The American Missionary. Volume 43, No. 12, December, 1889

BY SECRETARY A.F. BEARD

The Southern problem is a National peril. Problems are not always perils. This is a problem large with political and religious perils, and whether political or religious it can not be ignored, nor can its consideration be postponed. It is here. It is our problem. It is nearer to the South, and more immediate, than to the North, but it is ours. We are not foreigners in any part of this country. It has been settled once for all that we are to be fellow citizens in a common country when we come from Boston to Chicago and when we go from New York to New Orleans. The problem which belongs to a country to which we belong, is ours. This might as well be understood. We have no right to take our hands off from that of which we are a part and which is a part of us. No part can say to another, it is not your concern.

This is true politically. Thrice true is it religiously—Christian faith is not confined to State boundaries. It belongs everywhere. The problem is not a new one. It has its roots bedded deep in history. When years ago it began to be discussed by a few they were called agitators, as if the discussion of right and wrong were itself a wrong, as if the letting in of light upon the darkness were a deed of darkness. Nevertheless, the Nation became thoughtful over the question of the rights of man. While it was musing the fire burned, and an irrepressible conflict came. In the issue it was settled that no man should be held by another man in involuntary servitude in this common and inseparable country.

A quarter of a century has elapsed since this settlement of a problem which involved the destiny of two races, and of our whole country. The question now before the Nation and before the churches is a corollary of slavery. It is the second section of the first chapter. The first question was: How shall liberty be proclaimed to the captive and the enslaved become free? The second is: Being free, how can the two races—as distinct and separate as are the white and black races of the South—now equal before the law, live side by side under the same government, and live in Christian truth and peace? This is the problem, and, like the first, it is irrepressible.

In one sense it is a new question—that is, a new generation of white people has in part come forward to participate in the duties of citizenship, since all men became men in the law of the land. To them the question is practically new. The situation as they find it, is this: The Negroes, who, twenty years ago, were four millions, are now eight millions. The increase of the blacks above the increase of the whites in the period of twenty years, is fourteen per cent. In his work on the African in the United States, Professor Gilliam, having in hand the figures of our Census Bureau, forecasts with the demonstration of mathematics our population one century hence. We do not know what may modify his figures, but he computes that at the present rate of increase there are to be in the old slave States in one hundred years, ninety-five millions of whites and double this number of African descent. Therefore, whatever may modify, it is probable that before one half an hundred years are over, the numbers of the blacks will furnish them sufficient guarantee for their legal rights.

There are those in this presence who have seen the population of this republic multiply itself nearly three times. Our childhood's geography taught us that twenty-three millions of people lived in the United States. Now our children learn that there are sixty millions. Twenty years ago four millions of Negroes and eight millions to-day. Therefore, as large as the problem now is to us, it will be greater for our children if we err in our solution of it.

This race of African descent has been declared by constitutional enactment to be entitled to whatever privileges belong to man, as man. Standing on this, and beginning with nothing but the heredity of hindrances, with the brand of color and the prejudice of race against them, this people have climbed up from their low estate with a remarkable progress. They have applied themselves to take hold of knowledge as no other people ever did in the annals of history. They have made great inroads upon their previous illiteracy. They have rapidly acquired property. They have developed industrial skill, and established the evidences of business facility. They have shown themselves capable of good citizenship, both in the understanding of its duties and the practice of them. They have vindicated the act of emancipation and the decrees of citizenship.

Yet to-day their standing both as citizens and as Christians is opposed. The question of their rights is discussed as if it were an open one, and in the South it is coming to be increasingly denied. Under the plea that it is unsafe for the black man to exercise his civil rights, there arises a condition of affairs that can have no standing under our government except a revolutionary standing. And the question whether the rights of man as man shall be regarded, is to-day a more pressing question than it has been at any previous time since the slaves were declared to be men.

