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236 THE CRISIS

benefit of the Negro in making up their representation in Congress, or else they ought not to have power to disfranchise him.

The Chicago Tribune says:

If the Negro does not vote his vote ought not be counted. Especially it ought not to be counted for the side he would vote against if he were allowed to vote. Negroes are traditionally Republican. In the South not only are they not allowed to vote but their uncast votes are counted for the Democratic candidates.

The South is taking careful notice and the Houston, Texas, Post states:

There are in the South about 7,000,000 males of voting age, of whom less than 2,000,000 vote in the Presidential election. Of the 5,000,000 non-voters, the majority are white.

The problem will be solved some day, but not through Federal interference or the punitive reduction of southern representation in Congress. Already, much complaint is heard among southern white men against the election laws. These laws will be modified in time and intelligent Negroes of character will not only be permitted to vote, but encouraged to do so in many of the states.

The encouragement, however, will not come from Mississippi. The Yazoo, Miss., Sentinel has this letter from a "White Line Democrat:"

In looking over the election table for Yazoo County in the last issue of your paper, I see that there were thirteen votes cast for Hughes at the Court House box. Upon inquiry from some of the election officers I learn that a number of these were Negroes, and this raises the question in my mind: "Are we to have a return of the Negro to politics in Yazoo County?"

In days gone by, Yazoo was pointed to as the one county with sufficient courage and manhood to eliminate the Negro from politics. It was Yazoo, headed by the late Major Wash Gibbs, who wrested the state from the domination of the Negro and carpetbaggers, by shouldering their muskets and standing at the polls in Jackson, with the solemn pledge that the first Negro that offered to vote would be met by a volley from their trusty rifles. . . .

There is dissatisfaction, too, among the poor whites as voiced in the Columbia, S. C., State by a defeated candidate for governor:

Since 1876 political fraud in this state has been common. I have seen fifty white men out vote five hundred Negroes. Such may be tolerated by them, applied to Negroes in politics, but when free-born white citizens attempt to apply them to free-born white citizens they will soon find a day of reckoning.

It is common to hear charges of election fraud from the stump in this state. The parties making the charges ought to know for they are in a position to know.

THE LYNCHING INDUSTRY

THE Birmingham, Ala., News, discussing the Negro exodus "in all kindliness and in the very deepest concern for the Negro's future," opines that:

It is high time that some great Negro Moses were appearing to direct this race back to the soil. The News not only expresses its deep conviction in this matter, but it believes the whole secret of the continuation of the Negro race lies in its return to the provinces, where it may live its own natural life away from the sharp competition of living with which it is utterly unfitted to cope. . . . . The African can serve himself and the land of his adoption best in agriculture.

We venture to suggest that the opinion of a successful Negro farmer, if obtainable on this point, might be of interest to the editor of the News and we would suggest that he address a letter to MR. ANTHONY CRAWFORD, ABBEVILLE, S. C.; or he might write the Rev. Richard Carroll of South Carolina, a Negro who has deep reverence for white folks, and get him to explain this statement which he recently made:

I have in mind now three Negro men who have accumulated much property in South Carolina––not in Abbeville County. One has 600 acres of land with debts all paid; 30 or 40 bales of cotton stored at his house. He has been ordered to leave under penalty of death. For three years these Negro men have been intimidated and threatened.

The editor, too, might get some information from the Atlanta Independent, which has this society note from Georgia:

In the counties of Randolph, Calhoun and Jasper, of our won state, the mobs have not been satisfied to lynch men, but have lynched innocent women. It is reported in Putnam County that a two-year-old child was destroyed in the home of a Negro woman because the mob could not find the mother, whom they desired to lynch. With these conditions obtaining and with a record of quite a dozen and a half Negroes lynched in our state this year and not a single member of the mobs indicted or punished, there can be no wonder that the Negro is moving to a country where he can at least expect to live out the days of his appointed time. With the white man building agricultural schools all over the state for the education of his children out of the money of the tax payers, without regard to race or color; with the double sessions crowded in the city schools for Negroes; with the half-paid and starved-out Negro school teachers; with the Negro tax payers and property owners driven from the polls on election day, in spite of the fact that there are not enough Negroes registered in Georgia to elect one

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THE LOOKING GLASS 237

congressman against 250,000 or more registered white voters––these are causes that must be removed if the white man would have a peaceful, respectful and industrious laboring class to till the soil, to work in the shops, in the factories, and in domestic service.

