Masterpieces of Negro Eloquence / The Best Speeches Delivered by the Negro from the days of / Slavery to the Present Time

by Unknown

The act of the President, while it affected the rights of all Americans, bore with peculiar hardship, with crushing injustice, on the one hundred and sixty-seven men of the Black Battalion who were discharged from the Army without honor and on a mere assumption of their guilt in the "Brownsville" affray.

That act was a sad blow to the colored race of the country likewise, and fell upon them with cruel surprise. For they are people without many friends and are hard pressed in this boasted land of the free and home of the brave. They are hard pressed in every part of the Republic by an increasing race prejudice, by a bitter colorphobia which forgets that they are weak, forgets their claim at the hands of a Christian nation to just and equal treatment to the end that they may do and become as other men with a race and color different from their own. Blows they are receiving thick and fast from their enemies whose name is legion, blows against their right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness in the South and in the North. We are accustomed as a race to such blows. Cruel as they are and hard to bear, yet they do not take us by surprise. For we have learned by long and bitter experience to look for them from a people who loudly proclaim, in season and out, their belief in the principles of democracy and of Christianity. But when an old friend turns against us, and strikes too like an ancient enemy, such a blow is more grievous to bear, and seems crueler than death itself. The blow of an old friend is always the unkindest blow of all. One is never prepared for it, and when it falls the wound which it inflicts cuts deeper than flesh and blood, for the iron of it enters the soul itself. And so it happened to us, when, two years ago, the cruel wrong of that executive order was done to our brave boys in blue by the hand of a trusted friend, the apostle of the "square deal."

Who can describe the shock of that first terrible amazement, the hot indignation felt by a race at the huge injustice, at the Draconian severity of that order which expelled from the American Army one hundred and sixty-seven men without trial of any kind and on a mere suspicion of their guilt, and which made them forever ineligible to employment thereafter in any department of the National Government, whether on its civil, military, or naval side, and the deep consternation which filled the homes of every colored man in the land—North and South alike? I for one can not describe those feelings, although I experienced in unison with the race at the time the amazement, the indignation, and the consternation which swept us together and caused us to feel and speak and act as one man under the wrong done us by the hand of an old friend whose golden words of hope and fair play we had sometime written in letters of light on the tablets of our hearts. It is no slight matter for any man, whether he be President or private citizen, so to wound the sense of right of a whole race, so to shock its faith in the justice and righteousness of its rulers and government, as that cruel blunder of the President of the United States produced among the colored people of the entire country.

We lifted up our voice as the voice of many waters from one end of the land to the other in loud protest against the wrong, in stern denunciation of it, and the press of the North came nobly to our assistance and swelled the volume of our protest and denunciation. But alas, all this volume of protest and denunciation on the part of the race and of the press would have passed over the nation and the Government like a summer storm of wind and rain—so little do our outcries against injustice and oppression excite the attention and sympathy of the Republic any more—had there not arisen in the Senate of the United States a man for the hour, had not God raised him up to defend his little ones against the slings and arrows of a sleepless energy, of an almost omnipotent power seated in the highest place of the Government. It was the genius, the grandeur of soul of a great man who was able to gather into thunderbolt after thunderbolt all the sense of outraged justice on the part of race and press, and to hurl them with marvelous precision and overwhelming might against that cruel executive order and the hosts of words and messages and other hordes of blood-dyed epithets which the President marshalled and sent forth from time to time in defense of his Draconian decree. If there was sleepless energy in the White House, there was an energy just as sleepless on the floor of the Senate. The almost omnipotent power wielded for the destruction of the Black Battalion by the formidable occupant of the executive mansion was met and matched, ay, overmatched again and again by an omnipotence in discussion which a just cause and genius as orator, lawyer, and debater of the first rank could alone have put into the strong right arm of the brave redresser of a race's wrongs on the floor of the Senate. For more than two years he carried the case of the Black Battalion in his big and tireless brain, in his big and gentle heart, as a mother carries under her bosom her unborn babe. God alone knows what sums of money, what deep thought and solicitude, what unflagging energy, what unceasing labor, he spent in his holy and self-imposed task to right the wrongs of those helpless and persecuted men. In the Senate their case pursued him like a shadow, and at home it sat with him like a ghost in his library, and slept for a few hours only when the great brain slept and the generous heart rested from the pain which was torturing it. Sir, did you know what love went out to you during those tremendous months of toil and struggle, and what prayers from the grateful hearts of ten millions of people?

Yes, he was one man against the whole power of the Administration and all that that meant. Perhaps we do not fully understand what a colossal power that was to confront and grapple with. Almost single-handed he met that power and threw it again and again in the arena of debate. Every speech he made in behalf of his clients, whether on the floor of the Senate or outside of that body, was as terrible as an army with banners to the enemies of the Black Battalion who had now, alas, become his enemies too, and who were bent on the destruction of both, the defender and the defended alike. But he did not hesitate or quail before that power and the danger which threatened his political life. As the battle thickened and perils gathered fast about his head he fought the fight of the Black Battalion as few men in the history of the Republic have ever fought for the weak, for a just cause against organized power and oppression in the high places of the Government. Senator Foraker was one man, but Senator Foraker was a host in himself. We know this, but the enemies of the Black Battalion know it better than we do, for wherever they appeared on the field of action during those two years, whether with their sappers and miners or assaulting columns, there they found him alert, dauntless, invincible—their sappers and miners hoisted with their own petard, their assaulting columns routed and driven to cover before the withering, the deadly fire from the flashing cannon of his facts, his logic, his law, and his eloquence. Sir, God knows that I would rather have fought the fight which you fought so gloriously than be a Senator of the United States, day, than be President of the Republic itself. For it is better to be a brave and just and true man than to be either Senator or President, or both.

