THE COLOURED RACE IN AMERICA.

[Issued by the Howard Association, London, 1899.]

The noble spirit of sympathy with the victims of Spanish tyranny in Cuba and the Philippines, which has lately been manifested by the great nation of the UNITED STATES, has successfully removed an incubus which had long weighed terribly on those splendid islands. May it now be hoped that a similarly humane feeling will as determinedly grapple with a still more extensive form of oppression in the Southern portions of the United States themselves?

During the past year, the Howard Association has, on various occasions, received from those Southern States very grievous accounts of cruelties inflicted both upon prisoners and others of the coloured race, and, in particular, in the convict camps and chain-gangs, where a shocking condition of affairs exists.

THE CONVICT-CAMPS AND CHAIN-GANGS.

There are comparatively very few prison buildings in the South. Offenders are chiefly leased out, for open-air work, to contractors, or bidders, who pay for their labour, so much a head, to the State or county, and then become absolute masters of such prisoners; so that the taxpayer is entirely relieved from the burden of criminals, who actually become a source of large revenue to the State and to individuals. This may, at first sight, seem to be a great advance upon the general systems of the North and of Europe, which are so costly to the community. But in reality the lease-system produces the most terrible sufferings and fatalities to many thousands annually.

A REVIVAL OF SLAVERY.

It is PRACTICALLY, A REVIVAL OF SLAVERY, and on a very extensive scale. In FLORIDA, public sales of convicts (most of whom are negroes) occasionally take place, when they are sold by auction to the highest bidder, for various periods, up to four years. Usually the sentences in the South (on coloured people), even for minor offences, such as stealing eggs, are for very long periods.

There are several classes of leased convicts. Firstly, those under the immediate supervision of the State, in camps, or farms, corresponding somewhat to British convict establishments. These, though open to grave objection, are comparatively free from the grossest evils, and have, of late years, undergone considerable improvement in several of the States. Secondly, there are the County camps, which are worse. And, lastly, and worst of all, there are the numerous gangs farmed out to private sub-contractors, or bidders, who, in many cases, "sweat" their victims to death by excessive labour, wretched food, brutal violence, and the grossest neglect of sanitary requirements. And, of course, religious and moral obligations are utterly ignored in most instances.

In the best prisons of the Northern States, as in New York (at Elmira), Massachusetts (at Concord Junction and Sherborne), Illinois (at Joliet and Pontiac), Ohio (at Columbus), Minnesota (at Stillwater), and in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Rhode Island and other States, the reformation of the prisoner is, at least, earnestly attempted, and often successfully achieved. But in the Southern camps and chain-gangs it is the very reverse.

"INFERNOS."

The "captains" employed by the sub-contractors are often of the class depicted in "Legree," in "Uncle Tom's Cabin." Their conduct to the female convicts is indescribable. A large number of illegitimate births take place in these camps. The wretched children born in them are, in some instances, permanently retained as slaves. And the breeding of such has become an avowed purpose, at least in one State. Woe to the women and girls who are sent to such camps! Their life is, and must be, an inferno. Men and women frequently run and are then chased with bloodhounds and guns; those killed being sometimes registered as "escaped."

The coloured population furnishes about nine-tenths of the Southern convicts; and it is reliably stated that a considerable portion of them are either quite innocent, or are punished by long sentences for the most trifling offences, and, frequently, on merely trumped-up charges. It is the interest of the local officials and contractors that the number of convicts should be as large as possible, and their detention as prolonged as it can be made.

CHILDREN IN THE CHAIN-GANGS.

A very sad feature in these chain-gangs is the number of young children sent to them. A leading philanthropist of Baltimore, Mr. G. S. Griffith, President of the Maryland Society for the Protection of Children, was pained to find in the gangs so many children from nine years of age and upwards! In one of the better class of chain-gangs, in NORTH CAROLINA, he found 55 prisoners, including three women, and one boy of eleven years of age. And he says:--"These men, women and boys, all sleep under a tent 70 by 24 feet." This promiscuous and most demoralising association of the various ages and sexes, by day and night, is the usual feature of the private camps, and, sometimes, even of the State establishments.

Judge Chandler, of Georgia, says:-- "My experience is that when a boy is sent to the chain-gangs, he is ruined." JUDGE BERRY, of Atlanta, says:-"I have seen too many cases where boys have been ruined by being sent to the chain-gangs." Then what must they be for girls?

BRUTAL "CAPTAINS."Fearful brutalities are perpetrated by the "captains" in the lonely, remote places where many of the gangs are located, as in forests and mines. Sometimes convicts have been flayed alive! On one prisoner's corpse forty injuries were found. He had been literally beaten to pieces. Another had been disgustingly dismembered by kicks, and there was a great hole gaping in his side. A young white girl of seventeen years, after being repeatedly outraged by the officers of a camp, fled to the woods. She was overtaken by bloodhounds, her clothes stripped off, and she was then flogged in the presence of jeering men. Another poor girl, similarly treated, gave birth to a child, but both mother and offspring were speedily relieved by death. Women and girls are habitually subjected to the grossest indecencies and exposures. In one camp was found a woman who had had seven children whilst there, and another had had six there. And such cases are legion!

Christian America sends hundreds of missionaries to Asia and Africa. But is there not here a vast mission-field for effort and influence?

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A LITTLE RECENT IMPROVEMENT IN SOME STATES.

