An editorial from Fraina on the public vote to formally institute segregation in St. Louis.

‘”Democracy” and Negro Segregation’ by Louis C. Fraina from New Review. Vol. 4 No. 4. April, 1916.

THE American press is practically unanimous in its condemnation of the Mexican people,–their alleged savagery and general all-around uncivilized habits. But the Mexicans have been fighting, are fighting against injustice and oppression, while the American people are devising new forms of injustice and new means of oppression. Just now, our oppression of the Negro has been emphasized by the adoption in St. Louis of a segregation ordinance.

The question was brought before the electorate by means of the initiative, that palladium of bourgeois progressivism, and the ordinance passed by an overwhelming majority. The sentiment for Negro segregation was hitherto believed to be confined to the South; how much deeper the evil is has been proven by St. Louis. It is all disgustingly discouraging, particularly as the vote cast represented all sorts and conditions of peoples, many of whom have only recently fled oppression to come to this country of equal opportunity.

All this brings to mind American criticism of the Russian “pale.” How about the American “pale” being forced upon the Negro? Our gallant defenders of all the bourgeois virtues hysterically condemn “autocracy” and “frightfulness” in Germany. How about the white oligarchy of the South disfranchising the Negro and battening upon his helplessness? How about the policy of frightfulness being practiced upon the Negro? It is all a hideous nightmare. We are a democracy, yes; but we are a democracy in the old Athenian sense, an oligarchic democracy superimposed upon a mass of slaves, the slaves in our case being the Negro and unskilled foreign labor.

The American Socialist movement has criminally neglected the race problem. It is one of the most potent instruments of oppression in this country. It is a serious obstacle to Socialism. The interests of Socialism, of common decency, require an agitation for justice to the Negro and all subject races. L.C.F.

New Review was a New York-based, explicitly Marxist, sometimes weekly/sometimes monthly theoretical journal begun in 1913 and was an important vehicle for left discussion in the period before World War One. In the world of the Socialist Party, it included Max Eastman, Floyd Dell, Herman Simpson, Louis Boudin, William English Walling, Moses Oppenheimer, Walter Lippmann, William Bohn, Frank Bohn, John Spargo, Austin Lewis, WEB DuBois, Maurice Blumlein, Anton Pannekoek, Elsie Clews Parsons, and Isaac Hourwich as editors and contributors. Louis Fraina played an increasing role from 1914 on, leading the journal in a leftward direction as New Review addressed many of the leading international questions facing Marxists. The journal folded in June, 1916 for financial reasons. Its issues are a formidable archive of pre-war US Marxist and Socialist discussion.

PDF of full issue: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/newreview/1916/v4n04-apr-1916.pdf