The Art of Public Speaking
asks: "Are they at work upon it? What solution do they offer? When will
the black man cast a free ballot? When will he have the civil rights
that are his?" I shall not here protest against a partisanry that, for
the first time in our history, in time of peace, has stamped with the
great seal of our government a stigma upon the people of a great and
loyal section; though I gratefully remember that the great dead
soldier, who held the helm of State for the eight stormiest years of
reconstruction, never found need for such a step; and though there is no
personal sacrifice I would not make to remove this cruel and unjust
imputation on my people from the archives of my country! But, sir,
backed by a record, on every page of which is progress, I venture to
make earnest and respectful answer to the questions that are asked. We
give to the world this year a crop of 7,500,000 bales of cotton, worth
$450,000,000, and its cash equivalent in grain, grasses and fruit. This
enormous crop could not have come from the hands of sullen and
discontented labor. It comes from peaceful fields, in which laughter and
gossip rise above the hum of industry, and contentment runs with the
singing plough. It is claimed that this ignorant labor is defrauded of
its just hire, I present the tax books of Georgia, which show that the
negro twenty-five years ago a slave, has in Georgia alone $10,000,000 of
assessed property, worth twice that much. Does not that record honor him
and vindicate his neighbors?
What people, penniless, illiterate, has done so well? For every
Afro-American agitator, stirring the strife in which alone he prospers,
I can show you a thousand negroes, happy in their cabin homes, tilling
their own land by day, and at night taking from the lips of their
children the helpful message their State sends them from the schoolhouse
door. And the schoolhouse itself bears testimony. In Georgia we added
last year $250,000 to the school fund, making a total of more than
$1,000,000--and this in the face of prejudice not yet conquered--of the
fact that the whites are assessed for $368,000,000, the blacks for
$10,000,000, and yet forty-nine per cent of the beneficiaries are black
children; and in the doubt of many wise men if education helps, or can
help, our problem. Charleston, with her taxable values cut half in two
since 1860, pays more in proportion for public schools than Boston.
Although it is easier to give much out of much than little out of
little, the South, with one-seventh of the taxable property of the
country, with relatively larger debt, having received only one-twelfth
as much of public lands, and having back of its tax books none of the
$500,000,000 of bonds that enrich the North--and though it pays annually
$26,000,000 to your section as pensions--yet gives nearly one-sixth to
the public school fund. The South since 1865 has spent $122,000,000 in
education, and this year is pledged to $32,000,000 more for State and
city schools, although the blacks, paying one-thirtieth of the taxes,
get nearly one-half of the fund. Go into our fields and see whites and
blacks working side by side. On our buildings in the same squad. In our
shops at the same forge. Often the blacks crowd the whites from work, or
lower wages by their greater need and simpler habits, and yet are
permitted, because we want to bar them from no avenue in which their
feet are fitted to tread. They could not there be elected orators of
white universities, as they have been here, but they do enter there a
hundred useful trades that are closed against them here. We hold it
better and wiser to tend the weeds in the garden than to water the
exotic in the window.
In the South there are negro lawyers, teachers, editors, dentists,
doctors, preachers, multiplying with the increasing ability of their
race to support them. In villages and towns they have their military
companies equipped from the armories of the State, their churches and
societies built and supported largely by their neighbors. What is the
testimony of the courts? In penal legislation we have steadily reduced
felonies to misdemeanors, and have led the world in mitigating
punishment for crime, that we might save, as far as possible, this
dependent race from its own weakness. In our penitentiary record sixty
per cent of the prosecutors are negroes, and in every court the negro
criminal strikes the colored juror, that white men may judge his case.
In the North, one negro in every 185 is in jail--in the South, only one
in 446. In the North the percentage of negro prisoners is six times as
great as that of native whites; in the South, only four times as great.
If prejudice wrongs him in Southern courts, the record shows it to be
deeper in Northern courts. I assert here, and a bar as intelligent and
upright as the bar of Massachusetts will solemnly indorse my assertion,
that in the Southern courts, from highest to lowest, pleading for life,
liberty or property, the negro has distinct advantage because he is a
negro, apt to be overreached, oppressed--and that this advantage reaches
from the juror in making his verdict to the judge in measuring his
sentence.
Now, Mr. President, can it be seriously maintained that we are
terrorizing the people from whose willing hands comes every year
$1,000,000,000 of farm crops? Or have robbed a people who, twenty-five
years from unrewarded slavery, have amassed in one State $20,000,000 of
property? Or that we intend to oppress the people we are arming every
day? Or deceive them, when we are educating them to the utmost limit of
our ability? Or outlaw them, when we work side by side with them? Or
re-enslave them under legal forms, when for their benefit we have even
imprudently narrowed the limit of felonies and mitigated the severity of
law? My fellow-countrymen, as you yourselves may sometimes have to
appeal at the bar of human judgment for justice and for right, give to
my people to-night the fair and unanswerable conclusion of these
incontestable facts.
