Part 4
Then came a great decision--not the first, but one of the most important that marked her long career. Her education was by no means complete, and at whatever cost she was determined to go to school. That she had no money, that her clothes were shabby, that her mother needed her, made no difference; now or never she would realize her ambition. She would do anything, however menial, if it was honest and would give her food while she attended school. For one long day she walked the streets of Belvidere looking for a home. Could any one use a young woman who wanted to work for her board? Always the same reply. Nightfall brought her to a farmhouse in the suburbs of the town. She timidly knocked on the door. "No, we do not need any one," said the woman who greeted her, "but wait until I see my husband." The man of the house was very unwilling, but decided to give her shelter for the night. The next morning he thought differently about the matter; and a few days afterward the young woman entered school. The work was hard; fires were to be made, breakfasts on cold mornings had to be prepared, and sometimes the washing was heavy. In the midst of it all, the time for lessons was frequently cut short or extended far into the night. But the woman of the house was kind, and her daughter a helpful fellow-student.
The next summer came another season at school-teaching, and then the term at Rockford. 1862! a great year that in American history, one fraught with great events, and more famous for the defeat of the Union arms than for their success. But in September came Antietam, and the heart of the North took courage. Lincoln now issued a preliminary proclamation, "That on the first day of January, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty-three, all persons held as slaves within any state or designated part of a state, the people whereof shall then be in rebellion against the United States, shall be then, thenceforward, and forever, free."
The girls at Rockford, like the people everywhere, were interested in the great events shaking the nation. A new note of seriousness crept into their work. Embroidery was laid aside; instead, socks were knit and bandages prepared. On the night of January 1 a jubilee meeting was held in the town. At last the black man was free and everywhere throughout the North there were shouts of joy.
To Joanna P. Moore, however, the news bore a strange undertone of sadness. She was, as we have said, much more mature than her schoolmates, and to her, somehow, the problem of the spiritual and intellectual freedom of the bondsmen presented itself. Strange that she should be so possessed by this problem! She had of course thought of the possibility of working in China, or India, or Africa--but of this, never!
In February a man who had been on Island No. 10 came to the Seminary and told the girls of the hundreds of women and children there in distress. Cabins and tents were everywhere. As many as three families, with eight or ten children each, cooked their food in the same pot on the same fire. Sometimes the women were peevish or quarrelsome; always the children were ignorant and dirty. "What can a man do to help such a suffering mass of humanity?" asked the speaker. "Nothing. A woman is needed; nobody else will do." For the student listening so intently, the cheery schoolrooms with their sweet associations faded; the vision of foreign missions also vanished; and in their stead stood only a pitiful black woman with a baby in her arms.
She reached Island No. 10 in November. The outlook was dismal enough. The Sunday School at Belvidere of which she was a member pledged four dollars a month toward her support; and this was all the salary in sight. The Government had provided transportation and soldiers' rations. That was in 1863, more than fifty years ago; but every year since then, until 1916, in summer and winter, in sunshine and rain, in the home and the church, with teaching and praying, feeding and clothing, nursing and hoping and loving, Joanna P. Moore in one way or another ministered to the needs of the Negro people of the South.
In April, 1864, her whole colony was removed to Helena, Arkansas. The Home Farm was three miles from Helena. Here was gathered a great crowd of women and children and helpless old men, all under the guard of a company of soldiers in a fort near by. Thither went the missionary, alone, except for her faith in God. She made an arbor with some rude seats, nailed a blackboard to a tree, divided the people into four divisions, and began to teach school. In the twilight every evening a great crowd gathered around her cabin for prayers. A verse of the Bible was read and explained, prayers were offered, one of the sorrow-songs was chanted, and then the service was over.
Some Quaker workers were her friends in Helena, and in 1868 she went to Lauderdale, Mississippi, to help the Friends in an orphan asylum. Six weeks after her arrival the superintendent's daughter died, and the parents left to take their child back to their Indiana home to rest. Miss Moore was left in charge of the asylum. Cholera broke out. Eleven children died within one week. She stood by her post. Often, as she said, those who were well and happy when they retired, ere the daylight came were in the cold grave, for they were buried the same hour they died. Night after night the lone woman prayed to God in the dark, and at length the fury of the plague was abated.
From time to time the failing health of her mother called her home, and from 1870 to 1873 she once more taught school in the vicinity of Belvidere. The first winter the school was in the country. "You can never have a Sunday School in the winter," she was told. But she did; in spite of the snow the house was crowded every Sunday; whole families came in sleighs. Even at that the real work of the missionary was still with the Negroes of the South. In her prayers and in her public addresses they were always with her; and in 1873 friends in Chicago made it possible for her to return to the work of her choice. In 1877 the Woman's Baptist Home Mission Society honored itself by giving to her its first commission.
