WHAT PROGRESS DID THE AMERICAN WHITE MAN MAKE, IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY, ALONG THE LINE OF CONCEDING TO THE NEGRO HIS RELIGIOUS, POLITICAL, AND CIVIL RIGHTS?

BY JOHN W. CROMWELL.

JOHN WESLEY CROMWELL.

John Wesley Cromwell, the twelfth child and seventh son of Willis H. and Elizabeth Carney Cromwell, was born at Portsmouth, Va., September 5, 1846. In 1851 the family moved to Philadelphia, where he entered the public schools and subsequently the Institute for Colored Youth, graduating in 1864.

He taught at Columbia, Pa., after which he established a private school in his native town. Under the auspices of Northern charitable associations he taught at Spanish Neck and Little Gunpowder in Maryland, Providence Church, Scott Farm, Charlotte County and Wytheville, Va. On the inauguration of the public school system he became principal of the Dill's Bakery School in Richmond, Va., and in the following summer taught near the scene of the Nat Turner Insurrection in Southampton County in the same State.

Mr. Cromwell took an active part in the reconstruction of Virginia, was delegate to the first State Republican Convention, did jury service in the United States Court for the term at which the case of Jefferson Davis was calendared, and was a clerk in the reconstruction Constitutional Convention. A shot, fired with deadly intent, grazed his clothing while at Spanish Neck, Md., where the church in which the school was taught was burned to the ground, and he was twice forced to face the muzzles of revolvers in Virginia, because of his work as an educator.

In 1871 he entered the law department of Howard University, graduating therefrom in 1874. In 1872, after a competitive examination, having distanced two hundred and forty applicants, he received a $1,200 appointment in the Treasury Department, in which he was twice promoted, by the same method, within twenty months. In 1885, in the early days of the Cleveland administration, he was removed as an offensive partisan, having established and conducted since 1876 "The People's Advocate," a weekly journal of more than local influence. He then began the practice of law in connection with his journalistic work. In 1889 he was tendered and he accepted a principalship of one of the grammar schools of Washington, D. C., the position he still holds.

In 1875 he was chosen at Richmond the president of the Virginia Educational and Historical Association and was four times re-elected. He has served two terms as the president of the "Bethel Literary," with which he has been officially connected for twenty years. He was one of the original members of the American Negro Academy founded by Rev. Alexander Crummell, and is its corresponding secretary.

In 1873 he was married to Miss Lucy A. McGuinn, of Richmond, Va. Six children survive of that marriage, the eldest being Miss Otelia Cromwell, the first Colored graduate (1900) of Smith College, Mass. In 1892 he married Miss Annie E. Conn, of Mechanicsburg, Pa.

In 1887 he became a member of the Metropolitan A. M. E. Church under the pastorate of Rev., now Chaplain, T. G. Steward.

Among his addresses and papers are "The Negro in Business," "The Colored Church in America," "Nat Turner, a Historical Sketch," "Benjamin Banneker," "The Negro as a Journalist," and other historical and statistical studies. The first named, published for a syndicate of metropolitan newspapers in 1886, found its way in one form or other in nearly all the representative papers of the land.

The status of the Negro at the close of the eighteenth and the opening of the nineteenth centuries was substantially the same, North and South. These well-defined geographical sections on both sides of Mason and Dixon's line were not as extensive then as now. Ohio, Kentucky and Tennessee were the only states west of the Alleghanies; Florida was a foreign possession, Alabama and the region beyond were to be numbered with the United States at a subsequent period.

The colored population in 1800 was 1,001,436, free and slave, or 18.88 per cent of the entire population; 893,041 were slaves, of whom there were in round numbers 30,000 in the states of New Hampshire, Rhode Island, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, New York and Delaware; 20,000 were in New York alone. In 1900 the total population is 76,303,387, with 8,840,789 persons of Negro descent, or 11.5 of the aggregate population.

The year 1800 marks the beginning of an epoch of increasing hardship for the Negro, both in church and state. It was also characterized by fierce aggressiveness by the slave power, stimulated by the invention of the cotton gin by Eli Whitney and the impetus which it gave to the growth and importation of cotton. The acquisition of the Louisiana Purchase from France added to the possible domain of slave territory and affected the current of political action for more than half a century.

During this period the Negro was a most important figure, both in church and state, the occasion if not the cause of perplexing problems. In the field of religion and politics, especially, has his status attracted world-wide attention.

