The color line in Ohio

Front matter

PUBLISHED UNDER THE DIRECTION OF THE DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY

V

THE

Preface

Eight years ago while a student doing post-graduate work in Harvard University, I received from Professor Albert P>ushnell Hart the inspiration to investigate the feeling of the people of the North toward the negroes living amongst them. I wrote out at first a brief story of the treatment of the negroes in my home town in Ohio. At the suggestion of Professor Hart this article was submitted to The Independent and published. Soon it was copied in scores of newspapers throughout the country, giving evidence that the treatment of the negroes was of great interest to the American people.

From the publication of the above article until the present time I have been a student of this particular phase of the negro question. For five years I have been carrying on my investigations under the supervision of Professor Claude H. Van Tyne, of the department of History in the University of Michigan. For the history of the feeling against the negro I have had recourse to many good libraries, the best of which

I found to be the Ohio State Library at Columbus, Ohio, in which I spent many profitable weeks. For the knowledge of present day conditions I have depended upon an original or "first-hand" investigation, travelling about for months and interviewing many hundreds of white and colored men.

The book is divided into two parts, Part I giving the history of the feeling toward the negro, and Part

II showing present day conditions. Either part may be read first. The casual reader will probably find more interest in the book if he reads Part II first .

In these pages there will be found, I hope, no defense of race prejudice or sentimental regard for the negroes. The book will portray conditions only, and for this reason will appeal for its readers to a wider

X public. The author of this book is descended on his mother's side from the Pennsylvania Dutch and on his father's side from Virginia English. He was born and brought up on the north bank of the Ohio River, while many of his relatives lived just across the river in "Dixie Land," where he often visited- He is a native of the great State of Ohio which led in the anti-slavery crusade, but which now in its treatment of the liberated blacks is like so many of the other Northern States— in a way to be developed in the following

pages.

For these and other reasons the author hopes to be able to narrate facts about the treatment of the negro in the North without a partisan temper or a biased mind.

I am indebted to hundreds of people in various parts of the States of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois and Michigan, for the information in this book. But I desire to express my special obligations to Professor A. B. Hart of Harvard University for getting me started on the work, to Professor U. B. Phillips, of the University of Michigan, for reading the proof and making many valuable suggestions, to Mr. C. B. Galbreath, of the Ohio State Library for most courteous treatment during the time spent with him in the summer of 1909, to my wife for the many hours spent in tedious work upon the maps, and for many most valuable suggestions, and to The Independent, of New York City, for the privilege of incorporating in this book several articles written by the author and published in that excellent magazine during the last few years. To Profess. >r ( Maude H. Van Tyne, of the University of Michigan, who has for live years encouraged me at every step of the way but who has not been content with anything but what he considered thorough, I acknowledge my deepest obligations.

Frank U. Quillin.

Galesburg, Illinois, September, 1912.

THE HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT.

Chapter I

FEELING TOWARD THE NEGRO SHOWN IN THE CONSTITU- TIONAL CONVENTION, 1802..

The first Ohio Constitutional Convention — Motions regarding the status of free negroes — Votes for and against negro rights — The question of introducing slavery — Slavery prohibited — Little evidence of sectional vote — Race prejudice evident.

Chapter II Legal Status Of Negro, 1802 — 1849

Status of negro in the State constitution — First Black Laws passed— Law of 1807; negroes forbidden to enter State, etc.— Debarred from serving in militia — Forbidden to sit on juries — Shut out from school privileges — Summary of Black Laws — Supreme Court decisions affecting negroes — Why the Black Laws were passed — The number of negroes entering Ohio — Report of legislative committee on the negro question, 1832 — Enforcement of the Black Laws- Great expulsion of negroes from Cincinnati, 182!) — Conclusion.

x ji THE COLOR LINE IN OHIO

Chapter III. Repeal Oe The Black Laws, 1849

The negro question in Ohio before 1830 — Antislavery's defense of free negroes — Petitions to Legislature; for repeal of Black Laws — Repeal accomplished, 1840 — Reasons for the repeal — W. H. Seward's speech in Cleveland, 1848— Attitude of the Freest »il party — Make-up of the State Legislature — Balance of power held by two men — The "deal" made by these men and the Democratic party — The repeal not in accord with the popular will — Summary.

