The question was whether there was any distinction between religious and social equality?
That depends upon the estimate of each individual as to what “The Church” is.
If it is in truth and fact a divine institution, then the necessity of subjecting it to those regulations which experience has proven most expedient, for the proper adjustment of civil relations, is not very clearly apparent.
If it is not a divine institution, then it is a social organization, no matter how high the plane upon which it is operated, and religious equality brings in its train social equality.
The attempt of British divines, face to face with the color question in South Africa, to readjust the religious views of the fifties, directed at people mainly outside their own doors and to justify the refusal to extend religious equality to the blacks in the Dominions, on the professed ground that there is not complete spiritual equality among men and that the final award for the use cannot be made a basis for the adjustment of earthly relations, moves somewhat limpingly, and, in lucidity, falls far below the utterance of that profound Negro, who has so clearly set forth the rights of his race in America, in the following declaration:
“The Negro has a God ordained right to protest against his exclusion from means of self support. He has equal right to protest when deprived of legal and civil justice, or when the opportunity of knowledge or sober living is denied him. He has no just cause of complaint, however, when excluded from social intercourse with the white race, for the obvious reason that mankind does not mingle on terms of social equality—a fact as true of black men as of white. Nor is Negro exclusion from membership in white churches a trespass on Negro rights, for after all, a church is neither more nor less than a social family.”[210]
Of the Negro who made this sane well balanced pronouncement it is fitting that a white South Carolinian should have something to say, although he has been absolutely ignored by the most cultivated members of his race.
As we shall later note DuBois, who today comes nearer being recognized as the leading Negro of America than any who can be mentioned, has claimed that:
“the greatest stigma on the white South is ... that when it saw the reform movement growing and even in some cases triumphing, and a larger and larger number of black voters learning to vote for honesty and ability, it still preferred a Reign of Terror to a campaign of education, and disfranchised Negroes instead of punishing rascals.”[211]
In 1874 in South Carolina, Judge John T. Green, a Republican, was a candidate for governor against D. H. Chamberlain. Green was a South Carolina Unionist, a lawyer of ability against whom it was impossible to find anything to hang a charge on. Chamberlain was the most brilliant of all the carpet-baggers and after he defeated Green and became governor of South Carolina he did turn to a great extent against the rottening thieves who had raised him to that position. His opposition to black Whipper most dramatically expressed, flashed all over the United States, when that Northern born Negro was a candidate for judicial honors, in the piquant phrase—“The civilization of the Puritan and the Cavalier is in danger”—made this Union soldier from Massachusetts almost a type of the fighting reformer, and there was need of such, although, as DuBois claims: