[Illustration: Yours sincerely A. J. Cooper.]
A VOICE FROM THE SOUTH.
BY
A BLACK WOMAN OF THE SOUTH.
XENIA, OHIO:
THE ALDINE PRINTING HOUSE.
1892.
COPYRIGHT 1892
BY
ANNA JULIA COOPER.
A VOICE FROM THE SOUTH.
“WITH REGRET
I FORGET
IF THE SONG BE LIVING YET,
YET REMEMBER, VAGUELY NOW,
IT WAS HONEST, ANYHOW.”
TO
BISHOP BENJAMIN WILLIAM ARNETT,
WITH PROFOUND REGARD FOR HIS HEROIC DEVOTION
TO
GOD AND THE RACE,
both in Church and in State,—and with sincere
esteem for his unselfish espousal of the cause
of the Black Woman and of every human interest
that lacks a Voice and needs a Defender, this,
the primary utterance of my heart and pen,
IS AFFECTIONATELY INSCRIBED.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CONTENTS.
PART FIRST.
SOPRANO OBLIGATO.
WOMANHOOD A VITAL ELEMENT IN THE REGENERATION AND PROGRESS OF A
RACE 9
THE HIGHER EDUCATION OF WOMAN 48
“WOMAN VS. THE INDIAN” 80
THE STATUS OF WOMAN IN AMERICA 127
PART SECOND.
TUTTI AD LIBITUM.
HAS AMERICA A RACE PROBLEM; IF SO, HOW CAN IT BEST BE SOLVED? 149
THE NEGRO AS PRESENTED IN AMERICAN LITERATURE 175
WHAT ARE WE WORTH? 228
THE GAIN FROM A BELIEF 286
OUR RAISON D’ÊTRE.
In the clash and clatter of our American Conflict, it has been said that
the South remains Silent. Like the Sphinx she inspires vociferous
disputation, but herself takes little part in the noisy controversy. One
muffled strain in the Silent South, a jarring chord and a vague and
uncomprehended cadenza has been and still is the Negro. And of that
muffled chord, the one mute and voiceless note has been the sadly
expectant Black Woman,
An infant crying in the night,
An infant crying for the light;
And with _no language—but a cry_.
The colored man’s inheritance and apportionment is still the sombre
crux, the perplexing _cul de sac_ of the nation,—the dumb skeleton in
the closet provoking ceaseless harangues, indeed, but little understood
and seldom consulted. Attorneys for the plaintiff and attorneys for the
defendant, with bungling _gaucherie_ have analyzed and dissected,
theorized and synthesized with sublime ignorance or pathetic
misapprehension of counsel from the black client. One important witness
has not yet been heard from. The summing up of the evidence deposed, and
the charge to the jury have been made—but no word from the Black Woman.
It is because I believe the American people to be conscientiously
committed to a fair trial and ungarbled evidence, and because I feel it
essential to a perfect understanding and an equitable verdict that truth
from _each_ standpoint be presented at the bar,—that this little Voice
has been added to the already full chorus. The “other side” has not been
represented by one who “lives there.” And not many can more sensibly
realize and more accurately tell the weight and the fret of the “long
dull pain” than the open-eyed but hitherto voiceless Black Woman of
America.
The feverish agitation, the perfervid energy, the busy objectivity of
the more turbulent life of our men serves, it may be, at once to cloud
or color their vision somewhat, and as well to relieve the smart and
deaden the pain for them. Their voice is in consequence not always
temperate and calm, and at the same time radically corrective and
sanatory. At any rate, as our Caucasian barristers are not to blame if
they cannot _quite_ put themselves in the dark man’s place, neither
should the dark man be wholly expected fully and adequately to reproduce
the exact Voice of the Black Woman.
Delicately sensitive at every pore to social atmospheric conditions, her
calorimeter may well be studied in the interest of accuracy and fairness
in diagnosing what is often conceded to be a “puzzling” case. If these
broken utterances can in any way help to a clearer vision and a truer
pulse-beat in studying our Nation’s Problem, this Voice by a Black Woman
of the South will not have been raised in vain.
TAWAWA CHIMNEY CORNER;
SEPT. 17, 1892.
SOPRANO OBLIGATO.
For they the _Royal-hearted Women_ are
Who nobly love the noblest, yet have grace
For needy, suffering lives in lowliest place;
Carrying a choicer sunlight in their smile,
The heavenliest ray that pitieth the vile.
· · · · ·
Though I were happy, throned beside the king,
I should be tender to each little thing
With hurt warm breast, that had no speech to tell
Its inward pangs; and I would soothe it well
With tender touch and with a low, soft moan
For company.
—_George Eliot._
[1]WOMANHOOD A VITAL ELEMENT IN THE REGENERATION AND PROGRESS OF A RACE.
[Illustration]
The two sources from which, perhaps, modern civilization has derived its
noble and ennobling ideal of woman are Christianity and the Feudal
System.
Footnote 1:
Read before the convocation of colored clergy of the Protestant
Episcopal Church at Washington, D. C., 1886.