"Greater love hath no man than this that a man lay down his life for his friends." This is what Senator Foraker has done for the Black Battalion and for the principles of law and liberty which underlie their case. He has given his political life, his seat in the Senate, all the honor and power which were his had he chosen to defend the order of the President, discharging those one hundred and sixty-seven men without trial of any kind from the Army which their valor had helped to make glorious—instead of the soldiers whom he did not know but whose pitiful case, whose unjust and cruel punishment, enlisted the sympathy of his great heart and the masterly labors of his tireless brain. Yes, I repeat, and do not let it ever be forgotten by us as a race, that Senator Foraker might to-day be his own successor in the United States Senate had he chosen to play in the "Brownsville" affair the part of defender of President Roosevelt's wanton abuse and usurpation of executive power, instead of taking the side of the Black Battalion and the fundamental principle of our law and Constitution that each man accused of crime is entitled to trial before he is condemned and punished. He chose the side of the weak, of justice, and the Constitution in this great struggle, and not that of power and the Administration. This was the sin which brought upon him all the wrath of that power and of that Administration, but of which all good men and true absolve and for which they honor him, and for which, besides, a grateful race enshrines him in its heart of hearts. For he preferred to suffer affliction with the Black Battalion and to suffer defeat for the Senatorship rather than enjoy power and office as the price of his desertion of the cause of those helpless men.

No man can give as much as Senator Foraker has given to a just cause, give as generously, as unselfishly, gloriously as he has given of his very self in this "Brownsville" case and lose that which is best striving for in life. He may lose place in the Government and power as a political leader. But what are these but the ephemera of man's fevered existence and strivings here below? "What shadows we are," Burke said on a memorable occasion in his contest for a seat in Parliament, "and what shadows we pursue." Office, power, popularity; what are they but shadows of passing clouds which a breath blows to us and a breath blows from us again. No man loses anything in reality when he loses such fleeting, such shadowy possessions. But if for the sake of them he loses truth, justice, goodness, his love of the right and his hatred of the wrong, his sympathy for the oppressed, his passion to help God's little ones, such a man has bartered away his soul, the immortal part of him for a rood of grass, which to-day flourisheth and to-morrow withereth and is cast into the oven of all transitory and perishable possessions.

How many men who now hold seats in the United States Senate or the House of Representatives do we even know the names of? How many of all that long procession of them who have been passing for more than a century though those halls of power have we so much as heard the names of? They have filed through those stately chambers to dusty death and oblivion, and the places which knew them once know them no more forever. A few names only are remembered among all the multitude of them, not because of the places they occupied or the power they wielded, but because while in those houses they chose the better part—chose not to busy themselves with shadows, with the things which perish, but seized and held fast to the eternal verities of justice and freedom and human brotherhood. The vast majority of them magnified their brief authority and neglected the opportunity which their offices offered them to link their names and official lives with some noble movement or measure for the betterment of their kind, for the lifting up of those who were down, the strengthening of those who were weak, the succor of those who were hard pressed by man's inhumanity to man.

It is beautiful to defend those who can not defend themselves, to lift up the weak, to succor those who are ready to perish. It is heroic, divine, when the doing so involves peril and sacrifice of self. It is the essence of the Gospel preached and lived by one who spoke and lived as never man spoke and lived. It is simple and undefiled Christianity. Nothing avails to make Senator or President or people Christian but just this one thing—not race or color or creed, not learning and wealth and civilization—but kindness to God's poor, to Christ's little ones. Did you feed them when they were hungry; did you give them to drink when they were thirsty; did you visit and comfort them when they were in prison? Those who do these things to the humblest and the blackest of these little ones of the Republic have done them unto the divine Master, are in truth His disciples; and those who do them not are not His followers, whatever may be their profession, but quite the contrary. They have no part or lot with Him but belong to the evil forces of the world which are forever opposing the coming of His righteous Kingdom on earth when all men shall be brothers, when the strong shall everywhere bear the burdens of the weak.

Inasmuch as William Lloyd Garrison, Charles Sumner, Wendell Phillips, John Brown, and Abraham Lincoln did it to the least of His little ones in this Republic, they did it unto Him. They are a goodly company, the glorious company of the elect of the Republic, its prophets, its priests, and its kings. And, Sir, inasmuch as you, too, did it to the Black Battalion in their dire need, you did it unto Christ, and you are now henceforth and forevermore to enter into the supreme joy of that supreme service and sacrifice. You lost, Sir, your seat in the Senate, it is true, but you have won an enduring place in a race's heart, its enduring love and gratitude, and the plaudit of the divine Master, "Well done, good and faithful servant," uttered from the lips of all good men and true the country over.