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I YOUR NEGRO NEIGHBOR 1

II THE NEGRO IN AMERICA: HISTORICAL REVIEW 10

V ASPECTS OF NEGRO EDUCATION 48

VI A GREAT MISSIONARY: JOANNA P. MOORE 61

YOUR NEGRO NEIGHBOR

YOUR NEGRO NEIGHBOR

CITIZENS AND PATRIOTS:

Our country is still in the midst of the greatest war in the history of mankind. Already our sons and brothers have died in Europe. While the sacrifice is great, and each day comes home more closely to us, there must be no ceasing of the conflict until victory is assured. The principles of Christ must prevail, and democracy must be given some chance in the world. Because we believe this, because we love our country, because we wish to see our country truly noble and great, I am once more asking your attention to the vital subject of the place of the Negro in our American life.

We feel that we may not unreasonably ask a hearing at this time. In the war now raging we have fully done our part, if indeed any American could venture to say that he has done his part. Whether as officers or stevedores our men have borne their share of the brunt of battle. Let it not be supposed that many of them did not enter the conflict with misgiving. They could not readily forget that under our country's flag crimes unspeakable had been committed against them. They could not help remembering that even as they went forth to fight, their sisters and their wives did not have the full protection of the law. They still had faith, however, in the great heart of the American people; and they could not believe that when the nation's finest manhood was being given for the principles of democracy and Christianity, deliberate injustice would indefinitely be tolerated.

We remember of course at this time that public sentiment with reference to the Negro has undergone a great change within fifty years. Immediately after the Civil War there was a spirit, in the North at least, to give him a helping hand, though even here he was not always wanted as a laborer. In a period when feeling ran high there was a tendency to base his rights on the fundamental principles of the republic. Recently, however, in the stress of commercialism, the status of the Negro, along with many other grave moral questions, has been much in the background. Suddenly the war burst upon us and gave us a new era of soul-questioning.

The period of industrialism was formally signalized by one of the most telling speeches ever delivered in this or any other country, all the more effective because the orator was a high-minded, patriotic gentleman. In 1886 Henry W. Grady addressed the New England Club in New York on "The New South." The two preceding decades had been an era of great scandal in the public life of the United States. Grady spoke to practical men, and he knew his ground. He asked his listeners to bring their "full faith in American fairness and frankness to judgment" upon what he had to say. He pictured in brilliant language the Confederate soldier, "ragged, half-starved, heavy-hearted," who wended his way homeward to find his house in ruins and his farms devastated. He spoke kindly also of the Negro: "Whenever he struck a blow for his own liberty he fought in open battle, and when at last he raised his black and humble hands that the shackles might be struck off, those hands were innocent of wrong against his helpless charges." But Grady also implied that the Negro had already received too much attention and sympathy from the North. Said he: "To liberty and enfranchisement is as far as law can carry the Negro. The rest must be left to conscience and common sense." Hence he asked that the South be left alone in the handling of its grave problem. The North took him at his word. Result: Disfranchisement, segregation, and a lynching record that leaves us very little to say about the Turk in Armenia.

To-day the Negro daily suffers such indignities as make the very words Liberty and Democracy a travesty. If he rides in a trolley-car in the South he is assigned a few rear seats. If his part of the car is crowded and seats near the front are vacant, he must still stand. If he takes a train he must ride in a dirty half-coach, the other half being the baggage car; and he enters the railway station by a side-door. In all the cities, even some of the largest, there is a persistent endeavor to restrict his residence to some unfavorable part of the town; witness the segregation struggles in Atlanta, St. Louis, and Baltimore. Places of refinement and refreshment, libraries, parks, etc., are regularly closed to him. If Negro children go to school they stand only a fraction of a chance of getting an education--or a seat. In Massachusetts, of the children from six to fourteen years of age, 93 per cent. are in school. In Louisiana 68.4 per cent. of the white children are in school and 37.4 per cent. of the Negro children. In Birmingham there is a public high school to which Negro students have to pay to go; in all Georgia there is no public high school for Negroes at all. Not long ago a colored man of excellent character and standing boarded a train between Birmingham and Chattanooga, accompanying his sister. Some white men invaded the coach and proceeded to smoke. The colored man protested to the officials, and forthwith both he and his sister received a beating. Such are the incidents that drive the iron into the Negro's soul. We submit that they are altogether unjust and entirely at variance with the principles for which we are at war.

