Persistent and Violent Racism Against African Americans

NEW YORK WORLD, New York Negroes Stage Silent Parade of Protest (1916)

African Americans had begun to move away from the rural South into more urban areas, including northern cities, by the second decade of the twentieth century, a migration that would peak during the Great Migration of World War I. They continued to suffer persistent racism, bearing the disdain of many whites who never reconciled with emancipation’s legacy. Sometimes this hostility erupted into fatal violence. Lynching became epidemic during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, provoking an antilynching campaign among reformers. A silent parade in New York City in 1916 focused attention on this crisis in the African American community, as described in this article from the New York World.

Leaders among the negroes of New York City decided that a silent parade would be the most dramatic and effective way to make felt the protest of their race against injustice and inhumanity growing out of lynch law.

And this silent parade was staged with real impressiveness and dignity and with an indefinable appeal to the heart in Fifth Avenue yesterday afternoon.

From the time that the 3,500 or 4,000 men, women, and children marchers left Fifty-sixth Street shortly after 1 o’clock until they were completing their dispersal in Twenty-fourth Street about 3[,] no note of discord was struck.

Police Inspector Morris, who, with upward of one hundred policemen, was in charge of the arrangement down to Forty-second Street, expressed his warm admiration for those in the silent lines.

“They have done everything just right,” he said to a reporter for The World. “They have been lovely.”

And it might be mentioned that this was the first time that the reporter, who has observed many parades in the past few years in New York, ever heard a police official use the adjective “lovely” to describe those whom it is his task to keep in order.

Of the many printed signs prepared by the marchers, Inspector Morris doubted the good taste of only one. It showed a colored mother crouching protectively over two cowering children with the caption, “East St. Louis.” And then it showed a photograph of President Wilson and his assertion that the world must be made safe for democracy.

“I asked them if they did not think it was in bad taste too,” the Inspector said. “And they agreed that it was and put it aside. They made every effort to have this parade exactly what it was planned to be.”

The only sound as the marchers passed down the avenue was the slow tum, tum, tum-tum-tum. And except for little cries of sympathy and admiration from women when they saw a tiny, bright-eyed, kinky-haired baby peeping solemnly over the moist neck of its marching mother, the silence of the parade spread to and enveloped the watchers on the sidewalk too.

There must have been as many colored men and women and babies on the sidewalk as there were in the parade. Probably there were more. And they too showed the same restraint and sense of decorum that governed the marchers.

The parade was led by a drum corps of boys in khaki. Then there were fourteen lines of young girls. After them were six rows of boys, eight-five rows of women, many of them mothers with babies in their arms, and fifty-five lines of men. The lines appeared to average twenty persons.

In the line of march were doctors, lawyers, ministers, school teachers and trained nurses. Many veterans of the Spanish-American War were there too. The Grand Marshal, Capt. Hubert Jackson, served in Cuba and the Philippines as Captain of Company L of the Sixth Massachusetts. Clifton G. A. French, a lawyer, was in the Twenty-third Kansas. He explained the purpose of the parade this way:

“We love our Government. And we want our Government to love us too.”

The banners carried aloft bore the following inscriptions:

“Thou shalt not kill.”

“Unto the least of these, my brethren.”

“Mother, do lynchers go to heaven?”

“Suffer little children and forbid them not.”

“Give me a chance to live.”

“Mr. President, why not make America safe for democracy.”

“The first blood for American independence was shed by a negro, Crispus Attucks.”1

“Put the spirit of Christ in the making and the execution of laws.”

“Your hands are full of blood.”

“We have 30,000 teachers.”

“Race prejudice is the offspring of ignorance and the mother of lynching.”

“Ten thousand of us fought in the Spanish-American War.”

“Three thousand negroes fought for American independence under George Washington.”

“No negro has ever betrayed his country or attempted to assassinate a President or any official of the Government.”

“Patriotism and loyalty presuppose protection and liberty.”

“America has lynched without trial 2,867 negroes in thirty-one years. Not a single murderer has suffered.”

“Memphis and Waco, centres of American culture?”

“Twenty thousand black men fought for your liberty in the Civil War.”

“The world owes no man a living, but every man an opportunity to earn a living.”

“Thirty-four negroes have received Carnegie hero medals.”

“Our music is the only American music.”

“A square deal for every man.”

And there was another one to the effect that if there is any fault to be found with color, either white people or God is responsible.

Ralph Ginzburg, 100 Years of Lynchings (Baltimore: Black Classic Press, 1988), 104–106.

READING AND DISCUSSION QUESTIONS