At a very early day the Methodist and Baptist churches had the largest number of colored followers in both town and city; but these as yet were not assembled in distinctive organizations. The right of the Negro, not only to govern but to direct his religious instruction, was bitterly contested, sometimes by force, at other times by law. The high-handed manner in which the ordinary rights of worship were denied the Negro led to the withdrawal of the majority of colored Methodists in Pennsylvania, New York, Maryland and South Carolina, and ultimately to the formation of the two denominations, the African Methodist Episcopal and the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Churches, that became independent before the end of the first quarter of the last century.

As to the recognition of the right of colored Baptists to church fellowship, the white Baptists were more liberal, for we find an association of white churches recognizing the existence of a colored Baptist church at Williamsburg, in 1790.

The first colored Episcopal society was received into membership on the express condition that no delegate was to be admitted in any of the diocesan conventions.[1] As early as 1801 Rev. John Chavis, a Negro of North Carolina, was licensed by the Hanover Presbytery of Virginia as a missionary to his own people.[2] The incompatibility of an ordained minister of the same denomination being a slave was recognized in the manumission of Rev. John Gloucester, the slave of Rev. Gideon Blackburn, of Tennessee, on the organization of the first colored Presbyterian church of the country, at Philadelphia, in 1807, and the subsequent settlement of Rev. Gloucester as its pastor.[3]

That the white Baptists really manifested greater liberality in this period is obvious, because we also find Jacob Bishop, a Negro, the pastor of the First Baptist church of Portsmouth, Virginia, for a few years.[4] The church was a large and influential one, and the predecessor of Bishop, Rev. Thomas Armistead, had served with distinction as a commissioned officer in the Revolutionary War.

To-day at all the general conferences of the M. E. and M. E. South—both white—and of the A. M. E., A. M. E. Zion, and C. M. E. denominations—all colored—fraternal delegations are exchanged with all the courtesies bestowed by the two former on the two latter that should prevail among brethren. A further concession is seen in the fact of the elections of colored ministers of recognized scholarship and fitness to important secretaryships and an editorship by the powerful M. E. Church. Another illustration is the organization about thirty years ago by the M. E. Church South of its colored membership into the C. M. E. denomination and the liberal provision made by the former connection for secondary education in the Payne Institute, at Augusta, Georgia.

The Protestant Episcopal Church that forbade St. Thomas, Philadelphia, and St. Phillips, New York, to aspire to membership in diocesan conventions repealed this resolution after the breaking out of the Civil War and delegates from these and other colored parishes throughout the North and West, at least, find free admission.

Sixty years ago the application of so promising and talented a young man as Alexander Crummell to be matriculated as a student in any of the Episcopal divinity schools created a great shock in church circles, and his rejection is set forth at length in Bishop Wilberforce's History of American Episcopalianism; yet both at the New York and Philadelphia theological seminaries numerous colored clergymen, Episcopalian and others, now graduate with honor and distinction.

To-day in the House of Bishops there are two colored prelates of African descent, Rt. Rev. S. D. Ferguson, the Bishop of Africa, and the Rt. Rev. James Theodore Holly, the Bishop of Hayti; the former a native of South Carolina, the latter of the District of Columbia. Their welcome to the pulpits of many of the most exclusive Episcopal Churches and to the homes of their parishioners is in marked contrast to the greeting of the Negro by the same communion only two generations previously.

In the general assemblies of the Presbyterian Church to-day the presence of colored commissioners is no novelty, and the faculty of Biddle University, composed of colored professors, by the will of the Presbyterian Board of Education, shows what this conservative body has done in the recognition of Negro scholarship.

The conventions and associations of the Baptist Church in the South, where the bulk of the black race dwell, are still on the color line, yet there is progress towards true fraternal feeling here. Some years since "The Religious Herald," of Richmond, Virginia, the leading journal of that denomination in the South, announced among its paid contributors the name of a prominent colored divine.

It must be said, nevertheless, that during the first half of the nineteenth century the record of the white church on the Negro shows not only a temporizing, but a cowardly spirit. This was true in some respects of the Congregational Church;[5] instead of leading, the church followed the state. The anti-slavery sentiment which was unmistaken in the later years of the eighteenth century became with the growth of commercialism and national expansion, quiescent and subservient to the slave power. The right to vote, which in colonial days was generally exercised by colored freeholders, was subsequently either restricted or wholly denied. North Carolina, Maryland and Tennessee in the South, and Pennsylvania in the North, disfranchised their colored suffragists. The wave of disfranchisement then, as on the threshold of the twentieth century, dashed from one state to another. In the North repeated efforts were made to concede to the Negro his complete political and civil rights. Though the sentiment in his behalf became stronger at every trial of strength, yet with a single exception—Wisconsin—each result was decisive against the concession of the franchise to the Negro. It was only after a bloody civil war, in which thousands of lives were sacrificed and billions of treasure were expended, that the nation conceded to the Negro, first, his freedom, next his civil rights, finally his political franchise.

