Written memos should be 2 single-spaced pages, 12-point font. Your memo should discuss topics or questions arising from the week’s reading. You might pull out specific passages to comment on or pull out what you see as a key concept, idea, or argument from the reading. These are thought pieces – they should be coherent, but they are not polished papers. You must end your memo by proposing at least one question for discussion.
Reading:
*Ferguson, Susan. 2020. Women and Work: Feminism, Labour, and Social Reproduction.
London: Pluto Press, Ch 3-5: pp. 71-81
*Lengermann, Patricia Madoo and Gillian Niebrugge. (1998). The Women Founders: Sociology and Social Theory 1830-1930, Ch 5: pp. 149-159
*Kollantai, Alexandra. [1909]. “Social Basis of the Woman’s Question”*Kollantai, Alexandra. [1914]. “Working Woman and Mother”*Wells-Barnett, Ida B. (1895). A Red Record(Ch 1, 5-6, 9-10)*Cooper, Anna Julia, A Voice from the South[1892] (excerpts)
A Voice From the South:
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Cooper, Anna J. (Anna Julia), 1858-1964
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(title page) A Voice From the South
Anna Julia Cooper
iii, 304 p.
Xenia, Ohio
The Aldine Printing House
1892
C326 C769v (North Carolina Collection, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill)
The electronic edition is a part of the UNC-CH digitization project, Documenting the
American South.
A VOICE FROM THE SOUTH.
BY
A BLACK WOMAN OF THE SOUTH.
XENIA, OHIO:
THE ALDINE PRINTING HOUSE.
1892.
Page ii
COPYRIGHT 1892
BY
ANNA JULIA COOPER.
Page I
OUR RAISON D’ÊTRE.
IN the clash and clatter of our American Conflict, it has been said that the South
remains Silent. Like the Sphinx she inspires vociferous disputation, but herself takes little
part in the noisy controversy. One muffled strain in the Silent South, a jarring chord and a
vague and uncomprehended cadenza has been and still is the Negro. And of that muffled
chord, the one mute and voiceless note has been the sadly expectant Black Woman,
An infant crying in the night,
An infant crying for the light;
And with no language–but a cry.
The colored man’s inheritance and apportionment is still the sombre crux, the
perplexing cul de sac of the nation,–the dumb skeleton in the closet provoking ceaseless
harangues, indeed, but little understood and seldom consulted. Attorneys for the plaintiff
and attorneys
Page II
for the defendant, with bungling gaucherie have analyzed and dissected, theorized and
synthesized with sublime ignorance or pathetic misapprehension of counsel from the
black client. One important witness has not yet been heard from. The summing up of the
evidence deposed, and the charge to the jury have been made–but no word from the
Black Woman.
It is because I believe the American people to be conscientiously committed to a fair
trial and ungarbled evidence, and because I feel it essential to a perfect understanding
and an equitable verdict that truth from each standpoint be presented at the bar,–that
this little Voice, has been added to the already full chorus. The “other side” has not been
represented by one who “lives there.” And not many can more sensibly realize and more
accurately tell the weight and the fret of the “long dull pain” than the open-eyed but
hitherto voiceless Black Woman of America.
The feverish agitation, the perfervid energy, the busy objectivity of the more
turbulent life of our men serves, it may be, at once to
Page III
cloud or color their vision somewhat, and as well to relieve the smart and deaden the
pain for them. Their voice is in consequence not always temperate and calm, and at the
same time radically corrective and sanatory. At any rate, as our Caucasian barristers are
not to blame if they cannot quite put themselves in the dark man’s place, neither should
the dark man be wholly expected fully and adequately to reproduce the exact Voice of
the Black Woman.
Delicately sensitive at every pore to social atmospheric conditions, her calorimeter
may well be studied in the interest of accuracy and fairness in diagnosing what is often
conceded to be a “puzzling” case. If these broken utterances can in any way help to a
clearer vision and a truer pulse-beat in studying our Nation’s Problem, this Voice by a
Black Woman of the South will not have been raised in vain.
TAWAWA CHIMNEY CORNER,
SEPT. 17, 1892.
Page 80
“WOMAN VERSUS THE INDIAN.”
IN the National Woman’s Council convened at Washington in February 1891, among
a number of thoughtful and suggestive papers read by eminent women, was one by the
Rev. Anna Shaw, bearing the above title.
That Miss Shaw is broad and just and liberal in principal is proved beyond
contradiction. Her noble generosity and womanly firmness are unimpeachable. The
unwavering stand taken by herself and Miss Anthony in the subsequent color ripple in
Wimodaughsis ought to be sufficient to allay forever any doubts as to the pure gold of
these two women.
Of Wimodaughsis (which, being interpreted for the uninitiated, is a woman’s culture
club whose name is made up of the first few letters of the four words wives, mothers,
daughters, and sisters) Miss Shaw is president, and a lady from the Blue Grass
State was secretary.
Page 81
Pandora’s box is opened in the ideal harmony of this modern Eden without an Adam
when a colored lady, a teacher in one of our schools, applies for admission to its
privileges and opportunities.
The Kentucky secretary, a lady zealous in good works and one who, I can’t help
imagining, belongs to that estimable class who daily thank the Lord that He made the
earth that they may have the job of superintending its rotations, and who really would
like to help “elevate” the colored people (in her own way of course and so long as they
understand their places) is filled with grief and horror that any persons of Negro
extraction should aspire to learn type-writing or languages or to enjoy any other
advantages offered in the sacred halls of Wimodaughsis. Indeed, she had not calculated
that there were any wives, mothers, daughters, and sisters, except white ones; and, she is
really convinced that Whimodaughsis would sound just as well, and then it need mean
just white mothers, daughters and sisters. In fact, so far as there is anything in a name,
nothing would be lost by omitting for the sake of euphony, from this unique mosaic, the
letters that represent wives. Whiwimodaughsis might be a little startling, and
Page 82
on the whole wives would better yield to white; since clearly all women are not wives,
while surely all wives are daughters. The daughters therefore could represent the wives
and this immaculate assembly for propagating liberal and progressive ideas and
disseminating a broad and humanizing culture might be spared the painful possibility of
the sight of a black man coming in the future to escort from an evening class this solitary
cream-colored applicant. Accordingly the Kentucky secretary took the cream-colored
applicant aside, and, with emotions befitting such an epoch-making crisis, told her, “as
kindly as she could,” that colored people were not admitted to the classes, at the same
time refunding the money which said cream-colored applicant had paid for lessons in
type-writing.
When this little incident came to the knowledge of Miss Shaw, she said firmly and
emphatically, NO. As a minister of the gospel and as a Christian woman, she could not
lend her influence to such unreasonable and uncharitable discrimination; and she must
resign the honor of president of Wimodaughsis if persons were to be proscribed solely on
account of their color.
To the honor of the board of managers, be it
Page 83
said, they sustained Miss Shaw; and the Kentucky secretary, and those whom she
succeeded in inoculating with her prejudices, resigned.
‘Twas only a ripple,–some bewailing of lost opportunity on the part of those who
could not or would not seize God’s opportunity for broadening and enlarging their own
souls– and then the work flowed on as before.
Susan B. Anthony and Anna Shaw are evidently too noble to be held in thrall by the
provincialisms of women who seem never to have breathed the atmosphere, beyond the
confines of their grandfathers’ plantations. It is only from the broad plateau of light and
love that one can see petty prejudice and narrow priggishness in their true perspective;
and it is on this high ground, as I sincerely believe, these two grand women stand.
As leaders in the woman’s movement, of to-day, they have need of clearness of
vision as well as firmness of soul in adjusting recalcitrant forces, and wheeling into line
the thousand and one none-such, never-to-be-modified, won’t-be-dictated-to banners of
their somewhat mottled array.
The black woman and the southern woman, I imagine, often got them into the
predicament of the befuddled man who had to take
Page 84
singly across a stream a bag of corn, a fox and a goose. …
The black woman appreciates the situation and can even sympathize with the actors
in the serio-comic dilemma.
But, may it not be that, as women, the very lessons which seem hardest to master
now, are possibly the ones most essential for our promotion to a higher grade of work?
