Book: American Missionary, Volume 43, No. 12, December, 1889

V >> Various >> American Missionary, Volume 43, No. 12, December, 1889




The cause of it has been largely overlooked, and therefore the remedies
so often advocated have proved futile. Until the cause is distinctly
recognized and acknowledged and remedied, the prejudice will remain. The
cause is this: All freeborn people in every age and clime have had a
contempt for slaves. That is very near the feeling--mark my words--they
ought to have. It was stronger in Athens than it has ever been in
Charleston. It is partly, and has always been largely, caused by the
wicked pride of mastership, but it has also been largely inspired by the
perception of those vices and inferiorities which his condition breeds
in the slave. Ignorance, deceit, cowardice, are contemptible; and
therefore men who know better fall into the way of despising those who
are ignorant and cowardly instead of trying to help them become the
reverse of all these things. In nearly every other nation--there are two
exceptions that will readily occur to you--save our own, as soon as the
slave's chains have been broken and the slave's vices eradicated, the
emancipated man has been absorbed among the class of freemen. There was
nothing left to suggest that he had ever been a slave. The people forgot
it. But the black man bears an ineffaceable mark that he belongs to a
race which has been enslaved; and it is, therefore, in ninety-nine cases
out of a hundred unconsciously but instinctively assumed that his is
still the servile character. There is no natural antipathy between the
white and the black races; if there were there could be no mulattoes.
The sole reason of the persistence of this caste feeling is that the
black man bears the mark saying to every one that sees him, "I belong to
a race that has been enslaved:" and unconsciously men assume, "Therefore
your character is still a servile character." The prejudice is deep; it
is almost universal; and so long as there is a God in heaven who led
forth the Hebrews and overthrew the Pharaohs, there will be no safety
for this Nation of ours until the prejudice is obliterated, as
completely as that which once existed and was more intense between the
Anglo-Saxon and the Norman. If, as has been the case in many another
land, there should arise an emergency threatening the existence of our
Nation, and there were one man, and only one, capable of steering us
through the storm into safety--some Lincoln or Washington--and if every
voter in our country knew that this man were the only one who could do
it, that man, if he were black, could not be elected President. Were
such an emergency to arise to-morrow, we should perish. We should perish
by suicide, and richly deserve all that we got. There is no safety for
our land until this prejudice of caste is gone. It never came by
argument; it can never be argued away. It can not be smothered under
legislation nor uprooted by resolutions nor effaced by tears. While good
men feel it they will fight it, but the majority will yield to it and it
can be decided in only one way. That way was well outlined by a colored
student in Hampton Institute in the debating club of that institution.
The subject for discussion was, "How Shall We Black Men Secure Our
Rights?" The last speaker was black as ebony, and had been bred in his
early years a slave. When he arose I expected to hear him repeat the
familiar complaints and suggest the familiar remedies. He did neither.
He simply said: "My friends, I do not agree with all that you have said.
I think, as you do, that the way white people treat us in the street
cars and hotels"--and he might have added, in churches, but he did
not--"is wrong, unchristian, and cruel." And when he said that, there
was a pathos in his voice which made me ashamed to be a white man.
"But," he added, "while I think as you do that it is cruel, I do not
think that the white people will ever stop treating us as inferiors so
long as we are inferiors, and I think that they will despise us as long
as they can. But when we get enough character in our hearts, enough
brains in our head, and enough money in our pockets, they will stop
calling us niggers!"

