8 and 9 we will not discuss them separately, or pass upon the validity vol non of such provisions as the delegation of power attempted by sections 6 and 7 to property owners, etc., but for the reasons stated we will affirm the judgement."