Chapter 39

That the white Baptists really manifested greater liberality in this period is obvious, because we also find Jacob Bishop, a Negro, the pastor of the First Baptist church of Portsmouth, Virginia, for a few years.[4] The church was a large and influential one, and the predecessor of Bishop, Rev. Thomas Armistead, had served with distinction as a commissioned officer in the Revolutionary War.

To-day at all the general conferences of the M. E. and M. E. South--both white--and of the A. M. E., A. M. E. Zion, and C. M. E. denominations--all colored--fraternal delegations are exchanged with all the courtesies bestowed by the two former on the two latter that should prevail among brethren. A further concession is seen in the fact of the elections of colored ministers of recognized scholarship and fitness to important secretaryships and an editorship by the powerful M. E. Church. Another illustration is the organization about thirty years ago by the M. E. Church South of its colored membership into the C. M. E. denomination and the liberal provision made by the former connection for secondary education in the Payne Institute, at Augusta, Georgia.

The Protestant Episcopal Church that forbade St. Thomas, Philadelphia, and St. Phillips, New York, to aspire to membership in diocesan conventions repealed this resolution after the breaking out of the Civil War and delegates from these and other colored parishes throughout the North and West, at least, find free admission.

Sixty years ago the application of so promising and talented a young man as Alexander Crummell to be matriculated as a student in any of the Episcopal divinity schools created a great shock in church circles, and his rejection is set forth at length in Bishop Wilberforce's History of American Episcopalianism; yet both at the New York and Philadelphia theological seminaries numerous colored clergymen, Episcopalian and others, now graduate with honor and distinction.

To-day in the House of Bishops there are two colored prelates of African descent, Rt. Rev. S. D. Ferguson, the Bishop of Africa, and the Rt. Rev. James Theodore Holly, the Bishop of Hayti; the former a native of South Carolina, the latter of the District of Columbia. Their welcome to the pulpits of many of the most exclusive Episcopal Churches and to the homes of their parishioners is in marked contrast to the greeting of the Negro by the same communion only two generations previously.

In the general assemblies of the Presbyterian Church to-day the presence of colored commissioners is no novelty, and the faculty of Biddle University, composed of colored professors, by the will of the Presbyterian Board of Education, shows what this conservative body has done in the recognition of Negro scholarship.

The conventions and associations of the Baptist Church in the South, where the bulk of the black race dwell, are still on the color line, yet there is progress towards true fraternal feeling here. Some years since "The Religious Herald," of Richmond, Virginia, the leading journal of that denomination in the South, announced among its paid contributors the name of a prominent colored divine.

It must be said, nevertheless, that during the first half of the nineteenth century the record of the white church on the Negro shows not only a temporizing, but a cowardly spirit. This was true in some respects of the Congregational Church;[5] instead of leading, the church followed the state. The anti-slavery sentiment which was unmistaken in the later years of the eighteenth century became with the growth of commercialism and national expansion, quiescent and subservient to the slave power. The right to vote, which in colonial days was generally exercised by colored freeholders, was subsequently either restricted or wholly denied. North Carolina, Maryland and Tennessee in the South, and Pennsylvania in the North, disfranchised their colored suffragists. The wave of disfranchisement then, as on the threshold of the twentieth century, dashed from one state to another. In the North repeated efforts were made to concede to the Negro his complete political and civil rights. Though the sentiment in his behalf became stronger at every trial of strength, yet with a single exception--Wisconsin--each result was decisive against the concession of the franchise to the Negro. It was only after a bloody civil war, in which thousands of lives were sacrificed and billions of treasure were expended, that the nation conceded to the Negro, first, his freedom, next his civil rights, finally his political franchise.

One hundred years ago there were but few colored schools, even in the free states, and these only in the larger towns and cities. Philadelphia was in the lead, with New York a second and Boston a third.

Connecticut, in the third decade of the nineteenth century, would not permit Prudence Crandall to maintain a school of colored girls. The means employed to break it up stands a blot on the name of the commonwealth. A resolution of the National Convention of Colored Men, held at Philadelphia, to establish a college for the education of colored youths, at New Haven occasioned both fierce excitement and bitter hostility.

Negroes could ride only on the top of the stagecoach when traveling, and Jim Crow cars prevailed on the introduction of railroads. Angry mobs were frequent. Churches and schools were the common target of attack. In the opening of the West to settlement public sentiment there against the Negroes found emphatic expression in Black Laws forbidding with heavy penalties their permanent abode in that section. These laws have only been removed in the memory of men still living. In many communities, however, these laws were a dead letter, just as to-day there are isolated localities in Indiana and Illinois, as in Georgia and Texas, where no Negro is permitted to permanently abide.

