John Wesley Cromwell

“ In his “Autobiography of a Fugitive Negro,” Samuel Ringgold Ward says: “A State or a National Convention of black men is held. The talent displayed, the order maintained, the demeanor of the delegates, all impress themselves upon the community. All agree that to keep a people rooted to the soil who are rapidly improving, who have already attained considerable influence and are marshalled by gifted leaders, (men who show themselves qualified for legislative and judicial positions) , and to doom them to a state of perpetual vassalage is altogether out of the question.” ”

“ But unless she is not only allowed but encouraged to emerge out of her world with the shameful fruit of her guilty life and love, and so to confront her white paramour or betrayer in his world, how is the lower world ever to rid itself of such as she, or the upper one of such as he? In the segregation and outlawry of the black woman under such conditions lie the white woman's greatest danger, lie the white race's greatest danger from admixture of the races, lies the South's greatest danger to its morals. ”

“ For there arises unbidden, unavoidably, in the minds of such women the ugly question, whose daughter is she, and whose mistress is she to be? For in the girl's veins may flow the proudest blood of the South. And this possibility, aye, probability, so shameful to both races, no one in the South knows better than the Southern white woman. What happens? The most natural thing in the world, but not the wisest. The hatred, the suspicion, the fear of these women find expression in scorn, in active ill-will, not only toward that particular girl, but toward her whole class as well. ”

“ The lust, the passions of the master-class, act powerfully on the lust, the passions of the slave-class, and those of the slave-class react not less powerfully on the master-class. The greater the cruelty, tyranny and lust of the one, the greater will be the cunning, deceit and lust of the other. And there is no help for this so long as the one race rules and the other race is ruled, so long as there exists between them in the state inequality of rights, of conditions, based solely on the race-hood of each. ”

“ This racial inequality generates heat in masculine breasts in the under world. And with this heat there ensues that fermentation of thought and feeling which men call passion. Those submerged men begin to think sullenly on the subject, they try to grasp the equities of the situation. As thought spreads among them, feeling spreads among them also. About their own women they see no fence, about the women of the other race they see that high wall. ”

“ Let the Negro and his friends realize that the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the United States Constitution represent not a backward step but a stride forward in civilization, and that they were fostered and ratified, not for the sake of the temporary burden which they may have put upon the white race in the South, but for the benefit of all races, at all times, in all America. ”

“ Indeed, slavery is a breeding-bed, a sort of compost heap, where the best qualities of both races decay and become food for the worst. The brute appetites and passions of the two act and react on the moral nature of each race with demoralizing effects. The subjection of the will of one race under such circumstances to the will of another begets in the race that rules cruelty and tyranny, and in the one that is ruled, fear, cunning and deceit. ”

“ What is a Negro? When are we are going to discriminate against a fellow, we must be careful and definite in pointing him out. And so each set of discriminating laws contains its own definition of the word Negro, and the definitions have differed widely. At first in some parts of the North the Negro was defined as any person who was visibly colored. It is plain, however, that if the matter is left to the eyes, millions of American "Negroes" will have to be taken into the Caucasian race,—and so most of the state legislatures reduced their definition to the finer discriminations of mathematics. ”

“ All the sanctions of law, of morals, and of religion conspire to protect the wife against the roving propensities of the husband, combine to curb his male instinct to run after many women, to practice plural marriages. There thus grows up in the breast of the race, is transmitted to each man with the accumulated strength of social heredity, a feeling of personal fear, a sense of moral obligation, which together war against his male instinct for promiscuous sexual intercourse, and make for male purity, for male fidelity to the one-wife idea, to the one-wife institution. ”

“ The great law of reproduction which applies without shadow of change to individual life, applies equally to the life of that aggregation of individuals called a race or nation. Not any more than an individual can they do wrong with impunity, can they commit a bad deed without reaping in return the result in kind. There is nothing more certain than the wrong done by a people shall reappear to plague them, if not in one generation, then in another. ”

“ With a firm faith in our ability and the consciousness of our inalienable title to a worthy share in the development of the New World. We may look forward with confidence to the inevitable reward of industry sustained by the courage which demands that an honest toiler shall not be despoiled of the fruits of his labor. We may expect therefore that as Negro slavery began in the West Indies and South America and crept northward, so also will come to the United States the gradual dissolution of the problem of color in the general problems of a progressing human race. ”

“ The name of Haiti will always stimulate us to revere the memory of men who have stamped their names on the scroll of time, for not only did that island strike the first effective blow for the liberation of the black slave, but, having accomplished this purpose, the Haitians aided in the liberation of all America from the yoke of Europe. ”

“ For it is a fact hardly less curious, if not so strange, that there are men who while they would not think of marrying into a class beneath them would nevertheless live readily enough in a state of concubinage with women of that class. And in this upper class there are women, not many, it is true, who would do the same thing. They care enough for the men in the class beneath them to enter into illicit relations in secret with them, but not enough to enter into licit relations with these same men in the open, in the gaze of a scornful and horrified world. ”

“ The one followed the other with the regularity of a law of nature, the invariability of the law of cause and effect. As slavery grew and multiplied and spread itself over the land, the evils begotten of slavery grew, and multiplied, and spread themselves over the life of the people, black and white alike. ”

“ Haitians, all, and Negro of the continent of America and of all the adjacent islands; My Brethren! Learn it at once, and never forget it. The free man is the one who takes the responsibility? of his own proper well-being. He has nothing to ask, nothing to solicit, neither from the pity nor the generosity of his fellows. He is bound to count upon himself, and upon himself alone, to turn aside or to overcome, whatever obstacles that lie in the way of his happiness. Strength and skill are for the free man absolute necessities. ”

“ And the Fifteenth Amendment did not appear till five years after the war, when even the Fourteenth Amendment had failed to persuade. Why should revenge wait so long and advance so reluctantly? It seems that the friends of freedom, who had the political power in their hands, were slow to anger and plenteous in hope.
This suffrage amendment was to be a bulwark to the liberties not only of black men but of all men in America; it was directed not only against the "Black Laws" of the South but against political and civil slavery everywhere in the nation. ”

“ The real peril of an admixture of the races in the South lies not in intermarriage, but in concubinage, lies through that secret door which connects the races, the key to which is in the hands of the white men of the South. It is they who first opened it, and it is they who continue to keep it open. Were it not for the folly of the white women of the South, it might yet be closed and sealed. ”

“ But these women forget the existence of that secret door, of the hidden way. They forget also the hand that holds the key to the one and the clue to the other. That hand is the hand of the white man; it is certainly not the hand of the colored woman.
Is it not the white woman of the South more than any other agency, or than all other agencies put together, who are responsible for the existence of a public sentiment in the South which makes it legally impossible for a colored girl to obtain redress from the white man who betrayed her, or support from him for his bastard child? ”