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About The Omaha guide. (Omaha, Neb.) 1927-19?? | View Entire Issue (Nov. 2, 1935)
I^r—* I Ll>—* I Hr—I Ur-* | Hr—I git—I 111—I IM—1 UCJ HU U» HU MT « HU mwj m. ■ »*—• — » ■ . . EDITORIALS . . ran iran ran n=ni iF>n n=n [fsi r=h r?=n rpn irfi 11=11 rFm^TUPn rpn fpn/fFn^’n/rmfr’fLfauaLraLrai rF^n FTua THE OMAHA GUIDE Published every Saturday nt 24618-20 Grant Street., Omaha, Nebraska Phone WEbster 1750 GAINES T. BRADFORD, - - Editor and Manager -I Entered as Second Glass Matter March 15, 1927, at the Post Of fice at Omaha, Neb., undertheActof Congress of March 3, 1879. TERMS OF SUBSCRIPTION $2.00 PER YEAR Race prejudice must go. The Fatherhood of God and the Brotherhood of Man must prevail. These are the only priciples which will stand the acid test of good citizenship in time of peace, war and death. Omaha, Nebraska. Saturday, November 2 ,1935 FOUR HOMES WAITING FOR THEIR BOYS (Continued from last week) “1 know you all up there are doing all you can for our boys. And I hope you keep right on doing it until they are free with us again. Though I don't know what they are corn ing back to.” CUT OFF FROM RELIEF Mrs. Williams lives in this rumbling old house with her sister and her children, and a lodger and her children. She was completely cut off the relief while she was sick, and stayed with Mother Patterson who took her in and eared for her. The children stayed with her sister. They wouldn’t give her anything until she went hack to her children .they told her. “Imagine that, letting on that 1 abandoned my children or something. .Just so they could put more money in their own pockets. I know they do. They just ran a man out of town for telling on them. They do all us people outol' our relief money and put it in their own pocket. They don’t even deny it very hard. Because the papers and reports they send on to the government tell what they spent all the money they got for the relief and nobody except us knows the difference. “I went to the relief lady and fought and finally, four weeks ago, she put me hack on after 1 came here. Yes, 1 gel $1.50 a week for me and all the children. That's all. She knows I don’t pay my sister any rent. So all I get is that $1.50 and I had to go fight for the last one, too. She didn’t send it out when it was supposed to come. PRISONERS RELIEF OF I. E. D. HELPS “If it wasn’t for the money you all send me every month we’il all be starved to death. We just about get enough to eat to keep alive on now. I was hoping to save enough money to get to see Eugene, but I couldn’t with the doctor and the medi cine 1 had to get, and feel that I was taking the food out of the mouths of my children when I did it.” Mrs. Williams has six children besides Eugene. The littlest is Christine. She has a tiny, heart-shaped face, and large, sail eyes like her mother’s. After her comes Dorothy and then three boys, Fred aud Junior and Robert, who is thirteen now. Just the size of Etigene when he left home ,und the same age. “lie looks so much like I remember Eugene, too,’’ Mrs. Williams said. Then there’s Ophelia, age 15. Ophelia is a big girl who never smiles She doesn't get a chance to smile. She’s working all the time. Especially now that her mother is sick. She has to cook and wash and try to keep the children clean .though that is an im possible task. All around the house is dust and filth. The chil dren run around half-naked and bare footed, in clouds of gray dust. There’s no place for them to sit except on the bare ground. They simply can’t keep clean. And sd Ophelia stands over the tub, aud scrubs awny ut the rags. “And I bet if she was a boy she’d be off just like he was,’’ said Mrs. A\ illiams. “That child is so unhappy. Like me when I was her age, work and work and nothing else, and hardly enough to eat, and no decent clothes. 1 don’t blame Eugene for going off. Maybe be would have found work further on— so he could grow up decent and help us all. “Maybe when lie’s free he’ll be able to take all of us away from this here—’’ The sweep of her hand embraced the blackened boards of the porch, the chairs that all missed a leg or a back or a seat, the road banked by mountains of junk and garbage, the totter ing old houses, and the ragged children. Maybe soon— “Ada, I’m gonna tell my mother you waa talking to a white lady all day loug.’’ This belligerent statement was made by a mean looking red-headed youngster to Mrs. Ada Wright, moth er of Roy and Andy, two of the Scottsboro boys in the kitchen of the “white-folks house’’ she works at. Among her many duties which include scrubbing the large house, washing, and doing all the cooking is the care of this boy and his little sister. They have a white nurse to look after them. But they don’t Jike her, and why should she work when she can get Mrs. Wright to fetch and carry for her, while she sits out on the shady porch erdering her around. The lady of the hou^e is away on business most of the day. In 1932, Mrs. Ada Wright Left the same job at the invita tion of the international Labor Defense and traveled through twenty-six countries of Europe. Wherever she went, if she was not put