African Americans; African Americans -- Politics and government -- 20th century; African Americans -- Social conditions -- To 1964
But in the eastern sky, darkness began to arise, the warning flash of
danger swept across the heavens, the thunder drum of war began to roll.
For a moment the world listened in breathless suspense, the suspense of
horror. Louder and louder rose the thunder peal until it drowned every
other sound in the ears of the nation, every other sound save the cries
and wails of dying women and the shrieks of tortured children. Then
France, England, Germany, Japan and America marshalled their forces and
swept eastward to save and to avenge. The story of the Boxer uprising has
been told, but little has been said of how Vladivostok, "A sea-port in the
maritime Province of Siberia," became one of the most important points of
communication with the outside world, and its Consul came frequently to be
heard from by the State Department. And so Greener after years of patience
and toil had come to his own. If the government had wished to get him out
of the way, it had reckoned without China.
A new order of things has come into Negro-American politics and this man
has become a part of it. It matters not that he began his work under the
old regime. So did Judge Gibbs, a man eighty years of age, but he, too,
has kept abreast of the times, and although the reminiscences in his
delightful autobiography take one back to the hazy days when the land was
young and politics a more strenuous thing than it is even now, when there
was anarchy in Louisiana and civil war in Arkansas, when one shot first
and questioned afterward; yet because his mind is still active, because
he has changed his methods with the changing time, because his influence
over young men is greatly potent still; he is, in the race, perhaps, the
best representative of what the old has brought to the new.
Beside him strong, forceful, commanding, stands the figure of George H.
White, whose farewell speech before the Fifty-sixth Congress, when through
the disfranchisement of Negroes he was defeated for re-election, stirred
the country and fired the hearts of his brothers. He has won his place
through honesty, bravery and aggressiveness. He has given something to the
nation that the nation needed, and with such men as Pinchback, Lynch,
Terrell and others of like ilk, acting in concert, it is but a matter of
time when his worth shall induce a repentant people, with a justice
builded upon the foundation of its old prejudice, to ask the Negro back to
take a hand in the affairs of state.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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