In the face of such things we go back to fundamentals. The Declaration of Independence says: "We hold these truths to be self-evident: That all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." The Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States says: "The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States, or by any State, on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude." But above even such noble utterances as these stand the words of Him whom we profess to follow: "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy strength, and with all thy mind; and thy neighbor as thyself."

And who is my neighbor?

We feel that the United States can not long remain in the dilemma of fighting for democracy while at the same time she denies the fundamental principles of democracy at home. We cannot much longer pluck the mote from our brother's eye unmindful at the same time of the beam in our own.

Meanwhile, however, the Negro goes quietly about his work. He has picked cotton and pulled fodder, scrubbed floors and washed windows, fired engines and dipped turpentine. He is not quite content, however, to be simply the doormat of American civilization. Twelve million people are ceasing to accept slander and insult without a protest. They have heard about freedom, justice, and happiness, though these things seemed not for them. They can not quite see the consistency of fighting for outraged Belgians or Armenians so long as the rights of citizens at home are violated. In the words of Foraker, "They ask no favors because they are Negroes, but only justice because they are men."

Yours for liberty and democracy,

BENJAMIN BRAWLEY.

THE NEGRO IN AMERICA: HISTORICAL REVIEW

It was in August, 1619, that a Dutch vessel brought to Jamestown, Va., twenty Negroes, who were sold into servitude. While this event definitely signalized the coming of the Negro for permanent residence within the limits of what is now the United States, it by no means marked his first coming to this country. The records of the Negro extend as far back as the voyages of Columbus. Within a few years after the visits of the great explorer there were several Negroes in the West Indies, and in 1513 thirty assisted Balboa in the building of the first ships made on the Pacific Coast. One of the four survivors of the ill-starred expedition of De Narvaez in 1527 was the Negro Estevanico, to whom belongs the credit of the discovery of the Zu?i Indians and of New Mexico. Nothing from these early years, however, exercised any abiding influence on the history of the Negro in the United States.

The status of the Negro after 1619 was for several decades complicated by the system of indentured labor known as servitude. This applied especially to white servants brought from England; but the first Negroes brought to the country technically fell into the system. According to the New International Encyclopedia, "Servitude became slavery when to such incidents as alienation, disfranchisement, whipping, and limited marriage, were added those of perpetual service and a denial of civil, juridical, marital and property rights as well as the denial of the possession of children." While legislation was enacted earlier in Massachusetts, it was Virginia that in 1661 really led the way for the South in the definite recognition of slavery as a system by saying that Negroes were "incapable of making satisfaction for the time lost in running away by addition of time." The next year the same colony enacted that the status of a child should be determined by that of the mother, which act both gave to slavery the sanction of law and made it hereditary; and thus the system definitely gained a foothold in the oldest of the colonies.

As a race there was little to be remarked of the Negro in the colonial period. To those in bondage there was little outlook. Occasionally there was an attempt at an insurrection; but nothing of first rate importance materialized. In 1741 there was a very unhappy panic in New York, then a prosperous town of ten thousand inhabitants. Nine fires in rapid succession led to the report that the Negroes were conspiring to burn the city. All of the eight lawyers of the town appeared against the defendants, who had no counsel and who were convicted on most insufficient evidence. Before the fury was over, fourteen of the Negroes were burned, eighteen hanged, and seventy-one deported.

Any evidence of progress in this period would of course have to be found among the free Negroes. The position of these people was a very anomalous one. In the South especially very harsh laws were passed against them; but very frequently these were not enforced. In general the class was regarded as idle and shiftless and a breeder of mischief. More and more, however, individuals made their way in gainful occupations. The free Negro might become skilled at a trade; he might buy land; he might even buy slaves; and he might have one gun with which to protect his home. Liberty, however, genuine liberty, he did not possess. In all the finer things of life, the things that make life worth living, the lot that was his was only less hard than that of the slave.

