KANSAS.
The Condition of the Blacks at Topeka, Kan., and Savannah, Ga., Contrasted.
REV. R. F. MARKHAM.
I spent five years in Savannah, devoting my whole time to the colored people. Savannah claims 30,000 inhabitants, of whom about 15,000 are colored. Topeka has 16,000 inhabitants, 5,000 of whom are colored. Physical wants can be more easily supplied in Savannah than in Topeka. In nearly all of the South the bare necessities of life are more easily secured than at the North. The colored people of Topeka have equally good schools with the whites, where separate schools for them are established. The State Superintendent has ruled that any district which does not supply equal advantages for both white and colored can have no State appropriation. Savannah has tolerably good public schools for a little over one half of the colored children, but the poorest teachers are employed especially outside of the city. Everywhere through Kansas the blacks are as well supplied as the whites.
In Topeka a colored man can take jobs and superintend business when he is competent, and all are willing he should, but in Savannah I employed a very competent negro to superintend a job of mason work. I asked a white mason a few days afterward if it would do to put mortar on green lath. He replied, “I will not answer you. You have got a nigger to do your work.”
It is all right for colored men to do the work South, but they must have a white overseer. At the barber shops in Topeka they shave both white and colored, but let a colored man shave a black man in Savannah, and he will have no white customers. If a white man and a colored man walk the streets of Savannah together, the colored man must go behind, like a dog, not walk by the white man’s side. It was a long time before I learned why even my deacons would always walk behind me. That was their training. I said: “Walk by my side, you are my brother.” My daughter walked the streets of Savannah with a colored lady by her side. A white lady said to her, “You cannot be respected; you should have the colored girl walk behind you.”
In Topeka colored men and white walk side by side. Even the Governor of the State does not hesitate to walk this way with a colored man. I attended an election yesterday in Topeka. Politicians were anxious for colored votes. So they are in the South sometimes, but I observed the different way they have of treating a colored man in Topeka from the one they practice in Savannah. The politician says: “Mr. So-and-So,” but in Savannah it is, “Jim, Jack, boy, come, give me a vote.” I never heard a Southern white man “Mr.” a colored man. I wrote several articles for the Savannah News and called the colored girls Misses, and applied Mr. to colored men. In every case they struck out Miss or Mr., as applied to colored persons. I was told by a prominent man in Savannah that any man who would sit at the table with a colored man ought to be driven out of the city. A colored man cannot sue a white man in Savannah and collect a debt; but in Kansas he is equal before the law. A negro entered the Presbyterian church in Savannah when Ralph Wells, of New York, was lecturing on Sabbath-schools, and was called upon to pray, at which the black sexton said to me, “The millennium must be here, a colored man prayed in the Presbyterian church! I never heard of such a thing before in my life.”
The Topeka Ministerial Association invites negro ministers to come in and join indiscriminately in its deliberations. In Topeka every white man encourages the colored man to save his money and get a home; in Savannah it is right the reverse. In Topeka a majority get homes; in Savannah but very few. In Topeka a majority of the whites encourage temperance, and, as the result, the colored vote goes nearly solid for temperance. In Savannah it is the reverse; nearly all drink. The moral instruction in Topeka is deficient, as the instruction is largely given by ignorant colored people, except the Sabbath-school sustained by the A. M. A. I believe it a great mistake of the A. M. A. not to put more laborers into the field in Kansas, where there are nearly 60,000 freed people. By no means neglect the South; all the work now being done is needed and twice as much more, but do not neglect this important field in Kansas, where all that pertains to true manhood can be far more rapidly developed than at the South.