In Oriental countries woman has been uniformly devoted to a life of
ignorance, infamy, and complete stagnation. The Chinese shoe of to-day
does not more entirely dwarf, cramp, and destroy her physical powers,
than have the customs, laws, and social instincts, which from remotest
ages have governed our Sister of the East, enervated and blighted her
mental and moral life.
Mahomet makes no account of woman whatever in his polity. The Koran,
which, unlike our Bible, was a product and not a growth, tried to
address itself to the needs of Arabian civilization as Mahomet with his
circumscribed powers saw them. The Arab was a nomad. Home to him meant
his present camping place. That deity who, according to our western
ideals, makes and sanctifies the home, was to him a transient bauble to
be toyed with so long as it gave pleasure and then to be thrown aside
for a new one. As a personality, an individual soul, capable of eternal
growth and unlimited development, and destined to mould and shape the
civilization of the future to an incalculable extent, Mahomet did not
know woman. There was no hereafter, no paradise for her. The heaven of
the Mussulman is peopled and made gladsome not by the departed wife, or
sister, or mother, but by _houri_—a figment of Mahomet’s brain,
partaking of the ethereal qualities of angels, yet imbued with all the
vices and inanity of Oriental women. The harem here, and—“dust to dust”
hereafter, this was the hope, the inspiration, the _summum bonum_ of the
Eastern woman’s life! With what result on the life of the nation, the
“Unspeakable Turk,” the “sick man” of modern Europe can to-day
exemplify.
Says a certain writer: “The private life of the Turk is vilest of the
vile, unprogressive, unambitious, and inconceivably low.” And yet Turkey
is not without her great men. She has produced most brilliant minds; men
skilled in all the intricacies of diplomacy and statesmanship; men whose
intellects could grapple with the deep problems of empire and manipulate
the subtle agencies which check-mate kings. But these minds were not the
normal outgrowth of a healthy trunk. They seemed rather ephemeral
excrescencies which shoot far out with all the vigor and promise,
apparently, of strong branches; but soon alas fall into decay and
ugliness because there is no soundness in the root, no life-giving sap,
permeating, strengthening and perpetuating the whole. There is a worm at
the core! The homelife is impure! and when we look for fruit, like
apples of Sodom, it crumbles within our grasp into dust and ashes.
It is pleasing to turn from this effete and immobile civilization to a
society still fresh and vigorous, whose seed is in itself, and whose
very name is synonymous with all that is progressive, elevating and
inspiring, viz., the European bud and the American flower of modern
civilization.
And here let me say parenthetically that our satisfaction in American
institutions rests not on the fruition we now enjoy, but springs rather
from the possibilities and promise that are inherent in the system,
though as yet, perhaps, far in the future.
“Happiness,” says Madame de Stael, “consists not in perfections
attained, but in a sense of progress, the result of our own endeavor
under conspiring circumstances _toward_ a goal which continually
advances and broadens and deepens till it is swallowed up in the
Infinite.” Such conditions in embryo are all that we claim for the land
of the West. We have not yet reached our ideal in American civilization.
The pessimists even declare that we are not marching in that direction.
But there can be no doubt that here in America is the arena in which the
next triumph of civilization is to be won; and here too we find promise
abundant and possibilities infinite.
Now let us see on what basis this hope for our country primarily and
fundamentally rests. Can any one doubt that it is chiefly on the
homelife and on the influence of good women in those homes? Says
Macaulay: “You may judge a nation’s rank in the scale of civilization
from the way they treat their women.” And Emerson, “I have thought that
a sufficient measure of civilization is the influence of good women.”
Now this high regard for woman, this germ of a prolific idea which in
our own day is bearing such rich and varied fruit, was ingrafted into
European civilization, we have said, from two sources, the Christian
Church and the Feudal System. For although the Feudal System can in no
sense be said to have originated the idea, yet there can be no doubt
that the habits of life and modes of thought to which Feudalism gave
rise, materially fostered and developed it; for they gave us chivalry,
than which no institution has more sensibly magnified and elevated
woman’s position in society.
Tacitus dwells on the tender regard for woman entertained by these
rugged barbarians before they left their northern homes to overrun
Europe. Old Norse legends too, and primitive poems, all breathe the same
spirit of love of home and veneration for the pure and noble influence
there presiding—the wife, the sister, the mother.
And when later on we see the settled life of the Middle Ages “oozing
out,” as M. Guizot expresses it, from the plundering and pillaging life
of barbarism and crystallizing into the Feudal System, the tiger of the
field is brought once more within the charmed circle of the goddesses of
his castle, and his imagination weaves around them a halo whose
reflection possibly has not yet altogether vanished.
It is true the spirit of Christianity had not yet put the seal of
catholicity on this sentiment. Chivalry, according to Bascom, was but
the toning down and softening of a rough and lawless period. It gave a
roseate glow to a bitter winter’s day. Those who looked out from castle
windows revelled in its “amethyst tints.” But God’s poor, the weak, the
unlovely, the commonplace were still freezing and starving none the less
in unpitied, unrelieved loneliness.
Respect for woman, the much lauded chivalry of the Middle Ages, meant
what I fear it still means to some men in our own day—respect for the
elect few among whom they expect to consort.
