Benjamin Griffith Brawley

“ 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. ”

“ What is the situation as we actually find it to-day? Go to any one of the most representative institutions, and what do we find? Efficient teachers struggling against most enormous disadvantages and frequently dealing with the crudest possible material. The wonder is that so much has been accomplished in the face of the handicap. It is not enough to reply that in all the schools and colleges of the country the teaching is irregular and the systems too lenient—that there is no human perfection in fact; these Negro colleges are crying for a better chance and they ought to have it. ”

“ If America has not reached her heights after three hundred years, she ought not to be impatient with the Negro after only fifty years of opportunity. Furthermore, all signs go to prove the assumption fundamentally false. We know of some of the younger men of to-day who have not only mastered language and science, but who have outshone brilliant groups of white students in pure philosophy. It would be a miracle if this were the everyday occurrence. It is not; but the fact that it is an occurrence at all means that the Negro is at least capable of the highest things. ”

“ Is the American white man, in the face of the rising brotherhood of man the world over, going to take the position that other races, and especially the colored races—the Japanese, the Chinese, the Hindu, the Negro—shall not occupy places of dignity and responsibility in this country? Does [100] he expect to maintain the position that any person not an Anglo-Saxon, no matter how cultured or educated or talented he may be, must forever maintain a politically and socially inferior status in the greatest republic in the world? ”

“ 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. ”

“ Let us, however, grant, say some, that the Negro helps himself; that is not sufficient. Anybody should help himself, anybody can; but what is the race worth as a constructive factor in American civilization? Is it finally to be an agency making for the upbuilding of the nation, or simply one of the forces that retard? What is its promise in American life? ”

“ Others might desert, but not the Negro; others might be spies or strikers, but not he—not he in time of peril. In peace or war, in victory or danger, he, the Negro, has ever been loyal to the Stars and Stripes. ”

“ And now, all around us, everywhere is the greatest of all wars. Once more has the Negro been summoned to the colors, and, because he is not fully protected in some places, because he has not the full power of suffrage, summoned out of all proportion to his numbers, summoned even when he could best serve at his regular work on the farms—not because the government intended unfairness, but because local registration officials have not been fair, because exemption boards have not been honest. ”

“ 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. ”

“ To train our boys in the virtues of citizenship and at the same time in knowledge of the rights of others; to teach them respect for others at the same time that they cultivate their own self-respect; to teach them the value of scholarship and also to let them know when scholarship [60] must become dynamic; to teach them to work, to love, to sing, to have faith, even when they see wrong all around them—this is a task calling for all one has of Christianity, of scholarship, and of delicacy. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ So far we have lightly touched upon some of the most important phases of the life of the Negro people in America. We have looked at a people whose ancestors were brought to the country against their own will and suddenly thrust into the rising civilization of a new nation, and we have looked at some of the more hopeful features of their life as well as at some of their greatest problems. ”

“ We shall have a glorified, a chastened, a regenerated United States—a country about whose greatness there shall be no doubt, and on whose honor there shall be no stain, a country that shall in the highest sense [94] stand for law and efficiency and justice, and one for which not some, but all, would be willing to die, because all would know that the government was thinking wisely for every one of its citizens. ”

“ Aside from the curriculum, what is the atmosphere that a boy breathes as soon as he sets foot on a college campus? Is he trained in honesty, in politeness, in high ideals of speech, in lofty conceptions of character? Does he have to obey orders? Is he taught to be neat, prompt, and industrious? Such questions are of things too often taken for granted, and too often lacking. ”

“ Far from being an advantage to both races the color line is the curse of both. Obsessed by the Negro problem, the white South has always been held back and still finds it impossible to think in the large; while the Negro is daily met with such insults as shake the very foundations of his citizenship. The argument on the mulatto goes back to the circle already remarked. Everybody knows that in a country predominantly white the quadroon has frequently been given some advantage that his black friend did not have, from the time that one was a house-servant and the other a field-hand ”

“ Let democracy mean the perfect freedom of the individual, the equal freedom of all individuals, but not license, and not that the rights of one individual shall endanger the rights of most. When the war began we availed ourselves of the talents of Thomas Alva Edison. ”

“ With our ideas of democracy we had slowly drifted into crass individualism, and sooner or later that was forced to mean selfishness. One year after the opening of the war we still had the sad spectacle of senators fiercely assailing the administration because of the tardiness of its shipping and airplane programs. We should not be too hasty in finding a scapegoat for what after all is a national delinquency. ”

