ASHAMED.
Any colored man who complains of the treatment he receives in America is apt to be faced sooner or later by the statement that he is ashamed of his race.
The statement usually strikes him as a most astounding piece of illogical reasoning, to which a hot reply is appropriate.
And yet notice the curious logic of the persons who say such things. They argue:
White men alone are men. This Negro wants to be a man. Ergo he wants to be a white man.
Their attention is drawn to the efforts of colored people to be treated decently. This minor premise therefore attracts them. But the major premise—the question as to treating black men like white men—never enters their heads, nor can they conceive it entering the black man’s head. If he wants to be a man he must want to be white, and therefore it is with peculiar complacency that a Tennessee paper says of a dark champion of Negro equality: “He bitterly resents his Negro blood.”
Not so, O Blind Man. He bitterly resents your treatment of Negro blood. The prouder he is, or has a right to be, of the blood of his black fathers, the more doggedly he resists the attempt to load men of that blood with ignominy and chains. It is race pride that fights for freedom; it is the man ashamed of his blood who weakly submits and smiles.
JESUS CHRIST IN BALTIMORE.
It seems that it is not only Property that is screaming with fright at the Black Spectre in Baltimore, but Religion also. Two churches founded in the name of Him who “put down the mighty from their seats and exalted them of low degree” are compelled to move. Their palatial edifices filled with marble memorials and Tiffany windows are quite useless for the purposes of their religion since black folk settled next door. Incontinently they have dropped their Bibles and gathered up their priestly robes and fled, after selling their property to colored people for $125,000 in good, cold cash.
Where are they going? Uptown. Up to the wealthy and exclusive and socially select. There they will establish their little gods again, and learned prelates with sonorous voices will ask the echoing pews: “How can the Church reach the working man?”