The New York herald., 1922-12-17


1O4 Salaries of white teachers $S.6s2.S14;
of negro teachers, s474.749, Pupils enrolled
per teacher: White Al; negro, 20. One
county, Dallas, in the Black Belt, spends
per white child, s17.35; per colored child,
ninety cents. Result: Throughout Ala
bama. white illiterates, 10 per cent; negro
illterates, 40 per cent. This is the statisti-
cal result; the result in crimes caused by
poverty and ignorance and the result in
stunted lives and minds and souls is be-
yond computation.
The three Rs taught the negroes are
not Reading, 'Riting and 'Rithmetic; they
are Rope, Riot and Race-war
Lawbreaking.
In spite of everything the negro remains.
as long as we let him, an easy going, happy
souled optimist. He walks in music; his
words have not been dried by the sirocco
of business efficiency out of their golden.
haunting rhythm. His religious life is
deep and primitive. But what of, the day
when he learns that the white mans God
is on the side of the red souled lyncher?
Will he always remain the same or will
he discover his own black god climbing
within him?
Let US begin to study the harvest of
this sowing.
The negro is, statistically, both North
and South, less lawabiding than the white
Compulsory illiteracy is a large cause;
the fact that he is arrested by white Off
GERS and tried before white jury and
Judge helps swell the figures. "All coons
look alike to me" is popular joke among
Southern prosecutors and jurymen; you
can't tell one niger from another: they're
all guilty of something, anyway. :"
In addition to the due" process of law.
there is Judge Lynch's court, constantly
invoked by Southern whites against the
negroes for offenses real or imaginary.
OF course, it is only for rape, you may
object, that lynching takes place.
During the recent war four white pat
riots in Vicksburg went to the home of a
negro woman who was not working after
the order had gone forth that every one
must work. The woman was pregnant
They whipped, tarred and feathered her.
She lost her child and almost lost her life
as a result. The four patriots, two years
later, were sentenced to six months each
in jail; not a day of this was served
Recently in Mississippi, Miss .Ratliff
states, negroes were illegally killed for
such offenses as trying to enter a movie
theater on the white side; trying to enter
a white restaurant; helping a negro MUIR
derer to escape; drawing gun or a white
man. There is, Of course, a law on the
statute books to cover these offenses but
there is pleasure in Judge Lynch's trials
that the written law lacks. From equally
reliable sources we learn that pregnant
colored wife in Georgia, named Mary
Turner. was hanged, burned and disem-
bowelled because she said that if she knew
the names of the lynchers of her husband
she would turn them over to the police
In Arkansas a negro grandfather Of sew
enty-two was lynched for endeavoring to
protect his two granddaughters from two
white ravishers.
In Texas white men started a race riot,
shooting up a negro quarter, because a
local negro school teacher had published
in Chicago paper the true story of a
Texas lynching The Chicago race riot
started when white hoodlums were stoned
to death for drowning a negro boy in bath
ing. An Arkansas race riot was caused by
orderly negro protest against wholesale
cheating on the part of white plantation
owners. Out of ze4 lynchings between
1914 and 1918 in only twenty eight was
rape assigned as the cause. Among the
other alleged offenses were stealing hogs: