IN NORTH FLORIDA AND NEW ORLEANS

Lynching is more associated with the cotton-growing districts than with others. It is not a fact that the further south you go the more violent the temper of the people. Southeastern Georgia, where the main business is lumbering and rice growing, has a better record than the cotton-growing interior. The cotton planters are aware of this, and it is not uncommon to curse the cotton and wish they could turn to something else. Cotton is not a popular industry. In the old days it bound slavery upon planter and Negro—for cotton necessitates cheap labor—and now it keeps the Negro down and perpetuates an ungenerous type of life.

I worked down the Atlantic coast to Brunswick and Jacksonville, preparing in mind for some sort of joyful surprise when I should enter Florida. Brunswick is one of the oldest ports in Georgia. As far as records go, it has never been disgraced by a lynching. Its background of industry is chiefly timber, and the eye looks in vain for a cotton bale or a cotton blossom. It is a peaceful little city, all sand and low palm and scrub, with innumerable grasshoppers and butterflies even in December. An open-streeted port with placid, happy Negroes and no race movement of any kind.

At Jacksonville one experiences a complete change of air. It is the climate of Florida, and the difference between cotton and fruit. The difference also between much sombre business and some gilded pleasure. When the rich from the North step out of their cars in Florida and take their ease at Palm Beach, they naturally would not care to be mixed up in the South’s pet sport. Lynchings are bad business in Florida, for if the things occurred there that take place in the neighboring State of Georgia it would certainly frighten away many polite and wealthy visitors. As regards the white woman also, the Floridians do not so assiduously libel the Negro as do the Georgians. Ladies need not be afraid to visit the watering places; the colored man is said to have his passions well under control. Most of the trouble that does occur is in more obscure places, and more in northern than in southern Florida.

Jacksonville is a large port with a population bordering on a hundred thousand. Naturally, there are masses of poor as well as numbers of rich. There is employment for a great quantity of Negro labor, and on the streets one may observe the characteristics of a large maritime city. What strikes an Englishman visiting these Atlantic ports—Baltimore, Norfolk, Savannah, Jacksonville, when compared with Hull, Cardiff, Liverpool, London Docks, etc.—is the absence of that somewhat agitating phenomenon of black dock laborers walking out with poor white girls. You may see them any evening in England. As a natural and instinctive thing, most Whites resent it, and street fights in England are the not uncommon result. In America, walking out with Negroes either innocently or otherwise is impossible. Riots and lynchings do not arise from that reason, but from alleged individual assaults upon white women. It should be remarked that womanhood in America is practically idealized. The public as a whole is disinclined to tolerate a woman smoking or drinking, or bathing in inadequate attire, or even “spooning.” It would not occur to a poor white factory girl as even possible to walk out with a Negro. Her moral self-esteem is higher than that of her English sister. The girls who are seen walking out with Negroes in London belong more often to a class which is economically or morally submerged.

The Jacksonville Negroes were in a state of considerable anxiety and ferment when I was there. Not because of white-woman trouble, but in anticipation of a riot breaking out on one plea or another. A bad lynching had occurred in the preceding September. A drunken White quarreled with a Negro taxi driver, threatened him and exasperated him, whereupon a conflict ensued in which the White was killed. The white mob then rounded up every Negro chauffeur in the city and terrified a great number of homes, because the lyncher does not care whether he lynches the right Negro or not, as long as one of them suffers. And in this case two paid the penalty. Undoubtedly the horror and terror of being taken by the mob is the worst of an execution of this kind.

The Negroes were very suspicious of white men, and I did not make much progress inquiring into their ways of life. I found, however, a considerably inflated prosperity of churches, due to the philanthropy of Northern visitors, and a well-to-do black proletariat working in the shipbuilding yard and the docks. Nearly all the work done by them was, however, unskilled, and they were only taken as substitutes on skilled work. Substitutes earned as much as seven dollars a day. There is a “Colored” Bank and, as at Birmingham, a so-called “skyscraper” of six stories accommodating all and sundry of trades and professions. Once more, successful drug stores and burial parlors, and a Mme. Nettie Price with beauty establishment. I called at the War Camp Community Club for colored soldiers and sailors—not so enterprising as the one I visited at Norfolk—but the right sort of institution, well used in a proper and discreet way.

