Part 5
In Portland I attended a meeting of a select group of ladies and gentlemen of the Theosophical Society. I did not speak, but went primarily to hear an old friend speak on the subject of “Racial Unity.” His lectures covered a number of cities on the coast, and his subjects, “The Unity of Religions,” “Seven Valleys,” “Inter-racial Amity,” “Harmony Between Religion and Science,” “The Mashrak; Ulkar or Universal Science,” “What is a Bahai?” “Four Stages in Man’s Growth.” All of these different lectures are summed up in the one though, “The Fundamental Unity of Races and Religion.” The object of the lectures are the promotion of universal brotherhood, international coöperation, universal education, the abandonment of prejudices. The lecturer was a colored man, a product of Fisk University, and of the law school of Howard University. He has traveled through Europe, Egypt, and Palestine. His thought and language is clear and convincing. Our friend Dr. Gregory proved himself a master with these subjects.
The subjects above are very suggestive. There is nothing else to be said when the speaker has finished his address. What does it mean? In New York, Buffalo, Cleveland, Detroit, Chicago, St. Paul, and all our large centers there are the finest temples and edifices built to the new cult, new thought, new religion. Many of our traditional churches in these large centers have a hard fight to get a hearing. I attended one of these new thought churches in St. Paul where the interest was at white heat with an attendance of more than seven hundred people. The temperature outside was fourteen degrees below zero. This was at night. All these cults are based in one way or another on the Bible, but we seem to have adapted for our own spiritual edification and practice that which fits our own mind and temperament. We then argue that everybody else is dead wrong. Some of the finest minds I know are lined up with these new cults. Surely they must have some basis for their mental attitude.
I was asked by the Secretary, Rev. Dr. George Hinman, of the American Missionary Association office in San Francisco, to fill an appointment for him in Berkley, Cal., February 26th. This was at the North Congregational Church at Berkley. This church was right under the shadow of the University of California, and I counted it a great honor to be asked to speak there. The minister of the church was Rev. Mr. Ralph Baxter Larkin. He was sick the day of my visit, and I was introduced by Rev. Dr. Sargent. The printed programme announcing the service for the day with my address had this on the first page, “A Church of Reverent Worship, open mind, intellectual freedom, social conscience, spiritual aspiration and human sympathy. It seeks to discover and interpret the meaning of life in the life of the eternal.” This expression gave me great poise for what I had to say. I was at once at ease.
It is fine to speak to people who have a sympathetic spirit especially when you have a feeling that you have an unpopular subject. My racial identity was not clear in the mind of the gentleman who introduced me. He said something like this: “Professor Steiner, of the University of California said somewhere that if he had to be born again he would like to be born a colored man, so that he might be able to study the colored problem from the inside. We have with us today a gentleman who understands the colored problem, and who did not have to be born colored either.” These may not be the exact words, but it is the thought. The first thing that I had to do was to dispel the mind of my audience of the fact or statement just made, that I did not have to be born a colored man, and that I wanted them to know that the traditions of our country and the laws in many, if not all the states, had said that any man is colored who has one iota of Negro blood in his veins. “I am glad to have the honor to address you as a colored man.” Those who know me best tell me that I do not have many stopping places. So I fore-warned my friends in the front of me that sometimes my address was three in one and sometimes one in three. Three in one when I have only one hour in which to speak and one in three when I have three hours in which to speak. Speaking to a Congregational Church, and a white church, too, one has to observe the traditions very closely. These traditions limit us to about thirty minutes, and unless one is very interesting he had better stop in twenty-five minutes. So my address had to be three in thirty.
The audience was scarcely dismissed when a large crowd gathered at the corner of the church to ask more about certain topics which I had only the time to touch. They were seeking to discover and to interpret the meaning of life. I was invited to go home with many friends, but I could not go with all, so a compromise was effected, and several families joined, and I was the guest for the afternoon of these families. One of these families had been missionaries in China. Others had worked among the Japanese. There we were exchanging our experiences each for the edification of the other. We were all happy that our lot had been cast in these divergent directions.
I cannot continue this without becoming monotonous. I was most happily received in a great many other churches, colored as well as white. My message was generally, “The Amistad,” “The American Missionary Association,” “General O. O. Howard and Reconstruction,” “The Schools of the American Missionary Association,” “The Progress of the Colored People,” “Inter-Racial Relations,” etc. One can see a wide latitude in these subjects.
