The Taint of the Negro.

 THE NIGHTMARE OF AMERICA.

Mr. O. Roberts, the author of "Scissors" and other popular novels, has been visiting America and records his impressions in a series of vivid articles in "The Sphere." We quote his views on the negro menace:—

We English have a sentimental affection for the negro which the American finds hard to understand. To him, any man with a black skin is a fellow to be severely kept in his place. This feeling is so intense that I have heard an American, whose aversion from dark skins was not controlled by his ignorance of geography, explode on the steps of a Piccadilly club when he saw an English lady enter accompanied by a well-known Indian rajah. It took a long time to impress him with the fact that there is colour and colour. For the taint of the negro is the American's nightmare. When a wealthy young bounder of New York wished to escape the result of his amorous folly, he had only to accuse his wife of possessing negro blood for the whole of society to stand behind him in his divorce proceedings.

 THE MIXING OF WHITE AND BLACK

New York, of course, shocks the rest of America with the "freedom" it allows the negro. The extent to which they "mix" with the whites fills the southerner with rage. How far the mixing really takes place is easily seen by anyone who drives through the million population of Harlem, New York's negro section. Here and there a negro has emerged from the rut of janitors, porters, elevator and pullman car boys. You will certainly see them driving their limousines, crammed with piccaninnies; but black is black and white is white and never the twain shall breed.

America has every cause for her fear. The negro is over-running the continent as the rabbit is over-running the Australasian. They are an oppressed race, in parts heavily oppressed, with no political rights, despite the magnificent "Declaration" that hangs up in every railway station and begins with those two bold lines to the effect that "Every man is born free and equal." Marcus Garvey, an adventurous negro who collected the dollars of his too-credulous people, has languished in gaol since his famous Black Star Line (which was to transport his fold back to Africa and Liberty) when its one ship sank, was shown to carry little save a cargo of whisky and rum. Booker T. Washington established the right of the negro to some kind of education, and there his work stopped. To-day a very able negro novelist and professor, Dr. W. E. B. Du Bois, who bitterly exclaims that he has "a flood of negro blood, a strain of French, a bit of Dutch, but, thank God, no Anglo-Saxon!" is head of a militant party that is determined to win absolute equality before the law.

AN UNHAPPY PEOPLE

The stranger in the land cannot suppress a feeling of sympathy and sorrow towards those unhappy people. They are in a land where they never sought to be, and their problem is one which no justice can really settle. Their liberty constitutes a menace to the white population, their oppression is a stigma upon white justice. In the South they have neither political nor social rights. Their place is in the back seats, under the threats of lynching, burning, flogging. More than a million of them live in hovels without sinks, closets, taps, or gardens, and they are ever at the mercy of the Klu Klux Klan, a body with as low a mentality and as high a moral irresponsibility.

When, in the spot light of an English music hall they sing those strangely harmonised love-songs, supposedly from the plantations, but mostly from the bureaux of New York Jewish composers, we find them a picturesque, happy race. They are happy, they can be picturesque, but their songs had but two sources, their utter misery and their spiritual frenzy. In the negro this latter is a form of intoxication, not holiness. Their beliefs, like their loves, are very promiscuous. We are apt to mix the negro metaphors. When a darky sings charmingly about his longing to see his "coal-black mammy," it is not his mother he indicates, but his sweetheart.

I saw five hundred coal-black mammies pressed to the amorous breasts of five hundred immaculately dressed young negroes, all swaying in a New York underground hall in the weird jungle-rhythm of a negro orchestra, whose pianissimo passages were obtained by placing their bowler hats over the ends of their trombones. In this Harlem "Paradise," as it is euphuistically termed, the dancing took place in a kind of cattle pen, where horizontal movement was rendered impossible owing to density. Even the waiters swayed to rhythm as they carried their trays. Slim girls, lost in a sensuous ecstasy, clung to their lovers.

The shine on the heads of the negro youths was no casual one. Nearby sat a negress whose discovery of Kink-Out, a grease that, liberally applied, softens the tell-tale kink, enabled her to support a Rolls Royce car. They were treading their way back to the jungle in this midnight basement dance-hall of Harlem. You could see they were happy again, with the same kind of happiness, half-animal, half-dream, that I had seen in their eyes in strange religious gatherings.


Muswellbrook Chronicle (NSW : 1898 - 1955), Tuesday 10 January 1928, page 3