Short History of the American Negro - Benjamin Brawley




Social and Economic Progress

143. General Advance.—Within the period of a little more than half a century since emancipation the Negro race has advanced not only in home-life, in organization, and in art, but in almost every field of endeavor it has produced individuals whose achievement challenges consideration by the highest standards of American culture. In the list of professions and occupations one observes architects, chemists, metallurgists, designers, and other skilled workers in an ever-increasing number, and more and more have these people made themselves a necessary element in the civilization of which they are so vital a part? Along with general progress has gone increasing racial consciousness and pride. About five hundred men are now engaged in the work of journalism, and through such a magazine as the Crisis  and such weekly newspapers as the Age  (New York), the Freeman  (Indianapolis), and the Defender  (Chicago), the aspiration of the race finds expression; while the quarterly Journal of Negro History  is representative of work in the higher fields of scholarship.

144. Home-Life and Health.—In no way perhaps has the general advance been better shown than is the improved conditions of home-life. In spite of inadequate hygienic facilities in many places, the Negro constantly shows a striving to make his home and his surroundings as comfortable and as refined as possible. By the census of 1910 the aggregate number of all homes occupied by Negro families in the Southern states was 1,917,391, of which 430,449, or 22.4 percent, were reported as owned, including 314,340 reported as owned free of encumbrance. Within one decade a division of four states Arkansas, Louisiana, Oklahoma, and Texas—showed an increase of 65 percent in the ownership of homes other than farm house; and one city in the 25,000 class, Petersburg, Va., bet ore the recent war set the very high standard of one owned home for every 13 of its Negro inhabitants, and in the 10,000 class Greenville, Miss., had one owned home for every 11. In the North, where the Negro population is of course by no means as stable as in the South, much greater use is made of temporary abodes; thus in a crowded center like New York lodgers hardly ever number less than 30 percent of the total Negro population.

Closely connected with the whole subject of housing conditions of course is that of mortality. The figures here are depressing. In 57 representative cities in 1910 the death rate among Negroes was 27.8 per 1,000, as compared with 15.9 per 1,000 for the white people. However, every city in the South except two showed in 1910 a lower death rate than in 1900. On the other hand half of the cities in the North showed an increase in the death rate in 1910 over that of 1900. Very vital is the point that as the number of owned homes in a given area increases the mortality figures decidedly decrease. Evidently the whole matter of sanitation, with the securing of better light and water facilities and the furnishing of wholesome recreation, should be one of the chief concerns of those interested in the welfare of the race in America.

145. Organization and Business.—It is not only in his home-life that the Negro has learned to exhibit the virtues of thrift and self-reliance. In the wider field of organization and co-operation he is rapidly developing large enterprises. We have already remarked the National Negro Business League, founded in 1899. The annual meetings of this organization years ago became the rallying-place of many of the foremost business men of the race. Important also is the work of several strong fraternal and benefit organizations, and the last two decades have witnessed an interesting multiplication of insurance companies throughout the South. The African Methodist Episcopal Church has at Philadelphia an extensive publishing business in the A.M.E. Book Concern, and the Baptists have at Nashville the National Baptist Publishing Board. There are other church publishing firms, but these are the largest distinctively Negro enterprises. Among secular interests must be remarked the Mme. C. J. Walker Manufacturing Co. of Indianapolis and New York, whose business is now conducted in accord with the principles regularly governing large American commercial organizations.

146. Industry.—It is not only in his own industrial enterprises that the Negro is felt, however; upon his shoulders has fallen much of the most arduous an& necessary work of the nation. In 1910, of 3,178,554 Negro men at work in the country, 981,922 were listed as farm laborers and 798,509 as farmers. That is to say, 56 percent of the whole number were engaged in raising farm products either on their own account or by way of assisting somebody else. If to these are added men in the building and hand trades, saw and planing mills, as well as railway firemen and porters, draymen, teamsters, and coal mine operatives, it will be found that a total of 71.2 percent were engaged in such work as represents the very foundation of American industry. Of the women 1,047,146, or 52 percent, were either farm laborers or farmers, and 28 percent more were either cooks or washer-women. In other words, a total of 80 percent were doing some of the hardest and at the same time some of the most necessary work in American home and industrial life. Under the influence of the migration of 1915–18 Negro men were employed by the thousands in the great industrial centers of the North. They gave a good account of themselves. On one occasion Charles Knight, a Negro riveter of the Bethlehem Steel Corporation at Sparrows Point, Md., drove 4,875 three-quarter rivets in a nine-hour day, breaking the previous record by 433. He was awarded the first international prize for riveting, $125, offered by Lord Northcliff. Unfortunately the general attitude of the labor unions in the North has not always been cordial toward the Negro worker, and the adjustment of this problem is one of the most important questions in the whole range of the industrial life of America.

