Robert Strange

“ What we white men of the North and South ought to do to encourage and help this better class of negroes is, in brief phrases, this: First, to keep our faces as flint against all social intermingling that looks toward amalgamation. Then, across this chasm, which both races frankly accept, to join hands with those trying to lift and better themselves, cheering, encouraging, and helping them. We must give them full protection in their life, liberty and pursuit of happiness ”

“ Just a word or two here about slavery, this suggestion coming to me from a Northern clergyman, who has for the past twenty years been doing noble work for the negroes in North Carolina. Slavery with all its horrors was over-ruled by God to be a great missionary institution. The savage black men were brought into the closest contact with the highest Anglo-Saxon civilization, the best negroes coming into personal touch with the best whites as servant and master. ”

“ I have already said that the Church strove to continue after the war the same method of dealing with the negroes as before. She tried to keep the races together; but she has found it impractical, that impracticability growing more and more clear as the years have run on. The races have been steadily drifting apart in all social or semi-social life; the better class of each race is coming less and less into contact with each other; and race prejudice is increasing and deepening in the great masses of both the white and the black people. ”

“ The negroes are dividing into two distinct classes more decidedly, it seems to me, than any other nationality in our country; and I hope they will continue to keep and increase this distinction. A minority are improving, are taking advantage of education, are advancing in morality and industry, are acquiring property and becoming worthy citizens. These few are setting a standard, and are giving us hope of what the negro can and may become. The majority are not improving, but rather retrogressing. ”

“ Surely among our own men in the Church, or our system is woefully at fault, we can find one or two honest, true, able, pure men, fit to be Bishops to their own race." Such a man would be a Bishop indeed to his race, such a Bishop as no white man can possibly be. ”

“ The other answer comes from the men who think that we are confronted by facts, not theories, and that theories must be given up in the face of opposing facts; who think that the Church in her wisdom must rise up to meet this opportunity and responsibility, must adapt and adjust her system to the facts; who say that if a negro Bishop is acknowledged to be the best means to Christianize and save the negroes, then we must have a negro Bishop. ”

“ So, we are placed in this condition: when we keep the negro close to us on formal equality, he has no real opportunity to grow and develop in the true characteristics of manhood; when we put him off in an inferior diocesan Convocation, he feels that he is not treated as a man; he is forced steadily to realize his inferiority to the white man, that inferiority declared [Pg 22] and impressed upon him by the Church of God. This, it seems to me, is the chief reason why we are not now growing as we ought to among the leading influential negroes of the South ”

“ What are we doing to evangelize the negroes and build them up into Christian men and women? I will tell you a little of the work which I know myself, in my own State of North Carolina, in our two dioceses and our one missionary jurisdiction. Bishop Atkinson—our great Church Father during and after the Civil War—felt his responsibility for the souls of the black folk; and he and his successors have been in more or less degree pressing the work of the Church among the negroes. We have now in the State two arch-deacons, thirteen clergymen, 1,400 communicants and 35 parishes and missions. ”

“ Two special ways in which the Church is influencing the negro race I take pleasure in mentioning. Arch-deacon Russell is holding every summer on his school grounds at Lawrenceville a "Farmers' Conference." The negroes come from all over the county and spend the day together, asking and answering publicly questions about their progress or their failure, their customs, good or bad, praising or criticising one another, and listening to selected speakers, urging them on to the best lines of development for their race. ”

“ This answer, again, comes from those who are looking more closely at the few, better, advancing negroes, thinking of them as men, with manly hopes and powers and aspirations, believing that races must be lifted by their own race leaders, that they can only truly understand and follow their own heroes. ”

“ One answer comes from those in the Church who still cling to the theory that there must be no race division whatever in the Church, that there must be under all conditions conceivable or inconceivable one Bishop in the same territory to all kinds, classes and races of people. ”

“ I have about the same size classes for Confirmation among the negroes that I have among the whites in the Churches of the same numerical strength. I have been Bishop of East Carolina about two and a half years; and I have confirmed 106 negroes and 644 white people, being an increase of 25 per cent. for the negroes and 18 per cent. for the whites. I am really proud of my staff of negro clergy; they are men of high moral character [Pg 17] and are doing good and effective service. ”

“ Now, as I study this race so dividing in the great laboratory of Nature, under the law of God which works on so justly, ofttimes apparently so cruelly, always for the general good of man, I look forward with the hope that this smaller, higher class will increase, and that the larger, lower class will decrease. ”

“ Lawrenceville, Va., and the Bishop Payne Divinity School, Petersburg, Va. In these schools we are educating for our part of the South workmen, teachers, business and professional men, and clergymen. We are combining in them education for the hand, for the head, for the heart, and for the spirit of man; we are giving these negroes the education that trains for life in all its phases, fitting them to be workers and leaders among their people. You have heard of the "Church Institute for the Negro." ”

“ Each arch-deacon goes all about his own diocese, visiting the colored parishes and missions, consulting with the clergy, and opening out new fields. The clergy are doing just the same kind of work among their people that the white clergy are doing in their white parishes and missions, with the exception that the colored clergy are giving more of their time to educational work. ”

“ From such friendly contact and advice from the highest and most sympathetic white men, he will go forth among his own people as their Apostle, their true Bishop and Father in God. In this double relation, in this position of high responsibility, he will stand forth as a true mediator between the races, pleading with both for peace, harmony, justice. ”

“ The better class will increase as all good things do and will increase in the providence of God and with the help and sympathy of true good men. The larger, meaner class of negroes will steadily diminish in two directions; the first by movement of their best into the higher class, swelling that slowly into the majority ”

“ They are looking on liberty as license; they are thinking that a little education will give them the privilege of living without manual labor; they are making higher wages the way to less work rather than the way to a higher standard of [Pg 24] life; they are shiftless, immoral, and criminal. ”

“ This action of the Church, this frank and fair position given to the negro will so appeal to the better class of the leading negroes, will so cheer and encourage them in their true progress, that they will come, I believe, steadily and largely into the Church. ”

“ And, my friends, I want to tell you here in Chicago to-night that we men of the South are largely doing all of these things now, and we are going to do them more and more completely. We are coming to see more and more clearly that it will not do to have forty per cent. ”

“ No; after forty years the separation between the races is clearer, wider and more distinct than ever before. The thoughtful black men do not desire amalgamation; and the white men will not have it. Some say the negro will be colonized. I think that there is less reason in this answer even than in the former. The negroes do not wish to go ”

“ The fact is, say what we will about it—it would carry me too far afield to explain it to-night—that the negro cannot work together on equality with the white man; he either assumes an apparent insolence and stubbornness, which the whites will not allow ”