Chapter IV. Social Position Of Negro, 1802 — 1849

Negroes generally regarded "as an excrescence on the body politic" — William Jay's discussion of free negro status in the United States — Attitude of the people of Ohio toward schooling for negroes — School troubles in Cincinnati — Oberlin College and its attitude on the question — Opposition to "nigger schools" throughout the State — Negroes denied religious privileges — No protest by colored people — Committee report on condition of negroes in Cincinnati in 1834 — Negroes denied the right of petitioning the Legislature — Slaves actually held in Ohio — White men's views of racial discriminations — Report of legislative committee, 1827 — Editorial opinion — Report of legislative committee, 1832 — The expression of a justice of the Supreme Court of the State — Summary.

Chapter V

PEELING TOWARD THE NEUltO AS EXPUESSE1) IX THE CON- STITUTIONAL CONVENTION, 1 S.">() — 1851.

The growth of race prejudice — Proceedings of the Convention as expressing public opinion toward the negro — Petitions, number and kinds — Petitions on

CONTENTS xiii

behalf of the negroes bitterly assailed — A typical petition — Division of Ohio into a "North" and a "South' 1 — Comparison of negro types and numbers in the two sections — Consequences — Votes in the convention upon motions regarding negroes — (1) To enroll them in the State militia— (2) To give them the suffrage — (3) To throw open public schools to white and black children on equal terms-

Chapter VI

Legal Status of negro in 1850 — New school law of 1853 — Supreme Court decisions upon this — Chief Justice Peck on the situation as regards the negro — Suit of colored boy for remedy, 1870 — A similar suit in a Federal Court, 1881 — New enactment throwing Public schools open to whites and blacks, 1887 — Reception of this law in the State — Colored schools retained by many towns in spite of the law — The struggle for negro suffrage — Attitude of the Legislature in 1859 — Attitude of the Democratic party, 1865 — The popular vote, 1807, upon granting negro suffrage — Action upon the proposed Fourteenth Amendment to the Federal Constitution — The effect of the amendment in Ohio — Act of 1884 securing equal rights to the negro.

Chapter VII. Social Status, 1850 — 1912

"Equal rights" on the statute books and "equal rights" in actual life — A judge refuses a colored preacher a license to perform marriages — A colored woman ejected from street car in Cincinnati, 1859, solely on account of color — Wilberfore College burned to the ground by negro haters — Convention of colored people of Ohio, 1873, and their resolutions — Colored man put up for office to appease his race — A colored

XIV boy tries to join a company of cadets in a Columbus school — Colored man refused admittance to certain section of theatre in Columbus — He assaults the doorkeeper — City Council refuses to prohibit discriminations — A picture of race-prejudice in one of the smaller towns of the State — Negro Lynchings in Ohio — In Adams County, 1856, 189-1— In Crawford County, 1882, — At Washington Court House, Fayette County, 1894,— In Clermont County, 1895,— At Urbana, Champaign County, 1897, — The Akron race riot, 1900 — The Springfield race riots and lynchings — The refusal of the white people to give "equal rights" to negroes — Attempts of colored people to collect damages as provided for in the equal rights act of 1884 — Defeated by the State Supreme Court — Conclusion.

Chapter I— Cincinnati

Purpose and method of this inquiry — The equalrights law a dead letter in Cincinnati — Physicians — The fire department — Parks, hotels and restaurants — Pullman cars — The Y. M. C. A. — Theatres — The realestate market — Labor unions — The industrial status of negroes, and the reasons therefor.

