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7he Golden Age
{SUCCESSOR TO RELIGIOUS lO9JJNY
Published Ebery Thursday by ths Goldin Hge Publishing
Company {lnc.)
OlllCES: LOWNDES WILDING, ATLANTA, GA.
WILLIAM D. UPSHAW. - - - - Editor
MPS. G. 9. LI NDS El - - Managing Editor
LEN G. 9KOUGHTON - - Pulpit Editor
Price: $2.00 a Year
Ministers $1.50 per Year.
kn eeuet »t foreign address fifty cents should he added to color
additional postage.
Entered at the feet Office tn Atlanta, Ga.,
as second-class nuttier.
A Rousing Worker.
One of the brightest young men whom Georgia has
given to religious work in many years is Mr. E. E.
Lee, now of Dallas, Texas, who is gen-
eral field secretary in the B. Y. P. U.
works of the South. Not a preacher,
he can “beat” lots of preachers preach
ing, and is one of the livest wires in
attracting and holding the attention of
A Former
Georgian
Winning the
Wesst.
young people that we have ever seen. Mr. Lee has
just been making a tour of this section of the South
and greatly charmed and blessed all who heard him.
Greater fields of conquest await this rousing, in
spiring worker in the cause of youth and truth.
at at
A Toolishman Congressman,
They grow strange things up in Ohio sometimes,
albeit, the “Buck Eye” is a mighty fine State on
Hollingsworth
Must Have
the “Holler”
Head.
the “holler head.”
“Least ways,” it seems that way to about eleven
teen millions of people, north, south, east and west.
This Mr. Hollingsworth who broke into Congress
(we wonder how and why?) is the member who pro
posed a blazing resolution in Congress seeking to
restrain the State of Mississippi from accepting, a
beautiful silver service on which is engraved the
face of the great Mississippian, the great American,
Jefferson Davis.
This, too, in the 20th Century! This in this ad
vanced age and stage of fraternity! This from a man
who sits among the “Wittenagemot of the Nation!”
It is a pity that this poor man had no older and
wiser head to advise him before he indulged in such
a sad, mad “breaking out at the mouth!”
He might as well have introduced a resolution
to keep Alabama from allowing the face of William
L. Yancey on her silver service, or Texas the face
of John H. Reagan or Georgia the face of Alexander
H. Stephens or John B. Gordon!
What narrow, shallow blindness! What pitiful
anti-deluvian policy!
We are “not mad, most noble Festus.” We are
just sorry for the man —and sorry for all who are
not sorry for him! And sorry for anybody and
everybody who would build a nation on bitterness.
Gall is not good for the heart, nor vinegar a good
lotion for the face and eyes. We hope Mr. Hollings
worth will recover from the “holler head” before it
is “everlastingly too late.”
* *
"As Long As I Like.”
Editor The Golden Age, Atlanta, Ga.
I expect to take your paper as long as I live. In
every issue that you or Dr. Broughton speak,—that
issue is worth the price.
Wishing you and Dr. Broughton long lives and
double portion of God’s blessings, I am, etc.,
Mount Olive, Miss. F. E. Shivers.
general principles. Maybe he can’t
help it —if so both he and his State
are to be pitied, but anyway Ohio’s
latest freak of folly is a Congress
man named Hollingsworth, who has
The Golden Age for May 6, 1909.
Governor Vardaman’s Mistake
It will be remembered that The Golden Age gave
a whole column on its editorial page to Governor
Bitterness
Will Not
Solve the
Negro Problem.
Frankly we had never sympathized with his bitter
ness on the negro question, but we thought he was
softening a little and coming around to a more
rational basis. Governor Vardaman’s last message
was really a great paper and created a widespread
impression in his favor. We hoped he had deter
mined to lend his magnificent powers of leadership
to a more hopeful and constructive type of states
manship than the “ negro” platform. We
have admired so many things about this brilliant and
picturesque Mississippian that it really pains us to
be compelled to part company so widely and take
issue so definitely with him on this great question.
But in the last issue of The Issue he seems to blow
out the light and throw overboard.
He prints in full The Jeffersonian caustic comment
(as only Tom Watson can comment) on the fall
of a negro bishop entitled “Just Like a Nigger,”
and then the former Governor of Mississippi who
laudably aspires, they tell us, to a seat in the United
States Senate, expresses himself as follows:
“That is just like a nigger.
“What is said of ‘Bro. Charles Spencer Smith’
could be said of ninety-nine negroes of every hun
dred if they had the opportunity enjoyed by Bishop
Smith.
“As a matter of fact, the negro is growing more
criminal as his mentality is improved.
“He is as devoid of morals as a mink, and as full
of crime as a pecker-wood’s nest is full of bad
odors.
“He never heard the restrainnig voice of a sen
sitive conscience.
“And he cannot distinguish between a lie and the
truth.
11 If he tells the truth, it is because it is to his in
terest to tell the truth and not for the truth’s sake.
“And every educated negro in* America also en
tertains the views of Bishop Smith on the question
of social equality.
