harvest of the whirlwind?

[Pg 12]

Hard indeed is the lot of the Negro whether in the country or the city of the South, and in those of the North too for that matter. For wherever he goes he carries the marks of his race with him, and that is the essence of his offense in America. His lot is practically the same everywhere. He faces either in city or country the white man’s courts and police power and race prejudice and his industrial and residential exclusiveness and jealousies, but above all he faces the white man’s church with its undisguised color-phobia, with its virtual rejection of the brotherhood of man in respect to all races who happen not to be white. They are in the[Pg 13] regard of this church unclean and socially beyond the pale of its Christian fellowship. They are salvable to be sure but from afar by missionary efforts, the farther away the better, in China and Japan, in India and Africa. For there this church is in no danger of race contamination in its pews and at its altars and in its homes. The American church is saying with the spirit of the unseeing Peter of old, “Not so Lord, we have never accepted any man who is brown or black or yellow as really our brother, for we are white and Thou hast made us of different clay, of purer blood than all these millions of brown and black and yellow peoples. Thou hast made us white and white we mean to remain, Thy common fatherhood and the brotherhood of all these alien races to the contrary notwithstanding. We try to be humble Lord, but we have never yet succeeded in humbling the proud blood which Thou hast given us to the level of brotherhood with these strange dark peoples.”

[Pg 13]

That is the spirit which the Negro encounters in the American church; that is the spirit which crushes him down and crowds him back whenever he tries to rise and advance. He and his are denied the White man’s chance to make the best of themselves and to get the most out of themselves. And when many of them fail, as fail they must, they are beaten with many bitter words by this so-called Christian people because of this failure, and when some succeed in spite of the gates of this hell of race hatred and oppression they are beaten with even more bitter words and sometimes with bitter blows, and told to stay where they are put behind the poorest and most worthless of the whites in America’s long procession of progress and civilization. Is it any wonder that crime emerges out of such cruel and unequal conditions? The wonder is that the colored criminal class is not larger and more dangerous to person and property. Take a 

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