Gideon Bands for work within the race and for work without the racea message to the colored people of the United States
discriminations which violate this principle. If we can’t do anything else, at least, protest; cry aloud. Let those who are responsible know that we know that we are unjustly discriminated against.

(c). We ought also, as far as possible, to carry on a campaign of education, the design of which should be to strengthen our hold on the friends that we have among the whites, and to so present the facts touching the race, as to make a favorable impression upon, and, win over, if possible, our enemies, or, at least, to get them thinking along right lines. In this connection the Crisis, a magazine that is published under the auspices of The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, ought to appeal to our people in every community, and ought, through their support, to be given the widest circulation. It presents, as no other organ does, the bare naked facts as to our race along all lines; and, after all, the facts are the things that tell, that win their way, and that produce conviction. The more widely we can get this magazine distributed among the whites, the more hopeful will be the outlook for us.

(d). In every community also, through our churches, through our schools—Sunday and day schools, and through every other agency by which they may be reached, we should endeavor to impress upon our people the importance of being respectable, of behaving themselves, especially in their public deportment, when they are before the eyes of those who are prejudiced against them, and who will be sure to view them with a much more critical eye than they would their own race. We should impress upon them also, in every possible way, whenever the opportunity presents itself, the importance of being trustworthy, reliable, of qualifying themselves to do well whatever they undertake to do, so that as they come in contact with the whites, as they may find employment among the whites, the fact of their respectability, their efficiency, their reliability, their trustworthiness will stand out conspicuously. In this way much can be done to create a sentiment favorable to us, to set us in a better light, to give us a better standing with those who have been indifferent or hostile to us. We need, as a race, every one of us, to understand and to lay to heart, and to get our children to understand and lay to heart, that in the environment in which we find ourselves, we can do very much through our personal conduct, through the manner in which we bear ourselves, the manner in which we acquit ourselves, through what we make of ourselves and of our children, to intensify or to diminish this opposition to us. This won’t accomplish everything, of course, but it will aid mightily 
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