The general period of the Revolution was one of idealism. Humanitarianism and liberalism were in the air, and both principles were exerting a profound influence on English literature and life. In 1772 Lord Mansfield, Chief Justice of England, thrilled all English-speaking people by handing down from the Court of King's Bench the decision that as soon as a slave set foot upon the soil of England he became free. The logic of the position of the patriots, Franklin, Adams, and Jefferson, naturally forced them to defend liberty at all times; and by the time the convention for the framing of the Constitution of the United States met in Philadelphia, at least two of the original thirteen states had positively prohibited slavery, while in three others gradual abolition was in progress. Under the influence of commercialism and industrialism, however, great convictions gradually declined; and at least two of the three great compromises that entered into the Constitution were a concession to the slave-holding South. Then across the page of history flashed the brilliant figure of Toussaint L'Ouverture, who led the Negro race to obtain its first independent colony outside of the continent of Africa. In America the influence of the chieftain became one of the reasons for the cheap selling of Louisiana, and rendered more certain the prohibition of the slave-trade at the end of 1807. A wave of fear swept over the South, and Georgia and the Carolinas at once passed repressive measures designed especially to restrict the importation of Negroes from the West Indies.

Meanwhile the sections were being arrayed against each other. The first fugitive slave law had been passed in 1793. The period 1820-60 was marked by five great aggressive steps on the part of the slave power: the Missouri Compromise , the annexation of Texas , the Fugitive Slave Law , the Kansas-Nebraska Bill , and the Dred Scott Decision . One after another appeared Lundy and Garrison, Parker and Birney, Whittier and Lovejoy, Phillips and Sumner, Lydia Maria Child and Harriet Beecher Stowe; the South replied to the Underground Railroad with a virtual reopening of the slave-trade; John Brown made a raid on Harper's Ferry; and then came the appeal to arms.

And what of the Negro himself in all this period of turmoil and tumult? The inner life of the race was one of furious ferment. Already were there sharp cries for vengeance, for economic freedom, and for the immediate granting of the full privileges of citizenship; and on the other hand there were those who tried to look far into the future with an air of conservatism and philosophy. Naturally there was the appeal to force; the only wonder is that there was not more of this. As early as 1687 a conspiracy among the Negroes in the Northern Neck in Virginia was detected just in time to prevent slaughter. In Surry County in 1710 there was a similar plot, betrayed by one of the conspirators. An attempt in New York in 1712 resulted in the execution of many Negroes. In 1740 some slaves on the coast of South Carolina, under the lead of one of their number named Cato, began an indiscriminate slaughter of the white people in which many lives were lost. Somewhat more ambitious was the effort made in Richmond in 1800 and known as Gabriel's Insurrection. In 1822 an unusually intelligent Negro, Denmark Vesey, the deepest thinker of all Negro insurrectionists, conceived a plan that contemplated nothing less than the total annihilation of the people of Charleston. His plot was divulged, and as a result thirty-five men were executed and thirty-seven banished. For the magnitude of its plan, the care with which it was matured, and the faithfulness of the leaders to one another, Vesey's insurrection was never equaled by a similar attempt for freedom in the United States. Nine years later, however, Nat Turner, the type of the emotional insurrectionist, with the assistance of five other men, actually killed fifty-seven white people before he was stopped. The effect of this revolt upon legislation was immediate. Virginia, Maryland, North Carolina, and other states at once passed harshly repressive measures.

Less direct than open revolt, but more effective sometimes, was escape by running away. In general the slaves directed their way to the North or to the swamps such as those in Virginia and Florida. The Dismal Swamp became a famous hiding-place. Soldiers never ventured into the colony, and bloodhounds sent thither did not return. The first Seminole War was very largely caused by fugitives who had been befriended by the Indians, and the second was even more directly so caused than the first.

In the ordinary social life of the Negro, however, the decade after Nat Turner's insurrection was one of the most trying in the history of the race in America. Repressive measures in the Southern states have just been remarked. In the North the free Negro was beginning to feel the force of economic ostracism. In Ohio no Negro was allowed to settle unless he gave bond for his support. When this law and others of similar import began to be put in force in 1829, serious riots prevailed in Cincinnati for three days, in the course of which several Negroes were killed. Mobs in Philadelphia at various times within the period also murdered Negroes.

