Racial purity

“ 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. ”

“ Race feeling may be called prejudice by those whose careers are cramped by it but it is a natural antipathy which serves to maintain the purity of type. The unfortunate fact that nearly all species of men interbreed freely leaves us no choice in the matter. Races must be kept apart by artificial devices of this sort or they ultimately amalgamate and in the offspring the more generalized or lower type prevails. ”

“ We have consequently the present reaction—a reaction which says in effect, Keep these black people in their places, and do not attempt to treat a Negro simply as a white man with a black face; to do this would mean the moral deterioration of the race and the nation—a fate against which a divine racial prejudice is successfully fighting. ”

“ For this is all that our intellects can do in the case of a racial problem—to help us to understand. The actual work of adjustment must be fought out or worked out; becomes, that is to say, a struggle to be settled by the contending races with forces more complex than the purely intellectual ones of argument and proof. Let us first consider, then, the conditions under which the relations between the black and white races were established in America. ”

“ Shall a line be drawn which shall separate the Negroes, and assign them as a race to the position of inferiors irrespective of merit or character, and merely on the ground of race or color?
To narrow the discussion, we leave out of view the civil or political aspect of the question and confine ourselves to the religious, and we propose to give a few illustrations. A Negro in every way qualified, in character, piety, and intelligence, applies for membership in a white church. Shall the color-line be drawn and he be refused admission for no other reason than that he is a Negro? ”

“ 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. ”

“ Then, when we rid ourselves of prejudice, or racial feeling, and look facts in the face, we must acknowledge that, notwithstanding the cruelty and moral wrong of slavery, the ten million Negroes inhabiting this country, who themselves or whose ancestors went through the school of American slavery, are in a stronger and more hopeful condition, materially, intellectually, morally, and religiously, than is true of an equal number of black people in any other portion of the globe. ”

“ Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite ideas. Its foundations are laid, its corner-stone rests, upon the great truth, that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and normal condition. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The states or people that favor this equality and amalgamation of the white and black races, God will exterminate. To make the negro, the political, social and religious equal of the white race by law, by statute and by constitutions, can easily be effected in words; but so to elevate the negro jure divino, is simply impossible. You can not elevate a beast to the level of a son of God—a son of Adam and Eve—but you may depress the sons of Adam and Eve, with their impress of the Almighty, down to the level of a beast. ”

“ But, fortunately for the Negro and for humanity at large, we live now in an epoch when race malice and sectional hate are disappearing beneath the horizon of a brighter and better future. The Negro in America is free. He is now an acknowledged factor in the affairs of the continent; and no community, state, or government, in this period of the world's history, can afford to be indifferent to his moral, social, intellectual, or political well-being. ”

“ It is the subjective, historic and ultimately, perhaps, racial and temperamental factor in the lives of peoples which makes it difficult, though not impossible, perhaps, to transmit political and religious institutions to people of a different racial type and a different social tradition. ”

“ But there is no denying that the American negro bears the marks of his bondage, in his indolence, his untruthfulness, his dishonesty, his animalism. But these are all vices of the slaves, not of the men; of the condition, not of the race. The possibilities of the negro nature are to be estimated by its highest actual attainments in the most favored individuals. Two of the noblest races of history have come from an ancestry less promising than our Southern freedmen—the Israelites and our own ancestors. ”

“ We have been advised, if we really wished to benefit the slave and the colored race generally, not unnecessarily to shock the feelings, though they were but prejudices, of the white people, by admitting colored persons to our Anti-slavery meetings and societies. We have been told that many who would otherwise act in unison with us were kept away by our disregard of the feelings of the community in this respect.... ”

“ The first attempt at the social equality of the negro, with Adam's race, brought the flood upon the world—the second, brought confusion and dispersion—the third, the fire of God's wrath, upon the cities of the plain—the fourth, the order from God, to exterminate the nations of the Canaanites—the fifth, the inhibition and exclusion, by express law of [Pg 42] God, of the flat-nosed negro from his altar. Will the people of the United States, now furnish the sixth? Nous verrons.
There remains now but one other point to prove, and that is—That the negro has no soul. ”