He was right--a thousand times right. We must face the facts and steer
by them, and not attempt to be guided by sentiment and emotions. So long
as the sight of a black face instinctively suggests to us rags and
ignorance, and servility and menial employments, just so long this
prejudice of caste will endure, and no amount of individual genius,
culture, or character will be able to brush the mildew of caste from any
individual black man's brow. That lady may be a Florence Nightingale,
but if I whisper, and whisper truly, that she came from the slums, that
her sisters are in the penitentiary, and her brothers are thieves,
society will never forgive her for not being in the penitentiary
herself. Society will pity her in ostentatious magniloquence, which is
far worse than contempt or neglect; perhaps it will clothe her with silk
and diamonds; but it will never treat her as it would not dare not to
treat any lady whom it felt its equal. As has been well said, what is
needed is not patronage nor pity, but fact--the recognition of fact.
When the sight of a black face shall no longer remind men that it
belongs to a race of which the immense majority close at hand are still
showing what we have driven into them by the lash and bound in them by
chains; when the black face shall have clothed itself in associations as
full of comfort and culture and Christian worth as a white man wears,
"Negro" will be as honorable as "Caucasian." And for this, through its
churches which are schools, and its schools which are churches, the
American Missionary Association is laboring and praying with splendid
success.

I would like to remind you of the second point, which is emphasized by
the statement in the report that a graduate, of Fisk University, with
his wife, another graduate, has gone to Africa under commission of the
American Board, and has there shown eminent abilities. Africa is the
only continent on the planet that has never had a history. For
millenniums it has been a locked closet. But in the providence of God
the gaze of Christendom is now concentrated upon it. All the passions,
good and bad, which push men are impelling the most adventurous and
energetic of our race to look or to go thither. Love of money, love of
adventure, love of power, love of man and love of God, are leading men
to look into the 200,000,000 dusky faces there from which the veil has
at last been thrown back. Meanwhile 8,000,000 of that race whose
Christianizing means the regeneration of a continent vaster than Europe
and the inauguration of a history perhaps to be more splendid than that
which Europe has wrought out in two millenniums, are here for you and me
to educate. Do you believe these facts are accidents? Do you believe
that He who maketh the wrath of man to praise Him and restraineth the
remainder of wrath has not ordained them according to the counsels of
his own will? There never can be a Christian education which does not
plant and foster the missionary spirit. Is it a dream? If so, let me die
before I wake. Is it a dream that among 8,000,000 of our fellow citizens
each of whom, as Dr. Strieby told us at New York, is qualified to live,
perhaps to thrive, in the climate which has proved a grave to
Anglo-Saxons, each of whom is qualified to visit Africa with a fair hope
of making himself received as a child returning unto his own household?
Is it too much to hope that, under the Christian education we may give
them if we will, enough will desire to preach Christ to the dark continent
to gem it with life and light as the sky is gemmed with stars?

I am too old to do it, but so complete is my conviction that the future
of the race in the coming century shall move toward Africa as in the
ages following Paul it moved toward the North and West of Europe, that
were I a young man, loyal and devoted to my Master, and trying as he
told his followers by Gennesaret to read in the morning and evening red
the signs of the times, I should not go to Africa, perhaps; I would go
to Tougaloo University, I think, and there devote all my energies and
powers to instructing black men in the meaning and scope and inspiration
and promise of the Master's words, "Go ye."

* * * * *

ADDRESS OF REV. F.P. WOODBURY, D.D.

I feel that I have learned a great deal to-day; and as the last speaker
spoke concerning Africa, an idea has come into my mind which I may
express. Here we have on one side of the great ocean, Africa; on the
other side, America. We have here a race conflict; on the one side eight
millions of blacks, we will say, and perhaps eight millions of
irreconcilable whites on the other. And these dominant eight millions of
white men maintain, with the utmost pertinacity--and they have the power
in their right hand so far as we can see--that they propose to rule and
keep down those eight millions of black men. I have seen the title of a
book recently published, "An Appeal to Pharoah," which is vouched for as
a calm and temperate discussion of the question whether, after all, we
are not going to get by this race difficulty by a great deportation to
Africa. It is a good deal to raise the question of eight millions of men
leaving one country and going across the ocean and settling in another
continent. But isn't there something in it after all? Might it not
compose the differences? I know that the cost would be very large, but
careful estimates go to show that the cost is not anywhere near the
amount we spent in our civil war. On the one side, we have these eight
millions of black men--ignorant, very largely superstitious, still
somewhat above those of the same color in Africa, and plunged here into
an antagonism which is deep, and bitter, and hopeless. On the other
side, we have these eight millions of white people who do not accept the
results of the war. Isn't it better that eight millions shall go? I
don't know. I think it deserves serious consideration.