I crossed the neck of land to Pensacola, passing through Tallahassee, a district where fine leaves of tobacco for cigar wrapping are grown under trellis. Orange groves hung in plenteous fruit just ripe to pick, changing from green to gold. Pensacola is a port with a great history of its own involving Spanish, British, French, American history. Its background is of orange groves and pecan orchards. The pecan nut, a refinement from the walnut, is so prized in the rest of the United States that one can make a good living and save money on a planting of a hundred or so trees. The main street of Pensacola, leading down to the long pier, is very picturesque, with its mariners’ grocers and marine stores. A passenger vessel plies weekly to Mobile, the great fruit port of southern Alabama, and it is possible to get a passage on cargo boats going to New Orleans. Before the war there was much maritime traffic, but few of the vessels which sailed away to do transport and other war duties have returned.

Pensacola claims to be the oldest white city in the United States, disputing the matter with St. Augustine, Jacksonville, and is taking the question very seriously in view of any celebration. It is not an important place, but is building toward its own supposed greatness, has a fine new railway station and huge, white stone post office and mammoth hotel. These buildings are puzzling in a town where life seems so placid.

Here was a bad lynching for rape a year ago, and a Negro was burned to death. Representations were made to the governor of Florida on the matter. The governor, Sidney I. Catts, replied that he made every effort to keep down lynching in the State, but he could not bring the lynchers to trial, as the citizenship of the State would not stand for it. Apparently he condoned the burning of the Negro, because it was a clear case of sexual wantonness and violence on the part of one of the Negro race. It is somewhat surprising that the chief officer of the law should thus fail to uphold the law. Who is to uphold it if he do not? A contrast this, to the heroic behavior of Mayor Smith of Omaha!

Nature did not intend the Gulf of Mexico as a frame for lynching, nor that those happy, blue skies should look down on human candles. If ever there was a serene and happy place in the world it is here, and there is scope for all races to live and to let live. Health is on the shoulder of the winds that blow; fish and fruit and grain and sugar are abundant. Are not the harbors bobbing with grapefruit; upon occasion does not every boy suck the natural sugar from the cane? The luscious canteloupe fills with the sun; peaches and nectarines swell to double sizes of lusciousness and sweetness. Visitors, moreover, bring a plenitude of dollars and scatter them as they go. Jacksonville, Tallahassee, Pensacola, Mobile, New Orleans—they are more blest by Nature than other cities of the South.

Personally, I preferred New Orleans. It is the finest and most interesting city in which to live. It is by far the largest city of the South, Atlanta coming second, and Birmingham, Alabama, third. It is the great port of the vast Mississippi River, and is the head of what was a mighty river traffic. It faces south, and is more related to France and Spain and the Indies than to Britain and Scandinavia and the North Atlantic. Like New York, it has also a strange mixture of races, but they are southern races.

Of course it has been notorious as a city of pleasure and fast living. Everyone says to the tourist, “When you get to New Orleans, you’ll see ‘life,’” by which is meant the life-wasting of the immoral. Its reputation in that respect resembled that of Cairo, and the curious, even if they did not wish to taste, could pay to be shown round and thus satisfy their eyes by looking upon evil. The money which flows southward from the pockets of the rich throughout the winter has no doubt helped to keep the red light burning. Now all has changed, however. The various vice crusades and the enactment of prohibition have combined to bring New Orleans to the moral level of other cities of America. There is a violent opposition to the Puritan movement in many sections of the population, and the law is flouted very often, but New Orleans nevertheless has ceased to present any particular interest to the low pleasure seeker or those of morbid imagination. The city will be the better for it. It is a wonderful place. The inhabitants, after all, were not mainly engaged in the business of pleasure, but in honest trade, and they increase ever. New Orleans is the metropolis of the South, and has a vast and growing commerce which is rendered picturesque by the glamour of that abundance of Nature in the midst of which she is founded.

