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“DISCRIMINATION” IN MEMPHIS

A night’s railway journey on the Illinois Central carries you from Louisville to Memphis, Tennessee, and from the Ohio to the Mississippi. You strike the Father of Waters some time before you reach Memphis. Here two sets of literary associations were awakened in my mind. We passed through miles of swampy, malarial-looking forests, with snake-like vines binding the trees together; and every here and there would come a clearing on the river-bank, still bristling with huge gaunt stumps of dead timber, and showing a melancholy cabin or two, which forcibly recalled the Eden of “Martin Chuzzlewit.” And then, again, in some quiet backwater, we would see a great raft of lumber, with a hut or tent on it—the very raft of Huckleberry Finn and Jim. So strongly have the great rivers always appealed to my imagination that the first thing I did in Memphis was to go down to the wharf and ascertain whether I could not travel at least part of the way to New Orleans by steamer. There are plenty of huge sternwheel boats, still on the river; but alas! their movements are not arranged in view of passenger traffic. Only in short stages, and at great expenditure of time, could I have carried out my ambition. Baffled at Memphis, I still hoped to take boat from Vicksburg to Natchez; but I found that I should have to wait two days for a boat, and should then spend two more days in covering a distance which I could do by rail in a single night. So, except for a short excursion at New Orleans, I did not go a-sailing on the waters of the Mississippi.

Memphis is a much brighter, cleaner, more alert and prosperous-looking place than Louisville. |Charity and Colour.| There are shops on Main Street that would make a good figure in Paris; and at night it is as gay with electricity as the “Great White Way” of New York. When I arrived, Memphis was evidently in the thick of some excitement. The side-walks of Main Street were crowded with ladies, young and—less young, who were making dashes at every male passer-by, and seeking to pin a square purple badge to the lapel of his coat. It was soon evident that life was not worth living unless you wore one of these badges; so I secured one, at the expense of half-a-dollar, and on examining it found that it was inscribed—“Tag-Day for the Tennessee Home for Incurables.” This was, in fact, a sort of Hospital Saturday, and the tag pinned to your coat was a certificate that you had paid up.

The system struck me as ingenious; but it is because of a significant sequel that I mention it. In the afternoon, I called on a negro professional man who had invited me to go for a drive in his buggy. As we left the house I noticed that he wore no tag. I touched my own tag, and said, smiling, “Dare you venture into the streets without one of these?” “Why,” he replied, “they wouldn’t for anything ‘tag’ a coloured man!”

This was “discrimination” with a vengeance! Even charity fenced round by the colour-line! I felt that here at last I had touched the limit.

“Free” Libraries.

We drove past the small but attractive-looking Public Library, situated on a bluff, with a glorious view over the lake-like Mississippi.

“Is there discrimination here?” I asked.

“Why, certainly,” was the reply. “My son is in an office where several of the white young men have cards enabling them to draw books from the library. My son applied for a card; and as he is very light in colour, it at first seemed that there was going to be no difficulty. But when they heard his name, they identified him as my son and refused him a card. The librarian wrote to me privately, and said that the boy could have as many books as he liked without any card. But I would not have that; I threatened to take the case into court by refusing to pay any tax for the support of the library. But then they offered to establish a branch library for coloured people, and that compromise I accepted.”

Some time later, in another city, I was reminded of this conversation on seeing a very handsome Carnegie Free Library occupying a prominent site.

“Is it free to coloured people?” I asked.

“Oh dear no,” was the reply. “Carnegie offered to give an extra $10,000 for a black branch library, if the town would contribute $1000 a year to its support. This the town agreed to do, on condition that the negro community provided the site. We, on our part, consented to this, merely stipulating that we should have a voice in the management. The town replied emphatically ‘No,’ and the whole thing fell through. It would simply have meant, you see, that they would have dumped upon us any rubbish for which they hadn’t room in the main library. Can you wonder that we declined?” I could not.

To return to Memphis. I had gone there, not exactly to attend the annual “Conference for Education in the South,” but to see several people who were attending it. |Educators in Council.| However, I did go to one or two meetings, and notably to one which was to be addressed by the British Ambassador, Mr. James Bryce. It was in the Lyceum Theatre, and I sat on the platform (the stage) and looked out over the crowded house, where a dozen electric fans were keeping the sultry air in motion. It seemed to me odd that, while the floor of the house and the first and second circle were overcrowded, there were only one or two people in the gallery. Presently I looked up again; there were now about twenty people in the upper regions, and I had a curious difficulty in distinguishing their features. A light burst upon me—they were negroes. In a “Conference for Education in the South” the whites did all the conferring and the blacks, if they were so minded, might listen from the gallery.

Next day my black, or rather olive-coloured, friend said: “I could have whipped myself this morning when I opened the paper and saw that I’d missed hearing Bryce. I was bent upon hearing him, but somehow I forgot that yesterday was the evening.” I wondered whether he realized that he would have had to sit in the gallery. But I did not ask him. Every now and then, in this country, one turns tail and flees from the haunting colour question. It is the skeleton at the feast of Southern life.

In New York I had met President Booker T. Washington, of Tuskegee, one of the most notable men in America, an accomplished speaker, and an authority, if ever there was one, on the education of the negro. “No doubt I shall see you at Memphis,” I said, in an off-hand way. He answered, rather drily, “No;” and some time afterwards he said, “You asked me if I would be at Memphis—I am not at all sure that I should be welcome there. I received a printed circular notifying me of the meeting, but no invitation to attend it. You will find friends of the negro there, and of negro education—oh yes, plenty. But they will not be of my colour.”

I did, as a matter of fact, hear one friend of negro education hold forth—Bishop Bratton, of Mississippi. |A Bishop on Race Equality.| The Bishop laid down a good many principles—among them that “the negro is capable of development to a point whose limit he (the speaker) had not discovered,” but that “the vast majority are still children intellectually, and little short of savages morally.” The purport of his address was the assertion that negro education should not be left entirely or mainly to negro teachers. The ideal school would be one under the supervision of a white clergyman, where carefully selected portions of Scripture should be necessary parts of the curriculum, and “where the race should be taught that race integrity is obedience to God’s own creation and appointment, and that race intercourse, kindly and cordial, is not race equality.” “Indeed,” the Bishop proceeded, “the very expression ‘race equality’ is an anachronism belonging to the mediæval period of reconstruction history [that is, roughly, the period between 1866 and 1876], which has long gone to its account.” These remarks were warmly received by the audience, and greatly applauded by the leading Southern papers. But one understands why Mr. Booker T. Washington—and, still more, why Professor W. E. B. Du Bois, of Atlanta University—were not bidden to the conference. Of these two negro leaders I shall try to give a sketch in my next paper.