Part 16
The Northern white soldier did not, however, feel ill disposed toward the black soldier, and I have met those who saw deeds of heroism done by Negroes, and many who saw them wounded and suffering in the common cause, and felt drawn toward them, to help them and their brothers. But whatever may have been the common feeling about Negro soldiers in the United States, it was definitely hostile to them in the camps in France. There emerged two characteristic points of view: (1) That it was good to kill off as many Negroes as possible, as that helped to solve the Negro problem. (2) That the Negro was not worthy to fight for his country.
Not much for patriotism to feed on there! There seems never to have been any resolve to make first-class Negro regiments, and those units who served in France were by no means adequately trained. By all competent accounts they were very slack, and it goes without saying that an almost superhuman effort of discipline was necessary to obtain complete steadiness in this terrible war. It was common to endeavor to terrorize the Negroes by alarming and exaggerated accounts of the horrors of battle. Negroes were talked to by Whites in a very unsoldierly way. Baiting them and scaring them was thought to be better sport than dealing with them sternly and seriously. There is no doubt also that some white soldiers rejoiced to see the Negro put back into the slavery position and forced to obey on pain of death. There are those who cannot forgive the Negro having got free from slavery, and for them the spectacle of the Negro in the rank and file afforded much pleasure. Threating Negroes with a court-martial and death sentence became a characteristic jest.
The white man, however, soon found that the Negro fell into the humor of the war more readily than into the tragedy of it. It agreed with his own sense of humor. It was soon impossible to scare the raw recruits with yarns. The idea of running away from a machine gun became natural and hilarious. The dangers from night-bombing raiders over the lines were facetiously exaggerated. Hiding best became a humorous point of honor, and one Negro would vaunt against another how far he fled. Private soldiers chaffed their officers on the subject of death. Asked what “going over the top” meant, the raw recruit would answer: “I know; it means Good mornin’, Jesus.” In short, in nearly every Negro unit there set in a humoresque attitude to the war.
Officer: The Germans are going to start an offensive.
Negro Soldier: That so, cap? Then we’se spread the news over France.
As the popular joke has it.
The Negro officer then began to receive the white man’s attention. Having trained many colored officers, Negroes often of education and means and refinement, and having given them commission and uniform, the Staff came to the conclusion that they had made a mistake. The white Southern officer stirred up trouble, the white ranker would not salute. There was the usual sordid squabble in officers’ messes. And then the upshot—a great number of Negro officers subjected to the humiliation of losing their commissions and being placed in the ranks. This discouragement necessarily set the Negro officer thinking. It cultivated his resentment. It sowed in his heart the seed of national disaffection.
The next serious trouble was that of the French women and the Negro. The indifference of white women whether the man they walked with was black or brown or white was taken as an intolerable affront by Southerners. They felt called upon to interfere and save the French woman from herself. The rape legend was imported, and every effort was made to infect the French male with race prejudice. Happily, the propaganda failed. For one thing, Puritanism does not easily take root in a French heart, and for another, the French have no instinctive horror of Negroes. Possibly the rape legend even made the Negro a little ornamental from the point of view of _amour_. “Black American troops in France have given rise to as many complaints of attempted rape as all the rest of the army ‘Les troupes noires Americaines en France ont donné lieu, a elle seules, a autant de plaintes pour tentatives de viol, que tout le reste de l’Armée,’” as an army order puts it.
Negro honor, however, demands that the charge be rebutted, and the matter has been thoroughly investigated. There does not seem to be much in it. As every one knows who served in the ranks, women of easy virtue were extremely plentiful and complaisant. The need might easily have been to protect the Negro from the women rather than the women from the Negro.
The fact is simply that the Negro walking with a white woman is to the Southern American White as a red rag to a bull. And as by nature this White is unrestrained and unreasonable, he seeks by all means, fair or foul, to part them.
Finally, the culmination of the story of the American Negro in the war is that the White denied him any valor or prowess or military virtue of any kind, said the Negro was a coward and a runaway and utterly useless in the fighting line. Fighting units were taken off their allotted duty and changed to labor units. Regiments were ordered home; whole brigades were given as a present to the grateful French. They may have been rather inefficient. But, if so, that was due to bad training. Negroes have fought magnificently in America’s wars of the past. They are a great fighting race, and they are capable of discipline.
I listened when at New Orleans to a lecture given by Sergeant Needham Roberts of the 369th U. S. Infantry, a handsome young Negro warrior, twice wounded, the first American to be decorated by the French Government. He was entirely patriotic, and made the apathetic Negro audience stand to sing the “Star-Spangled Banner.” He told how he ran away from home to enlist, trained with a mass of black strangers, went across the ocean—quite a terrifying experience for some of these young soldiers, who but for the war had never crossed the sea. He gave his first impressions of France and of the line, the exaggerated fright of shell explosions and night attacks and bombs from the air. They were just getting used to the first aspect of war when one day the news flew round—“We are all ordered home again.” Official orders to that effect quickly followed. They had all packed up and were marching to entrain for Cherbourg when, according to the sergeant, Foch intervened.
