The Golden Age, “Facts About the American Negro”
“For two centuries the American people as a whole profited by the unpaid labor of the Negro and then set him adrift, ragged, unguided and unlettered, to assume the burdens of citizenship and to be further exploited by politicians, to his real injury. … In the thirty years, 1889-1918, lynching mobs murdered 3,224 persons in the United States, of whom 2,522 were Negroes and 702 were white persons.”
The unsigned cover article of the issue runs to six pages. It traces the slave trade, notes that New England capital financed it, gives census and occupational statistics, describes black economic advance in the Mississippi delta, and reprints at length a Chattanooga Times account of a lynching by torture. It closes by saying the remedy for "the injustices the Negro has suffered, and still suffers" is the coming Kingdom.
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Provenance and verification note for The Golden Age, Facts About the American Negro
Confidence note. Read page by page from the item’s djvu.xml on 19 September 2026 and re-checked independently. The article opens on the leaf mapped to printed page 547, which carries the masthead “New York, Wednesday, May 26, 1920 Number 18” with the title set around it as “FACTS ABOUT THE … AMERICAN NEGRO”, and runs to the leaf mapped to page 552; the next article, “An Alaskan Gold Tragedy”, begins on page 553. The issue’s own contents page lists the article and its sub-sections. The first sentence quoted stands on page 547 and the lynching figures on page 550. The article carries no by-line. OCR artefacts corrected against the surrounding text; the page images were not separately inspected.
Scan provenance. Internet Archive item “Magazines: The golden age, 1920”; printed page numbers from the item's page_numbers.json checked against the running head “The Golden Age for May 26, 1920”.
Corroborated by. src-race-ga-1920-0526-negro-characteristics
Notes. The critical sites consulted for this topic do not cite this article. It is the longest treatment of race in the 1920 volume and takes the opposite side from the magazine’s harsher race material.
Accessed. 19 September 2026 · Source ID. src-race-ga-1920-0526-american-negro-lynching