The usual procedure of the whites is to notify the Negroes to leave the county in ten days, and if they do not heed the notice the mob gathers and runs them out.* The white people of the class above mentioned do not always wait to organize a mob, but as individuals commit outrages upon the Negroes with and without provocation. For example, in a Georgia county an envious white man caused his Negro neighbor to be falsely arrested, and, together with his two educated daughters, to be brutally beaten and cuffed by a sheriff, on a charge of trespass. The Negro was a prosperous farmer, and, during the World War, he and his family of twelve children purchased approximately $1,000 worth of Liberty Bonds and Thrift Stamps, and he headed an organization which purchased $10,000 in Liberty Bonds. The white man who had the Negro arrested could neither read nor write, and, when he heard of the Negro's generous subscriptions to the war fund, he remarked: "'E's getting too damned prosperous and biggity for a nigger." 5 In another county in Georgia, a Negro witness in a peonage case was killed by a son of the white farmer against whom the Negro had testified. A boy fishing found the body of the Negro in a creek." The recent development of the new Ku Klux Klan which has spread over the entire United States, and which now seems to be dying a natural death, does not appear to have been greatly concerned with the Negro. Its main object seems to have been to maintain in the United States the dominance of the Protestant type of citizen. The worst that can be said of its influence in the South is that it has intensified race prejudice among a class of people who already have too much of it. Race riots, as distinguished from lynchings, are violent outbreaks in which one or both races develop the mob spirit. A single individual may initiate the disturbance, but the outcome is the assembling of angry groups of both races and their commission of crimes against each other. The riot of greatest magnitude in the South during the past twentyfive years was the so-called Atlanta riot of 1906. According to a Northern man's version of it, "A lame boot-black, an inoffensive, industrious boy, at that moment actually at work shining a man's shoes, was dragged out and cuffed, kicked and beaten to death in the street. Ibid., sec. C. Another young Negro was chased and stabbed to death with jackknives in the most unspeakable, horrible manner. The mob entered barber shops where respectable Negro men were at work shaving white customers, pulled them away from their chairs and beat them. Cars were stopped and inoffensive Negroes were thrown through the windows or dragged out and beaten. They demolished Negro barber shops and restaurants and robbed stores kept by white men." Not a criminal was touched by the riot. Its victims were all law-abiding and industrious citizens. Two white men and ten colored men were killed, and ten white men and sixty colored men injured. Among the riots which have occurred in the South since the World War the following are the more outstanding: A riot at Charleston, South Carolina, May 10, 1919, between Negroes and sailors from the Naval Training Station grew out of the shooting of a sailor by a Negro. The casualties were two Negroes killed and about twenty Negroes and eight sailors wounded. On July 11, 1919, a riot at Longview, Texas, between whites and Negroes resulted in the wounding of four white men and the burning of a number of Negro residences. The riot grew out of the effort of some white men to punish a Negro school-teacher who was accused of the publication in a Negro newspaper of statements derogatory to a young white woman concerning whom a Negro had been lynched some weeks previous. On August 30 and 31, 1919, a riot at Knoxville, Tennessee, between Negroes and whites resulted in the killing of one Negro and one officer of the National Guardsmen, and the wounding of six Negroes and seven whites. The rioting began with the storming of the jail to get a Negro accused of murdering a white woman. The jail was wrecked and all of the white prisoners, sixteen in number, were released. The Negro prisoner had been removed for safety to another county, but the mob invaded the Negro quarter, where several clashes without fatality occurred. In Washington, D. C., July 19-23, 1919, there occurred a very serious riot in which three Negroes and four whites were killed and some thirty or more people wounded. It started as a result of reported attacks of Negroes on white women. On the morning of July 19 the Washington Times announced, "The sixth attack by Negroes on white women during the last four weeks," etcetera. It seems that certain 'Baker, Following the Color Line, p. 15. • Ibid., p. 55. newspapers reported as news, giving no details of names or locality, the wild rumors picked up from the gossip of the streets. A riot at Tulsa, Oklahoma, May 31 and June 1, 1921, resulted in the killing of about ten whites and twenty-one Negroes and the burning of a whole section of Negro residences. The riot began with the assembling of a number of armed Negroes at the county jail in response to a