Theodore D. Jervey

“ It is much better that our drays should be driven by slaves—that our factories should be worked by slaves—that our hotels should be served by slaves—that our locomotives should be served by slaves, than that we should be exposed to the introduction, from any quarter, of a population alien to us by birth, training and education, and which, in the process of time, must lead to that conflict between capital and labor, which makes it so difficult to maintain free institutions in all wealthy and highly cultivated nations, where such institutions as ours do not exist. ”

“ It is not an uncommon thing to hear men say—‘Let the negro alone; he makes a good peasant class; he is the best laborer we can get for the cotton fields, etc.’ Do not all such forget that there is no such thing as a peasant class under our form of government? Do they not forget that the Negro is a free American citizen, entitled by virtue of his citizenship, if on no other account, to equality before the law with the foremost citizens of the land, equality of opportunity, equality of rights.... ”

“ Forty one years before this Negro scholar discovered the handicap, the South, in attempting to readjust itself to the consequences of defeat and the overthrow of its industrial system, had legislated to preserve that acquaintanceship by a system of apprenticeship, which if it was calculated to work out the problem very slowly; yet was calculated to produce something superior even to the free persons of color that slavery had evolved, a worthy product which no Negro or Northern scholar has ever had the patience to think about. ”

“ No race ever gave Passive Resistance and Submission to Evil longer, more piteous trial. Today we raise the terrible weapon of Self Defense. When the murderer comes he shall no longer strike us in the back. When the armed lynchers gather, we too must gather armed. When the mob moves we propose to meet it with bricks and clubs and guns. But we must tread here with solemn caution. We must never let justifiable self defense against individuals become blind and lawless offense against all white folk. We must not seek reform by violence. ”

“ Now whatever wrongs or supposed wrongs the Negro soldiery suffered in Houston, can it be reasonably contended that they, armed by the Federal Government and enlisting to be under its orders, in breaking away from the control of their superior officers and with weapons put in their hands for other purposes, in any way assisted civilization and order by precipitating themselves upon the white population in an attempt to shoot up the city? ”

“ For the first time the bold ground has been taken that slaves have a right to petition Congress ... itself emancipation.... Our fate as a people is bound up in the question. If we yield, we will be extirpated; but if we successfully resist, we will be the greatest and most flourishing people of modern time. It is the best substratum of population in the world and one on which great and flourishing Commonwealths may be most easily and safely reared. ”

“ The yearning desire was for political supremacy and never for domestic thrift and economy. Hence we became dependent upon the North for everything from a lucifer match to a columbiad, from a pin to a railroad engine. A state of war found us without the machinery to make a single percussion cap for a soldier’s rifle, or a single button for his jacket. The system of labor which erected a class covetous of political distinction has been forever abolished ”

“ They are merely symptoms of the protest of your entrance into a higher sphere of American citizenship. They are the dark hours before morning which have always come just before the burst of a new civic light. Some people see this light and they provoke these riots endeavoring to stop it from coming. But God is working. Things will be better for the Negro. We want full citizenship ballot, equal school facilities and everything else. We fought for them. We will have them; we must not yield. The greater part of the best thinking white people, North and South know we are entitled to all we ask. ”

“ Eighteen years ago, before the great world problem of color had arisen, there was nothing to chill the zeal of the British Negrophilist; but in South Africa the British Negrophobe is increasing in numbers and his influence is also being felt in Canada. Still there are opportunities for the Negro yet, if the leaders of the race will only awaken to the necessities of diffusion. But time and tide wait for no man. ”

“ Men of different races may well stand uncompromisingly against any suggestion of social equality. Indeed it would be helpful to have the word equality eliminated from this consideration, to have it accepted on both sides that this is not a question of social equality but a question of recognizing a fundamental, eternal and inescapable difference. We shall have made real progress when we develop an attitude in the public and community thought of both races which recognizes the difference. ”

“ But fierce as was the blaze that Wilson and his like were fanning, it became a devouring flame with the assassination of Lincoln. This President Johnson, with the aid of Seward, strove earnestly to quench.
Born in North Carolina, the most democratic State of the old South, Andrew Johnson had raised himself from the humblest of origins to a position of distinct prominence in that western Southern State Tennessee, mainly peopled from North Carolina. ”