Meanwhile migration was strongly urged in some quarters as a solution of the problem. Says Dr. DuBois: "As early as 1788 a Negro union of Newport, Rhode Island, had proposed a general exodus to Africa. John and Paul Cuffe, after petitioning for the right to vote in 1780, started in 1815 for Africa, organizing an expedition at their own expense which cost four thousand dollars. Lott Carey organized the African Mission Society in 1813, and the first Negro college graduate went to Liberia in 1829 and became superintendent of public schools.... About two thousand black emigrants eventually settled in Hayti."

Even after the Civil War migration efforts were renewed, the Baptists and the Methodists of South Carolina joining hands in 1877 in the formation of the Liberian Exodus Joint Stock Company. As early as 1833, however, in his pamphlet entitled "Thoughts on African Colonization," Garrison showed the futility of the whole plan as a means of solving the problem of the Negro in the United States, and time has justified his view.

The Civil War meant more than the emancipation of four million slaves, with all the perplexing problems that that liberation brought with it; it involved the overturning of the whole economic system of the South. To educate the freedmen, to train them in citizenship, and to give them a place in the new labor system, was all a problem calling for the wisest statesmanship and the largest and most unselfish patriotism. Strange contradictions moreover were frequently in evidence to increase the practical difficulties of the situation. Some Negroes, because of personal attachment, refused to leave their former masters; while the South in general, although it laid all its ills at the door of the Negro, violently opposed any considerable effort to have him taken away.

What was the Federal Government to do with the freedman? Of course it could leave him alone. Having emancipated him, it could let him work out his destiny as he would. In view of the situation, however, and the principles for which the war had been fought, such a course was manifestly impossible, especially as the so-called Black Codes of some of the Southern states raised the question if the results of the war were really being accepted in good faith. The next course then was some form of Federal oversight; and thus we have the Freedmen's Bureau. The best exposition of the work of this institution is to be found in the writings of Dr. DuBois. It started the ex-slaves on their new career as free laborers, gave them recognition before the courts, and established the free common school in the South. It did not wholly guard its methods from paternalism, however; it did not live up to its implied promise to furnish the freedmen with land; and, worst of all, when the Negroes in spite of all their disadvantages had actually accumulated a total of three million dollars, the same being deposited in the Freedman's Bank, this bank, morally if not technically a part of the Freedmen's Bureau, failed, and the former slaves, at the very beginning of their economic freedom, received a severe blow not only to their confidence in the good faith of their government but also to that in the virtues of self-reliance and thrift. Gradually, through the efforts of Charles Sumner in the Senate and Thaddeus Stevens in the House, the conviction was forced upon the country that the only solution of the problem was to give the Negro the ballot as the full protection of his citizenship. Thus in 1870 the Fifteenth Amendment was passed. All the logic of the situation demanded it, in spite of temporary disadvantages; and yet it has never since ceased to be bewailed in some quarters as a grave political error, even by such a representative student as James Bryce. In proof of this position theft and the incompetency of officials in the Reconstruction era are cited, when everybody knows that the carpetbaggers rather than the freedmen themselves received most of the spoil, and that the good points of the Reconstruction governments, such as the emphasis on common school education, have just as sedulously been belittled. In 1875 the second Civil Rights Act was passed, designed to give Negroes equality of treatment in theaters, railway cars, hotels, etc.; but this the Supreme Court declared unconstitutional in 1883. Meanwhile the KuKlux Klan was already at work; the withdrawal of the Federal troops and the wholesale removal of disabilities by Congress weakened the Reconstruction governments; and thus the way was paved for democratic success in the South.

As the KuKlux Klan declined, however, and the Negro, in spite of discouraging circumstances, steadily advanced in property, education, and culture, more and more the South felt the need of re?nforcing its position by definite legislation. In 1890 the era of disfranchisement was formally inaugurated. In this year Mississippi so amended her constitution as to exclude from the suffrage any person who had not paid his poll-tax or who was unable to read any section of the Constitution, understand it when read to him, or give a reasonable interpretation of it. Real discretion in interpretation of course lay only with the registrars, who could admit just so many persons as they deemed of good character and as understanding the duties of citizenship. South Carolina amended her constitution to similar purpose in 1895; and in 1898 Louisiana invented the so-called "grandfather clause." This excused from the operation of her disfranchising act all descendants of men who had voted before the Civil War, thus admitting to the suffrage all white men who were illiterate and without property. Other Southern states in one way or another followed these three. In the final estimate of history the whole effort must appear simply as a pathetic attempt to delay the full operation of justice and the rights of man.

