Again, I cannot dwell too much upon the fact that coloured people are
much damaged by this charge. As an injured class we have a right to
appeal from the judgment of the mob, to the judgment of the law and to
the justice of the American people.
Full well our enemies have known where to strike and how to stab us
most fatally. Owing to popular prejudice, it has become the misfortune
of the coloured people of the South and of the North as well, to have,
as I have said, the sins of the few visited upon the many.
When a white man steals, robs or murders, his crime is visited upon
his own head alone. But not so with the black man. When he commits a
crime, the whole race is made responsible. The case before us is an
example. This unfairness confronts us not only here but it confronts us
everywhere else.
Even when American art undertakes to picture the types of the two
races, it invariably places in comparison, not the best of both races
as common fairness would dictate, but it puts side by side and in
glaring contrast, the lowest type of the Negro with the highest type
of the white man and then calls upon the world to “look upon this
picture, then upon that.”
When a black man’s language is quoted, in order to belittle and degrade
him, his ideas are often put in the most grotesque and unreadable
English, while the utterances of Negro scholars and authors are
ignored. To-day, Sojourner Truth is more readily quoted than Alexander
Cromwell or Dr. James McCune Smith. A hundred white men will attend a
concert of counterfeit Negro minstrels, with faces blackened with burnt
cork, to one who will attend a lecture by an intelligent Negro.
Even the late World’s Columbian Exposition was guilty of this
unfairness. While I join with all other men in pronouncing the
Exposition itself one of the grandest demonstrations of civilization
that the world has ever seen, yet great and glorious as it was, it was
made to show just this kind of injustice and discrimination against the
Negro.
As nowhere in the world, it was hoped that here the idea of human
brotherhood would have been grandly recognized and most gloriously
illustrated. It should have been thus and would have been thus, had
it been what it professed to be, a World’s Exposition. It was not
such, however, in its spirit at this point; it was only an American
Exposition. The spirit of American caste against the educated Negro
was conspicuously seen from start to finish, and to this extent the
Exposition was made simply an American Exposition instead of a World’s
Exposition.
Since the day of Pentecost there was never assembled in any one place
or on any one occasion a larger variety of peoples of all forms,
features and colors and all degrees of civilization, than was assembled
at this World’s Exposition. It was a grand ethnological object lesson,
a fine chance to study all likenesses and all differences of mankind.
Here were Japanese, Soudanese, Chinese, Singalese, Syrians, Persians,
Tunisians, Algerians, Egyptians, East Indians, Laplanders, Esquimaux,
and, as if to shame the educated Negro of America, the Dahomeyans
were there to exhibit their barbarism and increase American contempt
for the Negro intellect. All classes and conditions were there save
the educated American Negro. He ought to have been there, if only to
show what American slavery and American freedom have done for him. The
fact that all other nations were there at their best, made the Negro’s
exclusion the more pronounced and the more significant. People from
abroad noticed the fact that while we have eight millions of colored
people in the United States, many of them gentlemen and scholars,
not one of them was deemed worthy to be appointed a Commissioner,
or a member of an important committee, or a guide or a guard on the
Exposition grounds, and this was evidently an intentional slight to
the race. What a commentary is this upon the liberality of our boasted
American liberty and American equality! It is a silent example, to
be sure, but it is one that speaks louder than words. It says to the
world that the colored people of America are not deemed by Americans as
within the compass of American law, progress and civilization. It says
to the lynchers and mobocrats of the South, go on in your hellish work
of Negro persecution. You kill their bodies, we kill their souls.