IT was in a suit for divorce in Kansas fifty years ago that the husband gave testimony as follows: “We quarreled about sheets. She wanted linen sheets and I wanted cotton; and we compromised on cotton.” Such is the compromise which the arbitrators present to the Georgia Railroad at the demand of the white firemen. The number of negro firemen is to be reduced until it does not exceed 25 per cent. The first place is always to be given to a white man, no matter which is the more faithful and efficient. The white man shall always be the senior and be preferred in assigning a job.
We are not inclined to blame the United States Government severely for its slowness in the matter. It takes some time to get ready to act, and the Georgia authorities avoided the difficulty by sending out mail trains with no passengers. We must presume that if the mails had still been stopped, President Taft would have acted as vigorously as did President Cleveland in the Chicago strike. That was understood and expected. But we can not exculpate Governor Hoke Smith. He utterly refused to protect the Georgia Railroad and thus forced the submission. He got his election on the cry of danger of negro supremacy, and had to carry out his infamous policy of injustice.
Possibly the wrong of this settlement is the escape from a greater and more extensive wrong. Negroes have been employed from the beginning as firemen, but without the privilege of promotion as engineers. It is a laborer’s job, requiring simple, faithful, manual labor. Now the white men want it all, and were this demand made the basis of a contract, it is likely that the trouble would spread to all the railroads in the South.
We have been told that the South is the paradise of the negro; that there the people welcome the negro to all sorts of labor, as mechanics as well as scavengers and porters. But here was the attempt to forbid just this ordinary humble sort of service. It represents the ill will to the aspirations of the negro felt by the lower class of white men. The trouble has been fomented among the country poor whites along the lines of the railroad. It is they that have dragged the black firemen off the engines and beaten them. They would drive the negro back to the soil.
The Luxembourg, Paris
Well, let them try it. Even their success would be the greater failure. Those that own the soil in the end own the country. If the whites go to the cities and the blacks to the country, in the end the latter will get the better of it. It is the whites that are crowded out of the country, and in the end the successful and wealthier blacks will go to the cities also. The great black belts will have their mechanics, their merchants, their bankers, their men of property and culture, and they will find their level, no matter how high. We have had this week an important conference in this city at which Professor Wilder, of Cornell, and other anatomists and anthropologists have shown most clearly that there is no skull or brain structure by which we can tell a white man from a negro, and this is the present conclusion of science. Every race has its medium men, and its great men, and no class prejudice can permanently shut out a race from its opportunity. But even now, a great hope for the negro in the South is the growing sense of justice among the whites. The general condemnation of the Georgia Railroad strike by the Southern press is a most encouraging symptom of a better public sentiment demanding a fair chance for all men.—The Independent.
