Black No More

by George S. Schuyler

  “Ain’t it the truth?” agreed the former Admiral of the Royal African Navy.

  NINE

  Bunny, I’ve got it all worked out,” announced Matthew, several mornings later, as he breezed into the office.

  “Got what worked out?”

  “The political proposition.”

  “Spill it.”

  “Well, here it is: First, we get Givens on the radio; national hookup, you know, once a week for about two months.”

  “What’ll he talk about? Are you going to write it for him?”

  “Oh, he knows how to charm the yokels. He’ll appeal to the American people to call upon the Republican administration to close up the sanitariums of Dr. Crookman and deport everybody connected with Black-No-More.”

  “You can’t deport citizens, silly,” Bunny remonstrated.

  “That don’t stop you from advocating it. This is politics, Big Boy.”

  “Well, what else is on the program?”

  “Next: We start a campaign of denunciation against the Republicans in The Warning, connecting them with the Pope, Black-No-More and anything else we can think of.”

  “But they were practically anti-Catholic in 1928, weren’t they?”

  “Seven years ago, Bunny, seven years ago. How often must I tell you that the people never remember anything? Next we pull the old Write-to-your-Congressman-Write-to-your-Senator stuff. We carry the form letter in The Warning, the readers do the rest.”

  “You can’t win a campaign on that stuff alone,” said Bunny disdainfully. “Bring me something better than that, Brother.”

  “Well, the other step is a surprise, old chap. I’m going to keep it under my hat until later on. But when I spring it, old time, it’ll knock everybody for a row of toadstools.” Matthew smiled mysteriously and smoothed back his pale blond hair.

  “When do we start this radio racket?” yawned Bunny.

  “Wait’ll I talk it over with the Chief,” said Matthew, rising, “and see how he’s dated up.”

  —

  The following Thursday evening at 8:15 P.M. millions of people sat before their loud speakers, expectantly awaiting the heralded address to the nation by the Imperial Grand Wizard of the Knights of Nordica. The program started promptly:

  “Good evening, ladies and gentlemen of the radio audience. This is Station WHAT, Atlanta, Ga., Mortimer K. Shanker announcing. This evening we are offering a program of tremendous interest to every American citizen. The countrywide hookup over the chain of the Moronia Broadcasting Company is enabling one hundred million citizens to hear one of the most significant messages ever delivered to the American public.

  “Before introducing the distinguished speaker of the evening, however, I have a little treat in store for you. Mr. Jack Albert, the well-known Broadway singer and comedian, has kindly consented to render his favorite among the popular songs of the day, ‘Vanishing Mammy.’ Mr. Albert will be accompanied by that incomparable aggregation of musical talent, Sammy Snort’s Bogalusa Babies. . . . Come on, Al, say a word or two to the ladies and gentlemen of the radio audience before you begin.”

  “Oh, hello folks. Awfully glad to see so many of you out there tonight. Well, that is to say, I suppose there are many of you out there. You know I like to flatter myself, besides I haven’t my glasses so I can’t see very well. However, that’s not the pint, as the bootleggers say. I’m terribly pleased to have the opportunity of starting off a program like this with one of the songs I have come to love best. You know, I think a whole lot of this song. I like it because it has feeling and sentiment. It means something. It carries you back to the good old days that are dead and gone forever. It was written by Johnny Gulp with music by the eminent Japanese-American composer Forkrise Sake. And, as Mr. Shanker told you, I am being accompanied by Sammy Snort’s Bogalusa Babies through the courtesy of the Artillery Café, Chicago, Illinois. All right, Sammy, smack it!”

  In two seconds the blare of the jazz orchestra smote the ears of the unseen audience with the weird medley and clash of sound that had passed for music since the days of the Panama-Pacific Exposition. Then the sound died to a whisper and the plaintive voice of America’s premier black-faced troubadour came over the air:

  Vanishing Mammy, Mammy! Mammy! of Mi—ne,

  You’ve been away, dear, such an awfully long time

  You went away, Sweet Mammy! Mammy! one summer night

  I can’t help thinkin’, Mammy, that you went white.

