Race Relations Complicated

Race Relations Complicated

Unknown

CS37

c. 1914

Newspaper article or editorial on the complexity of race issues in the United States.

Library of Congress
Wilson Papers, Series 4, 152A Reel 231, Manuscript Division

Woodrow Wilson Presidential Library & Museum

African-Americans--segregation

Althea Cupo

Maria Matlock

English

Digital copy acquired from federal archives by previous WWPL Archivist, Heidi Hackford.

Daniel S. Lamont, of far-famed tactfulness and skill, betrayed his Albany rearing in his attempt as private secretary to President Cleveland to settle the first controversy that came before a Democratic national administration on its return to power. Two factions of the colored race were struggling for official recognition in the District of Columbia. It became a question which the President should review in an annual parade on the local emancipation day. To Mr. Lamont it seemed natural to assign his colored messenger to straighten out the tangle, and so Arthur Simmons went to see W. Calvin Chase, the editor of a colored newspaper, and leader of one of the factions. Chase was as readily offended as any other educated man would be. Passing out his card, he said: “You tell the man who sent you here that this is my address, and that any time he wishes to communicate with me he may do so in writing and not through his black (sic) messenger.”

There seems to be a pitifully small place for the negro in our Caucasian civilization. In the South he should hold most of the offices, to which he is entitled, under the law of percentages, and yet the southern people will not let him do so. They will not tolerate him in the postal service, either as postmaster, letter carrier or railway mall clerk. Midnight ruffians murdered the postmaster at Indianola, Miss., in the face of his wife and children, for no other offence than his venturing to accept such an office, and when Roosevelt closed it in punishment, they cheerfully arranged for the handling of mail at personal cost. The southern people will not let negroes come to their door with letters, out of fancied fear for the women, and their whites resist associating with the negro in the mail cars. Republican Presidents have been able to make exceedingly few colored appointments. Most of the attempts become so celebrated that the country knows of them, like Dr. Crum's designation as collector of the port at Charleston.

In the Washington departments many negroes are employed as messengers and in other subordinate capacities, without protest from any quarter. But when they are given higher places the trouble begins. White clerks, particularly women, are unwilling to work under a colored chief of division. This experience has led to the manning of a few bureaus, like that of recorder of deeds of the District of Columbia, with colored helpers entirely. This is a commonsense arrangement which might to advantage be extended, although it does not accord with the idealistic standards of equal rights. The so-called segregation, against which Mr. Trotter made his recent protest, is only a local manifestation--and not a large one-of a general disease. And none of the doctors who profess to treat great national ills seem able to cure this one.

It is a boast of Chauvinistic spellbinders that Americans settle all their problems; that they find a way out of all their difficulties. This sounds well, but it is not in accord with the facts. We have not found a way out of the race problem. It is highly complicated 50 years after the war, though in changed manifestations, since the Ku Klux Klan pursued its mad course. That organization would come back into power today, with its old-time virulence, if any Washington government saw fit to put political power back into the hands of the negro as was attempted in the days of reconstruction, -

wood and drawer of water, is the hard one to "place" in our political system. It is the negro in the Pullman, car that provokes the disturbance, unless perchance he is there as a servant. And still we must recognize how impossible it will be for our civilization to continue if one large element of our population be deprived of all opportunities for education and advancement and of all rights under the judicial and legal machinery of the government under which they must live.

We should not forget that in this situation Woodrow Wilson has a very serious personal problem. As a southern man he is expected to "understand the race question," a phrase applied in the South only to those who share its view as to the place of the negro. He could very easily be defeated for renomination by a step: which would have been tolerated in Grover Cleveland of Buffalo, by reason of his "invincible ignorance.” If Mr. Wilson, for example, should invite Booker Washington to luncheon at the White House, he would never be renominated for the Presidency. On the other hand, he could antagonize the New York Evening Post and other northern supporters to great disadvantage, to say nothing of the negroes of Indianapolis, many of whom voted for him before because they did not like either Taft or Roosevelt. He has probably already done the latter.

Not least of Mr. Wilson's troubles, therefore, is the necessity of exemplifying two policies to suit two sections of the country. A Republican President can play the northern end, and so long as the South presents a solid wall of opposition to him no practical harm will be done. But the moment he wants any southern support he has got to yield to the southern view. Mr. Roosevelt recognized this in the organization of his Progressive party by refusing to admit a colored delegation from South Carolina. He had hoped by standing with the people of the section who were actually endowed with political power to split the South, a task in which the Republican party had failed. But in this Mr. Roosevelt has failed, too, as the recent returns from Louisiana show.

To the man who tells you that he knows how to solve the race question in America, and that it is really very easy, you might appropriately reply that he “has another think coming.”

Newspaper Article