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The Clash of Color

The Negro in American Democracy

By GLENN FRANK

[This is one of a series of articles Mr. Frank is contributing to THE CENTURY on post-war problems. This article presents the facts that lay back of the recent race riots, and without prejudice or rant offers certain suggestions regarding inter-race relations in the future.-THE EDITOR.]

T

HE war has left no end of aftermath as a legacy to American statesmanship. This aftermath in part comprises new problems, but in the main represents simply an intensification and fresh reference of certain old problems with which we dallied rather than dealt before the war. I have referred in earlier papers to the fact that the political idealism of our diplomacy has shown a disconcerting tendency to filter down into the social and economic areas of our national life. It was so easy for the facile idealism of war-days to bandy about that strangely elusive idea of self-determination and to hawk the merits of democracy to the ends of the earth. But the preachers of these doctrines did more than stimulate morale with their phrases. They set the mind of the planet at work thinking out the full implications of these phrases, and the phrases have refused to stay tethered to politics alone. The mass mind has shown a penchant for analogy. When the German throne fell, the crash set many non-political thrones tottering. The crusade for political democracy has stirred to life a crusade for industrial democracy. Self-determination has become a class slogan no less than a watchword for oppressed nationalities. short, the partisans of problems long unsolved have found a new vocabulary in the phrases of our war-time diplomacy. This has meant a psychological factor of no mean moment in the intensification of certain social and industrial isues. Many of the sleeping lions of pre-war days are now on prowl, and

In

they roar familiar phrases to which we give indiscriminate assent during the

war.

These facts stand boldly out in the recent race-riot-dramatizations of our American negro problem, a capital illustration of the tendency to apply our diplomatic slogans to domestic issues. One periodical heads its review of the race riots with the caption "Our Own 'Subject Race' Rebels," and suggests the irony of a race riot at President Wilson's door in Washington so soon after his return from pleading the rights of subject races in Europe. A cartoonist parodies Rodin's "The Thinker" by sketching the pensive figure of a muscular black man about whose feet lie parchments with titles that are a study in satirical contrasts, "American Democracy for the World" and "Black Men in the World War" lying next to "American Lynch Law." Negro publicists, with singular unanimity, find in the ideals of the war a fresh basis for race appeals, touched here and there with a menacing passion.

Local race riots have never been isolated and unrelated happenings. Two years ago the clash of color in East St. Louis was not just an East St. Louis affair. It was only a local bursting of a storm that had been brewing the country over for more than a generation. The lines of its causes ran into other years and into all parts of the North and South. Wherever white and black have met in serious labor competition, as section hands in the South, as domestics in the East, or as mechanics in the West or North, race tension has been the result. It was

impossible to assess the issues at East St. Louis by a merely local study. It It was part and parcel of our distinctly national negro problem, of the settling of which we have never made even a pretense. Then as always we did our best to hush the hubbub for the moment, straightway proceeding to bury our heads in the sand and to maintain an out-of-sight-out-of-mind attitude toward the problem until the red orgies of Washington and Chicago again brought us to attention.

They

Now less than ever can we treat these race riots as local issues. are interknit with the whole complex of post-war passions, prejudices, aspirations and tendencies. The occasions for race riots are superficial and easily determined; the causes of race riots lie deeper. It is these less obvious causes that must be determined and dealt with if we are to do more than bridge over recurrent crises. It is suicidal fool'splay merely to drive the passions of a situation underground, there to gather fresh strength for an even more serious outbreak later. Here is a point at which we must refuse to fall victim to our fatal facility for opportunism. Here is a clear test case of American ability to take the long view, and wrestle with the fundamentals of a national issue.

The daily and weekly press have made unnecessary more than a brief reminder of the details of the recent riots. Washington and Chicago at the moment of my writing are the most dramatic points in the situation, but they are only part of a general situation that has been for months growing tenser. Birmingham and Memphis trembled upon the verge of a race clash earlier in the year. Connecticut, Georgia, Texas, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Pennsylvania have had to reckon with tense local situations. The attempt on the part of many newspapers to explain these outbreaks solely on the basis of a colored "crime wave" is of course dismissed by all students of the situation either as superficial analysis or as deliberate distortion of facts. Several weekly periodicals have justly corrected these hasty conclusions by reference to the records of the Wash

on

ington police department. These records, it is asserted, show that the alleged "crime wave" in that city comprised four assaults upon women June twenty-fifth, twenty-eighth and thirtieth, and on July eighteenth. Three of these four crimes were probably committed by one person, who was already under arrest when the clash came. In addition to these assaults, three similar offenses were committed in contiguous Maryland on July fifth, twenty-first, and twenty-second by a mulatto.

