Chapter 6

The problem set for our solution by Almighty God is just this--as stated in this missionary view of it: How, being free, two races as dissimilar as are the white and black races, now equal before the law, can live side by side under the same government and live in prosperity and peace. This problem must be solved, and it must be solved aright. And we may be sure that the ultimate solution of blessing for both races does not, and can not, lie in any retrograde movement toward the old darkness and bondage, but forward in the direction of the larger light and truer liberty of Christ. If the colored race, as a race, seems to have reached a point when "a little knowledge is a dangerous thing," its hope and ours lie not in a return to ignorance and degradation, but in pressing on to that larger knowledge and truer wisdom, the beginning of which is the fear of God, and the fullness of which is a hearty recognition and cordial acceptance and discharge of the obligations and trusts of a Christian manhood and Christian citizenship. The condition of the colored race, indeed, is but a necessary stage in its upward and onward march. It is no other than we have always had reason to expect would be reached. That the mile-stone of to-day marks so great progress is cause for profound gratitude. The new features of the situation and the fresh difficulties are those, and those only, which are incident to progress.

There is but one solution for the Southern problem, and that is the solution for which this Association has labored from the beginning, and which this paper urges. Christianity in its highest forms, an intelligent Christian manhood, is that solution. It is an impressive thought that it is the mission of this Association, more than all other institutions and agencies, to develop that Christian sentiment among the colored people, and indirectly among the whites, which shall create a _balance of power_ which shall save the races and the nation from that conflict which without it seems inevitable. This fact is a trumpet call to us to press the work of the Association in its schools and colleges and churches with renewed vigor and devotion.

And we would especially emphasize the necessity of preserving the unity of the educational and religious work of the Association to this end. Every teacher must be a missionary as truly as every preacher. And this unity of purpose and effort must be felt. Church and school, as in the past, must continue to stand together in the minds and labors of the people that there may be no exaltation of education at the expense of religion. In the dark days of slavery, it was faith in God that sustained the Negro, that inspired his songs, and that made him strong to endure and patient to wait. And it was by the power of God that he was at last set free. Never did the colored man need that faith in God, and in an overruling and guiding Providence, more than now, when the goal of liberty and equality is so nearly attained, and yet strangely delayed. Nobly do the leaders of the race realize that faith, and seek to lead their brethren into it.

It belongs to this Association, by all the agencies at its command, to teach this people to be patient and to wait upon the Lord, to endure hardship, to leave vengeance with the Lord, and, accepting the responsibilities of liberty and citizenship, to gird themselves to meet them in the spirit and in the strength of a grand Christian manhood. This the history of this people warrants us in expecting from them. To this manhood, struggle and work we welcome them, and in it we pledge them our Christian support.

Let this be the temper of those who hold the balance of power between the races in the South, and in no long time the slumbering conscience of the Southern white will respond. The noble utterances of the Southerners, who already demand that the Golden Rule shall be applied to the race problem, prove that it is already waking to life and power. It will be felt then that it cannot be safe to sin against God, to despise even the least of his children; that it must be safe to follow in the way where he leads, to do his bidding, and to give equal rights to all, and to treat all men as brethren. And thus the missionary view prevailing, and the missionary solution accepted, the perils and conflicts of to-day will disappear as the storm-cloud passes, and the difficulties of race relations now anticipated will adjust themselves in God's way, and in God's time--the way of Christian manhood and brotherhood, of righteousness and of peace.

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ADDRESSES ON THE PRECEDING REPORTS.

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ADDRESS OF REV. WM. BURNET WRIGHT, D.D.

When that Egyptian King, of whom we all know, was carving those memorials of his greatness which, even as brought to us by the magazines of late, have interested us all so much, and when Egypt was the most superb power in the world, slave women, of whom the mother of Moses was one, were lamenting by the Nile. But the people then to be pitied were not the Hebrews, but the Egyptians.

As I think of the future of my country, my anxiety is not for the black race.

