Minories

“ Further: this with more trouble: that one pot of beer before dinner is enough for any man seriously bent on the pursuit of art.
Moreover: that the board must not be painted white again.
Lastly: that the period of invention and meditation be considered at an end; and that sleep on Mr. Cripps's part be regarded as an acknowledgment that meals are over for the day.
These articles being at length agreed and confirmed, and Mr. Cripps having been duly witnessed to make certain marks with charcoal on the white board, as a guarantee of good faith, Grandfather Nat and I set out for the Minories. ”

“ Is it good policy? Have we in America a distinct mission as a race–a distinct sphere of action and an opportunity for race development, or is self- obliteration the highest end to which Negro blood dare aspire?
If we carefully consider what race prejudice really is, we find it, historically, to be nothing but the friction between different groups of people; it is the difference in aim, in feeling, in ideals of two different races ”

“ My third and greatest objection to the Colonization Society is, that its members write and speak, both in public and private, as if the prejudice against skins darker colored than our own, was a fixed and unalterable law of our nature, which cannot possibly be changed. The very existence of the Society is owing to this prejudice: for if we could make all the colored people white, or if they could be viewed as impartially as if they were white, what would be left for the Colonization Society to do? ”

“ But who are the agents to bring about this grand change in the Negro race? Remember, just here, that all effectual revolutions in a people must be racial in their characteristics. You can't take the essential qualities of one people and transfuse them into the blood of another people, and make them indigenous to them. The primal qualities of a family, a race, a nation are heritable qualities. They abide in their constitution. They remain, notwithstanding the conditions and the changes of rudeness, slavery, civilizations, and enlightenment. ”

“ The habits, the feelings, all the prejudices of society—prejudices which neither refinement, nor argument, nor education, nor religion itself, can subdue—mark the people of color, whether bond or free, as the subjects of a degradation inevitable and incurable. The African in this country belongs by birth to the very lowest station in society ”

“ If they had been actuated by a strong pride of ancestry and of race, if they had felt that injury to one was injury to all, if they had hung together instead of hanging separately, their place in the civil and political life of the Republic to-day would not be that, largely, of pariahs, with none so poor as to do them honor, but that of equality of right under the law enjoyed by all other alien ethnic forces in our citizenship. They who will not help themselves are usually not helped by others. ”

“ But what seems to escape attention is the fact that the Negro boy and girl, getting the same (though worse) instruction, also get from it the same notion of the Negro’s place and part in life which the white children get. Is it any wonder, then, that they so readily accept the status of inferiors; that they tend to disparage themselves, and think themselves worth while only to the extent to which they look and act and think like the whites? ”

“ I am aware that some of the Colonizationists make large professions on this subject; but nevertheless we are constantly told by this Society, that people of color must be removed, not only because they are in our way, but because they must always be in a state of degradation here—that they never can have all the rights and privileges of citizens—and all this is because the prejudice is so great. ”

“ Laying aside all prejudice in favor of or against race, looking at the negro as politically and socially related to the American people generally, and measuring the forces arrayed against him, I do not see how he can survive and flourish in this country as a distinct and separate race, nor do I see how he can be removed from the country either by annihilation or expatriation. ”

“ I commit this work to the public, white and black, to the friends and foes of the Negro, in the hope that the obsolete antagonisms which grew out of the relation of master and slave may speedily sink as storms beneath the horizon; and that the day will hasten when there shall be no North, no South, no Black, no White,—but all be American citizens, with equal duties and equal rights. ”

“ 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? ”

“ But if, in full view of a proposition to break down all the social barriers which now divide the races, so that our descendants and those of the colored man shall form one homogeneous people, we interrogate our own [Pg 603] consciousness, we shall discover that we, even those of us who have most eloquently and indignantly denounced 'prejudice against color,' are compelled to own ourselves in sympathy with the great mass of the American people, in utter and unconquerable aversion to such an arrangement. ”

“ What to do with this class is a problem that perplexes the better element of Negroes, more, possibly, than it does the whites; since their shortcomings are generally credited to the whole Negro race, which is wrong as a fact and unjust in theory.
“This vicious element in the race is a constant subject of discussion in Negro churches and in private conversation. It is a mistake to say that crime is not condemned by the better class of Negroes. ”

“ And yet the Negro Question is still the great American Question. Perhaps it is with questions like this as with the movements of a battle; those at a distance see them more clearly than those in the thick of action. The intelligent Englishman or Frenchman will tell you in an instant that our great problem is the negro question—the political, as dependent on the social and moral condition of the freedmen. ”

“ 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. ”

“ As one of our writers has recently put it: "It is imperative that we understand the white world in its relations to the non-white world." As with the Jew, persecution is making the Negro international. ”

“ 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? ”