We assume to be leaders of thought and guardians of society. Our country’s manners
and morals are under our tutoring. Our standards are law in our several little worlds.
However tenaciously men may guard some prerogatives, they are our willing slaves in
that sphere which they have always conceded to be woman’s. Here, no one dares demur
when her fiat has gone forth. The man would be mad who presumed, however
inexplicable and past finding out any reason for her action might be, to attempt to open a
door in her kingdom officially closed and regally sealed by her.
Page 85
The American woman of to-day not only gives tone directly to her immediate world,
but, her tiniest pulsation ripples out and out, down and down, till the outermost circles
and the deepest layers of society feel the vibrations. It is pre-eminently an age of
organizations. The “leading woman,” the preacher, the reformer, the organizer
“enthuses” her lieutenants and captains, the literary women, the thinking women, the
strong, earliest, irresistible women; these in turn touch their myriads of church clubs,
social clubs, culture clubs, pleasure clubs and charitable clubs, till the same lecture has
been duly administered to every married man in the land (not to speak of sons and
brothers) from the President in the White House to the stone-splitter of the ditches. …
Page 86
… The American woman then is responsible for American manners. Not merely the
right ascension and declination of the satellites of her own drawing room; but the rising
and the setting of the pestilential or life-giving orbs which seem to wander afar in space,
all are governed almost wholly through her magnetic polarity. The atmosphere of street
cars and parks and boulevards, of cafes and hotels and steamboats is charged and
surcharged with her sentiments and restrictions. Shop girls and serving maids, cashiers
and accountant clerks, scribblers and drummers, whether wage earner, salaried toiler, or
proprietress, whether laboring to instruct minds, to save souls, to delight fancies, or to
win bread,–the working women of America in whatever station or calling they may be
found, are subjects, officers, or rulers of a strong centralized government, and bound
together by a system of codes and countersigns, which, though unwritten, forms a
network of perfect subordination and unquestioning obedience as marvelous as that of
the Jesuits. At the head and
Page 87
center in this regime stands the Leading Woman in the principality. The one talismanic
word that plays along the wires from palace to cook-shop, from imperial Congress to the
distant plain, is Caste. With all her vaunted independence, the American woman of to-day
is as fearful of losing caste as a Brahmin in India. That is the law under which she lives, the
precepts which she binds as frontlets between her eyes and writes on the door-posts of
her homes, the lesson which she instils into her children with their first baby breakfasts,
the injunction she lays upon husband and lover with direst penalties attached.
Page 88
…
It was the good fortune of the Black Woman of the South to spend some weeks, not
long since, in a land over which floated the Union Jack. The Stars and Stripes were not the
only familiar experiences missed. A uniform, matter-of-fact courtesy, a genial kindliness,
quick perception of opportunities for rendering
Page 89
any little manly assistance, a readiness to give information to strangers,–a hospitable,
thawing-out atmosphere everywhere–in shops and waiting rooms, on cars and in the
streets, actually seemed to her chilled little soul to transform the commonest boor in the
service of the public into one of nature’s noblemen, and when the old whipped-cur
feeling was taken up and analyzed she could hardly tell whether it consisted mostly of self
pity for her own wounded sensibilities, or of shame for her country and mortification that
her countrymen offered such an unfavorable contrast.
Some American girls, I noticed recently, in search of novelty and adventure, were
taking an extended trip through our country unattended by gentleman friends; their wish
was to write up for a periodical or lecture the ease and facility, the comfort and safety of
American travel, even for the weak and unprotected, under our well-nigh perfect railroad
systems and our gentlemanly and efficient corps of officials and public servants. I have
some material I could furnish these young ladies, though possibly it might not be just on
the side they wish to have illuminated. The Black Woman of the South has to do
considerable travelling in this country, often unattended.
Page 90
She thinks she is quiet and unobtrusive in her manner, simple and inconspicuous in her
dress, and can see no reason why in any chance assemblage of ladies, or even a
promiscuous gathering of ordinarily well-bred and dignified individuals, she should be
signaled out for any marked consideration. And yet she has seen these same
“gentlemanly and efficient” railroad conductors, when their cars had stopped at stations
having no raised platforms, making it necessary for passengers to take the long and trying
leap from the car step to the ground or step on the narrow little stool placed under by the
conductor, after standing at their posts and handing woman after woman from the steps
to the stool, thence to the ground, or else relieving her of satchels and bags and enabling
her to make the descent easily, deliberately fold their arms and turn round when the
Black Woman’s turn came to alight–bearing her satchel, and bearing besides another
unnamable burden inside the heaving bosom and tightly compressed lips. The feeling of
slighted womanhood is unlike every other emotion of the soul. Happily for the human
family, it is unknown to many and indescribable to all. Its poignancy, compared with
which even Juno’s
Page 91
spretae injuria formae is earthly and vulgar, is holier than that of jealousy, deeper than
indignation, tenderer than rage. Its first impulse of wrathful protest and proud self
vindication is checked and shamed by the consciousness that self assertion would outrage
still further the same delicate instinct. Were there a brutal attitude of hate or of ferocious
attack, the feminine response of fear or repulsion is simple and spontaneous. But when
the keen sting comes through the finer sensibilities, from a hand which, by all known
traditions and ideals of propriety, should have been trained to reverence and respect
them, the condemnation of man’s inhumanity to woman is increased and embittered by
the knowledge of personal identity with a race of beings so fallen.
I purposely forbear to mention instances of personal violence to colored women
travelling in less civilized sections of our country, where women have been forcibly
ejected from cars, thrown out of seats, their garments rudely torn, their person wantonly
and cruelly injured. America is large and must for some time yet endure its out-of-theway jungles of barbarism as Africa its uncultivated tracts of marsh and malaria. There are
murderers and
Page 92
thieves and villains in both London and Paris. Humanity from the first has had its vultures
and sharks, and representatives of the fraternity who prey upon mankind may be
expected no less in America than elsewhere. That this virulence breaks out most readily
and commonly against colored persons in this country, is due of course to the fact that
they are, generally speaking, weak and can be imposed upon with impunity. Bullies are
always cowards at heart and may be credited with a pretty safe instinct in scenting their
prey. Besides, society, where it has not exactly said to its dogs “s-s-sik him!” has at least
engaged to be looking in another direction or studying the rivers on Mars. It is not of the
dogs and their doings, but of society holding the leash that I shall speak. …
Page 93
… There can be no true test of national courtesy without travel. Impressions and
conclusions based on provincial traits and characteristics can thus be modified and
generalized. Moreover, the weaker and less influential the experimenter, the more exact
and scientific the deductions. Courtesy “for revenue only” is not politeness, but
diplomacy. Any rough can assume civility toward those of “his set,” and does not hesitate
to carry it even to servility toward those in whom he recognizes a possible patron or his
master in power, wealth, rank, or influence. But, as the chemist prefers distilled H2 O in
testing solutions to avoid complications and unwarranted reactions, so the Black Woman
holds that her femineity linked with the impossibility of popular affinity or unexpected
attraction through position and influence in her case makes her a touchstone of American
courtesy exceptionally pure and singularly free from extraneous modifiers. The man who
is courteous to her is so, not because of
Page 94
anything he hopes or fears or sees, but because he is a gentleman.
