IF LINCOLN COULD RETURN
(FIFTY YEARS AFTER EMANCIPATION)
ON Sunday, September 22, in negro churches everywhere, men and women of dark skin celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of the first Emancipation Proclamation. It was an occasion which might well have been made a day of heart-searching, to ask ourselves whether, in our treatment of the negro, the nation as a whole is honoring the memory of Lincoln himself, and of those who labored, fought, and died to abolish slavery. Are we, as a nation, dealing fairly with the negro? Or is “The Independent” correct when it declares that of all our ninety millions there are none to-day so oppressed as the race that Lincoln freed?
In this number of THE CENTURY we group examples of the work of four members of the race,—in prose, poetry, art, and musical composition, the first being a paper of entire authoritativeness and singular moderation of tone. In it Dr. Washington, with the dauntless faith and courage which have carried him so far, sets forth his answer to the question whether the American negro is having a fair chance. Discouragement he will not admit; he fixes his eyes ever upon the hopeful signs. When he goes abroad it seems to him the working-classes of Europe are worse off than our own colored people, whose accessions from abroad are proof to him that the negro fares nowhere else so well.
That Dr. Washington serves a useful purpose in ever presenting the cheerful side, is obvious. But he who fifty years after Emancipation would stop there would see but one side of the question. The shadows upon the race which the head of Tuskegee glides over so lightly lie heavily upon ever-growing numbers of intellectual colored people, who are moved but little by figures of increased negro farm holdings, by statistics about negro grocers, lawyers, physicians, and teachers. Grateful as their hearts may be that they are to-day in possession of their own bodies, they regard the future with troubled eyes.
Looking upon their children they ask with panic fear if these are to be the children of the ghettos now being established, set apart as though leprous, with one avenue of advancement after another closed to them, denied the participation in government guaranteed to them by law, and in some States put beyond the pale of law. They read that the American Bar Association has virtually drawn the color line. They read almost every week of men of their race burned at the stake, North and South; of their women, done to death, ruthlessly shot out of semblance to their Maker, by the mobs that destroy them in the name of the purity of the white race! They read that even Northern communities where the mob rules, like Coatesville, Pennsylvania, and Springfield, Illinois, once the very home of Lincoln, fail to punish those who defy the laws and slay the accused or the innocent with barbarities known in no other land. They see themselves left out of account in the South by a leader of a new political party that boasts its desire for “social justice.” If their children, deprived of school by the thousands, and depressed and ignorant, without a single influence to uplift, go wrong, the imputed shame is that of the whole race. Every negro criminal becomes a living indictment of his people. Bitterest of all, they cannot defend themselves against official wrong-doing, for having only a phantom ballot in their hands, the vilest sheriff is beyond their reach. Moreover, to the injury of the whole body-politic, no adequate education through self-government is provided for them in this Republic of Lincoln.
This is the reverse of the picture and its pathos is beyond description. What would Lincoln say? Would he, if reembodied, declare that the negro, for all his progress, is having a fair chance, North or South, to-day?