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1 Fifty years ago, Ray Sprigle of the Post-Gazette posed as a black man to experience firsthand what life was like for 10 million people living under the system of legal segregation known as Jim Crow. As he wrote in his 21-part series, "I Was a Negro in the South for 30 Days": "I quit being white, and free, and an American citizen when I climbed aboard that Jim Crow coach. . . . From then on, until I came up out of the South four weeks later, I was black, and in bondage — not quite slavery but not quite freedom, either.’’ To mark the 50th anniversary of Sprigle's work, which was first published in the PostGazette beginning Aug. 9, 1948, the Post-Gazette republished selected chapters from his accounts. Post-gazette.com has compiled the entire 21-part series for publication, including an introduction by Post-Gazette staff writer Bill Steigerwald that looks at Sprigle's unusual reporting career.. The language and editing remain the same as when the stories first appeared. Ray Sprigle in the newsroom. Sprigle's secret journey By Bill Steigerwald, Post-Gazette Staff Writer CHICKAMAUGA, Ga. -- No one in the small country church 50 years ago had any reason to suspect that their visitor was not who he said he was. It was true that James R. Crawford - the light-skinned Negro man from Pittsburgh - was a complete stranger. And a Northerner. 2 But Crawford had come to their black fraternal group's district meeting and picnic with C.D. Haslerig, who was a prosperous dairy farmer and one of the leading black citizens in the rural northern Georgia cotton mill town. What's more, he was staying the weekend at Brother Haslerig's home. And he was traveling with none other than John Wesley Dobbs, the Grand Master of the state's black Masonic lodges and the most important Negro civic and political leader in Atlanta, maybe in all of Georgia. Yet Crawford - who stood up in front of them and politely declined a request to tell them about the status of the Willie Haslerig, 76, knew Ray Sprigle Negro back in Pittsburgh - was a total impostor. as James Crawford when he drove "Crawford" around Chickamauga, Ga., 50 years ago. He was 26 when Sprigle spent the weekend at the home of his father, C.D. Haslerig. One of Sprigle's stops was the A.M.E. Zion Church, behind Haslerig. (Photo by Bill Steigerwald/Post-Gazette) The unassuming, friendly bald gent with the glasses and checkered cap - conspicuous only for his curiosity and lusty appetite for fried chicken - was not really a fellow Mason learning organizing tips from Grand Master Dobbs. He was really a nationally famous journalist. And though none of the 150 black men and women gathered in the old Midway A.M.E. Zion Church that pleasant Sunday afternoon in 1948 knew it, "Brother Crawford" was not really a Negro at all. He was a white man masquerading as one. As only J.W. Dobbs knew, "Brother Crawford" was actually the famed Pittsburgh Post-Gazette newspaper reporter Ray Sprigle, a full-blooded Pennsylvania Dutchman who had disguised himself as a black man as part of a secret, ambitious - and dangerous - journalistic adventure. Sprigle had decided he wanted to see for himself how the South's 10 million mostly poor, mostly uneducated black people endured the petty humiliations and legal oppressions of Jim Crow, a system of enforced racial segregation that the then-quickening civil rights movement would spend the next 20 years working to destroy. Though he was a lifelong friend of the underdog, Sprigle was no softhearted liberal. He was no moralist, no precocious civil rights crusader, no longtime champion of the cause of the Negro, North or South. He was a staunch conservative Republican who hated FDR and the New Deal. All he had wanted his Southern investigation to do, he said later, was to see "that justice was done to a group that is grossly oppressed." 3 As a newspaper man, Sprigle ranked among the country's elite. A front-page star at the Post-Gazette since the late 1920s, he had won a Pulitzer Prize and national acclaim in 1938 for uncovering proof that Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black was a member of the Ku Klux Klan. A lively, excellent and prolific writer, he was known as a great investigative reporter who mixed facts and his own strong opinions. A colorful character whose everyday trademarks were a Stetson hat and a corn cob pipe, he loved doing crime stories and exposes and was always in search of his next big story - whether it was in Pittsburgh's criminal underworld or in pre-World War II Europe. He had donned disguises and used the pseudonym James Crawford many times before to write first-hand accounts of conditions in state mental hospitals and coal mines and to investigate illegal gambling operations. His expose of Pittsburgh's thriving black Ray Sprigle as he looked market in meat during World War II, for which he posed as a for investigative stories on butcher and bought and sold meat for a month, won him another Mayview State Hospital. national prize, the 1945 Headline Club award. In May 1948, with the blessing and personal help of the national executive secretary of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, Sprigle was a week into his greatest - and final - undercover mission. To darken his skin, he had tried various chemicals and things like walnut juice. All were unsuccessful. So, after drawing up a fresh will and kissing his wife Agnes and 12-year-old daughter Rae Jean goodbye, he went to Florida, where he shaved his head and mustache and spent three weeks acquiring a deep tan that would allow him to pass for a light-skinned Negro. Sprigle was 61, five years younger than J.W. Dobbs, his trusted, Shakespeare-quoting guide, protector and "cover." Dobbs, the son of a freed slave, was known as the honorary mayor of black Atlanta and in 1948 was near the peak of his political and civic power. Dobbs lived near Auburn Avenue, Atlanta's black main street, a few blocks from a preacher's teen-age son named Martin Luther King Jr., who used to play Monopoly on Dobbs' kitchen floor with two of his six daughters. Dobbs had no sons. But his first grandson, Maynard Jackson Jr., would become the city's first elected black mayor in 1973. 4 For 30 days and nearly 4,000 miles, the unlikely pair of senior citizens traveled the South's primitive back roads to places like Dalton and Americus, Ga., in Dobbs'1947 Mercury. From the Mississippi Delta to Georgia's white-only Atlantic beaches, Sprigle "ate, slept, traveled and lived Black." His true race was detected only twice. He dined with dirt-poor sharecroppers and middle-class black farmers and dentists, and with principals of ramshackle black schools and the families of lynching victims. Ray Sprigle as he investigated the conditions imposed on miners. The Post-Gazette presented Sprigle's findings in a heavily promoted series of Page 1 articles that began on Aug. 9, 1948, as Jackie Robinson was in his second year of breaking baseball's color barrier. A month before, Sen. Strom Thurmond and his fellow Dixiecrats bolted from the Democratic National Convention in protest of their party's newly hewn pro-civil rights plank. Titled "I Was a Negro in the South for 30 Days" and running for 21 days, the series provided a detailed, impassioned and frequently bitter inside look at a parallel black universe most white Americans knew virtually nothing about. Eleven years before John Howard Griffin wrote "Black Like Me," the best-selling book describing his experiences as a white Texan pretending to be an itinerant black man in the South, Sprigle reported what it felt like to use the "For Colored" entrances at railroad stations, to ride in Jim Crow taxis, to sit in Jim Crow parks. Sprigle also described what it felt like to know that your "rights of citizenship ran only as far as the nearest white man said they did." Sprigle's series was syndicated to about 15 other newspapers, including the New York Herald Tribune, Philadelphia Inquirer and the mighty Pittsburgh Courier, which in those days enjoyed wide readership among black people throughout the Deep South. It appeared in no white paper south of the Mason-Dixon Line. Yet the South's fierce reaction to Sprigle's vivid dispatches and his undisguised moral outrage at "the iniquitous Jim Crow system" would ignite one of the country's first national media debates about racial segregation in the South. "That's him," Willie Haslerig said confidently three weeks ago, standing in the living room of the farmhouse near Chickamauga that Ray Sprigle slept in half a century ago. The 76-year-old retired dairy man was looking for the first time at a 50-year-old Time magazine photo of the stocky, bald "black" man he had known as James Crawford. Haslerig remembers him well. He was 26 when Sprigle spent the weekend at his father's 65-acre farm, where he and his wife, Dorothy, were living at the time. He gave the undercover reporter 5 the grand tour of his relatively progressive corner of northern Georgia, where black people were segregated and subjected to the rules of Jim Crow but could vote and did not suffer serious injustices and intimidations so common in counties in southern Georgia. Haslerig, who is a distant relative of ex-Steeler Carlton Haslerig, drove Sprigle around the farms and cotton fields. He also dropped him off in town, where for several hours Sprigle strolled Chickamauga's sidewalks, talked to the local folk, visited the segregated train station and continued, without detection, to play the part of a visiting Northern Negro. Dorothy Haslerig recognized "Crawford's" picture, too. She said Sprigle and Dobbs slept in the front guest bedroom - in the same double bed. Sprigle was active, well-mannered, quiet. He did a lot of writing in a swing on the front porch. "He didn't really look white," she said. "He did a really good job of disguising himself." The Haslerigs, who never saw Sprigle's newspaper series in 1948 or the articles describing it in Time or Newsweek, discovered their gentlemanly visitor's true identity only when Dobbs told them several months later. But even if they had known Sprigle was a white journalist when he visited, it wouldn't have mattered, Dorothy said. "If he was with Mr. Dobbs, he was all right." Dorothy's attitude illustrates why NAACP executive secretary Walter White had recruited Dobbs to help Sprigle. Dobbs, a pioneering civil rights activist who had been doggedly encouraging black Americans to register and vote for years, was quick to accept the proposition. Like his friend White, Dobbs foresaw important PR benefits from a project like Sprigle's. Dobbs assured White he would protect Sprigle, as long as he was "willing to endure the hardship of accommodations that we will face in cheap hotels and private boarding houses." Dobbs, whose mother's father was a white man, said he could easily pass Sprigle off as a distant relative or friend. His only concern was that "this matter must be kept a profound secret until over." He needn't have worried. His role as Sprigle's guide was never revealed in the Post-Gazette or any other publication. It was first reported in 1973 in a doctoral dissertation by Carnegie Mellon University history student Alan Guy Sheffer, who is now a teacher at North Allegheny High School. Dobbs' help was priceless to Sprigle. He inserted him into a world no white reporter could otherwise hope to see in 1948. In addition to putting him in touch with local black leaders like his good friend C.D. Haslerig, Dobbs introduce d Sprigle to the poor, and far more typical, black residents of the South, like John Henry and Hannah Ingram. The Ingrams were living deep in the cotton and peach country of Macon County, about 100 miles south of Atlanta, when the old duo turned off Route 49 and stopped at their homestead. Former sharecroppers, the Ingrams and a couple of hundred of her indigent black people had been given a chance by a federal farm project to move out of their two-room shacks and buy their own homes and land at subsidized rates. 