Through the Anti-Slavery and Abolition agitation, carried on by such reformers as William Lloyd Garrison, Wendell Phillips, Frederick Douglass, John G. Whittier and Horace Greeley, the organizations of the colored people themselves, and their appreciation of the meager educational advantages afforded them prior to Appomattox, the sentiment of the country yielded one by one the rights and privileges of citizens, until colored members of state legislatures in more than half a dozen Northern states, delegates to city councils, a judgeship each in Massachusetts and Michigan, and state elective officers in Kansas--in none of which communities was the colored voting population of itself sufficiently numerous to elect--evidences the remarkable revolution in public opinion towards the Negro throughout the North.

In the South, since 1867, there have been more than a score of congressmen, including two senators, state legislators by the hundreds, councilmen, police officers, city and county officials without number; but nearly all of these were obtained by the numerical preponderance of the Negro rather than any liberalizing of dominant white sentiment.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] History of the Protestant Episcopal Church in America. Samuel Wilberforce.

[2] History of Education in North Carolina.--United States Bureau of Education.

[3] Semi-Centenary Discourses.--Rev. William T. Catto.

[4] Rise of the Baptists.--R. B. Semple.

[5] Slavery and Anti-Slavery.--Wm. Goodell.

SECOND PAPER.

WHAT PROGRESS DID THE AMERICAN WHITE MAN MAKE, IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY, ALONG THE LINE OF CONCEDING TO THE NEGRO HIS RELIGIOUS, POLITICAL, AND CIVIL RIGHTS?

BY REV. J. M. COX, D. D.

JAMES MONROE COX.

James Monroe Cox was born in Chambers County, Alabama, February 26, 1860. While he was yet a boy his parents moved to Atlanta, Ga., and in the public schools of that city he received his first educational training. Having a desire to go to college and receive the best training possible for life's work, he entered Clark University. He took high rank in his studies, completing the classical course in 1884, and graduated from Gammon Theological Seminary in 1886, being the first student to receive the degree of B. D. from that institution. The year following his graduation from Gammon he was appointed teacher of ancient languages in Philander Smith College, Little Rock, Ark. In the fall of 1887 he was married to Miss Hattie W. Robinson, a young woman of culture and refinement, who after graduating from Clark University in 1885, taught two years in the public schools of Macon, Ga. They have five interesting children, and their married life has been singularly happy and helpful. After a professorship of eleven years in Philander Smith College he was appointed president of the institution. As president he has served for five years, and under his administration the school has had a strong, healthy growth, until now it numbers almost five hundred students. A much-needed addition to the main building has been completed at a cost of fourteen thousand dollars, the faculty has been increased, and through the efforts of the students he has raised some money, which forms the nucleus of a fund for a trades school. He is a member of the Little Rock conference of the M. E. Church, and has twice represented his brethren as delegate to the General Conference,--at Omaha, Neb., in 1892 and at Cleveland, Ohio, in 1896. His influence over the young people committed to his care is great, and he is striving to send out strong, well-rounded, Christian characters, and thus erect monuments more enduring than granite or marble. Last year Gammon honored him with the degree of D. D.

The very language of our subject assumes that the Negro is entitled to religious, political and civil rights, and limits our task to showing the extent these rights have been conceded to him by the American white man. In considering this, as well as other subjects that concern the race, it is well to bear in mind the fact that men make conditions and conditions also make men. The truth of this statement is strikingly demonstrated in the reactionary influence which slavery had upon the American white man. The chains that bound the Negro and made him a chattel, also fettered the mind and soul of the white man and caused him to become narrow and selfish. Lincoln's proclamation gave freedom alike to slave and master, and now the progress made by each along all lines of human development will depend upon the extent he leaves behind slavery conditions and thinks on purer and higher things. Living in the past, meditating upon the time when he was owner of men and women, the white man must still be a slaveholder. If he can not hold in subjugation human beings, he will arrogate unto himself the rights of others and use them to further his own selfish ends. The Negro also must get away from slavery conditions, if he hopes ever to be a man in the truest sense of the word and have accorded him the rights of a man. Time and growth are determining factors in what is known as the Negro problem. The white man must grow out of, and above, his prejudice, learn to measure men by their manly and Christian virtues rather than by the color of their skin and the texture of their hair. The Negro must devote himself to character-making, wealth-getting, and to the faithful performance of all duties that belong to him as a man and a citizen, for, he may only hope to receive his rights to the extent that he impresses the white man that he is worthy and deserving of them. We repeat, it will take time to accomplish these things, but when they are accomplished, rights which now the white man withholds, and which it seems he will never concede, will, like Virgil's golden branch, follow of their own accord. Viewing the subject in the light of the above stated facts, we believe that much progress was made by the American white man in the nineteenth century along the line of conceding to the Negro his religious, political, and civil rights.