“ There is danger today that between the intense feeling of the South and the conciliatory spirit of the North grave injustice will be done the Negro American in the history of Reconstruction. Those who see in Negro suffrage the cause of the main evils of Reconstruction must remember that if there had not been a single freedman left in the South after war the problems of Reconstruction would still have been grave. Property in slaves to the extent of perhaps two thousand million dollars had suddenly disappeared. ”

“ The Western people are already calling out for slaves in their new lands, and will fill that country with slaves, if they can be got through South Carolina and Georgia. Slavery discourages arts and manufactures. The poor despise labor when performed by slaves. They prevent the immigration of whites, who really enrich and strengthen a country. They produce the most pernicious effect on morals. Every master of slaves is born a petty tyrant. ”

“ Harper knew that slave labor was not by any means cheap labor. Like Hammond and other students of affairs, he knew that free labor was cheaper both in Great Britain and the United States, but that the reports of the parliamentary commission of 1842 had indicated that the laboring classes of the United Kingdom were in a more miserable condition, and were more degraded morally and physically than the slaves of the South. ”

“ While there is no more social equality in the North than there is in the South, and practically no desire for the same, the longer the Negro lives there, the opportunities to enjoy himself according to his means appeal to him. He earns more money, can live in a better house, buy better clothes, develops more accomplishments, has more leisure and has more protection in his enjoyment. Personally, I think it is good both for the Negroes and for the whites that a million or two million Negroes leave the South. ”

“ Weighing duly what is urged above, without necessarily accepting all of it as accurate, is it not apparent, that, for a Southern white man to argue that the Negroes should remain in the South, in the masses in which they now exist there, is an indication that he refuses to consider anything as beneficial, which affects industrial conditions he has become accustomed to? For the Negro so to think is simply the survival of the servile instinct, which the bulk of the Southern whites claim is latent in all Negroes. ”

“ We discovered that there were two different and distinctly differing races living in this region in harmony with each other, one being clearly of Indo-African origin, possessing exceedingly fine features, aquiline noses, slender necks, small heads, with a grand and proud carriage; an old, old race, possessing splendid traditions and ruled by inflexible customs, which would admit of no deviation. Though the majority have a nutty brown complexion, some even of a rich dark brown, the purest of their kind resemble old ivory in color and their skins have a beautiful soft feel, as of finest satin. ”

“ Not only would we pay for Western production consumed by the South, in foreign goods received in exchange for our own produce, but we should be able to supply a large portion of the Western country with all the goods now obtained by them from abroad, receiving in exchange their products to be distributed in Southern ships throughout the world. The truth is that all our efforts to establish a direct trade with Europe must in a great measure be unavailing unless we can provide a market in the West for the goods we may import. ”

“ He realized that capital would inevitably reach out for cheap labor, which while a benefit to the employer and the consumer, would slowly undermine the foundations of the republic, bringing all labor down, while it built up a privileged class of idle rich. He heard in this cry for the re-opening of the slave trade, the same demand for cheap labor with all the ills which the South had freed herself from, in the years in which she had trained and elevated her expensive laboring class. ”

“ If Sir Harry Johnston, or for the matter of that, his patron, President Roosevelt, had only been able to study that neglected and impoverished Negro seer, the only one of the teachers of his people who gave his blood for their freedom, proving his faith by his works and not by mere lip service, the repudiation of whom by the Negroes and their leaders is the severest indictment which could be drawn against the race, they might have been wiser. ”

“ Life and liberty will then be secured, for these are naturally under the guardianship of society and that civilization which is the fruit of its progress. ‘Free government’ and all that sort of thing has been, I think, a fatal delusion and humbug from the time of Moses. Freedom does not spring from government, but from the same soil which produces government itself, and all that we want from that is a guarantee for property fairly acquired. ”

“ Yet with all these imperfections in the social acceptance of the colored people of the United States—imperfections which with time and patience and according to the merits of the Negro will disappear—the main fact was evident to me after a tour through the Eastern and Southern States of North America; that nowhere in the world—certainly not in Africa—has the Negro been given such a chance of mental and physical development as in the United States. ”