One pictures New Orleans as a city of men in white, with white hats as well as white clothes, men smoking heavy, black cigars, or sauntering idly in the company of exotic-looking ladies; a city of wide open streets and white houses, of many open-air cafÉs and garden theatres and luxuriant parks, a place certainly of fashion and gayety and elegant living. But what I found on my first impression was an unpainted city, a mass of houses mostly wooden, but mouldering, pallid, and peeling, of every hue of decay. Some walls seemed ready to fall out, some ready to fall in. Man of the period 1920, European, industrialized, diminutive, clad in sober garb, pursued the common way of life. The cheap lunch shop, hall-mark of American civilization, identified the city as American. There were the usual lofty, ramshackle caravanserai with Negro bell boys and the clatter of ice water, the usual public gardens strewn with the newspapers of the day. But though it was winter, the weather was hot. The atmosphere was dense and warm, and the closeness was not dissipated even by the wind when it came. A gale blew in from the Gulf. It scattered warm rain in the city, it rushed through multitudes of palm trees in the suburbs outside.

The American part of the city is vast and residential and conventional. The business section expresses business; the home section is uptown and removed from the life of the center. If there were only this “new” part, nothing would distinguish New Orleans from other cities. But it has its vieux carrÉe in which its history is written, the old, or French, part of the town. The American side is continually rebuilding itself, but the French remains as it was. It has not torn itself down and got rebuilt in modern style. Its great public place is Jackson Square, flanked by the market, and that is beautifully prim and French, but it is foiled by ugly railings and municipal sheds. Nevertheless, it holds one more than does the architectural grandeur of Lafayette Square, in the American half, with its stupendously grand Post Office and Town Hall; and the subdued simplicity of Dauphine Street and Chartres and Bienville and many others is better than any quantity of the new and takes one back in mind to Old Paris and Old London. With all its Creole restaurants and cheap markets and French churches, it reminded me forcibly of Soho, in London, but of course it is larger and grander.

Once a tongue of the Mississippi divided the old from the new, a long and narrow strip of somewhat torpid water. Now it has been filled up, though where the water was it is in some places green with grass. Six lines of electric cars and four streams of other traffic go up and down Canal Street, as it is now called. It is a great highway, finer in some respects than the Nevsky Prospect in Petrograd, certainly broader. On one side of it and down to the water edge it is definitely and undoubtedly old; on the other it is definitely and undoubtedly new. On one side is reality and matter of fact, on the other glamour and color; on one you make or lose money, on the other you have or miss adventures; one is prose, the other poetry; and it is well understood in New Orleans. You work in one, you live a conventional home life in one, but in the other you seek pleasure and adventures away from home. Not that you cannot dine on the new side, where there are costly and luxurious hotels, but an interesting and characteristic story might be written of a man who stayed too long over his wine in the new part, and then, late at night, strayed across this broad, dark Lethe which divides old from new, to lose himself on the farther side—an adventure and a dream.

The foreign streets are of red brick and painted wood, with vine-wreathed verandas and balconies. The houses are crowded within. Red painted wood, with vine-wreathed verandas and show a bed occupying half a tiny room, and perhaps a Creole lady in the bed. There is not much squeamishness in the Creoles. French is spoken everywhere, and often English is not understood. Most of the people are Catholic, and are related spiritually to “Mother Church.” Old St. Louis Cathedral, with its spiky tower, is full of people of a Sunday morning, and the service is so perfunctory that it is clear it is no mission church, but one long established and sure. There are monastical institutions, even for the Negroes. While Irish Catholics do not like Negroes, the French and Spanish do. Specially interesting is the Convent of the Sacred Heart, with its black Mother Superior and its happy, placid Negro Catholicism. The best of the Negroes call themselves Negro Creoles. The Creoles are the cross-breed of French and Spaniard and their descendants. Strictly speaking, no Negroes are Creoles, but the descendants of the slaves of the Creoles and in general the French and Spanish-speaking Negroes call themselves Negro Creoles, and are generally indulged in the appellation. Creoles indeed have not much prejudice against color, being much mixed themselves, and in any case of French extraction, and the French have never had much sense of racial distinction. To speak French is a sign of belonging to society in New Orleans. The opening of the opera season at the French Opera House (lately burned down) is the event of the winter, and everyone of importance must be present. The next sign of good taste is to know cuisine, and to be able to differentiate the delicaces and the subtleties of the famous Creole chefs.