rumor that a mob of white people was going to lynch a Negro prisoner charged with assault upon a white woman. The assembling of the Negroes was the signal for an outpouring of the whites who, after driving the Negroes away, followed them to their residence quarter and set fire to their homes. It is commonly believed that the riot would not have occurred but for an inflammatory speech made in Tulsa prior to the riot by a representative of the National Association for the Advancement of the Colored People. CHAPTER 18 THE PEONAGE OF NEGROES Its Origin-Character and Extent of It-Laws Which Encourage Peonage-The Remedy-General Extent of Outrages upon the Negro-What the White People Are Doing and Should Do to Give the Negro a Square Deal THE HE term peonage as used in the South has grown out of a court practice which was solely humanitarian in its motive and was designed especially to favor Negro offenders. When white people are fined for a minor offense they usually are able to raise the money from some relative or friend and thus avoid going to jail. In order to give the Negro an equal opportunity to escape a jail sentence, laws were made which provided that persons unable to pay a fine might be bound out or bailed to any one who would pay the fine. Under these laws Negro offenders have been bailed to any man who needed their labor, and have been deprived of their freedom until the fine was worked out. Although the kind of Negroes who have to be bailed are not the best workers, and, while the white people who do the bailing are not of the best type of farmers, perhaps nine-tenths of the cases of bailing are terminated according to agreement and without injustice to the bailee. In a great many cases the white man who pays the fine is a friend of the Negro and allows him his freedom and trusts him to repay the amount of the fine when convenient or at a specified date. Where abuses have arisen from this bailing process they have been neither designed nor foreseen. But a practice of this kind, by its very nature, offers the opportunity for a class of unprincipled white men to exploit the Negro, and, in the last twenty-five years, many instances of such exploitation have come to light, accompanied in some cases by unbelievable cruelties, and even by murder of the Negro victims. In a pamphlet issued by Governor Hugh M. Dorsey of Georgia in 1921, there are enumerated twelve such cases of peonage. The worst case in the history of the system came to light in the spring of 1921, when John S. Williams, a planter in Jasper County, Georgia, was indicted for the wholesale murder of Negro men whom he had held in peonage. He had made a practice of bailing out prisoners from the Atlanta and Macon stockades and putting them to work on his plantation. Here he retained them unlawfully, beat them unmercifully, and, to prevent the victim from telling on him, began to put them to death and hide their corpses. The trial brought out the fact that eleven Negroes had been done to death on the Williams plantation; six of them had been thrown into a river and five buried on the plantation. The farm boss, a Negro, Clyde Manning, confessed that, under the directions of Williams, he had done most of the killing. The trial attracted national attention and ended in the sentencing of Williams and Manning to life imprisonment. Peonage cases have been most common perhaps in Georgia, but even in that state they have come to light in only a few counties. The general run of people in the cities and rural districts of Georgia have been as indignant and as much amazed over the story of peonage cases as people could have been in any part of the country, and, under the leadership of Governor Dorsey, have made a determined effort to stamp it out. There is no certain way of uprooting peonage except by repealing the laws which permit a person unable to pay a fine to be bailed out. This might be a hardship on the impecunious offender in compelling him to go to prison for minor offenses, but it is better that he go to prison than become a slave. To be bound to involuntary servitude to a private citizen, under whatever pretext, is to become in reality a slave, and no such servitude should be tolerated in any civilized country. In lieu of the bailing-out laws, the Southern states should adopt the French policy of allowing impecunious offenders to pay their fines by their free labor and earnings within a specified time, and appointing a probation officer to assist them in finding work and to see that they pay the fines. A Georgia law1 under which Negroes could be arrested and convicted upon the charge of fraudulent intent in violating any labor contract has enabled white scoundrels to perpetrate many outrages upon Negro tenants and wage workers. For example, a white man in a county in Georgia had a Negro boy arrested for failing to comply with his contract. The boy had been drafted for service in the United States Army and had served fifteen months, and he pleaded that his service caused him to break his contract. A well-to-do Negro farmer was in the act of signing the boy's bond, which the sheriff 'Code Section, pp. 715-16. |