Nine years she spent in the vicinity of New Orleans. Near Leland University she found a small, one-room house. After buying a bed, a table, two chairs, and a few cooking utensils, she began housekeeping. Often she started out at six in the morning, not to return until dark. Most frequently she read the Bible to those who could not read. Sometimes she gave cheer to mothers busy over the washtub. Sometimes she would teach the children to read or to sew. Often she would write letters for those who had been separated from friends or kindred in the dark days. She wrote hundreds and hundreds of such letters; and once in a while, a very long while, came some response.
Most pitiful of all the objects she found in New Orleans were the old women worn out with years of slavery. They were usually ragpickers who ate at night old scraps for which they had begged during the day. There was in the city an Old Ladies' Home; but this was not for Negroes. A house was secured and the women taken in, Miss Moore and her associates moving into the second story. Sometimes, very often, there was real need; but sometimes, too, provisions came when it was not known who sent them; money or boxes came from Northern friends who had never seen the workers; and the little Negro children in the Sunday Schools in New Orleans gave their pennies.
In 1878 Miss Moore started on a journey of exploration. In Atlanta Dr. Robert at Atlanta Baptist Seminary (now Morehouse College) gave her cheer; so did President Ware at Atlanta University. At Benedict in Columbia she saw Dr. Goodspeed, President Tupper at Shaw in Raleigh, and Dr. Corey in Richmond. In May she appeared at the Baptist anniversaries, with fifteen years of missionary achievement already behind her.
But each year brought its own sorrows and disappointments. She wanted her Society to establish a training school for women; but the objection was raised to this on the score that such an institution would overlap the educational work of the American Baptist Home Mission Society. Down in Louisiana of course it was not without danger that a white woman attended a Negro Baptist Association in 1877; and there were always sneers and jeers. At length, however, a training school for mothers was opened in Baton Rouge. All went well for two years; and then a notice with skull and crossbones was placed on the gate. The woman who had worked through the cholera still stood firm; but the students had gone. Sick at heart and worn out with waiting, she left Baton Rouge and the state in which so many of her best years had been spent.
Bible Band work was started in 1884, and _Hope_ in 1885. Just how live the idea is to-day may be seen from the recent experience of one of the representative colleges for young men. With a crowded Sunday schedule, and with all the distraction of concerts, rhetoricals, and athletics, with Y.M.C.A. meetings and required chapel services, with church and Sunday School, thirty men voluntarily meet each week after the required Sunday evening service for the study of the lessons in _Hope_. This little paper, beginning with a circulation of five hundred, has now reached a monthly issue of more than eighteen thousand copies; and daily it brings its lesson of cheer to thousands of mothers and children in the South. In connection with it all has developed the Fireside School, than which few agencies have been more potent for the salvation and uplift of the humble Negro home.
What wisdom has been gathered from the passing of fourscore years! On almost every page of her tracts, her letters, her account of her life, one finds quotations that for proverbial pith may be equaled only by the words of Franklin or Lincoln or Booker Washington:--
The love of God gave me courage for myself and the rest of mankind; therefore I concluded to invest in human souls. They surely are worth more than anything else in the world.
Beloved friends, be hopeful, be courageous. God cannot use discouraged people.
I am very thankful to-day that there has always been some one weaker than myself along some line, some one that I could really help and comfort.
The good news spread, not by telling what we were going to do, but by praising God for what had been done.
So much singing in all our churches leaves too little time for the Bible lesson. Do not misunderstand me. I do love music that impresses the meaning of words. But no one climbs to heaven on musical scales.
I thoroughly believe that the only way to succeed with any vocation is to make it a part of your very self and weave it into your every thought and prayer.
You must love before you can comfort and help.
There is no place too lowly or dark for our feet to enter, and no place so high and bright but it needs the touch of the light that we carry from the Cross.
How shall we measure such a life? Who can weigh love and hope and service, and the joy of answered prayer? "An annual report of what?" she once asked the secretary of her organization. "Report of tears shed, prayers offered, smiles scattered, lessons taught, steps taken, cheering words, warning words--tender, patient words for the little ones, stern but loving tones for the wayward--songs of hope and songs of sorrow, wounded hearts healed, light and love poured into dark sad homes? Oh, Miss Burdette, you might as well ask me to gather up the raindrops of last year or the petals that fall from the flowers that bloomed. It is true I can send you a little stagnant water from the cistern, and a few dried flowers; but if you want to know the freshness, the sweetness, the glory, the grandeur, of our God-given work, then you must come and keep step with us from early morn to night for three hundred and sixty-five days in the year."