Chapter Vi— Syracuse, A Negro-hating Small Town

Negroes prohibited from spending a night in Syracuse — The town's reputation — A negro family on the outskirts — A son and daughter in school — The exclusion of a would-be negro resident — Ohio town conditions in general — Feeling in the state as a whole.

xv i THE COLOR LINE IN OHIO

MAPS.

PAGE

No. 2 — Votes in Constitutional Convention of

1802 on Status of Negroes 19

No. 5 — Votes in Constitutional Convention of

1850-'51 on Status of Negroes 75

No. G — Votes by Counties in 1807 on Giving Suffrage to Negroes 100

INTRODUCTION.

This book was written as the fruit of an investigation of race relations in the history of Ohio. It contains generalizations which I consider important and which at the time I reached them I thought were original contributions as well as independent conclusions. They had been forced upon me by the weight of the facts revealed by my own investigations in Ohio, and were not obtained from the works of oilier writers. One of the readers of my manuscript, a Southern gentleman, who had made an extensive study of the race question kindly pointed out that many of my conclusions were familiar to the special students of the negro problem. I then looked more deeply into the literature bearing upon the larger phases of race relations. Among other works, I read a book written by a Southerner living in the "black belt," a book entitled Studies in the American Race Problem by Alfred Holt Stone, which not only contains my "important conclusions" but which emphasizes them as his important conclusions; he a planter in the far Southern State of Mississippi and I a school-master in the most northern State of the Northwest Territory ; he, after fifteen years' study of the relation of the white and colored races throughout America, and I after studying for several years the feeling between the races in one of the largest of the Northern States. come to these conclusions: 1. That the prejudice of the white man against the negro increases according to the growth of the negro population; 2. Thai the average negro is worse off in the North than in the South because he is here so completely shut out from the more advantageous industrial opportunities; 3. That social equality between the races in the North as well as in the South is a myth; 4. That civil rights for whites and negroes in the North are the same technically, but that actual discriminations are just as numerous as in any Southern State; 5. That there is much more prejudice against the negro race today than there was at the close of the Civil War ; 6. That it is essential to the Northern man, if he would really know the truth of his own section, to get it from the lips and hearts of the colored people themselves.

Although I have been disillusioned as to some of my conclusions being discoveries I am more than satisfied for the sake of truth and harmony to find that the same conclusions have been arrived at by another, and he a Southerner. The conclusions arrived at by such independent investigations must necessarrily have greater significance for those who desire a mutual understanding between the North and the South on this important race question. As Mr. Stone says, "There would be precious little room for misunderstanding between us here, if each of us were only more thoroughly acquainted with his own and the other's ground." 1 "We would do well to sweep our own doorsteps before calling attention to the condition of our neighbor's. It is a fundamental principle of every proceeding in equity that the complainant come into court with clean hands." 2

Before proceeding with the discussion of prejudice in the abstract let us Northerners "sweep our own doorsteps," let us "come into court with clean hands." A picture drawn by another Southern writer to show racial discriminations in the South requires but slight retouching to portray conditions in Ohio. Here the public places of honor and profit, which are open to every white man, have been and are closed to the black man as by iron doors. In the learned professions, in the direction of corporate enterprises and important industrial agencies, in the higher industrial and mechanical occupations, even in the factories and

INTRODUCTION 3

workshops, where some small degree of skill and intelligence is required of the operatives, he has had and now has no standing or place whatever among white men. As a professor, teacher, merchant, lawyer, physician, journalist, he receives some little countenance and patronage from his own race, and he looks for no other ; porter, drayman, hod-carrier, coachman, butler, barber, cook or waiter, he may be at pleasure, and find service; but when in touch with the whites it is ever the service of the inferior to the superior that is exacted from him.

