FOOTNOTES:
[3] For a full discussion of this matter, see the Report of a Committee of the Diocese of South Carolina, 1859.
[9] For Resolutions contained in this Report, see Appendix, Note [9].
Chapter VIII
WHAT OF THE FUTURE?
A young professor, after reading portions of the manuscript here printed, asked, “Where is this leading to? Suppose the Negro is evangelized and educated as thoroughly as your ideal for him seems to desire. What will happen, and what is to be his relation to the white people in this country?” That has been the white man’s question ever since the possible consequences of his bringing the Negroes to the new land were brought home to him. The question was faced with impelling emphasis as the Fathers of the Republic contemplated the purposes and ideals of the new form of government which they established. From this government they expected to realize an equality of opportunity for all men such as no other had ever dreamed of as an ideal to be desired. The Declaration of Independence inevitably brought the white man’s question to the fore as he faced the red man, owner by right of occupation, and the black man, now become American by right of birth. Just as inevitably, with the first freedman, arose the negro’s question, “What is my status in American life?” The clamor for a true, unclouded answer to both questions increased with the increasing numbers of the freedmen.
Even during the slave era, with the growth in numbers and in race consciousness on the part of the intelligent, educated few, the question of the status of the Negro in American life inevitably arose. Among those who were first to awake to the inevitable was the Rev. James W. C. Pennington, D.D., of New York, foremost among the negro scholars and leaders of the last century.
Lecturing in England and Scotland about 1840, Dr. Pennington said, “The colored population of the United States have no destiny separate from that of the nation in which they are an integral part. Our destiny is bound up with that of America. Her ship is ours; her pilot is ours; her storms are ours; her calms are ours. If she breaks upon any rock, we break with her. If we, born in America, cannot live upon the same soil on terms of equality with the descendants of Scotchmen, Englishmen, Irishmen, Frenchmen, Germans, Hungarians, Greeks, and Poles, then the fundamental theory of America fails and falls to the ground.”
The same question is involved today in any discussion of the status of the Negro. The Negro cannot answer it alone, the white race must enter with him into these too often forbidden portals, and help him unlock the door of mystery.
What, then, is the Negro’s status in American political life? It is that which our national Constitution gives him, with lawful qualifications made by several States. No sincere Christian can stand for the breaking or the ignoring of law. If laws are bad, change them; but safety, justice, and decency demand that they be obeyed—else, anarchy. The national Constitution declares the ideal. The qualifications of the States are based upon the same just principle “that the best qualified should rule;” the practice of the politicians is quite another thing. The wise know that the resort to illegality to gain ends is as the pit to destroy others.
During the slave era, the negro leaders of the freedmen set themselves to the task of establishing their citizenship; so that this question was a live issue even before the Civil War. Out of it, grew two distinct theories of relationship of the Negro to American life. Richard Allen was the leader of one school of thought. He and his confrères had been treated with scant courtesy in the white Methodist Church of Philadelphia; he therefore withdrew, and founded the African Methodist Episcopal Church. His contention was that the Negro should have his own Church, his own leaders, and should build his own enterprises in every line of endeavor.
The leader of the opposite school was Frederick Douglass, who thus declared the principle upon which his following proceeded: “I am well aware of the anti-Christian prejudices which have excluded many colored persons from white churches, and the consequent necessity of erecting their own places of worship. This evil I would charge upon its originators, and not the colored people. But such a necessity does not now exist to the extent of former years. There are societies where color is not regarded as a test of membership, and such places I deem more appropriate for colored persons than exclusive or isolated organizations.”
While, in detail, these two theories may vary in their developing expression, the principles upon which they were founded remain, and powerfully affect the Negroes’ attitude towards all the departments of our complex life. The question was both natural and inevitable, and became an increasingly live issue with the growing free population, as they looked forward hopefully, in 1850, to the day of universal freedom. It was a question which could not be answered by themselves alone. The disfranchisement of the Negro before the Civil War, was so nearly universal, that the answer to his question of relation to the political life of America was clearly a negative one. But there was a growing sentiment in the Northern States, coincident with the rise of the Abolition party, toward negro suffrage on a restricted basis.