6 Much has changed on the Ingrams' old street since Sprigle and Dobbs dropped by. The road is still stuck all alone in the middle of hundreds of acres of cotton and soybeans. But today, Post Office Route 2 consists of a dozen tidy brick and mobile homes. The few original homesteads have been remodeled - and given indoor plumbing, a feature that only white-occupied government houses got when they were built in 1940. The Flint River Farms School at the corner of Route 49, still new when Sprigle talked to its young principal, John Robinson, in 1948, is long gone. So too is most of the Ingrams' old place across the street. The two-bedroom house, like e most of the road's 20 or so other original government-issue homesteads, has been lifted from its foundation and moved to a lot in the nearby town of Montezuma. Only a few small piles of red brick, some rotting lumber and a rusting old water pump mark the spot where Sprigle and Dobbs stopped by for a drink of well water and a bite of corn pone half a century ago. The heated rhetoric in Sprigle's syndicated 21-part series would be inflammatory even today. Needless to say, in 1948, as the drive for racial equality in America was starting to become a burning political and social issue, it create d quite a stir. The series brought Sprigle hundreds of letters (70 percent of them critical) and quickly got the attention of the Southern press. Sprigle's leading press opponent was Hodding Carter Sr., the editor of the Democrat Delta-Times in Greenville, Miss. His six-part reply, "The Other Side of Jim Crow," which immediately followed Sprigle's series in the Post-Gazette and elsewhere, ran in many Southern papers that never carried a word of "I Was a Negro in the South for 30 Days." Carter had won a Pulitzer Prize himself for editorial writing in 1946 and on the matter of race was considered a Southern liberal. Yet he believed "it will be tragic for the South, the Negro and the nation itself if the Government should enact and attempt any laws or Supreme Court decisions that would open the South's public schools and public gathering places to the Negro." Carter, the father of PBS journalist Hodding Carter III, was on firmer ground when critiquing Sprigle's deliberate lack of objectivity. Among dozens of other complaints, he accused Sprigle of painting an unfair, overly bleak and distorted picture of the South and of ignoring the many recent improvements in the political, economic and legal lives of black Americans. He essentially charged Sprigle with committing a crude hatchet job on the South and its culture while conveniently ignoring the North's racial problems. On Nov. 9, 1948, Sprigle and Carter met face-to-face as part of a debate on "What Should We Do About Race Segregation?" on ABC's national TV and radio discussion show "America's Town Meeting of the Air." A transcript of the debate shows that Sprigle was a spirited speaker as well. 7 He refused to accept the quaint idea that segregation was merely a way to physically separate the races in public spaces. He indicted segregation as "the whole vicious and evil fabric of discrimination, oppression, cruelty, exploitation, denial of simple justice, denial of rights to full citizenship and the right to an education, which the white South imposes upon the Negro." Sprigle rejiggered and recycled his 21-part newspaper series to produce a 1949 book for Simon and Schuster called "In the Land of Jim Crow," which didn't sell well. And though the PostGazette campaigned hard on it s behalf, the series did not win Sprigle a second Pulitzer, which many thought he deserved. Sprigle, who began his newspaper career in 1912, wrote hundreds more stories and columns for the Post-Gazette until 1957, when he died in Pittsburgh as a result of injuries suffered when his taxi was hit by a car. His old friend J.W. Dobbs died in 1961, on the day Atlanta's public schools were integrated. While Sprigle's life and deeds are immortalized in millions of his own words, Dobbs' have been immortalized on the downtown streets of Atlanta. Today there is a J.W. Dobbs Avenue and Dobbs Plaza, an urban parklet on Auburn Avenue centered around a huge black brass sculpture of Dobbs' head. Dobbs is also a major figure in "Where Peachtree Meets Sweet Auburn," a book about the making of modern Atlanta by Gary Pomerantz of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. It's a heavily researched biography of the city , told through the histories of its two most illustrious white and black families. It tells Dobbs' remarkable life story in rich detail. But it makes no mention of the secret mission he shared with Sprigle 50 springtimes ago. Chapter 1 'I Traveled, Ate, Black' By Ray Sprigle For four endless, crawling weeks I was a Negro in the Deep South. I ate, slept, traveled, lived Black. I lodged in Negro households. I ate in Negro restaurants. I slept in Negro hotels and lodging houses. I crept through the back and side doors of railroad stations. I traveled Jim Crow in buses and trains and street cars and taxicabs. Along with 10,000,000 Negroes I endured the discrimination and oppression and cruelty of the iniquitous Jim Crow system. It was a strange, new-and for me, uncharted world that I entered when, in a Jim Crow railroad coach, we rumbled across the Potomac out of Washington. It was a world of which I had no remote conception, despite scores of trips through the South. The world I had known in the South was white. Now I was black and the world I was to know was as bewildering as if I had been dropped down on the moon. 8 The towers and turrets of the great cities of the Southland, painted against the falling night, as we rolled along the highways, represented a civilization and an economy completely alien to me and the rest of the black millions in the South. Questioned Only Twice Only twice in my month-long sojourn was my status as a black man even remotely questioned. A Negro doctor in Atlanta, to whom I was introduced and with whom I talked briefly, later turned to my Negro companion, who was leading me along the unfamiliar paths of the world of color, and demanded: "What are you carrying that white man around with you for?" To which my friend replied: "He says he’s a Negro and that’s enough for me. Have you found any way of telling who carries Negro blood and who doesn’t?" And if the doctor wasn’t convinced, he was at least silenced. Another time my membership in the black race was doubted was my own fault. I broke my resolution to keep my mouth shut. For a couple of days I was alone in Atlanta, living in the Negro YMCA and eating in a small but excellent restaurant. Mrs. Hawk, the proprietress, tangled me in conversation one day-never a difficult task for anyone. So, I talked too much, too fast and too expansively. A couple of days later she met my friend and remarked: "That friend of yours — he talks too much to be a Negro. I think he’s white." Detected No Suspicion But in literally thousands of contacts with Negroes, from nationally known leaders of the race to sharecroppers in the Cotton rows I was accepted as a Negro. I sat for long hours in Negro groups where we discussed everything from Shakespeare to atomic energy and the price of cotton. Neither I nor my companion ever detected any reserve or suspicion that I wasn’t just what I pretended to be, a light-skinned Negro from Pittsburgh, down South on a visit. I attended half a dozen Negro meetings, from YMCA banquets to political conferences and church gatherings — and was even called upon to speak. My Contacts with whites were few indeed but here, too, I went unsuspected and unquestioned. Southern whites have long taken the position that when a man says he’s black, so far as they are concerned, he is. So the white folks never lifted an eyebrow when I sat in the Jim Crow sections of trains, buses and street cars, drank from the "For Colored" fountains in courthouse and railroad station, ate in Negro restaurants, sat in the ’For Colored" sections of rail and bus stations. Rarely is a light or white Negro questioned in the South when he seeks Jim Crow accommodations. Now and then a conductor or policeman will remind a passenger, apparently white, in a Jim Crow coach, or a light-skinned Negro entering a "For Colored" restaurant — "That’s for Negroes, you know." But the usual response of "I’m where I belong" ends the matter right there. 9 He Took Guide Of course I realize that if I had tried to make my way through the black South on my own, alone, I would have met with suspicion and rebuff on every hand from blacks and whites alike. Fortunately, though, I didn’t have to go alone into the black world of the South. Walter White, executive director of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, took care of that. Out of his vast store of friendships of Negroes, North and South, he chose a man to lead me through the warrens of the black South. And if there is any commendation due anyone for these chronicles, surely the lion’s share must go to that companion of mine. I doubt if there is a man living who knows the South, black and white, as he does. We ate, slept, lived, and traveled for four weeks. If I learned anything about the life of the Negro, it is because he took me to the places, the men and the women from whom I might learn. Roll Along Through Night We’d roll along through the night, our destination the Negro section of a town perhaps 200 miles away and for hours I’d listen while he recited long passages from Macbeth and Hamlet, Ingersoll’s essay on Napoleon — page after page from the best in English literature. All his life he has fought against the oppression, the injustice and the discrimination weighing on his people. But there is no bitterness, no hatred in the man. To him, his "Southland," as he always calls it, is the fairest country in the land. He loves his Georgia above all other states — he would live nowhere else in America. In four weeks and 4,000 miles of travel we met and talked with the Negro leaders of the South. If in four weeks anyone can get the actual picture of the life of the Negro in the South — then I got it. Because that friend of Walter White showed it to me. One last word as l begin this account of my four weeks of life as a Negro in the deep South. Don’t anybody try to tell me that the North discriminates against the Negro, too, and seek to use that as a defense against the savage oppression and the brutal intolerance the black man encounters in the South. Discrimination against the Negro in the North is an annoyance and an injustice. In the South it is bloodstained tragedy. In the North the Negro meets with rebuff and insult when he seeks service at hotels and restaurants. But, at least in states like Pennsylvania and others, he can take his case to court and he invariably wins. But in the South he is barred BY LAW from white hotels and restaurants. He is fined and jailed, and frequently killed, if he seeks to enter a railroad station through an entrance reserved for whites, to ride in the forward end of a street car or bus, or a railway coach sacred to the white man. His children are barred from white schools and denied an adequate education in the tumbledown shacks in which little black citizens are forced to seek learning. 10 No Northern white can deny that there is discrimination against the Negro in the North. Prejudice against the black citizen breaks out in race riots from time to time, as witness Detroit in recent years, and Chicago and Springfield, Ill., in an earlier day. But in the North, both black and white rioters go to prison. In the South only the black ones climb the steps to a gallows or serve term in a cell. In short, discrimination against the Negro in the North is usually in defiance of the law. In the South it is enforced and maintained by the law. Chapter 2 Acquiring a Negro Appearance By Ray Sprigle This thing of suddenly switching races after more than half a century of life as a white man has its problems and difficulties. Remember all those romances you’ve read in which the hero is going to turn Hindu, or Arab or one or the other of the darker races. Remember how almost invariably he goes to "an old woman" in tile nearby village and she gives him a lotion that turns him dark for weeks or months. Well, my trouble, I guess, was that I couldn’t seem to find one of those old women. And in more than six months of searching I couldn’t find any lotion or liquid that would turn a white hide brown or black and still be impervious to perspiration, soap and water and the ravages of ordinary wear and tear. Wait a bit though. Let me modify that last statement. Both Mellon Institute in Pittsburgh and a Long Island chemist I consulted did come up with a permanent stain. Both recommended any one of a series of phenol compounds. But they thought it only fair to warn me that there was one little drawback. It seems that if you covered yourself thoroughly with one of them you’d find yourself thoroughly dead in from 15 minutes to 15 days, depending upon your resistance. I thanked them kindly for their assistance. Tried Walnut Stain Naturally before I turned to chemists and make-up experts and the like I had recourse to that old reliable stain of boyhood memory, the juice of walnut hulls. Walnut juice will stain the human skin, I am able to report. I am also able to report that a day or two later it will neatly remove the human hide. Fortunately I took the precaution of applying it experimentally on a square foot or so of my chest. I was weeks in getting over that. I tried iodine, argyrol, pyrogallic acid, potassium permanganate. Come a little perspiration and I’d find myself striped like a tiger or spotted like a leopard. 