Following the color line : $b An account of Negro citizenship in the American democracy
History
Following the color line : $b An account of Negro citizenship in the American democracy
African Americans; United States -- Race relations
A decided tendency also exists to charge up to the Negro, because he is a
Negro, all the crimes which are commonly committed by any ignorant,
neglected, poverty-stricken people. Only last summer we had in New York
what the newspaper reporters called a "crime wave." The crime in that case
was what is designated in the South as the "usual crime" (offences against
women) for which Negroes are lynched. But in New York not a Negro was
implicated.
I was struck while in Philadelphia by a presentment of a grand jury in
Judge Kinsey's court upon the subject of a "crime wave" which read thus:
In closing our duties as jurymen, we wish to call to the attention of
this court the large proportion of cases presented to us for action
wherein the offences were charged to either persons of foreign birth
or those of the coloured race, and we feel that some measures should
be taken to the end that our city should be relieved of both the
burden of the undesirable alien and the irresponsible coloured
person.
Here, it will be seen, the "undesirable alien" and "irresponsible coloured
person" are classed together, although it is significant of the greater
prejudice against the coloured man that the newspaper report of the action
of the grand jury should be headed "Negro Crime Abnormal," without
referring to the alien at all. When I inquired at the prosecutor's office
about the presentiment, I was told:
"Oh, the dagoes are just as bad as the Negroes."
And both are bad, not because they are Negroes or Italians, but because
they are ignorant, neglected, poverty-stricken.
Thus in the dust and confusion of the vast readjustments now going on in
the South, the discomfort of which both races feel but neither quite
understands, we have the white man blindly blaming the Negro and the Negro
blindly hating the white. When they both understand that many of the
troubles they are having are only the common gall-spots of the new
industrial harness there will be a better living together.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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