Page:The New Negro.pdf/454

398 and the English fear black folk who have even tasted freedom. Everything that America has done crudely and shamelessly to suppress the Negro, England in Sierra Leone has done legally and suavely so that the Negroes themselves sometimes doubt the evidence of their own senses: segregation, disfranchisement, trial without jury, over-taxation, “Jim Crow” cars, neglect of education, economic serfdom. Yet all this can be and is technically denied. Segregation? "Oh no,” says the colonial official, "anyone can live where he will only that beautiful and cool side of the mountain with fine roads, golf and tennis and bungalows is assigned to government officials.” Are there black officials? "Oh yes, and they can be assigned residences there, too.” But they never have been. The Negroes vote and hold office in Freetown-I met the comely black and cultured mayor—but Freetown has almost no revenues and its powers have been gradually absorbed by the autocratic white colonial government which has five million dollars a year to spend. Any government prosecutor can abolish trial by jury in any case with the consent of the judge, and all judges are white. White officials ride in special railway carriages and I am morally certain- I cannot prove it—that more is spent by the government on tennis and golf in the colony than on popular education.

These things, and powerful efforts of English industry to reap every penny of profit for England in colonial trade, leaving the black inhabitants in helpless serfdom, have aroused West Africa, and aroused it at this time because of two things —the war, and cocoa in Nigeria. The burden of war fell hard on black and British West Africa. Their troops conquered German Africa for England and France at bitter cost and helped hold back the Turk. Yet there was not a single black officer in the British army or a single real reward save citations and new and drastic taxation even on exports.

But British West Africa had certain advantages. After the decline of the slave trade and before the discovery that slavery and serfdom in Africa could be made to pay more than the removal of the laboring forces to other parts of the world, there was a disposition to give over to the natives the black colonies