The Negro's Place in the Sun
Weil, Elsie
June 19, 1929 THE COMMONWEAL 179 THE NEGRO'S PLACE IN THE SUN
By ELSIE WEIL T WENTY years ago a conference on racial ques- tions, dominated by colored people, would scarcely have received...
...Restless in the full exercise of his political rights at home, the intellectual Negro is acquiring an inter-national outlook...
...If No Trespassing signs shut him out of many industries controlled by white employers, nothing except the most insidiously organized mob violence can prevent him from starting an independent business of his own, provided he has the necessary capital...
...We have been very careful to obey the letter of the federal constitution--but we have been very diligent and astute in violating the spirit of such amendments and such statutes as would lead the Negro to believe himself the equal of a white man...
...The attempt :o exclude Negroes from the public library of Charles- :on, West Virginia, was frustrated by the Supreme 2ourt of Appeals of the state, thus establishing the . ~recedent for Negroes to use public libraries throughJut West Virginia...
...The publicity given to the educational campaign of Negro leaders of the Association in co-operation with their white friends has been responsible for reducing the number of lynchings...
...Doors dosed to opportunity have disciplined the educated and pro-gressive Negro into working out his own economic sal- vation...
...It was Booker T. Washington who started the National Negro Business League in I9oo...
...One of the most important decisions of the Supreme Court was to declare unconstitutional the "grandfather clauses" disenfranchising southern Negroes...
...And we shall continue to conduct ourselves in that way...
...It has not been concerned with pretty tales for drawing-room consumption, but with the consti-tutionally guaranteed rights of the submerged and darker tenth...
...The more influential professional groups, teachers, physicians, lawyers and musicians, have, like the business men, organized them- selves into national associations...
...Negro business men are following the example of their white Rotarian neighbors and banding themselves into organizations for their mutual advantage, such as national associa- tions of bankers, insurance companies, builders, funeral directors, retail grocers, tailors, and other representative trades and industries...
...He is on the staff of Harlem Hos- pital and the first Negro appointed a police surgeon in New York...
...He has relegated Uncle Tom and the planta- tion mammy to the ash-heap...
...Negroes in the public eye were expected to be buffooning minstrels...
...7ovement for a CAorale No city shall I call my own the winds can blow down and the rains dissolve to leave one standing isolate in wide unfruitful savage lands that show the season and the worm can scrawl a dry sarcasm on the walls of all these cities we have sown-no city the winds can blow down and the rains dissolve to show the gaping ribs of steel beneath the facile flesh of stone-the rooms untenanted except of eyes that watched the burning cities fall (Column and column--cornice and arcade) untenanted except of eyes and echoes-echoes of an endless crying grown and blown down grown again as harvest of such sterile lands as I have known (and the isles drifting to seaward on the seaward swells-dissolved seaward the vagrant isles---the isles drifting to seaward on the swells unraveled by drifting mists as winds unravel vagrant bells) R. ET.LSWORTH LAggSOtr...
...In his new-found racial pride, the Negro is turning with eager interest to his ances-tral continent...
...The women of Texas, North Carolina ant...
...Jessie Redmon Fauset, an honor student at Cornel...
...To quote Alain Locke : The Negro today wishes to be known for what he is, even in his faults and shortcomings, and scorns a craven and precarious survival at the price of seeming to be what he is not...
...He is searching Africa for the roots of his past and exploring primitive cultural expression in music, sculpture and folk-lore...
...In recognition of the event, the Cleveland Museum of Art has arranged a display of Negro art and addresses on Negro art and literature, the public library is featur- ing books by Negro writers, and the museum of natural history, an exhibition of African ethnology...
...A bit of wood-carving from Gabon, a bold Bushongo design, a West Coast legend related to the Bre'r Rabbit tales tran-scribed by Joel Chandler Harris, strengthen his con-viction that his genealogical jungle tree has healthy roots in a life-sustaining soil...
...Now the National Association for the Advance-ment of Colored People is celebrating its twentieth anniversary the end of June with a conference in Cleveland, which has offered its public auditorium, seating 15,ooo , for a mass meeting...
...The attitude acceptable to most South-erners today has been concisely and definitely stated by Senator Walter F. George of Georgia, for several years on the Georgia Supreme Court: No statutory law, no organic law, no military law supersedes the law of racial necessity and social identity...
...In many northern states, the Negro as a matter of principle can bring suit if a restaurant refuses to serve him or a theatre will not honor his seats...
...Alumni of Rut-gets remember him as the colored boy who was versa- tile enough to star in football as the All-American end in I918 and at the same time win a Phi Beta Kappa key...
...Southern colleges and universities are offering courses in race studies, providing undergraduates with reliable information as a background for their own future responsibility in adopting a fair-minded attitude in their relations with the Negro...