  Of course I can’t blame you, Mammy! Mammy! dear

  Because you had so many troubles, Mammy, to bear.

  But the old homestead hasn’t been the same

  Since I last heard you, Mammy, call my name.

  And so I wait, loving Mammy, it seems in vain,

  For you to come waddling back home again

  Vanishing Mammy! Mammy! Mammy!

  I’m waiting for you to come back home again.

  “Now, radio audience, this is Mr. Mortimer Shanker speaking again. I know you all loved Mr. Albert’s soulful rendition of ‘Vanishing Mammy.’ We’re going to try to get him back again in the very near future.

  “It now gives me great pleasure to introduce to you a man who hardly needs any introduction. A man who is known throughout the civilized world. A man of great scholarship, executive ability and organizing genius. A man who has, practically unassisted, brought five million Americans under the banner of one of the greatest societies in this country. It affords me great pleasure, ladies and gentlemen of the radio audience, to introduce Rev. Henry Givens, Imperial Grand Wizard of the Knights of Nordica, who will address you on the very timely topic of ‘The Menace of Negro Blood.’”

  Rev. Givens, fortified with a slug of corn, advanced nervously to the microphone, fingering his prepared address. He cleared his throat and talked for upwards of an hour during which time he successfully avoided saying anything that was true, the result being that thousands of telegrams and long- distance telephone calls of congratulation came in to the studio. In his long address he discussed the foundations of the Republic, anthropology, psychology, miscegenation, coöperation with Christ, getting right with God, curbing Bolshevism, the bane of birth control, the menace of the Modernists, science versus religion, and many other subjects of which he was totally ignorant. The greater part of his time was taken up in a denunciation of Black-No-More, Incorporated, and calling upon the Republican administration of President Harold Goosie to deport the vicious Negroes at the head of it or imprison them in the federal penitentiary. When he had concluded “In the name of our Savior and Redeemer, Jesus Christ, Amen,” he retired hastily to the washroom to finish his half-pint of corn.

  The announcer took Rev. Givens’s place at the microphone:

  “Now friends, this is Mortimer K. Shanker again, announcing from Station WHAT, Atlanta, Ga., with a nationwide hookup over the chain of the Moronia Broadcasting Company. You have just heard a scholarly and inspiring address by Rev. Henry Givens, Imperial Grand Wizard of the Knights of Nordica on ‘The Menace of Negro Blood.’ Rev. Givens will deliver another address at this station a week from tonight. . . . Now, to end our program for the evening, friends, we are going to have a popular song by the well-known Goyter Sisters, lately of the State Street Follies, entitled ‘Why Did the Old Salt Shaker’. . . .”

  —

  The agitation of the Knights of Nordica soon brought action from the administration at Washington. About ten days after Rev. Givens had ceased his talks over the radio, President Harold Goosie announced to the assembled newspaper men that he was giving a great deal of study to the questions raised by the Imperial Grand Wizard concerning Black-No-More, Incorporated; that several truckloads of letters condemning the corporation had been received at the White House and were now being answered by a special corps of clerks; that several Senators had talked over the matter with him, and that the country could exp
ect him to take some action within the next fortnight.

  At the end of a fortnight, the President announced that he had decided to appoint a commission of leading citizens to study the whole question thoroughly and to make recommendations. He asked Congress for an appropriation of $100,000 to cover the expenses of the commission.

  The House of Representatives approved a resolution to that effect a week later. The Senate, which was then engaged in a spirited debate on the World Court and the League of Nations, postponed consideration of the resolution for three weeks. When it came to vote before that august body, it was passed, after long argument, with amendments and returned to the House.

  Six weeks after President Goosie had made his request of Congress, the resolution was passed in its final form. He then announced that inside of a week he would name the members of the commission.

  The President kept his word. He named the commission, consisting of seven members, five Republicans and two Democrats. They were mostly politicians temporarily out of a job.

  In a private car the commission toured the entire country, visiting all of the Black-No-More sanitariums, the Crookman lying-in hospitals and the former Black Belts. They took hundreds of depositions, examined hundreds of witnesses and drank large quantities of liquor.

