Letters, Aug. 31, 1931

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Some years ago I heard Booker T. Washington speak to an audience of whites and blacks. One of the jokes of his speech fitly typifies the condition of the Negro race. After excoriating the blacks present for misconduct, Washington turned to the white section of the audience. "You white folks have a great responsibility for the Negro,'' he said. "The Negro is a born imitator; whatever the white man does the Negro will do. We have white cooks and Negro cooks, white doctors, Negro doctors, white lawyers, Negro lawyers. The Negro does whatever the white man does. Why I actually heard of a Negro robbing a bank in Texas the other day!". . .

W. G. HASTINGS

Atlanta, Ga.

Sirs:

... I apprehend and appreciate the distinction made as between a black man and ''some CRAZY black man . . . will rape her, kill her, or both." Which distinction, however, I fear the Negro intelligentsia is going to overlook, as its editors upon whom you depend for information about ALL Negroes as "The Negro" begin to strafe TIME for "goin" 'gainst the race" in its comment on the Birmingham assault. They "solve" the race problem for a living; and categoric language means nothing when it will not permit of reasonable race-problem exploitation by them.

However, the paragraph is far-fetched per se. For, first, every Southern white man does not carry in the back of his head any mortal fear that his wife or daughter will be raped or killed or both by some black man. crazy or otherwise. Many of him has a forbidding superiority complex; just as every Southern black man does not have mortal fear of some day being lynched, easy recourse of many Southern whites to it to penalize black men even for misdemeanors notwithstanding. And. last, white men's vigilance over their women folk is far more practical, certainly more nearly possible, than is true of "the other way around."

RIENZI B. LEMUS

Grand President

Brotherhood of Dining Car Employees New York City

Ignorant Reporter

Sirs:

Would not the ignorant insolence of this reporter, removing neither hat nor cigaret when interviewing these stricken parents, bar its reproduction in any publication except the world's greatest newspaper from which it was clipped?

PAULINE M. WETZEL

Polo, Ill.

The picture, clipped by Reader Wetzel from the Chicago Tribune ("World's Greatest Newspaper"), was taken by Detroit's Daily Mirror (gumchewers' sheet-let owned by the Tribune's publishers). It showed a round-shouldered, straw-hatted young man with a cigaret hanging from his mouth smirking at Mr. and Mrs. Rudolf Gold, interviewing them about their young daughter Vivian and their nephew Harry Lore who had just been murdered and burned with another young couple by three fiends (one a big Negro) in Ypsilanti, Mich. (TIME, Aug. 24).—ED.