For the present, however, the question of the Negro's attitude toward the problem was one of surpassing moment. Suddenly, in 1895, arose a new and genuine leader, Booker T. Washington, who offered a very definite program. In a remarkable speech at the Atlanta Exposition he said to the white South: "In all things that are purely social we can be as separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress.... Ignorant and inexperienced, it is not strange that in the first years of our new life we began at the top instead of at the bottom; that a seat in Congress or the State Legislature was worth more than real estate or industrial skill." What seemed the common sense and the sweet reasonableness of this program at once commanded attention; and the South, in the first flush of a new era of industrial development, and the North, perfectly ready to accept any program that promised to make Southern investments secure, both approved the new leader, who along the lines of thrift and self-reliance certainly gave tremendous inspiration to thousands of his brother-laborers in the South.

Let it not be forgotten that even in the first of these two large programs there was much that was admirable. Its virtues, however, fell distinctly short of the second. A man might have ten thousand dollars in his pocket; but if he was in a strange town and legally denied a bed late at night, or if he could not buy a meal in a restaurant when he was hungry, he would learn that there are some things in the world greater than money; and to-day more than ever we might assert that anything other than the fullest emphasis on the ordinary rights of citizenship is out of harmony with the principles of American democracy.

In this rapid review we have of course touched only lightly upon some matters of the highest importance. Among these are the economic advance of the race and its very great importance as an industrial factor; lynching; education; political significance; literature and music; and the connections with the present great war. Some of these will be considered more fully in the pages that follow. More and more we trust that it will be found that a struggling people is working out its own salvation, slowly out of the darkness climbing to the light.

FOOTNOTES:

This chapter is naturally indebted in some degree to the author's "A Short History of the American Negro" .

THE NEGRO AS AN INDUSTRIAL FACTOR

If the war has taught us anything, it has given us new respect for labor. There may once have been a time when great plantation owners despised workers in fields; but that time is past. Under the stress of new conditions, our richest captains of industry value the man who can raise cotton or make a shell or fix rivets in a ship.

The Negro has importance in America to-day as a working-man; and, aside from all questions of philanthropy or sentiment, he asks for consideration in this capacity. Some of our greatest businesses are becoming dependent upon him. In turn he asks if it is unreasonable for him to expect a man's chance to earn a living, fair wages for fair work, and such working conditions as make for general health and social betterment.

In 1910, of 3,178,554 Negro men at work in this country, 981,922 were listed as farm laborers and 798,509 as farmers. That is to say, 56 per cent. of the whole number were engaged in raising farm products either on their own account or by way of assisting somebody else. The great staples were of course the cotton and corn of the Southern states, and the new importance given to these crops by the war no one can gainsay. That is not all, however. If we take along with the farmers those engaged in the next occupations employing the greatest numbers of men--those of the building and hand trades, saw and planing mills, as well as those of railway firemen and porters, draymen, teamsters, and coal mine operatives--we shall find a total of 71.2 per cent. engaged in such work as represents the very foundation of American industry. What of the women? Of these, 1,047,146, or 52 per cent., were either farm laborers or farmers, and 28 per cent. more were either cooks or washerwomen. In other words, a total of exactly 80 per cent. were doing some of the hardest and at the same time some of the most necessary work in our home and industrial life. These are the workers for whom we ask consideration; and we make the request not on the basis of what they did fifty or a hundred years ago, but what they are worth now, to-day, as an important asset in the industrial life of the United States.

It has sometimes been said that these people are not reliable as workers, that they are migratory, that they fail to appear on Monday mornings, etc., and hence that it is hardly advisable to give them a chance in American industry on a large scale. Hear the testimony of Homer L. Ferguson, described as "the most human shipbuilder in America--and one of the ablest," fully half of whose 7,800 men and boys in his great Newport News shipyard are Negroes. Mr. Ferguson was born in North Carolina and he was talking to a Northern reporter: "Don't you dare come down from the North to this yard and tell us that the black man in the South is an industrial failure--you who only use him as an elevator boy or a parlor-car porter or a chauffeur and refuse to give him an equal industrial opportunity with white labor. How long would one of our expert machinists last at Taunton or at Paterson or at Schenectady? What opportunity would the unions give him? Can one of our good riveters go north and join the union? He can not. And otherwise he can not drive a single rivet."

