__________________________________________________________________

            Anna J Cooper.  “The Ethics of the Negro Question,” September 5, 1902.

            Occasion: Speech given at Asbury Park, NJ to the Biennial Session of Friends General Conference.

            __________________________________________________________________

The Ethics of the Negro Question

1

Where there is no vision, the people perish.  Proverbs 29:18.

            2

A nation’s greatness is not dependent upon the things it makes and uses.  Things without thoughts are mere vulgarities.  America can boast her expanse of territory, her gilded domes, her paving stones of silver dollars; but the question of deepest moment in this nation today is its span of the circle of brotherhood, the moral stature of its men and its women, the elevation at which it receives its “vision” into the firmament of eternal truth.

3

I walked not long since thru the national library at Washington.  I confess that my heart swelled and my soul was satisfied; for however overpowering to a subdued individual taste the loud scream of color in the grand hallway may be, one cannot but feel that the magnificence of that pile, the loftiness of sentiment and grandeur of execution here adequately and artistically expressed the best in American life and aspiration.  I have often sat silent in the gallery under the great dome contemplating the massive pillars that support the encircling arches and musing on the texts traced above the head of each heroic figure: since, holding in her hand instruments for the study of Astronomy, proclaims “the heavens declare the glory of God and the firmament showeth His handiwork.”  Law bears the equal scales with the text: “Of Law there can be no less acknowledged than that her voice is the harmony of the world.”  Religion stands with firm feet and fearless mien, unequivocally summing up the whole matter: “What doth the Lord require of thee but to do justly, to love mercy and to walk humbly with thy God.”

4

Surely if American civilization should one day have to be guessed from a few broken columns and mutilated statues like the present grandeur of Egypt, Greece and Rome, the antiquarian or the historian who shall in future ages, dig from the dust of centuries this single masterpiece, this artistic expression of a people’s aspiration and achievement, will yield ready homage to the greatness of the nation which planned and executed such a monument of architectural genius. “Surely here was a Nation,” they must conclude, “Whole God was the Lord!  A nation whose vision was direct from the Mount of God!”

5

Whether such an estimate is just, it is our deepest concern to examine.  Where there is no vision, the people perish.  A nation cannot long survive the shattering of its own ideals.  Its doom is already sounded when it begins to write one law on its walls and lives another in its halls.  Weighed in the balance and found wanting was not more terribly signed and sealed for the trembling Belshazzar than for us by these handwritings on our walls if they have lost their hold on the thought and conduct of the people.

6

The civilizations that have flowered and failed in the past did not harvest their fruit and die of old age.  A worm was eating at the core even in the heyday of their splendor and magnificence so soon as the grand truths which they professed had ceased to vitalize and vivify their national life.

7

Rome’s religion was pagan, it is true, but for all that it was because Rome had departed from the integrity of her own ideals and was laughing in her sleeve at the gods of her fathers that she found herself emasculated and effete before the virile hordes that plundered and finally superseded her.  Thor and Woden had not become to the barbarians a figure to paint on a wall or adorn a fountain.  Let America beware how she writes on her walls to be seen of men the lofty sentiment “Give instruction to those who cannot procure it for themselves”, while she tips a wink at those communities which propose to giver her instruction to the poor only that which is wrung from their penury.  The vision as pictured on our walls is divine.  The American ideal is perfect.  A weak or undeveloped race apparently might ask no better fate than the opportunity of maturing under the great wing of this nation and of becoming Christianized under its spiritual ministrations.

8

It is no fault of the Negro that he stands in the United States of America today as the passive and silent rebuke to the Nation’s Christianity, the great gulf between its professions and its practices, furnishing the chief ethical element in its politics, constantly pointing with dumb but inexorable fingers to those ideals of our civilization which embody the Nation’s highest, truest, and best thought, its noblest and grandest purposes and aspirations.

