IV.
But I now come to a grave objection to my theory of this violent persecution. I shall be told by many of my Northern friends that my argument, though plausible, is not conclusive. It will be said that the charges against the Negro are specific and positive, and that there must be some foundation for them, because, as they allege, men in their normal condition do not shoot, hang and burn their fellow men who are guiltless of crime. Well! This assumption is very just and very charitable. I only wish that something like the same justice and the same charity shall be shown to the Negro. All credit is due and is accorded to our Northern friends for their humane judgment of the South. Humane themselves, they are slow to believe that the mobocrats are less humane than themselves. Their hearts are right but their heads are wrong. They apply a general rule to a special case. They forget that neither the mob nor its victims are in a normal condition. Both are exceptions to the general rule. The force of the argument against my version of the case is the assumption that the lynchers are like other men and that the Negro has the same hold on the protection of society that other men have. Neither assumption is true. The lynchers and mobocrats are not like other men, nor is the Negro hedged about by the same protection accorded other members of society.
The point I make, then, is this. That I am not, in this case, dealing with men in their natural condition. I am dealing with men brought up in the exercise of irresponsible power. I am dealing with men whose ideas, habits and customs are entirely different from those of ordinary men. It is, therefore, quite gratuitous to assume that the principles that apply to other men, apply to the lynchers and murderers of the Negro. The rules resting upon the justice and benevolence of human nature do not apply to the mobocrats, or to those who were educated in the habits and customs of a slave-holding community. What these habits are I have a right to know, both intheory and practice. Whoever has read the laws of the late slave states relating to the Negroes, will see what I mean.
I repeat, the mistake made by those who, on this ground, object to my theory of the charge against the Negro, is that they overlook the natural influence of the life, education and habits of the lynchers. We must remember that these people have not now and have never had any such respect for human life as is common to other men. They have had among them for centuries a peculiar institution, and that peculiar institution has stamped them as a peculiar people. They were not before the war, they were not during the war, and have not been since the war, in their spirit or in their civilization, a people in common with the people of the North, or the civilized world. I will not here harrow up your feelings by detailing their treatment of Northern prisoners during the war. Their institutions have taught them no respect for human life, and especially the life of the Negro. It has, in fact, taught them absolute contempt for his life. The sacredness of life which ordinary men feel does not touch them anywhere. A dead Negro is with them now, as before, a common jest.
They care no more for the Negro’s rights to live than they care for his rights to liberty, or his right to the ballot or any other right. Chief Justice Taney told the exact truth about these people when he said: “They did not consider that the black man had any rights which white men were bound to respect.” No man of the South ever called in question that statement, and no man ever will. They could always shoot, stab, hang and burn the Negro, without any such remorse or shame as other men would feel after committing such a crime. Any Southern man, who is honest and is frank enough to talk on the subject, will tell you that he has no such idea as we have of the sacredness of human rights, and especially, as I have said, of the life of the Negro. Hence it is absurd to meet my arguments with the facts predicated of our common human nature.
I know that I shall be charged with apologising for criminals. Ex-Governor Chamberlain has already virtually done as much. But there is no foundation for such charge. I affirm that neither I nor any other coloured man of like standing with myself has everraised a finger or uttered a word in defence of any man, black or white, known to be guilty of the dreadful crime now in question.
But what I contend for, and what every honest man, black or white, has a right to contend for, is that when any man is accused of this or any other crime, of whatever name, nature, degree or extent, he shall have the benefit of a legal investigation; that he shall be confronted by his accusers; and that he shall, through proper counsel, be allowed to question his accusers in open court and in open daylight, so that his guilt or his innocence may be duly proved and established.
If this is to make me liable to the charge of apologising for crime, I am not ashamed to be so charged. I dare to contend for the coloured people of the United States that they are a law-abiding people, and I dare to insist upon it that they or any other people, black or white, accused of crime, shall have a fair trial before they are punished.
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.