THE RELATIONS OF THE CHURCH TO THE COLORED RACE.
BY REV. LEWIS GROUT.
Rev. Dr. J. L. Tucker’s speech on the above subject before the Episcopal Church Congress, in Richmond, last October, has had a very emphatic indorsement from professional and other men in the South, and yet not without severe criticism from some of the colored people, especially in Jackson, Miss., the home of Dr. Tucker, where he made the speech. It seems that Dr. Tucker is a man of Northern birth, that he was a soldier in the Confederate army, after which he became a planter, then a rector, and that he has had much experience and interest in the education of the colored race, as planter, teacher and minister. And yet, with all his acquaintance with that race, there are several important points pertaining to their history, character and welfare, in which he is sadly mistaken.
The first mistake of his that I will notice has respect to the character of the native African. In Africa, he says, “human life has no sacredness, and men, women and children are slain as beasts are, and even more carelessly, as less valuable. Human suffering excites no pity, and blood flows like water.” “That what we call morality, whether in the relations of the sexes, or in the sense of truthfulness, or in the sense of honesty, has no lodgment whatever in the native African’s breast;” and that they have “no words” for gratitude, generosity, industry, truthfulness, honesty, modesty, gentleness and virtue, because they have none of these ideas. Now all this, and much more of the same sort, is the baldest of hyperbole, far from the truth. During my fifteen years of labor in that land, I made the study of African character and language a specialty; and I believe that words representing the ideas above named may be found in every language and dialect on the continent. As to humanity and all kindred virtues, they are abreast, if not ahead, of any and every other people that have not had the gospel. For honesty and morality, under pure native rule, in many respects, the Zulus and cognate tribes would put to shame the people in every part of this land of ours. I have no reason to believe that I ever lost a sixpence worth of anything, through their stealing, in all those fifteen years of my stay among them; and as to the relations of the sexes, I believe there are ten illegitimate births here in New England to-day, where there was ever one in Zululand previous to the incoming of the Dutch and English. To be sure, all African tribes may not be abreast of what the Zulus used to be, in these things. And yet Rev. Dr. Crummell, for many years a college professor and rector of a parish in Liberia, says: “All along the west coast of Africa the family tie and the marriage bond are as strong as among any primitive people.” “Their maidenly virtue, the instinct to chastity, is a marvel.”
2. Dr. Tucker says the colored people of the South are grossly immoral. If he had made a very deserved exception of the many who have been brought under the restraints of the gospel by good mission work among them, within a few years, his charge would have been more just. But whence came the great excess in vice which he avers? Could anything else have been expected from long generations of the peculiar training their bondage gave them? Under the treatment they had, as Dr. Tucker says, “they quickly learned to conceal,” “learned lying, stealing and adultery.” By a somewhat minute detail, he shows how the familiarity and “the intrigues which the white men” had with the black women wrought in them, as he says, “the utter destruction of the very sense of virtue.”
3. Dr. Tucker says nothing of importance has been accomplished by Northern benevolence for the colored people, except to make them worse—to “build strongholds for the devil in disguise,” to “build up the kingdom of evil.” Now all this, in which his speech abounds, I repudiate as false and slanderous. In the course of forty years I have seen a good deal of mission work, of one kind and another, at home and abroad, and under the auspices of almost every society in the world. I have also seen the work of the American Missionary Association among the Freedmen; and, as the result of all, I am free to say, I believe Dr. Tucker may go the world over, time through, ransack all history, and not be able to point to a time or place where mission work and money have done more, in proportion to the means employed, than has been done by this Association among the colored people since their emancipation, two decades since.
4. Dr. Tucker alleges that Northern missionaries are incompetent, “don’t know what they are about,” or “how to reach the colored people,” or “how to deal with them,” “barely know a Negro when they see him.” Well, I am told there are some white people in the South, who, themselves “don’t know a Negro when they see him,” in some cases only as they trace his genealogy and find out who his mother was. But how should Dr. Tucker, himself, be able to know all about this matter, how to reach the colored people, how to lift them up, how to heal them, better than other men of Northern birth?
5. The counterpart of the above charge is, that the Southern whites are the “only ones” who know how to do good mission work for the colored race, and that we of the North must put all our money into their “control.” But what have they ever done to prove such special fitness to inspire the Negro with confidence in their teaching and treatment, to prove their own faith in his capacity for a high order of improvement, to encourage us to put “every dollar” of our mission money into their hands? Why, after they had had the black man in their own special teaching and treatment for more than two centuries, utterly dissevered from pagan Africa, all plastic, docile and confined, as he was, to their exclusive training, has his original heathenism been so little improved as to leave the Negro no better than Dr. Tucker represents him to be. And even now, what great effort have they made for his improvement in the two decades that have passed since his emancipation?