“ There were in attendance some good-looking little negro boys and men dressed in liveries, which smacked of our host’s Orientalism, and they must have heard our discussion, or rather allusion, to the question which would decide whether we thought they are human beings or black two-legged cattle, with some interest, unless indeed the boast of their masters, that slavery elevates the character and civilises the mind of a negro, is another of the false pretences on which the institution is rested by its advocates. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Not the least evil of the solidifying of the Negro race during the period of reconstruction was the destruction of all distinctions between virtue and vice, as a qualification for civic promotion. After thirty years the upright, law-abiding, conservative Negro is bound by that manacle to the thief and the evil-liver, and strangely enough he mainly appears unwilling to help break the shackles which hold him down. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Thus helped, those of both races in the South will soon throw off the shackles of racial and sectional prejudice, and rise above the clouds of ignorance, narrowness, and selfishness into that atmosphere, that pure sunshine, where it will be the highest ambition to serve man, our brother, regardless of race or previous condition. ”

“ 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 ”

“ The negro in a state of slavery is brought up by the master, from early childhood, to strict obedience and to obey implicitly the dictates of the white man, and they are thus led to believe that they are an inferior race. ”

“ A certain shade of complexion, though much lighter than some brunettes, consigned any one guilty of it to the grade of the blacks, which was de-gradation. We were educated to regard negroes as an inferior race of beings, not entitled to the distinctive rights and privileges of white men. Ignorance, poverty, and servitude came to be considered the birthright, the inheritance, of all Africans and their descendants; and therefore we did not feel the pressure of their bonds, nor the smart of the wounds that were continually given them.
Prejudice against color had become universal. ”

“ That the Negroes as a race are impure and unregulated is the judgment of most white observers whether ill-wishers or fair-minded men. Thomas Nelson Page, for instance, declares that the immorality of the negro race has increased since slavery times. ”

“ 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. ”

“ So far from being equal to us, the polished inhabitants of Europe, as some ignorant people suppose, they are immeasurably below the Africans themselves,
"The typical Negro is the true savage of Africa; and I must paint the deformed anatomy of his mind, as I have already done that of his body.
"The typical Negroes dwell in petty tribes, where all are equal except the women, who are slaves; where property is common, and where, consequently, there is no property at all; where one may recognize the Utopia of philosophers, and observe the saddest and basest spectacles which humanity can afford. ”

“ Here in America the spirit of the Negro has been transformed by three centuries of subjection, physical and mental, so that they have even glorified the fact of subjection and subservience. How many Negro speakers have I not heard vaunting the fact that when in the dark days of the South the Northern armies had the Southern aristocracy by the throat, there was no Negro uprising to make their masters pay for the systematic raping of Negro women and the inhuman cruelties perpetrated on Negro men. ”

“ Our books, our reviews, our newspapers, our almanacs, have all been silent, or exerted their influence on the wrong side. The negro's crimes are repeated, but his sufferings are never told. Even in our geographies it is taught that the colored race must always be degraded. Now and then anecdotes of cruelties committed in the slave-holding States are told by individuals who witnessed them ”

“ In all history we cannot find a race that possessed property, industry, intelligence, and character in a high degree that has long been denied its rights. If the possession of these elements does not bring to the Negro every right enjoyed by any other class of citizens, then the Bible and the teachings of the Great Jehovah are wrong. I propose that the Negro take his position on the high and undisputed ground of generosity, usefulness, forgiveness, and honesty in all things, and that he invite the white man to step up and occupy this ground with him. ”

“ 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. ”

“ However, into whatever causes they channel this mood, all recognize one common concept--the American Negro is a group with a heritage of suffering, taking action to force the white majority to recognize and fulfill its legal rights. ”