Church work among the Negroes in the South / The Hale Memorial Sermon No. 2

by Robert Strange

with the whites; but that custom has been steadily changing. Some twenty years ago South Carolina and Virginia, dreading too great an increase of negro clergy and laity, led the way to new conditions. South Carolina excluded them entirely from the Diocesan Council, without any further provision for them. Virginia did not disturb those already having seats in the Council, but simply refused to let any more come in on the same terms. She erected a separate Convocation for the negroes, and now allows a certain number to have seats as representatives from the Convocation to the Council. Two years ago Arkansas put the negroes aside into a separate Convocation with no representation in the Council of the Diocese. Georgia last year formed a separate Convocation; but has allowed them by the act of separation to come into the Council to vote for the Standing Committee, the deputies to the General Convention and for the Bishop, whenever one is to be elected: giving them, you see, legal representation in important affairs. The Convention of the Diocese of North Carolina is now discussing the matter of separation, and is only delaying its own action, while waiting to see what shall be done next fall by the General Convention. In our own Diocese of East Carolina, the negroes are formally and legally on the same basis as the whites; but is that satisfactory? Not at all. The negro

laity rarely go to the Council. The negro clergy go; but they take a back seat; they have nothing to do or say; they are not expected to show their interest or their will, except by voting. Instead of its doing them good to come to the Council, it really does them harm. They are depressed, they feel the difference between themselves and the white men; they have little or no opportunity to take responsibility and to develop Christian manhood. Perceiving this state of things, the clear headed leader of the forces for separation in the Diocese of North Carolina tells me that he is urging this separation for the real good of the negro as well as for the growth and influence of the Church among the white people of the State.

The fact is, say what we will about it—it would carry me too far afield to explain it to-night—that the negro cannot work together on equality with the white man; he either assumes an apparent insolence and stubbornness, which the whites will not allow; or he puts on a civility and submission, which strips him of his manhood. So, we are placed in this condition: when we keep the negro close to us on formal equality, he has no real opportunity to grow and develop in the true characteristics of manhood; when we put him off in an inferior diocesan Convocation, he feels that he is not treated as a man; he is forced steadily to realize his inferiority to the white man, that inferiority declared

and impressed upon him by the Church of God. This, it seems to me, is the chief reason why we are not now growing as we ought to among the leading influential negroes of the South; and the reason why there is much restlessness and want of satisfaction among the negroes who are already in the Church.

What ought we to do to meet these conditions? Let us turn aside for a moment to consider the general conditions of the negroes and their relation to the white people. We have to-day about the same relative proportion of blacks to whites in the whole country as we had in 1860—about 12 per cent.—; and we have nearly the same in the South, about 40 per cent. What is to become of the negro for the next fifty years? No man would dare suggest an answer looking farther ahead than that: God only knows. Some say he will amalgamate with the whites. Many thought so immediately after the war who do not think or say so now. No; after forty years the separation between the races is clearer, wider and more distinct than ever before. The thoughtful black men do not desire amalgamation; and the white men will not have it. Some say the negro will be colonized. I think that there is less reason in this answer even than in the former. The negroes do not wish to go; and we cannot force them. Think of the difficulty of deporting forcibly nine million people! No; as Dr. Booker T. Washington

says, "This problem is not to be solved by deportation or by amalgamation." The negroes are here to stay with us, and the bulk of them will stay in the South.

For years there has been a steady movement of the negroes from the country to the towns and cities of the South, and from the Southern cities to the Northern. I think they are coming and will continue to come North in sufficient numbers for our brethren of the North to learn to know them, to sympathize with us in our problem and to have something of a problem themselves, and to feel that we must all work together towards its true and final solution. The negroes are dividing into two distinct classes more decidedly, it seems to me, than any other nationality in our country; and I hope they will continue to keep and increase this distinction. A minority are improving, are taking advantage of education, are advancing in morality and industry, are acquiring property and becoming worthy citizens. These few are setting a standard, and are giving us hope of what the negro can and may become. The majority are not improving, but rather retrogressing. They are looking on liberty as license; they are thinking that a little education will give them the privilege of living without manual labor; they are making higher wages the way to less work rather than the way to a higher standard of

life; they are shiftless, immoral, and criminal. Now, as I study this race so dividing in the great laboratory of Nature, under the law of God which works on so justly, ofttimes apparently so cruelly, always for the general good of man, I look forward with the hope that this smaller, higher class will increase, and that the larger, lower class will decrease. The better class will increase as all good things do and will increase in the providence of God and with the help and sympathy of true good men. The larger, meaner class of negroes will steadily diminish in two directions; the first by movement of their best into the higher class, swelling that slowly into the majority; the second, by the stern sloughing off of their worst by the diseases which spring from idleness, self-indulgence, filth, and immorality.

What we white men of the North and South ought to do to encourage and help this better class of negroes is, in brief phrases, this: First, to keep our faces as flint against all social intermingling that looks toward amalgamation. Then, across this chasm, which both races frankly accept, to join hands with those trying to lift and better themselves, cheering, encouraging, and helping them. We must give them full protection in their life, liberty and pursuit of happiness; we must give them even handed justice in law and in politics; we must give them equality of opportunity

in earning their bread, in making their homes, in educating their children; we must give them every chance and all cheer and sympathy in seeking the fulfillment of the aspirations of the human heart among their own people. And, my friends, I want to tell you here in Chicago to-night that we men of the South are largely doing all of these things now, and we are going to do them more and more completely. We are coming to see more and more clearly that it will not do to have forty per cent. of the people of our Southern land sullen and suspicious, discontented and hopeless; but that we can only go forward at our best pace towards a happy and noble civilization, with both races cheerful and hopeful, sympathizing with each other in their peculiar perplexities, trusting their brother man on earth and their Father God in Heaven.