One hundred years ago there were but few colored schools, even in the free states, and these only in the larger towns and cities. Philadelphia was in the lead, with New York a second and Boston a third.

Connecticut, in the third decade of the nineteenth century, would not permit Prudence Crandall to maintain a school of colored girls. The means employed to break it up stands a blot on the name of the commonwealth. A resolution of the National Convention of Colored Men, held at Philadelphia, to establish a college for the education of colored youths, at New Haven occasioned both fierce excitement and bitter hostility.

Negroes could ride only on the top of the stagecoach when traveling, and Jim Crow cars prevailed on the introduction of railroads. Angry mobs were frequent. Churches and schools were the common target of attack. In the opening of the West to settlement public sentiment there against the Negroes found emphatic expression in Black Laws forbidding with heavy penalties their permanent abode in that section. These laws have only been removed in the memory of men still living. In many communities, however, these laws were a dead letter, just as to-day there are isolated localities in Indiana and Illinois, as in Georgia and Texas, where no Negro is permitted to permanently abide.

Through the Anti-Slavery and Abolition agitation, carried on by such reformers as William Lloyd Garrison, Wendell Phillips, Frederick Douglass, John G. Whittier and Horace Greeley, the organizations of the colored people themselves, and their appreciation of the meager educational advantages afforded them prior to Appomattox, the sentiment of the country yielded one by one the rights and privileges of citizens, until colored members of state legislatures in more than half a dozen Northern states, delegates to city councils, a judgeship each in Massachusetts and Michigan, and state elective officers in Kansas—in none of which communities was the colored voting population of itself sufficiently numerous to elect—evidences the remarkable revolution in public opinion towards the Negro throughout the North.

In the South, since 1867, there have been more than a score of congressmen, including two senators, state legislators by the hundreds, councilmen, police officers, city and county officials without number; but nearly all of these were obtained by the numerical preponderance of the Negro rather than any liberalizing of dominant white sentiment.

SECOND PAPER.

WHAT PROGRESS DID THE AMERICAN WHITE MAN MAKE, IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY, ALONG THE LINE OF CONCEDING TO THE NEGRO HIS RELIGIOUS, POLITICAL, AND CIVIL RIGHTS?

BY REV. J. M. COX, D. D.

JAMES MONROE COX.

James Monroe Cox was born in Chambers County, Alabama, February 26, 1860. While he was yet a boy his parents moved to Atlanta, Ga., and in the public schools of that city he received his first educational training. Having a desire to go to college and receive the best training possible for life's work, he entered Clark University. He took high rank in his studies, completing the classical course in 1884, and graduated from Gammon Theological Seminary in 1886, being the first student to receive the degree of B. D. from that institution. The year following his graduation from Gammon he was appointed teacher of ancient languages in Philander Smith College, Little Rock, Ark. In the fall of 1887 he was married to Miss Hattie W. Robinson, a young woman of culture and refinement, who after graduating from Clark University in 1885, taught two years in the public schools of Macon, Ga. They have five interesting children, and their married life has been singularly happy and helpful. After a professorship of eleven years in Philander Smith College he was appointed president of the institution. As president he has served for five years, and under his administration the school has had a strong, healthy growth, until now it numbers almost five hundred students. A much-needed addition to the main building has been completed at a cost of fourteen thousand dollars, the faculty has been increased, and through the efforts of the students he has raised some money, which forms the nucleus of a fund for a trades school. He is a member of the Little Rock conference of the M. E. Church, and has twice represented his brethren as delegate to the General Conference,—at Omaha, Neb., in 1892 and at Cleveland, Ohio, in 1896. His influence over the young people committed to his care is great, and he is striving to send out strong, well-rounded, Christian characters, and thus erect monuments more enduring than granite or marble. Last year Gammon honored him with the degree of D. D.

