Appletons' Popular Science Monthly, July 1899: Volume LV, No. 3, July 1899Various
Religion
Appletons' Popular Science Monthly, July 1899: Volume LV, No. 3, July 1899
Various
Science -- Periodicals; Technology -- Periodicals
property and in industrial and business development, rather than in
mere political agitation.
"The highest test of the civilization of any race is in its
willingness to extend a helping hand to the less fortunate. A race,
like an individual, lifts itself up by lifting others up. Surely no
people ever had a greater chance to exhibit the highest Christian
fortitude and magnanimity than is now presented to the people of
Louisiana. It requires little wisdom or statesmanship to repress, to
crush out, to retard the hopes and aspirations of a people, but the
highest and most profound statesmanship is shown in guiding and
stimulating a people, so that every fiber in the body and soul shall
be made to contribute in the highest degree to the usefulness and
ability of the State. It is along this line that I pray God the
thoughts and activities of your convention be guided."
As to the cure for such outbreaks as have recently hurt North Carolina
and South Carolina, I would say that the remedy will not come by the
Southern white man's being merely cursed by the Northern white man or
by the negro. Again, it will not come by the Southern white man merely
depriving the negro of his rights and privileges. Both of these
methods are but superficial, irritating, and must in the nature of
things be short-lived. The statesman, to cure an evil, resorts to
enlightenment, to stimulation; the politician to repression. I have
just remarked that I favor the giving up of nothing that is guaranteed
to us by the Constitution of the United States, or that is fundamental
to our citizenship. While I hold to these views as strongly as any
one, I differ with some as to the method of securing the permanent and
peaceful enjoyment of all the privileges guaranteed to us by our
fundamental law.
In finding a remedy, we must recognize the world-wide fact that the
negro must be led to see and feel that he must make every effort
possible in every way possible to secure the friendship, the
confidence, the co-operation of his white neighbor in the South. To do
this, it is not necessary for the negro to become a truckler or a
trimmer. The Southern white man has no respect for a negro who does
not act from principle. In some way the Southern white man must be led
to see that it is to his interest to turn his attention more and more
to the making of laws that will in the truest sense elevate the negro.
At the present moment, in many cases, when one attempts to get the
negro to co-operate with the Southern white man, he asks the question,
"Can the people who force me to ride in a Jim Crow car, and pay
first-class fare, be my best friends?" In answering such questions,
the Southern white man as well as the negro has a duty to perform.
In the exercise of his political rights I should advise the negro to
be temperate and modest, and more and more to do his own thinking,
rather than to be led or driven by a political "boss" or by political
demagogues.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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