SOUTHERN NEGROES IN NEW YORK CITY.
In our efforts to find out the needs of the emigrants for Liberia, now in New York, we have discovered facts in regard to the resident colored population in the city which were to us a great surprise. One of its most intelligent colored men informs us that of the 20,000 colored inhabitants in this city, only about 5,000 are of Northern birth.
A church organized two years ago, with 21 members, has now a membership of 150, and a congregation of about 800, all of whom are from the South. They now worship in a hall for which they pay $40 per month; have raised more than $3,000 for current expenses; $300 for charities, and have $2,000 in bank toward a church building. The pastor of this church is a young ex-slave from Norfolk, Virginia.
Now, in regard to the refugees themselves, we believe an attendance upon the meeting in Dr. Garnet’s church, called to organize and systematize the effort to care for them, would have proved a radical cure for chronic and most persistent doubt as to the negroes’ ability to meet an emergency. The overflowing charity of that meeting was only matched by the wisdom, prudence and skill with which it was managed.
If the Christian churches and friends of Christ would but seek out, and bring as prominently before the public, facts, of which there are many, such as the above, showing the rapid progress these people are making under great discouragements, as the police courts and enemies of the negro report and dwell upon those which show his degradation, we are confident he would be held in much higher estimation.
We venture to say that a like number of refugees of any other race, in as great destitution, with a similar story of wrongs, whether true or false, could not be so quietly stowed away in New York, or left to be cared for so exclusively by their own people. There have been no urgent appeals to the public, and either none at all, or but a passing notice of their arrival, in our religious papers.