It is probable that President Lincoln’s very conservative view of the matter would have expressed the view of the growing minority of whites before the war; and, had he lived after it, it is equally likely that it would have prevailed over all the reunited Union, as it does, with qualifications, in many States at the present time. I quote his letter, written in 1864, to the Governor of Louisiana, and printed in the Negro Year Book of 1919. “Now you are about to have a Convention which, among other things, will probably define the elective franchise. I barely suggest, for your private consideration, whether some of the colored people may not be let in, as for instance, the very intelligent, and especially those who have fought gallantly in our ranks. They would probably help, in some trying time to come, to keep the jewel of liberty in the family of freedom. But this is only a suggestion, not to the public, but to you alone.” Again in his last public speech, April 11, 1865, in speaking of the new Louisiana Government, he said: “It is also unsatisfactory to some, that the elective franchise is not given to the colored man. I would myself prefer that it were conferred on the very intelligent, and on those who serve our cause as soldiers.”
It is true that a State like Mississippi would be in an intolerable condition if unqualified suffrage were in practice, because the majority of the Negroes and some of the Whites are either illiterate, or too nearly so, to be intelligent voters. It is safe to say that no intelligent man, black or white, in the State, would vote for unrestricted franchise with its certain consequence of domination by the mass of the unfit.
In no sense does this age face the problems of the old reconstruction of 1865 to 1880. But the tragedies of that old time were not primarily of the Negro’s making. The thoughtful, older men, who are familiar with the age, and analyze the motives of conduct, know that Negroes, whose loyalty to their old masters has never faltered, transferred that loyalty to their liberators in utmost good faith and profound gratitude. We know that the Negro bowed before the “Yankee” with the same motive of grateful reverence that the American bows to the statues of Washington and Lafayette. The wise, thoughtful Negro of today looks back upon that wild era, and sees the mistakes and the loss to his race; while he lets others do the talking. Its lessons are not lost to him, difficult as it is for many people in the South to believe it. No one can read between the lines of the lectures of their great leaders without knowing how keen their insight is. An illuminating example is Dr. Isaiah Montgomery’s debate in the Mississippi Constitutional Convention in favor of the present suffrage law of the State.
There is but one demand—that laws be honestly administered. But this would involve office-holding! Well, why not if it contribute to mutual interest? Is it true democracy that would leave half of a population (as in some communities) unrepresented, all the way from State Legislature to policemen of a negro ward in town? Can that be Christian justice, whose approval we ask of our Lord, but which deprives a people of the right to guard the most sacred trust which God imposes—the homes in which they live? There are just as many classes among the Negroes as among the Whites. They are all forced into solidarity for like reasons that make the solid South. Neither is healthy. Both are based on unreasonable prejudice. The solid Negro believes he faces a solid white wall. The solid South believes it faces two solids, North and Negro. In neither case is it true. Just let somebody begin to do justly, trust the other fellow, and trust, above all, God’s power to inject a sense of justice and fair play even where human shortsightedness cannot see, and most of our troubles in this line would evaporate. The problem of trust is at once a community problem and a world problem which only the determined faith which removes mountains can solve.
Every one of our States has some wise, patriotic negro leaders who are earnestly studying the problems of race and of State, and who are profoundly anxious that race-integrity be maintained and race-relations be cordial and mutually helpful. They, and they alone, know the trials and burdens, the achievements and ambitions of their race so perfectly as to witness with authority. Over our entire nation, it is by the white race that the laws are made and executed, that social needs are ministered to, that prisons are administered, and that education is provided, and health and sanitation supervised. There is not a State in which the regulation of civic life would, or could, be turned over to the Negroes. This lays upon the Whites the chivalric obligation of studying, the more conscientiously and carefully, the needs and interests of their negro fellow-citizens. This cannot be done apart from the highly intelligent Negroes. In our State governments we should have negro representatives of their race to confer with law-makers as advisers. An hour’s conference with two or three of their leaders, chosen for the purpose by their own people, informed and freely representing their interests, would clear the atmosphere of racial misunderstanding, as no debate of a white legislature could do in a whole session.
In our city administration, the white and colored population are, by mutual choice, not by law, segregated; yet, through employment in daily contact, if one member suffer, all members suffer with it—but the Negro, most. In many cities, never a peace-officer is seen, save after crime has been committed. How much better that his ward of the city be guarded and cared for before, so that the order and decency which ordinarily prevails, in spite of neglect, may be guarded and maintained! The Negroes should have their own peace officers; and their right to protect their own homes should be kept utterly inviolate. Citizenship is a sacred trust, and the care of citizens and the harmony of life demand that the most wholesome conditions of life be made for all alike.
