He has never either evolved nor sustained a civilization of his own.
Fortunately for the Afro-American, he finds himself better situated than his brethren elsewhere. In Africa and Haiti they have to scuffle for themselves. Result—barbarism.
In America he swells the ranks of civilization’s advancing army, and he has to go forward. We not only support him with aid of all sorts, we not only give him daily precept and example, but we compel him to live a better life than he would live in Africa and Haiti. This compulsion is of two kinds, the fear of punishment and the hope of reward—thus enlisting two of the most powerful passions of the human being.
It should be significant to Doctor Washington that the only portion of his race which has ever made any development is that which has the vast advantage of being sustained, encouraged, taught, led and coerced by the whites among whom they live.
Not long ago a negro preacher whose self-appreciation was as great as that of Doctor Washington went out to Liberia to subdue the heathen, in the home of the negro race.
The heathen were not subdued, but the preacher was. He threw off his store clothes, gave a whoop, gathered up an armful of wives and broke for the woods; the “Call of the Wild” was too much for his newly soldered civilization.
Now, I don’t mean to say that Doctor Washington would relapse, under similar circumstances; but when I hear him call his new race Afro-Americans and listen while he soberly tells them that they are superior to the whites, I beg that he will remember his kin across the sea, his brethren in Santo Domingo, the decadents of Liberia, and the tens of thousands of his race here in this country who devoutly believe in witch doctors, in ghosts, in the conjure bag, and in the power of one negro to undo another by the mysterious but invincible “Trick.”
Remember this, Doctor, education is a good thing, but it never did, and never will, alter the essential character of a man or a race.
Of course, Doctor, if you think your race the equal of ours, you have the right to say it. It’s a free country, you know.
But, really, you ought not to “crowd the monkey” by putting in a claim for superiority.