“Why are you sending them back?” said he.
“They are not wanted.”
Foch seemed astonished.
“If you cannot use them, I can,” said the French marshal.
And then, hurray!—we were attached to the French.
It was no playground, the French front, but, as ever, a sterner piece of reality than American or British. The Negroes were hotly engaged and had many casualties. Roberts won his Croix de Guerre for a feat which he performed with his chum, Pete Johnson. They had been left at an advanced listening post and apparently overlooked—not relieved for three days and three nights. The division had been relieved. On the third night the Germans made a raid which the two Negro soldiers repelled by themselves, first throwing out their bombs, then firing, and finishing with a remarkable bit of butchery with the bayonet. The Germans whom they did not put out of action they put to flight. How many Germans lay dead it would be difficult to say. The number probably grew like those of Falstaff’s men in buckram, but I did hear twenty mentioned.
There was no doubt about the fact that Sergeant Roberts was a jolly soldier—a “bonny faechter”—and he made himself on good terms with his audience very quickly. He came from New York, and had swung along Fifth Avenue with the heroes of New York’s Fighting Fifteenth. He was full of the faith of the North, horribly depressed by the atmosphere of the South, above all by the passivity and apathy of the Negroes of New Orleans. He had better keep north of the Mason-Dixon line, for he is evidently a born fighter.
If the war itself was a persistent educator of the Negro, his subsequent treatment after the Armistice enforced very terribly what he learned. It would be hardly worth while to enlarge on this in detail. The fact which I wished to isolate is the growing resentment of the colored people, the fact that some twelve millions are becoming highly charged with resentment.
As illustration of this resentment one could quote much from the spoken and the written word of the Negroes. But a poem, or part of a poem, may suffice. It is Archibald Grimké’s “Thirteen Black Soldiers.” The 24th United States Infantry, a Negro regiment, was sent to Houston, Texas, and was received with lack of sympathy and some hostility by the population. A series of petty troubles culminated in a riot and mutiny. Sixty-four Negroes were court-martialled, and thirteen were sentenced to death, and hanged. It seems to show a lack of foresight to station a Negro regiment among such a hostile people as the Texans. They are more the enemies of the Negroes than were the Germans, and there was certainty of trouble. Grimké’s poem expresses the boiling resentment to which I have referred.
She hanged them, her thirteen black soldiers, She hanged them for mutiny and murder, She hanged them after she had put on them her uniform, After she had put on them her uniform, the uniform of her soldiers, She told them they were to be brave, to fight and, if needs be, to die for her. This was many years before she hanged them, her thirteen black soldiers. She told them to go there and they went, To come here and they came, her brave black soldiers. For her they went without food and water, For her they suffered cold and heat, For her they marched by day, For her they watched by night, For her in strange lands they stood fearless, For her in strange lands they watched shelterless, For her in strange lands they fought, For her in strange lands they bled, For her they faced fevers and fierce men, For her they were always and everywhere ready to die. And now she has hanged them, her thirteen black soldiers. For murder and mutiny she hanged them in anger and hate, Hanged them in secret and dark and disgrace, In secret and dark she disowned them, In secret and dark buried them and left them in nameless disgrace. Why did she hang them, her thirteen black soldiers?
What had they done to merit such fate? She sent them to Houston, to Houston, in Texas, She sent them in her uniform to this Southern city, She sent them, her soldiers, her thirteen brave soldiers, They went at her bidding to Houston, They went where they were ordered. They could not choose another place, For they were soldiers and went where they were ordered. They marched into Houston not knowing what awaited them. Insult awaited them and violence. Insult and violence hissed at them from house windows and struck at them in the streets, American colorphobia hissed and struck at them as they passed by on the streets. In the street cars they met discrimination and insult, “They are not soldiers, they and their uniforms, They are but common niggers, They must be treated like common niggers, They and their uniform.” So hissed colorphobia, indigenous to Texas. And then it squirted its venom on them, Squirted its venom on them and on their uniform.
