THE NEW MIND OF THE NEGRO

Resentment is the main characteristic of the Negro forward movement. In endeavoring to understand the Negro mind a maximum is gained by answering the question: What does it mean to have been a slave? Analysis of racial consciousness at once brings to light in the case of the Negro a slave mentality. He has been pre-dispositioned by slavery.

To have been a slave, or to be the child of a slave, means to have an old unpaid grudge in the blood; to have, in fact, resentment either smouldering or abeyant or militant. If it does not develop in the slave it will develop in the child of the slave or the child of the child. It may not take a violent form. Certain circumstances, such as prosperity, have power to neutralize it. On the other hand, certain other circumstances have power to bring it more rapidly to a head. The virus feeds on grievances, will even feed on imaginary grievances, but most certainly will grow apace on real grievances. In all seriousness, there is nothing like burning people alive for bringing out active spite and hate. Because of burning and lynching, the whole of American Negrodom swells larger in resentment, day by day, and moon by moon.

The character of ex-slave, and the child of one who was a slave, is aptly shown by the way the Negro treats animals, in the way also in which he treats those Negroes who happen to come under him.

It is appalling to hear a Negro say to a horse struggling with a heavy load: “I’ll take a stick and beat you to death,” and to realize that the voice of the tyrannous master is being repeated as by a human phonograph. If the American Negroes are more cruel to animals, though quick to understand their ways, it is because they conceive of themselves as masters and the animals as their slaves.

For while a man is a slave he is learning in one way to be a master. A slave’s children are more ready to be tyrannous than the children of one who never has been a slave. When a slave is being flogged he is learning racially how to flog when he gets a chance. His children will have a flogging spirit in them. When he is being tortured he is learning how to torture.

The Anglo-Saxon looks upon animals as friends and equals. He loves his horse and his dog, he honors the fox and the bear. Not so the Negro, the Russian peasant, the Jew. They have an attitude toward the animals which is quite other. And toward human beings in their power or employ they often have a point of view which is hateful. The peasant workman in the power of the Kulak peasant, the Jewish seamstress in the power of the Jew who owns the “sweatshop,” the Negro workman under the Negro boss or foreman! To be in the power of a master is bad, but to be in the power of a slave is so much worse!

In a land where the slave class is gaining power there is therefore a great deal of resentment in the air. America has it; Russia has it. To-day all the world has it. In the Great War the youth of almost every country underwent the yoke of military slavery, and what resentment there is against the masters! In Germany, where that slavery was worst, it raised Spartacus from death. And who was this Spartacus who has suddenly become a type and given a name to a movement? Himself a slave, he led an insurrection of slaves against Rome. The masters defeated him and killed him, and the heads of hundreds of his followers were impaled on spikes upon all roads which led to Rome—a warning and a witness to all other slaves of that and other times. Bitter and malignant blood-stained faces stared at the passers-by upon the Roman highway. They stare still in history, and they stare to-day, not from pikes, but from an infinite number of children of slaves. Spartacus lives.

What is called the Spartacus movement in Germany is called Bolshevism in Russia. Bolshevism is eminently a slave movement. The children of the serfs have grasped everything. Its first expression has been class war and revenge on the master class. There is so much of slave in the Russian that his racial name is Slav. Now comes out all the resentment and ill feeling of centuries. Unlike the followers of Spartacus, the Russian serf has triumphed, and instead of having his head impaled he has been able to impale the heads of his masters. From his example all slaves and children of slaves throughout the world have taken courage. Russian serfs and military slaves and wage slaves and Negroes are finding an accord, and here we have the foundation for a grand proletarian revolutionary movement throughout the world.

It may be objected that the American Negroes are not Bolshevik. They are not in name, but they are potentially of the same spirit. They hate the white proletariat because the latter uses them ill, but curiously enough they have a common cause. The leaders of the Negro forward movement are almost exclusively Bolshevik in spirit. We cannot wonder at it. Persecution has developed a great resentment and class hate. When the time comes, Dr. Du Bois and Johnson and Walter White and Pickens and the rest will know whose side they are on in the great world struggle.

There are those who will say that if ever the lynching mob become the victims of the enraged Negroes no one will shed tears but the lynchers themselves. They say the lyncher knows that he is wrong and has been told so often enough. Thus, in a pedagogic way, think the wiseheads who do not stray out of doors when a Negro is being killed. Thus think also the governors of the States, the sheriffs, the judges, the police, and the law. But they are fond and foolish. It is not the lynching crowd on whom vengeance will ultimately be taken. The Negro mob, when it rises, may easily join with the lynchers and make common cause against those who should have administered the law, and against those who have stood idly by. In those days we may see the ugly crowd making its way to the Pilate governors, who so often wash their hands, and beating them to death and burning their wives. That is the real movement. There is nothing very reasonable in it, but the risen mob is not guided by logic.

Resentment is the principal feeling of the Negro soldiers returned from France. It is an example of how modern life, undirected, uncontrolled, and unadvised, is manufacturing ever and ever more of the dangerous stuff of revolution.

A policy as to the use of Negro citizens in the Great War was not come to in the United States. Once more the seemingly unworkable theories of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were applied equally to the Negro as to the white man, as if the Negro were only a white man with a dark skin. Negroes were conscripted equally with white men, drilled and equipped, and sent to France, without any regard to the two vital questions:

The first of these questions was evaded by America as it had been from the first by France. There are many who think that the use of “native” troops against the Germans was more indefensible than the German use of poison gas. For, by using colored troops against Whites in a white man’s quarrel, the moral leadership of the Whites is obviously thrown away, and there are bound to be serious after-effects in the weakening of morale.

The second question was merely an important practical detail that had been overlooked. Theoretically, all American citizens are equal. The laws apply without distinction of race or color. In practice, equality is denied. What more natural than to continue in the theoretical assumption of equality, and hope that divergency in practice might be overlooked. What more absurd, however, than to take a man who is being illegally disfranchised by the community and make him fight for that community?

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.