The Southern press, which both creates and voices public opinion, reveals an attitude of mind increasingly hostile to the equal civil rights of the black man, for the simple reason that he is not white, which is calculated to fill the friends of American institutions with gravest apprehensions, and which demands the serious attention of us all. Almost every week discloses to us the fact that intimidation, oppression and violence do override the government of the land, in its application to the Negro people. Influential Southern journals have pronounced the Fifteenth Amendment a living threat to the civilization of the South, and declare that Christian statesmanship demands its abrogation.

A thoughtful book published in New York, written in a calm and judicial tone by an able lawyer in Virginia, in its chapter upon the future of the Negro, says: "The social aspect of the Negro suffrage is certain to grow more threatening as the blacks increase. The motives which have led the great body of whites to vote together in this age, must augment in force in the age to follow. To day the rapid increase of the black population constitutes a greater danger to the stability of our government than any that is sapping the vitality of the European monarchies. The partial disfranchisement of the Negro in the future would appear to be inevitable, essential, if not to the existence of the South, then to the prosperity of the Union." This is a temperate expression of much Southern opinion.

Not a few hold the view that the education and advancement of the Negro tends to create the race problem, and do not hesitate to say that if the Negroes could only be kept as laborers in the cotton and rice and sugar fields, in the furnaces and mines of the South, aspiring to nothing higher and not antagonizing the whites in political matters, there would be no race problem.

Six months ago we could quote from an editorial column written by an ex-Confederate officer for an influential Democratic paper in the South these words: "The duty of the white people of the South is plain. In the spirit of noblesse oblige we must sympathize with those who are fitting the colored people for the duties of life, remembering what the Negroes were to our forefathers and what our forefathers were to them. No one can doubt that a Negro has a soul to save. That admitted, he is as much entitled to the benefits of salvation as the white man. But", he adds, "what do we see? Nearly all the bodies of Christians even, except the Roman Catholics, shuffling to set the Negro apart and leave him largely to his own ways, shuffling out of their responsibility according to the gospel which they profess as their guide, and putting the Negro apart in spite of the word of God, whom they worship, that he is no respecter of persons. The Negro was brought over here by theft and outrage. He is here to stay, and we must deal with him according to the golden rule, and as we would wish to be done by if we were similarly placed."

This is not a quotation from the National Council of Congregational Churches, where such an utterance would both by nature and by grace find expression, but it is from the pen of an officer of the Southern Confederacy, who knows the light when he sees it, who keeps open an honest eye, and who does not hesitate to speak from an honest mind. This sentiment balances somewhat of that which pleads against the black man, and not a few friends of this kind has the American Missionary Association won to itself throughout the South. It never had so many who are saying: "Yours is the most practical missionary work ever undertaken by a Christian body." "You have won our confidence by your spirit and your methods; you have our cordial sympathy." At the same time we recognize the fact that both prejudice and partisanship are now making strenuous efforts to create the judgment that the Negro should be stripped of his civil rights and that his education is going on too rapidly. For example, the Southern Journal, whose Christian sentiments of six months ago, just quoted, with another editor to-day, comes to us with another deliverance, probably nearer to the heart of most of its constituency, saying: "The Negro is not a fit subject for Northern missionary effort. Northern money is not wanted to build him schools, and Northern teachers and preachers are not wanted to improve his mind nor to save his soul. He should be let alone. He is out in the water: let him swim. He should be left alone to work out his own salvation." The editor who says we must save him is an ex-Confederate officer who has always lived in the South. The editor who says he should be left alone is a Northern man who has gone South to live. The first writes, noblesse oblige. The second does not understand the language. He, doubtless, has the largest constituency.

The pulpit also creates and voices public opinion. Our work is coming to get many a good word from the Southern pulpit. But a Southern white bishop—Bishop Pearce—did not write to unwilling ears when he said: "In my judgment higher education would be a calamity to the Negroes. It would elevate Negro aspirations far above the station which the Negro was created to fill. The whites can never tamely, and without protest submit to the intrusion of colored people into places of trust, profit, and responsibility." This, you will observe, is from a minister of Christ. It is from a bishop of a church. It is from one who prays our Lord's prayer, given alike to white and black. "After this manner, therefore, pray ye." "Our Father." This is from one who believes in the baptism at Pentecost, when devout men from every nation under heaven received the impartial benedictions of God. This from one who read the story of Peter and the sheet. "Alas, my brother."

