“Five thousand years ago some laws were better than those of our day.
“For instance, in those ancient laws, if a slave woman had a child, the father being her owner, the mother and the child were set free. In magnificent America, in Lincoln’s day, thousands of slave children, with slave owners for fathers, were sold in the public markets.”
Now, not for one moment do intelligent and law-abiding Colored citizens uphold or make excuses for the brutish crimes committed by the degenerate members (and there are many) of their own race. For they fully realize that it means a faster and higher progress of all their people to have Colored criminals punished to the fullest extent of the law, after they have been given the same fair trials, convictions and sentences that are handed out to the thousands of white criminals who commit the same kind of crimes. And just as Colored degenerates are disgusting and shameful to up-right living white people, so are white degenerates disgusting and shameful to up-right living Colored people. Thus the broad-minded and law-abiding Colored and white citizens now mutually know that it is for the greater advancement of both races and a closer brotherhood combining of all Americans for them to see to it, as far as possible, that all criminals be rightly protected when arrested, given fair trials, safely guarded after sentenced and fully punished in a confinement where they cannot further morally lower themselves nor longer dilute the purity of human society.
And in thus far carrying out their Christian duties for the elevation of humanity, good Colored and white people are contented in knowing that for those criminals of both races who are shrewd enough to escape the detection and punishment of earthly laws, there is a Heavenly law that never fails to punish them at the proper time. And even while on their death beds those evil doers are twisting and turning in mental and bodily sufferings, they will not on account of their torturing pains be able to truthfully and peacefully chant such consoling lines that are found in Tennyson’s poem “Crossing The Bar”, nor will their names be written in that “Book of Gold” where it is said Abou Ben Adhem had his name inscribed above all of those who loved the Lord, because he (Abou Ben Adhem) loved all his fellowmen.
FOLK-LORE SONGS OF THE AMERICAN NEGRO
Different Emotions
Prayer
From lips of slaves with age bent low,
Wet prayers burst forth in deepest flow
To God above that some new light
Would slaves unborn save from such plight.
Work