Various

“ Often having to battle against this great evil of race prejudice which yet lingers in our land and which so often stands in the way of progress for these women, not only, said Mrs. Terrell, must she struggle with the handicap of color, but only too often she gets no sympathy from the white woman, who should be at least willing to give a helping hand to these colored friends who, like herself, are more or less looking forward to perfect freedom and all which that means for womanhood. ”

“ But when a group of black folk growing in power put a $75,000 church on your corner—that is a phase of the race problem that hadn’t struck you before.
Between these cities of past and present lies the mystic city of the future, with its great cloud walls.
In Oberlin there are nearly two thousand young folk at study and at play. Working and playing beside them are a hundred colored boys and girls, and they all walk on sacred ground, on ground long since consecrated to racial equality and hatred of caste and slavery. ”

“ No man more perfectly sensed, and more entirely abhorred, slavery, and no one has ever poured such scorn upon the secondhand, Walter-Scotticised, pseudo-chivalry of the Southern ideal. He held himself responsible for the wrong which the white race had done the black race in slavery, and he explained, in paying the way of a Negro student through Yale, that he was doing it as his part of the reparation due from every white man to every black man. ”

“ The continued existence of the color prejudice that is peculiar to the American people is one of the most singular features of our national life. It is probably due to the lurking consciousness that the white people of the United States owe a debt to the Negro race that can never be repaid. None are so unforgiving as those who are conscious that they have most to be forgiven. It takes more than common magnanimity to cherish a friendly feeling toward those you have wronged, and the American people have hardly attained to that point of magnanimity yet. ”

“ There is no use to palaver about and invent reasons. Everybody who knows anything at all knows that racial antipathy is a real thing, even though intangible. Why beat about the bush and deny it? Aside from the ignorance of the Negro, his many weaknesses, his fatal physiological structure, his extraction prevents his recognition as a social equal, be he in South Africa, America or anywhere else. ”

“ You ask whether, in my judgment, the Negro is as good as the white man. Now I will not venture to say that the Negro is as good as you, for I do not know how good you are. But I will put it this way: The Negro is as good as I am. You certainly cannot object to my appraising myself; and I say that the Negro is as good as I am. I also say that I am as good as you or any other man that lives or has lived or ever will live! ”

“ The New York Globe says:
“The Negro has been told to smile and look pleasant as his political rights have been taken from him. The argument has been that if he did not make a fuss over voting the race prejudice of his white fellow citizen would abate—that he would be given a freer chance to work, to acquire property, to become of material weight in the community. But, North as well as South, doors of industry are being shut against the Negro. The economic tragedy of the educated Negro who aspires to good things is pitiful. ”

“ It is true that with all peoples, and especially with a race in the throes of birth-pain, personal likes and jealousies play a wretchedly large part. But it does not follow that they explain all the struggle and difference of opinion. It is true that the rise of a man like Mr. Booker T. Washington to a place of commanding influence has made him an object of envy to many narrow souls. But it does not follow that the thousands of intelligent people who differ with Mr. Washington are all actuated by such motives, or are unable to distinguish great and vital principles apart from personal feeling. ”

“ There are social limitations that are cruel and inexcusable, but the blacks are not the only ones against whom the gates are shut.
“This is a world in which true men give and take. It is a world in which all must make allowances. It is a world in which, after all, men are judged not so much by race or nationality or possessions as by personal merit. Otherwise, how could a Booker Washington, born a Virginia slave, have ‘stood before kings’ and associated for the greater part of his life with the earth’s greatest and best?
“We do not condemn the American men of color who have made this protest. ”

“ It is one thing to govern colored peoples. It is another to live with them. The States has the harder problem, and the problem is not of its own making. Until we have a Mr. Roosevelt of our own, we shall not hasten to advise the States, and we shall be as careful in our censure as in our advice.
But we must recognize, for it is of primary importance, this new and violent spirit which is growing in America, under pressure of the Negroes from within and the yellow races from without. ”

“ One of the biggest tasks awaiting the energetic and intelligent action of the American Socialists is our great Negro problem. It is by no means disposed of by reference to our theoretical declaration for human equality regardless of race, creed or color. The problem is here, a momentous part of the general labor problem. For behind all the antagonism to the Negro lurks the desire of capitalism to keep the colored people down in a state of political helplessness so that they may all the easier be exploited for the benefit of the profit makers.—The Call. ”

“ Why not ask the working man? Why not ask black people, and yellow people, and poor people, and all the people from whom such congregations flee in holy terror? The church that does not run from the lowly finds the lowly at its doors, and there are some such churches in the land, but we fear that their number in Baltimore is not as great as should be. ”

“ To me the injustice is plain of permitting the 4,000 Republicans of Mississippi to cast 20 votes in the convention, while Iowa, with 300,000 Republicans, can cast only 26. It it right that Georgia, with only 30,000 Republican voters, should have exactly the same number of delegates as Iowa, with ten times that number of Republican votes? Every one recognizes that the Republican party—such as it is in the far Southern States—is composed almost wholly of Federal officeholders and those who want Federal office. ”

“ White men alone are men. This Negro wants to be a man. Ergo he wants to be a white man.
Their attention is drawn to the efforts of colored people to be treated decently. This minor premise therefore attracts them. But the major premise—the question as to treating black men like white men—never enters their heads, nor can they conceive it entering the black man’s head. If he wants to be a man he must want to be white, and therefore it is with peculiar complacency that a Tennessee paper says of a dark champion of Negro equality: “He bitterly resents his Negro blood.” ”