Until the very last she was on the roll of the active missionaries of the Woman's American Baptist Home Mission Society. In the fall of 1915 she decided that she must once more see the schools in the South that meant so much to her. In December she came again to her beloved Spelman. While in Atlanta she met with an accident that still further weakened her. After a few weeks, however, she went on to Jacksonville, and then to Selma. There she passed.
* * * * *
"When the Son of Man shall come in his glory, and all the holy angels with him, then shall he sit upon the throne of his glory.... Then shall the righteous answer him, saying, Lord, when saw we thee an hungered, and fed thee? or thirsty, and gave thee drink? When saw we thee a stranger, and took thee in? or naked, and clothed thee? Or when saw we thee sick, or in prison, and came unto thee? And the King shall answer and say unto them, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me."
VII
SOME CRITICS AND THEIR FALLACIES
It is the purpose of the present chapter to reply to some of the more common of the arguments brought forward against the Negro. We shall by no means attempt to cover the whole ground, or even pretend that in every case we have summoned the most representative critics. At the same time we feel that those that are adduced are fairly typical of those of harsher view.
One of the noteworthy characteristics of discussion in recent years has been a tendency to deny the ideals on which America was founded, especially where the Negro was concerned. One of the frankest statements along this line was a Fourth of July address in 1911 by no less a person than Ex-President Eliot of Harvard University. This distinguished citizen gave voice to an opinion which is just now gaining more and more converts in this country, in effect this: The Declaration of Independence is a wornout document; it never was meant to be taken seriously; and, in the words of Rufus Choate, it is made up simply of "glittering and sounding generalities of natural right." The passage to which exception seems especially to be taken is this: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." It will be observed that in a way each successive one of the three clauses here explains the one preceding; that is to say, all men are equal in the rights given to them by God, and these rights consist in life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The fathers were not thinking about such things as that one child was born in a palace and another in a hut, or that one was born with brilliant intellect and the other with little power of mind. Certainly the "facts submitted to a candid world" are based on no such principles as these. The founders were talking about things moral. Each man deserved at least that no other man should have power to declare that he _must_ live in a hut. In other words, each man deserved a man's chance in the world.
So far as the Negro is concerned then we hold that the Declaration of Independence is a very live document. More and more, however, within recent years has it been the fashion to fix attention upon his shortcomings, and this attitude has led some people to strange conclusions. One of the most accessible statements of the adverse point of view is "The Color Line," by Prof. William Benjamin Smith, for years a teacher at Tulane University. This book is in no sense better than many others. At the same time it was written by a man who had broadened his scholarship in Europe, being the holder of a doctor's degree from a German university, and who in his own studies had emphasized such subjects as mathematics and philosophy. From such a source one would at least expect some degree of consideration for logic; and yet "The Color Line" but shows the lengths to which some persons will go when they discuss the Negro. The central thesis seems to be the following (p. 174): "Drawing the color line, firm and fast, between the races, first of all in social relations, and then by degrees in occupations also, is a natural process and a rational procedure, which makes equally for the welfare of both." Professor Smith remarks several Negroes of distinction, shows that in fact most of them were not pure Negroes at all, but persons with an infusion of white blood, and concludes (p. 44): "It seems vain to deny that the mixed blood is notably more intelligent than the pure black; the necessary inference is that the white blood with which it was mixed is far more intelligent still." The same line of argument is used by Mr. Alfred Holt Stone in his _Atlantic_ paper on "The Mulatto Factor in the Race Problem," included in "Studies in the American Race Problem," as well as by Mr. E.B. Reuter in his recent study in the _American Journal of Sociology_, "The Superiority of the Mulatto." "Have equal opportunities," we are asked, "raised the Negroes in Pennsylvania to the white level?" Education has been a complete failure. Professor Smith visited a Negro school (p. 166): "An olive-colored young man was at the board trying to explain to a mulatto woman, the only member of the class, the mysterious nature of the perpendicular. He appeared very earnest in his exposition, but unable to awaken any answering intelligence." "The higher culture at 'colored universities' merely spoils a plough-hand or house-maid." Finally (p. 259), "nearly forty years of devoted and enthusiastic effort to elevate and educate the Southern Negro lie stretched out behind us in a dead level of failure."
