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where who take up our cause, but we wish them to know that we have already taken it up ourselves. While they were refusing to diagnose our case we diagnosed it ourselves, and, now that we have prescribed the remedyRace Solidarity-they come to us with their prescription -Class Solidarity. It is too late, gentlemen! This racial alignment is all our own product, and we have no desire to turn it over to you at this late day, when we are beginning to reap its benefits. And if you are simple enough to believe that those among us who serve your interests ahead of ours have any monopoly of intellect or information along the lines of modern learning, then you are the greater gulls indeed.

We can respect the Socialists of Scandinavia, France, Germany or England on their record. But your record so far does not entitle you to the respect of those of us who can see all around a subject. We say Race First, because you have all along insisted on Race First and class after when you didn't need our help. We reproduce below a brief portion of your record in those piping times of peace, and ask you to explain it. If you are unable to do so, set your lackeys to work; they may be able to do it in terms of their own "radical scientific" surface slush. The following is taken from the majority report of one of your national committees during one of your recent national conventions. It was signed by Ernest Untermann and J. Stitt Wilson, representing the West, and Joshua Wanhope, editor of the Call, and Robert Hunter, representing the East, and it was adopted as a portion of the party program. We learn from it that

"Race feeling is not so much a result of social as of biological evolution. It does not change essentially with changes of economic systems. It is deeper than any class feeling and will outlast the capitalist system. It persists even

after race prejudice has been outgrown. It exists not because the capitalists nurse it for economic reasons, but the capitalists rather have an opportunity to nurse it for economic reasons because it exists as a product of biology. It is bound to play a role in the economics of the future society. If it should not assert itself in open warfare under a Socialist form of society, it will nevertheless lead to a rivalry of races for expansion over the globe as a result of the play of natural and sexual selection. We may temper this race feeling by education, but we can never hope to extinguish it altogether. Class-consciousness must be learned, but race consciousness is inborn and cannot be wholly unlearned. A few individuals may indulge in the luxury of ignoring race and posing as utterly raceless humanitarians, but whole

races never.

Where races struggle for the means of life, racial animosities cannot be avoided. Where working people struggle for jobs, self-preservation enforces its decrees. Economic and political considerations lead to racial fights and to legislation restricting the invasion of the white man's domain by other races."

It is well that the New Negro should know this, since it justifies him in giving you a taste of your own medicine. The writer of these lines is also a Socialist; but he refuses in this crisis of the world's history to put either Socialism or your party above the call of his race. he does this on the very grounds which you yourselves have given in the document quoted above. Also because he is not a fool.

And

March 27th, 1920.

An Open Letter to the Socialist Party of New York City.

Gentlemen: During 1917 the white leaders of the Republican party were warned that the Negroes of this city were in a mood unfavorable to the success of their party at the polls and that this mood was likely to last

until they changed their party's attitude toward the Negro masses. They scouted this warning because the Negroes whom they had selected to interpret Negro sentiment for them still confidently assured them that there had been no change of sentiment on the part of the Negro people, and white politicians did not think it necessary to come and find out for themselves. Consequently they were lied to by those whose bread and butter depended on such lying. Then came the mayoralty campaign, and, when it was too late they discovered their mistake. At a memorable meeting at Palace Casino John Purroy Mitchell, the candidate of the Republican party, and Theodore Roosevelt, its idol, were almost hissed off the stage, while the Mitchell outdoor speakers found it impossible to speak on the street corners of Harlem. The party went down to defeat and Judge Hylan was elected.

All this is recent history, and it is called to your attention at this time only because you are in danger of making a similar costly mistake. You, too, have selected Negro spokesmen on whose word you choose to rely for information as to the tone and temper of Negro political sentiment. You have chosen to adopt the same faulty method of the white Republican politicians, and you do not care to go behind the word of your selected exponents of Negro thought and feeling. Yet the pitiful vote which you polled in the last election might have warned you that something had gone wrong in your arrangements. What that something is we shall now proceed to show you—if you are still able to see.

During the recent world war the Negro in America was taught that while white people spoke of patriotism, religion, democracy and other sounding themes, they remained loyal to one concept above all others, and that was the concept of race. Even in the throes of war, and on

the battlefields of France it was "race first" with them. Out of this realization was born the new Negro ideal of "race first" for us. And today, whether Negroes be Catholics or Protestants, capitalists or wage workers, Republicans or Democrats, native or foreign-born, they begin life anew on this basis. Alike in their business alignments, their demands on the government and political parties, and in their courageous response to race rioters, they are responding to this sentiment which has been bred by the attitude of white men here and everywhere else where white rules black. To be sure, neither Burleson nor Palmer have told you or the rest of the white world this. The Angle-Saxon white man is a notorious hypocrite; and they have preferred to prate of Bolshevism—your "radicalism"-rather than tell the truth of racialism, our "radicalism," because this was an easier explanation, more in keeping with official stupidity. But we had supposed that you were intelligent enough to find this out. Evidently, you were not.

Your official Negro exponents, on behalf of their bread and butter, have seized on this widely-published official explanation to make you believe that the changed attitude of the Negro masses was due to the propaganda which you were paying them (at their published request) to preach. But this is a lie. Don't take our word for it. Do some reading on your own account. Get a hundred different Negro newspapers and magazines, outside of those which you have subsidized, and study their editorial and other pronouncements, and you will see that this is so.

But let us come nearer home. The propaganda of Socialism has been preached in times past in Harlem by different people without awakening hostility of any sort. Today it elicits a hostility which is outspoken. Send up and see; then ask yourselves the reason. You will find a

Negro Harlem reborn, with business enterprises and cultural arrangements. And these things have been established without any help from you or those who eat your bread. Even the work of Socialist propaganda was neglected by you between 1912 and 1917. Consult your own memories and the columns of the Call.

All these things are the recent products of the principle of "race first." And among them the biggest is the Universal Negro Improvement Association, with its associate bodies, the Black Star Line and the Negro Factories Corporation. No movement among American Negroes since slavery was abolished has ever attained the gigantic proportions of this. The love and loyalty of millions go out to it as well as the cold cash of tens of thousands. Yet your Negro hirelings have seen fit to use the organs which you have given them to spread Socialist propaganda for the purpose of attacking all these things, and the Black Star Line in particular. Do you wonder now that they meet with such outspoken opposition that they have been driven to seek an underhanded alliance with the police (as your Negro Socialist organ avows in its latest issue)? Isn't that a glorious alliance for purposes of Negro propaganda? When such things can happen you may depend upon it that someone has been fooling you.

And, just as the white Republicans did, you have assumed that those whom chance or change brought your way have, somehow, achieved a monopoly of the intellect and virtue of the Negro race. Do you think that this is sound sense on your part? Of course, it was natural that they should tell you so. But was it natural for you to be so simple as to believe it? On March 27 this newspaper in an editorial quoted a passage from one of your official documents

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