11 Six months’ search and experiments and the expenditure of a couple square feet of skin (mine) and close to a hundred dollars and I was no nearer to getting away from the white race than I was the day I started. There was one thing left — sure fire — but with one big drawback, the time required. That was sunshine and not in homeopathic doses either. But Pennsylvania’s sunshine is sometimes a mighty uncertain commodity. Now down in Florida — there the sunbeams were something else again. So to Florida I went. I knew full well that one should be cautious in exposing tender human skin to the tropical sun. I knew that a half hour was the limit for a first day’s sun bath. So I lay out in the sun for an hour and a half. With the result that I spent that night standing up and rubbing soothing unguents into my flaming epidermis. Well, as a result of my researches I am also able to report that Florida sunshine will remove hide much more efficiently than will the juice of walnut hulls. I peeled like a snake from head to foot. But when I could no longer light a match by touching it to my incandescent skin, went back to the solarium to accumulate my disguise. At the start I had shaved head, practically down to the skull, had my glasses reset in enormous black rims, and acquired a cap that drooped like a tam-o-shanter. I was all set for "passing," in reverse. This business of "passing" is a mighty private concern and how is anyone to get statistics on it? But the fact remains that there are many thousands of Negroes in the South who could "pass" any day they wish. I talked to scores of them. Nearly every one had a sister or brother or some other relative who was living as a white man or woman in the North. Most Southern Negroes don’t approve of "passing" and when one of their number does it he cuts himself off from the black race. One of the most interesting families I encountered — I only encountered the black half of it — was that of a Southern planter in one of the Georgia counties. He had maintained his white wife in the pillared plantation home. He maintained his black mistress — this wasn’t in slavery days when it was common — in a quite comfortable home on the plantation. He produced a mulatto son and a white daughter. He must have been a reasonably fair-minded rascal at that because when he died he divided his plantation and his fortune equally between his black and white children. The son runs the plantation, turning over to his half-sister her share of the production of her half of the land. She is married and is a figure in Detroit white society — she IS white, of course. Several times her mulatto half brother has visited her and been entertained In her home. But when she comes South she has to stay at a hotel. No Disguise Needed So at last I scurried back north to Washington, met my companion who was to pilot me through four weeks of life as a Negro, and that night we were on our way south, just a couple of Negroes Jim Crowing it through the Southland. 12 As a matter of fact, most of my concern over acquiring a dark skin was so much nonsense. Everywhere I went in the South I encountered scores of Negroes as white as I ever was back home in Pittsburgh. Stories of 20,000 Negroes a year "passing" to the white race are a lot of hooey. Looks to me from where I sit, as just another light-skinned one of millions of other light-skinned Negroes, that the noble white man got hold of this racial purity thing a little late. Where does he think these millions of white, light, and brown Negroes came from? Think the stork found ’em somewhere? Chapter 3 Going South by Jim Crow Car By Ray Sprigle I quit being white, and free, and an American citizen when I climbed aboard that Jim Crow coach in Washington Union station. From then on, until I came up out of the South four weeks later, I was black, and in bondage not quite slavery but not quite freedom, either. My rights of citizenship ran only as far as the nearest white man said they did. Not that that Jim Crow coach was particularly bad-when regarded solely as a railroad coach. In fact, it was surprisingly good. The reclining seats were comfortable. The wash room was really luxurious compared with those in some of the coaches I ride around home. Seats were numbered and reserved. There was no crowding. But-even excellent accommodations are not going to reconcile intelligent, cultured Negroes to Jim Crow. My companion and I were having a little difficulty in finding the black section of the train. He encountered the daughter of an old friend of his, a handsomely-dressed, quite beautiful Negro girl, and asked where the Jim Crow coaches were. "There’s the things we’ll ride in," she said with a contemptuous wave toward the two pieces of Jim Crow rolling stock. It developed that she was a school teacher from Harlem on her way home to visit her aged mother. (Weeks later we passed through the sunbaked, dusty, sprawling little town where the mother lived. There was a vast difference between that unkempt town and the fashionable, cultured-appearing girl from Harlem with upswept hair-do and latest doo-dads in the way of costume.) Both coaches were filled. The crowd was like any other group of travelers one might encounter anywhere except, of course, that nearly everyone was on the decidedly brunette side. Everyone was courteous and quiet. Even the inevitable drunk who seems to be standard equipment on every railroad coach in the world was annoying only because he was so insistently polite. o, early in the journey, some of the many absurdities-idiocies might be a better word-that mark the Jim Crow system began to develop. To get to the diner we had to traverse half a dozen 13 Pullman coaches. My companion stopped to introduce me to at least three Negroes riding Pullman-a doctor from Atlanta, a minister and a businessman. And I was astonished to learn that Jim Crow doesn’t go on a Pullman. If you’ve got the price you ride Pullman, no matter how black you are. In the corridor of the dining car a long line of whites waited for vacant tables. My companion, leading the way, brushed unceremoniously past them. "Oh, oh, now comes trouble, so early," I said to myself. But it was just that he knew the ropes and I didn’t. There were no seats for white folks but at the end of the diner were two’ tables curtained off from the rest of the car, and vacant. They were for us colored folks. So we. sat down while the white folks stood. Just what protection that curtain affords the white folks I don’t think that any living human has ever figured out. We could watch them eat and they could watch us eat. There weren’t any curtains around the Negro waiters who served their food with black hands. I don’t know what kind of service the white folks got from those waiters. But ours was something right out of the old South. Our food arrived on the jump – promptly — and hot. Our waiter "sirred" us as I’ve never been "sirred" before. Across from us a family group took over the other table. He was a navy petty officer-spick and span-and black. His wife was pretty and fashionably dressed. Their baby had everything hung on him that the magazines say a well-dressed baby ought to have. And then there was the baby’s grandmother-also right out of the old South. She wore a turban just like the one in the pancake ads. I noticed that her hands were hard and knotted and gnarled. I was to see many hands like that on little old colored women in the weeks to come. They get that way from long hours on a hoe in the cotton fields. Becoming an Alien People On our way back to our Jim Crow seats we pressed carefully through the queue of whites waiting to enter the diner. Then we staggered through the swaying Pullmans past the white folks but careful not to jostle or bump any of them. Already I was in the pattern. Already I was experiencing the thing that was to grow upon me through the succeeding weeks. These whites already were a people entirely alien to me, a people set far apart from me and my world. The law of this new land I had entered decreed that I had to eat apart from these pa1e skinned men and women—behind that symbolical curtain. For 300 years these people had told each other, told the world, told me, that I was of an inferior breed, that if I tried to associate with them they would kill me. Already I had begun to dislike them. It did no good to tell myself that I was white — or that I would be white again four weeks hence. I was beginning to think like a black man. Not that I wanted to ride with these whites, nor eat with them. What I resented was their impudent assumption that I wanted to mingle with them, their arrogant and conceited pretense that no 14 matter how depraved and degenerate some of them might be, they, each and every one of them, was of a superior breed. A Psychological change In weeks to come I was to become seriously concerned about the psychological change that was taking place in my thinking. There were to be nights when I had sat for hours listening to grim tales of injustice, and cruelty and the wanton shedding of innocent blood, that I began to be worried over the problem of turning my mind white again. To tell the truth, I doubt if I ever regain the satisfied, superior white psychology that I took South with me. Came morning — and Atlanta. Now I had been briefed for days on my manners and behavior as a Negro. And I went wrong before I even got out of the Atlanta railroad station. I was ahead of my companion and mentor since I was traveling light and he was laden with more bags than an actor. Through the front portal of the station I could see the line of waiting cabs. Eager to be helpful I hustled ahead, intent on staking claim to a cab. "Wait a minute," I heard my friend call. "This way." I backtracked and he led me through a door branded "For Colored," to a small littered waiting room. Another door with the Jim Crow brand above it led outside. Here was no wide portico, no line of cabs. In fact, no cab. Not until you called one. I knew of course that white and Negro passengers must wait in separate waiting rooms in southern railroad stations. But I didn’t know until then that there were black and white entrances to stations. Just Police Inefficiency But my mistake gave my companion an idea. He led me around to the front of the station and we defiled the white folk’s entrance by going through it. Nothing happened. So we tried it again. Still nothing happened. "Well, why aren’t we in jail? Looks like the white folks are easing up," I said to my companion. He was actually disappointed. But his reaction was somewhat astonishing. "Just another example of police inefficiency," he asserted. "There usually is an officer on duty at that front entrance with the sole duty of shooing Negroes around to the side entrance." My friend was all set for minor adventure and then the Atlanta police force let him down. "Seriously though," he told me while we waited for our Jim Crow cab, ordinarily we’d have been stopped and told to go to the colored entrance. There’d have been no unpleasantness unless we had refused. They wouldn’t even have called us ’nigger’ as they would have a few years ago. But if you have any idea you can walk through the white folks’ entrance to a railroad station-you just try it at any station in the South outside Atlanta. And I’ll stand back and watch-and bail you out." 15 Politely I declined his challenge. That was the first, last and only time I disobeyed the white folks’ law during all my stay in the South. Finally our cab, with the "For Colored" legend that Georgia law requires on its door, arrives. Half an hour later we debark at the home of -my friend-the way I feel right now, my only friend in all the world-just