But it is claimed that under this fair seeming there is disorder and
violence. This I admit. And there will be until there is one ideal
community on earth after which we may pattern. But how widely is it
misjudged! It is hard to measure with exactness whatever touches the
negro. His helplessness, his isolation, his century of servitude,--these
dispose us to emphasize and magnify his wrongs. This disposition,
inflamed by prejudice and partisanry, has led to injustice and delusion.
Lawless men may ravage a county in Iowa and it is accepted as an
incident--in the South, a drunken row is declared to be the fixed habit
of the community. Regulators may whip vagabonds in Indiana by platoons
and it scarcely arrests attention--a chance collision in the South among
relatively the same classes is gravely accepted as evidence that one
race is destroying the other. We might as well claim that the Union was
ungrateful to the colored soldier who followed its flag because a Grand
Army post in Connecticut closed its doors to a negro veteran as for you
to give racial significance to every incident in the South, or to accept
exceptional grounds as the rule of our society. I am not one of those
who becloud American honor with the parade of the outrages of either
section, and belie American character by declaring them to be
significant and representative. I prefer to maintain that they are
neither, and stand for nothing but the passion and sin of our poor
fallen humanity. If society, like a machine, were no stronger than its
weakest part, I should despair of both sections. But, knowing that
society, sentient and responsible in every fiber, can mend and repair
until the whole has the strength of the best, I despair of neither.
These gentlemen who come with me here, knit into Georgia's busy life as
they are, never saw, I dare assert, an outrage committed on a negro! And
if they did, no one of you would be swifter to prevent or punish. It is
through them, and the men and women who think with them--making
nine-tenths of every Southern community--that these two races have been
carried thus far with less of violence than would have been possible
anywhere else on earth. And in their fairness and courage and
steadfastness--more than in all the laws that can be passed, or all the
bayonets that can be mustered--is the hope of our future.
When will the blacks cast a free ballot? When ignorance anywhere is not
dominated by the will of the intelligent; when the laborer anywhere
casts a vote unhindered by his boss; when the vote of the poor anywhere
is not influenced by the power of the rich; when the strong and the
steadfast do not everywhere control the suffrage of the weak and
shiftless--then, and not till then, will the ballot of the negro be
free. The white people of the South are banded, Mr. President, not in
prejudice against the blacks--not in sectional estrangement--not in the
hope of political dominion--but in a deep and abiding necessity. Here is
this vast ignorant and purchasable vote--clannish, credulous, impulsive,
and passionate--tempting every art of the demagogue, but insensible to
the appeal of the stateman. Wrongly started, in that it was led into
alienation from its neighbor and taught to rely on the protection of an
outside force, it cannot be merged and lost in the two great parties
through logical currents, for it lacks political conviction and even
that information on which conviction must be based. It must remain a
faction--strong enough in every community to control on the slightest
division of the whites. Under that division it becomes the prey of the
cunning and unscrupulous of both parties. Its credulity is imposed upon,
its patience inflamed, its cupidity tempted, its impulses
misdirected--and even its superstition made to play its part in a
campaign in which every interest of society is jeopardized and every
approach to the ballot-box debauched. It is against such campaigns as
this--the folly and the bitterness and the danger of which every
Southern community has drunk deeply--that the white people of the South
are banded together. Just as you in Massachusetts would be banded if
300,000 men, not one in a hundred able to read his ballot--banded in
race instinct, holding against you the memory of a century of slavery,
taught by your late conquerors to distrust and oppose you, had already
travestied legislation from your State House, and in every species of
folly or villainy had wasted your substance and exhausted your credit.
But admitting the right of the whites to unite against this tremendous
menace, we are challenged with the smallness of our vote. This has long
been flippantly charged to be evidence and has now been solemnly and
officially declared to be proof of political turpitude and baseness on
our part. Let us see. Virginia--a state now under fierce assault for
this alleged crime--cast in 1888 seventy-five per cent of her vote;
Massachusetts, the State in which I speak, sixty per cent of her vote.
Was it suppression in Virginia and natural causes in Massachusetts? Last
month Virginia cast sixty-nine per cent of her vote; and Massachusetts,
fighting in every district, cast only forty-nine per cent of hers. If
Virginia is condemned because thirty-one per cent of her vote was
silent, how shall this State escape, in which fifty-one per cent was
dumb? Let us enlarge this comparison. The sixteen Southern States in '88
cast sixty-seven per cent of their total vote--the six New England
States but sixty-three per cent of theirs. By what fair rule shall the
stigma be put upon one section while the other escapes? A congressional
election in New York last week, with the polling place in touch of every
voter, brought out only 6,000 votes of 28,000--and the lack of