The negro is admitted to some hotels and other public resorts; but his place is on his feet while there, or is fixed apart by some special provision in his behalf. He cannot sit at the table, public or private, with a white man. If he attends the white man's church (which he seldom does), he is assigned a place where he will have much more space than he really needs for comfort. He has no seat in the congregation and none at the communion table. He is excluded without ceremony from the councils of the laity. He is sexton and organ-blower and bell-ringer. His position in the household of faith is the same as in the household of fashion, — that of a door-keeper and servitor. In the theater and the circus, the camp-meeting and the court-room, the hospital and the prison, the cemetery and the potter's field, his place is his alone, and is readily located. Wherever he goes or stays, works or worships, plays or suffers, lives or dies, the lines are drawn sharply around and about him, and there is no transgressing them — from his side.

The two races have been and are utterly separated. As the Cincinnati (Ohio) Commercial Gazette of June 15, 1889, said : "The color-line is everywhere. It is in every church. It is in society. It is in politics. And there is no class that knows this better than the colored people There may be a sentiment in favor of wiping out the color-line, but it is not honest."

Exceptions there are to all the above restrictions on the negroes, but we are concerned not with exceptions but with general conditions, — with the views of the white people in general toward the negroes dwelling in their midst, and with the adjustments resulting.

Some readers will say that this picture is overdrawn, others will say that it is wholly untrue. I was born and reared in Ohio. I love her as I love no other State, and I have no reason whatever for misrepresenting her. I shall give the facts as I found them.

Ohio is not alone among the Northern States in her discriminations against the negro race. "There is not a State in the Union, from Massachusetts to California, which through some element of its population, does not today, somewhere within its borders, in some way discriminate against the negro race. The laws and customs of every State, from the beginning until this hour, have been influenced by the factor of the relative numerical strength of the negro." 3 As Mr. Stone goes on to say, wherever the negro population increases in numbers there you may find the discriminations also increasing. Ohio is but typical of all the Northern States and for this reason I entitle this book Tli e Color Line In Ohio, a History of Race Prejudice in a Typical Northern State.

"On the evening of December 17, 1855, there assembled a gathering of the colored citizens of the city of Boston to do honor to a member of their race. The man was William C. Nell. The occasion was the presentation to him of a testimonial of appreciation of his labors in behalf of the removal of the color line from the public schools of Boston. The e\ent commemorated the crowning achievement of a purpose formed and work begun some twenty-six years before. It marked the close of a quarter century of patient and unremitting struggle with established law and custom. The meeting was made memorable by the pres-

INTRODUCTION 5

ence of such men as Wendell Phillips and William Lloyd Garrison, who rejoiced with their colored brethren that "the prejudice against color was dying out." This was the keynote of all the addresses made — the faith that the final surrender of this long-stormed citadel marked the passing of the prejudice of race.

"Fifty-two years later, in November, 1907, a great concourse of Boston's colored citizens assembled in Faneuil Hall to protest against the steady and wide increase of race prejudice in America. The meeting was addressed by the gray-haired son of the great abolitionist, in tones which were far from sounding an echo of the hopeful, long forgotten words of his father." 4

It was not in the South that one of the most sensitive and most cultured men identified with the negro race, W. E. DuBois, was first made to realize that he "was different from the others." It was away up in the hills of New England where he was made to feel the presence of "the shadow of the veil,'' 3 when a white girl schoolmate refused his card with a significant glance.

In 1842 in the State of Massachusetts we find negroes excluded altogther from the cars on the New Bedford Traction Railroad. 6 In 1905 in the same State we find a clause in the warrant for the "town meeting" of Marion, providing for a vote on the question of employing only white men on town work. 7 In a town of northern Indiana in 1907 the proprietor of the leading hotel permitted a negro to sit down at the table with white customers, and as a result the travelling men and others boycotted the hotel and it was forced to close. In a contribution to a leading negr< i magazine a Southern negro in relating his experiences

4 Stone, American Race Problem, 211-212. G DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk, 2.

Samuel J. May, Some Recollections of our Anti-Slavery Conflict, 399. Quoted by Stone, American Race Problem, 67.