The idea of the radical amelioration of womankind, reverence for woman
as woman regardless of rank, wealth, or culture, was to come from that
rich and bounteous fountain from which flow all our liberal and
universal ideas—the Gospel of Jesus Christ.
And yet the Christian Church at the time of which we have been speaking
would seem to have been doing even less to protect and elevate woman
than the little done by secular society. The Church as an organization
committed a double offense against woman in the Middle Ages. Making of
marriage a sacrament and at the same time insisting on the celibacy of
the clergy and other religious orders, she gave an inferior if not an
impure character to the marriage relation, especially fitted to reflect
discredit on woman. Would this were all or the worst! but the Church by
the licentiousness of its chosen servants invaded the household and
established too often as vicious connections those relations which it
forbade to assume openly and in good faith. “Thus,” to use the words of
our authority, “the religious corps became as numerous, as searching,
and as unclean as the frogs of Egypt, which penetrated into all
quarters, into the ovens and kneading troughs, leaving their filthy
trail wherever they went.” Says Chaucer with characteristic satire,
speaking of the Friars:
‘Women may now go safely up and doun,
In every bush, and under every tree,
Ther is non other incubus but he,
And he ne will don hem no dishonour.’
Henry, Bishop of Liege, could unblushingly boast the birth of twenty-two
children in fourteen years.[2]
Footnote 2:
Bascom.
It may help us under some of the perplexities which beset our way in
“the one Catholic and Apostolic Church” to-day, to recall some of the
corruptions and incongruities against which the Bride of Christ has had
to struggle in her past history and in spite of which she has kept,
through many vicissitudes, the faith once delivered to the saints.
Individuals, organizations, whole sections of the Church militant may
outrage the Christ whom they profess, may ruthlessly trample under foot
both the spirit and the letter of his precepts, yet not till we hear the
voices audibly saying “Come let us depart hence,” shall we cease to
believe and cling to the promise, “_I am with you to the end of the
world_.”
“Yet saints their watch are keeping,
The cry goes up ‘How long!’
And soon the night of weeping
Shall be the morn of song.”
However much then the facts of any particular period of history may seem
to deny it, I for one do not doubt that the source of the vitalizing
principle of woman’s development and amelioration is the Christian
Church, so far as that church is coincident with Christianity.
Christ gave ideals not formulæ. The Gospel is a germ requiring millennia
for its growth and ripening. It needs and at the same time helps to form
around itself a soil enriched in civilization, and perfected in culture
and insight without which the embryo can neither be unfolded or
comprehended. With all the strides our civilization has made from the
first to the nineteenth century, we can boast not an idea, not a
principle of action, not a progressive social force but was already
mutely foreshadowed, or directly enjoined in that simple tale of a meek
and lowly life. The quiet face of the Nazarene is ever seen a little way
ahead, never too far to come down to and touch the life of the lowest in
days the darkest, yet ever leading onward, still onward, the tottering
childish feet of our strangely boastful civilization.
By laying down for woman the same code of morality, the same standard of
purity, as for man; by refusing to countenance the shameless and equally
guilty monsters who were gloating over her fall,—graciously stooping in
all the majesty of his own spotlessness to wipe away the filth and grime
of her guilty past and bid her go in peace and sin no more; and again in
the moments of his own careworn and footsore dejection, turning
trustfully and lovingly, away from the heartless snubbing and sneers,
away from the cruel malignity of mobs and prelates in the dusty marts of
Jerusalem to the ready sympathy, loving appreciation and unfaltering
friendship of that quiet home at Bethany; and even at the last, by his
dying bequest to the disciple whom he loved, signifying the protection
and tender regard to be extended to that sorrowing mother and ever
afterward to the sex she represented;—throughout his life and in his
death he has given to men a rule and guide for the estimation of woman
as an equal, as a helper, as a friend, and as a sacred charge to be
sheltered and cared for with a brother’s love and sympathy, lessons
which nineteen centuries’ gigantic strides in knowledge, arts, and
sciences, in social and ethical principles have not been able to probe
to their depth or to exhaust in practice.
It seems not too much to say then of the vitalizing, regenerating, and
progressive influence of womanhood on the civilization of to-day, that,
while it was foreshadowed among Germanic nations in the far away dawn of
their history as a narrow, sickly and stunted growth, it yet owes its
catholicity and power, the deepening of its roots and broadening of its
branches to Christianity.
The union of these two forces, the Barbaric and the Christian, was not
long delayed after the Fall of the Empire. The Church, which fell with
Rome, finding herself in danger of being swallowed up by barbarism, with
characteristic vigor and fertility of resources, addressed herself
immediately to the task of conquering her conquerers. The means chosen
does credit to her power of penetration and adaptability, as well as to
her profound, unerring, all-compassing diplomacy; and makes us even now
wonder if aught human can successfully and ultimately withstand her
far-seeing designs and brilliant policy, or gainsay her well-earned
claim to the word _Catholic_.