in jail or immediately deported by the police, she was greeted by huge crowds of workers, who cheered her iu more than a 'dozen different languages iuid pledged to help her win freedom for her two sous and all the other Scottsboro boys. * - - * ACCLAIMED BY CROWDS In Germany, she spoke to a mass gathering of 150,000 in the Lustgarten in Berlin. In Paris, she was acclaimed by tens of thousands. In the Soviet Union at the W'orld Congress of o the International Labor Defense, Mrs. Wright was a guest of honor. To millions she became a symbol of an oppressed, black skinned people—a mother whose children are threatened with murder and lynching so that a whole nation can be “kept in its place’’ for plunder and robbery. Back in Chattanooga, Tennessee, Mrs. Ada Wright is being pushed back “into her place.” She has to support herself and her baby Lucille, who is 13 years old. Her married daughters have troubles of their own. Mother Wright and Lucille move back and forth, staying with each of them part of the time. Beatrice, the oldest daughter .lives in the house the “boys’ livid in and grew up in. It’s just beyond the tracks. All day long and far into the night trains passing over those steel rails could beckon to the hoys carrying promises of work and plenty further on yonder, somewhere. Roy and Andy Wright and their friends Haywood Patter son and Eugene Williams must have been tempted by those shiny roads for years. At home—only proverty and hunger and no work no matter how hard you tried. So there was only hope left. And one fine morning the four hoys went off to gether on those tracks and got as far as Scottsboro, Alabama, and a lynch sentence to death. STARVATION WAGES Mrs. Wright thinks of her boys all the time while she goes about her work in the fine “white folks” house way out in a suburb called St. Elmo. Its wide clean streets are shaded by the sides of Lookout Mountain from the intense heat of the southern sun. She gets $5 a week for seven days work from seven in the morning to seven at night. It costs her a dollar a week in bus fare to get out there every1 day. That leaves $4 a week for her an<l Lucille—which would mean starvation but for the funds supplementing it from the International Labor Defense. Mother Wright smiles as she works. She is full of hope. She saw all those thousands of people all over the world who are ready to help her boys. “Sure, I keep cheerful, ’ she said as she pulled her tired hands out of the dish pan and wiped them on her apron. “I try not to worry about the boys. I know they have plenty of friends thinking for them and doing for them every minute they are In jail, it makes it easier as the months go by to know that.” Mother Patterson lives in Chattanooga too. Right near the tracks. Her little wooden house is us neat as a pin. Its mantel pieces are decorated with pictures of Haywood taken at his three trials and of crowds and meetings held for Seottsboro dcnfen.se. In the back of her house is a small garden in which she works all day long raising a good part of the food the Patterson family gets to eut. Claude Patterson, Hey wood's father, a slight wiry man works in the railroad shops. Long time ago he used to make $30 or $40 a week. But five years ago things began to get bad and he got less and less and hunger found its way into the little household. The older daughters had gone off and got married, but the young ones—Heywood was the oldest of them—were left at home and Heywood want ed to help them. That is why he went off with his friends hunting work. WAITS FOR HER BOY Mother Patterson never has a waking moment without thinking of her boy. His wide eyes look down on her from every corner of the house. She smiles up at him and tries not to weep when she thinks of him locked up in jail these four and a half years. She works hard all day long but she doesn’t mind it. She even found time to nurse Mother Williams through a terrible sickness that lasted for months, earing for her until she was able to go home to her six little children. Mother Patterson has not losj, hope. She knows all the people she spoke to at all those meetings from coast to coast will do all they can to free her boy. She does not fear the new trial that’s coming—though her kind eyes flash when she talks about “that Victoria Price” and the new lying warrants she just swore out in Seottsboro against those children. She is waiting bravely for the day when she can take down all those pictures off the walls, because her boy, her Haywood, will be home again where he belongs. A RACIAL DANGER There is one phase of the ltalian-Ethiopain struggle that lias received much less notice than it deserves. That phase— which, in the long view, may become the most important and most potentially dangerous of all the phases—is the inter-racial complications that may arise from Italy’s imperial ambitions. Here is the way it is expressed by the famed American Negro leader, educator, uml writer, W. E. 1?. Hu Bois, in the October issue of Foreign Affairs: “The probabilities are that Italy . . . will subdue Ethiopia. If this happens, it will be a costly victory, both for Italy and the white world—India, China