“the leaders of the Negro people to inveigh against these garments (frock coats and silk hats) which only look well on two white men out of ten, and never look other than ugly and inappropriate on a person of dark complexion.”[320]
It is hardly necessary to make any great endeavor to discover the exact meaning of the author’s mouth filling phrase:
“If the Imperial destiny of the English speaking peoples of North America is to be achieved, they must expect to see their flag or flags covering nationally many peoples of non-Caucasian race wearing the shadowed livery of the burnished sun.”[321]
For while he tells us that:
“The eleven States of the Secession have remained to this day (1910) apart from the rest of America in their domestic policy towards the Negro and people of color with any drop of black blood in their veins. Here alone—except perhaps in the Transvaal, Orange State and Natal of British South Africa—does the racial composition of a citizen (and not mere dirtiness, drunkenness, or inability to pay) exclude him or her from municipal or national privilege and public conveniences otherwise open to all and paid for by all.[322] Yet with all these imperfections in the social acceptance of the colored people of the United States—imperfections which with time and patience and according to the merits of the Negro will disappear—the main fact was evident to me after a tour through the Eastern and Southern States of North America; that nowhere in the world—certainly not in Africa—has the Negro been given such a chance of mental and physical development as in the United States.”[323]
If Sir Harry Johnston, or for the matter of that, his patron, President Roosevelt, had only been able to study that neglected and impoverished Negro seer, the only one of the teachers of his people who gave his blood for their freedom, proving his faith by his works and not by mere lip service, the repudiation of whom by the Negroes and their leaders is the severest indictment which could be drawn against the race, they might have been wiser. But from time immemorial the call to the prophet has always been: “Prophesy unto us smooth things.”—and W. Hannibal Thomas having fought in the ranks of the Union army and lived in the midst of Reconstruction, knew a little too much, despite his exaltation of the civilization of New England, and his criticism of the South’s attempt in 1865 to mould again its own, apart from slavery, to ever be accepted by those who had participated in or were responsible for Reconstruction.
FOOTNOTES:
[295] Stone, The American Race Problem.
[296] Stanley, In Darkest Africa, Vol. I, p. 384.
[297] Hart, The Southern South, p. 113.