We, of the Episcopal Church, have tested this out through many years. We have sat in councils, in conferences, on committees and boards with Negroes. With scarcely an exception, we have found them as courteous as ourselves. In counsel, some are wise and valued advisers; some are less so; none are useless. Their addresses sound much like ours; upon matters of their own race, far more illuminating than ours, as a rule. We mutually fulfil the covenant which Dr. Washington’s Atlanta speech proposed, and which our whole people accepted in 1884. The substance of that proposal was that “in our outward, common life, in all that goes to make a harmonious relation and a prosperous people, we are a unit like a man’s hand; in our inner social life, in all that contributes to racial integrity and the separate trusts that God imposes, we are separate as the fingers of that hand; but hand and fingers unite in striving to perfect the human family, to strengthen and build up, to guard and to purify, the great living Temple of God.” Can the Church be God’s Church, and stand for less?
The educated, intelligent Negroes of today, who read and think, are as anxious to contribute to the best interests of their communities, their States, and our common Nation, as are the Whites. This has been tested in community “clean-up campaigns,” in anti-tuberculosis movements, in liberty loan drives, in volunteers for war, in active service in army and navy—in every movement in which they have been assigned a share. They have never asked exemption from any duty. If service be a badge of honor, the Negro has won it. If the laborer is worthy of his hire, then the Negro has earned the fruit of his service as a citizen. If there are difficulties to be encountered in the bestowal of his earnings, they should be met squarely. Conference on any vital subject whatever, is always courteous and cordial when the Negro is accorded the place that God gave him in creating him a man. That, too, is not conjecture, but long-proved fact. When men have learned that the house of State is as much God’s house as that of Church, we shall learn how to hold brotherly conference with black or red or yellow or brown, and differences and misunderstandings and green-eyed hatred will be banished.
Utopia, one says! Possibly; but if there were no Utopia to strive for, we would cease the striving, and be content to live in any jungle that gave us birthplace.
The philosophy of life changes as present ideals are reached, and as loftier ones replace them in the half-conscious process of spiritual growth. A retrospect of child-growth, with its heightening ambitions urged upward by progressive ideals and mental and spiritual growth, illustrates this changing philosophy. It ought also to illustrate the folly of a rigid fixedness in life’s relationships such as leaves no room for that expansion which enlightenment brings both to ourselves and to others. Thoughtful people cannot suppose that our ideas about race-relations will always remain just as they are. They have changed greatly in the past, and we do not know just how God is going to lead us through the maze of the future. There is but one sure rule—to do justly, and to know that righteous obedience to God’s law of justice, and conformity to God’s law of love, constitute the wisdom which will be justified of its children in never-ending generations. There ought also to be a human reliance that can be depended upon. In every age, it has been the unusual stability of character based upon profound religious conviction on the part of the few, that has saved the many.
We have traced, in brief, the lives of some of those outstanding negro characters of deep conviction, who have been the ensigns of their people. It was upon these men of Church and School, with their co-workers like Booker Washington and others, that the duty of leadership has fallen in these years, beginning in the ’80s, and continuing until now, when new relations between the races have been in the making. At the beginning of this period the old régime had not yet been forgotten; the bad start of reconstruction had muddied the waters, and no one could see the bottom; the new freed race had still to try its wings; the old survivors of both races—now few, indeed—who had made the old relations, were then the many in middle life clinging to the past; the old “Uncles” and the old “Mammies” were still too many, and the endearment of the old ties was still too strong to give immediate place to a new relation between free Whites and black Freedmen or their free-born sons.
The North did not know just where to place the members of a race in its existing level of development; and the South was unwilling to have them where reconstruction had placed them. In consequence that happened, which has always happened in the history of the race when others had the power; the Negroes were largely unconsidered or ill-considered, and their real interest and their best good were alike submerged, while North and South spent weary years in controversies in which each side was sure of its own rectitude and distrustful of the other’s. No better condition for missing the conservative right can be found than that which extremist advocates necessarily make in imputing error to others because of the conviction that those others must think wrong. Through such a maze, the younger leaders were raised up to guide their people, and to demonstrate to the older, more advanced, white race, the real worth of the backward black.