  Two months later they issued a preliminary report in which they pointed out that the Black-No-More sanitariums and lying-in hospitals were being operated within the law; that only one million Negroes remained in the country; that it was illegal in most of the states for pure whites and persons of Negro ancestry to intermarry but that it was difficult to detect fraud because of collusion. As a remedy the commission recommended stricter observance of the law, minor changes in the marriage laws, the organization of special matrimonial courts with trained genealogists attached to each, better equipped judges, more competent district attorneys, the strengthening of the Mann Act, the abolition of the road house, the closer supervision of dance halls, a stricter censorship on books and moving pictures and government control of cabarets. The commission promised to publish the complete report of its activities in about six weeks.

  Two months later, when practically everyone had forgotten that there had ever been such an investigation, the complete report of the commission, comprising 1,789 pages in fine print, came off the press. Copies were sent broadcast to prominent citizens and organizations. Exactly nine people in the United States read it: the warden of a country jail, the proofreader at the Government Printing Office, the janitor of the City Hall in Ashtabula, Ohio, the city editor of the Helena (Ark.) Bugle, a stenographer in the Department of Health of Spokane, Wash., a dishwasher in a Bowery restaurant, a flunky in the office of the Research Director of Black-No-More, Incorporated, a life termer in Clinton Prison at Dannemora, N. Y., and a gag writer on the staff of a humorous weekly in Chicago.

  Matthew received fulsome praise from the members of his organization and the higher-ups in the Southern Democracy. He had, they said, forced the government to take action, and they began to talk of him for public office.

  The Grand Exalted Giraw was jubilant. Everything, he told Bunny, had gone as he had planned. Now he was ready to turn the next trick.

  “What’s that?” asked his assistant, looking up from the morning comic section.

  “Ever hear of the Anglo-Saxon Association of America?” Matthew queried.

  “No, what’s their graft?”

  “It isn’t a graft, you crook. The Anglo-Saxon Association of America is an organization located in Virginia. The headquarters are in Richmond. It’s a group of rich highbrows who can trace their ancestry back almost two hundred years. You see they believe in white supremacy the same as our outfit but they claim that the Anglo-Saxons are the cream of the white race and should maintain the leadership in American social, economic and political life.”

  “You sound like a college professor,” sneered Bunny.

  “Don’t insult me, you tripe. Listen now: This crowd thinks they’re too highbrow to come in with the Knights of Nordica. They say our bunch are morons.”

  “That about makes it unanimous,” commented Bunny, biting off the end of a cigar.

  “Well, what I’m trying to do now is to bring these two organizations together. We’ve got numbers but not enough money to win an election; they have the jack. If I can get them to see the light we’ll win the next Presidential election hands down.”

  “What’ll I be: Secretary of the Treasury?” laughed Bunny.

  “Over my dead body!” Matthew replied, reaching for his flask. “But seriously, Old Top, if I can succeed in putting this deal over we’ll have the White House in a bag. No fooling!”

  “When do we get busy?”

  “Next week this Anglo-Saxon Association has its annual meeting in Richmond. You and I’ll go up there and give them a spiel. We may take Givens along to add weight.”

  “You don’t mean intellectual weight, do you?”

  “Will you never stop kidding?”

  —

  Mr. Arthur Snobbcraft, President of the Anglo-Saxon Association, an F. F. V. and a man suspiciously swarthy for an Anglo-Saxon, had devoted his entire life to fighting for two things: white racial integrity and Anglo-Saxon supremacy. It had been very largely a losing fight. The farther he got from his goal, the more desperate he became. He had been the genius that thought up the numerous racial integrity laws adopted in Virginia and many of the other Southern states. He was strong for sterilization of the unfit: meaning Negroes, aliens, Jews and other riff raff, and he had an abiding hatred of democracy.

  Snobbcraft’s pet scheme now was to get a genealogical law passed disfranchising all people of Negro or unknown ancestry. He argued that good citizens could not be made out of such material. His organization had money but it needed popularity—numbers.

