The American Missionary — Volume 37, No. 12, December, 1883

by Various

Nor is that awaiting vain, nor that time distant, in view of the astonishingly rapid increase of the colored population—an increase of over 500 per day—an increase of 35 per cent. in ten years, as against 28 per cent. in the white population of the South. It is easy to estimate in how few years the colored population will equal the whites, and it is easy to see that, as this growth goes on and long before the equal numbers are reached, the sense of growing strength and of continued wrong will stimulate the negative resistance of the present to the determined hostility of the future; and when that race conflict comes, what human ken can foretell the issue? But we may be sure that when it comes the North, the whole nation, can no more keep out of it than it could keep out of the dreadful conflict with slavery, out of which this impending struggle grows.

Special significance is given to all this by the recent decision of the Supreme Court of the United States pronouncing the Civil Rights Bill unconstitutional. This takes from the colored man the last shadow of legal protection to rights which he, and all men for themselves, consider essential to their manhood, and will stimulate him to more determined resistance unless the conscience and good sense of the white races shall speedily end this needless, yet dangerous conflict.

This leads me to ask: Is there a remedy for all this, and what is it? Not in dragging the white man down, but in lifting the colored man up. Both races must coöperate. The white man must let down the ladder; the black man must climb. The white man must open the door of the shop, and the black man must go in and do as good work as the white man can. The white man must open the school house and the black man must go in and become as good a scholar as the white man is. The black man can never attain positions and honors by demanding them simply because he is a black man; he must fairly win them by being worthy of them. The white man cannot maintain his superiority by denying the black man the chance of becoming his equal. He cannot hold it by force. Slavery for a time enabled him to do so, for then he had superior numbers and the aid of the Government, but he has no longer that aid and he cannot always have the weight of superior numbers. The white man must give the chance, and the black man must take it and win his position.

But the white man is not ready to give the chance—in other words, surrender the vantage ground his color gives him. Here is a call for an appeal to conscience. The subject must be discussed, North and South, among white and black alike. As the anti-slavery reform arose not out of the stagnant waters of indifference, but out of the dashing stream of healthful agitation, so must the caste reform be brought about. That discussion has begun in earnest, and will not cease till caste be sent to that bourne to which slavery, its ancestor, has gone and whence it shall never return. But discussion must take shape; the Church must cease to sustain caste. The time was when men were afraid to oppose slavery because it would hinder the spread of their churches in the South. They urged: “Why endanger the growth of our denomination by joining in this useless clamor against slavery?” But the time came when these same persons decided that it was more important to destroy slavery than multiply churches that sustained slavery. Missionary societies abandoned their churches in the South, and the great national churches allowed themselves to be rent in twain rather than uphold slavery. Only such an attitude against caste will avail anything. When the North feels that ten churches or schools that stand unequivocally against caste are more important than a thousand churches or schools that sustain caste, then we shall see the beginning of the end.

But the colored people themselves must be educated out of caste. Strange as it may seem, some of them are its abettors, and, stranger still, they are so religiously. As men, they repudiate it; as Christians, they sustain it. They prefer separation mainly, perhaps, because they think the whites would not welcome them. Other reasons may be given. Some of the members love excitement in their worship, and this they can enjoy better if no whites are present; the leaders can be bishops and rulers among their own people, but, if joined to the whites, these honors are denied, or, at least, unequally divided. Why is it that religion is compelled to shield some of the greatest wrongs on earth? Albert Barnes said, long before slavery was abolished: “There is no power out of the Church that could sustain slavery an hour, if it were not sustained in it.” Must sinful and harmful caste, the baleful progeny of slavery, find its bulwark in the Church—nay, in some of the colored churches themselves?

But this wish or willingness of these churches for separation is gravely made use of by many most excellent people as a reason for ceasing to make war against caste. It is said triumphantly: “See how the colored people, welcomed to Dr. Goodell’s or Dr. Rankin’s churches, prefer churches of their own.” Does their abetting caste help to destroy it? Did the wish of the Israelites in the wilderness to return to Egypt help them on to Canaan? If the slaves in this country were ever content to remain slaves, as was sometimes alleged, that was all the greater evidence of the curse of slavery. If the Soodra consents to remain a Soodra, all the more does he need the breaking of his bondage that he may become a man. And so, if the colored people consent to caste separation, all the more do they need emancipation from the bondage of caste.

In this point of view the action of some of the large religious bodies North and South in consenting to a separation on the color line is riveting the chains of caste on the colored people, and sustaining caste-prejudice in the hearts of the white race; and it is seriously questioned by many considerate persons whether the presence of two Congregational Missionary Societies in the South, the one working mainly for the whites, and the other side by side, mainly for the blacks, will not, with all explanations, be construed into a sanction of caste. The question is fairly before the churches, and should be met in a frank and Christian way.

The presence with us to-day of a committee appointed by the American Home Missionary Society to confer on this very subject renders its consideration by this meeting a matter of comity and of Christian duty, and to aid in its intelligent and harmonious settlement I beg leave to contribute some facts and considerations.

The A. M. A. was organized when the great missionary societies, home and foreign, aided churches in the South that received slaveholders as members. It was formed not as an anti-slavery society, nor merely as a formal protest against slavery, but as affording a channel through which anti-slavery Christians might carry forward missions without complicity with slavery. Hence it established missions in foreign lands and among the Indians, and also home missions in the West.

But in the progress of the anti-slavery movement the large missionary societies withdrew their aid from slaveholding churches, and soon thereafter came the opening for the great work to be done for the freedmen. The Association was believed to be providentially prepared to undertake this work, and hence it gave up its home missions in the West and among the Indians and entered with alacrity into this new field.