Light Ahead for the Negro
now—his exile, nolens volens—would be a greater calamity to us than his emancipation or his enfranchisement ever has been. We need him and he needs us.

“Mr. Graves says that God never did intend that ‘opposite and antagonistic races should live together.’

“That seems to me to be as wild as to say that God intended all dogs to stay on one island; all sheep on another; all lions on another; or to say that all corn should grow in America and all wheat in Russia.

“Mr. Graves cites no ‘thus saith the Lord’ to back up his new revelation that antagonistic races must live separated.

“What God is it whose mind Mr. Graves is thus revealing? Surely it can’t be the God of the Bible—for He allowed the Jews to live 400 years among the Egyptians; then over 500 years in and out of captivity among the Canaanites; then in captivity nearly 100 years in Babylon; then under the Romans; then sold by the Romans; and from then to now the Jews—the most separate and exclusive of peoples—God’s chosen people of the Old Covenant—they have lived anywhere, among all people. Surely Mr. Graves is not revealing the mind of the God to whom the original thirteen colonies bowed down in prayer; the God of the Declaration of Independence and the God of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. For how many different races were planted in this new world? English, Dutch, Swedes, Quakers, Puritans, Catholics, French Huguenots, the poor, the rich—more antagonism than you can find between ‘Buckra’ and the ‘nigger.’ Yet all these antagonisms, such as they were, did not prevent our forefathers from uniting in one country, under one flag, in the common desire for political freedom, moral intelligence and individual nobility of character.

“Under Mr. Graves’ God every colony would have become a petty nation, with a Chinese wall around it. Mr. Graves’ inconsistencies reached a climax when he said in one breath, ‘I appeal for the imperial destiny of our mighty race,’ and then in the next breath says, ‘let us put the Negro out.’ Is it any more imperial to boss the Filipino abroad than it is to boss the Negro at home?

“The God of the Bible commands peace among races and nations, not war; friendship, not antagonism and hatred. Did not Paul, a Jew, become a messenger to the Gentiles? Did he not write the greater part of the New Testament of Christianity while living in Gentile and pagan Rome? Did not Christ set example to the world when He, a Jew, at Jacob’s well, preached His most beautiful sermon to a poor Samaritan 
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