VOLUME XX

NUMBER 77

The American

MERCURY
May 1930 THE AMERICAN NEGRO IN EUROPE
BY J. A. ROGERS

HE Aframerican who goes to Europe for the first time finds himself in a state of bewilderment as great as that of a lifer out on parole, or a canary tossed out of its cage. No more bars to beat against; they have disappeared as if by magic. In their place is a sense of freedom that is almost alarming. Trained to resist race prejudice or to submit to it, he now finds himself without an enemy to attack or a fetish to bow to. Timidly he watches, fearing, and almost hoping, for some sign of discrimination something that will make him feel at homebut as the days go by he meets, so far as his color is concerned, such respect, such courtesy, such appreciation as he would not receive even from his fellowNegroes in America. He begins to realize that he may go anywhere he wishes. Months pass and the days are like Paradise. At night he awakes with a start, dreaming he is back in America. When, at last, he takes ship to return he feels like an escaped convict going back to his jailers. In 1918 two colored American women and I made an automobile tour of Western and Southern Europe. In parts of Germany, Holland, Austria and Northern Italy we were so surrounded by crowds of curious natives that the police had to save us from suffocation. And this curiosity was not of the American kind that reaches for the

coil of rope and the tar pot: whenever we took pictures the crowd was eager to get into them. At the Hofbrauhaus in Munich, German men crowded around my two companions and began kissing their hands. They followed us out on the street and were so persistent in wishing to go with us to our hotel that our German chauffeur was forced to make it plain that we wanted to go home alone. All over Northern Europe a Negro of no particular worth may find himself taken up just because he is a Negro. The late Maximilian Harden, writing on the socalled atrocity of stationing French black troops on the Rhine, ridiculed the color objection. He said that the black man was not unwelcome to German women, and told how primitive Negroes would be missing from Hagenback's Circus, only to be found in the homes of society women. In Stockholm not long ago the Americanized proprietor of a restaurant refused to serve a ten-year-old Negro dancer called Little Esther, who had been having a great success elsewhere in Europe. A Swedish nobleman who was present, by way of protest, invited the child, her mother and her manager, both colored, to his home. The newspapers of the city without a single exception condemned the proprietor, and several of them cartooned him. One of them declared the incident to be "the

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