Black and White | Page 3

The
great newspapers, which should plead the cause of the oppressed and
the down-trodden, which should be the palladiums of the people's
rights, are all on the side of the oppressor, or by silence preserve a
dignified but ignominious neutrality. Day after day they weave a false
picture of facts--facts which must measurably influence the future
historian of the times in the composition of impartial history. The
wrongs of the masses are referred to sneeringly or apologetically.
The vast army of laborers--men, women, and even tender children--find
no favor in the eyes of these Knights of the Quill. The Negro and the
Indian, the footballs of slippery politicians and the helpless victims of
sharpers and thieves, are wantonly misrepresented--held up to the eyes
of the world as beings incapable of imbibing the distorted civilization
in the midst of which they live and have their being. They are placed in
the attic, only to be aired when somebody wants an "issue" or an
"appropriation."
There are no "Liberators" to-day, and the William Lloyd Garrisons
have nearly all of them gone the way of all the world.
The part played by the ministry of Christ in the early conflict against
human slavery in this country would be enigmatical in the extreme,
utterly beyond apprehension, if it were not matter of history that the
representatives of the Christian Church, in conflicts with every giant
wrong, have always been the strongest supporters, the most obsequious
tools of money power and the political sharpers who have imposed

their vile tyrannies upon mankind. They have alternately supplicated
and domineered, crawled in the dust or mounted the house-top, as
occasion served, from Gregory to the Smiths and Joneses of the present
time. So that it has passed into a proverb, that the ministers of the
gospel may be always counted upon to take sides with the strongest
party--always seeking to conciliate "King Cotton," "King Corporation,"
"King Monopoly," and all the other "Kings" of modern
growth--swaying, like the reed in the wind, to the powers that be,
whether of tyranny reared upon a thousand years of usurpation, military
despotism of a day's growth, or presumptuous wealth accumulated by
robbery, hypocrisy and insidious assassination. Instead of leading in the
reformation of leviathan wrongs, the ministry waits for the rabble to
applaud before it commends.[1] It was not in this manner that the great
Christ set the world in motion, sowed broadcast the dynamite which
uprooted long-established infamies, and prepared the way for the
ultimate redemption of the world from sin and error.
If the Christian ministry of the United States did at last recognize the
demoralization and iniquity of slavery, it was because the heroic band,
headed by William Lloyd Garrison, first fired the heart of the people
and forced the ministry to take sides with the righteous cause. I speak
not of the few heroic exceptions, but of the mass of the American
clergy. If in the evangelization of the black man since the rebellion, the
ministry have largely furthered the work, they have done so because
there were hundreds and thousands of brave men and women ready to
give their time and money to the upbuilding of outraged humanity and
the cause of Christ. They have simply put in operation movements
conceived and nurtured by the genius and philanthropy of others, and
no one of them will claim that he has not reaped an abundant pecuniary
harvest for his labors. Yet, I would accord to the ministry of the United
States full meed of praise for all that they have done as the agents of the
humane, intelligent and philanthropic opinions of the times; and, too,
there have been good men who fought the good fight simply because
the cause was just.
FOOTNOTES:

[1] Be thou the first true merit to befriend, His praise is lost who waits
till all commend. Pope's Essay on Man.
CHAPTER II
White
It is my purpose in writing this work to show that the American
Government has always construed people of African parentage to be
aliens, not only when the Constitution was tortured by narrow-minded
men to shield the cruel, murderous slave-holder in the possession of his
human property, but even now, when the panoply of citizenship is,
presumably, all-sufficient to insure to the late slave the enjoyment of
full manhood rights as a sovereign citizen.
The conflict of law and the moral sentiment of the country has been
long and bloody, and the end is not yet. Political parties in this country
do not lead, but follow, public opinion. They hang upon the applause of
the rabble, and succeed or fail in their efforts to administer the affairs
of Government in proportion as they interpret the wishes of the rabble.
Not alone do parties defer to the wishes of the illiterate, the