AMERICAN NEGROES.

Marlborough Express, Volume XLV, Issue 22, 26 January 1911, Page 3

AMERICAN NEGROES.

SEGREGATION PROPOSALS

America's greatest problem, write? the correspondent of an English journal, the negro, is once again exciting, the country. It is expected that the census returns will show about eleven million coloured people in the United States, and in some districts they increase faster than the whites. The trouble arises chiefly from the ownership of property, and is very acute ii; many places, more particularly Baltimore and New York.

The negroes, it is complained, while they remain stationary from tbo standpoint of morals, progress considerably commercially, and in nuiiiy places have bought good-class lion.-::* property for the purpose of investments. In Baltimore and New York they have bought fine- houses <as tenements for negro families, and immediately most of the good-class whites, who object strongly to coloured people as neighbours, decamped, and to that extent some neighbourhoods have sadly deteriorated financially. In Baltimore things have reafined such a pitch that violence is threatened, and the local government there has formed proposals to segregate the negroes. A few weeks ago a prominent citizen.of Baltimore told me that ho would not be surprised to wake up ono day and find that the whites in their indignation hiad risen and ''wiped out" a large number of their coloured brothers. To this citizen I pointed out the Declaration of American Independence, which declared that all men were born free and equal, and suggested that it would be a trifle hard to segregate the negroes, making them live in compounds, apart from the civilising influence of the whites. He replied that the negroes, despite their emancipation, are not, and never will be, equal to the whites, and that any talk about equality was. mere bunkum.

In New York things are not quite so bad as in Baltimore, but a meeting of the residents and property owners held there recently formed an association which will fight to exclude negroes from the-residential districts where they, are not wanted. Tlie property owners are pledged themselves not to sell or rent their houses to negroes, and it was also agreed to eliminate the negro tenants from -?.or,f m .streets of the American metropolis which they have lately invaded. *unds will be raised to purchase the property in "good" districts now owned by negroes, and the purchases will be resold only to whites. It is a mighty tough, problem, and one which threatens to make plenty of bad blood before it is settled. It' is true that the American negroes in all parts of the country are far below the status of the whites, and public opinion is agreed in denying them the privilege of riding in the same railway carriages or trains as the whites.

, In London last April I saw two fullblooded Mew York, negroes, know to me personally, dining in one of your .best-known London restaurants. They were garbed m evening dress, and evil' dently greatly appreciated London hospitality. In New York these same men, or any of their color, would nave been denied access to any res-r taurant possessing any social status, and ir they had accidentally secured' entrance every white present would immediately beat a retreat by way of protest.

Naturally, the negroes resent this discrimination/ but they are absolutely powerless. The negroes argue that their progenitors in the States, against their will—meaning their fathers, or at most grandfathers— were brought, here forcibly to work as slaves in the Southern cotton plantations, and now that they are here, and have acquired tastes for the luxuries of civilisation, they do not favor the prospect of returning to .Liberia or other. African settlements prepared to welcome them. The question of segregation is extremely difficult, and any municipal by-laws relative to compounds, would probably bo declared unconstitutional by * the Supreme Court, and, therefore, invalid, a, fact which the negroes, who have plenty of lawyers of their own. color/kno<7 just as well as the whites.;