The Condition, Elevation, Emigration, and Destiny of the Colored People of the United StatesDelany, Martin Robison
History
The Condition, Elevation, Emigration, and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States
Delany, Martin Robison
African Americans
The slave may become a lover of his master, and learn to forgive him for
continual deeds of maltreatment and abuse; just as the Spaniel would
couch and fondle at the feet that kick him; because he has been taught
to reverence them, and consequently, becomes adapted in body and mind to
his condition. Even the shrubbery-loving Canary, and lofty-soaring
Eagle, may be tamed to the cage, and learn to love it from habit of
confinement. It has been so with us in our position among our
oppressors; we have been so prone to such positions; that we have
learned to love them. When reflecting upon this all important, and to
us, all absorbing subject; we feel in the agony and anxiety of the
moment, as though we could cry out in the language of a Prophet of old:
"Oh that my head were waters, and mine eyes a fountain of tears, that I
might weep day and night for the" degradation "of my people! Oh that I
had in the wilderness a lodging place of way-faring men; that I might
leave my people, and go from them!"
The Irishman and German in the United States, are very different persons
to what they were when in Ireland and Germany, the countries of their
nativity. There their spirits were depressed and downcast; but the
instant they set their foot upon unrestricted soil; free to act and
untrammeled to move; their physical condition undergoes a change, which
in time becomes physiological, which is transmitted to the offspring,
who when born under such circumstances, is a decidedly different being
to what it would have been, had it been born under different
circumstances.
A child born under oppression, has all the elements of servility in its
constitution; who when born under favorable circumstances, has to the
contrary, all the elements of freedom and independence of feeling. Our
children then, may not be expected, to maintain that position and manly
bearing; born under the unfavorable circumstances with which we are
surrounded in this country; that we so much desire. To use the language
of the talented Mr. Whipper, "they cannot be raised in this country,
without being stoop shouldered." Heaven's pathway stands unobstructed,
which will lead us into a Paradise of bliss. Let us go on and possess
the land, and the God of Israel will be our God.
The lessons of every school book, the pages of every history, and
columns of every newspaper, are so replete with stimuli to nerve us on
to manly aspirations, that those of our young people, who will now
refuse to enter upon this great theatre of Polynesian adventure, and
take their position on the stage of Central and South America, where a
brilliant engagement, of certain and most triumphant success, in the
drama of human equality awaits them; then, with the blood of _slaves_,
write upon the lintel of every door in sterling Capitals, to be gazed
and hissed at by every passer by--
Doomed by the Creator
To servility and degradation;
The SERVANT of the _white man_,
And despised of every nation!
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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