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The Looking Glass 

Literature

Gilbert Chesterson writes: "For there is no real hope that has not once been a forlorn hope." 

Duffield & Co. announce "The Negro in Literature and Art," by Benjamin Brawley of Morehouse College. 

We have received Volume 1 of the very interesting "Encyclopaedia of African Methodism," Dr. R. R. Wright. It is a folio of 392 pages, containing a large number of photographs and a careful index. It might naturally be criticized for its not very critical selection of material and poor illustrations; but when one knows the extreme difficulty of collecting the material and the delicacy of the task for many reasons, Mr. Wright and his helpers are to be congratulated. All members of the A.M.E Church ought to own this volume, and we trust that succeeding volumes will follow at an early date.

"The Law of Human Progress" by Henry George is being distributed for fifty cents by the Public. 

The life of the late Bishop Turner has been written by Dr. M. M. Ponton in a small volume of 173 pages. 

"The American Jewish Year Book" for 1918 is, as usual, full of information. It takes up, among other things, the matter of Jewish rights at international congresses, a subject of interest to Negroes. 

We have received the following letter from a private in Company "L' of the Sixth Massachusetts Militia. This colored company has recently been transferred to Camp Greene, Charlotte, N.C.: "They are trying to keep the Negro Soldiers out of the Y.M.C.A building, and have succeeded with the help of Captain Pryor! He had them bring over some of their things to our mess shack, so that we would not have to go over to their building. 

"Don't worry about me. Of course, there are some men down here that can't relish looking at us, but just as sure as they start anything with us they will come to grief. One of them is in the hospital now because he had too much mouth. He was telling some men of the Sixth Massachusetts how they were going to shoot up the 'niggers,' and that the Northerners were no good anyhow. He did not know who he was talking to, but he soon found out when they threw him into the incinerator. 

"A conductor got fresh with one of our men on the car, but two of the Maine Heavies on the car saw that no harm was done. We have a few here, the Maine Heavies on the car saw that no harm was done. We have a few here, the Maine Heavy Artillery, the Second, Fifth, Sixth and Eighth Regiments are all with us. They have informed us of the fact. We feel different down here, but there is nothing to worry about." 

Segregation and the Supreme Court 

Comment on the recent Supreme Court decision is not widespread but emphatic, so far as the favoring papers are concerned. One, of course, expects this of the eastern papers, like the Springfield Republican, which says the decision is: 

Of importance not only as affecting the progress of the Negro race in this country but as a strengthening a principle of our fundamental law upon which the welfare of all the people depends. Right of access to the soil is a fundamental one; exclusion from it by law, whether the soil is an infertile farm or a desirable residential district, would be a peculiarly marked limitation of equal rights before the law. The unanimity of the Court's decision makes it all the more impressiveness is not lessened by the fact that the Chief Justice is a citizen of Louisiana—and Justice McReynolds of Tennessee. 

The Boston Herald regards the decision as: 

One of the most important decisions on the race question that the Supreme Court has handed down the Civil War. 

The Christian Register, organ of the Unitarians, says that this is: 

The most important event in the history of the colored race in this country since the Proclamation of Emancipation. It establishes the right of a colored man to be a man. It confirms to him one of the fundamental rights of citizenship, the right to legal use of property legally acquired. It reaffirms what was already thought to be settled when slavery was abolished by Constitutional Amendment. But the belief in slavery and the wish to re-establish it in some form was not abolished. The effort to legalize segregation was, in substance, an effort to enforce slavery, and the main motive underneath that effort was the wish of members of one race to subjugate the members of another. 

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THE LOOKING GLASS 135

Even the Brooklyn Eagle, which is not always square says:

We are glad that this decision has been reached without any division of the Court. It is pleasant to think that judges from the South, from the North, from the West, Democrats and Republicans, concur in enforcing the reconstruction rights of the colored people under the Fourteenth Amendment. Factinonal or sectional juggling with organic law by court interpretation is one of the most serious perils of any republic.

Many of the western papers are also sympathetic, like the Chicago News:

This court decision is a victory for those principles of liberty and democracy to which this republic is dedicated and for which Americans of all races, colors, and creeds are preparing to fight and die on European battle fields, The problems that arise from race antagonisms must be solved within the fundamental law, patiently, slowly, amicably, and justly.

The far-going implications of the decision are noted by the New York Evening Post which says that:

As in the case of the "grandfather clause" laws to disfranchise colored men, the Supreme Court has again shown itself a true bulwark population of the United States. By this last decision it has dealt a severe blow to those reactionaries in the South who seek ever to force the Negro into a position of inferiority and to add immeasurably to his difficulties of earning a livelihood and living a useful and respectable life. When the Berea College case was decided by the Supreme Court in favor of the Kentucky law forbidding the co-education of the races, it seemed as if this great tribunal had definitely placed itself on the side of those who would degrade and depress our colored citizenship. That decision, Justice Brewer said, made possible a law forbidding Jews from going to market except during certain hours. Monday's decision makes it certain that there will be no "reservations" for Jews or Negroes or Chinses, or any other of our racial groups. For this there are millions today giving profound thanks and taking new hope as they bear the heavy burdens of the disadvantaged.

The Pittsburgh Gazette Times adds:

Determination of this case is timely. The United States is engaged in a war to settle forever the rights of man in the world. America stands for liberty and freedom, conditions that cannot be modified by any considerations of race, creed, or color of skin. We can insist upon liberty and freedom throughout the world only if we grant them within our own jurisdiction. Lincoln said the world could not be half free and half bond. Nor can it be secure from equally evil caste domination if unjust restrictions are placed upon a part of the people because of race, creed, or color. Discriminations which are products of prejudice only will have to go, along with the crushing of the Prussian system, if we are to reap the full fruits of the victory we shall win on the battlefield.

We look, of course, to the cities chiefly involved for significant comment. Louisville seems dumb; St. Louis had from the beginning a strong division of opinion, and the Post Dispatch is complacent:

The demand for segregation was a property demand. In the case of Louisville, it was shown that for fear that some property would be depreciated the Negro citizens, compromising one-fifth of the city's population, would be crowded into one-eighth of the available area. This would have meant degradation, disease and a stimulus to crime. The segregated district would have been a menace to the whole city.
The tendency is the same in St. Louis and other cities. It is a good thing that the Supreme Court has put an end to the movement. Cities cannot flourish on a basis of short-sighted disregard for principle and the rights of their citizens.
Reedy's Mirror while satisfied wants it understood that Negroes are to have no "social equality":
There will always be social segregation of Negroes and laws cannot prevent it. Poverty, black or white, will always be segregated. 
The Republic is a bit grouchy and seeks to turn public attention elsewhere:
Assuming that the last word has been said on the ordinance, there is still much to be done in conserving real estate values. More real estate has been reduced in value by bad town planning than by movements of the Negro population. It was not the Negroes who made the "blighted district" north of the Union Station, and a good deal of deprecation that was charged to the Negroes may have had it origin in the causes that turned a mile of Olive Street into a region that is always on the verge of vice or really vicious.
Baltimore is angry and has made several silly proposals to bring the Supreme Court to its senses. The City Solicitor reasons thus:
In other words, the Supreme Court agrees that a colored man may be subjected to the humiliation of being ordered out of a car, but holds a property right sacred, even though no damage would result from its enforcement, except to the neighborhood in which the colored man insists upon having a residence. 
The rock-ribbed South is, as usual under such circumstances, wary and watchful. The Charleston News and Courier thinks that:
While the decision of the Supreme Court would seem to settle the present impossi-