9

Amid all the deafening and maddening clamor of expediency and availability among politicians and parties, from tariffs and trusts to free coinage and 16 to 1, from microscopic questions of local sovereignty to the telescopic ones of expansion and imperialism, the Negro question furnishes the one issue that says ought.  Not what will the party gain by this measure or that, not will this or that experiment bring in larger percentages and cash balances; but who, where, what is my neighbor?  Am I my brother’s keeper?  Are there any limitations or special adaptations of the Golden Rule?  If Jesus were among men today, is there a type of manhood veiled wherein, the Divinity whom our civilization calls Captain, would again, coming to His own, be again despised, rejected, because of narrow prejudices and blinding pride of race?

10

Uprooted from sunny lands of his forefather by the white man’s cupidity and selfishness, ruthlessly torn from all the ties of clan and tribe, dragged against his will over thousands of miles of unknown waters to a strange land among strange peoples, the Negro was transplanted to this continent in order to produce chattels and beasts of burden for a nation “conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”  A nation worshiping as God one who came not to be ministered unto, but to minister; a nation believing in a Savior meek and lowly of heart who, having not where to lay His head, was eyes to the blind, hearing to the deaf, a gospel of hope and joy to the poor and outcast, a friend to all who travail and are heavy laden.

11

The whites of America revolted against the mother country for a trifling tax on tea, because they were not represented in the body that laid the tax.  They drew up their Declaration of Independence, a Magna Charta of human rights, embodying principles of universal justice and equality.

12

Professing a religion of sublime altruism, a political faith in the inalienable rights of man as man, these jugglers with reason and conscience were at the same moment stealing heathen from their far away homes, forcing them with lash and gun to unrequited toil, making it a penal offense to teach them to read the Word of God, --nay, more, were even begetting and breeding mongrels of their own flesh among these helpless creatures and pocketing the guilty increase, the price of their own blood in unholy dollars and cents.  Accursed hunger for gold!

13

To what does thou not drive mortal breasts!  But God did not ordain this nation to reenact the tragedy of Midas and transmute its very heart’s core into yellow gold.  America has a conscience as well as a pocket-book, and it comes like a pledge of perpetuity to the nation that she has never yet lost the seed of the prophets, men of inner light and unflattering courage, who would cry aloud and spare not, against the sin of the nation.  The best brain and heart of this country have always rung true and its is our hope today that the petrifying spirit of commercialism which grows so impatient at the Negro question or any other question calculated to weaken the money getting nerve by pulling at the heart and the conscience may still find a worthy protagonist in the reawakened ethical sense of the nation which can take no step backward and which must eventually settle right this and every question involving the nation’s honor and integrity.

14

It gives me great pleasure to record the historian’s testimony to the clear vision and courageous action of the Society of Friends who persisted in keeping alive this ethical sense in some dark days of the past.

15

“The Quakers have the honor” says Von Holtz “of having begun the agitation of the Slavery Question from the moral standpoint earliest and most radically.”  Thanks to the fiery zeal of some members of this Society, the religious and moral instruction of the slaves and the struggle against any further importation of the Negroes were begun by the close of the 17^th century.  By the middle of the 18^th century the emancipation of slaves had gradually become a matter of action by the whole Quaker body.  By a resolution of 1774 all members concerned in importing, selling, purchasing, giving or transferring Negroes or other slaves were directed to be excluded from membership or disowned.  Two years later this resolution was extended to cover cases of those who delayed to set their slaves free.  In February 1790 the Quaker meeting in Philadelphia and the Quakers in New York sent addresses to Congress requesting it to abolish the African slave trade.  Certain representatives from the North urged that the petitions of so respectable a body as that of the Quakers in relation to so great a moral evil, were deserving of special consideration.  The representatives of the South replied with provoking irony and mercilessly castigated the Quakers.  Year after year the Friends came indefatigably with new petitions each time, and each time had to undergo the same scornful treatment.  In 1797 the yearly meeting at Philadelphia set forth some special wrongs in a petition, a prominent place in which was occupied by a complaint against the law of North Carolina condemning freed slaves to be sold again.  Many Southern delegates in Congress expressed in a bullying fashion their scorn for the tenacity with which these men of earnest faith ever constantly came back again and again to their fruitless struggle.  Not in America alone, England also witnessed the faith and work of this body of consistent Christians of unimpaired vision and unwavering extermination.  The first petition to the House of Commons for the abolition of the Slave Trade and Slavery went up from the Friends, and thru the long agitation which ensued before that prayer was granted, the Society of Friends took an active and prominent part.  Their own dear Whitter has sounded the keynote both of their struggle and its reward: “Whatever in love’s name is truly done To free the bound and lift the fallen one Is done to Christ; and the Master himself, inasmuch as ye did it unto one of the least of these my brethren ye did it unto me.”