And what did she do, she who put that uniform on them, And bade them to do and die if needs be for her? Did she raise an arm to protect them? Did she raise her voice to frighten away the reptilian thing? Did she lift a finger or say a word of rebuke at it? Did she do anything in defence of her black soldiers? She did nothing. She sat complacent, indifferent in her seat of power. She had eyes, but she refused to see what Houston was doing to her black soldiers, She had ears, but she stuffed them with cotton, That she might not hear the murmured rage of her black soldiers, They suffered alone, they were defenceless against insult and violence, For she would not see them nor hear them nor protect them. Then in desperation they smote the reptilian thing, They smote it as they had smitten before her enemies, For was it not her enemy, the reptilian thing, as well as their own? They in an hour of madness smote it in battle furiously, And it shrank back from their blows hysterical, Terror and fear of death seized it, and it cried unto her to help. And she, who would not hear her black soldiers in their dire need, She, who put her uniform on them, heard their enemy. She flew at its call and hanged her brave black soldiers. She hanged them for doing for themselves what she ought to have done for them, She hanged them for resenting insult to her uniform, She hanged them for defending from violence her brave black soldiers. They marched with the dignity of brave men to the gallows, With the souls of warriors they marched without a whimper to their doom. And so they were hanged, her thirteen black soldiers, And so they lie buried in nameless disgrace.
Is the watchword of Dr. Du Bois to be wondered?—
We return. We return from fighting. We return fighting.
I met at Memphis, Tennessee, one of the few Southern white men who are sympathetic to the Negro and understand the gravity of the situation. This was Mr. Bolton Smith, a rich business man, a member of the Rotary Club _quand meme_. As one who among other activities advances money on the security of real estate in the Mississippi Delta, he necessarily has been brought a great deal into contact with the Negro. Society in Memphis looked at him somewhat askance because he did not share the current conventional view, but he was not blackballed, only indulgently laughed at as one who had a weak spot in his mental armor. In places remote from Memphis, however, his views receive weighty consideration.
If he had his way he would give the Negro his right and his due, and stop lynching. He does not believe the Negro wishes “social equality,” the right to mix indiscriminately with white people, in schools, in trains, in marriage. He thinks the Negro prefers to be separate as long as there is no implied dishonor. He made a special study of the Frederick Douglass School at Cincinnati, an all black school which is admirably conducted, and found that by themselves the Negroes progress more than when mixed with Whites. As Cincinnati is a city on the northern fringe, with northern institutions, the Negroes had the choice to go to mixed schools with white children if they desired, but they preferred to be by themselves, and indeed did better by themselves. As regards Jim Crow cars, Smith said he would give equal comfort and equal facilities in colored cars and in colored waiting rooms. He does not think the Negro desires to be in a Pullman car where there are white women. It works without scandal in the North, but there is too much risk of the woman going into hysterics in the South, and the Negro getting lynched at a wayside station. He believes in abandoning “the policy of pin pricks,” and, above all, in suppressing lynching and race riot.
He was, however, strongly opposed to Du Bois and the National Association. He considered that Du Bois was leading the Negroes wrongly, leading them in fact to a worse calamity than any which had yet overtaken them. “If the Negro resorts to force,” said Mr. Smith to me, “he will be destroyed. In peace and in law the white man fails to understand how to handle the Negro, but if it comes to force, the issue becomes quite simple for the white man, and the Negro stands little more chance than a savage. Christianity alone can save the Negro, and the leaders of the National Association are leading the people away from Christianity.” He wished all Negroes could see how fatal it is for them to abandon Christianity.
“If it were not for the lynchings, the National Association and its newspaper would shrink to very small proportions. Every time a Negro is lynched it adds a thousand to the circulation of the _Crisis_, and a burning adds ten thousand,” said he.
“Hell would soon lose its heat should sin expire,” said I. I was inclined to agree that the only way was through Christianity. But there is such a thing as the wrath of God, and it is not incompatible with Divine Fatherhood and all-merciful Providence. John Brown has been greatly condemned, but he was not outside Christianity—surely he was a child of God. He used to think that without much shedding of blood the crimes of this guilty land could be purged away, but now....
I do not think the white South will be able to avert the wrath of God by machine guns, nor will it quell the Negro by force once the Negro moves from the depths of his being. Better than believe in meeting the great wrath is to be advised betimes and mend one’s ways. Was not the Civil War a sufficient bloodletting? Could not the lesson be learned?
It is certainly in vain to work directly against Du Bois when his power as a leader of revolt could be removed utterly by stopping the lynching. The U. S. Postmaster General refused postal facilities to one number of his newspaper because it was going too far in stirring up sedition, but it was ineffectual, and was, on the contrary, a useful advertisement for the paper. And then, is it not known there are far more advanced groups of Negroes than that of the association of which Dr. Du Bois is president? There are those who laugh Du Bois to scorn as a Moderate. There are those who have sworn that for every Negro done to death by the mob two white men shall somehow perish. An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth is the gospel—or rather, two eyes for one. Something is being started which will not cease with a recital of the Beatitudes. If America does not cast out the devil of class hate from the midst of her she will again be ravished by the Angel of Death as in the Civil War. The established peaceful routine of a country like America is very deceptive. All seems so permanent, so unshakable. The new refinement, the new politeness and well-lined culture, and vast commercial organization and press suggest that no calamity could overtake them. The force that makes for disruption and anarchy is generated silently and secretly. It accumulates, accumulates, and one day it must discharge itself. Its name is resentment, and its first expression is revenge.
XIII
NEGRO LEADERSHIP
Dr. W. E. Burghardt Du Bois, as the leader of the militant movement, is the greatest force among the Negroes to-day. Light of skin, short of stature, square-headed, he would pass easily in Southern Europe or in Russia as a white man. He looks rather like a highly polished Jewish professor. Considered carefully, however, it will be realized that behind an impassive mask-like face is an emotional and fiery nature. There is a white heat of resentment in him, and a decision _not to forgive_. Possibly his devotion to the cause and the race drags him down a little. For he is possessed of an unusual literary genius. The fire that ran in the veins of Dumas and of Pushkin is in him also, and as a master of the written word he stands entirely without rival in the American Negro world. In that respect he is altogether a greater man than Booker T. Washington. The latter was a practical genius, and what is gall and wormwood in the bosom of Du Bois was the milk of human kindness in his more sooty, natural breast. “I’m going to shout ‘Glory!’ when this world is afire, and I don’t feel noways tired,” he used always to be saying. “Booker T.,” as he is affectionately called, was the wonderful colored baby of the first days of freedom. His, “Up from Slavery,” which he wrote, and the vocational institute of Tuskegee, Alabama, are the chief monuments which he left behind him. But his portrait is almost as common in Negro cabins as pictures of the Tsar used to be in Russian _izbas_. “Our Booker T.,” the Negroes say lovingly and possessingly, looking upon the first of their number who rose from the dark depths of servitude, first fruits of them that slept. Freedom and Hope raised Booker T. Washington, but now he is dead a new time needs a new leader. Fain would the Whites have “Booker T.” back. The amenable Negro leader is much more to their taste than the militant one.
Many years ago Du Bois wrote “Souls of Black Folk,” which is a fascinating personal study. It has a true literary quality which raises it from the ruck of ephemeral publications to an enduring place. It is, however, immature. There is an emphasis of personal culture, and a note of self-pity, which a more developed writer would have been at pains to transmute. But the gift is unmistakable. You perceive it again and in better measure in “Darkwater,” published this year.
It has taken the war and the recent increased persecution of the Negro people to bring out the real power of Du Bois. As a labor leader said to me, “He is first of all a statesman and a politician. He is leading the Negroes. I wonder where he will lead them to?”
Certainly no other Negro in the United States is regarded by so many others as his leader. No doubt most of the quiet, cautious, and traditionally religious Negroes fight shy of him. But they, for their part, have no leader. Dr. Moton, the lineal descendant of Booker Washington at Tuskegee Institute, is only a leader in the sense that Dr. Arnold of Rugby might be considered a leader. He is there in his place. He is a great light, and is taken for granted.
In August, 1919, Dr. Moton wrote to the President, warning him of the growing tension:
“I want especially to call your attention to the intense feeling on the part of the colored people throughout the country toward white people, and the apparent revolutionary attitude of many Negroes, which shows itself in a desire to have justice at any cost. The riots in Washington and Chicago and near riots in many other cities have not surprised me in the least. I predicted in an address several months ago, at the fiftieth anniversary of the Hampton Institute, on the second of May—ex-President Taft and Mr. George Foster Peabody were present at the time—that this would happen if the matter was not taken hold of vigorously by the thoughtful elements of both races.
“I think the time is at hand, and I think of nothing that would have a more salutary effect on the whole situation now than if you should in your own wise way, as you did a year ago, make a statement regarding mob law; laying especial stress on lynching and every form of injustice and unfairness. You would lose nothing by specifically referring to the lynching record in the past six months; many of them have been attended with unusual horrors, and it would be easy to do it now because of the two most recent riots in the North, notably, Washington and Chicago. The South was never more ready to listen than at present to that kind of advice, and it would have a tremendously stabilizing effect, as I have said, on the members of my race.
“You very probably saw the account of the lynching in Georgia of an old colored man seventy years of age, who shot one of two intoxicated white men in his attempt to protect two colored girls who had been commanded to come out of their home in the night by these two men. The colored man killed the white man after he had been shot by one of the white men because he had simply protested.
“I am enclosing the lynching record for the past six months and an editorial from the Atlanta _Constitution_, which strongly denounces mob violence.
“With all kind wishes, and assuring you of no desire to add to your burdens, but simply to call attention to what seems to me vital not only for the interest of the twelve millions of black people, but equally as important for the welfare of the millions of Whites whom they touch, I am,
“Very sincerely and gratefully,
“R. R. MOTON.”