The American Missionary — Volume 35, No. 6, June, 1881 — John Shaqi
The American Missionary — Volume 35, No. 6, June, 1881Various
History
The American Missionary — Volume 35, No. 6, June, 1881
Various
Congregational churches -- Missions -- Periodicals; Home missions -- Periodicals
It is all right for colored men to do the work South, but they must
have a white overseer. At the barber shops in Topeka they shave
both white and colored, but let a colored man shave a black man in
Savannah, and he will have no white customers. If a white man and a
colored man walk the streets of Savannah together, the colored man
must go behind, like a dog, not walk by the white man’s side. It
was a long time before I learned why even my deacons would always
walk behind me. That was their training. I said: “Walk by my side,
you are my brother.” My daughter walked the streets of Savannah
with a colored lady by her side. A white lady said to her, “You
cannot be respected; you should have the colored girl walk behind
you.”
In Topeka colored men and white walk side by side. Even the
Governor of the State does not hesitate to walk this way with
a colored man. I attended an election yesterday in Topeka.
Politicians were anxious for colored votes. So they are in the
South sometimes, but I observed the different way they have of
treating a colored man in Topeka from the one they practice in
Savannah. The politician says: “Mr. So-and-So,” but in Savannah
it is, “Jim, Jack, boy, come, give me a vote.” I never heard a
Southern white man “Mr.” a colored man. I wrote several articles
for the _Savannah News_ and called the colored girls Misses, and
applied Mr. to colored men. In every case they struck out Miss or
Mr., as applied to colored persons. I was told by a prominent man
in Savannah that any man who would sit at the table with a colored
man ought to be driven out of the city. A colored man cannot sue a
white man in Savannah and collect a debt; but in Kansas he is equal
before the law. A negro entered the Presbyterian church in Savannah
when Ralph Wells, of New York, was lecturing on Sabbath-schools,
and was called upon to pray, at which the black sexton said to
me, “The millennium must be here, a colored man prayed in the
Presbyterian church! I never heard of such a thing before in my
life.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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