But it is said that white students will not now attend school with the colored, and that we must take the facts as they are. But the facts are not all on one side. For years the students of Berea College, in Kentucky, have been about equally divided between the two races, and have studied harmoniously together. And why? Simply because, for a large surrounding region, Berea College has offered the best and cheapest opportunity for an education. Let all the institutions of the American Missionary Association be amply endowed and equipped, so that they can offer to the poor whites more and better than can be obtained anywhere else, and the wasteful and needless expedient of missionary color-line schools and colleges will no longer be thought of.
The Congregationalist.
NOT ON ACCOUNT OF COLOR.
EDITORIAL IN INDEPENDENT.
Professor James M. Gregory, of the Howard University, made some capital remarks on the “color line” at the recent banquet in Washington, in honor of Frederick Douglass. “The color line,” as he justly said, “was drawn when the Negro was made a slave in this country,” and the prejudice existing against him is “not on account of color, but by reason of previous condition, his color serving to indicate his identity with a race held as bondmen.” “This prejudice,” he added, “is purely American. Colored men traveling in other countries have not found color a mark of degradation. If they are reminded of their color at all, it is by Americans they meet, who are not magnanimous enough to treat the negro courteously even on foreign soil, where race prejudice is not tolerated.” * * *
Let the practice of the American people be as impartially just as is their Constitution; and our colored fellow-citizens will have no grievances of which to complain. We congratulate them upon the fact that the Constitution has taken them under its charge, and upon the further fact that the day-star of a bright and promising future is gradually shedding its light upon their horizon. The doctrine of equal privileges and equal responsibilities will in the end lift them to the level of an unquestioned and developed manhood; and then the “color line” will wholly disappear.
ONLY HALF TRUE.
A friend, who is familiar with the blacks at the South, writes us that the statement that “the colored people prefer to be in churches by themselves” is only half true. He adds that, so far as it is true, it is because they either shrink from the restraints of a pure and intelligent religion, such as that of the whites, or from the scorn or ill-concealed toleration of their white fellow-worshipers; and that, if sure of a cordial welcome by the whites, they do not prefer to worship by themselves. We are glad to give publicity to this statement, although it is contradicted by that of every one else whom we remember to have heard speak of the matter. Is there not another reason which tends to separate white and black Christians into distinct churches? Do not the latter, even when assured of a cordial welcome by the whites, usually prefer an emotional, hortatory style of preaching which is very dear to them, but which disturbs, if it do not even amuse, the whites? Certainly it is so here at the North.
The Congregationalist.