try the whole claim upon him. He is debtor to the world. Why 4. What would be the effect on the Afro-American population here, should there be awakened this colonization spirit? I think it would enlarge the horizon of this oppressed and persecuted people in this country. It would be to them. what the American colonies have become to England and France and Germany and the world. It would open a new world. The United States is in the lead among nations, today, because of the faith and self-denial of the first American colonies. They were here to do the work for humanity, when the fullness of time had come. They were here confronting the princes of political darkness; confronting thrones and dominions and powers; confronting the tyrannical tendencies of the whole earth. They might have stayed in England. It was their mother country, its institutions were theirs; there their fathers were buried. But no, they were willing to become living stones on the foundations of freedom in the New World. This brought them greatness. This is one path to greatness for the Afro-American. 5. What are the probabilities of the Afro-American securing his constitutional rights in the United States? I wish to answer this question dispassionately. I feel deeply the wrong to him and the fraud to the nation of the present condition of things. Politically, there is no immediate prospect of any change. The Republican party can not help him; the Democratic party will not. He is thrown back upon this simple prospect: He can slowly gain his constitutional rights by convincing the communities, where he dwells, that he is fit to participate in the government; that he has the moral fitness, that is, that he can be trusted; that he has an intellectual fitness, that is, that he has ability; and that he has ceased to act as a black man against a white on questions of right and wrong. I know his great temptation so to act; what he thinks his justification. But so long as he will not trust the white man, the white man will not trust him. He must forget that he is a black man and then the white man will forget it. Just so long as he settles questions on the color line the white man will do so. 6. What additional legal or constitutional safeguards can be devised to secure the constitutional rights of the AfroAmerican in the United States? In the present condition of things new legal and constitutional safeguards would be as worthless as those at present existing. Those on the statute books are openly nullified. When President Hayes assented to a local self-government of the States, it was settled as a fact that the United States government would no longer interpose in behalf of its own citizens in the late slave States. This made him peaceably President. The suppression of the colored vote is a great crime against the Republic. It is a crime that is contagious. The methods of the Southern States are already practiced in the great cities of the North: New York, Troy. If cheating is to settle the destiny of the Republic, why may we not nullify cheating by cheating? If the ballot is not sacred, there is nothing sacred in our institutions. One man at Gravesend can, to-day, put his weight into the Republican scales and to-morrow into the Democratic scales, and laugh at the farce of a national election. And yet in the South this cannot be remedied by new legislation; and the existing legislation is nugatory. 7. Would there be a black belt, if the colored man began in any state to secure his constitutional rights? Certainly. He would go anywhere, could these rights be recognized. This was so, when just after the war, these rights were regarded. Colored men came from Canada, and the Middle and Northern States. It would be so again. 8. What plea does the candid Southern man make, when charged with depriving the colored man of his constitutional rights? It is that the most intelligent portion of a community always will govern and always ought to govern. It is a misfortune, he admits, that in insisting on this he is obliged to nullify the Constitution, and introduce a principle that destroys the possibility of a free government. But necessity knows no law. He says no higher civilization has ever willingly and intelligently submitted to the control of a lower civilization. 9. Is there any movement toward a colonization of Africa under the lead of the Knights of Labor? Is it not believed that there is any organized effort on the part of the Knights of Labor to promote emigration to Africa? In the Northern and Western States colored men are admitted to this order. The movement might be popular with those who think there are too many laborers for the country; and the suggestion may have arisen in this way; as a sop thrown to such people. But there is no evidence of such a movement. It would surely fail. IO. As to the Colonization Society before the war, it was in a false position. It is trying to recover from it. All signs indicate that just as God sent the descendants of Jacob into Egypt to get its civilization, just as He sent the Pilgrim Fathers to Holland to learn handicrafts, making Pharaoh's and King James' wrath to praise Him, He may have done in this matter. Certainly neither the Hebrews nor the Pilgrims had a better school than America. If it is a historical fact, we ought not to be so foolish as to quarrel with it. And if the planting of Liberia in Africa should result in giving an impulse to the spread of free institutions there, that is God's work; and we ought not to quarrel with His agent, even though he did it unwittingly or meant it for evil. Now at any rate, the Colonization Society means nothing that deserves criticism; and, perhaps, it is time to forgive what we conceive the errors of its earlier days. They were times of ignorance, not always of malicious intent. And there must have been something good in the hearts of some of the eminent men, who founded and sustained the society. The old warriors of the anti-slavery times perhaps never will see this; but the rising generation certainly will. Howard University, Washington. J. E. RANKIN. |