...Many of these are small retail establishments, restaurants, groceries, drug stores, general stores, garages and transfer companies, but an increasing number of Negroes are engaging in real estate, manufacturing of clothing, building and conI8o THE COMMONWEAL June 19, I929 tracting, lumber and live stock...
...The decisions won by the Negro in court depend entirely for their effectiveness on the temper of public and social opinion...
...phia--a world entirely unfamiliar to white people, whose acquaintance with the darker race is limited to laundresses, cooks and janitors...
...If they ventured into the limelight they were to amuse the public, not to distress it with a burden of racial woes...
...Du Bois was responsible for initiating the first Pan-African Con-gress, which met in Paris in I9I 9, the pioneer effort to bring together representatives of peoples of Afri- can descent in a world conference...
...One of the most significant activities of the Association has been to prevent the extradition of Negro prisoners to states which have a bad lynching record...
...Paul Robeson has captured audiences with his performance in the title r61e of The Emperor Jones and his moving interpretation of Negro spirituals...
...Ernest Everett Just, head of the department of physiology at Howard, the Negro university in Washington, has been recognized and honored as one of the world's leading biologists...
...For after all, America is my country...
...In one of the Spanish-speaking countries or in France he could meet people of his own intellectual calibre and he would not be continually reminded of his color...
...One could cite any number of colored men and women who have pushed up a stony road to higher opportunity...
...No legal victory can force a majority sentiment to shift from a position regarded as inviolable, just and proper...
...He is tremulously aware of himself in such expres-sions as the New Negro, the Negro Renaissance, the Negro's Coming of Age, and Harlem, the Mecca of the Negro World...
...I asked a Negro well known for his books--a man of culture, education and versatile gifts, who has spent many mellow and useful years in Latin-American coun- tries-why he did not live permanently abroad...
...Twenty years ago, What the Negro Thinks, by Robert Russa Moton, principal of Tuskegee, would have met with a cold if not a hostile reception...
...Because of the volunteer service of members of the bar, less than one hundred thousand dollars has been spent on legal work, which includes live decisive victories before the United States Supreme Court...
...Whatever I can contribute through my work grows out of my own experience as an American of African descent...
...The publication of a Negro investi- gation in Haiti first attracted public attention to con-ditions in the tiny island republic under American rule...
...The Negro of intellectual and cultural stand- ing continues to speak for his civil and political rights as a citizen in a democracy, but he is finding it more profitable to pour his real energy into creative and less controversial channels...
...The prac-tices of evasion wind through a complicated labyrinth in which the Quixotic intruder can be lost for a life-time...
...Educators ministers, social workers and editors are meeting wit[ intelligent members of the colored community for the frank and friendly discussion of the racial situatior and for the promotion of better schools, hospitals legislation and police protection for the Negro popu lation...
...at Harvard, is professor of phil- osophy at Howard University and a frequent con-tributor on Negro subjects to the magazines...
...In his own writing he is speaking with growing clarity in the modern idiom...
...Louis Tompkins Wright, who was graduated fourth in a dass of Ioo from Harvard Medical School, went overseas as a lieutenant in the medical corps of the 367th Infantry...
...if he is barred from a bathing beach or an amusement park...
...Countee Cullen, perhaps the most lyrically elo- quent of the new group of Negro poets, was a Phi Beta Kappa at New York University...
...Unpleasant problems were to be relegated to a murky shadow land and taken out for discussion .9rely at the whim of the governing class...
...Labor problems for natives of East and South Africa, the political situation under European control and the administrative policies of the ruling nations in Africa have all been included in the Negro educa-tional program "to understand the white world in its relations to the non-white world...
...W. E. Burghardt Du Bois, the brilliant Negro sociologist and writer, has lashed without compromise at racial oppression and injustice...
...No Negro family today would be without its favorite paper, which specializes in news untouched by the white press and reflects what prominent men in the colored commu-nity are thinking about questions affecting the interests of the race...
...Twenty years ago the average colored person thought of Africa as a remote elephant jungle inhab- ited by primitive tribes to which he was vaguely and anthropologically linked...
...A more recent triumph was the decision in the Texas white primary case, by which laws ex-.'luding Negroes from party primaries were held un-:onstitutional...
...The Commission on Interracial Co6peration, composed of leading whitc and colored people, is working throughout the Soutl" to improve conditions affecting the Negro...
...For twenty years the Crisis, under the editorship of Dr...
...The railroad com-pany settled the case out of court for $2,750...
...Quietly accepting handicaps and facing the possi-bility that a higher education might leave them stranded with a calculus anc~ a Horace as equipment for Pullman porters' jobs, Negro students are enter-ing the universities in ever-increasing numbers...