“The consuming desire and vaulting ambition of
every one of them is to stand on equality with white
women which is enjoyed by white men.
“And this is the creature who, under the laws of
the United States, is the equal of the white man
at the polls,
“This is-the creature that some foolish men insist
was included in the statement of the Declaration of
Independence ‘that all men are born equal,’ etc.
“It is astonishing that white men who are so
intelligent on other subjects should be so absurdly
stupid and ignorant when they come to consider this
one question.
“But the mists are rolling away and the sunlight
of truth is shining out.
“The American people are rapidly coming to
their senses on this subject.
“A little more time and they will see it as they
ought to see it.”
Alas! Will the former Governor of Mississippi and
the Pitchfork Senator from South Carolina and the
brave but blundering editor of The Jeffersonian
please tell us what contribution such utterances as
these make to the solution of a grave and mighty
problem?
To begin with, the negro bishop did not fall be
cause he was a negro. We have known, alas! many
white men to do the same. But when Editor Varda
man says “the negro is growing more criminal as
his mentality is improved;” ‘he flies in the face of
facts, statistics and experience on every side. Payne
Institute, Augusta, Ga., gives the inspiring record
that not one of its graduates has ever been convicted
of any crime. We say it sorrowfully, but few white
schools can claim such a record as that.
Lincoln McConnell, the famous Methodist Evange
list and Chautauqua manager, who used to be a de-
Jas. K. Vardaman, of Mississippi,
dealing in general kindness of com
ment about the time he sent his
last great message to the legisla
ture and launched his new paper
The Issue.
tective in Atlanta, told the writer that during his
six years experience in that work he ‘ ‘ kept tab ’ ’ on
six thousand cases —mostly negroes, and the figures
showed that the overwhelming majority of criminals
came from the ignorant negroes. Indeed, he declared
there were almost no educated negroes in all that
long list of criminals. The “unmentionable crime,”
is rarely, if ever, committed by an educated negro.
Occasionally some educated negro forges a check or
commits some other kindred crime, and instantly
a lot of short sighted simpletons (we can think of
no other name to fit them) rush into print or get up
on a stump and declare: “We told you so! Educa
tion makes a criminal of the negro. Educate a negTo
and you simply ruin him!”
These dear, foolish people, of course never heard
of a white man’s surging a check or being ‘ ‘ short ’ ’
in his accounts. The black criminal is “a thief,”
the white rogue is only a ‘ ‘ defaulter. ’ ’
These same people forget that the Federal Prison
near Atlanta is almost filled with educated white
men —many of them college and university graduates.
The trouble is not with the fact of education or
the color of the man who gets it, but with the kind
of education and the moral depravity of human
hearts in general and some in particular. Some
years ago the writer saw the tree in a certain county
in Georgia on which a white man was hung—for
what? For killing a white family and burning the
house down on them. Down at Statesboro two ne
groes were burned because they confessed to having
killed a family and burned their house and bodies.
What made those negroes commit that crime V
Somebody answers: “Because they were brutes. I
tell you the negro has no soul! ’ ’
Then what made the white man commit the same
kind of crime?
Just because the devil was in him. Because the
negro is a brute he waylays a man and kills him for
his money. Because the devil is in a white man he
Jdespoils a woman’s virtue, quarters her poor body,
hides it in a trunk or throws it in the river.
0 God, have mercy on sinful man!
The writer recently visited Bishop College and
Wylie University, the negro Baptist and Methodist
colleges at Marshall, Texas. We saw splendid build
ings erected wholly by the hands of negro students.
We heard white people around say that those negroes
are being taught not only books, but reliability, horn*
esty, purity, cleanliness —all preparing them to be
worth something as producers of a community’s hap
piness and a nation’s civilization. And we found
there just about the most heroic thing we ever saw —
we found our old Mercer schoolmate, John New
some, a Greek medal graduate of Mercer University
and a first honor graduate of Rochester Theological
Seminary, giving himself there in Bishop College
to the honest, earnest, unselfish work of trying to
better the mental, moral and spiritual conditions of
the negro, feeling that in so doing he is serving his
God and his country best. President C. H. Maxson,
of Bishop College, a white man great in body, mind
and heart and President Doogan, of Wylie Univer
sity, an educated, well balanced Mississippi negro,
are toiling like God’s messengers indeed, trying to
fit the young negroes under their tuition to make
better homes and better manhood and womanhood.
And speaking personally, I would rather be John
Newsome, a cultured, consecrated Southern man,
making this honqst contribution to the solution of a
mighty problem, than to le sitting in the National
Congress or even the White House of the Nation,
knowing that I had “waded through slaughter to a
throne” and had builded my pyramid of success
by walking rough-shod over the prostrate forms of
black people whom' I had kicked and cursed, but
never helped.
We know an educated black man named William
Hubbard, who came to Forsyth, Ga., some eight or
ten years ago, walking in the foot prints of unfaith
ful leaders, maybe, and certainly beginning his
work amid the distrust of his own race and the
careless suspicion of the white people around him.
Toiling in poverty and alone until his worth and
work commanded help from, friends at home and