off Auburn avenue, Atlanta’s Black Broadway. Well — I’d asked for it. Now I was due to get it. Chapter 4 A Discussion in a Pleasant Negro Home By Ray Sprigle We’re at breakfast in this pleasant, comfortable, Negro home. One of the daughters is home on a visit from Tennessee where she and her husband are university instructors. The conversation drifts, as it inevitably will wherever and whenever Negroes gather, to the all-overshadowing race problem. Her 5-year-old son is at the table too. Whenever she uses the word "white," she spells it out w-h-i-t-e. She spells N-e-g-r-o too. So far, she hopes, her youngster doesn’t know the difference between Negro and white. He probably doesn’t because some of his relatives are as white in color as any white man and others range all the way to deep black. Those spelled-out words highlight another and vitally important problem of the intelligent Negro. When do you begin teaching your child how he is to live as a Negro? When do you begin teaching him the difference between black and white -- not as colors but as races? When do you begin teaching him how to live under the iron rule of a master race that regards him as an inferior breed? When do you begin teaching him that for him, the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence are scraps of paper? Parents Must Answer Those are questions that every Negro mother and father has to answer. "We try to let them have their childhood free of prejudice and confusion," the mother says after we have shooed young Bobby out to play. "But we’ve got to tell them before they come up against the hard facts of discrimination and prejudice for themselves. You people up North have only one set of ‘the facts of life’ to put before your children. Down here we’ve got two. And sometimes I think the racial facts of life are the most important." (When she says "you people up North," she does so with the assumption that I, too, am a Negro.) Generally the Negro child gets his first lessons in race relations before he goes to school. But one couple I know delayed. So one day their little daughter brought home a white friend, a girl of her own age. They had encountered each other when their pathways to school crossed -- one on her way to her white school, the other on her way to the Jim Crow school house. The parents had to work fast. 16 First, as considerately as possible, they sent the little white girl on her way home with the understanding that she was never to come back. To their own little one they had to explain that she could not enter a white home except through the back door. That no white could enter a Negro’s house except on business and that certainly no little white girl could ever visit a little black girl. Guest From North All through the day, friends of the visiting daughter of my hosts were dropping in to see her. And of course Mr. James R. Crawford, the guest from Pittsburgh, was introduced to all of them. (James R. Crawford was the name I was using.) So what was more logical and natural than that Mr. Crawford should seek to slant the conversation toward a comparison between life in the South and the North? The Southern Negro woman, particularly one of refinement and culture, has Jim Crow problems all her own. For instance, there’s the seemingly simple matter of buying hats and dresses. In most Southern cities — with the notable exception of Atlanta — no Negro woman is permitted to try on anything, not even a $200 dress if she’s got the $200 right in her hand. In some millinery departments the sales girl will carefully pin a cloth over her black customer’s head before she’ll let her try on a hat. But in most places the Negro customer just picks her hats and dresses off the rack. If she touches them — she’s made a purchase — they’re all hers. All the women agreed that Baltimore was the worst town in the country for mistreatment of Negro patrons. Shoe stores arbitrarily set aside certain benches in the rear of the store for Negro customers. Every woman there recalled what happened to Roland Hayes, famous Negro tenor, when his New York-born wife went into a Rome, Ga., shoe store for a pair of shoes. Hayes had purchased the plantation, not far from Rome, where his mother had been born and lived in slavery. He planned to establish a model plantation that would supply ideas, modern methods, pure-bred seed and stock to neighboring farmers, white and black. In town for the weekly shopping, Hayes had dropped his wife off at the shoe store and had driven on to park. In the shoe store, Mrs. Hayes sat down on the first bench available. A white clerk, determined to keep his race pure, ordered her to a rear bench. She refused. By the time Hayes got back to the store a noisy argument was underway. "If it can happen to Roland Hayes in Rome," agreed all the women, "it can happen to any Negro anywhere in the South." Telephone Is Ordeal Even using the telephone is likely to be something of an ordeal for a Negro woman in the South. One quite frequent difficulty stems from a peculiar quirk of Southern white psychology. No Southern white who even pretends to be worthy of the noble traditions of the South -- white supremacy -- the purity of the race, the sanctity of white Southern womanhood would ever call a Negro "Mr." or "Mrs." He’ll call them "Doctor," "Professor," "Counselor," but he’d cheerfully burn at the stake before he’d ever so far forget his white heritage as to call one of the creatures "Mr." or "Mrs." 17 All of which presents a pretty involved problem to your Southern telephone operator who is emphatically Southern before she is a telephone operator. She won’t say Mrs. to a Negro woman either -- not if she knows it. One woman in the group, on a visit to Jackson, Miss., some time ago, wanted to telephone her family in Atlanta. She put in the call and gave her name as Mrs. John Black -- or at least Mrs. John Black will do for this story. If I used her real name she’d never get another long-distance call through as long as she lives. Anyway, the operator asked her, politely, "What’s your first name?" So she told her, "Grace." "Is this the colored woman, Grace Black?" asked the operator when she rang back a little later. "Yes," was the response. A couple of other questions and the replies, "Yes," "Yes." "Look here," was the infuriated response of the operator, "don’t you yes me. When you talk to me you say ‘Ma’am’ if you know what’s good for you." Then there was the incident of a purchasing agent of Tuskeegee Institute who tried to call his wife from Atlanta. He put in the call for "Mrs. Morgan," and gave the Tuskeegee number. "What’s her first name?" demanded the operator. "There’s only one Mrs. Morgan there," she was told. "Just get any Mrs. Morgan at that number and she’ll be the right one." "But she’s a nigger ain’t she?" was the wrathful response. "Do you think I’m going to say Mrs. to a nigger?" Well, the next day Mr. Morgan was in the office of the telephone company manager. The lily white operator was summoned and summarily fired. But the soft-hearted black man interceded and she got her job back. Negroes get normal telephone service in Atlanta today. Chapter 5 A Woman Tells How Her Husband Died By Ray Sprigle She is worn and aged and bent beyond her time. Nearly a quarter of a century behind a plow and a mule under blazing Georgia suns have done that to her. In a haze of dull despair, this broken, hopeless Negro farm woman sits in this little parlor in Black Atlanta and tells her tale of murder. "When the white folks gave him back to me he was in his coffin. I held his head in my hands when I kissed him. And I felt the broken pieces of bone under the skin. It was just like a sackful of little pieces of bone. 18 "I put my arms around him for one last time as he lay there. All down one side of him there were no ribs -- just pieces that moved when I held him." Talking About Husband That was her husband she was talking about—Henry Gilbert, 42 years old, Negro farmer, murdered by the white folks of Harris and Troup counties, Georgia, May 29, 1947. Henry Gilbert was victim of the mores of the white Southerner. When a Negro kills a white man and escapes, somebody has to pay. Henry Gilbert just happened to be the Negro picked for slaughter. Sunday night, May 4, Olin Sands, a white planter, in his pickup truck caught up with Gus Davidson, a young Negro with a bad record among both blacks and whites, driving his father’s car in front of the Union Springs Baptist Church. Sands accused him of driving over a calf lying in the road and began beating the Negro with a club. The Negro shot and killed him. Henry Gilbert, a deacon and treasurer of the little Baptist church, was inside the church counting the evening’s collection. Mrs. Gilbert and the wives of the other deacons were waiting in front. At the sound of the shots they called their men folk and everybody started for home in short order. Sheriff Appears Two weeks later, E. V. Hilyer, sheriff of Troup county, with two officers from Harris county, appeared at the Gilbert home at 4:30 in the morning. They arrested him on a warrant charging him with aiding and abetting the escape of Gus Davidson, despite the fact that a short time before Gilbert had had Davidson arrested and jailed for creating a disturbance in the church. Davidson, his father, Lovett Davidson, and their white employer, Luke Sturdevant, had all told Gilbert that they’d get even with him. The officers drove away with Gilbert just as it was getting light. And that last glimpse of him in the early dawn, three gun-hung white men shepherding him into their car was the last time Carolyn Gilbert was ever to see her husband alive. He’d be dead "when the white folks gave him back." For the next 10 days Henry Gilbert drops out of sight while Georgia law drags him from jail to jail. Early Monday Mrs. Gilbert hurried to Hamilton. She was told her husband had been "carried" to Columbus where "the FBI wanted to talk to him." Not until May 29 did Mrs. Gilbert get any definite word as to where her husband was being held. That afternoon two of her uncles, Jesse and Cicero Davenport, told her that Henry was back in Hamilton jail, that they had talked to him through his cell window. Happy to Hear News 19 Friday morning, "happier than I could tell you, Mr. Crawford," at the news that her husband was alive and well, she bustled through breakfast and got ready to go to Hamilton to see the husband she had feared was dead. She was all dressed and was waiting for a neighbor to drive her into town when another neighbor, Willie B. Andrews, came in. A white man, Mr. Louis Booker, had given Willie word to carry to Mrs. Gilbert. Her husband was dead. She’d find his body in a Hamilton undertaker’s rooms. Thursday night County Policeman Willie H. Buchanan had gone into Henry Gilbert’s cell. "To get a confession," he said afterwards. "The nigger drew a chair on me and I had to kill him," he explained. Here is what the undertaker found when he fixed Henry Gilbert’s body up for burial: His skull was crushed to a pulp both in front and the rear. One leg and one arm were broken. All the ribs on one side were smashed into splinters. He was riddled by five bullets fired at close range. That is what Georgia justice officially describes as "justifiable homicide in self-defense." And Willie Buchanan, wanton killer, is "man of the year" in Harris and Troup counties. The white folks gave Carolyn Gilbert less than a month to mourn her murdered husband in peace. Then comes Sheriff Hilyer again with another "aiding-abetting-escape" warrant and Carolyn goes to the same jail where her husband was murdered. She’s only there 24 hours, however, before Attorney Dan Duke has her out on $1,000 bail. Don’t Understand "I just don’t understand those white people," says Mrs. Gilbert. "If Henry had an enemy in the world it was Gus Davidson. He was a bad man. He came into our church with a gun and threatened one of our deacons. Henry had him jailed for that. And right then Gus Davidson told Henry he’d get even. So did his father, Lovett Davidson, and so did Lovett Davidson’s white man, Luke Sturdevant." At Mrs. Gilbert’s preliminary hearing when she was held for court, Davidson testified he had seen his fugitive son eating breakfast in the Gilbert home. "Why I wouldn’t have let Gus Davidson sit at my table. I wouldn’t have let him come into my house at any time -- let alone when he was being hunted for murder," declared Carolyn. Sheriff Hilyer himself pinned perjury