In fact, the progress made in this direction stands without a parallel in the annals of history. It surpasses the most sanguine expectation of the Negro's friends, and even of the Negro himself. Although the white man is not entirely rid of his prejudice in religion and the color line is written over the entrance to many of his temples of worship, yet he recognizes the Negro as a man and a brother and accords to him religious rights and privileges. The Negro worships God according to the dictates of his own conscience, and the laws of the land protect him in this worship. He is a potent factor in all religious and reformatory movements and works side by side with his brother in white for the overthrow of vice and sin and for the hastening of the time when man and nations shall live and act in harmony with the principles of the Christian religion. He sits in the councils of the leading denominations of the country and assists in making their laws and determining their polity. He is accorded a place on the programs of the different young people's gatherings and is listened to with the same attention which other speakers receive. He bears fraternal greetings from his to white denominations, and is courteously received and royally entertained. In international assemblies and ecumenical conferences he enjoys every right and receives the same attention that others enjoy and receive.

But this progress is further evidenced by the profound interest manifested by the white man in the Negro's religious and moral development and by the strong pleas on the part of the nation's best and ablest men for the complete obliteration of the color line in religion and for dealing with the Negro as with any other man. Millions of dollars have been given for the building of churches and schools and hundreds of noble men and women have toiled and suffered that the Negro might be elevated. The bishops of the Methodist Episcopal Church, representing two and a half million members, said in their address to the General Conference, at Omaha, in 1892: "We have always affirmed them (the Negroes) to be our brothers of the same blood and stock of all the races which compose one common humanity. As such, we have claimed for them the same rights and privileges which belong to all other branches of the common family."

His political rights. He, who but yesterday was a slave, is now a citizen, clothed with the elective franchise. This is marvelous, and all the more so, because the ballot is a wonderful force. It is the ground element of our American civilization. In its exercise the poor man counts as much as the rich, the ignorant as much as the learned, and the black as much as the white. Indeed, the free and untrammeled use of the ballot makes its possessor a veritable sovereign and gives him power over men and their possessions. Opinion is divided as to the wisdom of giving the Negro citizenship at the time it was given him. We think no mistake was made. It came at the time the Negro needed it most. It was the weapon with which he defended himself when he had but few friends. The Negro has not been a failure in politics. The very leaders who urge our young men to let alone politics, will, on the other hand, point out Bruce, Douglass, Pinchback and others as the most worthy and conspicuous characters of the race. That a reaction has set in, and the Negro is being deprived of the ballot, should occasion no alarm and little surprise.

The grandfather clause in the different state constitutions will serve as a check to the white man's progress along educational lines, but a spur to urge us on. These seeming setbacks in the concession of political rights I count as progress, and place it to the white man's credit.

The decision of the Supreme Court at Washington against the constitutionality of the Civil Rights Act of 1875 has had its effect, and to-day we find the Negro more discriminated against in his civil than in any other class of rights. Then, too, the social bugbear has had much to do with this discrimination. However, progress has been made. It has been slow, of course, because of the channel (public opinion) through which it has been compelled to come. In many sections of the country the Negro enjoys the most of his civil rights. He is admitted to the hotels, theaters, and other public places, and on public conveyances he is furnished fair accommodations. We believe in the ultimate triumph of right. Let us be patient. There is a disposition on the part of the better class of white people to do the fair and just thing by the Negro. This class will continue to increase, and some day the Negro will enjoy all of his rights, and our fair country will indeed be the land of the free, as well as the home of the brave.

TOPIC XIX.

THE NEGRO AS A LABORER.

BY N. W. HARLLEE.

N. W. HARLLEE, A. M., A. B.

The subject of this sketch was born a slave in Robeson county, near Lumberton, North Carolina, July 15th, 1852. His father was a Methodist preacher who exhorted the plantation slaves, and was noted as "a natural mathematician." His mother was deeply religious.

Mr. Harllee is a self-made man, for he taught himself to read and write after being taught to spell about a third through Webster's blue-back spelling book, and with this small beginning he laid the foundation for a collegiate education and for the active work of life.

