Black man

“ 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. ”

“ 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? ”

“ The self-forgetfulness, the undaunted heroism, and the great endurance of the negro, as exhibited that day, created a new chapter in American history for the black man. No negro hater will ever again dare to urge the withholding of our rights upon the plea that we will not fight.
The stale and stereotyped falsehood that the blacks are wanting in patriotism, was nailed to the counter as base coin, on the banks of the Mississippi. ”

“ For the Negro everywhere discriminated against, segregated and shunned, mobbed and murdered—he it is whose melodies are on all our lips, and whose rhythms impel our marching feet in a ‘war for democracy.’ The irresistible music that wells up from this sunny and unresentful people is hummed and whistled, danced to and marched to, laughed over and wept over, by high and low and rich and poor throughout the land. The downtrodden black man whose patient religious faith has kept his heart still unembittered, is fast becoming the singing voice of all America. ”

“ To the latter—the man who knows the Negro more remotely—the miracle is explained only upon the assumption that the Negro is a Caucasian in black and not what God made him—a Negro—with his own racial characteristics, able to absorb what is best in the world, to build it unto himself and to stand before his Master and before mankind in God and self-fashioned black manhood. ”

“ This great vision of the black man was, of course, at first the vision of the few, as visions always are, but it was always there; it grew continuously and it developed quickly from wish to active determination. One cannot think then of democracy in America or in the modern world without reference to the American Negro. ”

“ Dramatically the Negro is the central thread of American history. The whole story turns on him whether [136] we think of the dark and flying slave ship in the sixteenth century, the expanding plantations of the seventeenth, the swelling commerce of the eighteenth, or the fight for freedom in the nineteenth. It was the black man that raised a vision of democracy in America such as neither Americans nor Europeans conceived in the eighteenth century and such as they have not even accepted in the twentieth century; and yet a conception which every clear sighted man knows is true and inevitable. ”

“ With them the evil and the vision, there must be among both black and white a daily and hourly compromise. The black man can daily balance things and say “Is the vision of a strongly developed race worth the present insult, or blow or discrimination?” ”

“ 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 ”

“ There are those among the white race and those among the black race who assert, with a good deal of earnestness, that there is no difference between the white man and the black man in this country. This sounds very pleasant and tickles the fancy; but, when the test of hard, cold logic is applied to it, it must be acknowledged that there is a difference,—not an inherent one, not a racial one, but a difference [Pg 32] growing out of unequal opportunities in the past. ”

“ This is the red man's country by natural right, and the black man's by virtue of his sufferings and toil. Your fathers by violence drove the red man out, and forced the black man in. The children of the black man have enriched the soil by their tears, and sweat, and blood. ”

“ A word in conclusion about the relations between the whites and the blacks. What must be the general character of the intercourse between them? Am I to treat the black man as my equal or as my inferior? I must show him that I can respect the dignity of human personality in every one, and this attitude in me he must be able to see for himself; but the essential thing is that there shall be a real feeling of brotherliness. How far this is to find complete expression in the sayings and doings of daily life must be settled by circumstances. ”

“ They instinctively hate the black man; because the condition of the black, his superior capacity for labor and receptivity of useful knowledge, place him a few pegs higher than themselves in the social scale. ”

“ One can easily see how a person who saw slavery thus from his father’s parlors, and sees freedom on the streets of a great city, fails to grasp or comprehend the whole of the new picture. On the other hand, the settled belief of the mass of the Negroes that the Southern white people do not have the black man’s best interests at heart has been intensified in later years by this continual daily contact of the better class of blacks with the worst representatives of the white race. ”

“ It is important that this distinction be grasped for it goes to the root of the matter. It is the marked physical dissimilarity of the black man that rouses the fear and jealousy of the white man, and not any inherent mental inferiority in him. ”

“ The black man thrives where the white man decays, and it is the knowledge of this very remarkable fact that in great part accounts for the dislike to the coloured population which is everywhere expressed in the United States. ”

“ The habit is so inveterate with a great many persons as to render, on the least provocation, the impulse to whip a negro almost irresistible. It will continue to be so until the Southern people will have learned, so as never to forget it, that a black man has rights which a white man is bound to respect. ”

“ That consideration is the more complete adjustment of the black man to his new surroundings. His comparative helplessness immediately after emancipation was a condition adverse to his increase. The absence of thrift, energy, and management, many think, marks negro character at its best. ”

“ 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. ”

“ All I demand for the black man is, that the white people shall take their heels off his neck, and let him have a chance to rise by his own efforts. ”

