Los Angeles herald. [microfilm reel] (Los Angeles [Calif.]) 1900-1911, 1907-10-07
THE NEGRO QUESTION


society, in an address at Denver
on The Race Problem and It's Solu-
tion," and evidently from prejudiced
viewpoint, said some things of start
ling interest, among which was this:
"Thirty-six years ago about 10 per cent
Of the blacks were educated and paid
taxes on $1,000,Oo0. Today about 40 per
cent are educated and pay taxes on
$700,000,000. Yet the condition of the
race is worse now than it was then.
Then they had two United States sem
ators, eight representatives in congress
and many state officials; they have
none now. There We're no Jim Grow
cars or lynchings or acknowledgements
then; they are all common now" and
upon this showing he advocates colon
ization of the blacks in West African
territory. citing as an incentive thereto
the great steamship traffic 1t would
create.
This summary of conditions is notable
because it is unquestionably true, and
brings into prominence, through con-
trast, the deliverances of Booker Wash
ington and other advocates of education
as the great need of the black race in
America. This speaker claims, and the
people know, that the black race has
refrigerated in the moral scale in the
same ratio in which it has risen as
owners of property, and that evidences
are plentiful that this retrogression is
~, % F<,- /, ~,
that there is no possibility inherent in
it's rank and file, with or without edu-
cation, that can withstand the tempta-
lions incident to the higher civilization
of the white race. Booker Washington
and the Tuskegee institute are notable
facts, but they are the exceptions to
the common rule.
With disfranchisement under state
laws in the south (and 1t is likely to
become general there) and lack of both
opportunity and ability to compete with
white labor in the north, the lot of the
negro grows harder each year and the
sophistries of socialistic faddists do not
or cannot offer remedy,
These things make for another
troublesome feature of the omnipresent
race warfare threatening the nation.
magnified by the existing immigration
conflict, and all of them due to the
primal error of sacrificing the interests
of the laboring element of the popula-
ton on the altar of foreign markets for
the overproduction such sacrifice makes
possible.
If this couplet was true in Goldsmith's
day,
'.Ill fares the land, to fastening ills prey,
Where wealth accumulates and men decay"
it is painfully true today, and strict
appreciation of the national constitu-
ton, with all it's amendments, would
have conserved the interests of the men
who labor-the producer and not the
idle consumer-as was intended by the
men who drew up it's provisions. Back
of all regnant questionable law is the
partisan error of expediency that has
gerrymandered the all-sufficient basic
law of the land for partisan purposes
till existing conditions leave the great
majority of voters-the workingmen-
between the devil and the deep sea-low
wages and low life, or high wages and
high cost of living, either of which con-
fiicts with the intent of the constitu-
ton, as both are the result of class
and as such are directly OPP
posed to the purposes Of the men who1
made the constitution. Add to these
facts the further fact that class legis-
lation on partisan lines brings in the
oriental coolie to war for a livelihood
with white and black, and the full effect
of the great wrong is manifest.
Present conditions of white and black
are the logical outcome of fifty years
of Republican ascendency, and the
black man as well as his white brother
at last has come to see that both have
been made pawns in the game of politics
that the few who used them might be
benefited. 1t is coming to the conscious
ness of the great mass of workers OF
all nationalities that return to simple
constitutional law and its requirements
is the crying need of the times, and
that such return can come only through
the Democratic party, which ever re-
spected and conserved all the rights of
all the people nor gave advantages to
any.