in a Northern university says that he found "not an ounce more of opposition" from Southern than from Northern students, but describes the former as more "frank" and the latter more "secretive" in their social atitudes. 8 In virtually all the States of the North there are cities which provide for the separate education of the black and white children. President Emeritus Eliot, of Harvard, says, "In Northern towns, where negro children are proportionally numerous there is just the same tendency and desire to separate them from the whites as there is in the South. This separation may be effected by public regulations, but, if not, it will be effected by white parents procuring the transfer of their children to schools where negroes are few." 9

Many things might be mentioned here to show the truth of Mr. Stone's statements when he says, "A contention that the negro is treated as an equal in the North is not often made by sensible men, and it cannot be supported by facts. It is idle to point to a mulatto upon whom Harvard has conferred a degree, or to one whom a G.A.R. post has elected its commander, and say to the world : 'Here we tolerate no racial discriminations.' The negro knows better, whether he considers the discrimination in either its social, political or economic aspect." 10

Having taken this hasty view of the social position of the negro in the North let us now turn to the industrial phase of his life in this section, and compare it with his treatment in the South. It has often been stated by people in the North that the negro is not given a fair industrial opportunity in the South. The negroes themselves are almost unanimous in saying that lack of industrial opportunity is found in the

8 William Pickens, The Voice of the Negro, April, 1905, pp. 235, 236. Quoted by Stone in American Race Problem, 23.

" flic Work and Influence of Hampton, 1904, p. 9. Quoted by Stone, American Race Problem, 68.

INTRODUCTION 7

North more than in the South because the Northerners, especially trades-union people, will not think of working with them. As the negroes are the ones that hear the burdens of this prejudice it would seem that they ought to know whereof they speak. Booker T. Washington, in a plea for industrial education and opportunity, says : "No one can fully appreciate what I am saying who has not walked the streets of a Northern city day after day seeking employment, only to find every door closed against him on account of his color, except in menial service." 11 On the other hand, he says : "Whatever other sins the South may be called upon to bear, when it comes to business, pure and simple, it is in the South that the negro is given a man's chance in the commercial world." 1 "

The Bulletin of the Inter-Municipal Committee on Household Research is authority for the statement that the Boston Reform League has been unable to secure an equal chance for colored girls in obtaining employment, aud cannot secure places for more than half who apply. "Negroes who specialize in housework duplicate the experience of a colored butler for whom the league tried for three months to find a place, but without success. He was neat in his person and good looking, and was highly recommended. He stated that he had answered, in all, two hundred advertisements, but he was invariably refused the position simply because he was a colored man. It is not surprising, therefore, that on leaving Boston to return to New York, he said: 'These Boston people beat me. They will have mass-meetings and raise money to help Mr. Washington educate the miggers' down South, but they will let a decent Northerner starve before they will give him a chance to earn an honest living." 13

"Washington, Future of the American Negro, 76.

12 Washington, Up From Slavery, 219-220.

13 Bulletin, New York City, May 1905, p. 15. Quoted by Stone, American Race Problem, 161.

Dr. William N. D. Berry, for many years pastor of a Colored Congregational Church in Springfield, Mass., says that 86 per cent of the colored labor in his city on January 1, 1905, was confined to the lower strata of industry, because the large number fitted for other occupations were "debarred by pure race prejudice," which has closed the door of industrial opportunity against these men as a class," they suffering "a merciless industrial ostracism which shuts out the capapble and worthy negro because God chose to create him black." And Dr. Berry says that his study of conditions in Springfield should be "of more than local significance, inasmuch as the situation here in Springfield is fairly typical of the black man's condition throughout the North." 14

Dr. Du Bois in The Philadelphia Negro says, "It is a paradox of the times that young men and women from some of the best negro families of the city . . have actually had to go to the South to get work, if they wished to be aught but chambermaids and bootblacks." 15

The one great primal right of man is the right to labor and to live ; the right to have the proper wage of skill; the right to toil wherever human needs make work for human hands. Here is the foundation upon which the family is reared. This is the "door of hope," upon whose closing follow idleness and crime, destitution and vice, vagrancy and death, for the masses of the race. The South has been much accused of closing the "door of hope" to the negroes. According to the testimony of the sufferers themselves we of the North are surely far from guiltless in this respect in our relations with them.