The Chicago situation aptly illustrates the course a race riot takes. The situation was packed with inflammable material. An incident provided the torch. A bathing-beach was the Sarajevo of the conflict. Certain parts of the shore were by tacit understanding, not by segragation ordinance, for the use of negroes. On the Sunday afternoon of July twenty-seventh a negro youth aboard a raft floated across the custom-created line that separated the colored from the white sections of the beach. Crowds of blacks were on one side of the line, crowds of whites on the other. With an accurately aimed rock a white man knocked the negro youth from the raft. Negroes who attempted to rescue the negro youth were prevented by white interference. The negro youth was drowned. This white interference with his attempted rescue precipitated the riot. Reliable information indicates that a white patrolman, later suspended by the chief of police, refused negro requests for the arrest of the negro youth's assailant. The assailant was, however, captured by negroes, and other officers arrested him. He was charged with murder, and released under fifty-thousand dollar bail. The first blood drawn was that of a negro who was shot by a negro officer for having fired at a white officer. The rioting spread from the "black belt" into the four smaller negro colonies, blood being shed even in the crowded loop district. The negroes quite generally assert that the white policemen as a body did their duty against serious odds.

The details of the week of rioting are the usual details and are not vital to

this study. It is the details of the situation back of the week of rioting that is vital. It is the soil out of which race riots grow that needs analysis. Chicago is typical of the situation that exists in many, if not most, of our big industrial centers. I shall therefore summarize the factors in the race situation generally prevailing in such centers-factors that made possible the Chicago race riot, factors that will give rise to still other riots unless decisively and constructively handled.

NEGRO MIGRATION NORTHWARD

In the first place, the race situation in Northern industrial centers has been aggravated by the great influx of negro labor from the South during the war. The withdrawal of many white workmen from industry for military service, the return to their native lands of many Italians and other South-European laborers for war duty, and the practical cessation of immigration left Northern industry short of labor supply. Northern industry, facing the demand for increased production, found itself with more work and fewer workmen.

turned toward the negro labor of the South to help fill the gap. Attracted by high wages and influenced by direct appeals, something near a half million negro wage-earners moved North. This is the first factor to reckon with in studying the post-war race situation.

INADEQUATE HOUSING

This rush of negroes to industrial centers created an acute housing problem. Housing conditions in the negro districts of our cities, with certain exceptions, were none too good before the war; but the colored migrations have brought about a lamentable congestion. Take Chicago as a case in point. The results of the most reliable research to which I have access indicate that the colored population of Chicago has doubled within the last five years, having risen to the total of 125,000 or possibly 150,000. Nine tenths of these negroes are concentrated in Chicago's "black belt," which is a region of about eight square miles on the south side of

the city. There are four other negro colonies in the city, but three of them are small. That this doubling of the colored population, since it came at a time when the capital and energy of the city were unusually diverted from "welfare work" by the demands of war and war production, resulted in serious congestion, is not to be wondered at. In Chicago the main negro quarter happens to be at the old center of a growing part of the city. It lies in a sort of pocket, sealed up by a thriving white population around it that prevents the logical extension of the negro quarter to meet the requirements of the expanding colored population.

BLACK INVASION OF WHITE BLOCKS

When thirty thousand additional negroes attempted to crowd into this district, which was already congested with fifty thousand negroes, the inevitable happened. Negroes who had been receiving high wages in war industries sought better living-quarters than the congested district afforded. For the reason just stated, they could find better quarters only by invading white blocks. In the process of getting into white blocks, the good temper of the negro was not exactly increased, for unscrupulous real-estate agents took advantage of his necessity by boosting both rentals and purchasing prices, in some instances from fifteen to twenty-five per cent. above what white tenants or purchasers would have to pay. Black as well as white real-estate agents played at this game of tribute. Certainly the good humor of the white residents of the invaded blocks was not heightened as they watched the value of their property, for white occupancy, slump. The usual race tension resulted. The bomb and the torch were brought into play to discourage and discipline the black invaders. In face of the indisputable facts of inadequate housing facilities and a veritable hell of congestion, it is unscientific, to say the least, to leap to the conclusion that the negro invasion of white districts has been prompted primarily by a presumptive desire for social equality or for the prestige that might attach to

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