It is difficult to see how anybody can trace the life and work of the comparatively small band of negro leaders, during these forty years past, without a profound feeling of admiration for their Christian character, their patience, their wisdom, and their fine sense of Christian delicacy, exhibited under trying conditions. Think of the men upon whom God has placed this most difficult and delicate task of laying the foundation for a totally new relation toward a more numerous and powerful race, and then try to remember how very few have seriously blundered! Think of their task of remaking their relations with a people who were recently their masters! Think of their task of teaching themselves (and in such true way that the members of the other race will also accept the lesson) to live as free black men with white men, on the same soil, and amid the same surroundings, as of yore! Then say whether you can withhold your chivalrous sympathy, or your resolve to help on the learning of the lesson so utterly essential to the peace of both races.
The Negro has had, and still has, this tremendous task laid upon him of making the place which is his in life; and of taking it, not because he demands it, but because he has successfully made that place. In general, he who has to demand his place, has never earned it. In general, too, he who has made a place has deserved it, and, in the long run, it will be accorded him. The Negroes of education, of refinement, of gifts and of culture, are, too generally, held back from the place they have made. This is partly because of ignorance on the part of white people that such Negroes exist, while the only ones they know are the great majority of ignorant farm hands; partly because of the strange anachronism, “social equality,” which cuts straight across race integrity, and nowhere exists even within the single bounds of any race.
The negro people are not standing for social equality among themselves, even though some of their extremists, along with the Japanese, are muddying the stream of concord with a cry of “equality of races.” No one can doubt but that sane people of every race will continue to stand for that which God made them—white, yellow, brown, red and black—and will try to keep themselves so. In the long run, all will learn to value most the respect that righteous living and service to mankind merit, and to contend least for that which has not been earned. Whatever the future may bring, whether return to Africa in large numbers, or migration to Haiti as some of their leaders contend, or permanence in America, the duty of each day is to help the Negro to help himself in attaining the fullest preparation for the destiny which God’s providence has surely in store for him.
So much for political and social relationships, as between the two races. The Negroes have asked the momentous question, “What is our status?”
So too, in matters concerning the Church, they are asking the same question; not, indeed, as involving membership, but as regards organization. The proposal, made in 1874, to create separate Missionary Jurisdictions, resulted in separate Convocations, in a few Dioceses, some fourteen years later. Its renewal, in 1904, in the form of a Memorial, nearly unanimous, from the colored clergy, resulted, in 1918, in the application of the Canon on the Suffragan Episcopate to those Dioceses which should desire to adopt its provisions. The two Bishops elected by Arkansas and North Carolina have been given all the authority and personal initiative possible under the Canon. That it did not, and does not now, satisfy the full desire of the Memorialists is well known. That the conditions obtaining in the South and not now felt to be needful in the North, constitute ground for local adaptation of the Historic Episcopate, is the judgment of the Memorialists.
The reasons for the petition as “the result of many years of patient observation, study and prayer,” are clearly set forth, and may be found in the successive Journals of General Convention from 1904 to 1918. Meanwhile, there are no negro delegates in the House of Deputies, save one from Liberia and no direct voice, from the more than thirty thousand lay members, to represent their interests in the national body. This does not mean that the race is nowhere heard, or its interest never sought. But it does mean that, in national Conferences and Boards, to which the Negro has sought entrance, the Church is still slow to grant his request.
The picture is not wholly dark. What are the results which, in the midst of confusion and difficulties, the Negro has been able to achieve?
The statistics for the whole race, here given, are taken from the Negro Year Book of 1919. In 1866, the Negroes owned 12,000 homes; in 1919, 600,000. Farms owned in 1866, 20,000; in 1919, 50,000. The wealth, for the two contrasted years, is represented as $20,000,000 and $1,110,000,000.
These figures are very eloquent in their announcement. They do not, and cannot, even begin to tell the story of the supreme devotion, the untiring labor, the self-abasement, the sacrifice, the consummate wisdom, of most of that small company of real negro leaders, who, from the ’80s down to now, have accepted the responsibility, and performed the tremendous task, of retrieving the losses of reconstruction and inspiring the race with an indomitable will to move forward. For this company of leaders was from among the 3.6% of those in professional service, as teachers, doctors, lawyers and the like. Upon them fell the sacred task of guiding the remaining 96.4%, less than 10% of whom were literate. There is no more interesting reading than that which the story of these leaders presents; and that of the trade-schools, farmers’ conferences, educational rallies, and religious institutes.
And how was the progress accomplished? It began with the veritable crusade of constructive service preached by the leaders.