This whole argument is guilty of the vicious fallacy of begging the question by arguing in a circle. First we degrade human beings by the curse of slavery for two hundred and fifty years, and then because they are not advanced we argue that they have not the capacity to rise. Far from being an advantage to both races the color line is the curse of both. Obsessed by the Negro problem, the white South has always been held back and still finds it impossible to think in the large; while the Negro is daily met with such insults as shake the very foundations of his citizenship. The argument on the mulatto goes back to the circle already remarked. Everybody knows that in a country predominantly white the quadroon has frequently been given some advantage that his black friend did not have, from the time that one was a house-servant and the other a field-hand; but no thorough test in Negro schools has ever demonstrated that the black boy is intellectually inferior to the fair one. This is all a part of the general American snobbishness that places on the Negro the burden of any blame or deficiency, but that claims for the white race any merit that an individual may show, even while many advantages of citizenship are withheld from both mulatto and Negro alike. Furthermore, and this is a point not previously remarked in discussions of the Negro problem, the element of genius that distinguishes the Negro artist of mixed blood is most frequently one characteristically Negro rather than Anglo-Saxon; note the romantic and elemental sculpture of Meta Warrick Fuller and the mystical religious paintings of Henry O. Tanner. As to labor, how can any one assert that the Negro in the North has had an equal chance with the white man, in view of the attitude of the labor unions? The whole matter of education represents the circle worse than anything else. Would anybody who knows the South contend for a moment that public school appropriations are evenly divided between the white and black? And shall we allow one stupid pupil in a poorly organized school to offset the brilliant attainments in the foremost colleges in the country, from which institutions Negro graduates are each year coming by the scores? Not a year passes now but that some of these students win noteworthy honors, receive valuable prizes, or take doctors' degrees. Let one observe in full proof of this the educational number of the _Crisis_, published in July of each year. The point about "colored universities" simply represents a state of ignorance common throughout the South. The day never was when Fisk and Knoxville and Morehouse simply crammed Greek into unreceptive minds. No schools in the country have had a clearer idea of their mission, or have done more to answer it with limited facilities. The pity is that not one of a dozen representative colleges has the beginning of an adequate endowment, and all have had to do their work with the cheapest tools. And certainly such leadership as the race has had, and such advance as the race has made, have been due primarily to the large idea of Christian service behind the missionary institutions.
Within recent years, however, there has developed a fear of the part that the Negro is to play in American civilization. This was fairly well stated in an article in the _Forum_ a few years ago by Mr. W.W. Kenilworth, "Negro Influences in American Life." Mr. Kenilworth is much disturbed. "Can it be," he asks, "that America is falling prey to the collective soul of the Negro?" "It is unthinkable that the increase of Negro population, the increased and unhampered (_sic_) circumstances of Negro expression should not have an important reaction on the white population." The pity is that the whole article is based on unwarranted assumptions, and, in spite of some elements of truth, the reasoning, condensed, is somewhat as follows:--
The Negro element is daily becoming more potent in American society.
American society is daily becoming more immoral.
Therefore at the door of the Negro may be laid the general increase of divorce and all other evils of society.
Somewhat more subtle than all this is the criticism in Volume VII of "The South in the Building of the Nation," in the article on "The Intellectual and Literary Progress of the Negro" written by Mr. H.I. Brock. The central thesis here is the following: "The Negro is mentally quite sufficiently developed to use his brain with effect upon the immediate and the concrete. He is not sufficiently developed to start with the white man's generalizations, or more exactly, the formulas in which these generalizations are expressed, and work down to the concrete. He is in the class in arithmetic. He is not fit yet awhile for that in algebra and analytics." In proof of this position it is asserted that Booker T. Washington was in type and in fact "exactly like Peter the successful barber and Walker who runs a profitable carrier's business in a certain Southern town, though neither Peter nor Walker can read or write." As for Frederick Douglass, what happened to him "cannot be set down as his achievement. He was a sign and a symbol held up for men to see. He was floated on the top of the abolition wave into public office. He did not climb there." Phillis Wheatley was "taught the trick of verse. Her verses were printed as a curiosity at the time and her 'Poems' have no other interest." "Even Paul Laurence Dunbar has a fame quite disproportionate to his actual place in the catalogue of contemporary minor poets. He, too, is, in part, a curiosity." The whole question at issue, so far as the country at large is concerned, is "not so much how to advance the Negro as how to prevent the Negro from retarding the upward tendency of the rest of the population." All of his books and compositions so far "are like the schoolboy's essay which gets into the school magazine; they are to be considered as 'exercises,' not as achievements."