Wanted—Leaders!

by Theodore DeBose Bratton

In no sense does this age face the problems of the old reconstruction of 1865 to 1880. But the tragedies of that old time were not primarily of the Negro’s making. The thoughtful, older men, who are familiar with the age, and analyze the motives of conduct, know that Negroes, whose loyalty to their old masters has never faltered, transferred that loyalty to their liberators in utmost good faith and profound gratitude. We know that the Negro bowed before the “Yankee” with the same motive of grateful reverence that the American bows to the statues of Washington and Lafayette. The wise, thoughtful Negro of today looks back upon that wild era, and sees the mistakes and the loss to his race; while he lets others do the talking. Its lessons are not lost to him, difficult as it is for many people in the South to believe it. No one can read between the lines of the lectures of their great leaders without knowing how keen their insight is. An illuminating example is Dr. Isaiah Montgomery’s debate in the Mississippi Constitutional Convention in favor of the present suffrage law of the State.

There is but one demand—that laws be honestly administered. But this would involve office-holding! Well, why not if it contribute to mutual interest? Is it true democracy that would leave half of a population (as in some communities) unrepresented, all the way from State Legislature to policemen of a negro ward in town? Can that be Christian justice, whose approval we ask of our Lord, but which deprives a people of the right to guard the most sacred trust which God imposes—the homes in which they live? There are just as many classes among the Negroes as among the Whites. They are all forced into solidarity for like reasons that make the solid South. Neither is healthy. Both are based on unreasonable prejudice. The solid Negro believes he faces a solid white wall. The solid South believes it faces two solids, North and Negro. In neither case is it true. Just let somebody begin to do justly, trust the other fellow, and trust, above all, God’s power to inject a sense of justice and fair play even where human shortsightedness cannot see, and most of our troubles in this line would evaporate. The problem of trust is at once a community problem and a world problem which only the determined faith which removes mountains can solve.

Every one of our States has some wise, patriotic negro leaders who are earnestly studying the problems of race and of State, and who are profoundly anxious that race-integrity be maintained and race-relations be cordial and mutually helpful. They, and they alone, know the trials and burdens, the achievements and ambitions of their race so perfectly as to witness with authority. Over our entire nation, it is by the white race that the laws are made and executed, that social needs are ministered to, that prisons are administered, and that education is provided, and health and sanitation supervised. There is not a State in which the regulation of civic life would, or could, be turned over to the Negroes. This lays upon the Whites the chivalric obligation of studying, the more conscientiously and carefully, the needs and interests of their negro fellow-citizens. This cannot be done apart from the highly intelligent Negroes. In our State governments we should have negro representatives of their race to confer with law-makers as advisers. An hour’s conference with two or three of their leaders, chosen for the purpose by their own people, informed and freely representing their interests, would clear the atmosphere of racial misunderstanding, as no debate of a white legislature could do in a whole session.

In our city administration, the white and colored population are, by mutual choice, not by law, segregated; yet, through employment in daily contact, if one member suffer, all members suffer with it—but the Negro, most. In many cities, never a peace-officer is seen, save after crime has been committed. How much better that his ward of the city be guarded and cared for before, so that the order and decency which ordinarily prevails, in spite of neglect, may be guarded and maintained! The Negroes should have their own peace officers; and their right to protect their own homes should be kept utterly inviolate. Citizenship is a sacred trust, and the care of citizens and the harmony of life demand that the most wholesome conditions of life be made for all alike.

We, of the Episcopal Church, have tested this out through many years. We have sat in councils, in conferences, on committees and boards with Negroes. With scarcely an exception, we have found them as courteous as ourselves. In counsel, some are wise and valued advisers; some are less so; none are useless. Their addresses sound much like ours; upon matters of their own race, far more illuminating than ours, as a rule. We mutually fulfil the covenant which Dr. Washington’s Atlanta speech proposed, and which our whole people accepted in 1884. The substance of that proposal was that “in our outward, common life, in all that goes to make a harmonious relation and a prosperous people, we are a unit like a man’s hand; in our inner social life, in all that contributes to racial integrity and the separate trusts that God imposes, we are separate as the fingers of that hand; but hand and fingers unite in striving to perfect the human family, to strengthen and build up, to guard and to purify, the great living Temple of God.” Can the Church be God’s Church, and stand for less?

The educated, intelligent Negroes of today, who read and think, are as anxious to contribute to the best interests of their communities, their States, and our common Nation, as are the Whites. This has been tested in community “clean-up campaigns,” in anti-tuberculosis movements, in liberty loan drives, in volunteers for war, in active service in army and navy—in every movement in which they have been assigned a share. They have never asked exemption from any duty. If service be a badge of honor, the Negro has won it. If the laborer is worthy of his hire, then the Negro has earned the fruit of his service as a citizen. If there are difficulties to be encountered in the bestowal of his earnings, they should be met squarely. Conference on any vital subject whatever, is always courteous and cordial when the Negro is accorded the place that God gave him in creating him a man. That, too, is not conjecture, but long-proved fact. When men have learned that the house of State is as much God’s house as that of Church, we shall learn how to hold brotherly conference with black or red or yellow or brown, and differences and misunderstandings and green-eyed hatred will be banished.

Utopia, one says! Possibly; but if there were no Utopia to strive for, we would cease the striving, and be content to live in any jungle that gave us birthplace.

The philosophy of life changes as present ideals are reached, and as loftier ones replace them in the half-conscious process of spiritual growth. A retrospect of child-growth, with its heightening ambitions urged upward by progressive ideals and mental and spiritual growth, illustrates this changing philosophy. It ought also to illustrate the folly of a rigid fixedness in life’s relationships such as leaves no room for that expansion which enlightenment brings both to ourselves and to others. Thoughtful people cannot suppose that our ideas about race-relations will always remain just as they are. They have changed greatly in the past, and we do not know just how God is going to lead us through the maze of the future. There is but one sure rule—to do justly, and to know that righteous obedience to God’s law of justice, and conformity to God’s law of love, constitute the wisdom which will be justified of its children in never-ending generations. There ought also to be a human reliance that can be depended upon. In every age, it has been the unusual stability of character based upon profound religious conviction on the part of the few, that has saved the many.

We have traced, in brief, the lives of some of those outstanding negro characters of deep conviction, who have been the ensigns of their people. It was upon these men of Church and School, with their co-workers like Booker Washington and others, that the duty of leadership has fallen in these years, beginning in the ’80s, and continuing until now, when new relations between the races have been in the making. At the beginning of this period the old régime had not yet been forgotten; the bad start of reconstruction had muddied the waters, and no one could see the bottom; the new freed race had still to try its wings; the old survivors of both races—now few, indeed—who had made the old relations, were then the many in middle life clinging to the past; the old “Uncles” and the old “Mammies” were still too many, and the endearment of the old ties was still too strong to give immediate place to a new relation between free Whites and black Freedmen or their free-born sons.

The North did not know just where to place the members of a race in its existing level of development; and the South was unwilling to have them where reconstruction had placed them. In consequence that happened, which has always happened in the history of the race when others had the power; the Negroes were largely unconsidered or ill-considered, and their real interest and their best good were alike submerged, while North and South spent weary years in controversies in which each side was sure of its own rectitude and distrustful of the other’s. No better condition for missing the conservative right can be found than that which extremist advocates necessarily make in imputing error to others because of the conviction that those others must think wrong. Through such a maze, the younger leaders were raised up to guide their people, and to demonstrate to the older, more advanced, white race, the real worth of the backward black.