Читать книгу Colored girls and boys' inspiring United States history and a heart to heart talk about white folks - William Henry Harrison - Страница 13

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From African jungles to American shores,

Negroes were brought to do all the chores;

Though bought and sold without due blame,

They now forgive this country’s shame.

—Harrison.

THE slaves who went into the battles of the Civil War came up to all the standards of loyalty and bravery that had been set for them as fighting soldiers. But it was left to the millions of Colored men who staid on the plantations during the war to come up to and go far beyond the standards of moral self-control and human just treatment set by their owners. The Colored men who were in the war were really enjoying a temporary freedom while they were fighting for a permanent freedom. But it was quite different with the shackled men who staid on the plantations during the war. They were then slaves not only one way but in three ways. First, they were still slaves to their owners as they were yet under their control; secondly, they were slaves to themselves inasmuch as they were their own bosses and overseers to plant, cultivate and reap the crops in the absence of the white men; thirdly and most important of all, they were slaves to the trust and honor under which they had been left with the care and protection of the white women and children on the plantations. And no records in history have been found to show where those thousands of white wives, daughters, mothers and sisters made complaints to their returned husbands, sons, fathers and brothers about having forced upon them insulting and raping attentions from those millions of slave men under whose whole care those white women had been freely left and safely kept during the Civil War.

If those Colored men had wanted to copy the spiteful, revengeful and immoral actions of most of their white owners, they could easily have mistreated or destroyed all of those helpless white women and children in revenge for the two hundred and forty-four years of unspeakable crimes committed against their Colored womanhood by the Southern white slave owners and overseers. Or the slaves could have run away, joined the Union Army in a mass and left alone those destitute white women and children to starve on the untilled plantations. But those men of the Negro race, not then three hundred years from the underbrush of Africa, had under their dark skins too much inborn manhood and brotherhood qualities to stoop down to such beastily acts. They naturally grasped that grand and big opportunity to show to the Southern white people and the rest of the watchful world (that helplessly looked on in silence but with pitiful and admiring glances) that they had in their characters and dispositions and knew when and how to use them, the sterling principles of open-fairness, loyal friendliness, tender feelings, human considerations, moral self-control and Christlike mercy.

It is undeniably true that as early as 1860 there were in the United States over five hundred eighty-eight thousand Mulattoes. (Ref. Work’s Negro Year Book, page 432, 1918-1919 edition). Among that large number many thousands were beautiful and innocent girls who were either retained as their white owners’ immoral mistresses on Southern plantations or sold hither and thither from the Potomac River to the Gulf of Mexico to be forced into shameful and degraded lives a thousand-fold more friendless, unhappy and unprotected than Longfellow’s wandering Evangeline.

As the Civil War did not begin until 1861, it is readily seen that those one half million and more Mulattoes were not the results of slave men forcing immoral attentions upon the white women and girls left under their personal cares during the four years of the Civil War. But those half-Colored, half white people were the undeniable results of the brutal rapings of white plantation owners and overseers upon their helpless and unprotected black slave women for over two hundred years. So is it strange that fair and pure minded white people throughout the world, knowing and seeing all around them today the increased results of those first beastily actions by immoral members of their own race, listen without interest but with shame and impatience whenever, through sheer politeness, they are compelled to remain as audiences before certain classes of Southern men who for centuries (including today) have been talking through mouth and press about keeping their Southern white blood untainted and unstained? Colored boys and girls, therefore, should not become down-hearted and discouraged when they read in newspapers or hear from platforms such Southern white men writing or making such “Jekel-Hyde” talks; because close-observing, sound-reasoning and fair-judging white people in the South, in the North and throughout the world fully understand the whole situation and do not in the least take such Southern false utterances seriously. In fact they usually cannot keep from laughing at the funny side of the whole thing and say among themselves, “How absurd.”

No one but God knows the number of deceived Southern white married women who during slavery days secretly worried themselves sick, slowly pined away and silently died of broken hearts in their richly furnished colonial mansions, because of the ever haunting, taunting and stinging knowledge that their unfaithful, disloyal and immoral husbands as well as being the fathers of their white wives’ children were also the fathers of their slave mistresses’ Mulatto offsprings. So is it surprising that clean-living, clean-thinking and justice-loving white people always exchange knowing winks with their friends and hurriedly put handkerchiefs up to their mouths in order to hide disgusted features and weary yawns whenever they find themselves in places where they have to listen to certain classes of Southern white men who for centuries (including today) have been boasting from platform and press about their unsurpassed and unexcelled fidelity and chivalry to their Southern white womanhood? Instead of losing their ambitions and hopes when hearing and reading such blaspheming words against their race and progress, Colored boys and girls should take on new hope and redouble their efforts in striving to become even more devout Christians, higher learned students, better skilled industrial workers and fuller law-abiding citizens. In reference to the inferiority of their colors, Colored youths should remember that the prettiest thing in the world (the rainbow) is Colored, and yet, no one is able to resist the fascinations of its archful beauty or forget the consolations of its floodless promise, just because Nature with splashing rain drops and flashing sun rays oft ribbons the sky with rainbow hues.

No one but God knows the number of black slave women who moaned their heart strings loose and died of broken spirits either in their one-roomed log cabins or out in fence-cornered fields, because of the ever torturing knowledge that the virtues and womanhoods of themselves and the chaste maidenhoods of their immatured and innocent daughters had been repeatedly and forcibly taken or sold by their white owners and overseers. Yet, not one of those white rapists was lynched, tortured and burned at the stake by Negroes, not even at the close of the Civil War when there were thousands of ex-slave holders living in some Southern districts where the Colored people outnumbered the white people five to one. And surely, after gallantly fighting through the thickest and hottest battles of the war, it was not fear nor cowardice that held those Colored men from avenging the unprintable immoral wrongs forcibly done for over two hundred years to their unprotected and helpless Colored women. But, it was the living up to and the carrying out of a certain high civic principle of their African tribal laws that they had inherited and which prevented the ex-slaves from striking such a revengeful blow upon the Southern whites. For among savage tribes in Africa the universal punishment for raping was certain death; different tribes having different methods of dealing out that penalty. But that punishment was never dealt out by a mob. Those tribes so respected and obeyed the laws under which they lived and were governed that as savage as they appeared to be, they always had enough self-control over their tempers and passions to leave the captures, trials, convictions and executions of such offenders to be carried out by their chiefs and their assistants who had been put in their offices for such purposes. And since America had made laws and appointed officers who should have caught, tried, convicted and punished those Southern white men who raped enough black women to cause the birth of over a half million Mulattoes, the ex-slave men felt that even if those laws had not been enforced by people who had been selected to do so, it was not their rights to take the laws into their own hands by forming themselves into lynching mobs. They felt that just as raping of either black or white women is a most damnable crime; so is lynching either by black or white mobs a most hellish sin. In making comparisons between the ancient laws of Nippur and the modern laws of the United States, relative to slaves, the world-famed journalist, Arthur Brisbane, in the June 22, 1920 issue of the New York American, under the title, “Today”, wrote in part as follows:

“Five thousand years ago some laws were better than those of our day.

“For instance, in those ancient laws, if a slave woman had a child, the father being her owner, the mother and the child were set free. In magnificent America, in Lincoln’s day, thousands of slave children, with slave owners for fathers, were sold in the public markets.”

Now, not for one moment do intelligent and law-abiding Colored citizens uphold or make excuses for the brutish crimes committed by the degenerate members (and there are many) of their own race. For they fully realize that it means a faster and higher progress of all their people to have Colored criminals punished to the fullest extent of the law, after they have been given the same fair trials, convictions and sentences that are handed out to the thousands of white criminals who commit the same kind of crimes. And just as Colored degenerates are disgusting and shameful to up-right living white people, so are white degenerates disgusting and shameful to up-right living Colored people. Thus the broad-minded and law-abiding Colored and white citizens now mutually know that it is for the greater advancement of both races and a closer brotherhood combining of all Americans for them to see to it, as far as possible, that all criminals be rightly protected when arrested, given fair trials, safely guarded after sentenced and fully punished in a confinement where they cannot further morally lower themselves nor longer dilute the purity of human society.

And in thus far carrying out their Christian duties for the elevation of humanity, good Colored and white people are contented in knowing that for those criminals of both races who are shrewd enough to escape the detection and punishment of earthly laws, there is a Heavenly law that never fails to punish them at the proper time. And even while on their death beds those evil doers are twisting and turning in mental and bodily sufferings, they will not on account of their torturing pains be able to truthfully and peacefully chant such consoling lines that are found in Tennyson’s poem “Crossing The Bar”, nor will their names be written in that “Book of Gold” where it is said Abou Ben Adhem had his name inscribed above all of those who loved the Lord, because he (Abou Ben Adhem) loved all his fellowmen.