"Of course not; constant familiarity with the race has worn away all
sense of physical repulsion but there is a prejudice which ought to be
an American feeling; it is a prejudice against their rising in the scale
of humanity. A prejudice which virtually says you are down, and I mean
to keep you down. As a servant I tolerate you; you are useful as you are
valuable, but rise one step in the scale of being, and I am ready to put
you down. I see this in the treatment that the free colored people
receive in parts of the South; they seem to me to be the outcasts of an
outcast race. They are denied the right to walk in certain public places
accessible to every class unless they go as nurses, and are forbidden to
assemble in evening meetings, and forced to be in the house unless they
have passes, by an early hour in the night, and in fact they are
hampered or hemmed in on every side; subject to insults from any rude,
coarse or brutal white, and in case of outrages, denied their testimony.
Prejudiced as we are in Pennsylvania, we do not go that far."
"But, Josiah, we have much to blush for in Pennsylvania; colored people
are denied the privilege of riding in our street cars. Only last week
when I was in Philadelphia I saw a very decent-looking colored woman
with a child, who looked too feeble to walk, and the child too heavy for
her to carry. She beckoned to a conductor, but he swept by and took no
more heed of her than if she had been a dog. There was a young lady
sitting in the car, who remarked to her mother, as a very filthy-looking
white man entered, 'See, they will let that filthy creature ride and
prohibit a decent respectable colored person!' The mother quietly
assented.
"From her dress I took her to be a Quakeress, for she had a lovely dress
of dove-colored silk. The young lady had scarcely uttered the words when
a young man who sat next the mother deliberately arose, and beckoned to
the man with the sooty clothes to take his seat; but fortunately for the
Quakeress, a lady who was sitting next her daughter arose just at that
moment, and left the seat, and the old man without noticing the
manoeuvre passed over to the other side, and thus avoided the contact. I
was amused, however, about one thing; for the young man who gave up his
seat was compelled to ride about a mile standing."
"Served him right," said Thomas Carpenter; "it was a very contemptible
action, to attempt to punish the hardihood of the young lady by
attempting to soil her mother's dress; and yet little souls who feel a
morbid satisfaction in trampling on the weak, always sink themselves in
the scale of manhood."
While this conversation was going on, the tea bell rang, and Josiah and
his little charge sat down to a well supplied table; for the Friends,
though plain and economical, are no enemies to good living.
Anna had brought the high-chair in which their own darling had sat a few
months before, when she had made gladness and sunshine around her
parent's path.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account