I would eliminate also from the discussion all uncharitable reflections upon the
orderly execution of laws existing in certain states of this Union, requiring persons known
to be colored to ride in one car, and persons supposed to be white in another. A good
citizen may use his influence to have existing laws and statutes changed or modified, but
a public servant must not be blamed for obeying orders. A railroad conductor is not asked
to dictate measures, nor to make and pass laws. His bread and butter are conditioned on
his managing his part of the machinery as he is told to do. If, therefore, I found myself in
that compartment of a train designated by the sovereign law of the state for presumable
Caucasians, and for colored persons only when traveling in the capacity of nurses and
maids, should a conductor inform me, as a gentleman might, that I had made a mistake,
and offer to show me the proper car for black ladies; I might wonder at the expensive
arrangements of the company and of the state in providing special and separate
accommodations for the transportation of the various hues of humanity, but I certainly
could not take it as a want of
Page 95
courtesy on the conductor’s part that he gave the information. It is true, public sentiment
precedes and begets all laws, good or bad; and on the ground I have taken, our women
are to be credited largely as teachers and moulders of public sentiment. But when a law
has passed and received the sanction of the land, there is nothing for our officials to do
but enforce it till repealed; and I for one, as a loyal American citizen, will give those
officials cheerful support and ready sympathy in the discharge of their duty. But when a
great burly six feet of masculinity with sloping shoulders and unkempt beard swaggers in,
and, throwing a roll of tobacco into one corner of his jaw, growls out at me over the
paper I am reading, “Here gurl,” (I am past thirty) “you better git out ‘n dis kyar ‘f yer
don’t, I’ll put yer out,”–my mental annotation is Here’s an American citizen who has been
badly trained. He is sadly lacking in both ‘sweetness’ and ‘light’; and when in the same
section of our enlightened and progressive country, I see from the car window, working
on private estates, convicts from the state penitentiary, among them squads of boys from
fourteen to eighteen years of age in a chain-gang, their feet chained together and
Page 96
heavy blocks attached–not in 1850, but in 1890, ’91 and ’92, I make a note on the flyleaf
of my memorandum, The women in this section should organize a Society for the
Prevention of Cruelty to Human Beings, and disseminate civilizing tracts, and send
throughout the region apostles of anti-barbarism for the propagation of humane and
enlightened ideas. And when farther on in the same section our train stops at a
dilapidated station, rendered yet more unsightly by dozens of loafers with their hands in
their pockets while a productive soil and inviting climate beckon in vain to industry; and
when, looking a little more closely, I see two dingy little rooms with, “FOR LADIES”
swinging over one and “FOR COLORED PEOPLE” over the other; while wondering under
which head I come, I notice a little way off the only hotel proprietor of the place whittling
a pine stick as he sits with one leg thrown across an empty goods box; and as my eye falls
on a sample room next door which seems to be driving the only wide-awake and popular
business of the commonwealth, I cannot help ejaculating under my breath, “What a field
for the missionary woman.” I know that if by any fatality I should be obliged to lie over at
that
Page 97
station, and, driven by hunger, should be compelled to seek refreshments or the bare
necessaries of life at the only public accommodation in the town, that same stick-whittler
would coolly inform me, without looking up from his pine splinter, “We doan
uccommodate no niggers hyur.” And yet we are so scandalized at Russia’s barbarity and
cruelty to the Jews! We pay a man a thousand dollars a night just to make us weep, by a
recital of such heathenish inhumanity as is practiced on Sclavonic soil.
A recent writer on Eastern nations says: “If we take through the earth’s temperate
zone, a belt of country whose northern and southern edges are determined by certain
limiting isotherms, not more than half the width of the zone apart, we shall find that we
have included in a relatively small extent of surface almost all the nations of note in the
world, past or present. Now, if we examine this belt and compare the different parts of it
with one another, we shall be struck by a remarkable fact. The peoples inhabiting it grow
steadily more personal as we go west. So unmistakable is this gradation, that one is
almost tempted to ascribe it to cosmical rather than to human causes. It is as marked as
the
Page 98
change in color of the human complexion observable along any meridian, which ranges
from black, at the equator to blonde toward the pole. In like manner the sense of self
grows more intense as we follow in the wake of the setting sun, and fades steadily as we
advance into the dawn. America, Europe, the Levant, India, Japan, each is less personal
than the one before. . . . . That politeness should be one of the most marked results of
impersonality may appear surprising, yet a slight examination will show it to be a fact.
Considered a priori, the connection is not far to seek. Impersonality by lessening the
interest in one’s self, induces one to take an interest in others. Looked at a posteriori, we
find that where the one trait exists the other is most developed, while an absence of the
second seems to prevent the full growth of the first. This is true both in general and in
detail. Courtesy increases as we travel eastward round the world, coincidently with a
decrease in the sense of self. Asia is more courteous than Europe, Europe than America.
Particular races show the same concomitance of characteristics. France, the most
impersonal nation of Europe, is at the same time the most polite.” And by inference,
Americans, the most personal,
Page 99
are the least courteous nation on the globe.
… I have determined to plead with our women… to institute a reform by placing
immediately in our national curricula a department for teaching GOOD MANNERS.
Now, am I right in holding the American Woman responsible? Is it true that the
exponents of woman’s advancement, the leaders in woman’s thought, the preachers and
teachers of all woman’s reforms, can teach this nation to be courteous, to be pitiful,
having compassion one of another, not rendering evil for inoffensiveness,
Page 100
and railing in proportion to the improbability of being struck back; but contrariwise,
being all of one mind, to love as brethren?
I think so.
It may require some heroic measures, and Like all revolutions will call for a
determined front and a courageous, unwavering, stalwart heart on the part of the leaders
of the reform.
The “all” will inevitably stick in the throat of the Southern woman. She must be
allowed, please, to except the ‘darkey’ from the ‘all’; it is too bitter a pill with black people
in it. You must get the Revised Version to put it, “love all white people as brethren.” She
really could not enter any society on earth, or in heaven above, or in–the waters under
the earth, on such unpalatable conditions.
The Black Woman has tried to understand the Southern woman’s difficulties; to put
herself in her place, and to be as fair, as charitable, and as free from prejudice in judging
her antipathies, as she would have others in regard to her own. She has honestly weighed
the apparently sincere excuse, “But you must remember that these people were once our
slaves”; and that other, “But civility towards
Page 101
the Negroes will bring us on social equality with them.”
… One of the most singular facts about the unwritten history of this country is the
consummate ability with which Southern influence, Southern ideas and Southern ideals,
have from the very beginning even up to the present day, dictated to and domineered
over the brain and sinew of this nation. Without wealth, without education, without
inventions, arts, sciences, or industries, without well-nigh every one of the progressive
ideas and impulses which have made this country great, prosperous and happy,
personally indolent and practically stupid, poor in everything but bluster and self-esteem,
the Southerner has nevertheless with Italian finesse and exquisite skill, uniformly and
invariably, so manipulated Northern sentiment as to succeed sooner or later in carrying
his point and shaping the policy of this government to suit his purposes. Indeed, the
Southerner is a
Page 102
magnificent manager of men, a born educator. For two hundred and fifty years he trained
to his hand a people whom he made absolutely his own, in body, mind, and sensibility. He
so insinuated differences and distinctions among them, that their personal attachment
for him was stronger than for their own brethren and fellow sufferers. He made it a crime
for two or three of them to be gathered together in Christ’s name without a white man’s
supervision, and a felony for one to teach them to read even the Word of Life; and yet
they would defend his interest with their life blood; his smile was their happiness, a pat
on the shoulder from him their reward. The slightest difference among themselves in
condition, circumstances, opportunities, became barriers of jealousy and disunion. He
sowed his blood broadcast among them, then pitted mulatto against black, bond against
free, house slave against plantation slave, even the slave of one clan against like slave of
another clan; till, wholly oblivious of their ability for mutual succor and defense, all
became centers of myriad systems of repellent forces, having but one sentiment in
common, and that their entire subjection to that master hand.
Page 103
And he not only managed the black man, he also hoodwinked the white man, the
tourist and investigator who visited his lordly estates. The slaves were doing well, in fact
couldn’t be happier,–plenty to eat, plenty to drink, comfortably housed and clothed–they
wouldn’t be free if they could; in short, in his broad brimmed plantation hat and easy
aristocratic smoking gown, he made you think him a veritable patriarch in the midst of a
lazy, well fed, good natured, over-indulged tenantry.
