Mr. Dixon essays to portray Negro worship and makes of it a very grotesque affair.
Over against Mr. Dixon's representation of Negro worship as a heathenish affair, we place the old plantation melodies evolved in those and earlier days. Charged as these melodies are with true religious fervor, they stand as a bulwark against all who would assail these earlier gropings of the race after the unknown God. Equally misplaced are the sneers of Mr. Dixon at the Negro minister. The center of the whole social fabric erected by the Negro race in the South is the Negro church, and to the zeal and power of the untutored Negro pastor and his more favored successor is this success due. Subtract from the assets of the Negro race those things placed there through the instrumentality of the Negro minister and small will be the remnant.
Again, this religion and this minister at whom Mr. Dixon sneers, are really responsible for the pacific character of the Negro population of the South. The Negro race is a great fighting race. The native optimism of the individual soldier causing him to discount his own chances of being killed, coupled with his ability to be lost in his enthusiasms, make the Negro very effective as a soldier.
Africa has been one great battle field and the internecine strife of fighting Africans is in a measure responsible for the plight of the Negro race in the world, as a union of forces could have the better halted alien aggression. But in America the Negro was taught the Gospel of peace. The singing of the American Negro is said to lack the martial strain found in the fatherland. For the peace loving Negro, credit the church and the Negro minister, whom Mr. Dixon would have the world contemn.
MR. DIXON STABS TO KILL.
The late Hon. George F. Hoar, of Massachusetts, once remarked (we quote from memory), "Our population is composed of various races of mankind, but there are four great things upon which we are all united: Love of home, love of country, love of liberty and love of woman." The glory of the Anglo-Saxon race has come largely of the estimate it has placed on woman.
Mr. Dixon would break the accord of the American Negro with the rest of his fellows by picturing him as the savage enemy of womankind. In order to attain his end he picks up the degenerates within the Negro race and exploits them as the normal type. In one of his books Mr. Dixon makes a Negro school commissioner solicit a kiss from a white girl when she applies to him for a position. The man of this character in the Negro race is known of all men familiar with the Southern Negro to be an exotic, for nowhere in the world does woman get more instinctive deference from men than what Negro men render to the white women of the South. The very fact that degenerates sometimes make them the objects of assaults, invests them with a double measure of sympathy and deference on the part of the great body of Negro men.
WHERE MR. DIXON'S POWER FAILS.
Mr. Dixon displays great power in depicting the emotions of the white people when the news was borne to them that a little white girl had been outraged and slain by a Negro.
Mr. Dixon, there were other hearts throbbing in that neighborhood! Oh, that you had the spirit and the power to give utterance to those heart throbs.