“ If the Northern Negroes have a higher death rate and breed a larger proportion of criminals and prostitutes than do the whites, it is in large part our own fault. We cannot understand the problems of the Negro in the North unless we constantly bear in mind the fact of industrial opportunity. The Northern Negro has the right to vote, the right and duty to send his children to school, and technically, at least, many civil and political rights. ”

“ That, in turning the attention of the race to manual and industrial training, Washington performed a great work is not to be denied. That, in influencing many of his people to follow him in such a program, he has raised the ambition of not a few to a much higher plane than the race had shown itself heretofore capable of, must be admitted, and these are great achievements. But it is an error to imagine that Washington ever made for himself or his race any renunciation of the aspiration for social equality. ”

“ If at the end of half a century, only 50 per cent or 60 per cent instead of 89 per cent of the Negroes were congregated in the Southern States, it would end the fear of race domination, and take from the South many of its peculiar characteristics, which today hamper development. To the Negro it would be of even more obvious benefit.... For if the Southern Negro finding political and social conditions intolerable, were to migrate to the North, he would have in his hand a weapon as effective, as any he could find, in the ballot box.... ”

“ Contact with the whites is the chief condition for the progress of the Negro. Where he is isolated or where he greatly outnumbers the whites, his advance will be retarded.... Yet he is often no better off at the North where the white laborers may refuse to work with him and where he has no more chance than in the South of receiving, except in very exceptional cases, any sort of social recognition from any class of whites, while in the cities everywhere he is met by the competition of the generally more diligent and more intelligent whites. ”

“ If there is ground for condemnation in the above, the South must be condemned for thinking better of their conquerors than they deserved. The South Carolina Act, above alluded to, excepted from the provisions of what has been called the “Black Code”—“every person who may have of Caucasian blood, seven-eighths or more,” who it provided “shall be deemed a white person,” [196] declaring, however, that: “all other free Negroes, mulattoes and mestizos, all freed women and all descendants through either sex of any of these, except as above, shall be known as persons of color.” ”

“ The Supreme Court of the United States, therefore, shares with the Lower South the responsibility for this harsh and unwise restriction of the right of labor to its fullest wage, as well as the denial to a peculiarly ignorant and helpless mass of the population, of an assisted egress from localities where they are said to be such a menace from their extraordinary numbers, that a setting aside of all law and depriving of individuals of life without law by mobs is sometimes by some people justified. ”

“ Cleveland, I do not believe he is conscious of possessing any color [Pg 205] prejudice. He is too great for that. In my contact with people, I find that as a rule, it is only little, narrow people, who live for themselves, who never read good books, who do not travel, who never open their souls in a way to permit them to come in contact with other souls—with the great outside world. No man whose vision is bounded by color can come in contact with what is highest and best in the world. In meeting men in many places, I have found that the happiest people are those who do the most for others ”

“ In reply to this it may be said, that when the Negroes are thoroughly diffused throughout the United States, they are apt to get as free a ballot as the whites and proportionately the same education; but when all who labor, white or black, get a just wage, the millennium will have arrived and the capitalistic lion will be lying down with the horny headed laboring lamb. ”

“ When the broken, beaten South attempted to frame the Codes, which no Negro has ever been able to consider judicially, the survivors could not possibly approach the condition they were in with an open mind. The greatest mind that has ever considered our great experiment in government, the French student De Tocqueville and that strong but shallower mind, that for so many years had with its resolutions overshadowed all others in the South, united in the dictum. Abolition means Africanization for the South. But the whites of the South were to a great extent British and Northern Irish in stock. ”

“ His doctrine has tended to make the whites, North and South, shift the burden of the Negro problem to the Negro’s shoulders and stand aside as critical and rather pessimistic [Pg 208] spectators; when in fact the burden belongs to the nation, and the hands of none of us are clean, if we bend not our energies to righting these great wrongs. The South ought to be led by candid and honest criticism to assert her better self and do her full duty to the race she has cruelly wronged and is still wronging. The North, her co-partner in guilt—cannot salve her conscience by plastering it with gold.... ”