Then, too, the South represented blood– not red blood, but blue blood. The
difference is in the length of the stream and your distance from its source. If your own
father was a pirate, a, robber, a murderer, his hands are dyed in red blood, and you don’t
say very much about it. But if your great great great grandfather’s grandfather stole and
pillaged and slew, and you can prove it, your blood has become blue and you are at great
pains to establish the relationship. So the South had neither silver nor gold, but she had
blood; and she paraded it with so much gusto that the substantial little Puritan maidens
of the North, who had been making bread and canning currants and not thinking of blood
the least bit, began to hunt up the records of the
Page 104
Mayflower to see if some of the passengers thereon could not claim the honor of having
been one of William the Conqueror’s brigands…
In politics, the two great forces, commerce and empire, which would otherwise have
shaped the destiny of the country, have been made to pander and cater to Southern
notions. “Cotton is King” meant the South must be allowed to dictate or there would be
no fun. Every statesman from 1830 to 1860 exhausted his genius in persuasion and
compromises to smooth out her ruffled temper and gratify her petulant demands. But
like a sullen younger sister, the South has pouted and sulked and cried: “I won’t play with
you now; so there!” and the big brother at the North has coaxed and compromised and
given in, and–ended by letting her have her way. Until 1860 she had as her pet an
institution which it was death by the law to say anything about, except that it was divinely
instituted, inaugurated by
Page 105
Noah, sanctioned by Abraham, approved by Paul, and just ideally perfect in every way.
And when, to preserve the autonomy of the family arrangements, in ’61, ’62 and ’63, it
became necessary for the big brother to administer a little wholesome correction and set
the obstreperous Miss vigorously down in her seat again, she assumed such an air of
injured innocence, and melted away so lugubriously, the big brother has done nothing
since but try to sweeten and pacify and laugh her back into a companionable frame of
mind….
Page 106
…
So now, if one intimates that some clauses of the Constitution are a dead letter at
the South and that only the name and support of that pet institution are changed while
the fact and essence, minus the expense and responsibility, remain, he is quickly told to
mind his own business and informed that he is waving the bloody shirt.
Even twenty-five years after the fourteenth and fifteenth amendments to our
Constitution,
Page 107
a man who has been most unequivocal in his outspoken condemnation of the wrongs
regularly and systematically heaped on the oppressed race in this country, and on all even
most remotely connected with them–a man whom we had thought our staunchest friend
and most noble champion and defender–after a two weeks’ trip in Georgia and Florida
immediately gives signs of the fatal inception of the virus. Not even the chance traveller
from England or Scotland escapes. The arch-manipulator takes him under his special
watch-care and training, uses up his stock arguments and gives object lessons with his
choicest specimens of Negro depravity and worthlessness; takes him through what, in
New York, would be called “the slums,” and would predicate there nothing but the duty
of enlightened Christians to send out their light and emulate their Master’s aggressive
labors of love; but in Georgia is denominated “our terrible problem, which people of the
North so little understand, yet vouchsafe so much gratuitous advice about.” With an
injured air he shows the stupendous and atrocious mistake of reasoning about these
people as if they were just ordinary human beings, and amenable to the tenets of the
Gospel; and not long after the inoculation
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begins to work, you hear this old-time friend of the oppressed delivering himself
something after this fashion: “Ah, well, the South must be left to manage the Negro. She
is most directly concerned and must understand her problem better than outsiders. We
must not meddle. We must be very careful not to widen the breaches. The Negro is not
worth a feud between brothers and sisters.”
Lately a great national and international movement characteristic of this age and
country, a movement based on the inherent right of every soul to its own highest
development, I mean the movement making for Woman’s full, free, and complete
emancipation, has, after much courting, obtained the gracious smile of the Southern
woman–I beg her pardon–the Southern lady.
She represents blood, and of course could not be expected to leave that out; and
firstly and foremostly she must not, in any organization she may deign to grace with her
presence, be asked to associate with “these people who were once her slaves.”
Now the Southern woman (I may be pardoned, being one myself ) was never
renowned for her reasoning powers, and it is not surprising
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that just a little picking will make her logic fall to pieces even here.
In the first place she imagines that because her grandfather had slaves who were
black, all the blacks in the world of every shade and tint were once in the position of her
slaves. This is as bad as the Irishman who was about to kill a peaceable Jew in the streets
of Cork,–having just learned that Jews slew his Redeemer. The black race constitutes oneseventh the known population of the globe; and there are representatives of it here as
else-where who were never in bondage at any time to any man,–whose blood is as blue
and lineage as noble as any, even that of the white lady of the South. That her slaves
were black and she despises her slaves, should no more argue antipathy to all dark people
and peoples, than that Guiteau, an assassin, was white, and I hate assassins, should make
me hate all persons more or less white. The objection shows a want of clear
discrimination.
The second fallacy in the objection grows out of the use of an ambiguous middle, as
the logicians would call it, or assigning a double signification to the term “Social equality.”
Civility to the Negro implies social equality. I am opposed to associating with dark
persons
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on terms of social equality. Therefore, I abrogate civility to the Negro. This is like
Light is opposed to darkness.
Feathers are light.
Ergo, Feathers are opposed to darkness.
The “social equality” implied by civility to the Negro is a very different thing from
forced association with him socially. Indeed it seems to me that the mere application of a
little cold common sense would show that uncongenial social environments could by no
means be forced on any one. I do not, and cannot be made to associate with all dark
persons, simply on the ground that I am dark; and I presume the Southern lady can
imagine some whose faces are white, with whom she would no sooner think of chatting
unreservedly than, were it possible, with a veritable ‘darkey.’ Such things must and will
always be left to individual election. No law, human or divine, can legislate for or against
them. Like seeks like; and I am sure with the Southern lady’s antipathies at their present
temperature, she might enter ten thousand organizations besprinkled with colored
women without being any more deflected by them than by the proximity of a stone. The
social equality scare then is all humbug, conscious
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or unconscious, I know not which. And were it not too bitter a thought to utter here, I
might add that the overtures for forced association in the past history of these two races
were not made by the manacled black man, nor by the silent and suffering black woman!
When I seek food in a public café or apply for first-class accommodations on a railway
train, I do so because my physical necessities are identical with those of other human
beings of like constitution and temperament, and crave satisfaction, I go because I want
food, or I want comfort–not because I want association with those who frequent these
places; and I can see no more “social equality” in buying lunch at the same restaurant, or
riding in a common car, than there is in paying for dry goods at the same counter or
walking on the same street.
The social equality which means forced or unbidden association would be as much
deprecated and as strenuously opposed by the circle in which I move as by the most hidebound Southerner in the land. Indeed I have been more than once annoyed by the
inquisitive white interviewer, who, with spectacles on nose and pencil and note-book in
hand, comes to get some “points” about “your people.”
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My “people” are just like other people–indeed, too like for their own good. They hate,
they love, they attract and repel, they climb or they grovel, struggle or drift, aspire or
despair, endure in hope or curse in vexation, exactly like all the rest of unregenerate
humanity. Their likes and dislikes are as strong; their antipathies–and prejudices too I
fear, are as pronounced as you will find anywhere; and the entrance to the inner
sanctuary of their homes and hearts is as jealously guarded against profane intrusion.
What the dark man wants then is merely to live his own life, in his own world, with
his own chosen companions, in whatever of comfort, luxury, or emoluments his talent or
his money can in an impartial market secure. Has he wealth, he does not want to be
forced into inconvenient or unsanitary sections of cities to buy a home and rear his
family. Has he art, he does not want to be cabined and cribbed into emulation with the
few who merely happen to have his complexion. His talent aspires to study without
proscription the masters of all ages and to rub against the broadest and fullest
movements of his own day.
Has he religion, he does not want to be
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made to feel that there is a white Christ and a black Christ, a white Heaven and a black
Heaven, a white Gospel and a black Gospel,– but the one ideal of perfect manhood and
womanhood, the one universal longing for development and growth, the one desire for
being, and being better, the one great yearning, aspiring, outreaching, in all the
heartthrobs of humanity in whatever race or clime.
A recent episode in the Corcoran art gallery at the American capital is to the point. A
colored woman who had shown marked ability in drawing and coloring, was advised by
her teacher, himself an artist of no mean rank, to apply for admission to the Corcoran
school in order to study the models and to secure other advantages connected with the
organization. She accordingly sent a written application accompanied by specimens of her
drawings, the usual modus operandi in securing admission.
The drawings were examined by the best critics and pronounced excellent, and a
ticket of admission was immediately issued together with a highly complimentary
reference to her work.
