Joel Chandler Harris' life of Henry W. Grady including his writings and speeches
History
Joel Chandler Harris' life of Henry W. Grady including his writings and speeches
Grady, Henry Woodfin, 1850-1889
In political compliance the South has evaded the truth, and men have
drifted from their convictions. But we cannot escape this issue. It
faces us wherever we turn. It is an issue that has been, and will be.
The races and tribes of earth are of Divine origin. Behind the laws of
man and the decrees of war, stands the law of God. What God hath
separated let no man join together. The Indian, the Malay, the Negro,
the Caucasian, these types stand as markers of God’s will. Let not man
tinker with the work of the Almighty. Unity of civilization, no more
than unity of faith, will never be witnessed on earth. No race has
risen, or will rise, above its ordained place. Here is the pivotal fact
of this great matter—two races are made equal in law, and in political
rights, between whom the caste of race has set an impassable gulf. This
gulf is bridged by a statute, and the races are urged to cross thereon.
This cannot be. The fiat of the Almighty has gone forth, and in eighteen
centuries of history it is written. We would escape this issue if we
could. From the depths of its soul the South invokes from heaven “peace
on earth, and good will to man.” She would not, if she could, cast this
race back into the condition from which it was righteously raised. She
would not deny its smallest or abridge its fullest privilege. Not to
lift this burden forever from her people, would she do the least of
these things. She must walk through the valley of the shadow, for God
has so ordained. But he has ordained that she shall walk in that
integrity of race, that created in His wisdom has been perpetuated in
His strength. Standing in the presence of this multitude, sobered with
the responsibility of the message I deliver to the young men of the
South, I declare that the truth above all others to be worn unsullied
and sacred in your hearts, to be surrendered to no force, sold for no
price, compromised in no necessity, but cherished and defended as the
covenant of your prosperity, and the pledge of peace to your children,
is that the white race must dominate forever in the South, because it is
the white race, and superior to that race by which its supremacy is
threatened.
It is a race issue. Let us come to this point, and stand here. Here the
air is pure and the light is clear, and here honor and peace abide.
Juggling and evasion deceives not a man. Compromise and subservience has
carried not a point. There is not a white man North or South who does
not feel it stir in the gray matter of his brain and throb in his heart.
Not a negro who does not feel its power. It is not a sectional issue. It
speaks in Ohio, and in Georgia. It speaks wherever the Anglo-Saxon
touches an alien race. It has just spoken in universally approved
legislation in excluding the Chinaman from our gates, not for his
ignorance, vice or corruption, but because he sought to establish an
inferior race in a republic fashioned in the wisdom and defended by the
blood of a homogeneous people.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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