What would the unions do in fact? What have they done already? We learn from the very valuable study by Mr. Abraham Epstein, "The Negro Migrant in Pittsburgh," in the publications of the School of Economics of the University of Pittsburgh, that an official of a union which has a membership of nearly five thousand, said that it had about five colored members. An official of an even more powerful union was "greatly astonished when he learned that there are white people who take an interest in the Negro question. He absolutely refused to give any information and did not think it worth while to answer such questions, although he admitted that his union had no colored people and would never accept them." To be thoroughly concrete, however, let us consider the Negro plasterers of Pittsburgh. On January 1, 1917, about thirty of these men, discriminated against by the local white union, wrote to the national organization in Middletown, Ohio, asking formally to have a local body of their own. Headquarters sent back reply to the effect that a charter could not be given without the consent of the older organization. Then followed a meeting in which the Negro secretary was given five minutes before the white local at its regular meeting. Nothing resulted. Under such circumstances is it any wonder that Negroes adopt a canny attitude when labor unions are concerned? More than this, can not organized labor itself realize the dangers for all in this hostile attitude toward the black race?

In spite of the labor unions, however, the Negro has gone North. The war, suddenly putting an end to the great immigrant stream from Europe, brought a sudden demand for unskilled labor undreamed of five years ago. Nobody knows how many Negroes have gone from the South to the North within the last three years. Perhaps 500,000; perhaps even 200,000 more. We do know, however, that they have gone in amazing numbers; and the thing of really vital importance is that these people shall be adequately adjusted to their new environment. Some opportunity should be afforded them to rise from the ranks of unskilled into those of skilled laborers. It is moreover of the highest importance that these newcomers to our large cities shall be adequately housed. Thirty persons are known to have lived recently in a seven-room house in Philadelphia; and in Pittsburgh 57 out of 390 rooms investigated have shown over six persons using the same room. In many cases the paper is torn off the walls, plaster sags from the laths, windows are broken, and the ceiling is low and damp. The whole question is of course closely connected with disease and mortality. In many places, and even in some of our training camps, there is too little opportunity for wholesome refreshment for the Negro. When will our cities learn that tuberculosis and typhoid fever are no respecter of persons? It is not enough to isolate bad cases after they are found out. The conditions of home sanitation, or lack of sanitation, that lead to these should be made impossible. I recall a section of pleasant homes in the West End of Atlanta. Suddenly, in the midst of clean, comfortable little cottages for white people there yawned before me an alley in which Negroes lived, with its dilapidated two-room dwellings, general lack of cleanliness, and its unwholesome air. From these places came the cooks and the washerwomen for the white families in the neighborhood; and this condition in one section of Atlanta can be duplicated in any city in the South, and in many in the North.

In 1910 the death-rate in 57 representative cities was 27.8 per 1,000 for Negroes and 15.9 for white people. The rates for both white people and Negroes were higher in the South than in the North, but not a great deal more so. Among the Negroes the diseases that overwhelmingly outnumbered the others in their victims were tuberculosis and pneumonia. Can any one doubt that this is due to the unsanitary conditions under which these people are in many instances forced to live?

To argue, however, that the Negro should be looked after in order that white people should be protected is to be guilty of a fallacy. All should be protected because all should have the best chance at life that their city or their state can afford them. All the more important is the question since it involves the welfare of three million men and women upon whom so largely rest the burdens of our farming, our mining, our railroading, our planing industries, and our home life.

The war has already taught us many things, and among the most important is the need for a new adjustment of social and economic values. If we are to be together in a crisis we must be together in times of peace, with the broadest sympathy one for another. Especially must we give due consideration to those who have the hardest work to do. Too long have some few become rich by exploiting the poor, the unprotected, the ignorant. True democracy does not mean that any one race or any one class shall be on top or at the bottom, but that all shall advance together to the height of human attainment. Only thus can we finally be secure. Only thus can our country be the country of our dreams.

LYNCHING

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