Black men

“ Here at a stroke of the pen was erected a government of millions of men,—and not ordinary men either, but black men emasculated by a peculiarly complete system of slavery, centuries old; and now, suddenly, violently, they come into a new birthright, at a time of war and passion, in the midst of the stricken and embittered population of their former masters. ”

“ Though that little empire is now at peace with us and the world, yet black men have always a peculiar sympathy for their own colour. Besides this, many of our own free blacks have already gone, and many more will still go to that island, to enjoy all the blessings of liberty, civilization and science; leaving many of their brothers and children and connexions in bondage among us.—And do you think that a black man’s memory is so treacherous, or his heart so callous, that he can forget, or not feel for the wrongs of his own flesh and blood? ”

“ Should anyone in the twentieth century wish to see the old-fashioned prime negro at his best, let him take a Mississippi steamboat and watch the roustabouts at work—those chaffing and chattering, singing and swinging, lusty and willing freight handlers, whom a river captain plying out of New Orleans has called the noblest black men that God ever made. ”

“ Now, under the elevating and cherishing influence of the American Anti-slavery Society, the colored race, like the white, furnishes Corinthian capitals for the noblest temples. Aroused by the American Anti-slavery Society, the very white men who had forgotten and denied the claim of the black man to the rights of humanity, now thunder that claim at every gate, from cottage to capitol, from school-house to university, from the railroad carriage to the house of God. He has a place at their firesides, a place in their hearts—the man whom they once cruelly hated for his color. ”

“ But alas! while sociologists gleefully count his bastards and his prostitutes, the very soul of the toiling, sweating black man is darkened by the shadow of a vast despair. Men call the shadow prejudice, and learnedly explain it as the natural defence of culture against barbarism, learning against ignorance, purity against crime, the “higher” against the “lower” races. To which the Negro cries Amen! and swears that to so much of this strange prejudice as is founded on just homage to civilization, culture, righteousness, and progress, he humbly bows and meekly does obeisance. ”

“ Nobody wishes more than I do to see such proofs as you exhibit, that Nature has given to our black brethren talents equal to those of the other colors of men, and that the appearance of a want of them is owing only to the degraded condition of their existence, both in Africa and America. I can add, with truth, that no one wishes more ardently to see a good system commenced for raising the condition, both of their body and mind, to what it ought to be, as fast as the imbecility of their present existence, and other circumstances which cannot be neglected, will admit. ”

“ Now I like the colored people, and sympathize with all their reasonable aspirations; but you and I both know, John, that in this country the Negro must remain subordinate, and can never expect to be the equal of white men. ”

“ If this is true, then here is the path out of the economic situation, and here is the imperative demand for trained Negro leaders of character and intelligence,—men of skill, men of light and leading, college-bred men, black captains of industry, and missionaries of culture; men who thoroughly comprehend and know modern civilization, and can take hold of Negro communities and raise and train them by force of precept and example, deep sympathy, and the inspiration of common blood and ideals. ”

“ Race-prejudices, which keep brown and black men in their “places,” we are coming to regard as useful allies with such a theory, no matter how much they may dull the ambition and sicken the hearts of struggling human beings. ”

“ There are black novelists, poets, economists, and philanthropists.
“The half-breeds, the issue of master and slave, are singularly intelligent and vigorous. The coloured men, both cunning and ferocious, instinctive and calculating, will gradually (so one of them has confided to me) reap the advantage of number, and one day lord it over the effeminate creole race which exercises so lightly over the blacks its fitful cruelty. It may be that the mulatto of genius, who will make the children of the whites pay dearly the blood of the negroes lynched by their fathers, is already born.” ”

“ Bring hither the slaves of all Africa and let us convert their souls, this is God’s good reason for slavery. But convert them to what? to freedom? to emancipation? to being white men? Impossible. Convert them, yes. But let them still be slaves for their own good and ours. This was quibbling and good men felt it, but at least here was a practical path, follow it.
Thus arose the great mission movements to the blacks. The Catholic Church began it and not only were there Negro proselytes but black priests and an order of black monks in Spanish America early in the 16th century. ”

“ For some time men doubted as to whether the Negro could develop such leaders; but to-day no one seriously disputes the capability of individual Negroes to assimilate the culture and common sense of modern civilization, and to pass it on, to some extent at least, to their fellows. ”

“ Daily the Negro is coming more and more to look upon law and justice, not as protecting safeguards, but as sources of humiliation and oppression. The laws are made by men who have little interest in him; they are executed by men who have absolutely no motive for treating the black people with courtesy or consideration; and, finally, the accused law-breaker is tried, not by his peers, but too often by men who would rather punish ten innocent Negroes than let one guilty one escape. ”

“ The account which the Negro gave them of two white men who were following him, sent by a great lord, who knew about the things in the sky, and how these were coming to instruct them in divine matters, made them think that he must be a spy or a guide from some nations who wished to come and conquer them, because it seemed to them unreasonable to say that the people were white in the country from which he came and that he was sent by them, he being black. ”

“ It may be said that the influence of the Negro here is a passive influence and yet one must remember that it would be inconceivable to have an American literature, even that written by white men, and not have the Negro as a subject. ”

