Dingy Storyteller

(3 of 5)

The Negro. After the Civil War no one, says McWilliams, "could ... see a connection" between the old Indian problem and the new Negro problem. War weariness, desire for reconciliation between the North and South, eagerness to capture the white vote in the South, the determination of Northern industrialists to develop Southern industries—these factors led Northerners to accept the dogma that "the South will solve its own problem." The Supreme Court, through several decisions adverse to Negro rights, "opened the door to the South to establish a system of white supremacy . . . effectively tied the hands of Congress." By "a pretense of legality" discrimination against Negroes was enforced by law throughout the South, the Negro disfranchised and segregated. It became fashionable for Northerners to excuse their compromise through "scientific" theories of the Negro's unfitness for suffrage, his inborn racial inferiority.

The Other Minorities. Better off, from a racial standpoint, were the Hawaiians. In their Islands miscegenation was common; even today racial prejudice operates mainly in awarding "preferred positions" in industry to whites. But on the mainland Hawaiians shared in the disastrous spread of color consciousness that was embracing yellow and brown immigrants alike. Shortly before the Boxer Rebellion (1900), when America was "holding China accountable, in the highest degree, for the protection of American life and property in the Orient," the U.S. Congress was progressing "from vinegar to vitriol" in anti-Chinese legislation. Congress denied bail to Chinese in habeas corpus cases, refused to allow Chinese in America to bring their alien wives into the U.S., finally forbade all immigration and naturalization of Chinese. "It is," says McWilliams, ". . . almost incredible that we have a single friend in China today."

The same story, varying in detail but always with the common denominator of race prejudice and sectional pressures, is told by McWilliams in chapters on Filipinos, Puerto Ricans, Mexicans, Hindus, Japanese, Koreans. The facts, he is careful to explain, are not only morally shocking, but invidious from a practical point of view. "The South has received only about 6.3% of [war] contracts" largely because its industry will not make proper use of Negro labor. The huge expense required for separate schools, waiting rooms, toilets, schoolbooks, even stepping-boxes for getting on and off trains, McWilliams calls an economic scandal in our industrialized lives.