The next day my friend, congratulating her country and herself that at least in the
republic of art no caste existed, presented her ticket of
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admission in propria persona. There was a little preliminary side play in Delsarte
pantomime, –aghast–incredulity–wonder; then the superintendent told her in plain
unartistic English that of course he had not dreamed a colored person could do such
work, and had he suspected the truth of admission; that, to be right frank, the ticket
would have to be cancelled, –she could under no condition be admitted to the studio.
Can it be possible that even art in America is to be tainted by this shrivelling caste
spirit? If so, what are we coming to? Can any one conceive a Shakespeare, a Michael
Angelo, or a Beethoven putting away any fact of simple merit because the thought, or the
suggestion, or the creation emanated from a soul with an unpleasing exterior?
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…
It was Shakespeare’s own all-embracing sympathy, that infinite receptivity of his,
and native, all-comprehending appreciation, which proved a key to unlock and open
every soul that came within his radius. And he received as much as he gave. His own
stores were infinitely enriched thereby. …
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No true artist can allow himself to be narrowed and provincialized by deliberately
shutting out any class of facts or subjects through prejudice against externals. And
American art, American science, American literature can never be founded in truth, the
universal beauty; can never learn to speak a language intelligible in all climes and for all
ages, till this paralyzing grip of caste prejudice is loosened from its vitals, and the healthy
sympathetic eye is taught to look out on the great universe as holding no favorites and no
black beasts, but bearing in each plainest or loveliest feature the handwriting of its God.
And this is why, as it appears to me, woman in her lately acquired vantage ground for
speaking an earnest helpful word, can do this country no deeper and truer and more
lasting good than by bending all her energies to thus broadening, humanizing, and
civilizing her native land.
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This, too, is why I conceive the subject to have been unfortunately worded which was
chosen by Miss Shaw at the Woman’s Council and which stands at the head of this
chapter.
Miss Shaw is one of the most powerful of our leaders, and we feel her voice should
give no uncertain note. Woman should not, even by inference, or for the sake of
argument, seem to disparage what is weak. For woman’s cause is the cause of the weak;
and when all the weak shall have received their due consideration, then woman will have
her “rights,” and the Indian will have his rights, and the Negro will have his rights, and all
the strong will have learned at last to deal justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly; and
our fair land will have been taught the secret of universal courtesy which is after all
nothing but the art, the science, and the religion of regarding one’s neighbor as one’s self,
and to do for him as we would, were conditions swapped, that he do for us.
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It cannot seem less than a blunder, whenever the exponents of a great reform or the
harbingers of a noble advance in thought and effort allow themselves to seem distorted
by a narrow view of their own aims and principles. All prejudices, whether of race, sect or
sex, class pride and caste distinctions are the belittling inheritance and badge of snobs
and prigs.
The philosophic mind sees that its own “rights” are the rights of humanity. That in
the universe of God nothing trivial is or mean; and the recognition it seeks is … through
the universal application ultimately of the Golden Rule….
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The cause of freedom is not the cause of a race or a sect, a party or a class,–it is the
cause of human kind, the very birthright of humanity. Now unless we are greatly mistaken
the Reform of our day, known as the Woman’s Movement, is essentially such an
Embodiment, if its pioneers could only realize it, of the universal good. And specially
important is it that there be no confusion of ideas among its leaders as to its scope and
universality. All mists must be cleared from the eyes of woman if she is to be a teacher of
morals and manners: the former strikes its roots in the individual and its training and
pruning may be accomplished by classes; but the latter is to lubricate the joints and
minimize the friction of society, and it is important and fundamental that there be no
chromatic or other aberration when the teacher is settling the point, “Who is my
neighbor?”
It is not the intelligent woman vs. the ignorant woman; nor the white woman vs. the
black, the brown, and the red,–it is not even the cause of woman vs. man. Nay, ’tis
woman’s strongest vindication for speaking that the world needs to hear her voice . It
would be subversive of every human interest that the cry of one-half the human family be
stifled. Woman in stepping from the pedestal of
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statue-like inactivity in the domestic shrine, and daring to think and move and speak,–to
undertake to help shape, mold, and direct the thought of her age, is merely completing
the circle of the world’s vision. Hers is every interest that has lacked an interpreter and a
defender. Her cause is linked with that of every agony that has been dumb–every wrong
that needs a voice.
It is no fault of man’s that he has not been able to see truth from her standpoint. It
does credit both to his head and heart that no greater mistakes have been committed or
even wrongs perpetrated while she sat making tatting and snipping paper flowers. Man’s
own innate chivalry and the mutual interdependence of their interests have insured his
treating her cause, in the main at least, as his own. And he is pardonably surprised and
even a little chagrined, perhaps, to find his legislation not considered “perfectly lovely” in
every respect. But in any case his work is only impoverished by her remaining dumb. The
world has had to limp along with the wobbling gait and one-sided hesitancy of a man with
one eye. Suddenly the bandage is removed from the other eye and the whole body is
filled with light. It sees a circle where
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before it saw a segment. The darkened eye restored, every member rejoices with it.
What a travesty of its case for this eye to become plaintiff in a suit, Eye vs. Foot.
“There is that dull clod, the foot, allowed to roam at will, free and untrammelled; while I,
the source and medium of light, brilliant and beautiful, am fettered in darkness and
doomed to desuetude.” The great burly black man, ignorant and gross and depraved, is
allowed to vote; while the franchise is withheld from the intelligent and refined, the pureminded and lofty souled white woman. Even the untamed and untamable Indian of the
prairie, who can answer nothing but ‘ugh’ to great economic and civic questions is
thought by some worthy to wield the ballot which is still denied the Puritan maid and the
first lady of Virginia.
Is not this hitching our wagon to something much lower than a star? Is not woman’s
cause broader, and deeper, and grander, than a blue stocking debate or an aristocratic
pink tea? Why should woman become plaintiff in a suit versus the Indian, or the Negro or
any other race or class who have been crushed under the iron heel of Anglo-Saxon power
and selfishness? If the Indian has been
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wronged and cheated by the puissance of this American government, it is woman’s
mission to plead with her country to cease to do evil and to pay its honest debts. If the
Negro has been deceitfully cajoled or inhumanly cuffed according to selfish expediency or
capricious antipathy, let it be woman’s mission to plead that he be met as a man and
honestly given half the road. If woman’s own happiness has been ignored or
misunderstood in our country’s legislating for bread winners, for rum sellers, for property
holders, for the family relations, for any, or all the interests that touch her vitally, let her
rest her plea, not on Indian inferiority, nor on Negro depravity, but on the obligation of
legislators to do for her as they would have others do for them were relations reversed.
Let her try to teach her country that every interest in this world is entitled at least to a
respectful hearing, that every sentiency is worthy of its own gratification, that a helpless
cause should not be trampled down, nor a bruised reed broken; and when the right of the
individual is made sacred, when the image of God in human form, whether in marble or in
clay, whether in alabaster or in ebony, is consecrated and inviolable, when men have
been taught to
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look beneath the rags and grime, the pomp and pageantry of mere circumstance and
have regard unto the celestial kernel uncontaminated at the core,–when race, color, sex,
condition, are realized to be the accidents, not the substance of life, and consequently as
not obscuring or modifying the inalienable title to life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness,-then is mastered the science of politeness, the art of courteous contact, which is naught
but the practical application of the principal of benevolence, the back bone and marrow
of all religion; then woman’s lesson is taught and woman’s cause is won–not the white
woman nor the black woman nor the red woman, but the cause of every man or woman
who has writhed silently under a mighty wrong. The pleading of the American woman for
the right and the opportunity to employ the American method of influencing the disposal
to be made of herself, her property, her children in civil, economic, or domestic relations
is thus seen to be based on a principle as broad as the human race and as old as human
society. Her wrongs are thus indissolubly linked with all undefended woe, all helpless
suffering, and the plenitude of her “rights” will mean the final triumph of all right over
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might, the supremacy of the moral forces of reason and justice and love in the
government of the nation.
God hasten the day.
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HAS AMERICA A RACE PROBLEM; IF SO, HOW CAN IT BEST BE
SOLVED?
