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.