on both Davidson and Sturdevant, but a justice of the peace held Mrs. Gilbert for trial. Now word from Harris county is that the white folks want to drop the case against Mrs. Gilbert and just forget the whole thing. It won’t make much difference to the dry-eyed, huddled woman 20 in the chair across from me. Her life is finished. And the life that Henry and Carolyn Gilbert had built out of toil and struggle through the years is finished, too. Married for 22 Years "Twenty-two years we were married before the white folks killed him," she says, and there is not a sign of emotion in her voice. "We share-cropped two years and I worked with him in the fields from the day we were married. Then we saved enough to buy us a little old mule and we went to rentin’. We worked 17 years on our rented farm and saved our money until we had $1,350. So we bought us a farm a few miles out of Chipley. It was 111 acres and run down pretty bad. But we built it up, Henry and me, working from daylight to dark. "Henry borrowed $1,000 from the man at the bank and he let Henry have it just on his note. We had the whole farm wired in. We had nine cows and four big hogs and two mules. Henry worked one of the mules and I worked the other. But we didn’t let the girls work in the cotton. Henry wanted learning for them. So they all went to high school in La Grange. Two of them go to high school here now and the other one graduated and works in Mr. Rich’s store. "Henry paid back the thousand dollars he borrowed and the bank man lent him $600 more. Henry worked on the house, too. We had five rooms -- big rooms and screens on every window and he screened in the whole back porch too." All of this, the murder of her husband, the simple story of her life, without a tear, without a tremor in her voice. Suddenly she drops her head in her hands and sobs shake her. "Every night I keep asking God to help me. But I don’t know what he could do. Help me pray. Pray for me." Me, a white man -- even though she thinks I’m black -- pray for Carolyn Gilbert. Who would listen? Chapter 6 Beginning a Trip Into The Rack Country By Ray Sprigle Under a blazing Georgia sun we begin our journey of 3,400 miles through the black South. Cotton is greening the blood-red soil of the endless fields. It’s cotton chopping time, when the cotton plants must be thinned out. Family by family the Negro share-croppers are in the fields, children of seven or eight and grandmothers and grandfathers who totter when they walk but still are able to swing a hoe. 21 Not all of the women are in the fields, though. This is Monday, wash day in the South as in the North. All along the highway and the little side roads the iron kettles are steaming over fires in the yards — dirty clothes boiling clean. We stop off for a drink of water and a bite of corn pone in the kitchen of Hannah Ingram. Hannah is one of the hundreds of Negro homesteaders on the Flint River project In Macon county. It’s a tract of some 12,000 acres bought by the federal government eight years ago and divided into tracts running from 50 to 200 acres. These were parcelled out to Negro sharecroppers who could make a small down payment. They’ve got 40 years to pay out. Hannah Keeps Going Hannah Ingram is somebody. She and her husband were coming along fine, working from sunup to sundown, each of them behind a mule and plow, when Henry Ingram went down with a paralytic stroke four years ago. He hasn’t walked or used his arms since. He can’t talk. But Hannah kept the mules and the plows going. Two years she raised a crop. Then she played out. But the Ingrams are still going strong. Between them they had the land in such good shape that they were able to rent it for enough to feed them and make the required quarterly payments. Come 30 years and they’ll own their own land -- as Hannah smiling said, "Down here or up there." Nothing would do but we must sit down and share supper greens and a slab of corn pone and plain water from the pump outside. Hannah was really hurt when I wanted to leave some money. I wonder what she thought when she picked up my plate after we’d gone. Bet that’s the first time corn pone sold for a dollar a slice in Macon county, Georgia. This Flint River project is just a drop in an ocean, a bright clear drop in a dark and bitter ocean. A couple of hundred Negroes have quit their noisome, windowless share-croppers’ shanties to come out here to neat, substantial five-room houses, a well, a barn and a smoke house with each. Each house had its quota of solid plain furniture when the government sold it to the cropper. Half Me Making Good Young John Robinson is principal of the excellent school that boasts eight teachers. He judges that about half of the dwellers on the project are making good. One man paid out in four years instead of 40. The other half are just holding their own or falling back. Only a handful picked up and quit. This Flint River project is fine but it would take 10,000 such projects to make even a dent in the evil share-cropping system. By now I was getting pretty hungry. We’d had nothing to eat all day except Hannah Ingram’s corn pone. It was getting on toward seven, too, and what about a lodging for the night? Not a word from my mentor and companion except, "If we can make Americus tonight we’ll have a place to stay." And what, I wondered, if we don’t make Americus? 22 But at long last we roll into Americus. And then I get another installment of the facts of life when you’re black and in the South. We present ourselves at a fine, beautifully furnished home and are received with a welcome that warms your heart. In an hour we are making away with a bountiful meal. A comfortable room is awaiting us. So I learn how Negroes travel in the South. Only in the larger Southern cities are there hotels for them. Since I wanted to live my life as a Negro in the little towns and in the plantation country I didn’t get to stop in any of the big towns. But my friends tell me that life is pretty rugged in most Negro hotels. Travelers Are Guests So in every Southern town there are doctors, lawyers, undertakers, insurance men, who maintain open house for Negroes who are traveling. It’s a kind of reciprocal affair. When they travel, they are guests at the homes of friends whom they have sheltered. There is no question of payment but it is etiquette when leaving in the morning to press upon your hostess a contribution for her church or missionary society. Or if she’s an ardent member of the NAACP, then a donation to that organization. Through the years, this system of Negro travel in the South must add a good many thousands to the treasuries of Negro churches and other organizations. As always, when Negroes gather in the South there is one thing they always talk about — the relations between the races — what are the white folks going to do next? And why not? That one thing overshadows all else in the life of the black man. Here in Sumter county the white man has bowed his back and set himself to roll back the rising tide of franchise that is sweeping Georgia. The courthouse gang has "purged" the registration lists of 800 names of Negro voters. A bare 80 are left. Defense Fund Raised So the Negro leaders of the community -- the men and women I’m talking about tonight -- raised a defense fund of $600 to take the matter to the courts. They hired a lawyer and paid him $100. He made one trip to the courthouse. The committee hasn’t seen him since. But the "word went out" —that’s the expression when the white folks grapevine their warnings — that Sumter county Negroes had better drop their plans for a court fight. It was effective too. The $600 war chest was quietly returned to the contributors and there’ll be no fight to restore the purged names to the registration lists. A teacher in the Negro schools who had headed up the NAACP branch in Americus was called in and told to quit teaching or quit the national Negro organization. She quit her job. Maybe the Supreme Court did outlaw the white primary, but the white folks of Sumter county have overruled the high tribunal. And as between the Supreme Court of the United States and the white folks, Sumter county Negroes are in no doubt as to which to obey. They’ll live longer that way. 23 Chapter 7 What It Means to Be a Share-Cropper By Ray Sprigle You begin to get a better idea of what it means to be a black share-cropper in the South as you sit on a home-made stool in the two-room shack of Henry Williams in Sumter county on the road to Americus in the Georgia cotton country. No northern farmer would keep his cattle in a shanty like this. And this place of Henry’s is far and away better than hundreds of others we have passed on our travels. It at least has one window in one room. Many of these sharecropper cabins have none at all — just holes in the wall with a wooden shutter that can be closed against the sleet and cold of the winter. And when you close the shutters you shut out the light too, so you live for five months of the year in a dismal black cavern. In the summer you can leave your shutters open to the sunlight and wind -- and also to the flies, mosquitoes and sundry other insects. Discrepancy in Count Henry, however, has no fault to find with his mansion. "Yessir," he says, "got us four rooms here." The two-room discrepancy between Henry’s account and mine is due to a rough board lean-to slapped against the back of his shack and bisected by a rough board partition. In one-half of the place is a rather hopeless stove where Mrs. Williams does her cooking. At that she’s far better off than scores of her neighbors up and down the road. They do their cooking in an open fireplace — with a kettle for collards or turnip greens, a skillet for fat-back and the corn pone baked in the ashes. Henry has been a share-cropper for 29 years, he tells me. "You been making any money these few years back with cotton and peanuts bringing big prices?" I ask him. "You don’t make any money share-croppin’," he replies, surprised at the question. "Some years you get some cash in the fall. Bad years you jest go over to the next year." Five Years His Record Henry, like most share-croppers, admits that he "keeps movin’ " in a so-far futile effort to do better for himself. Five years was the longest he ever worked on one plantation in his 29 years of share-cropping. In 1946, he says, he "made" 14 bales of cotton and six and one half tons of peanuts. That year "The Man" (the landlord) gave him $800 cash. 24 Last year, 1947, he made 17 bales of cotton and 10 tons of peanuts. Despite bigger crops and equal if not higher prices, that year "The Man" gave him $700. Between crops he lives out of the commissary maintained by "The Man." Cotton last year brought about $200 a bale, with the seed, and peanuts sold at $200 a ton. That would be $3,400 for Henry’s cotton and around $2,000 for the peanuts -- $5,400 in all with Henry getting half of it or $2,700. Of course out of that $2,700 comes tractor hire, if "The Man" supplies a tractor, fertilizer, and Henry’s commissary bill. But $2,000 for that seems just a little high. Even Henry seems to think so. Now, it could be that the $700 that Henry got was a perfectly fair settlement. Point is that Henry doesn’t know, I certainly don’t know -- nobody in the whole wide world knows except "The Man." Never Sells Own Produce In all his share-cropping, Henry has never seen any kind of an account of his operations. "The Man" never gives him a statement – no figures — just hands him a check or a bundle of cash. Henry never has had a bill or account of his purchases at the commissary. He has never known what his cotton or corn or peanuts sold for. Technically, half the crop he raises is his. But he never has sold an ounce of cotton or a single peanut. Here is the pattern throughout the South. Every Negro knows it and accepts it. It’s a custom, a tradition, just as basic as Jim Crow. No Negro dares buck the system. Everywhere I went, and I talked with at least a score of sharecroppers, I heard the same expression: "If you go to figure behind The Man you’re gonna git trouble." For that matter every Negro share-cropper I talked to admitted that he couldn’t "figure." "The Man jes’ calls it off," they told me, each with a wry smile. Unable to "Figure" Up in Macon county Henry Mann farms 22 acres of "The Man’s" plantation. Last year he raised two tons of peanuts and 11 bales of cotton. At $200 a bale and ton that would have been $2,600 - Henry’s share $1,300 -- less, of course, his "furnish" and other expenses. He got $242 cash. Shamefacedly he admits he can’t "figure." He wouldn’t "figure behind ‘The Man’ " anyway. Year before, he says, he made only seven bales and a ton and a half of peanuts. He had a hospital bill to come out of his share and wound up with $30 cash for his year’s work. But Henry has a garden of his own and raises a few hogs each year. Apparently he’s convinced he is doing all right for himself. On many plantations "The Man" won’t waste good cotton land in gardens for his croppers, so cotton grows "right up to the front door and right up to the back door." On many other plantations "The Man" puts in a big patch of collards and turnips and other garden truck and assigns a couple of hands to take care of it. The share-croppers then buy it from "The Man." Every stem of collards they eat is charged against them on the bill they never see. 25 Well it’s no use cluttering up the record with statistics. The story runs like that all over the South. It could be that the share-croppers I happened to strike were all worthless, lazy or liars. But in county after county in the plantation country of three states, I talked to Negro business men, professional men, undertakers, now and then a Negro farm agent. Certainly they know the sharecropping system and the black men at the bottom who produce the cotton and the peanuts and the corn. Not one of them but insisted that cheating a sharecropper out of his eye teeth was accepted and standard practice. Every one of them backed up his belief with instance after instance. I didn’t bother taking notes. I’d talked with share-croppers myself. This share-cropping in the South is grand larceny on a grand scale. And the Negro is the victim. Chapter 8 Two Negroes Who Have Earned Their Way By Ray Sprigle This is a "tough" town in a "tough" county. We break our journey to get a couple of bottles of beer in the picturesque juke joint that Jared Buford runs down here in the Negro section for colored folk. And again, "Jared Buford" is about as far away from his real name as could well be. Jared just took over this little beer place a few months ago. He bought it out of the profits he made on his 100 rented acres outside of town. Jared himself is a tall, powerful Negro who moves like a great cat. He was three years in the Army, two of them overseas. There’s one thing that Jared Buford would like to do. He’d like to vote. Just once. He’s never voted and he’s never tried to vote. And he makes it plain that as long as he lives in this county he’ll never even try to vote. "No," he explains, "nobody would ‘hurt’ a Negro who tried to register. They’d just pay you no never mind. You go up to the courthouse and tell the white folks you want to register. That’d be the end of it. Nobody would give you anything to register with. Come closing time you’d just have to go home." Just Like "Figurin’ " Same way with this business of "figurin’ behind The Man (the landlord)," when we get to talking about the share-croppers in the county. "Nobody going to hurt a black share-cropper if he figures behind ‘The Man’ or all around ‘The Man,’ " insists Jared. "But if he starts fixin’ to DO anything with those figures — well that might be something else." 26 So no Negro votes in this county and no Negro protests against the conscienceless and brazen exploitation of the share-cropper. It looks as though the white folks down here have worked out a foolproof system of "keeping the black man in his place." In fact, Jared has arrived at that conclusion himself. Jared’s Philosophy "Ain’t no Negro in this county going to be hurt or killed as long as he keeps his place," he says. "White folks here ain’t going to make trouble just for the sake of trouble like they do some places. I never had any trouble and I ain’t going to have no trouble. I’ve got my place here and on the farm, and the white folks got their place. "This is our life down here in our end of the town. Oh, I know you folks back in Atlanta got your theaters and night clubs, but we get along without ’em." No, Jared isn’t going to buy a new car with his profits from his cotton and his beer. "No Negro in this territory has got a new car and they won’t no Negro git a new car until every white man that wants one has it," he says. "No sir -- no share-cropping for me," smiles Jared when I ask him about his farming operations. "If I’m going to follow a mule all day I want to see something in my hand for it when I git through." He Pays Cash Rent Jared rents himself a hundred good acres from a white planter and pays cash rent for it, $12 an acre or $1,200 for the farm. Last year he cleared $5,280 cash on his peanuts and cotton, and recites from memory the figures to prove it, so much gross, so much for fertilizer, draft animals and half a dozen other items. In every word and gesture it’s plain that here is a black man who has worked out a way of life for himself. And it’s plain, too, that the white man doesn’t enter into that life. Here is a man, it seems to me, who has just cut himself off from white civilization. And is doing all right at it, too. Over in Miller county we encounter a completely different type of Negro farmer. He’s Jordan Arline -- and that’s his real name. Two generations of Arlines who have owned and farmed their own land have made Arline a substantial figure in the life of the county. Arline owns 600 acres of land, having added about 200 acres to the farm left him by his father. He, like most Georgia farmers, has got away in recent years from a one crop cotton economy. He produces cotton, of course, and pecans, peanuts, sugar cane from which he manufactures his own molasses -- last year he sold a thousand gallons --corn, hogs, turkeys, chickens, and now he’s going in strong for beef cattle. Got an Itemized Statement 27 He uses the sharecropper system to produce his cotton, peanuts and corn. And here again is a striking contrast between the returns a share-cropper gets when he works for a white man or a Negro. Top sharecropper income on Arline’s farm last year was $1,514.21.His expenses for the year for "furnish," fertilizer and the like, were $884.80. And he got an itemized statement of his account. He was good, but Arline wishes he hadn’t done so well. Because with all that money he decided it was foolish to work any more. So he bought a secondhand car and took to the road. When he went he took with him 35 head of hogs he had raised with his own feed on his own time, molasses and corn. All of which seems to lend some degree of weight to the defense of the Southern white when he’s charged with ill-treating and cheating his share-croppers. "They’re shiftless and undependable," he explains. "No use tryin’ to do anything for them. They’ll just up and leave you any way." He Keeps Moving on It is true. And why not? Your Negro sharecropper is always desperately bent on "bettering himself." So he moves from plantation to plantation in the usually vain hope of finding one where he’ll not be cheated. And then he finds a planter like Arline, and finds himself at the end of the season with a fortune of $1,500 plus 35 hogs and corn to feed them! Who can blame him if he decides he’ll just quit work until he goes broke and has to find himself another boss? That was just too much money for a man who never had as much as $500 at one time in all his life before. Last year Arline decided it was time to vote. At the county seat the white folks in friendly fashion indicated that they’d rather he’d forget the whole thing. Arline wired the governor, notified the Georgia Political and Civic League, a group of Negro leaders with headquarters in Atlanta, and went to see the United States attorney at Macon. Everything was kept on a friendly basis. Arline left the argument and contention to the lawyers. Result — Arline is registered and votes along with about 60 other Negro property owners. There was no earthquake, no stars fell and by now the white folks are pretty well reconciled to the fact that it isn’t going to make much difference to them whether the Negroes vote or not. Chapter 9 Jim-Crow Is Kicked In the Pants By Ray Sprigle Not since my boyhood days in the homes of my Pennsylvania Dutch relatives have I sat down to a table loaded as this one is. Great platters of fried chicken - and listen, it’s Pennsylvania Dutch fried chicken, the gooey kind - not that abomination known as southern fried chicken that I’ve been getting for the past two 28 weeks. And biscuits - light, fluffy and piping hot. And here’s a new wrinkle. The biscuits are baked in small pans - in the oven at a time. So when you call for a fresh one it’s right out of the oven. Three or four kinds of jam; big gobs of country butter. And great pitchers of real buttermilk - what’s left after you churn country butter - the first I’ve tasted in 20 years. This 65 acres a few miles outside Chickamauga, Ga., is another little oasis in the desert of discrimination and injustice that is the black South. It is the farm of C. D. Haslerig, who has carved out a way of life for himself and his children on this fertile North Georgia farm. The rest of our group attends a district meeting of a Negro fraternal order. I am here to eat. Gather in Little Church After the lodge meeting and a Gargantuan picnic dinner in a grove on the Haslerig farm we repair to a little church in a grove of pines. The ladies of the women’s auxiliary of the order have worked diligently preparing a little entertainment for the visitors from downstate. There are piano solos and some really excellent singing. There are several essays and recitations. And here again, in this quiet country church, you realize anew the obsession the southern Negro has with this racial problem. It colors all his thinking and every phase of his life. Every recitation, every theme so laboriously written stresses only the one great facet of these people’s lives - their relations with the whites. Called on to Speak Brother Haslerig is chairman of the meeting. So it’s not too much of a surprise when he calls upon his house guest, Brother James R. Crawford, to offer a few remarks, preferably regarding the status of our people back in Pittsburgh. Now I have no objection to my deception of all these good people because if my mission succeeds it may be of some slight service to them. But making speeches as the representative of the colored folk of Pittsburgh would be carrying the deception a little too far. So I stand and bow and thank Brother Haslerig for the opportunity - and sit down again. To really sincere applause. Because the afternoon is getting on and the audience wants to go home. This Haslerig family demonstrates that you can wring success out of anything. On their 65 owned acres they run a herd of prize Guernseys, raise thousands of broilers each year, eggs and hogs. In recent years they have farmed 200 acres of leased land which they expect to buy. Their nine children have graduated from Chattanooga High school, the oldest in turn driving the 15 miles each morning and evening. Could Quit Right Here Me, I’d‘ be perfectly content to finish out this assignment in the Haslerig dining room - with, of course, rest periods in a rocking chair on the front porch. 