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THE AMENIA CONFERENCES                                DIGGS

and there were twenty-five race riots. This was called the "Red Summer." Robert Russa Moton, head of Tuskegee, at the request of President Wilson, visited Negro troops in France and elsewhere and reported their condition satisfactory.

  When the Lincoln Memorial was dedicated in Washington, D.C., in 1922 after twenty years of planning, speakers included President Harding, former President Taft and Robert Moton of Tuskegee but, according to a report submitted by James Weldon Johnson, segregation was practiced at the dedication ceremony. Washrooms, restaurants and public buildings were closed to Blacks. Black holders of tickets to the ceremonies found a special section roped off for them behind the white section.

  All aspects of black life in the United States were discussed in 1924 when the Black Sanhedrin or All-Race Conferences met in Chicago with Kelly Miller presiding. More than fifty of the sixty-one black organizations invited attended.

  Students at Fisk University staged a protest against Fayette Avery McKenzie's presidency. Howard University students rioted and staged a strike in opposition to a compulsory military program and so-called "twenty-cut" faculty ruling in 1925.

  In 1926 James Stanley Durkee announced his resignation as president of Howard University following a series of student uprisings. Groups of alumni had worked openly to ouse the president.

  Kelly Miller addressed Kappa Alpha Psi in these words in 1927: "The white race has furnished leaders for us. No man of one group can ever furnish leaders for people of another group, unless he is willing to become naturalized into the group he seeks to lead." Miller also expressed the belief that it would be well if all philanthropy were stopped and Blacks supported and maintained their own institutions.

  Randolph led the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters in a protest for wage increases and an end to "professional begging" for a living in the same year.

  For a long time national plans were made for a National Interracial Conference which was held in December 1928, at Washington, D.C., sponsored by sixteen national organizations. Before the meetings the Research Committee, under Charles S. Johnson, produced a digest of 250 typewritten pages. The purpose of it was "to construct a reasonably faithful contemporary picture of Negro life and the status of race relations as revealed in recent social studies and in official statistics." With this report before them it was the task of

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