The Journal of Negro History, Volume 6, 1921Various
History
The Journal of Negro History, Volume 6, 1921
Various
African Americans -- Periodicals
To be consistent with existing and probably unalterable
prejudices in the United States, the freed blacks ought to be
permanently removed beyond the region occupied by, or allotted
to, a white population. The objections to a thorough
incorporation of the two people, are, with most of the whites,
insuperable; and are admitted by all of them to be very powerful.
If the blacks, strongly marked as they are by physical and
lasting peculiarities, be retained amid the whites, under the
degrading privation of equal rights, political or social, they
must be always dissatisfied with their condition, as a change
only from one to another species of oppression; always secretly
confederating against the ruling and privileged class; and always
uncontrolled by some of the most cogent motives to moral and
respectable conduct. The character of the free blacks even where
their legal condition is least affected by their color, seems to
put these truths beyond question. It is material, also, that the
removal of the blacks to be a distance precluding the jealousies
and hostilities to be apprehended from a neighboring people,
stimulated by the contempt known to be entertained for their
peculiar features; to say nothing of their vindictive
recollections, or the predatory propensities which their state of
society might foster. Nor is it fair, in estimating the danger of
collisions with the whites, to charge it wholly on the side of
the black. There would be reciprocal antipathies doubling the
danger.
The colonizing plan on foot has, as far as it extends, a due
regard to these requisites; with the additional object of
bestowing new blessings, civil and religious, on the quarter of
the Globe most in need of them. The Society proposes to
transport to the African coast all free and freed blacks who may
be willing to remove thither; to provide by fair means, and, it
is understood, with a prospect of success, a suitable territory
for their reception; and to initiate them into such an
establishment as may gradually and indefinitely expand itself.
The experiment, under this view of it, merits encouragement from
all who regard slavery as an evil, who wish to see it diminished
and abolished by peaceable and just means, and who have
themselves no better mode to propose. Those who have most doubted
the success of the experiment must, at least, have wished to find
themselves in an error.
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