And has stood for a century.”
“The Brown” or “Century Fellowship Society”, which occupied almost all of Holloway’s leisure thoughts, had been founded in 1790. In 1904 some ceremonies were enacted upon the occasion of the laying of a corner stone for the new hall, it was hoped later to erect.[281] The address of welcome was delivered by a venerable member, ninety-six years of age, and was very brief. The religious services were conducted by the rector of the oldest Episcopal Church in Charleston, himself a veteran of the Confederate war, who, as a major of engineers, had contributed greatly to the “Defense of Charleston Harbor,” the history of which, under such caption, as author, he had also preserved. There was an ode by a member of the Society, and an address by a member of the board of aldermen of the city, also an ex-Confederate soldier. But a review of the aims and aspirations of the Society by J. H. Holloway, throwing as it does a light upon the point of view of a class, not given to undue exposure of their opinions, was probably the most important utterance of the occasion.[282] He said:
“My first proposition is that our society was founded upon right principles, having as its foundation stone Charity and Benevolence, and its capstone social Purity. Environed as we have been by the varied conditions through which we have had to pass and to have survived one hundred and fourteen years, with a record no organization may be ashamed of, so we may well exclaim “To the Lord be all the praise.” Our guests today represent the conditions through which the Society has passed during the Century. On the one hand we have the dominant race and on the other we have the backward race. The first looked with a scrutinizing eye on our every movement, so as to charge us with being a disturbing element in the conditions that existed, and they made stringent legislative enactments; and the public sentiment of the masses was to discourage everything that our Society stood for; but fortunately there were the classes in society, and as our fathers allied themselves with them, as a consequence, they had their influence and protection and so they had to be in accord with them and stand for what they stood for. If they stood for close fellowship, so did our Fathers. If they stood for high incentive, so did our Fathers. If they stood for slavery, so did our Fathers, to a certain extent. But they sympathized with the oppressed, for they had to endure some of it, and fellow feeling makes us wondrous kind, and many times they had as individuals helped slaves to buy their freedom, and on one occasion our records prove that the Society loaned one of their members the money to purchase his family. Our Fathers were public spirited, for our records prove, that from 1811 to 1814 the Society was interested in the defense of Charleston. So under perplexing conditions our Society passed more than three score and ten years of existence until the war of the sixties and while their material prosperity was at stake, their sympathies were with the side that promised more liberties and larger opportunities; however, the members of the Society, not as an organization, but as individuals became the firemen to protect the city from flames caused at times by the shelling of the city. We have proof that some of the sons of our members wore the Blue, and at least one contributed his life blood for freedom at the charge of Battery Wagner under the lead of the brave Col. Shaw, of the 54th Massachusetts Regiment, and thus the blood of South Carolina and Massachusetts mingled as in the case of the Revolution.... The change of conditions after the War did not make any difference with our Society, they continued in the beaten path of Charity and Benevolence; but they still kept the compact close, feeling that the heritage of the Fathers was only dear to their children, and as we had three generations born since the organization, we could enjoy social equality among ourselves.... In conclusion I will say that we are not responsible for our birth, but God has placed us where we could best honor Him, and his command is—‘Honor thy Father and Mother that thy days may be long’. So we are honoring our Heavenly Father’s command in honoring our ancestry.”[283]
Had Holloway only lived to read the exposition of the subject—“The Negro in the New World”, which in 1910 appeared from the pen of the great English explorer and Negro character specialist, Sir Harry Johnston, he would have learned that:
“Money solves all human difficulties. It will buy you love, honor and respect, power and social standing.”[284]
Would he have accepted this even from this great authority? His Society was languishing. How was the structure to be strengthened in 1904? In that year President Roosevelt appointed as Collector of the Port of Charleston, Dr. W. D. Crum, a colored physician of that city, a respectable Republican politician, well thought of by Dr. Booker T. Washington, but not wealthy. To some, who thought the appointment hardly the fittest, it looked as if the incident was fanned into a national question unnecessarily; but when it is noted what its importance appeared to be to men like Mr. Stone, of distinctly philosophical cast of mind in consideration of the color question; and further, that upon Mr. Taft’s elevation to the Presidency there was no reappointment, but instead the incumbent was appointed as minister to Liberia, it would seem as if there had been question of the wisdom of the appointment elsewhere than in the South. But whatever difference of opinion there may have been on the matter of the appointment, it would have been very difficult to find any reasonable ground for condemning the appointee in his acceptance; for he would have been less than a man had he refused it. All through the verbal storm that raged over it, the appointee remained perfectly silent, concerning himself solely with the duties of the office, and at the conclusion, when he departed for Liberia, in a letter to the head of the agency through which his transportation had been arranged, there was only apparent warm affection for the spot Holloway had so fondly alluded to, in the paraphrased lines of Oliver Wendell Holmes.
Holloway evidently did not subscribe to the idea of Sir Harry Johnston as to the power of money to solve all human difficulties, for there were colored men of means in Charleston at the time. It was character, and particularly self control, that appealed to Holloway. His selection, therefore, was W. D. Crum, who had shown that he possessed characteristics very akin to those which Holloway had shown to be the ideals of the Century Fellowship Society, although Crum’s forbears had not been free persons of color before the War of Secession, a matter of importance to Holloway.
Of another product of the old South a word may be further said for the benefit of the fiercely prejudiced English authors, who are unable to believe that any good thing can come out of the slave-holder’s Nazareth.
James H. Fordham, 1891
Free Person of Color—South
Carolina, 1860