Is not the South sowing into
the souls of both races the seeds of sin and violence, and shall it not
then reap its full crop of crime and misery, the wild and anarchic harvest
of the whirlwind?
Hard indeed is the lot of the Negro whether in the country or the city of
the South, and in those of the North too for that matter. For wherever he
goes he carries the marks of his race with him, and that is the essence of
his offense in America. His lot is practically the same everywhere. He
faces either in city or country the white man's courts and police power
and race prejudice and his industrial and residential exclusiveness and
jealousies, but above all he faces the white man's church with its
undisguised color-phobia, with its virtual rejection of the brotherhood of
man in respect to all races who happen not to be white. They are in the
regard of this church unclean and socially beyond the pale of its
Christian fellowship. They are salvable to be sure but from afar by
missionary efforts, the farther away the better, in China and Japan, in
India and Africa. For there this church is in no danger of race
contamination in its pews and at its altars and in its homes. The American
church is saying with the spirit of the unseeing Peter of old, "Not so
Lord, we have never accepted any man who is brown or black or yellow as
really our brother, for we are white and Thou hast made us of different
clay, of purer blood than all these millions of brown and black and yellow
peoples. Thou hast made us white and white we mean to remain, Thy common
fatherhood and the brotherhood of all these alien races to the contrary
notwithstanding. We try to be humble Lord, but we have never yet succeeded
in humbling the proud blood which Thou hast given us to the level of
brotherhood with these strange dark peoples."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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