All this, then, is the atmosphere of the situation. Some prophetic souls are looking out upon a most perplexing and perilous problem with profound solicitude, and extending to us their sympathy and prayers for our work. More, many more, are teaching and preaching that God has created the Negro race to fill forever a place of inferiority, and that he must stay down in the bog or in some way be destroyed. It is not surprising, therefore, that ignorant white people should give form and substance to these hostile opinions in scenes of violence and cruelty. They believe in the inherent inferiority of the blacks, and have a mighty fear lest this doctrine should prove to be untrue. The Negro, twenty-five years ago in absolute poverty and illiteracy, has been greedy for education, and has seriously thought of nothing but to rise from his low condition.

The intelligent white man now, and to his great surprise, is all at once confronted by the intelligent black man. They are not so numerous now as to be an element to fear, but the whites are foreseeing the not distant day when they can not be relegated to inferiority because of their color. The calamity that Bishop Pearce deplores and would prevent is not far away—educated Negroes with aspirations, in other words, men.

The general Negro illiteracy is gaining fast upon the white ignorance, and the despised Negro is found to be living above many of his illiterate white neighbors. This makes it easy work for designing men to sharpen race prejudices, which by force and fear shall keep the Negro down.

On the Negro side, he has been patient and forbearing. With these outbreaks of persecution some are discouraged, and are ready to surrender their manhood. On the other hand, some are no longer patient, but are enraged. They would retaliate. They feel that defense against wrongs is right. An influential Negro paper says, "EDUCATE, AGITATE, RETALIATE. Does one strike me? With the power of God on high, back also will I strike him." This feeling grows. Add to it the fact that the Negro is developing the power of organization. There are leaders. They are in their councils and conventions. They are feeling deeply, speaking plainly, and organizing efficiently.

This is the situation! "How shall this problem be solved? How shall we prevent the conflict between races?" A Southern author says: "These problems have been solved in the past in four ways. By reducing the weaker race to slavery, or by expulsion, or by extermination, or by the amalgamation of the races. Slavery is out of the question—that is settled. Equally repugnant is expulsion or extermination. Amalgamation is abhorrent." Therefore, the problem will not be solved by any historical precedents. The two races must live here in the same sections, equal before the law, with mutual rights, and all rights must be sanctioned and confirmed.

The American Missionary Association is living with this problem day by day. It is trying to see it with the look of Christ. This Association foresaw this question forty years ago. It took on itself the preparation for it. It guided itself to meet the problem in the fields before the armies in the South were disbanded. It went with its distinctive and unpopular principles. It went in the patience and love of Christ. For the most part it met a natural and unconcealed hostility. It did not retaliate even in spirit, but it stood firm in spirit and in truth. It has lived on in the South, and taught the same ever-living and everlasting gospel for all men, of whatever race or color. Its record is before the churches. They have never had reason to feel other than grateful to God for its work. Beginning with a great number of little primary schools, and with thousands of beginners in the alphabet of learning, it has gradually passed into larger and more far-reaching influences by teaching teachers and preachers, who shall go, and who do go out and reach multiplied thousands.