She saw the barbarian, little more developed than a wild beast. She
forbore to antagonize and mystify his warlike nature by a full blaze of
the heartsearching and humanizing tenets of her great Head. She said
little of the rule “If thy brother smite thee on one cheek, turn to him
the other also;” but thought it sufficient for the needs of those times,
to establish the so-called “Truce of God” under which men were bound to
abstain from butchering one another for three days of each week and on
Church festivals. In other words, she respected their individuality:
non-resistance pure and simple being for them an utter impossibility,
she contented herself with less radical measures calculated to lead up
finally to the full measure of the benevolence of Christ.
Next she took advantage of the barbarian’s sensuous love of gaudy
display and put all her magnificent garments on. She could not capture
him by physical force, she would dazzle him by gorgeous spectacles. It
is said that Romanism gained more in pomp and ritual during this trying
period of the Dark Ages than throughout all her former history.
The result was she carried her point. Once more Rome laid her ambitious
hand on the temporal power, and allied with Charlemagne, aspired to rule
the world through a civilization dominated by Christianity and permeated
by the traditions and instincts of those sturdy barbarians.
Here was the confluence of the two streams we have been tracing, which,
united now, stretch before us as a broad majestic river. In regard to
woman it was the meeting of two noble and ennobling forces, two kindred
ideas the resultant of which, we doubt not, is destined to be a potent
force in the betterment of the world.
Now after our appeal to history comparing nations destitute of this
force and so destitute also of the principle of progress, with other
nations among whom the influence of woman is prominent coupled with a
brisk, progressive, satisfying civilization,—if in addition we find this
strong presumptive evidence corroborated by reason and experience, we
may conclude that these two equally varying concomitants are linked as
cause and effect; in other words, that the position of woman in society
determines the vital elements of its regeneration and progress.
Now that this is so on _a priori_ grounds all must admit. And this not
because woman is better or stronger or wiser than man, but from the
nature of the case, because it is she who must first form the man by
directing the earliest impulses of his character.
Byron and Wordsworth were both geniuses and would have stamped
themselves on the thought of their age under any circumstances; and yet
we find the one a savor of life unto life, the other of death unto
death. “Byron, like a rocket, shot his way upward with scorn and
repulsion, flamed out in wild, explosive, brilliant excesses and
disappeared in darkness made all the more palpable.”[3]
Footnote 3:
Bascom’s Eng. Lit. p. 253.
Wordsworth lent of his gifts to reinforce that “power in the Universe
which makes for righteousness” by taking the harp handed him from Heaven
and using it to swell the strains of angelic choirs. Two locomotives
equally mighty stand facing opposite tracks; the one to rush headlong to
destruction with all its precious freight, the other to toil grandly and
gloriously up the steep embattlements to Heaven and to God. Who—who can
say what a world of consequences hung on the first placing and starting
of these enormous forces!
Woman, Mother,—your responsibility is one that might make angels tremble
and fear to take hold! To trifle with it, to ignore or misuse it, is to
treat lightly the most sacred and solemn trust ever confided by God to
human kind. The training of children is a task on which an infinity of
weal or woe depends. Who does not covet it? Yet who does not stand
awe-struck before its momentous issues! It is a matter of small moment,
it seems to me, whether that lovely girl in whose accomplishments you
take such pride and delight, can enter the gay and crowded salon with
the ease and elegance of this or that French or English gentlewoman,
compared with the decision as to whether her individuality is going to
reinforce the good or the evil elements of the world. The lace and the
diamonds, the dance and the theater, gain a new significance when
scanned in their bearings on such issues. Their influence on the
individual personality, and through her on the society and civilization
which she vitalizes and inspires—all this and more must be weighed in
the balance before the jury can return a just and intelligent verdict as
to the innocence or banefulness of these apparently simple amusements.
Now the fact of woman’s influence on society being granted, what are its
practical bearings on the work which brought together this conference of
colored clergy and laymen in Washington? “We come not here to talk.”
Life is too busy, too pregnant with meaning and far reaching
consequences to allow you to come this far for mere intellectual
entertainment.
The vital agency of womanhood in the regeneration and progress of a
race, as a general question, is conceded almost before it is fairly
stated. I confess one of the difficulties for me in the subject assigned
lay in its obviousness. The plea is taken away by the opposite
attorney’s granting the whole question.
“Woman’s influence on social progress”—who in Christendom doubts or
questions it? One may as well be called on to prove that the sun is the
source of light and heat and energy to this many-sided little world.
Nor, on the other hand, could it have been intended that I should apply
the position when taken and proven, to the needs and responsibilities of
the women of our race in the South. For is it not written, “Cursed is he
that cometh after the king?” and has not the King already preceded me in
“The Black Woman of the South”?[4]
Footnote 4:
Pamphlet published by Dr. Alex. Crummell.
They have had both Moses and the Prophets in Dr. Crummell and if they
hear not him, neither would they be persuaded though one came up from
the South.