16

The colored people of America find themselves today in the most trying period of all their trying history in this land of their trial and bondage.  As the trials and responsibilities of the man weigh more heavily than do those of the infant, so the Negro under free labor and cutthroat competition today has to vindicate his fitness to survive in face of acolorphobia that heeds neither reason nor religion and a prejudice that shows no quarter and allows no mitigating circumstances.

17

In the darkest days of slavery, there were always at the North friends of the oppressed and devoted champions of freedom who would go all lengths to wipe out the accursed stain of human slavery from their country’s scutcheon; while in the South the slave’s close contact with the master class, mothering them in infancy, caring for them in sickness, sorrow and death, resulted as pulsing touch of humanity must ever result, in many warm sympathies and a total destruction of that repulsion to mere color which betokens narrow and exclusive intercourse among provincials.

18

Today all this is changed.  White and black meet as strangers with cold, distant or avowed hostility.  The colored domestic who is no longer specially trained for her job or taught to look on it with dignity and appreciation, is barely tolerated in the home till she can do up the supper dishes and get away—when she can go—to the devil if he will have her.  The mistress who bemoans her shiftlessness and untidiness does not think of offering her a comfortable room, providing for her social needs and teaching her in the long evenings at home the simple household arts and virtues which our grandmothers found time for.  Her vices are set down to the debit account of her freedom, especially if she has attended a public school and learned enough to spell her way thru a street ballad.  So generally is this the case that if a reform were attempted suddenly, the girl herself of the average type would misunderstand and probably resent it.  The condition of the male laborer is even more hopeless.  Receiving 50 cents a day or less for unskilled but laborious toil from which wage he boards himself and is expected to keep a family in something better than a “on room cabin,” the Negro workman receives neither sympathy nor recognition from his white fellow laborers.  Scandinavians, Poles and Hungarians can tie up the entire country by a strike paralyzing not only industry but also existence itself, when they are already getting a wage that sounds like affluence to the hungry black man.  The union means war to the death against him and the worst of it is he can never be lost in the crowd and have his opprobrium forgotten.  A foreigner can learn the language and out-American the American on his own soil.  A white man can apply burnt cork and impute his meanness to the colored race as his appointed scapegoat.  But the Ethiopian cannot change his skin.  On him is laid the iniquity of his whole person but the good that love has planned for him must be labeled and basseted “special” for the Negro.  Special kinds of education, special forms of industry, special churches and special places of amusement, special sections of our cities during life and special burying grounds in death.  White America has created a terra incognita in its midst, a strange dark unexplored waste of human souls from which if one essay to speak out an intelligible utterance, so well known is the place of preferment accorded the mirroring of preconceived notions, that instead of being the revelation of a personality and the voice of a truth, the speaker becomes a phonograph and merely talks back what is talked into him.  It is no popular task today to voice the black man’s woe.  It is far easier and safer to say that the wrong is all in him.  The American conscience would like a rest from the black man’s ghost.  It was always an unpalatable subject but preeminently now is the era of good feeling, and self-complacency, of commercial omnipotence and military glorification.  It seems an impertinence as did the boldness of Nathan when he caught the conscience of the great king at the pinnacle of victorious prosperity with the inglorious seizure of the ewe worth the blood and treasure that have been spilled on his account, the heartache and bitterness that have racked the country in easing him off its shoulders and out of its conscience.  Let us have no more of it.  If he is a man let him stand up and prove it.  Above all let us have peace.  Northern capital is newly wed to Southern industry and the honeymoon must not be disturbed.  If southern conventions are ingenious enough to invent a device for disfranchising these unwelcome children of the soil, if it will work, what of it?

