with the money interests clamoring for the South ‘to be let alone’ with the Negro question, for fear of unsettling business and causing a slump in Southern securities; with the claims that, to keep the railroads earning dividends, to keep the cotton market active, the Negro must be handled according to the serfdom or shotgun plan, and that the best task master so far found was the Southern white man, who had proven himself wonderfully adept in getting good crops from Negro labor—with these and many other excuses, the question of raising the Negro in the scale of civilization was left to posterity.

26

“‘What is he worth to us now?’ That is the only question with which we are concerned, was the ruling thought, if not the open confession.

“Let it be understood that statistics (which the Negro did not compile) showed that the race at that time was, as a mass, the most illiterate, the least thrifty, and the most shiftless and criminal of any class of American citizens—dividing the population into natives—Irish emigrants, German emigrants, Italians, Jews, and Poles. This was a 27 fact that hurt, regardless of who was responsible for it.

27

“Then the question of color cut no small figure in this problem. The Negro’s color classified him; it rang the signal bell for drawing ‘the color line’ as soon as he was seen, and it designated and pointed him out as a marked man, belonging to that horrible criminal class whose revolting deeds were revealed every day in the newspapers. No wonder he was shunned, no wonder the children and women were afraid of him! The great mass of the people took the newspaper reports as true. They never read between the lines and seldom read the corrections of errors2 that had been made. In some cases the first report had been that a Negro had committed a crime, and later it was discovered that a white man with his face blacked 28 had been the perpetrator. Some one has said, ‘Let me write the songs of a people and I will control their religious sentiments.’ In a country like America where the newspapers are so plentiful and where people rely on them so implicitly, those who control the newspapers may be said to control the views of the people on almost any public question. With 30 per cent of the Negro population illiterate, with a criminal record double that of any of the emigrant classes above outlined, with the News Distributing Bureau against it, with no political or social standing—pariahs in the land—with Northern capital endorsing serfdom, with their inability to lose their race identity, on 

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