29 But the rest of our group from Atlanta has to be back for the Fulton county Republican convention to pick delegates to the state convention. Political conventions run true to form, North or South. We even have a smoke-filled room in which to operate, a courtroom in the Fulton county courthouse where for an afternoon politics spreads Jim Crow like a rug on the floor. But a week later when the state Republican convention is held in the same courtroom we learn that in other counties Jim Crow more than holds his own even in politics. The DeKalb county delegation ran into difficulties. Republican national committee rules require that in Georgia, county conventions must be held in the courthouse. Which was OK with DeKalb county commissioners. Except that Negroes and whites couldn’t meet in the same court room. So the white delegates met in one courtroom and the Negro delegates in another. Messengers ran themselves ragged from one courtroom to another, taking two votes on every measure and proposal and then adding the ayes and noes to find out where they stood. White Supremacy Jolted So the state convention passed a resolution condemning the action of the DeKalb commissioners. The convention also passed unanimously resolutions demanding that all Georgians of whatsoever shade should not only be permitted to vote, but encouraged to do so. The convention also called for equal school facilities for all citizens of Georgia. All of which was giving Jim Crow a hefty kick in the seat of the pants when you figure that among the white delegates who voted for the motion were such figures as Harry Sommers, former president of the Atlanta Chamber of Commerce, Colonel Elliott F. Tuttle, veteran of both world wars and retiring president of the Fulton County Bar Association, and C.J. Hilkey, dean of the law school of Emory University. Just a little more evidence that if the Negro is ever going to dent the more evil and vicious aspects of Jim Crow in the South it’s going to be accomplished through the franchise. Despite the determination of the southern white never to "Mr." a Negro, black and white delegates were mistering each other all over the place. They crippled their fingers shaking hands and even on occasion hugged each other. Southern white supremacy got an awful kicking around that day. I found myself wedged in between a couple of white delegates from North Georgia. I was distinctly uncomfortable. I hadn’t been so close to white folks in weeks. Until one of them leaned over to me and confided: "You know we don’t have many colored people up in our country, but you people ought to be allowed to vote. I served with a lot of your people in the Navy. They were damned good shipmates. Most of this stuff about you Negroes is just damned foolishness." —So much for one lily white Georgian. Chapter 10 30 A Soldier Who Came Home to Die By Ray Sprigle When they call the roll of Americans who died to make men free, add to that heroic list the name of Private Macy Yost Snipes, black man, Georgia, U. S. A. Death missed him on a dozen bloody battlefields overseas, where he served his country well. He came home to die in the littered door-yard of his boyhood home because he thought that freedom was for all Americans, and tried to prove it. It wasn’t that he didn’t get fair warning. He knew what to expect. And he got just that. Early in July the white folks passed the warning through the Negro countryside around the little sun-warped country hamlet of Rupert, in Taylor county, Georgia. It was brief and to the point. The first Negro to vote in Rupert would be killed, ran the word. Hadn’t Thought of Voting Macy Yost Snipes hadn’t even thought of voting, so his friends told me. But when the word came that he’d die if he did -then he decided that he’d vote. He had never voted. He didn’t know where or how to do it. He went to Butler, the county seat, to register. There they told him he’d have to go back to his home town of Rupert to register, and later, vote. The white folks in Rupert let him register. There were already a few Negro names on the registry lists. Bright and early on election day Macy appeared at the polling place - and voted. Afterward Macy told a friend that the white folks on the election board appeared "sorta dazed" as he cast his ballot. "It was like they thought a dead man was voting," Macy said laughingly to his friend who told me the story of how a Georgia Negro died. Private Snipes didn’t know it, but the white folks were right. He was already dead when he dropped that ballot in the box. The white folks just let him walk around another week before they buried him. Riddled With Bullets Just a week later four white men drove up to Macy Snipes’ home, called him out and after a few words riddled him with bullets and drove off. Taking courage from the fact that the white folks had promised to kill only the first Negro who voted, another black man voted after Private Snipes. He was right. The white folks didn’t kill him. They just ran him out of the county. But even after they had murdered him, the white folks weren’t finished with Private Macy Yost Snipes. The Snipes family owned a little burial plot in a Negro cemetery near Rupert. The 31 mother and father of the dead soldier arranged with a Negro undertaker to bury their slain son in the family plot. But the day of the funeral the undertaker got word from Rupert. "You try to bury that nigger here and you better have another grave ready for yourself." The undertaker had a plot in another cemetery at the other end of the county. That’s where Macy Snipes rests. Family Told to Get Out But it wasn’t enough to murder the returned veteran and deny his body burial because he had sought to overthrow white supremacy by dropping his ballot in the box. The white folks decided that they wanted none of Macy Snipes’ family in their midst, either. The Snipes family were hard-working and respected farmers owning 150 acres which provided them with a better-thanordinary competence. They were warned that they had better get out of the county. "Remember what happened to your son," one note read. So the Snipes family sold their farm and fled North. They live in Ohio now. And what about the champions of racial purity’ who murdered Macy Snipes? Well, one William Cooper proudly claimed the honor of having fired the shots that dropped the young veteran in front of his own threshold. He hunted up the coroner and explained that he and his friends were just trying to collect $10 that Macy Snipes had borrowed from him. When Snipes told him he hadn’t any money he said he told Macy to go to work for his companion, a sawmill owner and the sawmill man would pay off Macy’s $10 debt. "You don’t get me in no saw mill," was Macy’s reply, according to Cooper. A few more heated words, said Cooper, and Macy’ started toward his door, saying, "I’ve got something in the house that’ll move you fellows off." "That’s when I shot him," explains Cooper. There was no gun on Private Snipes’ body but there was $40 in his pocket and all the members of the Snipes family had through the years built up a reputation for paying their debts. "Justifiable killing in self-defense," was the verdict. Well, what price a monument for Private Macy Yost Snipes now? Chapter 11 A Most Successful Negro Farmer By Ray Sprigle 32 Given the right kind of white neighbors, the right kind of a community, the right kind of land and a terrific capacity for hard work, once in a while a Negro can do pretty well for himself in the deep South. Witness David E. Jackson down here on the outskirts of Adel Ga., in Cook county. But remember, too, that Dave is one in a million. So far as I know he’s one in ten million. Dave Jackson owns and farms 1,000 acres of some of the best land in Georgia. He owns two blocks of business property in Adel, and a score of houses. He’s a stockholder in the newly formed bank. He lives in a 10-room modern home. He runs four tractors and four big trailer trucks. He operates two big produce warehouses in Adel. He buys and sells 100,000 bushels of corn every year in addition to the thousands of bushels he raises. He ships corn as far north as Tennessee and North Carolina. Last year he shipped 15 carloads of watermelons and he can’t recall how many trailer truck loads of early vegetables. He raises cotton and tobacco and hogs, 500 hogs last year, 400 this year. Penniless 20 Years Ago Twenty years ago he was a penniless share-cropper. He started with 27 acres of land for which he promised to pay $1,500 when, as and if, he ever got $1,500. He’s been buying land almost every year since until he reckons his holdings at a thousand acres. How did he do it? Many farmers have done as well in the North. But how did a Negro accomplish it in Georgia? Well, first Dave was fortunate enough to start in an oasis of decency and tolerance in a desert of oppression and intolerance. Then Dave’s generous heart probably had a lot to do with the fact that Dave is one of the best-liked men in the county. Ever since he started with two mules and a plow, Dave has gone out of his way to help his neighbors. If a white plantation owner is caught with his cotton, or corn, or watermelon crop in danger, Dave is right there with mules, and tractors and trucks and himself and his two sons. Favors Are Returned And when his neighbor wants to know, "What do I owe you Dave?" Dave replies with a wave of his hand and, "Nothing at all. Some day you’ll do me a favor when I need it." And they do, sheriff, county commissioners, city council, bankers, businessmen, the white plantation owners of the community. But let nobody get the idea that there’s anything typical about the career of Dave Jackson or any other successful Negro farmer in the deep South. There are only a handful like him. And he and the others have become legends among their people. Why, clear across three states, in Mississippi, I found that Negro leaders had heard of Dave. To produce a Dave Jackson in the South you’ve first got to have a white community tolerant enough to sit back and let a Negro succeed. Then of course you’ve got to have an exceptional Negro. You’ve got both those conditions in Cook county. 33 Dave started as a share-cropper on the plantation of Wes Wells, probably the oldest white plantation owner in the community. He became a sort of general manager for Wells. With a growing family to maintain he didn’t save anything. Wells urged him to buy land and go on his own. Finally he found a piece of 27 acres for which the owner wanted $1,500. Wells handed him $1,500 and refused a note or mortgage. Working nights after he had finished his jobs on the Wells plantation, Dave made $4,000 from two crops of tobacco. He paid off Wells and bought more land. He’s been buying more land ever since. Has Five Share-Croppers And Dave Jackson has five share-croppers on his plantation, too. He doesn’t provide them with "furnish" because he figures they ought to be able to raise their own keep on land he allots them. They do. Last year he paid one cropper $1,600 in cash. Each of the four others got better than $1,000. The $1,600 man made his on 12 acres, four of watermelons, four of tobacco and four of corn. The least any of his share-croppers ever made was minus $1,400. He quit Dave after he had gone $1,400 in the hole. "Mistake I made," said Dave, "was to give him an $800 secondhand Chevrolet as an advance against settlement day. I knew he was a good man and I was glad to do him a favor. That auto ruined him. He had no time for mules or tractor. He just rammed around in that auto and the weeds took over." Others Have Done Well There are other Negroes who have done pretty well for themselves on the land. Over in Hancock county, near Sparta, there is A. J. Washington, for instance. He owns 500 acres and rents another 500. He uses a fallowing system so not all of his land is in cultivation in any one year. But last year he made 90 bales of cotton, a larger tonnage than any other farmer, white or black, in the county. He also operates a store in the Negro section on the edge of town. Dave had only three years of schooling in his life. "But I’ll figure with anybody, backwards or forwards," he boasts. Washington runs three sharecroppers on his land. Each of them made more than $1,000 in cash last year. That was clear of all expenses, even their living for themselves and families. "I give ’em figures on everything," explains Washington. "Not only that but when I go to the cotton warehouse to buy guano and fertilizer and seed I take ’em along. They hear what I pay and they see the bills. When I sell the cotton in the fall I take ’em with me to the warehouse again. They hear me dicker, they see the check I get. And right then and there I figure out their shares and write their checks." 