other things, that the census of 1900 proved that the Negro people owned in the very states of these college presidents, “23,383 square miles of territory, an area nearly as large as that of Holland and Belgium combined”; that this represented only a quarter of the farms worked by them; that, “after a searching investigation, I have not been able to find that a single graduate of Tuskegee, Hampton or any of the Negro [63] colleges can now be found in the prisons of the South;” that in a single county of Virginia-Gloucester Co.—Negroes were paying taxes on land valued at 88 million dollars and on buildings assessed at 80 millions, and all this on the soil where they had been slaves forty years before.

[63]

Is not this eloquent of the value of American opinion on the American Negro as given in the American press? And the question suggested is, whether such statements are published in ignorance or ill-will? In either case it is equally damnatory.

In December 1907 Professor R. R. Wright, Jr., an eminent Negro sociologist, published in McGirt’s Magazine an article on “The Newspapers and the Negro”, showing how the Negro is being “done” by headlines and other newspaper devices. The Horizon, at that time the most brilliant Negro periodical, dealt with the subject in its issue for April 1908. Under the caption, “The Color Line in the Press Dispatches”, it quoted approvingly these words of a Socialist paper—The Appeal to Reason—“The hand that fakes the Associated Press is the hand that rules the world.” European readers who are acquainted with the occasional diversions of Reuter’s Hong Kong and Shanghai correspondents will appreciate the point.

periodical

The Horizon was constrained to refer to the matter again in its August issue. In both instances specific cases were cited and proof given. Since that time the need of some formal protest has been growing in the minds of all those thinking Negroes who are not compelled to “crook the preg[64]nant hinges of the Knee”; and it has grown largely because the practices complained of have grown to alarming proportions.

[64]

The newspapers of this country have many crimes to answer for. They feature our criminals in bold head lines: our substantial men when noticed at all are relegated to the agate type division. Their methods, whether they obtain through set purpose or through carelessness, constantly appeal to the putrid passion of race hatred. They cause rapine to break loose by 

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