But when the question arises for practical consideration, I think there
is another and a little deeper question that we ought to remember, and
that is this: Which eight millions ought to go? Is it these who have
been faithful to the American flag, who are straight in the line of
progress that this republic proposes to maintain, who are in the line of
the development of all the ages, who are looking upward? Or is it the
eight millions who are hopelessly side-tracked by the purposes of
infinite God, and who are standing here in this republic, undertaking to
maintain a conflict that is necessarily one of despair, as sure as God
is at the head of the universe? Expatriation if you please, deportation
if you will; but consider the question whether it shall be eight
millions of American patriots who are to be sent over to Africa or eight
millions who have come out of a rebellion and maintain their seditious
and rebellious attitude to-day.

My friends, we all know that we are going to live together. There is no
more baseless theory on God's earth than that we are going to take eight
millions of men and send them out of this country, because they want to
learn something, because they want to live like men and be men and
citizens, and because God has put them here for our work and our
education. I tell you, my friends, the immediate problem seems to me
only one form of a larger problem. What is the problem of the planet
to-day? Is it not the problem as to which of two theories shall maintain
itself concerning the masses which are at the base of society? Isn't
that the problem in every nation? Isn't it the problem here concerning
white and black, red and yellow alike? There is no possible doubt about
it. The labor problem, do you call it? Here is one theory which holds
that the masses shall be kept down. Here is the other system which
maintains that they shall be elevated. We have got to live with them in
the world, for I imagine there is nobody talking about sending them to
the moon. Don't you know, and I know that the world is growing smaller
every year? Talk about neighborhood--look over this continent. Germany
is here; Ireland is here; France is here; China is here; Africa is here.
We are neighbors to everybody. We are touching elbows across the ocean
all the time. If you send anybody to Africa, why, he is only next door;
and by and by we shall have air ships that will float up over there in a
few hours! How are you going to manage this thing? We have got to live
together in this world, and nearer and nearer to one another with every
generation; and this country may just as well be the field in which to
try the experiment out as any other country on the face of the globe. I
think we are going to try it out to the end. There are symptoms of it
all around.

But the conflict is here; it is in the air. It is not a conflict by
sword. You know they tell the legend among the old mediaeval stories that
in one of the great battles on one of the plains of Europe, after the
quiet darkness of the night had settled over the scene, the field strewn
all over with the forms of the mangled and the dead, there were seen in
the shuddering midnight air to rise spirit forms maintaining the deadly
conflict there, and carrying on the battle of the day. It seems to me,
in some sense, true of us. The sword has done what the sword could do;
it can do no more. But the conflict is here in the air, pronouncing
itself with every event that drifts across our horizon. Harvard sets its
seal on the brow of Clement Morgan, and the Memphis _Avalanche_ has no
other word for him than to call him "that dusky steer with the crumpled
forelock."

My friends, we are going right forward in the field of conflict, which
is the field of victory. One with God is a majority, and we are
thousands with God. And we have on our side the weak and the helpless,
too. I don't want any better aid than that. You know that Burke in that
magnificent invective against Warren Hastings, when he rose to the very
climax of it and told the story of those atrocious tortures to which the
poor and ignorant and misguided peasants of India had been put, how they
had had their fingers tied together and mashed with hammers, and other
unmentionable things had been done to them, appealed to the parliament
and said that if they should refuse justice those mashed and disabled
hands, lifted high to Heaven in prayer, would call down the power of God
for their deliverance. Is it not worse to mash and disable a mind and a
soul than a hand? I tell you the prayers of the poor are on our side;
and if we had nothing of all this magnificent achievement of this
Association to look upon, we could look on those hands raised and those
souls crying out from the social bondage of to-day, as they did from the
physical bondage of a few years ago, and know that if God be for us we
need not care who or what is against us.