147. Invention.—The first Negro scientist to come into prominence was Benjamin Banneker of Maryland, who in 1770 constructed the first clock striking the hours that was made in America, and who published annually from 1792 to 1806 an almanac adapted to the requirements of Maryland and the neighboring states. Banneker attracted much attention by his knowledge of mathematics and astronomy and his achievements made a reputation for him in Europe as well as in America. Up to the present time there have bee granted to Negroes a little more than 1,000 patents. The honor of being granted the first belongs to Henry Blair of Maryland, evidently a free Negro, who in 1834 took out a patent for a corn harvester. In ante-bellum days a rather queer situation arose more than once. If a slave made, an invention he was not permitted to take out a patent, for no slave could make a contract; but neither could a slave's master take out a patent for him, for the Government would not recognize the slave as having the legal right to make the contract of assignment of his invention to his master.

Within more recent years Granville T. Woods appears to have surpassed every other inventor of the race in the number and the variety of his inventions. His record began in 1884 in Cincinnati, Ohio, where he then resided, and continued without interruption until his death in New York in 1910. Among his inventions may be found valuable improvements in telegraphy, including a system for telegraphing from moving trains; also an electric railway and a phonograph. Many of his patents were assigned to such companies as the General Electric Company, of New York, and the American Bell Telephone Company, of Boston. The authority on the subject says that there has been no inventor of the race "whose achievements have attracted more universal attention and favorable comment from technical and scientific journals both in this country and abroad" than those of Granville T. Woods.

Elijah McCoy, of Detroit, Mich., who began his work as early as 1872, has been granted about fifty patents, relating particularly to lubricating appliances for engines. Many of his inventions have long been in use on the locomotives of the Canadian and Northwestern railroads, and on the steamships of the Great Lakes. Ian E. Matzeliger, a Dutch Guiana Negro born in 1852, came to this country as a very young man and served an apprenticeship as a cobbler first in Philadelphia and then in Lynn, Mass. His hardships undermined his health and he passed away in 1889 in the thirty-seventh year of his age, but not before he had invented a machine for attaching soles to shoes, "the first appliance of its kind capable of performing all the steps required to hold a shoe on its last, grip and pull the leather down around the heel, guide and drive the nails into place, and then discharge the completed show from the machine." The patent for this invention was bought by the president of the United Shoe Machinery Company of Boston, and Matzeliger's invention thus formed the basis of a great enterprise that represents the consolidation of forty subsidiary enterprises and that gives regular employment to thousands of people. J. H. Dickinson and his son, S. L. Dickinson, both of New Jersey, have been granted more than a dozen patents for their appliances, mainly in the line of devices connected with the machinery of the player piano. W. B. Purvis, of Philadelphia, has been granted more than a dozen patents having to do with machinery for the making of paper bags, many of these being sold to the Union Paper Bag Company, of New York. Benjamin O. Jackson, of Massachusetts, has been granted nearly as many patents for his inventions, including a heating apparatus, a gas burner, an electrotyper's furnace, and a trolley wheel controller; and many other men have invented devices hardly less interesting than those mentioned.

148. Professions and Public Life.—In the so-called learned professions the Ministry, Law, and Medicine—the Negro has made rapid progress. In fact, if to these be added teaching, and, in later years, business, we shall have the fields upon which the race has primarily depended for its leadership. These professions are frequently thought to be crowded, and y in 1910, of a total Negro population of more than 10,000,000, and of 3,178,554 men at work, only 17,427 were listed as clergymen, 3,077 as physicians and surgeons, 796 as lawyers, and 7035 as teachers (169 others being specially listed as college presidents or professors). In this same year 2,450 women were schoolteachers; and within the last two decades women have made most noteworthy advance in all of the arts and professions. In individual cases they are outstanding, and numerically in music and the other arts the ratio of men to women is just about 3 to 2. Every one of the prominent denominations can furnish examples of men who are distinguished for eloquence, for community service, or for high spiritual leadership. In many communities where the church is the only social institution the preacher must still be the general adviser of the people in all of the ordinary affairs of life. To the lawyers also has naturally fallen much of the leadership of the race, especially in political affairs. With the large and pressing problems that have arisen in the social and civil life of the Negro within recent years this profession has received a new emphasis as one of the highest importance. Among those men who within recent years have been prominent in the public life of the nation have been Judson W. Lyons, William T. Vernon, and J. C. Napier as registers of the treasury of the United States; Charles W. Anderson as collector of internal revenue for the second district of New York; William H. Lewis as assistant attorney general of the United States; and Emmett J. Scott, previously remarked, as special assistant to the Secretary of War.