In 1881 he was elected register of deeds in Richmond county, N. C., where he had taught school for a number of years, and in 1882 was appointed United States postal clerk on the Carolina Central Railway and transferred to Charlotte, Columbia and Augusta Railway, which position he held till 1885. In 1879 he was graduated at the Biddle University, Charlotte, N. C., with honors. In 1885 he went to Texas and engaged in the profession of teaching, and served for a number of years as principal of the Grammar School No. 2 of Dallas, Texas. Afterward he was promoted to the principalship of the Colored High School of the Dallas City Public Schools, which position he now holds.

Professor Harllee has taken an active part in the educational work of his state, and has served as president and secretary of the Teachers' State Association of the state of Texas; he has also held the position of Superintendent of the Colored Department of the Texas State Fair for eight years, and still holds that position. He is a practical staff reporter on the Dallas Morning News, Dallas, Tex.

Mr. Harllee was married to Miss Florence Belle Coleman of Dallas, Tex., 1891, and has three children, Lucretia, Chauncey Depew and Norman W., Jr.

He is author of "Harllee's Tree of History," a new and graphic method of teaching history; also Harllee's "Simplified Long Division," a new graphic method of teaching long division; also Harllee's "Diagram System of Geography."

He has for a number of years advocated the establishment of a State University for the youth of Texas, and is also working with the Rev. W. Lomas and D. Rowens to establish an industrial school for his people at Dallas.

He is also chairman of the Y. M. C. A. board of education of Dallas, and along with Messrs. Rice, Darrell, Polk, Weems and Anderson is conducting a successful Y. M. C. A. night school for all ages and sexes.

For two hundred and fifty years the American Negro has been a drawer of water and a hewer of wood. He felled the trees and turned the forest into fields of cotton and corn; he drained the swamps and turned them into fields of rice; he graded the highways and made them possible for railroad transit and traffic. In summer he was to the white man, his owner, an umbrella; in winter, to the same owner, he was his winter wood, and always a ready servant with hand and brawn, as bread and meat and shelter.

The question of labor is one of bread and meat. To the bread-winner it means much; to the unemployed it often lends a charm for crime; for after all, the unemployed needs food, clothing, medicine, a shelter and employment alike for body and mind.

But the subject of labor is not a new one, and, indeed, it has been made a question of many complex phases introduced by prejudice from white trade unions. Also, climate makes an important factor, hence the different sections of our country employ to a large extent different kinds of labor, suited to the prevailing industries, thrift and enterprises.

We may consider at once the two general classes of labor, the crude and the skilled. For generations the black man, as a crude laborer, raised "King Cotton" in the cottonfields of the South. He has had no competition as a crude laborer; he still holds a trust on the fleecy staple; his right there is none to dispute.

But to-day a new and brighter era opens before us. We are to manufacture cotton as well as raise it. We are to advance and keep pace with the mental training of our children and provide employment for them in every avenue. As the Turk weaves his carpet and darns his shawl and as the Chinese prepares his silk, so the black youth must be trained to change cotton into cloth.

Trained hands and trained minds are inseparable companions. If we educate our boys and girls, we create in them a desire, we thrust upon them a stimulus which pushes them out into the active world, and, if only with polished brain and soft hands, they wander from place to place seeking the shady side of active, stern reality.

Since we, by educating our boys and girls, create new appetites, new desires, new activities, we set in motion new forces; then we ought the more to create new enterprises, open new avenues, establish new business or improve the old so as to meet the new relations, the awakened appetites, the growing activities and the employment of the new forces in the culture of cotton and the establishment of cotton mills.

We commit a crime by creating appetites and then failing to appease them.

The education of our children should no longer be a mere theory, but a matter of real practical nature, such as will benefit the bread-winner, the home-seeker, the higher citizenship, the welfare of the greatest number.

While I favor the higher education of the youth of the nation, I also think the youth ought to learn trades, to wear the overalls at the forge, at the work-bench, to adjust the machinery in the work-shop and the factory. I would have the youth able to design and build a house as well as to live in one, to raise potatoes as well as to eat them, to produce as well as consume. For many years the great majority of the youth must be common laborers, whatever their education, whatever their social condition or station; then it follows as the day follows the night that they should be educated with the trend of the mind and in connection with environment.

In the days of slavery many of our young men and women were trained along certain lines; the young men such as skilled carpenters, blacksmiths, stone masons, bricklayers, and the like, and the young women were trained in dressmaking and the like, and these boys and girls grew up having a kind of monopoly in their respective lines, although controlled by their owners. But for a quarter of a century very little attention has been paid to trade learning in many sections of the South.