THERE are two kinds of peace in this world. The one produced by suppression, which
is the passivity of death; the other brought about by a proper adjustment of living, acting
forces. A nation or an individual may be at peace because all opponents have been killed
or crushed; or, nation as well as individual may have found the secret of true harmony in
the determination to live and let live. …
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…
Now I need not say that peace produced by suppression is neither natural nor
desirable. Despotism is not one of the ideas that man has copied from nature. All through
God’s universe we see eternal harmony and symmetry as the unvarying result of the
equilibrium of opposing forces. Fair play in an equal fight is the law written in Nature’s
book. And the solitary bully with his foot on the breast of his last antagonist has no
warrant in any fact of God.
The beautiful curves described by planets and suns in their courses are the resultant
of conflicting forces. Could the centrifugal force for one instant triumph, or should the
centripetal grow weary and give up the struggle, immeasurable disaster would ensue-earth, moon, sun would go spinning off at a tangent or must fall helplessly into its master
sphere. The acid counterbalances and keeps in order the alkali; the negative, the positive
electrode. A proper equilibrium between a most inflammable explosive and the supporter
of combustion, gives us water, the bland fluid that we cannot dispense with. Nay, the very
air we breathe, which seems so calm, so peaceful, is
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rendered innocuous only by the constant conflict of opposing gases. Were the fiery,
never-resting, all-corroding oxygen to gain the mastery we should be burnt to cinders in a
trice. With the sluggish, inert nitrogen triumphant, we should die of inanition.
These facts are only a suggestion of what must be patent to every student of history.
Progressive peace in a nation is the result of conflict; and conflict, such as is healthy,
stimulating, and progressive, is produced through the co-existence of radically opposing
or racially different elements. Bellamy’s ox-like men pictured in Looking Backward, taking
their daily modicum of provender from the grandmotherly government, with nothing to
struggle for, no wrong to put down, no reform to push through, no rights to vindicate and
uphold, are nice folks to read about; but they are not natural; they are not progressive.
God’s world is not governed that way. The child can never gain strength save by
resistance, and there can be no resistance if all movement is in one direction and all
opposition made forever an impossibility.
I confess I can see no deeper reason than this for the specializing of racial types in the
world. Whatever our theory with reference
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to the origin of species and the unity of mankind, we cannot help admitting the fact that
no sooner does a family of the human race take up its abode in some little nook between
mountains, or on some plain walled in by their own hands, no sooner do they begin in
earnest to live their own life, think their own thoughts, and trace out their own arts, than
they begin also to crystallize some idea different from and generally opposed to that of
other tribes or families.
Each race has its badge, its exponent, its message, branded in its forehead by the
great Master’s hand which is its own peculiar keynote, and its contribution to the
harmony of nations.
Left entirely alone,–out of contact, that is with other races and their opposing ideas
and conflicting tendencies, this cult is abnormally developed and there is unity without
variety, a predominance of one tone at the expense of moderation and harmony, and
finally a sameness, a monotonous dullness which means stagnation,–death. …
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… Europe becomes the theater of the leading exponents of civilization, and here we have
a Race Problem,–if, indeed, the confused jumble of races, the clash and conflict, the din
and devastation of those stormy years can be referred to by so quiet and so dignified a
term as “problem.” Complex and appalling it surely was. Goths and Huns, Vandals and
Danes, Angles, Saxons, Jutes–could any prophet foresee that a vestige of law and order,
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of civilization and refinement would remain after this clumsy horde of wild barbarians
had swept over Europe?
…
Taine describes them as follows:
“Huge white bodies, cool-blooded, with fierce blue eyes, reddish flaxen hair;
ravenous stomachs, filled with meat and cheese, heated by strong drinks. Brutal drunken
pirates and robbers, they dashed to sea in their two-sailed barks, landed anywhere, killed
everything…
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…
What could civilization hope to do with such a swarm of sensuous, bloodthirsty
vipers? Assimilation was horrible to contemplate. They will drag us to their level, quoth
the culture of the times. Deportation was out of the question; and there was no need to
talk of their emigrating. The fact is, the barbarians were in no hurry about moving. They
didn’t even care to colonize. They had come
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to stay. And Europe had to grapple with her race problem till time and God should solve
it.
And how was it solved, and what kind of civilization resulted?
Once more let us go to Guizot. “Take ever so rapid a glance,” says he, “at modern
Europe and it strikes you at once as diversified, confused, and stormy. All the principles of
social organization are found existing together within it; powers temporal, and powers
spiritual, the theocratic, monarchic, aristocratic, and democratic elements, all classes of
society in a state of continual struggle without any one having sufficient force to master
the others and take sole possession of society.” Then as to the result of this conflict of
forces: “Incomparably more rich and diversified than the ancient, European civilization
has within it the promise of perpetual progress. It has now endured more than fifteen
centuries and in all that time has been in a state of progression, not so rapidly as the
Greek nor yet so ephemeral. While in other civilizations the exclusive domination of a
principle (or race) led to tyranny, in Europe the diversity of social elements (growing out
of the contact of different races) the incapability of any one to exclude
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the rest, gave birth to the LIBERTY which now prevails. This inability of the various
principles to exterminate one another compelled each to endure the others and made it
necessary for them in order to live in common to enter into a sort of mutual
understanding. Each consented to have only that part of civilization which equitably fell
to its share. Thus, while everywhere else the predominance of one principle produced
tyranny, the variety and warfare of the elements of European civilization gave birth
to reciprocity and liberty.”
There is no need to quote further. This is enough to show that the law holds good in
sociology as in the world of matter, that equilibrium, not repression among conflicting
forces is the condition of natural harmony, of permanent progress, and of universal
freedom. That exclusiveness and selfishness in a family, in a community, or in a nation is
suicidal to progress. Caste and prejudice mean immobility. One race predominance
means death. The community that closes its gates against foreign talent can never hope
to advance beyond a certain point. Resolve to keep out foreigners and you keep out
progress. Home talent develops its one idea and then dies. Like the century plant it
produces its one flower, brilliant
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and beautiful it may be, but it lasts only for a night. Its forces have exhausted themselves
in that one effort. Nothing remains but to wither and to rot.
…
But European civilization… was still not the consummation of the ideal of human
possibilities. One more degree westward the hand on the dial points. In Europe there was
conflict, but the elements crystallized out in isolated nodules, so to speak. Italy has her
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dominant principle, Spain hers, France hers, England hers, and so on. …It is not, however,
till the scene changes and America is made the theater of action, that the interplay of
forces narrowed down to a single platform.
Hither came Cavalier and Roundhead, Baptist and Papist, Quaker, Ritualist,
Freethinker and Mormon, the conservative Tory, the liberal Whig, and the radical
Independent,–the Spaniard, the Frenchman, the Englishman, the Italian, the Chinaman,
the African, Swedes, Russians, Huns, Bohemians, Gypsies, Irish, Jews. Here surely was a
seething caldron of conflicting elements. Religious intolerance and political hatred, race
prejudice and caste pride”Double, double, toil and trouble;
Fire burn and cauldron bubble.”
Conflict, Conflict, Conflict.
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America for Americans! This is the white man’s country! The Chinese must go, shrieks
the exclusionist. Exclude the Italians! Colonize the blacks in Mexico or deport them to
Africa. Lynch, suppress, drive out, kill out! America for Americans!
“Who are Americans?” comes rolling back from ten million throats. Who are to do
the packing and delivering of the goods? Who are the homefolks and who are the
strangers? Who are the absolute and original tenants in fee-simple?
The red men used to be owners of the soil,–but they are about to be pushed over
into the Pacific Ocean. They, perhaps, have the best right to call themselves “Americans”
by law of primogeniture. They are at least the oldest inhabitants of whom we can at
present identify any traces. If early settlers from abroad merely are meant and it is only a
question of squatters’ right’s–why, the Mayflower, a pretty venerable institution, landed
in the year of Grace 1620, and the first delegation from Africa just one year ahead of
that,–in 1[6]19. The first settlers seem to have been almost as much mixed as we are on
this point; and it does not seem at all easy to decide just what individuals we mean when
we
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yell “America for the Americans.” At least the cleavage cannot be made by hues and
noses, if we are to seek for the genuine F. F. V.’s [First Families of Virginia] as the
inhabitants best entitled to the honor of that name.