149. Medicine.—The history of the Negro physician is one of unusual and special interest. Even in colonial times, though there was much emphasis on the control of diseases by roots or charms, there was a beginning in work genuinely scientific. In the earlier years of the last century James Derham, of New Orleans, became the first regularly recognized Negro physician of whom there is a complete record. About the middle of the century, in New York, James McCune Smith, a graduate of the University of Glasgow, was prominent. "The first real impetus to bring Negroes in considerable numbers into the professional world came from the American Colonization Society, which in the early years flourished in the South as well as in the North. This organization hoped to return the free Negroes to Africa and undertook to prepare professional leaders of their race for the Liberian colony. To execute this scheme, leaders of the colonization movement endeavored to educate Negroes in mechanic arts, agriculture, science, and Biblical literature. Exceptionally bright youths were to be given special training as catechists, teachers, preachers, and physicians. Not much was said about what they were doing, but now and then appeared notices of Negroes who had been prepared privately in the South or publicly in the North for service in Liberia. Dr. William Taylor and Dr. Fleet were thus educated in the District of Columbia. In the same way John V. DeGrasse, of New York, and Thomas J. White, of Brooklyn, were allowed to complete the medical course at Bowdoin in 1849. In 1854 Dr. DeGrasse was admitted as a member of the Massachusetts Medical Society.'"

Very prominent about this time was Martin R. Delany, of Pittsburgh, who, after being refused admission at a number of institutions, was admitted to the medical school at Harvard. He became distinguished for his work in a cholera epidemic in Pittsburgh in 1854 and in his later years was outstanding as a race leader. After the Civil War medical departments were established in several of the new institutions of learning. As they have developed, the School of Medicine at Howard University and the Meharry Medical College, Nashville, Tenn., have proved to be the strongest. In the period after the Civil War two physicians in the District of Columbia became especially prominent. One of these, A. T. Augusta, studied medicine at the University of Toronto and became the first Negro to hold a position as surgeon in the United States Army. Charles B. Purvis, a graduate of the Medical College at Western Reserve University in Cleveland, also became a surgeon in the Army and was for a long period connected with the Freedmen's Hospital in Washington. He did more than any other man to develop the medical school at Howard.* At the present time the Negro physicians in the country number hardly less than 6,000 and the dentists very nearly 1,000.

150. Scholarship and Special Distinction.—Several students and investigators are at present engaged in original work in the field of medicine just remarked, and in chemistry, history, and social science as well. More and more these diligent workers are interpreting their pursuits in terms of regular academic standards, so that the number of those who have taken the degree of Doctor of Philosophy at the great universities of the country now number not less than twelve. Among those investigators who have best brought their work to bear upon the ordinary needs of life must be remarked Professor George W. Carver of Tuskegee Institute, whose general acquaintance with plants and whose breeding of new varieties of cotton and studies in the sweet potato and other foods have deservedly given him a national reputation. Dr. DuBois was outstanding in scholarship for several years before he became so prominent as a race leader; and Dr. Carter G. Woodson as the editor of the Journal of Negro History  has given great impetus to study in this field. In 1914 Dr. (now Major) Joel E. Spingam offered as an annual prize a bronze medal of the value of $100 to be awarded to that man or woman who, by his or her individual achievement as judged by a committee, should have reflected most credit upon the race in any honorable field of endeavor. In 1915 the first award of the Spingarn medal was made to Dr. E. E. Just, a biologist and a professor in Howard University. In 1916 it was awarded to Colonel (then Major) Charles Young for his distinction in the public service, especially in Liberia; in 1917 to Harry T. Burleigh, the foremost musician of the race; in 1918 to William Stanley Braithwaite, the distinguished critic and sponsor for American poetry; and in 1919 to Archibald H. Grimke, of Washington and Boston, for his efforts in the public service extending over several fields for a number of years.