Masterpieces of Negro Eloquence: The Best Speeches Delivered by the Negro from the days of; Slavery to the Present Time
History
Masterpieces of Negro Eloquence: The Best Speeches Delivered by the Negro from the days of; Slavery to the Present Time
African American orators; African Americans -- History -- Sources; Speeches, addresses, etc., American -- African American authors
The telegram which you sent to Governor Northern to read to his
audience, informing the people of the North of your willingness to
undertake the moral training of the colored children of Georgia, merits
more than a passing notice. It is the first time, we believe, in the
history of the South where a body of representative Southern white women
have shown such interest in the moral welfare of the children of their
former slaves as to be willing to undertake to make them more worthy the
duties and responsibilities of citizenship. True, there have been
individual cases where courageous women have felt their moral
responsibility, and have nobly met it, but one of the saddest things
about the sad condition of affairs in the South has been the utter
indifference which Southern women, who were guarded with unheard of
fidelity during the war, have manifested to the mental and moral welfare
of the children of their faithful slaves, who, in the language of Henry
Grady, placed a black mass of loyalty between them and dishonor. This
was a rare opportunity for you to have shown your gratitude to your
slaves and your interest in their future welfare.
The children would have grown up in utter ignorance had not the North
sent thousands of her noblest daughters to the South on this mission of
heroic love and mercy; and it is worthy of remark of those fair
daughters of the North, that, often eating with Negroes, and in the
earlier days sleeping in their humble cabins, and always surrounded by
thousands of them, there is not one recorded instance where one has been
the victim of violence or insult. If because of the bitterness of your
feelings, of your deep poverty at the close of the war, conditions were
such that you could not do this work yourselves, you might have give a
Christian's welcome to the women who came a thousand miles to do the
work, that, in all gratitude and obligation belonged to you,--but
instead, these women were often persecuted, always they have been
ruthlessly ostracised, even until this day; often they were lonely,
often longed for a word of sympathy, often craved association with their
own race, but for thirty years they have been treated by the Christian
white women of the South,--simply because they were doing your
work,--the work committed to you by your Saviour, when he said,
"Inasmuch as you did it to one of the least of these my brethren, you
did it unto me,"--with a contempt that would serve to justify a
suspicion that instead of being the most cultured women, the purest,
bravest missionaries in America, they were outcasts and lepers.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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