The American Missionary — Volume 44, No. 03, March, 1890 — John Shaqi
The American Missionary — Volume 44, No. 03, March, 1890Various
Religion
The American Missionary — Volume 44, No. 03, March, 1890
Various
Congregational churches -- Missions -- Periodicals; Home missions -- Periodicals
Our next duty is to furnish the Negro plentifully with opportunities for
education. An ignorant race can have no future, save one of degradation
for themselves, and of increasing danger for the nation of which it is a
part. The ignorant Negro must be abolished by the school-house. Training
for the mind, training for the hand, the development and drill of all
the powers of life are necessary to make the Negro no more a peril, but
a factor of immense value in securing the future prosperity of this
country. We must do far more in this direction than has ever yet been
done. The South is still poor and cannot furnish adequately the means
for doing this work as it should be done. The benevolence of the North
must furnish still larger sums for education, that the colored race may
be made safe for us and for themselves.
And, last but not least, we must secure to the Negro the full enjoyment
of all his rights and privileges in church and State. He cannot attain
the measure of success and usefulness toward which Providence points, if
he is to be kept in a state of peonage. A black man is no better for
being black, but he is none the less a man on that account. The simple
thing to be insisted on is that he shall be treated as a man, entitled
to the same rights as other men, and protected in his enjoyment of them.
This is no time to relax our emphasis on this point, when the bitterness
of the caste spirit is venting itself in violence, and in assertion that
white supremacy must be maintained by illegal means if it cannot be by
legal. We maintain that the only safety for the South, and the only way
to its large prosperity, is by securing fair play to every man within
its borders. There must not be one law for the white man and another for
the black. There must not be one standard of legal protection in the
North and another in the South. Anarchy in Chicago is not a whit worse
nor more dangerous than anarchy in the South, that defies law and rules
by the mob in order to gratify race prejudice. Conspiracy to murder in
Chicago is not more outrageous and perilous than the conspiracy of men
of one color in the South to get rid of obnoxious men of another color
by the shot-gun. Injustice and wrong will always bring forth a harvest
of disaster in any part of the country. Fair play for every man must be
our motto. We must have no color-line in politics, no color-line in the
church; but equal rights for all before the law, and in the church equal
privileges of Christian brotherhood.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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