19

On the floor of the most August body in the land, a South Carolina senator said: “Yes; we bulldozed and terrorized niggers and we are not ashamed of it.  If you had been in our place you would have done the same.”

20

During the slavery agitation Garrison was mobbed in the streets of Boston for advocating abolition; but he kept right no and would be heard.  In our day the simplest narrative in just recognition of the Negro meets with cold disfavor and the narrator is generally frozen into silence.  A lecturer on the Spanish-American War attempted as an eyewitness and with the aid of Stereopticon to tell a Richmond audience of the gallant charge up San Juan Hill and the brave part in it by the 10^th Cavalry.  His words were met by hisses, his lanternslides destroyed and he was obliged to close his entertainment in darkness and confusion.

21

A professor in a Southern school who in a magazine article condemned the saturnalia of blood and savagery known as lynching arguing that the Negro, while inferior, was yet a man and should be accorded the fundamental rights of a man, lost his position for his frankness and fairness.  The Negro is being ground to power between the upper and nether millstones.  The South, intolerant of interference from either outside or inside, the North too polite or too busy or too gleeful over the promised handshaking to manifest the most distant concern.

22

But God is not dead neither doth the ruler of the universe slumber and sleep.  As a Nation sows so shall it reap.  Men do not gather grapes from thorns or figs from thistles.  To sow the wind is to reap the whirlwind.

23

A little over two years ago while the gentlest and kindest of presidents was making a tour of the South bent only on good will to men with a better understanding and the healing of all sectional rancor and ill feeling, there occurred in almost a stone’s throw of where he was for the time being domiciled an outburst of diabolism that would shame a tribe of naked savages.  A black wretch was to be burned alive.  Without court or jury his unshrived soul was to be ushered into eternity and the prospect furnished a holiday festival for the countryside.

24

Excursion trains with banners flying were run into the place and eager children were heard to exclaim: “we have seen a hanging, we are now going to see a burning!”

25

Human creatures with the behavior of hyenas contended with one another for choice bones of their victim as souvenirs of the occasion.  So wanton was the cannibalistic thirst for blood that the Negro preacher who offered the last solace of the Christian to the doomed man was caught in the same mad frenzy and made to share his fate.  A shiver ran thru the nation at such a demonical lawlessness.  But a cool analysis of the situation elicited from the Attorney General of the United States the legal opinion that the case “probably had no Federal aspects!”

26

Just one year ago the same gentle people-loving president was again acting out his instinct of mingling naturally and democratically with his people.  Again lawlessness, this time in the form of a single red handed unreasoning ruffian instead of many but the same mad spirit which puts its own will whether swayed by lurid passion or smoldering hate, on the throne of the majesty of law and of duty, made the nation shudder and bleed by striking down unaccused and untried the great head of the nation.  A fact may be mentioned here, which was unquestioned at the time by those around, but which was not often repeated afterwards, that it was the burly arm of a Negro that felled the assassin and dealt the first blows in defense of the stricken president.

27

I will not undertake an apology for the shortcomings of the American Negro.  It goes without saying that the black is centuries behind the white race in material, mental and moral development.  The American Negro is today but 37 years removed from chatteldom, not long enough surely to ripen the century plant of a civilization.  After 250 years of a most debasing slavery, inured to toil but not to thrift, without home, without family ties, without those habits of a self reliant industry by which peoples maintain their struggle for existence, poor, naked, weak, ignorant, degraded even below his pristine state as a savage, the American Negro was at the close of the War of the Rebellion “cut loose” as the slang of the day expressed it, and left to fend for himself.  The master class, full of resentment and rage at the humiliations and losses of a grinding war, suffered their old time interest to turn into bitterness or cold indifference and Ku Klux beatings with re-enslaving black codes became the sorry substitute for the overseer’s lash and the auction block.

28

At this juncture the conscience of the Nation asserted itself and the federal constitution was so amended as to bring under the aegis of national protection these helpless babes whom the exigencies of war had suddenly thrown into the maelstrom of remorseless life.