The New York herald., 1922-12-17

In eleven Southern states the
whites outnumber the colored race by
less than to 1; in nine New England and
Middle Atlantic States the negroes are out
numbered more than 27 to l. In Missis-
sippi and South Carolina by the 1910 Gen.
sus, the population with African blood is
a distinct majority; in Nevada and Idaho
the whites lead by more than $40 to 1. In
the eleven counties of the Black Belt of
Alabama IS per cent. are negroes; in ten
mountain counties in the same State the
colored proportion is almost negligible
And all the time one man out of every ten
the length and breadth of the country is a
negro.
Or is he a man? There are Southern
blatherskite politicians who are elevated to
office on the one plank that he is not
Yet after all this may not be a real
question, for Orientals are Disseminated
against, without implication that they are
not human. Orientals are, of course, aliens
whose foothold in the States is not desired
by the majority, and is prohibited while
the negroes were brought here by the
They were brought here as things, not as
men; as property. not human beings. Le-
gauy, by virtue of the three civil war
amendments they are citizens, with all the
rights of citizens: legally they are men
In practice-that is perhaps a different
story.
What shall we do with them? For we
ing succession of intensifying race con-
flicts, riots, lynchings. klannings and re-
taliatory murders. What are the possible
methods of solving the problem?
Some have suggested that we cut them
out of the body social, as a cancer, either
by determination or by ferrying them back
to the dark land they came from. Expert
ence has proved the impracticability OF
banishing them. We are hardly so cal
lously unchristan or inhuman as to favor
determination.
Ii is a queer cancer, too-the race that
car claim the Russian national poet Push
kin, the English musician Coleridge-Ta
lor, the French novelists Dumas and Rene
Maran, and, in our own land. the authors
of the negro spirituals, of the Uncle Remus
folklore, the ragtime music and dancing
such leaders in the art world as Burleigh
Cook. Europe, among musicians; the
Johnsons. Braithwaite. Paul Laurence
Dunbar, among poets Henry o. Tanner
and others among artists. and, in wider
public fields, Booker T. Washington Motion
and Dr. Du Bois.
If we are not to get rid of them we must
deal with them as human beings granting
either full social justice or limited social
justice Seedlings of limited social justice
have usually produced only unending dis
cord. If amity and mutual progress have
resulted the sowing has usually been OF
full social justice Let us see what we
have sown and what so far we have reaped
The Skin Game.
For a quarter of a century my home
was in or near Birmingham. Ala; one OF
the results of that sojourn in medievalism
IS the novel Niger" During this time
contact was inevitable with Southern
whites and blacks whose memory reached
earlier than the admission of the State in
1919: this gave a vista of the whole dark
history. During slavery, when negroes
I'm white minds and white laws-were not
human beings but property, there was some
kind treatment and much that was not
The whole institution was saturated with