I visited the mayor, Catholic, but of German name. He could not easily have kept his mayoralty with such a name in England. But here he was very popular. He was a human pyramid in long, voluminous morning coat, smoking a cigar as he worked, but walking with a ponderous and poised walk, and exhibiting a front of truly mayoral proportions. He said, concerning the Negroes, “We have no trouble with them here; we get on very well together. They are outside politics; that makes it much easier. If they had the power to vote, of course it would be different.” New Orleans is one of those places where a Negro’s grandfather must have voted if he is to vote, and he must prove that his grandfather voted. I demurred to the mayor. “The Negroes seem very suspicious of the Whites, and hostile,” said I. He thought not. It was evidently his set policy to have that point of view. Politically he could not afford to be strongly interested in the Negro ferment. For although the disenfranchised Negro population thought him friendly to them, the Whites also thought him “sound on the nigger question.” No white man who expressed sympathy for the Negro could possibly succeed in Louisiana politics. There was proceeding while I was there a violent election campaign for the governorship of the State, and it was curious that, though the Negro could take little personal part in the choosing of the governor, he nevertheless took almost first place in the political discussions. Soundness on the Negro question seemed to be the chief test of candidacy. A man who might betray lynchers to justice or anything of that kind was evidently feared by the white population. Nevertheless, as I have said, the Creoles were on friendly terms with the Negroes. It is the Anglo-Saxon and Irish-American section of the population, the undifferentiated Southern Whites, who determine the way of politics here, as elsewhere in the South. It is likely that if the Creoles were left to themselves with the Negro population, they would grant them full rights, not only in the courts and in suffrage, but socially. The Negroes know this, and are therefore on very good terms with the French-speaking population.

Nevertheless, it must be said that but for a handful of leaders the Negro population is more dull, more impassive, and ignorant than elsewhere. A black proletariat of a hundred thousand ought to be able to raise on its broad base a fine column of intelligence and business. There ought to be large and flourishing groups of doctors and lawyers and shopkeepers, but here, as at Birmingham, there is the usual Insurance Society’s building, which is all-in-all. And Negro insurance is little more than the organization of burying clubs, with the Negro undertakers as prime beneficiaries. The biggest Negro business throughout the South is connected with burying Negroes. It is sad, but it is characteristic of this era of their development. New Orleans has its “Pythian Building,” its temple of the Knights of Pythias, of which the debonair Mr. Green is Grand Master, not only for the State of Louisiana, but for the world. This is the civic center of the Negro’s life in New Orleans, and, like the Penny Bank Building of Birmingham, and its sister building at Jacksonville, houses many activities. The Pythian Temple of New Orleans is said to be the finest Negro building in the United States. It is a fine edifice, and in America business is judged much more by the building it inhabits than in Europe. An integral part of the temple is a very useful theatre, not a cinema hall, but a genuine stage for the “legitimate” drama. Here, no doubt, the Knights of Pythias appear in full regalia and parade to do the pseudo ritual of the society. But the theatre is used for all manner of purposes.

I was present one Sunday afternoon at a local meeting of the National Association. The Southern White is opposed to the Association, and would do much to thwart it if he knew much about it. But the Southern Whites do not mix with Negro intellectuals, and are content to live in that paradise indicated by the mayor—We get on all right with them down here.

When, however, a bad lynching takes place the local white population soon hears of the National Association. It sends its representatives down from New York to investigate the facts. In such cases facts are the last things the white community wish brought to light, and then the National Association is discovered and roundly abused. Its representatives are sometimes white, which makes them more dangerous from a Southern point of view. Attempts are made to “railroad” them—run them out of town.