  His joy then knew no bounds when he received Matthew’s communication. While he had no love for the Knights of Nordica which, he held, contained just the sort of people he wanted to legislate into impotency, social, economic and physical, he believed he could use them to gain his point. He wired Matthew at once, saying the Association would be delighted to have him address them, as well as the Imperial Grand Wizard.

  The Grand Exalted Giraw had long known of Snobbcraft’s obsession, the genealogical law. He also knew that there was no chance of ever getting such a law adopted but in order to even try to pass such a law it would be necessary to win the whole country in a national election. Together, his organization and Snobbcraft’s could turn the trick; singly neither one could do it.

  In an old pre–Civil War mansion on a broad, tree-shaded boulevard, the directors of the Anglo-Saxon Association gathered in their annual meeting. They listened first to Rev. Givens and next to Matthew. The matter was referred to a committee which in an hour or two reported favorably. Most of these men had dreamed from youth of holding high political office at the national capital as had so many eminent Virginians but none of them was Republican, of course, and the Democrats never won anything nationally. By swallowing their pride for a season and joining with the riff raff of the Knights of Nordica, they saw an opportunity, for the first time in years to get into power; and they took it. They would furnish plenty of money, they said, if the other group would furnish the numbers.

  Givens and Matthew returned to Atlanta in high spirits.

  “I tell you, Brother Fisher,” croaked Givens, “our star is ascending. I can see no way for us to fail, with God’s help. We’ll surely defeat our enemy. Victory is in the air.”

  “It sure looks that way,” the Grand Giraw agreed. “With their money and ours, we can certainly get together a larger campaign fund than the Republicans.”

  Back in Richmond Mr. Snobbcraft and his friends were in conference with the statistician of a great New York insurance company. This man, Dr. Samuel Buggerie, was highly respected among members of his profession and well known by the readin
g public. He was the author of several books and wrote frequently for the heavier periodicals. His well-known work, The Fluctuation of the Sizes of Left Feet among the Assyrians during the Ninth Century before Christ, had been favorably commented upon by several reviewers, one of whom had actually read it. An even more learned work of his was entitled Putting Wasted Energy to Work, in which he called attention, by elaborate charts and graphs, to the possibilities of harnessing the power generated by the leaves of trees rubbing together on windy days. In several brilliant monographs he had proved that rich people have smaller families than the poor; that imprisonment does not stop crime; that laborers usually migrate in the wake of high wages. In his most recent article in a very intellectual magazine read largely by those who loafed for a living, he had proved statistically that unemployment and poverty are principally a state of mind. This contribution was enthusiastically hailed by scholars and especially by business men as an outstanding contribution to contemporary thought.

  Dr. Buggerie was a ponderous, nervous, entirely bald specimen of humanity, with thick moist hands, a receding double chin and very prominent eyes that were constantly shifting about and bearing an expression of seemingly perpetual wonderment behind their big horn-rimmed spectacles. He seemed about to burst out of his clothes and his pockets were always bulging with papers and notes.

  Dr. Buggerie, like Mr. Snobbcraft, was a professional Anglo-Saxon as well as a descendant of one of the First Families of Virginia. He held that the only way to tell the pure whites from the imitation whites was to study their family trees. He claimed that such a nationwide investigation would disclose the various non-Nordic strains in the population. Laws, said he, should then be passed forbidding these strains from mixing or marrying with the pure strains that had produced such fine specimens of mankind as Mr. Snobbcraft and himself.

  In high falsetto voice he eagerly related to the directors of the Anglo-Saxon Association the results of some of his preliminary researches. These tended to show, he claimed, that there must be as many as twenty million people in the United States who possessed some slight non-Nordic strain and were thus unfit for both citizenship and procreation. If the organization would put up the money for the research on a national scale, he declared that he could produce statistics before election that would be so shocking that the Republicans would lose the country unless they adopted the Democratic plank on genealogical examinations. After a long and eloquent talk by Mr. Snobbcraft in support of Dr. Buggerie’s proposition, the directors voted to appropriate the money, on condition that the work be kept as secret as possible. The statistician agreed although it hurt him to the heart to forego any publicity. The very next morning he began quietly to assemble his staff.