The Perfect Vacation (1931)
By W. E. B. Du Bois
At the end of the twentieth annual education issue, W. E. B. Du Bois, editor of The Crisis, offered the following travel reflections on leisure travel and the Civil War landscape in the Jim Crow era.
I have discovered, at least for myself, the perfect vacation. It was taken not in vacation time, when I have found rest quite impossible, but in February. It was taken in the South but not in Florida. I went first to Charleston, South Carolina and found sunshine and rain, the great tree where companions of Vesey, the black Rebel, were hanged, the lure of old King Street and the Battery. I had supper with a young couple and motored to Somerville. I heard a brown physician tell how he was held in peonage in South Georgia; I met white secretaries of the Y.W.C.A. and conversed with them with great interest. There was a beautiful new Teachers’ Home at Avery Institute and a lovely log cabin in the country where we spent part of the day. The little colored bank stands staunch. Charleston is one of the few cities in the United States that has not been hammered into convention. It is Southern and full of every variety of “Jim-Crow”; but it is lovely and curiously satisfying.
To avoid a part of the “Jim-Crow” car, I rode by the State College at Orangeburg and heard an astonishing sermon. But the school is a miracle. It has been pulled out of the purse of the South Caroline [sic] Legislature by a brown statesman. The chief thing that I noticed in Augusta was in the station: “Colored Men – Colored Women – White Men – Ladies.”
The most terrible thing about War, I am convinced, is its monuments, – the awful things we are compelled to build in order to remember the victims. In the South, particularly, human ingenuity has been put to it to explain on its war monuments, the Confederacy. Of course, the plain truth of the matter would be an inscription something like this: “Sacred to the memory of those who fought to Perpetuate Human Slavery.” But that reads with increasing difficulty as time goes on. It does, however, seem to be overdoing the matter to read on a North Carolina Confederate monument: “Died Fighting for Liberty!”
I came to Atlanta and to the ghost of Atlanta University. I heard all the voices of the past and found how in this transition period, the children of old A. U. are weeping. And yet birth-pains can never be made altogether pleasant and I think I see in Atlanta the finest opportunity for a really great Negro University that I have seen anywhere. Here on three different campuses are three separated but federated institutions; a men’s college; a women’s college, and a University. They are soon to be linked by a great library, and they are going to look down upon the terrible city.
I have seen nothing more disconcerting in its implications than the city of Atlanta. Conceive every mistake and crime that modern organized industrial life has committed and then go down to Atlanta and behold this frantic city, hurling itself blindly along the same paths; industrial exploitation, color caste, new millionaires, vast stores, prostitutes, gambling, and a new city hall with a tower!
I hurriedly went down into the country, beyond empty farms and wide lost spaces, to Fort Valley. I had a room furnished with flowers and a view of a quadrangle of new and well-proportioned buildings. There were four events in my stay: a class in journalism, which helped me the dummy the April CRISIS with enthusiasm and endless questions; a party with young and eager teachers; an excursion down to South Georgia to hear the luscious voice of Marian Anderson; and finally, a Ham Show Country folk brought in their hams and chickens and other things for competitive exhibition. Men told them to be thrifty and put their money in the bank – two thousand banks failed in the South last year. They told them other things equally wide and foolish. The farmers had evidently heard this nonsense too often to be particularly impressed, but they themselves impressed me. And so did the school. It is a lovely oasis, but Good Lord, the surrounding desert! I saw the old prison burial ground at Andersonville and the two monuments, Federal and Confederate, making faces at each other. I came by Durham with the new buildings of the State College and particularly that extraordinary dining room and kitchen. Then I came happily home.
Of course – and over all of this – was the “race problem” and the rules of “Jim-Crow.” There must be separate cars on the railroad; most of those that I rode in were not bad, – not, of course, as good as the white car – but both cars fairly empty. From Greensboro to Durham, for instance, there was place for thirty-four persons in my car. There were three persons present. The colored train porters are disappearing. There is no one to help the colored people on or off with their baggage; there is no step for them. The entrances to the depot are often insulting, particularly at Macon and the Terminal Station at Atlanta. It is better at Greensboro.
There is, of course, difficulty in the stations about tickets and telegrams, papers and Pullmans. And above all, and over the South, there is still the custom of murder. It is extraordinary in the South how people are killed! In Macon, a white worker, quite an ordinary person, forbids his daughter to marry a young white mechanic. She gets married. The father invites the son-in-law to dinner and casually kills him. “What is this town noted for?” I asked of the driver, as we wheeled through a South Carolina village. “Murder,” he said sententiously.