* * * * *

ADDRESS OF PROFESSOR GRAHAM TAYLOR.

I have but a very few words to add to this report. The facts speak
louder than any statement of them can. When skirting the Asiatic shore
of the inner sea, that lonely traveler, Paul, heard a voice, he looked
across to the shores of Europe, and there in the night stood a great
colossal form, not of a naked savage, but a form clad perhaps, in the
panoply of the Macedonian phalanx, the representative of the Europe that
then was and was yet to be, the precursor, it may be, to the classically
informed mind of the missionary to the Gentiles, of that long procession
of great world conquerors. It was the Man of Macedon who stood there in
the might of his strength and cried, like the crying of an infant in the
night, the crying of an infant for the light, "Come: come over into
Macedonia and help us."

Now, my brethren, this was the cry of the strong for help. This was the
cry of the peoples that were following the westward course of the star
of empire. And yet, in their strength, they cried as though they were
the weakest of woman born. And when that missionary, in response to that
call, crossed the sea, though he came to that Macedonian city which had
been the battle-scene of the contending forces of the Roman empire, he
found access for the gospel into Europe through the open heart of one
woman--Lydia, a seller of purple. And there, sitting down by the water
course, where prayer was wont to be made, he just grouped those
individuals into that unit of God's operations on the face of the earth,
the local church. And this church was distinguished among the apostolic
churches for its family traits, for the infusion of feminine grace and
masculine strength, for the most domestic hospitality and the very
faults of the close attritions of human life. There he planted the seed
which has grown into our European and American civilization and
Christianity.

And so ever at the cry of the strong for help the gospel has had just
these three great prime factors to present for the solution of the
problems of every age: first, the home, with its priesthood of the
father and mother, the sanctuary of the house and the ministrations of
family life; secondly, the school; and thirdly, between the home and the
school, the church. When our Lord himself, from all possible sources,
made selection of the first among the many means he has chosen for the
redemption of this world, he chose a trained personality. As the medium
for the transmission of truth, no improvement, no change has been found
in all the progress of the gospel. By this trained personality--the
heart that has been led to live with Christ awhile, and then go forth in
his name and filled with his love to the hearts that have place for that
love and rootage for that life--this wonderful product of our Christian
civilization has everywhere been produced.

And I take it that in no one of the Christian agencies known to us are
these three methods so wonderfully unified, so inseparably united, as
the home and the church and the school are in the work of the American
Missionary Association. They are one and the same. They are
indissoluble. The long experience of this Association through this half
century of specialized work does fit it, as the report has said, to give
an almost commanding opinion in regard to the method of the work to be
pursued among these very distinct classes. From the field as well as
from the office, and from the experience of those longest at work, we
learn that the school finds its ultimate aim only in the church; that,
as a Christian agency, we are to work with the school only as a means to
the end of building up that body of Christ on the face of the earth
which is known by the name of his church. I do not see how the
separation to any extent of school and church work can fail to break the
unity of administration and hinder the progress of this gloriously
on-going work.

I have just one word to add in regard to the reflex influence of this
church work upon the home churches. My brethren, there has been a great
dearth in candidates for the ministry until very recently. It strikes me
that there is no such object-lesson in all our land, inviting men to
consecrate themselves to the noblest of purposes, as the heroic ministry
of this Association. It needs the heroic element to attract young men.
It needs something which is very plainly worth their while to live for
and to work for and to consecrate their energies toward, in order to
attract them from the allurements of business and material progress
to-day. The Indian service of the British Government, and even the
service of the great commercial companies, have that element of heroism
in it them which has attracted the very best brain and brawn of the
English race to India. So it seems to me we will have to hold up these
great organizations, which reach down to the hard places of the land,
which occupy places that require men to man them, in order to recruit
the ranks of our ministers. A man needs to know that he will have to be
all the more a man to be anything of a minister now-a-days, to attract
him into this great work. And this heroic type of Christian ministry and
of Christian manhood and womanhood, shown in the half century of this
society's work and existence, is to my mind one of the great attractions
upon the best, the strongest, and the most consecrated of those men and
women who devote their lives to the service of the church.