The two nations which seem destined to exert in the near future the most intense and wide influence are Russia and the United States. Before each of them God has set essentially the same task and appears to have conditioned largely their prosperity upon the way in which they do it. That task is to develop into full-orbed free men a vast number of citizens who have been dwarfed and twisted by slavery. How to do this most thoroughly and speedily is the superlatively important question for each nation to decide. In Russia, there is no more acute observer than Count Tolstoi: and Count Tolstoi has said to his countrymen, "What we in Russia need supremely is three things; they are schools and schools and schools." The American Missionary Association, in view of all that has been said here these two days, seems to me to be repeating, with the emphasis of an adequate experience, those same words; and I think Mr. Hand has shown a judgment equal to his generosity in so wording the conditions of his gift that it repeats the same thing. The Association, whether intentionally or unintentionally, is telling us that what we need in the South supremely is "schools and schools and schools."

By schools I certainly do not mean institutions which train only the mind or the body, or both. I am perfectly familiar with the picture which Mr. Maturin Ballou has drawn of the Alaska Indian using the knowledge gained in missionary schools to raise a check. I know that education which does not rightly train the will may be giving tools to a burglar or weapons to a mad man. The anarchism in Chicago, but for the education it controls, would have been like Bunyan's giants--able only to gnaw its nails in malice and have fits in sunshiny weather. But the American Missionary Association understands this thoroughly. In that copy of the year's review which Dr. Strieby sent me, the report of the school work was marked with a red pencil, that of the church work with a blue one; but the two marks overlapped, the red and the blue, so completely that all attempts to separate them were hopeless. Dr. Strieby himself could not distinguish between the church work and the school work of the Association. No man can. They are indistinguishable because they have been inseparable. This is as it should be. This is essential to their real success. This is New Testament preaching--discipling; and that is what the Master told us to do. The danger of Count Tolstoi's leadership in Russia is great, and it is solely this: that he does not know that fact. The safety of your guidance, gentlemen, who conduct the policy of this Association, is that you do. The education given by the State and by the Federal Government has been and must necessarily be, almost wholly secular. But the education given by this Association is distinctly, not technically, religious. It is rooted and grounded in the Bible. And if what I am saying appears to you trite, I am glad of it, because it shows that on the substantial facts we are at one and need no argument.

There are, however, two facts which sharply distinguish between the work we have to do among our emancipated slaves and that set before Russia among her emancipated serfs, and which make it more conspicuously obvious than it can be in Russia that we need schools. We have, first of all, to contend with the prejudice of color. We have been told how great that is. I need spend no time in repeating this while the debates at Worcester and in the Episcopal Convention at New York ring in our ears; while Harvard seniors can not elect for class orator the ablest and fittest man they have if he happens to be colored, without eliciting from New York newspapers two-column editorials of amazement; and while writers as wise, as informed, and as calm as George Cable, are unable to write without showing their quivering apprehension of a race war. The wickedness of this class feeling is conceded by all good men, and I need not dwell upon it.

The cause of it has been largely overlooked, and therefore the remedies so often advocated have proved futile. Until the cause is distinctly recognized and acknowledged and remedied, the prejudice will remain. The cause is this: All freeborn people in every age and clime have had a contempt for slaves. That is very near the feeling--mark my words--they ought to have. It was stronger in Athens than it has ever been in Charleston. It is partly, and has always been largely, caused by the wicked pride of mastership, but it has also been largely inspired by the perception of those vices and inferiorities which his condition breeds in the slave. Ignorance, deceit, cowardice, are contemptible; and therefore men who know better fall into the way of despising those who are ignorant and cowardly instead of trying to help them become the reverse of all these things. In nearly every other nation--there are two exceptions that will readily occur to you--save our own, as soon as the slave's chains have been broken and the slave's vices eradicated, the emancipated man has been absorbed among the class of freemen. There was nothing left to suggest that he had ever been a slave. The people forgot it. But the black man bears an ineffaceable mark that he belongs to a race which has been enslaved; and it is, therefore, in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred unconsciously but instinctively assumed that his is still the servile character. There is no natural antipathy between the white and the black races; if there were there could be no mulattoes. The sole reason of the persistence of this caste feeling is that the black man bears the mark saying to every one that sees him, "I belong to a race that has been enslaved:" and unconsciously men assume, "Therefore your character is still a servile character." The prejudice is deep; it is almost universal; and so long as there is a God in heaven who led forth the Hebrews and overthrew the Pharaohs, there will be no safety for this Nation of ours until the prejudice is obliterated, as completely as that which once existed and was more intense between the Anglo-Saxon and the Norman. If, as has been the case in many another land, there should arise an emergency threatening the existence of our Nation, and there were one man, and only one, capable of steering us through the storm into safety--some Lincoln or Washington--and if every voter in our country knew that this man were the only one who could do it, that man, if he were black, could not be elected President. Were such an emergency to arise to-morrow, we should perish. We should perish by suicide, and richly deserve all that we got. There is no safety for our land until this prejudice of caste is gone. It never came by argument; it can never be argued away. It can not be smothered under legislation nor uprooted by resolutions nor effaced by tears. While good men feel it they will fight it, but the majority will yield to it and it can be decided in only one way. That way was well outlined by a colored student in Hampton Institute in the debating club of that institution. The subject for discussion was, "How Shall We Black Men Secure Our Rights?" The last speaker was black as ebony, and had been bred in his early years a slave. When he arose I expected to hear him repeat the familiar complaints and suggest the familiar remedies. He did neither. He simply said: "My friends, I do not agree with all that you have said. I think, as you do, that the way white people treat us in the street cars and hotels"--and he might have added, in churches, but he did not--"is wrong, unchristian, and cruel." And when he said that, there was a pathos in his voice which made me ashamed to be a white man. "But," he added, "while I think as you do that it is cruel, I do not think that the white people will ever stop treating us as inferiors so long as we are inferiors, and I think that they will despise us as long as they can. But when we get enough character in our hearts, enough brains in our head, and enough money in our pockets, they will stop calling us niggers!"