Source: W. E. B. Du Bois, “The Perfect Vacation,” The Crisis 40, no. 8 (August 1931): 279.
I have discovered, at least for myself, the perfect vacation. It was taken not in vacation time, when I have found rest quite impossible, but in February. It was taken in the South but not in Florida. I went first to Charleston, South Carolina and found sunshine and rain, the great tree where companions of Vesey, the black Rebel, were hanged, the lure of old King Street and the Battery. I had supper with a young couple and motored to Somerville. I heard a brown physician tell how he was held in peonage in South Georgia; I met white secretaries of the Y.W.C.A. and conversed with them with great interest. There was a beautiful new Teachers’ Home at Avery Institute and a lovely log cabin in the country where we spent part of the day. The little colored bank stands staunch. Charleston is one of the few cities in the United States that has not been hammered into convention. It is Southern and full of every variety of “Jim-Crow”; but it is lovely and curiously satisfying.
To avoid a part of the “Jim-Crow” car, I rode by the State College at Orangeburg and heard an astonishing sermon. But the school is a miracle. It has been pulled out of the purse of the South Caroline [sic] Legislature by a brown statesman. The chief thing that I noticed in Augusta was in the station: “Colored Men – Colored Women – White Men – Ladies.”
The most terrible thing about War, I am convinced, is its monuments, – the awful things we are compelled to build in order to remember the victims. In the South, particularly, human ingenuity has been put to it to explain on its war monuments, the Confederacy. Of course, the plain truth of the matter would be an inscription something like this: “Sacred to the memory of those who fought to Perpetuate Human Slavery.” But that reads with increasing difficulty as time goes on. It does, however, seem to be overdoing the matter to read on a North Carolina Confederate monument: “Died Fighting for Liberty!”
I came to Atlanta and to the ghost of Atlanta University. I heard all the voices of the past and found how in this transition period, the children of old A. U. are weeping. And yet birth-pains can never be made altogether pleasant and I think I see in Atlanta the finest opportunity for a really great Negro University that I have seen anywhere. Here on three different campuses are three separated but federated institutions; a men’s college; a women’s college, and a University. They are soon to be linked by a great library, and they are going to look down upon the terrible city.
I have seen nothing more disconcerting in its implications than the city of Atlanta. Conceive every mistake and crime that modern organized industrial life has committed and then go down to Atlanta and behold this frantic city, hurling itself blindly along the same paths; industrial exploitation, color caste, new millionaires, vast stores, prostitutes, gambling, and a new city hall with a tower!
I hurriedly went down into the country, beyond empty farms and wide lost spaces, to Fort Valley. I had a room furnished with flowers and a view of a quadrangle of new and well-proportioned buildings. There were four events in my stay: a class in journalism, which helped me the dummy the April CRISIS with enthusiasm and endless questions; a party with young and eager teachers; an excursion down to South Georgia to hear the luscious voice of Marian Anderson; and finally, a Ham Show Country folk brought in their hams and chickens and other things for competitive exhibition. Men told them to be thrifty and put their money in the bank – two thousand banks failed in the South last year. They told them other things equally wide and foolish. The farmers had evidently heard this nonsense too often to be particularly impressed, but they themselves impressed me. And so did the school. It is a lovely oasis, but Good Lord, the surrounding desert! I saw the old prison burial ground at Andersonville and the two monuments, Federal and Confederate, making faces at each other. I came by Durham with the new buildings of the State College and particularly that extraordinary dining room and kitchen. Then I came happily home.
Of course – and over all of this – was the “race problem” and the rules of “Jim-Crow.” There must be separate cars on the railroad; most of those that I rode in were not bad, – not, of course, as good as the white car – but both cars fairly empty. From Greensboro to Durham, for instance, there was place for thirty-four persons in my car. There were three persons present. The colored train porters are disappearing. There is no one to help the colored people on or off with their baggage; there is no step for them. The entrances to the depot are often insulting, particularly at Macon and the Terminal Station at Atlanta. It is better at Greensboro.
There is, of course, difficulty in the stations about tickets and telegrams, papers and Pullmans. And above all, and over the South, there is still the custom of murder. It is extraordinary in the South how people are killed! In Macon, a white worker, quite an ordinary person, forbids his daughter to marry a young white mechanic. She gets married. The father invites the son-in-law to dinner and casually kills him. “What is this town noted for?” I asked of the driver, as we wheeled through a South Carolina village. “Murder,” he said sententiously.
Source: W. E. B. Du Bois, “The Perfect Vacation,” The Crisis 40, no. 8 (August 1931): 279.