At the theaters we saw several colored stars. In Buffalo Charles Gilpin in “Emperor Jones.” Gilpin is an artist of the first magnitude, but I did not like his selection. I am not a critic of such matters, but it did seem to me that his piece was coarse. It was very popular. One could hardly find seating room in the large house where the play was given.
In New York “Shuffle ’Long” was exciting great interest. There must have been twenty or more taking part in the play, and every character was an artist. I never saw anything finer. These people played in New York in one house for nearly a year, and while the entrance fees were high the house was packed every night.
In Chicago Bert Williams was the whole attraction. I saw him at the Studebaker in “The Loop” just before his breakdown. I was told that after his death the company broke up. They could not find another “Bert Williams.” In his death the race has lost one of the greatest stars in the theatrical world, irrespective of color. It is an awful tragedy of our times that racial prejudice is blind to art when the artist happens to be colored. It is no fault of the artist that he was born colored. The theatrical field has been rather restricted so far as our colored artists are concerned, but wherever they have had the opportunity they have not been found wanting.
“Broadway Rastus and Sambo” are in a class by themselves. The play is clean and fine, every whit of it. It will cure the blues. The singers are the best on the American stage. The vaudeville is equal to any I have seen in the best white theaters.
Every place visited we met very prominent colored men and women who were formerly from North Carolina. We are compiling some interesting data on them which we hope to give to the public later.
In Cleveland we met our old friend Lawyer J. P. Green. He has been a lawyer there for forty years. He has written a splendid book of his life. He has been Recorder of Deeds in Washington, and for several terms member of the Ohio Legislature.
Mr. Charles Smith, whose parents were North Carolina people, has served on the Cleveland police force twenty-five years, and is now retired. His parents lived at Chapel Hill this state, and migrated to Oberlin where he, with several other brothers and sisters, were educated.
Mrs. Mary Talbert, of Buffalo, is President of the Negro Women’s League, which is a national organization of women. She was educated in Oberlin. Her parents migrated there before the Civil War from this state. It would take a chapter to tell what great things she has done for the colored women and what she is now doing. She is a traveler, lecturer and scholar. She has recently raised the money to have the Fred Douglass Home in Washington City as a Memorial to the greatest Negro who ever lived. It will be dedicated the 12th of August, 1922. Her husband, Mr. William Talbert, is a city official in the treasurer’s office, of Buffalo, New York.
Mrs. Clara Hardy, of St. Paul, Minnesota, a sister of Mrs. Talbert, is also a graduate of Oberlin College. She has held many places of honor in her adopted city. She is now Court Bailiff. She is a writer and speaker of no mean ability. Her home was a perfect model.
In California it was my pleasure to stop with Dr. R. R. Robinson. He is a Halifax County man. He was a student here for a number of years working his way with his hands. He laid out our walks, planted many of our older trees and helped to “Start Bricks.” He took an agricultural course at the A. and T. College in this state and went to Tuskegee, where he taught several years. He married a North Carolina girl from Bethel, who was a trained nurse. Later he went to Nashville, Tennessee, and took a course in medicine. After graduating he practiced medicine in Brunswick, Ga., through the flue, and was very successful. After the world war he went to Tulsa, Oklahoma, and was there when the riot broke out. He saved his life by hiding in the woods three days, he and his wife. He lost all his office fixtures and medical instruments, and every remnant of personal apparel. He is now a very successful physician in Los Angeles, California.
I have given only an outline of some impressions of my trip to California with the hope that it may inspire some reader to know, to go, and to acquire a larger vision of the world and of life.
FARM LIFE
For many years the farmer has been the laughing stock of the country. The conduct of his farm and his business methods have brought him more gibes and thrusts than are brought to any other professional class. The late Booker T. Washington described the characteristics of his class many years ago. The poor old mule or horse and often the ox, hitched to a single plow, scratching the earth with as much effectiveness as an old Plymouth Rock rooster would scratch for newly planted oats. The farmer follows behind this slow plodding plow in tatters and rags, illy fed, too often diseased with hook worm or some other infectious malady.
His road sides and ditch banks for ten or twenty feet back are filled with weeds and shrubby growth to sap the vitality from the growing crops in their proximity. He has stagnant pools all over his patch in wet weather to further deplete the growth of his crops that may be left from the weeds by the roadside and ditch banks.