and Japan, Africa in Africa and in America, ami all the South Seas and Indian America—all that vest mass of men who have felt the oppression and insults, the slavery and exploitation of white folks, will say: ‘1 told you sol There is no faith in them even toward each other. They do not believe in Christianity and they will never voluntarily recognize the essential equality of human beings or surrender the idea of dominating the majority of men for their own selfish ends. Japan was right. The only path to freedom and equality is force, and force to the uttermost.' * ' Mr. Hu Bois' allusion to China and Japan involves another point that is not so well understood at it should be. When Japan started her invasion of Manchuria a few years ago, the white nations seemed to be solidly on the side of China. Japan was called an outlaw among nations, was held to be a menace to the peace of the world. Yet a legion of white observers have returned from the orient since, bringing the news that China today feels more friendly to the Japanese who tried—and are still trying—to wrest from her a large share of her territory, than she does toward the English, the Americans, the Germans, the Italians and others. Results of that has been something approaching a Concord between Tokyo and Nanking govern ments. Whites have definitely “lost face” in China—they are mistrusted, disliked, feared. The Chinese believe they talk much, make fine promises, and then do nothing. They believe that the sole white ambition is to exploit the resources, human and ma" terial ,of the black and yellow peoples. The situation is particularly serious to England. If, as Mr. Du Bois also pointed out, an understanding between China and Japan closes Asia to white “aggression”, India need no longer hesitate between passive resistance and open rebellion. India is a mighty muscle in the body of the British Empire. Her millions of natives are governed by a few thousand whites. What an Indian revolt would mean can only be conjectured—but the sun that finally set on it would be red indeed. So it goes throughout all the colonies ofblackpeoples governed by Europeans—in British, French and Italian Someliland, in Kenya Colony, else where in Africa and South America. Nothing is more horrible, more dangerous ,more corrupting to tre orderly poscesses of civilization than race warfare. The great majority of the earth's population is colored, and a great majority of these colored people are dominated by whites. If es Italy-Ethiopian disorder leads to a decisive split between the two great groups, it will be one of the most important events in the history of the world—an event that, over a period of many years, perhaps, centuries, can change all the maps, and remake the eart hto a different plan. SANCTIONS League of Nations Sanctions against Italy will probably be in force by the time this is read. First sanctions will be economic, and will take the following forms among others: Forbid the opening of credit to Italy in any foreign country, h ordkl authorization of an Italian bond issue in any foreign country. Forbid opening of bank credit to Italy in any League nation agreeing to the sanctions. Forbid opening of normal commercial credits—a prohibition which, it is said, would bring about an almost complete stoppage of Italian trade. In brief, the canctions would be designed to paralyze Italy’s import and export business. Only three League nations voted against the sanctions and said they would not obey them—Albania and Hungary, which are relatively unimportant, and Austria, which, due to geo graphical position, is very important. Austria connects Italy with Germany, which is no longer a member of the League. Thus, goods Italy needs can be bought in Germany, transported across Austria, largely nullifying League sanctions. The League, which is now being led by England, could of course cure that by military action—something that would mean war. Many still believe that nothing will be really settled until that war occurs. THE WAY OUT (By Loren Miller) THEY DIE IN BED In the first place I don’t be' lliteve that Mussolini’s son-in daw is flying over the Ethiop ian lines dropping bombs. Fly ers sometimes get shot down and dictators, generals, and their kinsfolk don’t get killed in action ;they die in bed. I suspect that the story was coo,ted up by some of Musso lini’s hired me nin order to give the folks at home a thrill. Pro bably .they didn't intend to do it, but their little yarn provides an excellent object lesson for j Negroes. The story goes that the son- , iirlaw got his idea of bombing! women and children, from watching the Japanese perform a similar trick when they were reducing Manchuria to the sta tus of a vassal. It happened that the Chinese were almost as devoid of mod ern arms as are the Ethiopians, Japan had modern weapons of death as does Italy. Even the son-in-law of a dictator could mardly fail to get such an ob vious point. Remember Manchuria The parallel doesn’t end there. Those woh recall the Manchuri aincident will re member that the Japanese did n’t quite Rave the nerve to an nex the large part of China that they conquered. Instead, ; the