In this country ignorance and poverty are almost inseparable
companions; and it is surely not strange that those should be poor
whom we compel to be ignorant. The liberal professions are virtually
sealed against the blacks, if we except the church, and even in that
admission is rendered difficult by the obstacles placed in their way
in acquiring the requisite literary qualifications;[102] and when once
admitted, their administrations are confined to their own color.
Many of our most wealthy and influential citizens have commenced
life as ignorant and as pennyless as any negro who loiters in our
streets. Had their complexion been dark, notwithstanding their
talents, industry, enterprize and probity, they would have continued
ignorant and pennyless, because the paths to learning and to wealth,
would then have been closed against them. There is a conspiracy,
embracing all the departments of society, to keep the black man
ignorant and poor. As a general rule, admitting few if any exceptions,
the schools of literature and of science reject him--the counting
house refuses to receive him as a bookkeeper, much more as a
partner--no store admits him as a clerk--no shop as an apprentice.
Here and there a black man may be found keeping a few trifles on a
shelf for sale; and a few acquire, as if by stealth, the knowledge
of some handicraft; but almost universally these people, both in
town and country, are prevented by the customs of society from
maintaining themselves and their families by any other than menial
occupations.
[Footnote 102: Of the truth of this remark, the trustees of the
Episcopal Theological Seminary at New-York, lately (June, 1839)
afforded a striking illustration. A young man, regularly
acknowledged by the Bishop as a candidate for orders, and in
consequence of such acknowledgment entitled, by an _express statute_
of the seminary, to admission to its privileges, presented himself
as a pupil. But God had given him a dark complexion, and _therefore_
the trustees, regardless of the statute, barred the doors against him,
by a formal and deliberate vote. As a compromise between conscience
and prejudice, the professors offered to give him _private_
instruction--to do in secret what they were ashamed to do openly--to
confer as a favor, what he was entitled to demand as a right. The
offer was rejected.
It is worthy of remark, that of the trustees who took an _active_
part against the _colored_ candidate, one is the PRESIDENT _of the
New York Colonization Society_; another a MANAGER, and a third, one
of its public champions; and that the Bishop of the diocese, who
wished to exclude his candidate from the theological school of which
he is both a trustee and a professor, lately headed a recommendation
in the newspapers for the purchase of a packet ship for Liberia, as
likely to "render far more efficient than heretofore, the enterprize
of colonization."]
In 1836, a black man of irreproachable character, and who by his
industry and frugality had accumulated several thousand dollars, made
application in the City of New York for a carman's license, and was
refused solely and avowedly on account of his complexion! We have
already seen the effort of the Ohio legislature, to consign the
negroes to starvation, by deterring others from employing them.
Ignorance, idleness, and vice, are at once the punishments we
inflict upon these unfortunate people for their complexion; and the
crimes with which we are constantly reproaching them.