The case of Mr. Shillady, in Texas, must be mentioned here. He is the white secretary of this militant association, and has done very valuable work for his country by investigating and authenticating the details of mob murders. Texas has a bad record for lynching, rioting, and lawlessness. The Texan people, however, would not have him, and he was actually thrashed publicly by a judge and a constable. It was done in front of the Driscoll Hotel, Austin, where Shillady was staying. Having been assaulted in this way, he was put on a Northern train and told to leave it at his peril. The judge remains still judge, the constable remains still a constable—if he be not now a sergeant or inspector. When we sing “Down Texas Way” that is what it means.

The local meeting this Sunday afternoon was of a quarrelsome character. A well-known and devoted Negro leader had been accused in a New Orleans Negro paper of “selling out the colored folk” at St. Louis. There had been great enthusiasm in the forming of what is called the “American Legion,” a national club of all who had served or worn an American uniform in the Great War. Negro membership of the Legion was apparently being barred in the South, and some wrong-headed Negro journalist had accused an old Creole Negro of attending the St. Louis inaugural gathering of the Legion and agreeing that Negro soldiers and sailors should be excluded.

A violent personal quarrel banged from man to man. As I was asked to speak, I told them I thought they could ill afford to quarrel among themselves. Nevertheless, I had noticed a marked disposition to quarrel among the educated Negroes. Loyalty to one another was not one of their characteristics. No people could do much who did not prize unity more than discord. While so many were against them all, how absurd to spend an afternoon quarreling with one another!

This was warmly applauded, though no doubt one might as well sit in Canute’s chair and “bid the main flood bate its usual height,” as bid them cease to quarrel. They brought the fighting instinct out of Africa, and still longed to wield the battle-axe.

Besides the Pythian Temple Block, New Orleans has also a sort of South Street, a cheap line of shops with “swell toggery” for Negroes. Negro suit-pressing establishments, barbers, and the like, pawnshops, and what not. This is South Rampart, and on it is the People’s Drug Store, a hive of Negro life. Up above the store Mrs. Camille Cohen-Bell operates an insurance company, and her father, W. L. Cohen, runs for what it is worth in opinion (it cannot count much in votes), the Negro Republican party.

During a fortnight in New Orleans I visited frequently this pleasant company of Negro Creoles, the well-educated Mrs. Bell, who loved to speak French, and her ebullient father. The place was haunted by undertakers. It appeared that when a Negro was insured in the company he was allotted to an undertaker in case of death. Undertakers therefore became very anxious when clients moved out of their parish. If any one fell sick away from home, and there was the likelihood of his dying and being buried by a stranger, the fret of the local buriers was comical.

I met here a very advanced Negro lady who gave out very positive views on morality. The presence of a white man was perhaps a challenge to her mind. Some white woman called Jean Gordon had been making a missionary address to the Negroes on moral purity and proper behavior at a large Baptist church. I did not hear Jean Gordon, but her black protagonist was so forceful I asked her to write a statement of what she thought. This was her answer to Jean Gordon:

“ ... Jean Gordon states that every young colored girl knows no white man may marry her under the law, and if she brings into the world an illegitimate child she is not fit to be a mother. All very true. Now, I daresay that every young colored girl is aware of this fact, but, judging from the way the white men run after these colored girls, either they (the white men) are in ignorance of the law, or it is their object flagrantly to disobey it. There is one thing I wish all white men and women to bear in mind, when they refer to illicit relations of white men and black women, and vice versa—it is this: the laws of this Southland are made by white men, and no sooner have they made these laws than they get busy finding ways to break them and evading punishment for so doing. It is a well-known fact that no Negro woman seeks the attentions of a white man—rather is the shoe on the other foot, and Negro women have a very hard time making Whites keep in their places. However, the attraction is not confined to the men of the white race, for good-looking colored men have as hard a time as the good-looking colored women. So, it seems to me that if Jean Gordon should address an audience of white men and women, and plead with them to teach their boys, husbands, brothers, and fathers the necessity of respecting the laws, and the women of all races, then colored young women would have no trouble keeping their virtue and their morals. All honor is due to the Negro women, for no one knows better than Jean Gordon herself the terrible pressure brought against them by white men who seek to force their attentions on them. The wonder of it is that so many of them are able to hold out against such odds, but God is in His heaven and does not sleep. So, I say, let the white women get busy and teach morality and respect to their own, and we shall see how that will work out. As for illegitimate children, the bearing of these is not confined to women of the Negro race by any means. The white infant asylums will give ample proof of this. We know full well that a white man may not marry a colored girl in the South, but we wonder just why it is he does not marry the white girl whom he seduces? I am able to give a partial reason—THE FORCE OF HABIT! The white man has grown so accustomed to seducing Negro women and getting by with it, that the virtue of his own women has come to mean nothing to him.