The fact is this nation was foreordained to conflict from its incipiency. Its elements
were predestined from their birth to an irrepressible clash followed by the stable
equilibrium of opposition. Exclusive possession belongs to none. There never was a point
in its history when it did. There was never a time since America became a nation when
there were not more than one belief contending for supremacy. Hence no one is or can
be supreme. All interests must be consulted, all claims conciliated. Where a hundred free
forces are lustily clamoring for recognition and each wrestling mightily for the mastery,
individual tyrannies must inevitably be chiselled down, individual bigotries worn smooth
and malleable, individual prejudices either obliterated or concealed. America is not from
choice more than of necessity republic in form and democratic in administration. The will
of the majority must rule simply because no class, no family, no individual has
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ever been able to prove sufficient political legitimacy to impose their yoke on the country.
All attempts at establishing oligarchy must be made by wheedling and cajoling,
pretending that not supremacy but service is sought. …Compromise and concession,
liberality and toleration were the conditions of the nation’s birth and are the sine qua
non of its continued existence. A general amnesty and universal reciprocity are the
only modus vivendi in a nation whose every citizen is his own king, his own priest and his
own pope.
De Tocqueville, years ago, predicted that republicanism must fail in America. But if
republicanism fails, America fails, and somehow I can not think this colossal stage was
erected for a tragedy. I must confess to being an optimist on the subject of my country. It
is true we are too busy making history, and have been for some years past, to be able to
write history yet, or to understand and interpret
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it. Our range of vision is too short for us to focus and image our conflicts…The clashing of
arms and the din of battle, the smoke of cannon and the heat of combat, are not yet
cleared away sufficiently for us to have the judicial vision of historians. …
…This the last page is to mark the climax of history, the bright consummate flower
unfolding charity toward all and malice toward, none,–the final triumph of universal
reciprocity born of universal conflict with forces that cannot be exterminated. Here at last
is an arena in which every agony has a voice and free speech. Not a spot where no wrong
can exist, but where
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each feeblest interest can cry with Themistocles, “Strike, but hear me!” Here you will not
see as in Germany women hitched to a cart with donkeys; not perhaps because men are
more chivalrous here than there, but because woman can speak. Here labor will not be
starved and ground to powder, because the laboring man can make himself heard. Here
races that are weakest can, if they so select, make themselves felt.
The supremacy of one race,–the despotism of a class or the tyranny of an individual
can not ultimately prevail on a continent held in equilibrium by such conflicting forces and
by so many and such strong fibred races as there are struggling on this soil. …
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… In this arena then is to be the last death struggle of political tyranny, of religious
bigotry, and intellectual intolerance, of caste illiberality and class exclusiveness. And the
last monster that shall be throttled forever methinks is race prejudice. Men will here
learn that a race, as family, may be true to itself without seeking to exterminate all
others. That for the note of the feeblest there is room, nay a positive need, in the
harmonies of God. That the principles of true democracy are founded in universal
reciprocity, and that “A man’s a man” was written when God first stamped His own image
and superscription on His child and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life. And I
confess I can pray for no nobler destiny for my country than that it may be the stage,
however far distant in the future, whereon these ideas and principles shall ultimately
mature; and culminating here at whatever cost of production shall go forth hence to
dominate the world.
…
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“Let thy gold be cast in the furnace,
Thy red gold, precious and bright.
Do not fear the hungry fire
With its caverns of burning light.”
…
“And thy gold shall return more precious,
Free from every spot and stain,
For gold must be tried by fire.”
And the heart of nations must be tried by pain; and their polish, their true culture must
be wrought in through conflict.
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Has America a Race Problem?
Yes.
What are you going to do about it?
Let it alone and mind my own business. It is God’s problem and He will solve it in
time. It is deeper than Gehenna. What can you or I do!
Are there then no duties and special lines of thought growing out of the present
conditions of this problem?
Certainly there are. Imprimis; let every element of the conflict see that it represent a
positive force so as to preserve a proper equipoise in the conflict. No shirking, no
skulking, no masquerading in another’s uniform. Stand by your guns. And be ready for the
charge. The day is coming, and now is, when America must ask each citizen not “who was
your grandfather and what the color of his cuticle,” but “What can you do?” Be ready
each individual element,–each race, each class, each family, each man to reply “I engage
to undertake an honest man’s share.”
God and time will work the problem. You and I are only to stand for the quantities at
their best, which he means us to represent.
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…
We would not deprecate the fact, then, that America has a Race Problem. It is
guaranty of the perpetuity and progress of her institutions, and insures the breadth of her
culture and the symmetry of her development. More than all, let us not disparage the
factor which the Negro is appointed to contribute to that problem. America needs the
Negro for ballast if for nothing else. His tropical warmth and spontaneous emotionalism
may form no unseemly counterpart to the cold and calculating Anglo-Saxon. And then his
instinct for law and order, his inborn respect for authority, his inaptitude for rioting and
anarchy, his gentleness and cheerfulness as a laborer, and his deep-rooted faith in God
will prove indispensable and invaluable elements in a nation menaced as America is by
anarchy, socialism, communism, and skepticism poured in with all the jail birds from the
continents of Europe and Asia. I believe with our own Dr. Crummell that “the Almighty
does not preserve, rescue, and build up a lowly people merely for
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ignoble ends.” And the historian of American civilization will yet congratulate this country
that she has had a Race Problem and that descendants of the black race furnished one of
its largest factors.
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ONE PHASE OF AMERICAN LITERATURE.
FOR nations as for individuals, a product, to be worthy the term literature, must
contain something characteristic and sui generis.
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…
And so our writers have succeeded in becoming national and representative in
proportion as they have from year to year entered more and more fully, and more and
more sympathetically, into the distinctive life of their nation, and endeavored to reflect
and picture its homeliest pulsations and its elemental components. …
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… It is only through the unclouded perception of our tiny “part” that we can come to
harmonize with the “stupendous whole,” and in order to this our sympathies must be
finely attuned and quick to vibrate under the touch of the commonplace and vulgar no
less than at the hand of the elegent and refined. …
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…
For two hundred and fifty years there was in the American commonwealth a
great silent factor. Though in themselves simple and unique their offices were those of
the barest utility. Imported merely to be hewers of wood and drawers of water, no artist
for many a generation thought them worthy the sympathetic study of a model. No
Shakespeare arose to distil from their unmatched personality and unparalleled situations
the exalted poesy and crude grandeur of an immortal Caliban. Distinct in color, original in
temperament, simple and unconventionalized in thought and action their spiritual
development and impressionability under their novel environment would have furnished,
it might seem, as interesting a study in psychology for the poetic pen, as would the gorges
of the Yosemite to the inspired pencil. Full of vitality and natural elasticity, the severest
persecution and oppression could not kill them out or even sour their temper. With
massive
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brawn and indefatigable endurance they wrought under burning suns and chilling blasts,
in swamps and marshes,–they cleared the forests, tunneled mountains, threaded the
land with railroads, planted, picked and ginned the cotton, produced the rice and the
sugar for the markets of the world. Without money and without price they poured their
hearts’ best blood into the enriching and developing of this country. They wrought but
were silent.
The most talked about of all the forces in this diversified civilization, they seemed the
great American fact, the one objective reality, on which scholars sharpened their wits, at
which orators and statesmen fired their eloquence, and from which, after so long a time,
authors, with varied success and truthfulness have begun at last to draw subjects and
models. …
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…
In the days of their bitterest persecution, their patient endurance and Christian
manliness inspired Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which revolutionized the thought of the world on
the subject of slavery and at once placed its author in the front rank of the writers of her
country and age. Here at last was a work which England could not parallel. Here was a
work
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indigenous to American soil and characteristic of the country–a work which American
forces alone could have produced. The subject was at once seen to be fresh and
interesting to the world as well as national and peculiar to America; and so it has been
eagerly cultivated by later writers with widely varying degrees of fitness arid success.