In order that applied Christianity may have the power of self-help and self-care, industries are introduced. In that the people are being fitted to save themselves. All of our work from first to last is missionary, and instinct with the motive of salvation; our schools are means to an end; fitting preachers, teachers, mechanics, home makers to meet the problem and the peril. It is not by education that the question is to be solved. The missionary view is not simply the educational view. This society is not an educational society. Education is not the panacea for the ills of man. Ignorance is a great evil, but it is not the worst one; sinfulness is worse and more difficult to cure. The one who is educated may make trouble and not heal it; secular education can not meet the problem; State education can not protect against the peril, but sanctified education can, for it has in it the power of God. This society is a missionary society which, like the American Board, teaches in order to save. You can scarcely save ignorance. This means Christian schools not only full of ethics, but vital with faith. It means also the twin life of school work and church work. To put these factors apart would be a great disaster to each; nay, it would put away from the only society that can effectively, and we believe effectually, meet this problem, the chief factor in the solution of the impending and serious question. Education alone is not equal to this question, and those who have won the ear and the sympathy of those who need to come under the power of the gospel, who have been their friends and teachers, who have their confidence and trust, are the ones to take this gospel to them and show them how to take it to others. The schools reach parents, the schools reach pastors, the schools reach the people, the schools are intertwined with all the church life that has any hope in it. This is the missionary view. When this people in the wilderness cried out in their distresses, "Who will speak for us?" the Association spoke for them. When they needed sympathy, sympathy it gave. When they needed instruction, it went to them in the name of Christ. In his name it stood for the Negro. In his name it stood by the Negro. In his name it stood with him. It stands there to-day. It is his friend and counselor. When the Negro is cast down, the churches will hear one voice and they will wish their own society to be found faithful in this.

With this charter as a missionary society for schools and churches, we present to the Negro race continually the personal hope of souls not only, but the hope of the race. When they think that the progress is slow we tell them that Christianity is sure. When they tell us that they can not wait, but must organize and retaliate, we tell them to wait upon God. "Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord." We ask them to remember that a quarter of a century, or a century, is a short time in the history of a people. We point to a million—a round million—of Negro children in the schools to-day. We are teaching them to be men. We are saving them to be Christians. We teach them not to remain down and not to be put down. Being men, they are to stand like men, but like Christian men, to conquer prejudices by worthiness, to meet race hatred with only a stronger purpose to command respect, not to render evil for evil, but contrariwise, blessing; not blow for blow, but to go on upbuilding themselves, deserving their rights, and remembering that a great element in the solution of this problem must be an intelligent faith in God. With this missionary view we stand firm. We have learned that the Southerners of our own race, even when they hold their prejudices against our principles, respect those who stand in a Christian way for their principles; and that these principles will never be accepted in the South by our holding them loosely, or in suspense, or in any sort of abeyance. They respect us when we teach our people that they have all the rights of manhood and womanhood; that they are to respect themselves and to be worthy of self-respect; that they are not to consent in their own minds to any assertion of superiority based upon the tint of the skin, and that they are never to feel guilty for being black. We are teaching the colored people to hold honor with themselves.

What this Association and other missionary forces have done and are doing—this Association more than others—will be the balance of power to prevent the dreaded conflict of races; the balance of power to settle the question; How can the two races live in the same section with mutual respect for each other's civil and Christian rights? This may take time. Christianity takes time. It is ours to take Christianity to teach that the beginning of Christianity was the death blow to wrong principles and evil practices of men, however well intrenched and fortified these forces may be.

It is this which gives us courage to grapple with centuries of wrong and to undertake the slow reduction of these evils. When Christianity came, the era of conscience came, and in His gospel is the power of intelligence and moral determination that shall not be overcome of evil, but shall overcome evil with good.

"Men bound with right are strong:
Right bound with right in Christian faith
Will conquer a world of wrong."

The missionary schools and the missionary churches are, we believe, the only safeguard against the conflict of races. They are the guardian against this national peril. This being so, the churches must speed them more and more. They must not hinder them nor tie their hands. The guarantees of this peaceful solution are in the hands of the churches. Multiply and hasten the Christian energies. Multiply the Christian prayers that we may be workers together with Him of whom it is written, "He shall not fail or be discouraged."

REPORTS OF COMMITTEES

REPORT ON EDUCATIONAL WORK SOUTH

BY REV. WM. BURNET WRIGHT, D.D., CHAIRMAN

It is an ominous fact that in the South illiteracy is steadily increasing. It is an encouraging fact that in the region surrounding our chartered and normal schools illiteracy is steadily diminishing. The colored people are multiplying more rapidly than the means of educating them. If the supply of school accommodations to-day exactly equalled the demand, so that every colored child of suitable age was provided for in some school, there would be at the time of our next annual meeting 255,500 children asking to be taught their letters to whom we should have to say, We cannot teach you. But the supply does not yet nearly equal the demand.

