The negro workers

by Eugene V. Debs

Tuesday Evening, October 30, 1923

Mr. Debs: Friends and Comrades and Fellow-workers—I feel especially complimented by the invitation which has made it possible for me to stand in this inspiring presence to-night. I must first of all thank you and each of you in all sincerity for this very cordial greeting—this hearty manifestation of your sympathy and goodwill for the cause for which I am to speak to you to-night, and for the all too generous introduction of my young Comrade, the Chairman of the occasion, which touches me too deeply for words. I return my thanks to the dear little children whose floral offerings so enrich and reward me for the little that I have been able to do in the service of this great cause. The one regret of my life is that I have so little to give in return for all that is given me.

This great movement which I have been trying to serve; this movement in the interest of a higher social order, a nobler humanity, a diviner civilization that has given me my principles and my ideals and the right to live and to serve—I am only sorry that it is in my power to give so little in return.

I am more than glad to see the colored people represented here to-night. From the beginning of my life my heart has been with them. I never could understand why they were denied any right or any privilege or liberty that the white man had a right to enjoy. I never knew of any distinction on account of the color of the flesh of a human being. Indeed, when I think of what the colored people have been made to suffer at the hands of their supposedly superior race, every time I look a colored brother in the face I blush for the crimes that my race has committed against his race. (Great applause.)

I do not speak to my colored friends to-night in any patronising sense; I meet them upon a common basis of equality; they are my brothers and my sisters, and I want nothing that is denied them, and if there is one of them who will shine my shoes and I am not willing to shine his, he is my moral superior. (Applause.) One reason why I became a Socialist was because I was opposed to this cruel discrimination against human beings on account of the color of their skin. I never could understand it. When I travelled over the Southern States thirty-five years ago organizing the workers, oh, what a desolate, unpromising situation it was! I made my appeal to them wherever I went, to open their doors to the colored workers upon equal terms with the white workers, but they refused. Poor as most of them were, they still felt themselves superior to the colored people.

It is one of the surest indications of their own ignorance and their own inferiority (applause); but, of course, they are not conscious of it. There is what they call a race prejudice, that is simply another name for ignorance (applause), and you can trace it to that and that alone. It is comparatively easy to forgive a man who has wronged you, but it is a very difficult thing to forgive the man that you have wronged. And this is the attitude in which we find our colored brother who has been the victim of this so-called civilization during the last two centuries; and if there is any man who has read the history of the institution of chattel slavery on American soil, from its beginning—from its inception through all of its frightful stages, and who does not blush for himself and for his Anglo-Saxon race, it is because he is something less than a real human being. (Applause.)

Stolen from their native land, torn from their families ruthlessly by the brutal hand of conquest, and then thrown aboard vessels and herded like animals, half of them perishing on the way over from starvation or disease or ill-treatment, and the rest put upon auction blocks and sold to the highest or lowest bidders, and then through the years that followed designedly kept in ignorance and then despised, persecuted and punished because of their alleged inferiority!

The colored man has just as much in him that is potential and capable of development as the white man (great applause); and all he needs is a chance, that is all; he has never had that chance. (Renewed applause.)

I am sometimes surprised to think of the claims that are made in the name of religion and the much-vaunted Christian civilization that has everything in it but Christianity. (Applause.) Even in the great Christian Church the colored people have got to sit aloft—(A Voice: “Next to Heaven.” Laughter.)—and I have had many a heated argument down in the Southern States and sometimes narrowly avoided trouble, making the contention that the colored man was a human being and had some rights that the white man ought to respect. (Applause.)

I remember on one occasion down in Atlanta, we had a Labor meeting and they had a loft to which the colored people were admitted. It was so far aloft that I could hardly see them (laughter) and I wondered if they could hear me; but they did, because their ears were attuned to a voice that had some promise for them. (Applause.) And I noted in the course of my address that I received no applause from below; it all came from the loft. (Laughter.) I paused long enough to say “the intelligence of this audience is in the gallery” (laughter and applause); and if they had had intelligence enough to understand what I said, I might have been lynched that night. (Laughter.)