His home, the home of the old farmer, is the last thing to which any attention need be given. He has followed his methods for “Fifty years or more.” He has cotton right up to the door, potatoes, peanuts or corn filling the yard. No place is left for flowers or ornamentation of any sort. The old log house, just a place in which to sleep and in which to hide when it storms outside. It has only two rooms for a large family. The old man is in tatters, the wife is in tatters and the children are in tatters, I have seen many, the least of the little ones, as naked as they came into the world.
The implements of such a farmer never saw shelter or protection from the weather from the time they were bought from the store until they had been disintegrated by rust and rot and had gone back into the original mother earth to rest forevermore.
The farmer himself had a personality that was uninviting and dirty. He thought the good Lord had created him for just the sort of life he was eking out, and he eschewed all progress. Good roads and decent schools were things he never needed and he would not consent for such improvements if they cost him anything. The old mongrel hen was good enough because she could roost in the trees and lay at the same time. The pinewood rooters were all right because they could make their living by eating pine roots and other people’s crops. A half dozen dogs were useful to feed. The old cow was still kept in the family because of the ancestral history and not because of her utility.
Slipshod methods in business have been the handicap of more farmers than all the evils attending them. We very often receive congratulatory letters from business men on our farmers’ programme and at the same time these business men lament the fact that our farmers’ business methods are so poorly managed.
Not long ago we received notice that two of the wealthiest farmers, Negro farmers, in Georgia had died. They were reputed to be worth more than a hundred thousand dollars in cash besides the great land holdings and other property they owned. Later when their estates were settled up their business was in such a tangled condition, all interwoven with that of their neighbors’, that there was nothing left for the wife and children. I hope that we do not have in North Carolina such tangles as the above. Whatever else the farmer does he ought to keep his business straight. We have found out through our Federal Farm Loan Organization that many farmers have bought and paid for farms and have paid taxes on these farms for twenty years, but it would take a “Philadelphia Lawyer” to find out whether the legal owner was the farmer, the banker, or the land company, or the merchant. That is bad business. Any man who mortgages his farm after he has paid for it seriously jeopardizes his future as far as his farm is concerned. If you have debts that must be met you had better sell a portion of your farm outright and keep the other clean and clear. The mortgage business is a bad business for the average farmer to take into his partnership. The merchants, the business men, the state government and national government, are all emphasizing every movement tending to the exit of this mortgage system. The farmer, first of all, should give it a hard kick.
It is a matter of education first. These farmers’ meetings give us an opportunity to inform ourselves. Our schools and our colleges are helping us to get informed. The local conferences have no other purpose than to help you to be informed on farm and business matters relative to your farm. Bulletins sent out by the State and National governments are among the greatest educational agencies. They are all practically free. The farmer _who does not and will not_ take advantage of such agencies of information is certainly destined to be at the foot of the ladder; and there is where he belongs. The farmer who is given all the agencies and says he will not pull himself up ought to go down. The sooner he goes with that spirit the better, so that some other man can take his place and make good. I still see some of these old timers carrying water across the field a half mile away, still taking care of the family wash down by the river side, still holding on to the old ash pile. These relics have been heirlooms in the family and we are reluctant to let them go. It takes some spirit, some purpose and a great will to tear away from these old traditions. It must be done if we are going to advance. We must learn the lessons of experience. They have been sad lessons to many farmers. These farmers’ conferences are bringing to you lessons of scientific farming. Let the traditions go to the wind and take hold of the new problems in your farming and farming business that will bring success, happiness and a life.
Today as never before the farmer is coming into his own. Watch the agricultural papers and magazines. Visit our county and state fairs. See the interest and note the comparisons in our community fairs. Progress is in the air. If there are those who do not believe it, they will believe it, and feel the impress of the upward move, or they must get out of the business. Any farmer, white or colored, who does not line up with the best farming methods of the community is bound to lose out on his farm. The lessons may be hard, but as a class of farmers you must get these lessons.
The first lesson that must come to every farmer is that he must line up or unite with other farmers in the prosecution of his work. Every industry is organized except that of farming. The farmer produces his crops, and, unorganized, sells them to any bidder who comes along and takes his price or nothing. Organization will help the farmer to get the best price for his products. No man works very long by himself at anything. You cannot make it alone. Coöperation is the word. You get coöperation by organization. Every industry that is worth the name is organized.