I would beg, however, with the Doctor’s permission, to add my plea for
the _Colored Girls_ of the South:—that large, bright, promising fatally
beautiful class that stand shivering like a delicate plantlet before the
fury of tempestuous elements, so full of promise and possibilities, yet
so sure of destruction; often without a father to whom they dare apply
the loving term, often without a stronger brother to espouse their cause
and defend their honor with his life’s blood; in the midst of pitfalls
and snares, waylaid by the lower classes of white men, with no shelter,
no protection nearer than the great blue vault above, which half
conceals and half reveals the one Care-Taker they know so little of. Oh,
save them, help them, shield, train, develop, teach, inspire them!
Snatch them, in God’s name, as brands from the burning! There is
material in them well worth your while, the hope in germ of a staunch,
helpful, regenerating womanhood on which, primarily, rests the
foundation stones of our future as a race.
It is absurd to quote statistics showing the Negro’s bank account and
rent rolls, to point to the hundreds of newspapers edited by colored men
and lists of lawyers, doctors, professors, D. D’s, LL D’s, etc., etc.,
etc., while the source from which the life-blood of the race is to flow
is subject to taint and corruption in the enemy’s camp.
True progress is never made by spasms. Real progress is growth. It must
begin in the seed. Then, “first the blade, then the ear, after that the
full corn in the ear.” There is something to encourage and inspire us in
the advancement of individuals since their emancipation from slavery. It
at least proves that there is nothing irretrievably wrong in the shape
of the black man’s skull, and that under given circumstances his
development, downward or upward, will be similar to that of other
average human beings.
But there is no time to be wasted in mere felicitation. That the Negro
has his niche in the infinite purposes of the Eternal, no one who has
studied the history of the last fifty years in America will deny. That
much depends on his own right comprehension of his responsibility and
rising to the demands of the hour, it will be good for him to see; and
how best to use his present so that the structure of the future shall be
stronger and higher and brighter and nobler and holier than that of the
past, is a question to be decided each day by every one of us.
The race is just twenty-one years removed from the conception and
experience of a chattel, just at the age of ruddy manhood. It is well
enough to pause a moment for retrospection, introspection, and
prospection. We look back, not to become inflated with conceit because
of the depths from which we have arisen, but that we may learn wisdom
from experience. We look within that we may gather together once more
our forces, and, by improved and more practical methods, address
ourselves to the tasks before us. We look forward with hope and trust
that the same God whose guiding hand led our fathers through and out of
the gall and bitterness of oppression, will still lead and direct their
children, to the honor of His name, and for their ultimate salvation.
But this survey of the failures or achievements of the past, the
difficulties and embarrassments of the present, and the mingled hopes
and fears for the future, must not degenerate into mere dreaming nor
consume the time which belongs to the practical and effective handling
of the crucial questions of the hour; and there can be no issue more
vital and momentous than this of the womanhood of the race.
Here is the vulnerable point, not in the heel, but at the heart of the
young Achilles; and here must the defenses be strengthened and the watch
redoubled.
We are the heirs of a past which was not our fathers’ moulding. “Every
man the arbiter of his own destiny” was not true for the American Negro
of the past: and it is no fault of his that he finds himself to-day the
inheritor of a manhood and womanhood impoverished and debased by two
centuries and more of compression and degradation.
But weaknesses and malformations, which to-day are attributable to a
vicious schoolmaster and a pernicious system, will a century hence be
rightly regarded as proofs of innate corruptness and radical
incurability.
Now the fundamental agency under God in the regeneration, the
re-training of the race, as well as the ground work and starting point
of its progress upward, must be the _black woman_.
With all the wrongs and neglects of her past, with all the weakness, the
debasement, the moral thralldom of her present, the black woman of
to-day stands mute and wondering at the Herculean task devolving upon
her. But the cycles wait for her. No other hand can move the lever. She
must be loosed from her bands and set to work.
Our meager and superficial results from past efforts prove their
futility; and every attempt to elevate the Negro, whether undertaken by
himself or through the philanthropy of others, cannot but prove abortive
unless so directed as to utilize the indispensable agency of an elevated
and trained womanhood.
A race cannot be purified from without. Preachers and teachers are
helps, and stimulants and conditions as necessary as the gracious rain
and sunshine are to plant growth. But what are rain and dew and sunshine
and cloud if there be no life in the plant germ? We must go to the root
and see that that is sound and healthy and vigorous; and not deceive
ourselves with waxen flowers and painted leaves of mock chlorophyll.
We too often mistake individuals’ honor for race development and so are
ready to substitute pretty accomplishments for sound sense and earnest
purpose.
A stream cannot rise higher than its source. The atmosphere of homes is
no rarer and purer and sweeter than are the mothers in those homes. A
race is but a total of families. The nation is the aggregate of its
homes. As the whole is sum of all its parts, so the character of the
parts will determine the characteristics of the whole. These are all
axioms and so evident that it seems gratuitous to remark it; and yet,
unless I am greatly mistaken, most of the unsatisfaction from our past
results arises from just such a radical and palpable error, as much
almost on our own part as on that of our benevolent white friends.
The Negro is constitutionally hopeful and proverbially irrepressible;
and naturally stands in danger of being dazzled by the shimmer and
tinsel of superficials. We often mistake foliage for fruit and
overestimate or wrongly estimate brilliant results.
