GENERAL UNFAIRNESS—THE CHICAGO EXHIBITION, ETC.
Again, I cannot dwell too much upon the fact that coloured people are much damaged by this charge. As an injured class we have a right to appeal from the judgment of the mob, to the judgment of the law and to the justice of the American people.
Full well our enemies have known where to strike and how to stab us most fatally. Owing to popular prejudice, it has become the misfortune of the coloured people of the South and of the North as well, to have, as I have said, the sins of the few visited upon the many.
When a white man steals, robs or murders, his crime is visited upon his own head alone. But not so with the black man. When he commits a crime, the whole race is made responsible. The case before us is an example. This unfairness confronts us not only here but it confronts us everywhere else.
Even when American art undertakes to picture the types of the two races, it invariably places in comparison, not the best of both races as common fairness would dictate, but it puts side by side and in glaring contrast, the lowest type of the Negro with the highest type of the white man and then calls upon the world to “look upon this picture, then upon that.”
When a black man’s language is quoted, in order to belittle and degrade him, his ideas are often put in the most grotesque and unreadable English, while the utterances of Negro scholars and authors are ignored. To-day, Sojourner Truth is more readily quoted than Alexander Cromwell or Dr. James McCune Smith. A hundred white men will attend a concert of counterfeit Negro minstrels, with faces blackened with burnt cork, to one who will attend a lecture by an intelligent Negro.
Even the late World’s Columbian Exposition was guilty of this unfairness. While I join with all other men in pronouncing the Exposition itself one of the grandest demonstrations of civilization that the world has ever seen, yet great and glorious as it was, it was made to show just this kind of injustice and discrimination against the Negro.
As nowhere in the world, it was hoped that here the idea of human brotherhood would have been grandly recognized and most gloriously illustrated. It should have been thus and would have been thus, had it been what it professed to be, a World’s Exposition. It was not such, however, in its spirit at this point; it was only an American Exposition. The spirit of American caste against the educated Negro was conspicuously seen from start to finish, and to this extent the Exposition was made simply an American Exposition instead of a World’s Exposition.
Since the day of Pentecost there was never assembled in any one place or on any one occasion a larger variety of peoples of all forms, features and colors and all degrees of civilization, than was assembled at this World’s Exposition. It was a grand ethnological object lesson, a fine chance to study all likenesses and all differences of mankind. Here were Japanese, Soudanese, Chinese, Singalese, Syrians, Persians, Tunisians, Algerians, Egyptians, East Indians, Laplanders, Esquimaux, and, as if to shame the educated Negro of America, the Dahomeyans were there to exhibit their barbarism and increase American contempt for the Negro intellect. All classes and conditions were there save the educated American Negro. He ought to have been there, if only to show what American slavery and American freedom have done for him. The fact that all other nations were there at their best, made the Negro’s exclusion the more pronounced and the more significant. People from abroad noticed the fact that while we have eight millions of colored people in the United States, many of them gentlemen and scholars, not one of them was deemed worthy to be appointed a Commissioner, or a member of an important committee, or a guide or a guard on the Exposition grounds, and this was evidently an intentional slight to the race. What a commentary is this upon the liberality of our boasted American liberty and American equality! It is a silent example, to be sure, but it is one that speaks louder than words. It says to the world that the colored people of America are not deemed by Americans as within the compass of American law, progress and civilization. It says to the lynchers and mobocrats of the South, go on in your hellish work of Negro persecution. You kill their bodies, we kill their souls.