“We now come to Jean Gordon’s statement relative to ‘wild stories are being circulated that the Negro won the great world war....’ No intelligent Negro can claim that the Negro won the world war, but every intelligent man, woman, and child, in this country and on the other side, is aware that the Negro did his share in winning it over there, and did his full share over here. The Negro has participated in every war in which this country has engaged, and at no time did he retreat nor show the yellow streak. No one can cite an instance where a Negro protested against going to the front. Against propaganda that was overwhelming, the Negro remained loyal. The first Negroes to set foot on French soil were from Louisiana—longshoremen; they were not soldiers, true, but they did what they were sent to do, and did it well. Very few white regiments from Louisiana saw the firing line, yet they are all soldiers. No doubt, had they been sent to the front, they would have fought, but so would every black citizen of the United States. However, if it is true that ‘comparatively few of them fought when the total of the millions of white men who died in that struggle is considered,’ the reason for that is that the South did its level best to keep the Negro out of the war as a soldier. And it must be known that every white man who fought and died was not an American! Every black man who fought did his part creditably, as has ever been the case. Whole Negro regiments were decorated by the French, and bear in mind that among those who were the first to be decorated by the French were American Negroes! As for the fighting qualities of the Negro, all I need do is to refer any ‘doubting Thomas’ to Xon Hill. Nothing more need be said. And I repeat for all concerned that while the Negro did not win the world war, he did his share in helping to win it over there, and he and his women who remained over here helped to win it by laboring and giving funds.... The Negro dug trenches, he fought, he died on the battlefield, he gave of his money and his labor over here, and his women gave of their money and labor. Did the Negro help win the great world war? I’ll say he did!!! Will anyone say he did not? If anyone has done more, let him come forward.

“Before concluding, I wish to ask Jean Gordon just why it is she and the women of the South are so bitterly opposed to giving suffrage to Negro women? Do they fear us? Yea, they need to fear us, for we have made up our minds that we are going to help our men of the South get their rights, and Jean Gordon, being a woman, is fully aware that when a woman wills a thing, it is as good as done. The Negro men are going to come out on top, and their women are going to see to it. The Negro men are going to learn to protect their women from the snares of white men, and their women are going to help them do this, too.... No longer does a Negro woman consider it an honor to have a white man for a ‘friend’—a lover; gradually have we made her understand that it is an insult, and she now tells her father, brother, or husband, as the case may be, and it is up to this man to defend the virtue of his female relative, in the same way the white man defends his. No more do we hear nice-looking colored boys bragging that such and such a white woman is quite crazy for him, for we have shown him that her affection for him is likely to lead him into trouble, so, having quite a variety of colors to choose from in the women of his own race (thanks to the white man for that), the Negro boy runs along with the kind of girl who pleases him, and keeps out of trouble. Very often, though, the White does not let him stay out of trouble—there are so many ways devised by these nice white people to hurt the Negro who is peaceably bent. The Negro has been patient, true, but we all know there is an end to all patience. I hope the time has come when the Whites of this section will take up more time in improving themselves and less time in seeing the error of our ways. We both of us have much to do, but we Negroes are aware of it, and are anxious to improve ourselves, but we are unable to take pattern after those who are more in need of lessons than we. The Negro is bound to come out on top—even though he is in a hopeless minority. Right will ever and always crush Might; for reference, see William Hohenzollern!”

By this sulphurous little smoke one may know of subterranean fire. When the earthquake comes the Jean Gordons will fall down and the new Negro woman will stand forth. White society in places like New Orleans may one day be overthrown unless it can live for ideals and reform its institutions. Much depends on the law which is corrupted and much on the churches now in decay. Literature in New Orleans is nigh dead, so I will not mention that.