The late Martin R. Delany, who was an unadulterated black man, used to
say when honors of state fell upon him, that when he entered the council
of kings the black race entered with him; meaning, I suppose, that there
was no discounting his race identity and attributing his achievements to
some admixture of Saxon blood. But our present record of eminent men,
when placed beside the actual status of the race in America to-day,
proves that no man can represent the race. Whatever the attainments of
the individual may be, unless his home has moved on _pari passu_, he can
never be regarded as identical with or representative of the whole.
Not by pointing to sun-bathed mountain tops do we prove that Phœbus
warms the valleys. We must point to homes, average homes, homes of the
rank and file of horny handed toiling men and women of the South (where
the masses are) lighted and cheered by the good, the beautiful, and the
true,—then and not till then will the whole plateau be lifted into the
sunlight.
Only the BLACK WOMAN can say “when and where I enter, in the quiet,
undisputed dignity of my womanhood, without violence and without suing
or special patronage, then and there the whole _Negro race enters with
me_.” Is it not evident then that as individual workers for this race we
must address ourselves with no half-hearted zeal to this feature of our
mission. The need is felt and must be recognized by all. There is a call
for workers, for missionaries, for men and women with the double
consecration of a fundamental love of humanity and a desire for its
melioration through the Gospel; but superadded to this we demand an
intelligent and sympathetic comprehension of the interests and special
needs of the Negro.
I see not why there should not be an organized effort for the protection
and elevation of our girls such as the White Cross League in England.
English women are strengthened and protected by more than twelve
centuries of Christian influences, freedom and civilization; English
girls are dispirited and crushed down by no such all-levelling prejudice
as that supercilious caste spirit in America which cynically assumes “A
Negro woman cannot be a lady.” English womanhood is beset by no such
snares and traps as betray the unprotected, untrained colored girl of
the South, whose only crime and dire destruction often is her
unconscious and marvelous beauty. Surely then if English indignation is
aroused and English manhood thrilled under the leadership of a Bishop of
the English church to build up bulwarks around their wronged sisters,
Negro sentiment cannot remain callous and Negro effort nerveless in view
of the imminent peril of the mothers of the next generation. “_I am my
Sister’s keeper!_” should be the hearty response of every man and woman
of the race, and this conviction should purify and exalt the narrow,
selfish and petty personal aims of life into a noble and sacred purpose.
We need men who can let their interest and gallantry extend outside the
circle of their æsthetic appreciation; men who can be a father, a
brother, a friend to every weak, struggling unshielded girl. We need
women who are so sure of their own social footing that they need not
fear leaning to lend a hand to a fallen or falling sister. We need men
and women who do not exhaust their genius splitting hairs on
aristocratic distinctions and thanking God they are not as others; but
earnest, unselfish souls, who can go into the highways and byways,
lifting up and leading, advising and encouraging with the truly catholic
benevolence of the Gospel of Christ.
As Church workers we must confess our path of duty is less obvious; or
rather our ability to adapt our machinery to our conception of the
peculiar exigencies of this work as taught by experience and our own
consciousness of the needs of the Negro, is as yet not demonstrable.
Flexibility and aggressiveness are not such strong characteristics of
the Church to-day as in the Dark Ages.
As a Mission field for the Church the Southern Negro is in some aspects
most promising; in others, perplexing. Aliens neither in language and
customs, nor in associations and sympathies, naturally of deeply rooted
religious instincts and taking most readily and kindly to the worship
and teachings of the Church, surely the task of proselytizing the
American Negro is infinitely less formidable than that which confronted
the Church in the Barbarians of Europe. Besides, this people already
look to the Church as the hope of their race. Thinking colored men
almost uniformly admit that the Protestant Episcopal Church with its
quiet, chaste dignity and decorous solemnity, its instructive and
elevating ritual, its bright chanting and joyous hymning, is eminently
fitted to correct the peculiar faults of worship—the rank exuberance and
often ludicrous demonstrativeness of their people. Yet, strange to say,
the Church, claiming to be missionary and Catholic, urging that schism
is sin and denominationalism inexcusable, has made in all these years
almost no inroads upon this semi-civilized religionism.
Harvests from this over ripe field of home missions have been gathered
in by Methodists, Baptists, and not least by Congregationalists, who
were unknown to the Freedmen before their emancipation.
Our clergy numbers less than two dozen[5] priests of Negro blood and we
have hardly more than one self-supporting colored congregation in the
entire Southland. While the organization known as the A. M. E. Church
has 14,063 ministers, itinerant and local, 4,069 self-supporting
churches, 4,275 Sunday-schools, with property valued at $7,772,284,
raising yearly for church purposes $1,427,000.
Footnote 5:
The published report of ’91 shows 26 priests for the entire country,
including one not engaged in work and one a professor in a
non-sectarian school, since made Dean of an Episcopal Annex to Howard
University known as King Hall.
Stranger and more significant than all, the leading men of this race (I
do not mean demagogues and politicians, but men of intellect, heart, and
race devotion, men to whom the elevation of their people means more than
personal ambition and sordid gain—and the men of that stamp have not all
died yet) the Christian workers for the race, of younger and more
cultured growth, are noticeably drifting into sectarian churches, many
of them declaring all the time that they acknowledge the historic claims
of the Church, believe her apostolicity, and would experience greater
personal comfort, spiritual and intellectual, in her revered communion.
