The slave trade : $b Slavery and colorJervey, Theodore D. (Theodore Dehon)
History
The slave trade : $b Slavery and color
Jervey, Theodore D. (Theodore Dehon)
African Americans; Slave trade -- United States; Slavery -- United States; United States -- Race relations
“Contact with the whites is the chief condition for the progress of
the Negro. Where he is isolated or where he greatly outnumbers the
whites, his advance will be retarded.... Yet he is often no better off
at the North where the white laborers may refuse to work with him and
where he has no more chance than in the South of receiving, except in
very exceptional cases, any sort of social recognition from any class
of whites, while in the cities everywhere he is met by the competition
of the generally more diligent and more intelligent whites. So the
Negro is after all better off in the South and on the land, than
anywhere else.”[306]
Contrasting the views of Booker Washington and DuBois, he finds a
cultured group which declare they do not seek social equality with
the whites, yet in spite of the fact, stressed, that where he is
isolated or where he greatly outnumbers the whites, his advance will be
retarded, a condition of the South, building upon such a foundation,
Mr. Bryce does not hesitate to declare, that because, at the North,
“the white laborers may refuse to work with him ... the Negro is after
all better at the South.”
Apparently in the view of this great Englishman, the risk of a relapse
into barbarism is not as serious a matter to the Negro, as exposure
to the cold shoulder or angry scowl of a white laborer; and so he
dismisses the Negro and his future with an attempt to epitomize the
philosophy of Dr. Washington into what is really Mr. Bryce’s imperious
conviction, viz, that there is:
“no use in resisting patent facts, that all that the Negro can do
at present, and the most effective thing, that, with a view to the
future, he could do, is to raise himself in intelligence, knowledge,
industry, thrift, whatever makes for self help and self respect.”
But even while this epitome was appearing in print for the first time,
the inability of the great author to fully plumb the depths of Dr.
Washington’s political philosophy was shown by the New York Age, the
leading colored paper of the United States, which, upon the nomination
of Mr. Taft for the presidency in 1908, published what was asserted to
be the facsimile of the telegram sent him by Dr. Washington, to the
effect that he expected to see him elected and by his (Washington’s)
people, as no doubt he was, to a very great degree, by their votes in
the Northern States.
If then—
“a systematic effort has been made to settle colored people in
Indiana, to hold that State in the Republican column”[307]—
surely a way had been found for the colored man to do more than Mr.
Bryce thought he could. He can move out of that section where in mass
his vote was destructive into that one, in which it is sought, and
there cast it for what he deems his interest.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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