34 Washington has no trouble in getting the cream of the sharecroppers in the county. Perhaps with reason, because, as he say’s, he never heard of any other sharecropper in the county getting more than $500. Chapter 12 Negro Doctors Treat White Patients By Ray Sprigle Right here this Jim Crow thing gets to the point where it’s just plain silly - if a thing so replete with heartbreak and tragedy can ever be properly called silly. Here we sit in the waiting room of Dr. - well let’s say Dr. Bradford Gordon. He’s got that kind of a New England sounding name but why mention it here, when it might be the cause of getting him Kluxed. The room is filling up after the noon hour, white farmers in from the country with their wives and youngsters to get their teeth "fixed up." Other, better-dressed whites, men and women, plainly city dwellers. And a handful of Negro mothers with their children. No segregation here. When Dr. Gordon appears he proves to be very, very black. He Is a towering figure of a man, graduate of a famous northern university and a star on its football team. The man seems to beam with kindliness and courtesy. If he isn’t a gentleman, I never saw one. We chat a while. White Woman First Patient First patient to seat herself in the gleaming dental chair is a blooming young farm wife, as white as the doctor is black. Dr. Gordon’s big black fingers will operate drill and probe and chisel in the young white woman’s mouth. And in the mouths of hundreds of other white men, women and children, for Dr. Gordon is one of the most popular dentists in this great farming area. But, if later that evening, Dr. Gordon, on his way home in bus or streetcar should seek to sit beside, or even near his patient he’d probably be arrested. If he tried it again he could very well find himself completely dead. Dr. Gordon is just one of scores of Negro dentists in the South who, because of unusual skill, have found themselves with an ever growing white practice. One such Negro dentist the Negroes tell about made such a success down in this country that he moved to Nashville and opened elaborate offices. Now, they say, he’s gone completely Jim Crow and doesn’t accept any Negro patients at all. White and Black Babies Another day we drop into the office of Dr. C. C. Carruthers in a Tennessee town. Dr. Carruthers is aging fast now. He’s been in practice here for 32 years. He didn’t keep records of the babies 35 he’s helped into the world but there were hundreds of them - some years almost as many white youngsters as black ones. Many of "his" babies are married now and have children of their own. If he noticed one of "his" babies on a railroad train for instance - and sought to enter the white coach to greet her - well, he knows better. But there’s little enough of even the grimmest sort of humor in the impact of Jim Crow upon human lives. Besides the Jim Crow regulations established by law, which are onerous enough, this Jim Crow pattern has been built up into a way of life in which even the few legal rights of a Negro are ignored. No Justice for Negro Records of actual court cases, prove there is no justice for the Negro in criminal court. Every Negro I talked to insists that there is equally no justice for him in civil courts. "If you black, you never mess with no white man in court," a black share-cropper told me when I asked him why he didn’t sue "The Man" (the landlord). "All you git is mo’ and worse trouble." In different language, Negro leaders told me the same thing. A Negro banker I met, located in an area where there are few white banks, was urged by white plantation owners to deal with them for seasonal loans as he did for black farm owners. His reply was: "How could I ever expect to collect in court if you refused to pay me?" Testimony Not Given Weight Frankly and openly, the courts and the law in the South let Negroes know that their sworn testimony in court is not to be given the same weight as that of a white man. Automobile insurance companies, when they do sell insurance to a Negro automobile owner never go to court when he is in collision with a white driver. They just pay. So, too, when a Negro without insurance collides with a car owned by a white man. There rarely is any question as to who was at fault. The Negro is told how much he is going to pay. And pays it. If he goes to a white doctor or dentist he’ll probably get service. But he waits until all the white patients have been cared for. If it’s time for the physician to quit when he reaches his goal he’s told to try it again some other time. He can’t enter a white library. But if there’s a colored library branch in his town he can go there and any book he wants is obtained from the white library. Better Not Resist 36 If a white man attacks him, he’d better not resist. If he does he’s due for lynching. That’s why Negroes, if they do resist a white man generally try to kill him. If you’re going to be killed, better give the white folks something to kill you for, the black man figures. In most Southern towns, benches in the little parks in the center of town are not for him. Some few towns have a few benches marked "Colored." But not many. But surely even if you’re black, if you’ve died for your country in France or Germany or on Saipan or Iwo Jima, the white folks will forget your color and remember only that you were a hero! Reader, you don’t know. Here is the ultimate in Jim Crowism. In every southern town you’ll find not one but two honor rolls, one for white, one for black, sometimes side by side, oftener the Negro honor roll hidden in the dingy Negro section. No Negro is going to contaminate the white race by getting his name on the same honor roll with a white man even if he did die a hero in the service of his country. Chapter 13 A Visit to a Jim Crow School By Ray Sprigle Here on the outskirts of the pleasant, thriving little Georgia town of Bluffton in Clay county I go to school again. And what a school! This dilapidated, sagging old shack, leaning and lop-sided as its makeshift foundations give way, is the lordly white’s conception of a schoolhouse for Negroes. This leaking old wreck of a shanty must be nearly half a century old. The warped old clapboards are falling off. Holes bigger than your hand give permanent cross-ventilation. There are no desks, no seats but rude benches. Two rough tables serve as desks. A few dog-eared school books are scattered on the tables. A "blackboard,"’ apparently home made, just a sheet of cardboard about two by three feet, is nailed to the bare studding. Only redeeming feature of this thing called a school is the teacher. Tall and spare, gentle and soft spoken, earnest and intelligent, she reminds you of a typical New England school-marm with her sharp aquiline features - except for a deeper sun tan than one could ever get on a beach. Has Taught Three Generations 37 For 27 years, she tells us, she has taught this little school. Three generations of little black American citizens have picked up the rudiments of an education under her kindly tutelage. She is actually proud of this school. "The state furnishes us free school books now," she says. "When I started in 27 years ago the only text book we had was my Bible that I brought to school. Some of the children were able to buy text books as the years went on and the whole class used them." There are 38 children in her school, divided into seven grades. She teaches them all. If all of her 38 scholars came to school at one time the little room would be crowded to suffocation. But now there is only a handful of little tots. All the bigger girls and boys are "excused." This is cotton chopping time and cotton is more important than learning. The bigger boys and girls are also "excused" at plowing and planting time and again in the fall when it’s time to pick the precious cotton. The school term is eight months, she says. But only the little tots ever see eight months of schooling. Salary Is $112 a Month Miss Minnie Dora Lee draws a salary of $112 a month. When she started and for many years afterward she got $20 a month. It has taken the full 27 years of her service to climb to that magnificent figure of $112. Miss Minnie Dora Lee’s school is typical of Negro schools in Georgia and the deep South. We could have found many far worse and did. Some few are better. What sets her school ahead of most of the other one-room shanties in the South where little black children get their three R’s is Miss Minnie Dora Lee herself. In her 27 years as a school teacher, Miss Lee has learned, too. Hundreds of southern Negro schools have teachers who never went beyond the sixth or seventh grades and are wholly unfitted for teaching. I encountered more than one instance where the leading white cotton planter of the district appointed the teacher of the Negro school. Usually on the basis that her father raised more cotton "than any other nigger I’ve got on the place." Catchword of your lordly, lily-white representative of white supremacy to justify all the phases of segregation with its inevitable train of discrimination, oppression, brutality and petty chicanery is the term "separate but equal." A Brazen, Cynical Lie So far as the education of little black American citizens is concerned, that "equal" in the South’s pet catch phrase is a brazen, cynical lie and every white man knows it. No Negro school in all the South even begins to compare in any way with its companion white school. True enough, I didn’t check them all. But I did see scores of them. And I asked literally hundreds of Negroes to help me find at least one Negro school equal to a white one in the same area. Not only did none of them know of such an instance but even the most radical opponents of segregation didn’t even hope for, expect or ask for such a miracle. Any of them would be glad to settle for just ordinarily decent schools for their children. 38 Right here in Clay county is a typical illustration of the bitter, tragic hypocrisy of that "separate but equal" lying catchword. Ride with me about a thousand yards down the highway past Minnie Dora Lee’s disintegrating old rookery. On the edge of Bluffton is the school for the white folks the last word in small town educational plants. A neat brick structure, with a wing on either side - at least six rooms. Grounds beautifully landscaped, a spreading playground crowded with all the latest equipment that money can buy. Minnie Dora Lee’s school couldn’t cost more than $1,000 even today. This white folks’ school didn’t cost a cent less than $100,000. "Separate but equal." It’s not even funny. Chapter 14 Feudalism Lives on In the Delta By Ray Sprigle Black of the rich earth and green of the springing cotton plants stretch from horizon to horizon. This is the fabulous Mississippi Delta, last outpost of feudalism in America. Here is land more fertile than any other in the world. Here close to half a million Negroes toil from childhood to the grave in the service of King Cotton, from sunup to sundown if they share-crop, from 6 to 6 if they work by the day. Here are feudal baronies that run from 5,000 to 20,000 acres, where as many as 6,000 sharecropper families, wives and children, parents and grandparents follow the one mule plow and the chopping hoe all their lives. On these tight little Delta principalities "The Man" (the landlord), is the middle justice, the high and the low. Mississippi law stops dead in its tracks at their boundaries. No sheriff, no peace officer takes a man, black or white off these acres until "The Man" tells him he may Briefed On Tactics Back in Jackson, the night before we started our expedition into the Delta, half a dozen Negro leaders briefed us on tactics, strategy and general behavior for our Delta tour as if we had been going into an occupied country to join the Underground. "Don’t talk to share-croppers either at work or along the roads." "Don’t argue if a ’rider’ stops you and asks questions." ("Riders," by the way, are the mounted patrols that plantation owners maintain as field foremen and general overseers. Mounted field foremen frequently are trusted Negroes. Overseers are white.) In any event - whether because of the briefing or because our smiling brown faces aroused no suspicions - nothing happened. 39 We did stop one woman sharecropper near Scott, Miss., on the vast Delta Pine Land Company holdings. All we wanted was to find out where we were. The woman regarded us suspiciously and then started to g...
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Surname 1
Name:
Date:
Title of article: "I Was a Negro in the South for 30 Days"
Journal name: Post-Gazette
Author: Ray Sprigle
Date of publication: Aug. 9, 1948,
Question 1:
The article’s main idea is the life of a black man under the system of legal segregation
known as Jim Crow in the South. Disguised as James R. Crawford, a famed Pittsburgh PostGazette Journalist, Ray Sprigle traveled about 4,000 miles by train and car through Tennessee,
Georgia, Mississippi, and Alabama over the course of thirty days to get the firsthand experience
of what it meant to live under the Jim Crow segregation system. Ray Sprigle masqueraded as a
light-skinned Negro by getting a tan in Florida, shaved his head and put on the flat cap that most
Southern black man donned at that time and experienced the Jim Crow, the system of legal
discrimination experienced by the Southern Negroes.
Quest...


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