Organization helps you to buy as well as it helps you to sell. It will get you the lowest prices for what you have to buy, and the highest prices for what you have to sell. Single handed you pay what is charged and sell it for what you can get, much or little. The government is fostering the Federal Farm Loan Organization in order to put the farmer on his feet. Are you using that organization? The state is encouraging farm unions. They can be formed in every community where you can find ten men, _ten real men_. Are you using this organization? Some communities are using them very effectively. Our own Federal Farm Loan Organization, the Tri-County Federal Farm Loan Organization, of Bricks, N. C., has put into Negro farms and farm improvements about seventy-five thousand dollars and has applications for nearly as much more. Do we have your application?
Let us illustrate what we want to impress relative to coöperation and organization. A few years ago two renters came to the Brick School farm. Each had one horse. The wives had a lot of small children and could not be expected to do very much on the farm. One day I saw a team of two horses plowing. The two men had united their horses and were plowing their ground with a double team. One was plowing and the other man was clearing up the ditch banks. They worked tandem all summer and seemed to get fine results. They were happy in their work and each was company for the other.
A few years ago we needed here on the Brick School farm a peanut thresher. No one could get the thresher alone, so an organization was perfected and a peanut thresher was bought for two hundred dollars. This thresher did fine work for many years, and brought the stockholders a nice little revenue as long as it was in service. I cannot see why a few men in every community cannot unite their efforts and get everything they need on their farms.
Every time I go to Rocky Mount I see scores and scores of wagons on the road hauling tobacco to market. These wagons go in groups for company and mutual help. I have counted as many as twenty in one group, and I am sure the different groups represent a certain community. These communities of small farmers ought to unite and buy jointly a truck. Some of these grouped teams travel, to my personal knowledge, thirty miles with their tobacco. This trip takes two days and one night to land the sale. The teams and the men alike are unfit for work for several days thereafter. Count the cost of man, wagon and animals. The automobile will do the same work in a few hours and be ready instantly for other work. If the farmer drives his wagon half of his time on the road is lost driving this way and that getting out of the road for trucks and automobiles. If you cannot put your products on the market as fast as your neighbor you cannot compete with him. That is all. If you cannot do it single handed unite your forces. That is the commonest of common sense.
Farmers cannot hire ditching done any more. Ditching with pick and shovel is a past art. You cannot pay the price, and you cannot find the ditcher. Ditching is now a profession. The last time we had our work done by hand the gentleman came in a large Buick, worked a few hours for a few days and the job was done. The element of drudgery is too great. We are living in an age of steam and gas and power. Why strain the muscles when you can turn the throttle with the weight of one finger and the work is done? You can buy a machine ditcher, drawn by horse power, for as little as forty dollars. If done with hired help it does not take but a few yards to cost forty dollars. Two mules and a machine ditcher will make more ditches in a day than ten men can make in a week. Here the drudgery is eliminated. Any boy can drive the team. Why not join your forces and buy a ditcher or buy it by yourself? A dozen peanut growers will pay more to thresh their peanuts in one year than a whole peanut outfit will cost. At the same time it is yours and you can thresh your peanuts when you please to do it. You will have the outfit for many years, depending upon the care you give it. We are paying now around ten dollars a cord for cutting wood. The best woodcutters cannot cut more than two cords of wood in the woods a day. Do you know that you can buy a wood saw that will fell the tree and cut up the wood, and that one man can cut as much as fifteen cords in one day? Muscular strength and drudgery are again eliminated. Why not a few of you unite your forces and buy a machine, and in a few days lay in all the wood you need for the winter and summer use? Do you like to trudge along the old way because it is traditional? I do not know of anything more annoying than to have to run to the woods or wood pile morning, noon and night, to cut wood for the preparation of the meal. To me it would be enough to spoil the temper of a saint.
Here is a fine proposition suggested to me by a former Brickite. I am not sure that it is original with him, but it is a fine proposition and I am passing it along:
The average farmer who is working on his own farm or farming on his own account must grow not less than four or five hundred bushels of peanuts yearly or more. Some, to my knowledge, grow eight hundred and a thousand bushels. It usually costs twenty-five cents a sack to thresh this amount. One sack holds about four bushels. It will cost twenty-five dollars to thresh one hundred sacks or four hundred bushels. Form a company of sufficient numbers and let them pay for their stock exactly what they would pay to an outsider for threshing their peanuts. If properly handled it would pay for itself in one year and after that it ought to clear a dividend.
There is one outstanding difficulty in this as in nearly everything in which we engage in coöperative manner. That one man who will take the leadership. Where is he? He must be unselfish, honest and level-headed.