SOCIALISM AND THE NEGRO.By Reverdy C. Ransom.
By Reverdy C. Ransom.
What do the Socialists propose to do with the Negro question? One says, he is willing to treat a black man as he would a white man; that is, when Socialism is fully established. Another tells us, he has never considered the subject, besides he is too busy considering the question of “class consciousness.” The Socialistic cult in this country, under whatever name it may act, is bound to consider the Negro and the questions growing out of his presence here. Nine million people cannot be ignored. They are the storm centre for the exhibition of vigorous racial prejudices and animosities.
REV. R. C. HANSON, D. D.
REV. R. C. HANSON, D. D.
REV. R. C. HANSON, D. D.
Mr. Eraste Vidrine, a socialistic organizer in the Southern states, in the International Socialist Review for January, says: “The socialist organizations are restricted to whites, who refuse admission to Negroes.” This is God’s world and not a devil’s world.
Of all the numerous attempts through the ages to read the teachings of Jesus into widely differing schools of thought, that of socialism is nearest.
Karl Marx is the high priest of modern socialism, and Joseph Mazzini, Count Tolstoi, and Henry George are of the same company. It will take years for the ruling ideas of the present age to spend themselves. New England is conservative. Precedent, custom, the old-established order of things, hold sway. In the west, it is different. The immense distances of her prairies, and the lofty altitudes of her mountains are congenial soil for the growing of great ideas.
Theories, economic, populistic, socialistic, coming out of the west, strike the staid people of the east as being quite grotesque. But it must ever be that true prophets and reformers are made out of cranks and heretics.
With those who advocate the Negroes, forced elimination or self-effacement from politics, we have nothing but uncompromising dissent.
The obsequious, cringing, sycophantic man, with his hat under his arm, is only a thing to be despised. To be a man, one must stand erect, and contend for the recognition of all that belongs to a man. The Democratic party does not seek the Negro; the Republican party uses him, but has small use for him, in the paths that lead to honor and to power.
Those who falsely picture the Negro as indolent, shiftless, lazy, are one with those who seek to keep him in a condition of social, political and economic inferiority. The Negro is industrious and aspiring and is seeking to mount each round in the ladder of moral, social, industrial and political strength and progress.
Seventy percent of our women are wage-workers, with the overwhelming majority of our men. Organized labor may discriminate, but there can be no permanent advance while one-eighth of our population is ignored.
The program of socialism is begirt with the spirit of righteousness and seeks to establish itself on the foundations of justice. Sooner or later, in the affairs of men, there must come a levelling process. The Negro needs to take a broader outlook and a larger view of himself in relation to his surroundings.
Within the present century the mightiest battle of all the ages will be fought right here in the United States. It will be that of the people coming into their own. I have used the term socialism loosely; but I mean what Chicago meant when it voted to own its street railways; I mean what Kansas meant when it sought to establish its own oil refineries; I mean the spirit of what Edward Bellamy said in his “Looking Backward,” I mean in fine, that the wheels and spindles, the wealth of the bowels of the earth, and the produce of the soil shall be justly shared by the producers. The Negro’s cue for all time to come, is to preach brotherhood and to practice it. He or some other race, whom God shall choose, has it in his power to more mightily enrich the world than did Egyptian or Jew, Greek, Roman, or Anglo-Saxon, this by consecrating himself to a mission of unselfishness, to war against social, political and economic inequalities, and for a bringing in of the realization of the brotherhood of man.
New Bedford, Mass.