The first five chapters of this book will give a picof the status of the negro in Ohio before the Civil War, with especial attention to the legal obstacles put in his

" Springfield Weekly Republican, Feb. 10, 1905. u The Philadelphia Negro 1899, pp. 395"396.

INTRODUCTION 9

way to keep hiin out of the State and to keep hiin down after he once got into the State. These obstacles were the laws commonly known as the "Black Laws." These laws were found in every Northern State but were of varying degrees of rigor. They segregated the negroes as an inferior class under grave social, civil, and political disabilities. Without going into details, it may be said that in the Northwest free negroes could not testify against a white, serve on juries, vote, or send their children to the public schools ; they were forbidden, in some cases, to enter the State without giving bonds against tneir becoming paupers. Indiana in 1S51 by an enormous majority, the vote standing 108,513 to 20,951, decreed that all negroes should be excluded from coming into the State. 10 Illinois on June 17, 1862, gave a majority of 100,590 out of a total of 213, 202 votes cast on the proposition, iu favor of the continued exclusion of the negro from Illinois. Other States of the North excluded the negro and none of them wanted him.

Suffrage was denied to the negro in almost all the Northern States before the Civil War. When the Fifteenth Amendment was adopted in 1870 the negro could vote nowhere in the United States except in New York and five of the New England States. Connecticut, Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Colorado in 1805 voted on the question of giving the franchise to negroes, and in each case it was decided in the negative

Many things more might be mentioned here, such as the treatment of the negroes in New York City during the draft riots of 1863 and the Springfield, Illinois, race riots of very recent years, to show that in the North generally there has been and still is the same race prejudice as in the State of Ohio with which this book is particularly concerned. With the author of Studies in the American Race Problem I believe

10 Indiana Statesman, Sept. 3, 1851.

that "the people of this country cannot forever misunderstand each other over this racial problem, — and in all this I hold no firmer conviction than that the greatest beneficiary of a better knowledge of each other bv American white men will be the American negro." In this book I mean to take no attitude favoring North or South, white man or black man, but I endeavor to take the attitude of the scholar seeking truth for truth's sake. Sometimes this truth will make the white man blush, and sometimes it will make the colored man hang his head. But in both cases the final result must for many reasons be beneficial. The joy and satisfaction expressed by so many of the colored people whom I interviewed over the prospect of having the whole truth revealed by a writer of the white race furnished the biggest surprise of my whole investigation. The following excerpts from letters written to the author by Mr. F. D. Patterson, a large and prosperous carriage manufacturer of Greenfield, Ohio, and a graduate of the Ohio State University, will show the attitude of the better class of the negro race: "If it is encouragement to you to know that your work is not only appreciated by us but is also needed by our entire State and Nation, black and white, you have every reason to feel encouraged. The man who can tell the whole truth, the real truth, and get it read, is the one we most need now. We think sometimes that writers on both sides shrink from the whole truth. Men of our race simply will not see and appreciate our own shortcomings and limitations, and the undoubted "drag" we are at this present time. A few even go further like Mr. Washington and then we "blush." Men of your race insist on confusing the issue in order that they may not see. It is an unpleasant duty to be sure you have before you, but it is necessary. Indeed, it is an opportunity for your race that only a few such men as yourself will succeed

INTRODUCTION n

in saving and improving for your race. The man who strips the subject -'naked' and tells the truth is the man. AVe will all catch up with him in a few years and will appreciate him then if not now. We desire one-half dozen copies of your book."