It is a fact which any one may verify for himself, that representative
colored men, professing that in their heart of hearts they are
Episcopalians, are actually working in Methodist and Baptist pulpits;
while the ranks of the Episcopal clergy are left to be filled largely by
men who certainly suggest the propriety of a “_perpetual_ Diaconate” if
they cannot be said to have created the necessity for it.
Now where is the trouble? Something must be wrong. What is it?
A certain Southern Bishop of our Church reviewing the situation, whether
in Godly anxiety or in “Gothic antipathy” I know not, deprecates the
fact that the colored people do not seem _drawn_ to the Episcopal
Church, and comes to the sage conclusion that the Church is not adapted
to the rude untutored minds of the Freedmen, and that they may be left
to go to the Methodists and Baptists whither their racial proclivities
undeniably tend. How the good Bishop can agree that all-foreseeing
Wisdom, and Catholic Love would have framed his Church as typified in
his seamless garment and unbroken body, and yet not leave it broad
enough and deep enough and loving enough to seek and save and hold seven
millions of God’s poor, I cannot see.
But the doctors while discussing their scientifically conclusive
diagnosis of the disease, will perhaps not think it presumptuous in the
patient if he dares to suggest where at least the pain is. If this be
allowed, a _Black woman of the South_ would beg to point out two
possible oversights in this southern work which may indicate in part
both a cause and a remedy for some failure. The first is _not
calculating for the Black man’s personality_; not having respect, if I
may so express it, to his manhood or deferring at all to his conceptions
of the needs of his people. When colored persons have been employed it
was too often as machines or as manikins. There has been no disposition,
generally, to get the black man’s ideal or to let his individuality work
by its own gravity, as it were. A conference of earnest Christian men
have met at regular intervals for some years past to discuss the best
methods of promoting the welfare and development of colored people in
this country. Yet, strange as it may seem, they have never invited a
colored man or even intimated that one would be welcome to take part in
their deliberations. Their remedial contrivances are purely theoretical
or empirical, therefore, and the whole machinery devoid of soul.
The second important oversight in my judgment is closely allied to this
and probably grows out of it, and that is not developing Negro womanhood
as an essential fundamental for the elevation of the race, and utilizing
this agency in extending the work of the Church.
Of the first I have possibly already presumed to say too much since it
does not strictly come within the province of my subject. However,
Macaulay somewhere criticises the Church of England as not knowing how
to use fanatics, and declares that had Ignatius Loyola been in the
Anglican instead of the Roman communion, the Jesuits would have been
schismatics instead of Catholics; and if the religious awakenings of the
Wesleys had been in Rome, she would have shaven their heads, tied ropes
around their waists, and sent them out under her own banner and
blessing. Whether this be true or not, there is certainly a vast amount
of force potential for Negro evangelization rendered latent, or worse,
antagonistic by the halting, uncertain, I had almost said, _trimming_
policy of the Church in the South. This may sound both presumptuous and
ungrateful. It is mortifying, I know, to benevolent wisdom, after having
spent itself in the execution of well conned theories for the ideal
development of a particular work, to hear perhaps the weakest and
humblest element of that work asking “what doest thou?”
Yet so it will be in life. The “thus far and no farther” pattern cannot
be fitted to any growth in God’s kingdom. The universal law of
development is “onward and upward.” It is God-given and inviolable. From
the unfolding of the germ in the acorn to reach the sturdy oak, to the
growth of a human soul into the full knowledge and likeness of its
Creator, the breadth and scope of the movement in each and all are too
grand, too mysterious, too like God himself, to be encompassed and
locked down in human molds.
After all the Southern slave owners were right: either the very alphabet
of intellectual growth must be forbidden and the Negro dealt with
absolutely as a chattel having neither rights nor sensibilities; or else
the clamps and irons of mental and moral, as well as civil compression
must be riven asunder and the truly enfranchised soul led to the
entrance of that boundless vista through which it is to toil upwards to
its beckoning God as the buried seed germ to meet the sun.
A perpetual colored diaconate, carefully and kindly superintended by the
white clergy; congregations of shiny faced peasants with their clean
white aprons and sunbonnets catechised at regular intervals and taught
to recite the creed, the Lord’s prayer and the ten commandments—duty
towards God and duty towards neighbor, surely such well tended sheep
ought to be grateful to their shepherds and content in that station of
life to which it pleased God to call them. True, like the old professor
lecturing to his solitary student, we make no provision here for
irregularities. “Questions must be kept till after class,” or dispensed
with altogether. That some do ask questions and insist on answers, in
class too, must be both impertinent and annoying. Let not our spiritual
pastors and masters however be grieved at such self-assertion as merely
signifies we have a destiny to fulfill and as men and women we must _be
about our Father’s business_.