Its reflex influence upon every other branch of missionary activity in
the church is very plain. It is to-day--I do not hesitate to say it--the
hero of our organizations. It takes far less stamina, far less
consecration, I believe, to go to India, or China, or Japan than it does
to come out at the call of God and of this agency of His divine
Providence and enter many a field manned by this Association. In the
_personnel_ of our theological seminaries I have long noticed that the
choicest spirits, the men with the stamp of courage upon them, those who
are not working for place, but for Christ, and him alone, are the men
who take up this work. They are the men who, when they come back to the
schools of the prophets, thrill our hearts as no other men do with the
story of the conquests of Christ in their own hearts as well as out in
the hard fields which they cultivate for his sake; and there will be no
more glowing missionary meeting of the seminary with which I have the
honor to be connected than when the reports of this meeting shall be
carried back to the brethren. The prayers of the class-rooms, the
prayers of the missionary meetings, the yearnings of the hearts of the
men who are preparing to follow in the footsteps of those who have
heroically led the way, are the wires for these unseen and yet never
unused electric currents which unite the North with the South, the
frontier with the citadels of our common Christianity.

We know very well the danger of a false education, of a school without A
church, education without evangelization, a university without the heart
of Christ beating in it. Great are the joy and confidence felt in the
hearts of the constituency of this body that school and church are so
inextricably interwoven with each other that if you plant a school it
will develop into a church, and if the church comes it will eventually
and inevitably re-act, and in a most blessed way in spiritual and often
in material resources upon the school. We give largely to the school
because there is a home beneath it and a church around it.

I regard these churches of the American Missionary Association with
their evangelistic and nurturing agencies, prime sociological factors
for bringing in Christ's dear kingdom in this land of ours. It is their
mission not only to remedy evils, not only to restore rights, but to be
great constructive agencies of a new Christian civilization. For when
Christ came, he came preaching, not the gospel of the individual, not a
gospel simply to save that man, that woman, that child, but the gospel
of the Kingdom, the gospel which this great Association so effectually
preaches and not only preaches but applies and administers as well. And
the time will not be far hence when this whole subject of the
environment of the spiritual life will force itself so imperatively upon
the study of the churches at home that they will take the type of their
work and the inspiration for their new developments from the leadership
of this and kindred missionary organizations which have set them these
most brilliant examples of being ahead of the thought and the feeling of
their day.

* * * * *

ADDRESS OF REV. C.W. HIATT.

More than fifty years ago De Tocqueville gave utterance to these
prophetic words: "The most formidable of all the ills that threaten the
future existence of the United States arises from the presence of a
black population upon its territory." I think that that prophecy has
been iterated and reiterated before this convention until we ought
finally to let it rest as an established fact. I believe we are menaced
by these eight millions of people, who are twice as great in number as
were the people of the United Colonies when they broke from the
mightiest naval and military power in history; but I believe that the
peril that we are menaced by in the presence of this black man arises
from his perils. There is a peril from the black man, but it is a peril
secondary to the peril _of_ the black man upon this soil. I do not
apprehend any uprising by Uncle Tom; but Uncle Tom is dead, and his son
is here and his friends of a younger generation. These men are being
gnarled and corrupted and imbruted, and are massing themselves, touching
elbows one with another; and under the influences of the age in which we
live are becoming a factor in our civilization which, unless we modify
and change it under our Christian teaching, will render our Southland
like that island on the north of the Caribbean Sea where to-day it is
said that the name of Toussaint l'Ouverture, the original defender and
liberator, is a hissing and a reproach.

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