where three-fourths of the Negroes live, were so ingeniously framed that a black university graduate could be prevented from voting and the most ignorant white hoodlum could be admitted to the polls.  Labor laws were so arranged that imprisonment for debt was possible and leaving an employer could be made a penitentiary offense.  Negro schools were cut off with small appropriations or wholly neglected, and a determined effort was made with wide success to see that no Negro had any voice either in the making or the administration of local, state, or national law.

The acquiescence of the white labor vote of the South was further insured by throwing white and black laborers, so far as possible, into rival competing groups and making each feel that the one was the cause of the other’s troubles.  The neutrality of the white people of the North was secured through their fear for the safety of large investments in the South, and through the fatalistic attitude common both in America and Europe toward the possibility of real advance on the part of the darker nations.

The reaction of the Negro Americans upon this wholesale and open attempt to reduce them to serfdom has been interesting.  Naturally they began to organize and protest and in some cases to appeal to the courts.  Then, to their astonishment, there arose a colored leader, Mr. Booker T. Washington, who advised them to yield to disfranchisement and caste and wait for greater economic strength and general efficiency before demanding full rights as American citizens.  The white South naturally agreed with Mr. Washington, and the white North thought they saw here a chance for peace in the racial conflict and safety for their Southern investments.

For a time the colored people hesitated.  They respected Mr. Washington for shrewdness and recognized the wisdom of his homely insistence on thrift and hard work; but gradually they came to see more and more clearly that, stripped of political power and emasculated by caste, they could never gain sufficient economic strength to take their place as modern men.  They also realized that any lull in their protests would be taken advantage of by Negro haters to push their caste program.  They began, therefore, with renewed persistence to fight for their fundamental rights as American citizens.  The struggle tended at first to bitter personal dissension within the group.  But wiser counsels and the advice of white friends eventually prevailed and raised it to the broad level of a fight for the fundamental principles of democracy.  The launching of the “Niagara Movement” by twenty-nine daring colored men in 1905, followed by the formation of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in 1910, marked an epoch in the advance of the Negro.  This latter organization, with its monthly organ, The Crisis, is now waging a nation-wide fight for justice to Negroes.  Other organizations, and a number of strong Negro weekly papers are aiding in this fight.  What has been the net result of this struggle of half a century?