A Social History of the American Negro eBook

Benjamin Griffith Brawley
This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 546 pages of information about A Social History of the American Negro.

A Social History of the American Negro eBook

Benjamin Griffith Brawley
This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 546 pages of information about A Social History of the American Negro.
with men who, with arms in their hands, are shooting down an inoffensive people because they will not think and act with them.  For these reasons we say to these people that, cost what it may, we are determined that the commerce of this city must and shall be protected; that every man who desires to perform honest labor must and shall be permitted to do so regardless of race, color, or previous condition.”  About August I of this same year, 1895, there were sharp conflicts between the white and the black miners at Birmingham, a number being killed on both sides before military authority could intervene.  Three years later, moreover, the invasion of the North by Negro labor had begun, and about November 17, 1898, there was serious trouble in the mines at Pana and Virden, Illinois.  In the same month the convention of railroad brotherhoods in Norfolk expressed strong hostility to Negro labor, Grand Master Frank P. Sargent of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen saying that one of the chief purposes of the meeting of the brotherhoods was “to begin a campaign in advocacy of white supremacy in the railway service.”  This November, it will be recalled, was the fateful month of the election riots in North and South Carolina. The People, the Socialist-Labor publication, commenting upon a Negro indignation meeting at Cooper Union and upon the problem in general, said that the Negro was essentially a wage-slave, that it was the capitalism of the North and not humanity that in the first place had demanded the freedom of the slave, that in the new day capital demanded the subjugation of the working class—­Negro or otherwise; and it blamed the Negroes for not seeing the real issues at stake.  It continued with emphasis:  “It is not the Negro that was massacred in the Carolinas; it was Carolina workingmen, Carolina wage-slaves who happened to be colored men.  Not as Negroes must the race rise;... it is as workingmen, as a branch of the working class, that the Negro must denounce the Carolina felonies.  Only by touching that chord can he denounce to a purpose, because only then does he place himself upon that elevation that will enable him to perceive the source of the specific wrong complained of now.”  This point of view was destined more and more to stimulate those interested in the problem, whether they accepted it in its entirety or not.  Another opinion, very different and also important, was that given in 1899 by the editor of Dixie, a magazine published in Atlanta and devoted to Southern industrial interests.  Said he:  “The manufacturing center of the United States will one day be located in the South; and this will come about, strange as it may seem, for the reason that the Negro is a fixture here....  Organized labor, as it exists to-day, is a menace to industry.  The Negro stands as a permanent and positive barrier against labor organization in the South....  So the Negro, all unwittingly, is playing an important part in the drama of Southern industrial development.  His good nature defies the Socialist.”  At the time this opinion seemed plausible, and yet the very next two decades were to raise the question if it was not founded on fallacious assumptions.

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A Social History of the American Negro from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.