“If educated men and women of the race will see and acknowledge the necessity of practical industrial training, and go to work with a zeal and determination, their example will be followed by others who are now without ambition of any kind. The race cannot hope to come into its own until the young colored men and women make up their minds to assist in the general development along these lines. The elder men and women trained in the hard school of slavery, and who so long possessed all the labor—skilled and unskilled—of the South, are dying out; their places must be filled by their children, or we shall lose our hold upon these occupations. Again, Phillips Brooks gave expression to the sentiment: ‘One generation gathers the material, and the next builds the palaces.’ As I understand it, he wished to inculcate the idea that one generation lays the foundation for succeeding generations.”
This is a sample of the messages of these crusaders, borne in varying cadences throughout the race. The appeal was to the cultured, by precept and even more by example, to stimulate the ambition of the whole race; to realize that foundation-building is the task of each generation, and that the neglect of one generation means loss to itself and the next.
But they were not preaching only. They did what they exhorted others to do. With the help of white friends, they began to build schools, and to teach those who could teach others the value of industry and thrift, and the blessings of the self-respect that is unafraid to face life and contribute to its needs. And thus the army of teachers began to go forth. Most of them were not well prepared, and are not at this day, for the calls have been so hurried that the preparation has been equally so.
Today there are 38,000 teachers, against the 600 in 1866; most of them in the little country schools; many under most difficult conditions and impossible surroundings, both of which are rapidly improving under the kindly interest of the dominant whites. And, too, there are many thousands, trained to a degree in the various trades, and taking their places in the industrial life of their homes. The fact that, in 1866, 95% were illiterate, and now only 20%, stands as a living monument to the devoted leaders of these forty years past.
What then is the status of the Negro in American life? Our forefathers fought for liberty to bestow it on all when the time came that the humblest members were prepared to assume its responsibilities. A later generation fought for Democracy—that crowning and pervading principle of liberty. Our great leaders have been as wise, as clear, as simple in the interpretation of democracy as their forefathers were in that of liberty. Shall the Church of God be wise enough, and devoted enough, and fearless enough, to lead the people of God to realize what has been purchased with blood and consecrated by sacrifice?
Now, as then, self-interest engenders prejudice; prejudice of class towards other classes, of crafts towards other crafts, of race towards other races. All the prejudice is not on one side; but no white man, with an eye to justice, can fail to admit the Negro has far the greater cause for his prejudice.
The very existence of different crafts and classes, and still more of different races occupying the same national home, makes problems. The only solution that really solves is Justice, with its accompanying weight in the balance—Mercy. Without the exercise of these, no class or race could hope for continuous life or persistent growth. Where truth and justice meet together, righteousness and peace will kiss each other in a brotherly, harmonious relation, that only the devil’s lies and cruel injustice ever mar and distort.
The Negro has been free for sixty years and more. Building upon the wonderfully fine foundation of the past (in spite of manifold and manifest flaws in its making), he has reared racial structures of social, commercial, industrial and religious life, that command respect and admiration. The credit belongs to both races—to the Negro himself, but no less to the race which was once his owner, and whose hand is clearly seen in the building.
The Negro knows even better than his white critics how faulty a living building is in which the majority of the living stones are still rough, unpolished, unsquared. He asks, and he has the right which God gives to His people to ask, that, as a free man, he be treated as a man; that, as justice is the right of life, he be accorded it; that, as a citizen, he be granted the rights of citizenship—the equal right of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness; that laws governing citizenship be applied with equal justice to Negroes and to Whites.
If the Church of God (that is, her members) can bring herself to stand for less than that, it is difficult to find ground for forgiveness at the hands of the Son of Man who died upon the Cross for the salvation of all.
Of course there is a problem; but the real problem is not how to escape doing justice, but how to be just without destroying racial integrity. Race and family are of God’s institution, God’s alone, and their respective relations are of His making. Both are written in God’s handwriting, in flesh and blood; not in man’s, on scraps of paper. But this phase of the subject is exceedingly large. The apology for its introduction here, is to be found in the emphasis which it seeks to lay upon the ultimate purpose of education and training.
When one considers the few years from Emancipation, the reflection must come that long, long steps forward have been taken; and who can doubt that where unalloyed interest in the progress of the black members reigns in the hearts of the white, the guidance of the loving Father has stayed our impatience? Who can doubt that, in His guiding providence, He will deal with us according to His lovingkindness?