The States of Mississippi, Arkansas, and the Carolinas all need great reforms in this matter; but especially FLORIDA and GEORGIA. Their forest turpentine works and their phosphate mines are often awful spots, morally and physically. Louisiana is making some special efforts at improvement. Alabama and Texas are perhaps better than formerly. Yet a prison-chaplain in Texas writes to the Howard Association (1898):--"Practically there has been no advance in the lease-system of our convicts. It can only be an evil."

GENERAL OPPRESSION OF THE COLOURED RACE.

The Howard Association has also received, in connection with these sad accounts of Southern camps and chain gangs, much information showing that they form but one portion of a still vaster system of oppression of the coloured race generally in the Southern States. The Voice of Missions (Atlanta, December, 1898) contains a long and terrible indictment of the white race for the treatment of the coloured people since 1865.

It says: "The Cuban War and its results and the Armenian massacres are nothing when compared with the thirty years of `whitecapping,' chasing by bloodhounds, murdering, burning at the stake, lynching, flaying, swindling, robbing, defamation of character, injustice, false imprisonment, and oppression, which the coloured people of America have passed through, and are still undergoing." "This year 300 have been lynched and murdered by our white Christian friends and no voice but our own weak cry has been raised in protest." Many negroes were shot by the white Democrats in North and South Carolina during the November elections of 1898. Recently, also, many unoffending coloured people have been driven away from their homes and farms in the South by violent and covetous neighbours.

The same journal complains of the silence of the pulpit, both North and South, respecting these evils, and remarks that even the U.S. SUPREME COURT at Washington has always turned the scale against the coloured race. Also, that several of the Southern States have disfranchised the negroes by wholesale, in violation of the Federal Constitution, whilst returning them all as voters for the purposes of their own proportionate representation in Congress. It is known that some prominent politicians and legislators at Washington have made large fortunes as convict contractors.

THE LYNCHINGS.In the Richmond Planet (July 23, 1898), a Bishop is quoted as saying: "Enough coloured men have been lynched to death to reach a mile high, if laid one upon another--and nearly as many more women and children to make a similar pile."

These lynchings are defended by many persons on the ground of their necessity for protecting white women from negro assaults. No doubts, occasional crimes of this kind have been committed by them, but they have been immensely outnumbered by similar outrages by whites upon the females of the weaker race.

The coloured people have need to clear themselves from complicity with such crime, and also to cultivate more honesty and truthfulness. Nor can they expect to be much respected until they manifest more self-respect, and become less characterised as a people, by their everlasting grin and giggle. Lord Chesterfield said:--"I never knew a `Merry-Andrew' a respected man." But the 00044coloured people are too often such fools, and until, as a race, they manage to make themselves both respected and feared, they are not likely to get the justice which is due to them. Buffoons will be despised.

CONVICT MORTALITY.

Even the aggregate of the lynchings is very small in comparison with the enormous mortality of the convicts in the camps and chain-gangs. Whereas in English convict prisons the death-rate is under 7 per 1,000 per annum, it ranges in these camps from 75 to 200 per 1,000 yearly.

WHO WILL HELP?

The Voice of Missions mournfully remarks:--"There are no advocates of human rights in the United States to-day. Charles Sumner is dead, Abraham Lincoln is gone, Wendel Phillips, Wm. Lloyd Garrison, Frederick Douglas and Harriet Beecher Stowe have all passed away; and with them went the last great advocates of human rights." This complaint is, however, too pessimistic.

Yet even the Society of Friends (Quakers) in America, once the foremost champions of the Negro, through their J. G. Whittier, Thomas Garrett, Isaac B. Hopper, Levi Coffin, Francis T. King, and other good men, have, of late years, become strangely silent and apparently apathetic, as to the oppressed race.

SELF-HELP.

However, a people of twelve millions ought no longer to be mainly dependent upon, or looking to, others for their own protection. They must now chiefly turn to schemes of self-help--or remain oppressed.

THE PROBLEM.

An American correspondent of the Howard Association writes (1899) :--"The negro trouble has become so great that, I fear, the difficulty can never be settled but with blood."

The problem is indeed a vast one, and of pressing import to the United States, both North and South. Is the Christianity of that great nation to remain impotent for the solution? Are the coloured people to be driven to what now appears to be their only means of relief--by self-help, through imitating the methods of their adversaries--in the formation of Secret Societies and powerful and compact, Organised Unions, for defence and offence? Is it only thus, that they can make themselves what they must be, somehow--respected and feared as a race? But what else are they to do, unless the white race bestirs itself for other efforts than continuing oppression ?

TWELVE MILLION COLOURED PEOPLE IN U.S.A.

There are now nearly twelve million coloured people in the United States. They are increasing in numbers, in intelligence, and in wealth. It is stated that more than half of them can read, and that their property is worth 80 million pounds, or 400 million dollars. The idea of emigrating such a multitude is utterly visionary. They must be dealt with in America itself. Nor is foreign interposition for a moment to be thought of. Such a multitude are not likely to put up with their oppression indefinitely. Nor ought they to.

Must it be left again to the compulsion of national disaster to solve this great race problem, and so to bring about results which may far better and far more effectually be secured by voluntary humanity and peaceful wisdom ?

WERTHEIMER, LEA & Co. Printers Circus Place, London Wall, E.C.