...Today the increasing popular demand to learn about the Negro from the Negro himself is bringing about a normal interchange of ideas between the races, which will result in benefit to both...
...Fortified by his rehabilitated group consciousness, the Negro is shedding some of his traditional humble- ness...
...June 19, 1929 THE COMMONWEAL 179 THE NEGRO'S PLACE IN THE SUN By ELSIE WEIL T WENTY years ago a conference on racial ques- tions, dominated by colored people, would scarcely have received serious municipal con-.~ideration, even from a northern city...
...Directly after emancipation, 4,000 Negroes were engaged in busi- ness...
...He smiled a little sadly and a little wist- fully and said, "I have enjoyed living in those coun-tries, but always as an exile, always with the feeling that one day I would be returning home...
...The banks are handicapped by exclusion from clear- ing-house participation, absence of business with white firms and the lack of managerial experience...
...Over ten thousand Negroes have received college degrees...
...In 1928 there were eleven lynchings in five states, the lowest record in the forty years during which statistics have been kept...
...The Pan-African movement has not vet accomplished anything tangible, but it has drawn into a closer bond of common inter- est the I5O,OOO,OOO Negroes in Africa and America whose welfare is affected by selfish government policies...
...and literary editor of the Crisis, has recently published two novels, There, Is Confusion, and Plum Bun, which describe the social life of cultured Negroes in New York and Philadel...
...The Negro, encouraged by the success of outstand- ing members of his own race--men like Roland Hayes in music, William Stanley Braithwaite in literature and George W. Carver in science--is acquiring self- confidence as well as the self-respect preached as a pragmatic gospel by Booker T. Washington at the beginning of the century...
...The Association fights its battles in the courts with legal weapons...
...Since that time several congresses have been called...
...A colored woman, an interstate passenger, who had purchased Pullman accommoda-tions from New York to Orlando, Florida, was re-moved from the train at a small Florida town, placed in jail and fined $500 and costs...
...Other cases successfully defended by :he Association have involved residential and school ~egregation and unlawful discrimination against the Negro in the exercise of his civil rights...
...Only time and the subtly percolating influences of education can effect one of those slow geological changes in point of view which mark the end of one epoch and the beginning of another...
...There was, to be sure, Liberia, but that tiny dot of black nationalism was no promised land, only a diplomatic berth for an occa- sional American Negro...
...Many have already fulfilled the promise of their academic years with sterling achievement in their chosen professions...
...The National Negro Press Association is backed by 4oo periodicals, more than half of them newspapers...
...But the Negro knows that the vindication of his legal dignity will not wipe out discriminations, so long as they are regarded as social imperatives...
...But they are steadily growing and inspiring more confi-dence among their own people...
...Why did he, who has so much to contribute in creative effort, struggle against prejudices and limiting restric- tions...
...A more recent monthly, Opportunity, welcomes the work of the younger Negro writers...
...Why apologize or evade...
...other southern states have made public resolutions it which they have urged in challenging terms the pro~ tection of Negro womanhood, the right of Negrr childhood to better homes, better health and bette~ June 19, 1929 THE COMMONWEAL 181 education, and the stamping out of mob violence...
...The influence of newspapers like the Pittsburgh Courier, the Chicago Defender, the Balti- more Afro-American, and the New York Amsterdam News in molding Negro public opinion and solidifying group reactions is incalculable...
...Alain Locke, who was a Rhodes Scholar from Pennsylvania and took his Ph.D...
...Students of racial history find invaluable material in the scholarly quarterly, The Journal of Negro His-tory, edited by Carter G. Woodson, and in his pub- lished records of the Negro in America, which repre- sent many years of painstaking research...
...Now there are more than 70,000 Negro busi- ness enterprises...
...In his new mood he is not exalt~ lng himself---a compensatory measure of spiritual escape adopted by many oppressed classes--but rather he is turning inward for self-analysis and inviting con- structive criticism in preference to sentimental and charitable allowances for weakness...
...The only thing that mattered was what the governing class chose to think and do about the Negro problem...
...Twenty-eight insurance companies operated by Negroes write $i2o,ooo,ooo a year...
...From its inception the Association has openly and candidly broadcast facts that have made polite society wince...
...According to the i92o census, 8o,ooo Negroes are in the professions...
...In those days Negro co6peration in working toward a solution of the racial problem was unwelcomed as officious and inconsequential...
...Wright is known in medical circles for inventing a successful system of intradermal vac-cination and for his studies on the hookworm...
...The majority are clergymen, teachers, musicians, actors, lawyers, physicians, dentists and trained nurses...
...Seventy Negro banks do an annual business of $Ioo,ooo,ooo...
Vol. 10 • June 1929 • No. 7