It is a mistake to suppose that the Negro is prejudiced against a white
ministry. Naturally there is not a more kindly and implicit follower of
a white man’s guidance than the average colored peasant. What would to
others be an ordinary act of friendly or pastoral interest he would be
more inclined to regard gratefully as a condescension. And he never
forgets such kindness. Could the Negro be brought near to his white
priest or bishop, he is not suspicious. He is not only willing but often
longs to unburden his soul to this intelligent guide. There are no
reservations when he is convinced that you are his friend. It is a
saddening satire on American history and manners that it takes something
to convince him.
That our people are not “drawn” to a church whose chief dignitaries they
see only in the chancel, and whom they reverence as they would a
painting or an angel, whose life never comes down to and touches theirs
with the inspiration of an objective reality, may be “perplexing” truly
(American caste and American Christianity both being facts) but it need
not be surprising. There must be something of human nature in it, the
same as that which brought about that “the Word was made flesh and dwelt
among us” that He might “draw” us towards God.
Men are not “drawn” by abstractions. Only sympathy and love can draw,
and until our Church in America realizes this and provides a clergy that
can come in touch with our life and have a fellow feeling for our woes,
without being imbedded and frozen up in their “Gothic antipathies,” the
good bishops are likely to continue “perplexed” by the sparsity of
colored Episcopalians.
A colored priest of my acquaintance recently related to me, with tears
in his eyes, how his reverend Father in God, the Bishop who had ordained
him, had met him on the cars on his way to the diocesan convention and
warned him, not unkindly, not to take a seat in the body of the
convention with the white clergy. To avoid disturbance of their godly
placidity he would of course please sit back and somewhat apart. I do
not imagine that that clergyman had very much heart for the Christly (!)
deliberations of that convention.
To return, however, it is not on this broader view of Church work, which
I mentioned as a primary cause of its halting progress with the colored
people, that I am to speak. My proper theme is the second oversight of
which in my judgment our Christian propagandists have been guilty: or,
the necessity of church training, protecting and uplifting our colored
womanhood as indispensable to the evangelization of the race.
Apelles did not disdain even that criticism of his lofty art which came
from an uncouth cobbler; and may I not hope that the writer’s oneness
with her subject both in feeling and in being may palliate undue
obtrusiveness of opinions here. That the race cannot be effectually
lifted up till its women are truly elevated we take as proven. It is not
for us to dwell on the needs, the neglects, and the ways of succor,
pertaining to the black woman of the South. The ground has been ably
discussed and an admirable and practical plan proposed by the oldest
Negro priest in America, advising and urging that special organizations
such as Church Sisterhoods and industrial schools be devised to meet her
pressing needs in the Southland. That some such movements are vital to
the life of this people and the extension of the Church among them, is
not hard to see. Yet the pamphlet fell still-born from the press. So far
as I am informed the Church has made no motion towards carrying out Dr.
Crummell’s suggestion.
The denomination which comes next our own in opposing the proverbial
emotionalism of Negro worship in the South, and which in consequence
like ours receives the cold shoulder from the old heads, resting as we
do under the charge of not “having religion” and not believing in
conversion—the Congregationalists—have quietly gone to work on the
young, have established industrial and training schools, and now almost
every community in the South is yearly enriched by a fresh infusion of
vigorous young hearts, cultivated heads, and helpful hands that have
been trained at Fisk, at Hampton, in Atlanta University, and in
Tuskegee, Alabama.
These young people are missionaries actual or virtual both here and in
Africa. They have learned to love the methods and doctrines of the
Church which trained and educated them; and so Congregationalism surely
and steadily progresses.
Need I compare these well known facts with results shown by the Church
in the same field and during the same or even a longer time.
The institution of the Church in the South to which she mainly looks for
the training of her colored clergy and for the help of the “Black Woman”
and “Colored Girl” of the South, has graduated since the year 1868, when
the school was founded, _five young women_;[6] and while yearly numerous
young men have been kept and trained for the ministry by the charities
of the Church, the number of indigent females who have here been
supported, sheltered and trained, is phenomenally small. Indeed, to my
mind, the attitude of the Church toward this feature of her work is as
if the solution of the problem of Negro missions depended solely on
sending a quota of deacons and priests into the field, girls being a
sort of _tertium quid_ whose development may be promoted if they can pay
their way and fall in with the plans mapped out for the training of the
other sex. Now I would ask in all earnestness, does not this force
potential deserve by education and stimulus to be made dynamic? Is it
not a solemn duty incumbent on all colored churchmen to make it so? Will
not the aid of the Church be given to prepare our girls in head, heart,
and hand for the duties and responsibilities that await the intelligent
wife, the Christian mother, the earnest, virtuous, helpful woman, at
once both the lever and the fulcrum for uplifting the race.
Footnote 6:
Five have been graduated since ’86, two in ’91, two in ’92.
As Negroes and churchmen we cannot be indifferent to these questions.
They touch us most vitally on both sides. We believe in the Holy
Catholic Church. We believe that however gigantic and apparently remote
the consummation, the Church will go on conquering and to conquer till
the kingdoms of this world, not excepting the black man and the black
woman of the South, shall have become the kingdoms of the Lord and of
his Christ.