In respect to education, the South is a dark sky rapidly growing darker, but flecked with patches of lighter shade, which are gradually growing brighter and larger. Such a bright space frames each of our chartered and normal schools. Fisk University, Talladega College, Tougaloo University, Straight University, in New Orleans, and Tillotson Institute, at Austin, Texas, are doing work which vindicates each year more distinctly the strategic sagacity which located them. In these institutions alone nearly two thousand students of both sexes are being trained to be light-bearers to their race. Besides these, each of which is essentially a normal school, and includes a normal department, eighteen distinctively normal schools are sustained at different points of strategic importance. Two new schools have been established during the year. Good work has also been done among the mountain whites. The income from the gift of Mr. Daniel Hand has enabled the Association to enlarge its school accommodations, and to assist more than three hundred students, who, without it, would have been unable to attend schools of any kind.

The committee would emphasize among special needs of the work, funds for a girls' hall at Tillotson Institute, and for the endowment of a theological school for training colored pastors. Two facts are pre-eminently gratifying. The first is that in nearly all the schools of the Association some kind of industrial training is provided, and that the influence of such training is conspicuously shown in improved ideas of home life and comfort among those connected by family or other ties with our students. The second fact is, that in all our schools the students are taught that the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, and that consequently the separation between religion and morality, which is the supreme danger of the Southern black churches, is perceptibly diminishing.

REPORT ON CHURCH WORK

BY PROFESSOR GRAHAM TAYLOR, CHAIRMAN

The mission of the American Missionary Association is shown to be a specialty and a unit by its church work. It is the work of a specialist among Christian organizations that alone could have produced these churches. To meet the demands of an exigency which could not be met by the pre-existent ordinary agencies, this child of Providence was born of God and the times. For the accomplishment of ends for which no means had been found, its methods were providentially chosen by a process of spiritual selection. Its agencies are the accretions of the Divine purpose in its progress toward the salvation of the undermost, and the edifying of the whole body of Christ. To the production of its unique Christian institutions the exclusive devotion to the study of the peculiar conditions of these entirely distinct communities was necessary. There have been generated by this devotion and acquired through the experience of nearly half a century a knowledge and skill which claim for this Association the recognition of the world as its foremost expert in the successful application of Christianity to the solution of the most difficult race problems of modern civilization.

And yet in the accomplishment of this great achievement, loyalty to the common faith and to our own polity, as well as to the teachings of experience, demanded only the new application of the old prime factors of God's own choice, the local church with its evangelism and Christian nurture.

In the work of this Association these two great agencies are uniquely one. The pastor is often teacher and evangelist. The sanctuary is school-house and mission station. At twenty-three points on the field God has made of these twain—the church and the school—one. The church is the unit of this unity. For while the church is generally the offspring of the school, the school finds both its profoundest reasons for existence and its highest consummation in the needs and ends of the church. In it the work both of the teacher and evangelist co-ordinates and culminates.

It will not be so very long before these schools and colleges will find their chief sources of supply in these churches, which although now so dependent, must ultimately be depended upon to maintain and develop their own institutions. Even now it is to be remembered that the appeal of this evangelizing church work meets with the wider and more popular response from the giving constituency of the Association, while the educational institutions are more dependent upon the larger gifts of interested individuals.

Moreover, it is the church which opens the springs of the family life from which the schools must draw their scholars. And it is the church which creates the environment necessary to the Christian homes, to which the graduates are sent back again to live their lives, and from which, as the heart's fulcrum, their saved lives can best lift up the lost.

These little church groups of evangelized and educated families are at once the prime sources and the constituent elements of the new Christian civilization which already heralds the coming of the kingdom to those neglected, outcast peoples, to secure whose human rights, Christian privileges and church fellowship is the first, loudest, longest call upon the Congregational Churches of America.

