THE AMERICAN FLAG INSULTED BY NEGRO BISHOP IN MACON.
DENOUNCED GLORIOUS EMBLEM AS A CONTEMPTIBLE RAG AT THE STATE NEGRO CONVENTION.
Macon, Ga., Feb. 16.—In an address before the five hundred delegates attending the convention of negroes in this city to discuss racial problems, Bishop H. M. Turner declared the American Flag to be a dirty and contemptible rag. He further said that hell was an improvement on the United States when the negro was involved.
In closing he said:
“I have heard of both white and black men perpetrating rape upon innocent, angelic women, but no negro in this country has been tried by the courts and found guilty of the heinous crime of rape in fifteen years.
“I know that bloody-handed and drunken mobs have said so, but what Christian people would accept what they say? Yet there are millions of men who pretend to be moral and claim to be sensible in this country, who go to these drunken mobs to get information relative to the conduct of colored men.”
How it came to pass is a question which human wisdom may not solve, but in the earliest dawn of history we find the races of men separated by color and by characteristics, very much as they are at this time.
In spite of all the comings and goings, the migrations and conquests, the discoveries and colonizations, the world is pretty nearly the same old world, so far as the distinct races of men are concerned. The Jew is still the Jew, the Gentile still the Gentile. All the currents of the ages have not washed the yellow man white, nor turned the red man yellow, nor the black man red. The hot sun of the tropics pours down upon the heads of the sons of men as fervidly as in the days of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, but it has not been able to kink the hair, flatten the nose, blubber the lips or blacken the hide of a single man, woman or child of the Aryan race. The Chinaman, racially, is what he was in the time of Confucius; the Hindoo is yet the dark man whom Khrishna sought to lead to the higher life.
In Africa, the home of the negro, there has been a monotonous repetition of the same old facts which historians learned from monumental inscriptions and indestructible tablets thousands upon thousands of years old.
The African negro has always been a distinct type, an inferior type, a savage type, a non-progressive type. Left to himself, he wore no clothing, built no houses, had no commerce, systematized no production of any sort and never had the faintest conception of doing anything to improve himself or his condition. He killed for the day the game he needed for the day. For the future, he made as little provision as the Indian and the Esquimau.