By a rough classification, authors may be separated into two groups: first, those in
whom the artistic or poetic instinct is uppermost –those who write to please–or rather
who write because they please; who simply paint what they see, as naturally, as
instinctively, and as irresistibly as the bird sings– with no thought of all audience–singing
because it loves to sing,–singing because God, nature, truth sings through it. For such
writers, to be true to themselves and true to Nature is the only canon. They cannot warp
a character or distort a fact in order to prove a point. They have nothing to prove…
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…
In the second group belong the preachers,– whether of righteousness or
unrighteousness, –all who have an idea to propagate, no matter in what form their talent
enables them to clothe it, whether poem, novel, or sermon,– all those writers with a
purpose or a lesson, who catch you by the buttonhole and pommel you over the shoulder
till you are forced to give assent in order to escape their vociferations; or they may lure
you into listening with the soft music of the siren’s tongue–no matter what the expedient
to catch and hold your attention, they mean to fetter you with their one idea, whatever it
is, and make you, if possible, ride their hobby…
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…
Now owing to the problematical position at present occupied by descendants of
Africans in the American social polity,–growing, I presume, out of the continued
indecision in the mind of the more powerful descendants of the Saxons as to whether it is
expedient to apply the maxims of their religion to their civil and political relationships,-most of the writers who have hitherto attempted a portrayal of life and customs among
the darker race have belonged to our class II: they have all, more or less, had a point to
prove or a mission to accomplish, and thus their art has been almost uniformly perverted
to serve their ends; and, to add to their disadvantage, most, if not all the writers on this
line have been but partially acquainted with the life they wished to delineate and through
sheer ignorance ofttimes, as well as from design occasionally, have not been able to put
themselves in the darker man’s place. The art of “thinking one’s self imaginatively into the
experiences of others” is not given to all, and it is impossible to acquire it without a
background and a substratum of sympathetic knowledge. Without this power our
portraits are but death’s
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heads or caricatures and no amount of cudgelling can put into them the movement and
reality of life. Not many have had Mrs. Stowe’s power because not many have studies
with Mrs. Stowe’s humility and love. They forget that underneath the black man’s form
and behavior there is the great bed-rock of humanity, the key to which is the same that
unlocks every tribe and kindred of the nations of earth. Some have taken up the subject
with a view to establishing evidences of ready formulated theories and preconceptions;
and, blinded by their prejudices and antipathies, have altogether abjured all candid and
careful study. Others with flippant indifference have performed a few psychological
experiments on their cooks and coachmen, and with astounding egotism, and powers of
generalization positively bewildering, forthwith aspire to enlighten the world with
dissertations on racial traits of the Negro. A few with really kind intentions and a sincere
desire for information have approached the subject as a clumsy microscopist, not quite at
home with his instrument, might study a new order of beetle or bug. …
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…
This criticism is not altered by our grateful remembrance of those who have
heroically taken their pens to champion the black man’s cause. But even here we may
remark that a painter may be irreproachable in motive and as benevolent as an angel in
intention, nevertheless we have a right to compare his copy with the original and point
out in what respects it falls short or is overdrawn; and he should thank us for doing so.
It is in no captious spirit, therefore, that we note a few contributions to this phase of
American literature which have been made during the present decade; we shall try to
estimate their weight, their tendency, their truthfulness and their lessons, if any, for
ourselves.
Foremost among the champions of the black man’s cause through the medium of
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fiction must be mentioned Albion W. Tourgee. No man deserves more the esteem and
appreciation of the colored people of this country for his brave words. For ten years he
has stood almost alone as the enthusiastic advocate, not of charity and dole to the Negro,
but of justice. …
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… Not many colored men would have attempted Tourgee’s brave defense of
Reconstruction and the alleged corruption of Negro supremacy, more properly termed
the period of white sullenness and desertion of duty. Not many would have dared,
fearlessly as he did, to arraign this country for an enormous pecuniary debt to the colored
man for the two hundred and forty-seven years of unpaid labor of his ancestors. Not
many could so determinedly have held up the glass of the real Christianity before those
believers in a white Christ and these preachers of the gospel, “Suffer the
little white children to come unto me.” We all see the glaring inconsistency and feel the
burning shame. We appreciate the incongruity and the indignity of having to stand
forever hat in hand as beggars, or be shoved aside as intruders in a country whose
resources have
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been opened up by the unrequited toil of our forefathers. We know that our bill is a true
one–that the debt is as real as to any pensioners of our government. But the principles of
patience and forbearance, of meekness and charity, have become so ingrained in the
Negro character that there is hardly enough self-assertion left to ask as our right that a
part of the country’s surplus wealth be loaned for the education of our children; even
though we know that our present poverty is due to the fact that the toil of the last
quarter century enriched these coffers, but left us the heirs of crippled, deformed, frostbitten, horny- handed and empty handed mothers and fathers. Oh, the shame of it!…
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…
Among our artists for art’s sweet sake, Mr. Howells has recently tried his hand also
at painting the Negro, attempting merely a side light in half tones, on his life and
manners; and I think the unanimous verdict of the subject is that, in this single
department at least, Mr. Howells does not know what he is talking about. And yet I do not
think we should quarrel with An Imperative Duty because it lacks the earnestness and bias
of a special pleader. Mr. Howells merely meant to press the button and give one picture
from American life involving racial complications. The
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kodak does no more; it cannot preach sermons or solve problems.
… I cannot help sharing, however, the indignation of those who resent the picture in the
colored church,–“evidently,” Mr. Howells assures us, “representing the best colored
society”; where the horrified young prig, Rhoda Aldgate, meets nothing but the frog-like
countenances and cat-fish mouths, the musky
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exhalations and the “bress de Lawd, Honey,” of an uncultivated people. It is just here that
Mr. Howells fails–and fails because he gives only a half truth, and that a partisan half
truth. One feels that he had no business to attempt a subject of which he knew so little,
or for which he cared so little. There is one thing I would like to say to my fellow
countrymen, and especially to those who dabble in ink and affect to discuss the Negro;
and yet I hesitate because I feel it is a fact which persons of the finer sensibilities and
more delicate perceptions must know instinctively: namely, that it is an insult to
humanity and a sin against God to publish any such sweeping generalizations of a race on
such meager and superficial information. We meet it at every turn–this obtrusive and
offensive vulgarity, this gratuitous sizing up of the Negro and conclusively writing down
his equation, sometimes even among his ardent friends and bravest defenders. Were I
not afraid of falling myself into the same error that I am condemning, I would say it seems
an Anglo Saxon characteristic to have such overweening confidence in his own power of
induction that there is no equation which he would acknowledge to be indeterminate,
however
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many unknown quantities it may possess.
… The colored people do not object to the adequate
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and truthful portrayal of types of their race in whatever degree of the scale of civilization,
or of social and moral development, is consonant with actual facts or possibilities. …
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…
Our grievance then is not that we are not painted as angels of light or as goody-
goody Sunday-school developments; but we do claim that a man whose acquaintanceship
is so slight that he cannot even discern diversities of individuality, has no right or
authority to hawk “the only true and authentic” pictures of a race of human beings. Mr.
Howells’ point of view is precisely that of a white man who sees colored people at long
range or only in certain capacities. His conclusions about the colored man are identical
with the impressions that will be received and carried abroad by foreigners from all parts
of the globe, who shall attend our Columbian Exposition for instance, and who, through
the impartiality and generosity of our white countrymen, will see colored persons only as
boot-blacks and hotel waiters, grinning from ear to ear and bowing and courtesying for
the extra tips. In the same way Mr. Howells has met colored persons in hotels or on the
commons promenading and sparking, or else acting
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as menials and lazzaroni. He has not seen, and therefore cannot be convinced that there
exists a quiet, self-respecting, dignified class of easy life and manners (save only where it
crosses the roughness of their white fellow countrymen’s barbarity) of cultivated tastes
and habits, and with no more in common with the class of his acquaintance than the
accident of complexion…
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… What I hope to see before I die is a black man honestly and appreciatively portraying
both the Negro as he is, and the white man, occasionally, as seen from the Negro’s
standpoint.
There is an old proverb “The devil is always painted black–by white painters.” And
what is needed, perhaps, to reverse the picture of the lordly mail slaying the lion, is for
the lion to turn painter.
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