He was right--a thousand times right. We must face the facts and steer by them, and not attempt to be guided by sentiment and emotions. So long as the sight of a black face instinctively suggests to us rags and ignorance, and servility and menial employments, just so long this prejudice of caste will endure, and no amount of individual genius, culture, or character will be able to brush the mildew of caste from any individual black man's brow. That lady may be a Florence Nightingale, but if I whisper, and whisper truly, that she came from the slums, that her sisters are in the penitentiary, and her brothers are thieves, society will never forgive her for not being in the penitentiary herself. Society will pity her in ostentatious magniloquence, which is far worse than contempt or neglect; perhaps it will clothe her with silk and diamonds; but it will never treat her as it would not dare not to treat any lady whom it felt its equal. As has been well said, what is needed is not patronage nor pity, but fact--the recognition of fact. When the sight of a black face shall no longer remind men that it belongs to a race of which the immense majority close at hand are still showing what we have driven into them by the lash and bound in them by chains; when the black face shall have clothed itself in associations as full of comfort and culture and Christian worth as a white man wears, "Negro" will be as honorable as "Caucasian." And for this, through its churches which are schools, and its schools which are churches, the American Missionary Association is laboring and praying with splendid success.

I would like to remind you of the second point, which is emphasized by the statement in the report that a graduate, of Fisk University, with his wife, another graduate, has gone to Africa under commission of the American Board, and has there shown eminent abilities. Africa is the only continent on the planet that has never had a history. For millenniums it has been a locked closet. But in the providence of God the gaze of Christendom is now concentrated upon it. All the passions, good and bad, which push men are impelling the most adventurous and energetic of our race to look or to go thither. Love of money, love of adventure, love of power, love of man and love of God, are leading men to look into the 200,000,000 dusky faces there from which the veil has at last been thrown back. Meanwhile 8,000,000 of that race whose Christianizing means the regeneration of a continent vaster than Europe and the inauguration of a history perhaps to be more splendid than that which Europe has wrought out in two millenniums, are here for you and me to educate. Do you believe these facts are accidents? Do you believe that He who maketh the wrath of man to praise Him and restraineth the remainder of wrath has not ordained them according to the counsels of his own will? There never can be a Christian education which does not plant and foster the missionary spirit. Is it a dream? If so, let me die before I wake. Is it a dream that among 8,000,000 of our fellow citizens each of whom, as Dr. Strieby told us at New York, is qualified to live, perhaps to thrive, in the climate which has proved a grave to Anglo-Saxons, each of whom is qualified to visit Africa with a fair hope of making himself received as a child returning unto his own household? Is it too much to hope that, under the Christian education we may give them if we will, enough will desire to preach Christ to the dark continent to gem it with life and light as the sky is gemmed with stars?