Therefore, in the name of this Association, whose heroic type of missionary and teaching service makes our whole membership and ministry the more attractive and ennobling; in the name of its schools which became churches, and its churches which are schools; in the name of their 8,400 professing Christians, and their 15,000 Sunday-school scholars, and the 1,000 converts of the year; in the name of the races of three continents to whom the Father is sending these our brethren as we are sent to them, we pledge the fidelity of the American Missionary Association to the two-fold agency of its one work, the discipling of these races by the evangelizing church, and the Christian nurture of its schools. And we re-echo the call which the National Council makes upon our churches for the $500,000 required by the exigencies and opportunities of this year's work for the neediest and most helpless of all our fellow-countrymen.

REPORT ON MOUNTAIN WORK

BY REV. D.M. FISK, D.D., CHAIRMAN

The formal report of your committee can without injustice be brief; not because the field considered is narrow, or the work unimportant as a missionary movement, but from the fact that a certain unity pervades both, making it possible to comprehend in one view even the diversities of a population of over two millions, and an area of above one hundred thousand square miles.

The official summary of the year's work, on which we report, once again sets before this Association the situation and its involved problem; a situation full of contradictions, a problem at once serious but not hopeless.

Here is the amazing spectacle of a self-isolated people, begirt with the active life and thought of our eager times, yet sharing neither. Here is an empire that is content to live in the past: having rich resources it neglects to develop them; a productive soil but niggard crops. Amidst a veritable Lebanon of forestry it has shanties for homes; with coal deposits that are the envy of the world, its shivering women in stoveless hovels attempt to defend themselves about their domestic toil with coarse homespun shawls and slat-bonnets. In an age that has harnessed mechanism, beast, and steam to the plow, scythe, sickle and flail, these owners of mountains of iron and mines of power still indolently vex a grudging soil with tools of such barbaric simplicity that their intrusion is scarcely more than a provocation to weeds.

Here is needless poverty in the lap of potential wealth, thriftlessness in the face of every seeming stimulus to diligence. Here is a diversified landscape that should inspire and a climate that should invigorate, but in place of vivacity and health we find apathetic endurance and intrenched disease. Scrofula and its parasite kin are domesticated in the debilitated blood, and pills, calomel, and death jointly contend for the prolific cradle, and even when temporarily defeated succeed in transforming childhood into unlovely age, without the long interval of intermediate active, zestful manhood.

And yet, pitiful as is this exhibit of deficiency, these Highland dwellers are none the less men and our brethren. Slavery robbed them of their lands half a century ago, and roughly shouldered them off into the mountain wilderness dowered with the pauperizing maxims of oppression, notably the indignity of toil, and their shrewd native mother-wit has been left to rust to dullard loss in the absence of schools worthy the name; worse still, their natural devoutness has been warped by unworthy shepherds, till superstition, bigotry, and gross immorality have taken fierce possession of many a society, hearthstone and heart. If to-day the schools are inefficient and some of the preaching blasphemous; if self-satisfied idleness has turned over this mountain realm to want and the slavery of low living, and (as ever) made woman at once the servant and the victim of its barbarism, it is but another historic count in the awful indictment of human selfishness. And all these crying deficiencies are but make-weights with our conviction of responsibility to this mountain flock of God, that often has been misled and unworthily sacrificed.

The only problematical element in this matter is the measure of our faith in God and man and all-prevailing truth. Wherever the ground has been broken by faithful men there is a crop to show as returns for invested toil. More than a thousand children are now under Christian instruction in our schools. Our pupils are in hungry demand as teachers, even to a minimum of years that to us would seem absurd (15 and 16 years). Over twenty churches are holding up a reasonable religion, as a life rather than merely a profession. New fields plead for mission work. Our already planted churches and schools are stimulating other denominations to redoubled diligence in church planting. Courage is in the tone and look of our frontier workers. The officers of this Association feel in an aggressive mood. The question resolves itself into one of faith and contributions. What, my brethren, shall be our answer?