“ That point concerns the biological breed of persons who should be selected by Negroes as leaders of their race. We risk the offense this time because efficiency in matters of racial leadership, as in other matters, should not be too tender to these points of prejudice when they stand in the way of desirable results. For two centuries in America we, the descendants of the black Negroes of Africa, have been told by white men that we cannot and will not amount to anything except in so far as we first accept the bar sinister of their mixing with us. ”

“ Even to-day the masses of the Negroes see all too clearly the anomalies of their position and the moral crookedness of yours. You may marshal strong indictments against them, but their counter-cries, lacking though they be in formal logic, have burning truths within them which you may not wholly ignore, O Southern Gentlemen! ”

“ A white man has no right a negro need respect. The children of the breed of men who speak the tongue of Burns and Shakespeare, Drake and Raleigh, have been disarmed and made subject to the black spawn of an African jungle! ”

“ I will not insist that there is no other side to the shield; but I do say that of the nine millions of Negroes in this nation, there is scarcely one out of the cradle to whom these arguments do not daily present themselves in the guise of terrible truth. ”

“ The fiery trials of the young Colored men who gained admission to West Point, and the noble conduct of the four regiments of black troops in the severe service of the frontiers have strengthened the hopes of a nation in the final outcome of the American Negro.
But what of the future? Can the Negro endure the sharp competition of American civilization? Can he keep his position against the tendencies to amalgamation? ”

“ All of the above journals had done something towards raising the black man’s standard, but they were merely the ploughs breaking up the ground and getting the soil ready for the seed-time. Newspapers, magazines, and books published in those days by colored men, were received with great allowance by the whites, who had always regarded the negro as an uneducated, inferior race, and who were considered out of their proper sphere when meddling with literature. ”

“ This may be an odd contention from me, but to me one of the most distinctive traits of the American girl is her gift for being unserious. It is not always a sense of humor, either; if it is, it is a sense entirely her own, for it [81] certainly is not associated with traits which we ascribe to a sense of humor in men. In any case it is a saving sense, a sense that keeps her from taking things so tragically as the unknowing or unsympathetic spectator might expect. The American has a genius for radicalism, a creative defiance of logic and tradition. ”

“ Whatever tendency the American girl herself may be willing to foster or accept, it always will be true that the gift for writing the right letter to the right person is one of the most potent known to civilization. There are genuine, warm-hearted charming-mannered men who can write only a brutally dull letter, and there are reprobates who can fill a letter with the aroma of paradise. In an affair beginning with letters the reprobate must have the advantage. ”

“ It having been established by centuries of habit that civilized men and women shall always wear some clothes, and most of the time a great deal of them, the question has not the simplicity which it might have had at an earlier time. Clothes principles are now as intricate as apparel itself. They are associated with ages of prejudice, libraries of history, acres of painted art, mountains of dry goods. ”

“ What are the racial endowments of these risen negroes whom we are urged by lofty example to invite into our drawing-rooms upon terms of broadest equality—for upon other terms would be a mockery—as eligible associates, companions, suitors, husbands for our sisters and daughters?—for a sensible father or brother does not admit white men to his home on any other basis. Of what essential racial elements and sources is the negro, risen and unrisen alike? ”

“ It gave her courage.
"It is true, I am only a girl; you are my elders, and you are men; but I have known good and brave men who were not ashamed to listen to what a woman thought was right; and it is as a woman that I speak to you," she said; and her voice, low and timid as it was, had a strange, pathetic vibration in it, that went to the heart. "I have suffered much of late. I hope no other woman will ever suffer in the same way." ”

“ Are you so quick to put away the idle gossip they bring you about me? Would you not rather believe it? I trow you would as lief believe it as not. That it is to have friends! That it is to have those who should defend you in your absence; but would rather listen to slander against you! But when they speak about women's idle tongues, they know little; it is men who are the readiest to listen, and to carry evil reports and lying!"
"I meant not to anger you, Judith," said he, more humbly. ”

“ Because of them, men have passed laws and sleepless nights. Because of them men fought duels in the last century and lawsuits in this. To make it possible to have them more refulgent and fetching, husbands and fathers have worked on Sundays and stopped smoking. Though it has been assailed with fanatical bitterness, buffeted by satire, stripped by statute, stoned by envy, disciplined by reform, the hat serenely survives, a defiant catalogue of every trait for which it ever has been either praised or condemned. ”

“ And then, the hatred of races is so prominent there, that I heard of an old black preacher, who, in one of his sermons, while detailing to a white congregation their numerous grievances in the city of New York, asserted, "That he, old as he was, had to walk three miles to church, to preach, because the white people would not allow a negro to ride in the omnibuses." In the South, a black man can ride alongside of his master, and he will converse kindly all day with his slave, because he has no fear that he will presume to equality with him ”

“ Despite all any one has said or can say in regard to the injustice and unfair treatment of the people of my race at the hands of the white men in this country, I venture to say that there is no example in history of the people of one race who have had the assistance, the direction, and the sympathy of another race in all its efforts to rise to such an extent as the negro in the United States. ”

“ Now, what we ask for the negro is that he be judged by his best and not by his worst. Of course, the best is always in the minority, but that is the way we are judged. If these same men were to go into the South and go into the negroes’ homes, they would find there very often excellent comfort. Some one has asked whether the negro has any of this race prejudice in him. ”