The very language of our subject assumes that the Negro is entitled to religious, political and civil rights, and limits our task to showing the extent these rights have been conceded to him by the American white man. In considering this, as well as other subjects that concern the race, it is well to bear in mind the fact that men make conditions and conditions also make men. The truth of this statement is strikingly demonstrated in the reactionary influence which slavery had upon the American white man. The chains that bound the Negro and made him a chattel, also fettered the mind and soul of the white man and caused him to become narrow and selfish. Lincoln's proclamation gave freedom alike to slave and master, and now the progress made by each along all lines of human development will depend upon the extent he leaves behind slavery conditions and thinks on purer and higher things. Living in the past, meditating upon the time when he was owner of men and women, the white man must still be a slaveholder. If he can not hold in subjugation human beings, he will arrogate unto himself the rights of others and use them to further his own selfish ends. The Negro also must get away from slavery conditions, if he hopes ever to be a man in the truest sense of the word and have accorded him the rights of a man. Time and growth are determining factors in what is known as the Negro problem. The white man must grow out of, and above, his prejudice, learn to measure men by their manly and Christian virtues rather than by the color of their skin and the texture of their hair. The Negro must devote himself to character-making, wealth-getting, and to the faithful performance of all duties that belong to him as a man and a citizen, for, he may only hope to receive his rights to the extent that he impresses the white man that he is worthy and deserving of them. We repeat, it will take time to accomplish these things, but when they are accomplished, rights which now the white man withholds, and which it seems he will never concede, will, like Virgil's golden branch, follow of their own accord. Viewing the subject in the light of the above stated facts, we believe that much progress was made by the American white man in the nineteenth century along the line of conceding to the Negro his religious, political, and civil rights.

In fact, the progress made in this direction stands without a parallel in the annals of history. It surpasses the most sanguine expectation of the Negro's friends, and even of the Negro himself. Although the white man is not entirely rid of his prejudice in religion and the color line is written over the entrance to many of his temples of worship, yet he recognizes the Negro as a man and a brother and accords to him religious rights and privileges. The Negro worships God according to the dictates of his own conscience, and the laws of the land protect him in this worship. He is a potent factor in all religious and reformatory movements and works side by side with his brother in white for the overthrow of vice and sin and for the hastening of the time when man and nations shall live and act in harmony with the principles of the Christian religion. He sits in the councils of the leading denominations of the country and assists in making their laws and determining their polity. He is accorded a place on the programs of the different young people's gatherings and is listened to with the same attention which other speakers receive. He bears fraternal greetings from his to white denominations, and is courteously received and royally entertained. In international assemblies and ecumenical conferences he enjoys every right and receives the same attention that others enjoy and receive.

But this progress is further evidenced by the profound interest manifested by the white man in the Negro's religious and moral development and by the strong pleas on the part of the nation's best and ablest men for the complete obliteration of the color line in religion and for dealing with the Negro as with any other man. Millions of dollars have been given for the building of churches and schools and hundreds of noble men and women have toiled and suffered that the Negro might be elevated. The bishops of the Methodist Episcopal Church, representing two and a half million members, said in their address to the General Conference, at Omaha, in 1892: "We have always affirmed them (the Negroes) to be our brothers of the same blood and stock of all the races which compose one common humanity. As such, we have claimed for them the same rights and privileges which belong to all other branches of the common family."

His political rights. He, who but yesterday was a slave, is now a citizen, clothed with the elective franchise. This is marvelous, and all the more so, because the ballot is a wonderful force. It is the ground element of our American civilization. In its exercise the poor man counts as much as the rich, the ignorant as much as the learned, and the black as much as the white. Indeed, the free and untrammeled use of the ballot makes its possessor a veritable sovereign and gives him power over men and their possessions. Opinion is divided as to the wisdom of giving the Negro citizenship at the time it was given him. We think no mistake was made. It came at the time the Negro needed it most. It was the weapon with which he defended himself when he had but few friends. The Negro has not been a failure in politics. The very leaders who urge our young men to let alone politics, will, on the other hand, point out Bruce, Douglass, Pinchback and others as the most worthy and conspicuous characters of the race. That a reaction has set in, and the Negro is being deprived of the ballot, should occasion no alarm and little surprise.

The grandfather clause in the different state constitutions will serve as a check to the white man's progress along educational lines, but a spur to urge us on. These seeming setbacks in the concession of political rights I count as progress, and place it to the white man's credit.

The decision of the Supreme Court at Washington against the constitutionality of the Civil Rights Act of 1875 has had its effect, and to-day we find the Negro more discriminated against in his civil than in any other class of rights. Then, too, the social bugbear has had much to do with this discrimination. However, progress has been made. It has been slow, of course, because of the channel (public opinion) through which it has been compelled to come. In many sections of the country the Negro enjoys the most of his civil rights. He is admitted to the hotels, theaters, and other public places, and on public conveyances he is furnished fair accommodations. We believe in the ultimate triumph of right. Let us be patient. There is a disposition on the part of the better class of white people to do the fair and just thing by the Negro. This class will continue to increase, and some day the Negro will enjoy all of his rights, and our fair country will indeed be the land of the free, as well as the home of the brave.