Japanese looked around J until they found a Mr. Henry Pu Yi. i Mr. Pu Yi was living in ex tended obscurity at the time, but the Japanese took him to Tokio, dressed him in a top hat an dacro wn and made him em peror o f Manchuoko. He's do ing nicely on the job now, thank you. Mussolini got that idea too. Reports have it that he has found an equally obscure Ethi-1 opiau lord who has been in flated to the rank of emperor of that part of the country the Italians have been able to con quer. My geneologists report that the gentleman is a blood relative of a number of our own Uncle Toms. In The Same Boat I hope to have more to re" port on that score later, but for the present, I only want to point out that Japan is as mili taristic as Italy and that it is no more averse to conquering weaker nations of colored peo ples. I know that will be an awful blow to those who have been prating about Japanese love of all colored peoples, but I’m not responsible for facts; the best I can do is to report them. Japan an dltaly have been in the same boat for some time Both nations are ruled by little cliques of militarists who build their war machines at the ex pense of the people. It costs money to equip arm" es and furnish navies and the working people have to foot the bill. In both Ital yand Japan, iving standards of the people ire kept low to give the rich a *hance to enjoy luxury. No Copyright I understand that there has been some grumbling about the lisparity in the standards of iving between rich and poor in both nations. In both instances the militar sts have sought to stay the dis rontent by telling their people that greater glories and better ■ standards of living depend on Foreign conquest. The Japanese ■ rulers thought of it first, but there’s no copyright on ideas. Mr. Mussolini never did much original thinking anyhow. Unhappily, both Japanese and Italian militarists have ■ found their way out attacking ■ people whom we call colored, i That’s only an incident; either i or both, would have attacked < KELLY MILLER SAYS SOCIAL PRETENTIONS AMONG NEGROES Roughly speaking, society is divided into three classes—the upper ,the middle ami the low er. Only those belong to the upper class who are able to live, educate their children and give them a footing in life with out working for a living, and are wholly free from the an xieties of a livelihood. The mid dle class is composed of men in professions, politics, busi ness, commerce and the higher ranks of the technical ami skill ed pursuits ,from which they derive a competent living with marginal time and income for intellectual and cultural activ ities. To the lower class is •- i. signed those whose chief ener gies are engrossed in the rough er and coarser forms of toil irom which they derive scarce ly more than the bare necessit ies of life. According t othis classifica tion there is no upper class among Negroes (though the uppish class often mistake themselves for the upper class) and a comparatviely small num ber are in the middle class. The great bulk of the race falls in the lower classification. Man is a distinuction-making animal. Where there are no grounds for real distictions he According to this classifiea pretentions of the Negro so called ‘‘elite’ have generally been grotesque and bizzare. Wherever a handful of Negroes rose above the bulk of their kind, they at once set up super fical and silly distinctions. The house servants differentiated themselves from the field hands on the grounds that they wore better clothes, ate better food, and enjoyed closer association with the master and mistress of the manor. The cook, the coachman and the barber took first rank in Negro society. During and after Reconstruc tion, office holding became the badge of distinction. Negro Senators, Congressmen and po litical left-overs of the Recon struction regime gave an arti fical impulse to Washington Negro society from which it has not wholly recovered down tot this present day. At one time a government clerk, along with a Washington school teacher, were the social arbitors and law givers. When the Negro first began to go to college, academic de grees adorned their visiting cards and admitted the holder at once to the exclusive elite circles. Upon the rise of the professional class, the teacher, preacher ,lawyer and physician were assigned first place. This silly social aristocracy was accompanied by mimicry of manners, dress and carriage not character) of white social jelebrities fro mwhom they bor rowed the form rather than the substance of social distinction. Wealth inherited is always more honorific than wealth ac quired for it gives a basis of lereditary social distinction. 50 far as wealth is concerned, ;here never has been, is not now lor is there likely to be, in the near future ,and considerable ilass of Negroes of independent (Continued on page 7) vhite nations had they found he opportunity. In fact, Japan s now flirting with the idea of stacking the Soviet Union, nopulated by a pre-dominatly vhite group. Italy may be at var with Europe any day. It’s lot the color that counts with mperialists, it’s the possibility if feathering "their own nests.