“ And that is the first point which I ask you to consider; the extraordinary value to society, and to the whole evolution of the human race of minorities holding extremist opinions—so extreme that they do not seem at the present day to be practical politics—and yet having a chemic influence (which would not be otherwise obtainable) for bringing into being the mind of to-morrow, which has always been, all down the ages, the work of minorities, and generally of persecuted minorities. ”

“ Above all, in this connection, we must give due weight to the special problem of racial and national minglings. Using the popular catchword, we have to ask ourselves whether such a thing as a "pure race" really exists, or whether all races and nationalities are not in truth of mixed blood. ”

“ The events of the past year have been more fruitful in persecution, and have presented more inducements than any other period of the history of our country, for the men of color to fly from the graves of their fathers, and seek new homes in a land where the roaring billows of prejudice are less injurious to their rights and privileges. ”

“ They were turned loose and put upon their own resources in communities which were imbued with prejudices against them as a race, communities which for the most part had for years past-indeed from the very time when those who are now in existence were born-been taught and had instilled into them a prejudice against the equality which has been attempted to be established for the colored citizens of the United States. ”

“ The Negro problem, as now considered, seems, so far as the discussion of it is concerned, to be entirely in the hands of white people for solution, and the Negro himself is supposed to have no part in it, other than to ‘wait and tend’ on the bidding of those engaged at the job. ”

“ And it may as well be confessed, once for all, that to treat a man's sentiments in respect to negroes as of any importance, in making up your estimate of his character; or to announce, as your own motive, in whatever you may do for colored people, the simple desire to do them good, because it is just, irrespective of any object beyond, such as to save white recruits, to weaken an enemy, or to gain possible future votes,—is to bring upon yourself the contempt, secret or open, strong or mild, of nine-tenths of the people you meet. ”

“ Consider the change that has come in twenty years in the discussion of the Negro problem. Two or three decades ago social philosophers and statisticians and well-meaning philanthropists were still talking and writing about the deportation of the Negroes, or about their settlement within some restricted area, or about their settling in all parts of the Union, or about their decline through their neglect of their children, or about their rapid multiplication till they should expel the whites from the South—of every sort of nonsense under heaven. ”

“ From a Negroid nation, which ours is already, we would have become a composite and homogeneous people, and the elements of racial discord which have troubled our civil life so gravely and still threaten our free institutions, would have been entirely eliminated. ”

“ The manner in which we use what power we have, gives us ample reason to be grateful that the nature of our institutions does not intrust us with more. Our prejudice against colored people is even more inveterate than it is at the South. The planter is often attached to his negroes, and lavishes caresses and kind words upon them, as he would on a favorite hound: but our cold-hearted, ignoble prejudice admits of no exception—no intermission. ”

“ It is unquestionably one of the most difficult of the various social problems which at the present day so deeply agitate the thoughts of the civilized world. Is the negro race, or is it not, of equal attributes and capacities with our own? ”

“ Caucasian treachery in some of our national perils presented no charms for the Negro whose proven fidelity everywhere and on every occasion marks him the great American advocate in fact as well as in profession. ”

“ The principal theme is the danger to society from the increasing miscegenation of the black and white races, and the encouragement it receives in the social amenities extended to negroes of distinction by persons prominent in politics, philanthropy and educational endeavor ”

“ Here in America, and even in the south where the bulk of the Negroes live in the midst of a people who resentfully declare that they should be left to deal with the Negro because they alone know him—even there the notion of the Negro, fostered by the press and other agencies of public opinion is as wide of the truth as it can be. ”

“ I presume that all men, North and South, of whatever politics, religion, or prejudices, will assent to the principle that humanity compels us all to extend to the negro, and all other dependent races, all the privileges, immunities and facilities, consistent with the good of the society in which they reside. ”

“ Negroes Offensive.—Young negroes became offensive as a result of the false training of this vicious class of men and some women, pretended religious enthusiasts, who knew nothing of the class of people to whom they were teaching a doctrine of direct or indirect social equality. ”

“ Deep rooted prejudices entertained by the whites, ten thousand recollections by the blacks of the injuries they have sustained, new provocations, the real distinctions which nature has made, and many other circumstances, will divide us into parties and produce convulsions which will probably never end but in the extermination of the one or the other race ... ”

“ How should we think such a problem through, not simply as Negroes, but as men and women of a new century, helping to build a new world? And first of all, here is no simple question of race antagonism. ”

“ Negroes who have followed the advice of their real friends are now doing well, accumulating property and are in possession of homes of their own and their children are being educated, but those who have gone astray under the teaching and advice of aliens who know nothing about them and care less have become vagrants and criminals and are a menace to the communities in which they live. ”

“ II The position of the Negro today in America is the tragic but inevitable consequence of centuries of unequal treatment. Measured by any benchmark of comfort or achievement, meaningful equality remains a distant dream for the Negro. ”