The Negro Problem | Page 7

exceptional men. Some were natural sons of unnatural fathers and were given often
a liberal training and thus a race of educated mulattoes sprang up to plead for black men's
rights. There was Ira Aldridge, whom all Europe loved to honor; there was that Voice
crying in the Wilderness, David Walker, and saying:
"I declare it does appear to me as though some nations think God is asleep, or that he
made the Africans for nothing else but to dig their mines and work their farms, or they
cannot believe history, sacred or profane. I ask every man who has a heart, and is blessed
with the privilege of believing--Is not God a God of justice to all his creatures? Do you

say he is? Then if he gives peace and tranquility to tyrants and permits them to keep our
fathers, our mothers, ourselves and our children in eternal ignorance and wretchedness to
support them and their families, would he be to us a God of Justice? I ask, O, ye
Christians, who hold us and our children in the most abject ignorance and degradation
that ever a people were afflicted with since the world began--I say if God gives you peace
and tranquility, and suffers you thus to go on afflicting us, and our children, who have
never given you the least provocation--would He be to us a God of Justice? If you will
allow that we are men, who feel for each other, does not the blood of our fathers and of
us, their children, cry aloud to the Lord of Sabaoth against you for the cruelties and
murders with which you have and do continue to afflict us?"
This was the wild voice that first aroused Southern legislators in 1829 to the terrors of
abolitionism.
In 1831 there met that first Negro convention in Philadelphia, at which the world gaped
curiously but which bravely attacked the problems of race and slavery, crying out against
persecution and declaring that "Laws as cruel in themselves as they were unconstitutional
and unjust, have in many places been enacted against our poor, unfriended and
unoffending brethren (without a shadow of provocation on our part), at whose bare recital
the very savage draws himself up for fear of contagion--looks noble and prides himself
because he bears not the name of Christian." Side by side this free Negro movement, and
the movement for abolition, strove until they merged into one strong stream. Too little
notice has been taken of the work which the Talented Tenth among Negroes took in the
great abolition crusade. From the very day that a Philadelphia colored man became the
first subscriber to Garrison's "Liberator," to the day when Negro soldiers made the
Emancipation Proclamation possible, black leaders worked shoulder to shoulder with
white men in a movement, the success of which would have been impossible without
them. There was Purvis and Remond, Pennington and Highland Garnett, Sojourner Truth
and Alexander Crummel, and above all, Frederick Douglass--what would the abolition
movement have been without them? They stood as living examples of the possibilities of
the Negro race, their own hard experiences and well wrought culture said silently more
than all the drawn periods of orators--they were the men who made American slavery
impossible. As Maria Weston Chapman once said, from the school of anti-slavery
agitation "a throng of authors, editors, lawyers, orators and accomplished gentlemen of
color have taken their degree! It has equally implanted hopes and aspirations, noble
thoughts, and sublime purposes, in the hearts of both races. It has prepared the white man
for the freedom of the black man, and it has made the black man scorn the thought of
enslavement, as does a white man, as far as its influence has extended. Strengthen that
noble influence! Before its organization, the country only saw here and there in slavery
some faithful Cudjoe or Dinah, whose strong natures blossomed even in bondage, like a
fine plant beneath a heavy stone. Now, under the elevating and cherishing influence of
the American Anti-slavery Society, the colored race, like the white, furnishes Corinthian
capitals for the noblest temples."
Where were these black abolitionists trained? Some, like Frederick Douglass, were
self-trained, but yet trained liberally; others, like Alexander Crummell and McCune
Smith, graduated from famous foreign universities. Most of them rose up through the
colored schools of New York and Philadelphia and Boston, taught by college-bred men
like Russworm, of Dartmouth, and college-bred white men like Neau and Benezet.

After emancipation came a new group of educated and gifted leaders: Langston, Bruce
and Elliot, Greener, Williams and Payne. Through political organization, historical and
polemic writing and moral regeneration, these men strove to uplift their people. It is the
fashion of to-day to sneer at them and to say that with freedom Negro leadership