WHITES AND BLACKS OR THE QUESTION SETTLED 50

CHAPTER VII. OUR CHRISTIAN DUTY

Let it be known that a white man outraging a Negro will be as fearlessly and as earnestly hunted down and punished as in the case of a black man outraging a white person.

Let there be no inequality in citizenship and all is well.

The men upon whose shoulders depend the well-being of our commonwealth are those who fear God and lead sober, moral lives, from whom are selected our statesmen and our public officers.

Let the eminent white preachers, like Dr. McDonald,

Dr. Hawthorne, Dr. Lee, Dr. Carpenter and Dr. Cleveland, cry aloud, and spare not, from their pulpits until all is as it should be.

In the meantime, let such powerful colored preachers as Bishops Turner, Gaines and Grant, Rev. Carter of Atlanta, Rev. Love of Savannah, Rev. W. J. White of Augusta, Rev. Mason of the A.M.E. Church, Dr. A. E. P. Alberts and Professor Crogman, Holmes and Fortson tell the colored race from the "sacred desk" and in the colleges, that a conciliatory policy must be pursued; that minorities must persuade majorities; that the weak must make friends with the strong, and that the rabid, fire-eating, dissension-creating and strife-sowing politicians must emigrate.

Tell the colored people to stop being moved by passion and emotion, but to listen to sense and reason.

Tell the Negro to help own the developed cities, industries, banks, insurance companies, railroads and other great enterprises, that until he does help own them the white man will remain in control.

Tell them that the Negro who does not work should starve. Oppose on every hand the disposition to make five dollars a week and spend seven.

Tell them to care less for exhibition and more for real worth.

Tell them to give the circus and street shows the cold shoulder; to invest the money which they heretofore have been foolishly using in this manner, in buying dirt and in educating themselves and their children.

Tell the educated Negroes, with a little money, to still love their mothers' race, and despise the thought which bids them leave a race calling so earnestly for their services.

Tell them to be glad that they have learning, and to go among the lowly of their race and lift them up.

Tell them to ask for no legislation which does not apply alike to whites and blacks.

Tell them to stand alone, self-reliant, and show the world what they can do in the world of mind and in the world of matter.

Tell them not to ask places because they are black, and not to refuse them because they are colored, but to apply, if at all, on merit.

 If they can't hoe their own row, "tote their own skillet," they should perish from the face of the earth. I say this as a Negro, proud of the fact that my mother was a black woman.

It makes me sick to hear Negroes sending up baby appeals as though they were never to grow to manhood, where asking and resolving in halls about their wrongs, when they themselves do more to perpetuate these evils than anybody else.

I hate to hear a black man asking a white man to do for him what he will not do for himself. In order to be consistent I claim that the Negro must not ask white men to accept him into their hotels and other public places, until the Negroes owning barber shops and restaurants have the moral courage to accept their own race into them.

I do not by this admit that a black man is any better off because he is admitted to places where white men go.

If my boy goes to school and is rich in intellectual germs, the fact that no white boy attends that school will not prevent him from learning, all other things being equal;

But if my boy is a “dummy" or a "stick," neither will a white boy sitting in a seat by him make him more susceptible of cultivation.