“ Youth that craved adventure and inspiration found relief from the deadening routine of the week only in the coarse pleasure of the railroad on Sundays, or the big-meeting that came once a year. A gymnasium, a library, or an art museum the young man coming up to the academy in the city never saw in his life. ”

“ Not only, however, does the Negro give promise because of his economic worth; not only does he deserve the fullest rights of citizenship on the basis of his work as a soldier; he brings nothing less than a great spiritual contribution to civilization in America. His is a race of enthusiasm, imagination, and high spiritual fervor. [90] He revels in the sighing of the wind, the falling of the stars, the laughter of children, and already his music is recognized as the most original that the country has produced ”

“ Let any one ask, even the prejudiced observer, if he would like to see every Negro in the country out of it, and then he will decide whether economically the Negro is a liability for the country or an asset. ”

“ Now that the crisis is upon us all the more do we need to think clearly and conserve our energies for the future. Germany, under the guidance of her military philosophy, has destroyed the sanctity of the tenderest of all institutions, the home, encouraging temporary unions of men and women as a patriotic duty; and France in her hour of trial has further fallen prey to debauchery. We plead that American womanhood shall be preserved sacred and inviolate.
All of this has very close connection with our chief subject, the Negro. ”

“ More and more the South realized that she was not keeping pace with the country's development; and one of her own sons, speaking "simply as the voice of the non-slaveholding whites of the South," set forth such unpleasant truths as that the personal and real property, including slaves, of Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, Missouri, Arkansas, Florida, and Texas, taken all together, was less than that of the single state of New York; that representation in Southern legislatures was unfair; that slavery was to blame for the migration from the South to the West ”

“ Consider national organization. We were beguiled into thinking that our country as a whole was rich, well arrayed, amply prepared to take care of itself, invincible beyond question. As the first six months of the war slowly dragged by in their agonizing course, the conviction gradually forced itself upon us that we were only in the elementary class in economics, that we were neither organized nor prepared, and that it was after all vitally necessary for the government to assume official charge of the railroads. ”

“ Such is the situation in the church, in organized, conventional religion; when we look at the still larger principle of vital Christianity, at the heart of things of which mere churchgoing is only a symbol, we are still more appalled. Neither bigotry nor irreverence is right. Young people will not tolerate [96] cant; but neither will they be attracted to a worship that features what they can find better done in a theater. Simple goodness and kindness, however, never fail to command respect. Love is never hissed off the stage ”

“ This whole argument is guilty of the vicious fallacy of begging the question by arguing in a circle. First we degrade human beings by the curse of slavery for two hundred and fifty years, and then because they are not advanced we argue that they have not the capacity to rise. ”

“ No schools in the country have had a clearer idea of their mission, or have done more to answer it with limited facilities. The pity is that not one of a dozen representative colleges has the beginning of an adequate endowment, and all have had to do their work with the cheapest tools. And certainly such leadership as the race has had, and such advance as the race has made, have been due primarily to the large idea of Christian service behind the missionary institutions.
Within recent years, however, there has developed a fear of the part that the Negro is to play in American civilization. ”

“ We do not forget the work of Atlanta University in the training of common school teachers, nor that of Morehouse College for the Negro Baptists of Georgia, nor that of Spelman Seminary for the homes and Sunday Schools and rural schools of Georgia, when we raise the question if such institutions are really doing all that they should for their respective communities. We do not believe that they are, and we do not believe that the fault is wholly theirs. ”

“ So far as higher education for the Negro is concerned, however, there is one point at which the utilitarians persistently misunderstand those who do not wholly agree with them. No one better appreciates the value of genuine industrial education than the teachers in the Southern colleges. What they do oppose, however, is that sort of large legislation which says that because the Negro is mainly an agricultural race, his children as a whole should have that sort of education which will make of them good farmers and domestics. ”

“ Whatever is taught should be dynamic; now as never before it must justify itself in terms of human life. Such instructors for our youth would call for such an outlay for education as has not yet been dreamed of. They could not be ready, however, until they had passed through a long period of preparation; and for such an investment they should later of course be adequately paid. Along with better teachers would go better equipment generally. ”

“ 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 [9] Armenians so long as the rights of citizens at home are violated. ”

“ 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.
Not only at home, however, do we have to consider the problem. The war has brought us as never before face to face with the whole foreign policy of the United States, especially as regards the mixed races and colored peoples with whom the National Government has to deal. ”