“ Against this dominant tendency, strong and brave Americans, white and black, are fighting, but they need, and need sadly, the moral support of England and of Europe in this crusade for the recognition of manhood, despite adventitious differences of race, and it is like a blow in the face to have one who himself suffers daily insult and humiliation in America give the impression that all is well. ”

“ The Brooklyn Times, too, acknowledges that “the lot of the colored American is a hard one at best, but there is nothing to be gained by complaining over conditions and prejudices that cannot be altered or eradicated in the lifetime of a single generation. There are obstacles in the path of the Afro-American, even the most intelligent 11and aspiring, of which the meanest white man can hardly form an adequate conception; the only thing the Negro can do is to make the best of hard conditions and do his utmost by his individual achievements to make the handicap of his color forgotten. ”

“ If it is discrimination against poor people, then the schools for the poor people become worse than those for the rich—less well equipped and less well supervised. If it is discrimination against colored people, the colored school becomes poor, with less money and less means of efficiency.
The argument, then, for color discrimination in schools and in public institutions is an argument against democracy and an attempt to shift public responsibility from the shoulders of the public to the shoulders of some class who are unable to defend themselves. ”

“ When the white people in a city are tacitly leagued against the colored people within its borders, the result is sure to be disastrous, but there are still graver dangers in permitting the primitive instinct to survive and to become self-assertive. When race antagonism manifests itself through lynching, it defiantly insists that it is superior to all those laws which have been gradually evolved during thousands of years, and which form at once the record and the instrument of civilization. ”

“ Everybody should know that they are not.
“The Negroes are native-born American citizens. They know no other land. It is their sincere desire, according to the measure of their abilities, to share in the life of the American people. They are making progress in education and industry. Under these conditions, to deny to Negroes the right to join labor unions when they meet the standards required of white applicants for membership would be clearly un-American.” ”

“ The object of this publication is to set forth those facts and arguments which show the danger of race prejudice, particularly as manifested to-day toward colored people. It takes its name from the fact that the editors believe that this is a critical time in the history of the advancement of men. Catholicity and tolerance, reason and forbearance can to-day make the world-old dream of human brotherhood approach realization; while bigotry and prejudice, emphasized race consciousness and force can repeat the awful history of the contact of nations and groups in the past. ”

“ The New York Evening Post says, however:
“But even should a reactionary policy of rigid exclusion prevail, it cannot keep the Negro down industrially; it will doubtless handicap him in many sections, but the only people who can keep the Negroes in an inferior economic and social position are the Negroes themselves. A race that has risen so rapidly against such wonderful odds is to be held back by no organization of workingmen, however powerful.” ”

“ It is because of the suspicion that colored men are not capable of doing this, or are unwilling to do it, that so many American citizens acquiesce in the nullification of democracy known as disfranchisement. Let every colored man who can, vote; and whether he vote the Republican or Democratic or Socialist ticket, let him vote it, not because his father did or because he is afraid, but because after intelligent consideration he thinks the success of that ticket best for his people and his country. ”

“ He bitterly resents your treatment of Negro blood. The prouder he is, or has a right to be, of the blood of his black fathers, the more doggedly he resists the attempt to load men of that blood with ignominy and chains. It is race pride that fights for freedom; it is the man ashamed of his blood who weakly submits and smiles.
JESUS CHRIST IN BALTIMORE. It seems that it is not only Property that is screaming with fright at the Black Spectre in Baltimore, but Religion also. ”

“ Rental values will advance since there will be no outlet for an already congested population: they must stay where they are, and in order to do so pay any price which an unscrupulous money grabber may demand. With the high cost of foodstuffs and the low scale of wages for unskilled labor the passage of the West ordinance points to the creation of a pauper element in our city rather than a thrifty, law-abiding colored citizenship, and the pauper element of any city or community makes the more prosperous pay in one way or another for their support. ”

“ This is the history of color discrimination in general in Philadelphia, New York and Chicago. When the discrimination comes in various lines of life, it does not bear simply on those who are not hurt by it—who do not feel it, and who by their position naturally fall outside the lines of discrimination, but it comes with crushing weight upon those other Negroes to whom the reasons for discrimination do not apply in the slightest respect, and they are thus made to bear a double burden. ”

“ We even agree that many concessions must be made to the prejudices of mankind, and that it may be true that any action that tends to create irritation between the races is unwise. But at the same time the Negro is a citizen, and it seems to us unfair to lay down a general rule the effect of which is to exclude him from office, without any regard whatever to his fitness. But the interesting thing about it all is that this action is that of a Republican President, the President of a party that has always professed great devotion to the Negro.—Indianapolis News. ”

“ In other words, when white men have so little control over their baser element that they cannot keep them from offering bribes, the proper course, in Dr. Scudder’s opinion, seems to be to take the ballot from all colored men because some of them have accepted bribes, rather than to disfranchise the few white men who have offered them.
“When American Negroes become grateful for a disfranchisement accomplished in such ways, and on such grounds, and with such detriment to their own welfare, they will have proved themselves unworthy of American citizenship. ”

“ Back of this demand for the segregation of black folk in public institutions, or the segregation of Italians, or the segregation of any class, is almost always a shirking of responsibility on the part of the public—a desire to put off on somebody else the work of social uplift, while they themselves enjoy its results. Nobody pretends to deny that probably three-fourths of the colored children in the public schools of a great Northern city are below the average of their fellow students in some respects. ”