“ When he has got all he can from you, he has no further use for you. When the orange is squeezed, we throw it aside. The black man is a good fellow while he is a slave, and toils for nothing; but the moment he claims [Pg 270] his own flesh and blood and bones, he is a most obnoxious creature, and there is a proposition to get rid of him. He is happy while he remains a poor, degraded, ignorant slave, without even the right to his own offspring. While in this condition the master can ride in the same carriage, sleep in the same bed, and nurse from the same bosom. ”

“ The pride of race, of color, of the owner above the serf, stripped of its old power and insignia, but no whit weakened in root and core, set an adamantine wall along the line of social familiarity. Let the black man have his own place—in school and church, in street and market and hotel ”

“ A creature of impulse, seldom actuated by reflection, the black man astounds by his complete obtuseness, and as suddenly confounds you by an unexpected exhibition of sympathy. From a long experience with African savages, I think it is as absurd to condemn the negro in toto, as it is preposterous to compare his intellectual capacity with that of the white man. It is unfortunately the fashion for one party to uphold the negro as a superior being, while the other denies him the common powers of reason. ”

“ Indeed, there have been times when I have seriously debated the question, whether the black man had any manhood left, after the missionaries and religious enthusiasts had done picturing, or, rather, caricaturing his debased moral and mental condition. ”

“ But give this slave the right to use his own legs, his hands, his body, and his mind, and this happy and desirable creature is instantly transformed into a most loathsome wretch, fit only to be colonized somewhere near the mountains of the moon, or eternally banished from civilized beings! You must not lose sight of the fact it is the emancipated slave and the free colored man that it is proposed to remove—not the slave. This country is perfectly adapted to negro slavery; it is the free blacks that the air is not good for! What an idea! a country good for slavery and not good for freedom! ”

“ On the part of the Negro there are avowed also the three types: the wiley and crafty man who tells the North and the Negro of the kindness of the South and advance of the black man; the fighter who complains or shoots or migrates; and the silent sensitive black man who suffers but says nothing. ”

“ In his thinking about the things he knows the black man comes to the same conclusion as the white man when he thinks about the same things. The black man does not think about electricity or the differential calculus because he knows nothing about these matters, neither, and for the same reason, does the European peasant wherever he may still be found in his primitive state. ”

“ Much might be adduced on this point to prove the insignificance of the black man, politically considered, in this country, but we deem it wholly unnecessary at present, and consequently proceed at once to consider another feature of this important subject. ”

“ In these the Chief Justice does not directly assert, but plainly assumes as a fact, that the public estimate of the black man is more favorable now than it was in the days of the Revolution. This assumption is a mistake. In some trifling particulars the condition of that race has been ameliorated; but as a whole, in this country, the change between then and now is decidedly the other way, and their ultimate destiny has never appeared so hopeless as in the last three or four years. ”

“ The appeal of the Negro to force invited reaction and retaliation not only in the South, as we have noted, but also in the North. Here the common white workingman and particularly the new English, Scotch and Irish immigrants entirely misconceived the writhing of the black man. These white laborers, themselves so near slavery, did not recognize the struggle of the black slave as part of their own struggle ”

“ No black man would touch the rope. A poor old white man, long besotted by drink, was brought forty miles to be the executioner. And even the planters, with all their prejudice and hatred, believed him honest and sincere ”

“ The ultimate destiny of the black man was discussed, our host opening that his struggle for a habitation and a name must be in America. He said that his people were attached to the republic, notwithstanding many disadvantages imposed upon them, their hope being strong that patience and good citizenship would eventually soften the prejudices of the whites. ”

“ 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! ”

“ But if he be a black man he cannot put off his color. He cannot, if he were born a member of a particular race, strip himself of that quality; nor can he, if he has been in servitude; nor can he, if he has been in rebellion, take out that taint ”

“ We the darker ones come even now not altogether empty-handed: there are to-day no truer exponents of the pure human spirit of the Declaration of Independence than the American Negroes; there is no true American music but the wild sweet melodies of the Negro slave; the American fairy tales and folk-lore are Indian and African; and, all in all, we black men seem the sole oasis of simple faith and reverence in a dusty desert of dollars and smartness. Will America be poorer if she replace her brutal dyspeptic blundering with light-hearted but determined Negro humility? ”

“ I finally made up my mind that I would neither disclaim the black race nor claim the white race; but that I would change my name, raise a mustache, and let the world take me for what it would; that it was not necessary for me to go about with a label of inferiority pasted across my forehead. All the while I understood that it was not discouragement or fear or search for a larger field of action and opportunity that was driving me out of the Negro race. I knew that it was shame, unbearable shame. Shame at being identified with a people that could with impunity be treated worse than animals. ”