AN AMERICAN PROBLEM.

Northern Advocate, 17 January 1920, Page 6

AN AMERICAN PROBLEM.

A.\ KKFtX'T OF Tilt: WAR. Another race riot, this time in Omaha, accentuates the fact that the United States is still far from finding •i -a-ilmiou of what is .when all is said ami dune, the most difficult, thought nut imine.i.liflLely the most important, of her social problems, A good deal has been said i writes "The Times' " correspondent; in previous articles of the movement for the proper Americanization of citizens of alien blood. Things like the steel strike, which would not have come about had it not been for the inflammability of the foreign labourers in the mills, show that the movement is a much nfeded one. For the negro question there is no such ultimate cure as yet visible. Tho descendants of the slaves of colonial days and of the first era of independence, are already as much Americanised as they can be. One of the lessons of the present situation is that the farther upwards they move in the social scheme the greater their discontent and Ihe greater the prejudice against them of the whites with whom they compete. There are in the country over 10,000,000 people of black of mulatto blood. In the old days the vast bulk of ihe negroes, who thus number about Id per cent, of the population, were 10 be found in the Southern States. Alabama for instance had in 1910 1,_00,000 whites and 900,000 blacks; (ioorgia, 1,400,000 whites and 1,150,000 blacks; and Mississippi, only 780,000 white to 1,000,000 blacks. Montana, on the other hand, had 300,000 whites lo under L'OOO blacks; North Dakota, f)i;t),000 whites and only 000 blacks; and Nebraska, of which Omaha is tho chief city, 1,180,000 whites to 7f>oo blacks.

It is the custom of the negro to live in well-defined quarters of the cities. Kven in Washington one linds whole streets given up to coloured people, tucked away in the midst of the best residential quarter. As the negro crowds North the old coloured district becomes unable to hold him; he slops out into adjoining streets. His presence in them is resented, and there is bad blood. This bad blood is often aggravated by the white workman's jealousy of his new competitor. A crime against a white woman, or something of thnt sort, and tho fat is in the fire.

Plio win lms :ilso hardened the fool

in-- at' Hi,' nc.iro n«';iin*t iho white, lie v,;:s MMi! i;> l:u_'<' iimn.lifM'K io France, lie I'ouiiil in Franco no particular colour lino .ji'fiwn against hu-1. Ho was received as an ally and nol as an in-

lY'rior. fi irhs him to return to the inequalities of ilio homo ho woni io light for. io the "Jim C'rnw" laws oi' the Southern States that provide for him separate railway carriages, mid to the various schemes, like tho "Grandfather Clause/ whereby some St-itur, confine the .suffrage to those whose grandparents were free, in order to deprive him of ihe vote that ww constitutionally given him after the Civil War. It irks him the more inasmuch as he is told by his organs in the press that the American High Command tried to get the French to treat him as he was treated at homo. Proud of his new-found sense of discipline, ho is not deaf to propaganda against allowing himself to he exploited l>y ihe white race in times of crisis and then, when tho crisis is over, to ho put back into a position of recognised inferiorit v.

For many years past there have been two theories about the education of the American negro. One idea hay boon to concentrate upon technical education, to bring him up to manual trades, and to encourage him to become a small farmer. The other idea has been to neat him as a white man, to give him a higher education. The latter policy has had considerable success. There have been negroes high in the Federal service. There are good coloured doctors and lawyers; and there aro many thousands of negroes, probably rich enough to own their own motors and that sort of thing. In New York, for instance, there is a most prosperous coloured community, living together in

good streets and good houses with its | own theatres and all the oi-tor trappings in oiviii-in ii:>n. l'.ul i here, is a reverse i.ir .'>l' ili>shield. The in I eliei.-i mil 'icgro to lake rather kindly to Socialism and organised agitation. Thus one finds, besides the National AssoeittioH for the Advancement of the Co'ourcd People, which has many white members, a number of purely coloured organisations like the League for Democracy, an organisation of eoloure I soldiers aflame with grievances against the white ollieers they had in Prance; the Universal Negro improvement Association, whose programme is to awaken class consciousness among the negroes here and in Africa, and to knit together all the coloured races of the world; the National Association for the Organisation of Labour Unions among Negroes; the Hamitic League of the World; the League of the Darker People of the World, and so on. Nearly all such associations arc extreme and run by young coloured Socialists, often aided and abetted by professional white extremists of the type that causes so much troublo among the alien proletariat. Some of them publish inflammatory organs like the "Messenger," of New York; tho "Crisis," of the same city; or tho "Boston Guardian," whose editor, W. M. Trotter, a Harvard graduate, after a fruitless visit to the Peace Conference, lately lold ihe Sena 1c Committee on Foreign Relalions (o look out tor a race rising if the whites did not mend their ways. Even tho Industrial Workers of the World have been getting recruits among the negroes in the South, a fact which made the American Federation oi" Labour decide this year to countenance coloured unions, much to the disgust of Southerners.

To this the while reply, as has been seer, from the news of recent months, has 100 often boon mob force. ".Mob protection is the only protection of the white man 's home,'' cried the other day tho paper of a former Senator of tho United States, published in Mississippi, in the course of an article calling on the "best and bravest" in the State to organise, "since there is no doubt that hell will be to pay in this country in the near future."

But enough has boon said to show how discontent, merging often into impertinence and sometimes criminal misbehaviour one the one side, and the sometimes rough intolerance on tho other, are exacerabatiug a problem already difficult. Tho process is deplored by the vast majority of sober whites and by many thoughtful negroes. It is quite probable thai the bettor sense of the nation will prevent its going so far as some profess to fear; but for tho moment it is not the least troublesome feature of a genera) situation teeming with other problems of race amalgamation. Nor is it one (he existence of which wo can aiford to overlook. There can be little doubt that the extremists would like to cxtond their propaganda to our possessions. Several of the most active agitators in New York and elsewhere aro, indeed, reported to bo West Indians.