I am too old to do it, but so complete is my conviction that the future of the race in the coming century shall move toward Africa as in the ages following Paul it moved toward the North and West of Europe, that were I a young man, loyal and devoted to my Master, and trying as he told his followers by Gennesaret to read in the morning and evening red the signs of the times, I should not go to Africa, perhaps; I would go to Tougaloo University, I think, and there devote all my energies and powers to instructing black men in the meaning and scope and inspiration and promise of the Master's words, "Go ye."

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ADDRESS OF REV. F.P. WOODBURY, D.D.

I feel that I have learned a great deal to-day; and as the last speaker spoke concerning Africa, an idea has come into my mind which I may express. Here we have on one side of the great ocean, Africa; on the other side, America. We have here a race conflict; on the one side eight millions of blacks, we will say, and perhaps eight millions of irreconcilable whites on the other. And these dominant eight millions of white men maintain, with the utmost pertinacity--and they have the power in their right hand so far as we can see--that they propose to rule and keep down those eight millions of black men. I have seen the title of a book recently published, "An Appeal to Pharoah," which is vouched for as a calm and temperate discussion of the question whether, after all, we are not going to get by this race difficulty by a great deportation to Africa. It is a good deal to raise the question of eight millions of men leaving one country and going across the ocean and settling in another continent. But isn't there something in it after all? Might it not compose the differences? I know that the cost would be very large, but careful estimates go to show that the cost is not anywhere near the amount we spent in our civil war. On the one side, we have these eight millions of black men--ignorant, very largely superstitious, still somewhat above those of the same color in Africa, and plunged here into an antagonism which is deep, and bitter, and hopeless. On the other side, we have these eight millions of white people who do not accept the results of the war. Isn't it better that eight millions shall go? I don't know. I think it deserves serious consideration.

But when the question arises for practical consideration, I think there is another and a little deeper question that we ought to remember, and that is this: Which eight millions ought to go? Is it these who have been faithful to the American flag, who are straight in the line of progress that this republic proposes to maintain, who are in the line of the development of all the ages, who are looking upward? Or is it the eight millions who are hopelessly side-tracked by the purposes of infinite God, and who are standing here in this republic, undertaking to maintain a conflict that is necessarily one of despair, as sure as God is at the head of the universe? Expatriation if you please, deportation if you will; but consider the question whether it shall be eight millions of American patriots who are to be sent over to Africa or eight millions who have come out of a rebellion and maintain their seditious and rebellious attitude to-day.

My friends, we all know that we are going to live together. There is no more baseless theory on God's earth than that we are going to take eight millions of men and send them out of this country, because they want to learn something, because they want to live like men and be men and citizens, and because God has put them here for our work and our education. I tell you, my friends, the immediate problem seems to me only one form of a larger problem. What is the problem of the planet to-day? Is it not the problem as to which of two theories shall maintain itself concerning the masses which are at the base of society? Isn't that the problem in every nation? Isn't it the problem here concerning white and black, red and yellow alike? There is no possible doubt about it. The labor problem, do you call it? Here is one theory which holds that the masses shall be kept down. Here is the other system which maintains that they shall be elevated. We have got to live with them in the world, for I imagine there is nobody talking about sending them to the moon. Don't you know, and I know that the world is growing smaller every year? Talk about neighborhood--look over this continent. Germany is here; Ireland is here; France is here; China is here; Africa is here. We are neighbors to everybody. We are touching elbows across the ocean all the time. If you send anybody to Africa, why, he is only next door; and by and by we shall have air ships that will float up over there in a few hours! How are you going to manage this thing? We have got to live together in this world, and nearer and nearer to one another with every generation; and this country may just as well be the field in which to try the experiment out as any other country on the face of the globe. I think we are going to try it out to the end. There are symptoms of it all around.

But the conflict is here; it is in the air. It is not a conflict by sword. You know they tell the legend among the old mediæval stories that in one of the great battles on one of the plains of Europe, after the quiet darkness of the night had settled over the scene, the field strewn all over with the forms of the mangled and the dead, there were seen in the shuddering midnight air to rise spirit forms maintaining the deadly conflict there, and carrying on the battle of the day. It seems to me, in some sense, true of us. The sword has done what the sword could do; it can do no more. But the conflict is here in the air, pronouncing itself with every event that drifts across our horizon. Harvard sets its seal on the brow of Clement Morgan, and the Memphis _Avalanche_ has no other word for him than to call him "that dusky steer with the crumpled forelock."