That lynching is a prime cause of the present Negro unrest in the South is admitted by all real students. As the Wilmington, Del., Journal says:

It will be noticed that not a lynching occurred in what may be called a Northern state. Nor do we think that anyone will wonder that Negroes are prone to leave Southern states in which Negro life is held so cheaply.

The Brooklyn Eagle adds:

Why worry over fifty Negroes lynched in a year, if as a consequence 250,000 bettered their condition by getting out of the lynching zone? Each one lost was a warning to 500. mathematics always belps.

Most papers, however, express real concern over the continuance of this barbarity.

The Des Moines, Iowa, Register says:

For more than thirty years now the American people have accepted the barbaric penalties of unregulated vengeance in the South without doing anything and without saying very much. Is it not plain that we have a responsibility resting upon us here at home?

The Chicago Record-herald says:

The taunt of the recalled Turkish envoy calling on the United States to stop its lynching atrocities before it protested about Armenian massacres was not answered by the recall of the ambassador. The record of 1916 is a fresh challenge to the law-abiding citizens of the antion.

Meantime, the South, itself, has some strong words against lynching. The Birmingham, Ala., Age-Herald admits:

The figures show quite conclusively that the blood-lust of mobs is aroused more often by comparatively trifling infractions of the law than offenses against white women. Race hatred among the disorderly classes of white people is responsible for most of the lynchings.

The Valdosta, Ga., Times says:

It is only by educating the people and lifting them above savagery and barbarism, that we can expect them to look with abhorrence upon lynching and other crimes of that sort.

While a writer in the Manufactuers' Record, Baltimore, says:

It is not necessary to attempt to argue that the practice of the courts is so rotten that every citizen, of high or low degrees, has lost absolutely all respect for the courts because they know that therein justice has long since ceased to be a known quantity, and that today here ranks injustice and farce long drawn out, under the guise of law, is the rule and not the exception . . .

In Texas, every chance under the sun is thrown around the criminal and every hindrance possible is thrown in the path of the state in its attempt to convict him of crime. The result is that lawyers, and the yare bullragged to a finish by the attorneys for the defense.

We are glad to find in the Greenville, S. C., News, a frank admission of the real origin of lynching:

If the responsibility for lynching can be placed anywhere, it should be lodged at the door of the Republican party, which put the South under the yoke of the carpetbagger, the Negro and the scalawag. It put the reins of authority into the hands of the ignorant, the corrupt and the vicious, and thereby made it necessary for the white man to use lawlessness to secure the restoration of law and order. The lawless spirit in the South is directly traceable to that era and to that cause. We develop lynching as much as anybody, North or South, and hope it is passing from us, but the origin of the condition is easily located. The Ku Klux has disappeared over the horizon of history, but his imitators of less heroic motive have not.

There you are. It was not "rough Border justice;" it was not the "violation of women" that started the lynching industry. It was simply the supposed necessity of disenfranchising the Negro and "keeping him in his place"!

RECOGNITION

THE Boston Herald, speaking of the Tuskegee farmers' conference, says:

Why should abilities of this order seem exceptional in the Negro, but merely normal in the white? If we may trust Assistant Examiner Henry E. Baker, of the U. S. Patent Office, it is because of "the traditional attitude of the average American on the question of the capacity of the Negro for high scientific and technical achievement." Yet according to Mr. Baker, the black man has contributed with both brain and hand "very materially to the economic, industrial and financial development of our country." But the country does not know of it, partly because the patent office makes no mention of race, still more because the popular belief in Negro inferiority dies hard.

The New York Evening Globe says:

The appointment of a Negro as a member of the Board of Education by Mayor Mitchel