New national era. [volume] (Washington, D.C.) 1870-1874, 1872-05-23

But let no injustice be done Horace Gree
ley. He shall speak for himself. Truth has
nothing to lose by fair play, and no man Is
better entitled to fair play than the man OF
the 7Iituae. He saya: ~ -
-" trust the time will come when no mans
color will exclude him from any church or
any religious organization whatever. But
though that time should come, / am not at
ali SIRE that the colored race will not, as they
now do as rule, prefer their own society,
and prefer to have churches and semlnarles
and colleges of their own. Nor am clear
that this would not be a wise choice. SO
then, say, with regard to our common
schools, where a rural district contains but
TWENTY-FIVE or thirty, families, it is simply
impossible, where two or three of those are
colored, to have separate schools; and IN
those cases, to say that black children shall
not 90 to school with white children is to say
they shall not have any school whatever.
But in communities such as these, while If l
were black man, should not ask separate
school. vet l should still say if the whites
chose to have separate schools / should not
object to it. should only ask that the
schools for my children should be made as
good, as sufficient, as schools provided for
other mems children. Then, if the majority
chose that the minority should be educated
in separate schools, l should say, "Gentle-
men, be it as you please; have no choice
in the matter" A gentleman or lady never
discusses the question, Was it proper to re-
fuse me an invitation to my neighbours party?
He or she accepts the fact or lets the reason
take care of itself. Precisely so with regard
to religious fraternity or associations for
maintenance of divine worship. would adj
wise the colOred man never to make dis
tinction, and never to refuse one. II the
whites choose that the blacks shall not be
members on equal terms of general congre-
cations, should accept exclusive cOngrega-
tons, not as my choice, but as the choice OF
the dominant race"
Very plainly there is some monster lurking
in the thoughts Of Mr.. Greeley. He knows
that there is something mean in the exclusion
of a person from any place on earth for no
better reason than color, and yet he does not
know after all but that the colored man
ought to prefer such exclusion. The confu-
sion of ideas which he betrays in the above
is a common one. Almost every one of those
who hesitate to do us justice as people
plunge into the nuddle of confounding civil
rights with social privileges, and because
they are not ready for the latter deny us the
former.
Mr.. Greeley puts the case of his colored
fellow-citizens most unfairly, Ito use very
mild tenm,) when he says A gentleman
or lady never discusses the question, 'Was
1t proper to refuse me an invitation to my
neighbours party?'" A man fit to be a can
didate for the Presidency of the United States
ought to be above the sophistry involved in
this comparison. There is no analogy. To
speak of the failure Of somebody to receive an
invitation to the party of somebody else, in
such connection, is to show that the Gin
cinuati candidate for the Presidency, however
sensitive he may be to the rights of other
men, he has no true sense of the outrages
and insults daily heaped upon the colored
people of this country solely because they
are colored. During our recent tour to New
Orleans in company with several colored
gentlemen, we were most of the way COM
PEELED to ride in a miserable smoking car,
and found it impossible to get even meal
for love Or money. They who starved loyal
prisoners at Andersonville and Salisbury
would have gladly starved us; and this and
similar barbarisms the humane Mr.. Greeley
cOmplacently likens to the failure of one
neighbor to invite another to his tea party,
and argues that we should silently submit in
the one case as in the other. We submit
that there is difference, however incOnve-
nient it may be for Mr.. Greeley to see it just
now, between a.railway train and the private
house--a difference between the table of a
public house, where men meet as strangers
and part as strangers, each paying his own
way, occupying his own room, and leaving
his neighbor to do the same. The feeling
that would deny hungry man food and shell
ter in a public hotel because of color, would
drive man out of the city and State because
of color. Rail cars, hotels, schools, and
churches are all public places. There is no
question of social equality involved in riding
in the same Car, stopping at the same hotel,
attending the same church, or the same
school. People may meet in all these places
as they meet in the street, in the market, at
the pump, at the State fair, on the ball ground
to see a match game. We meet there simply
as individuals to serve our own individual
ends, and no one is in any degree responsible
for the character of the other. A blind man
can see the difference between this and what
is called society. When people associate
with each other voluntarily they are supposed
to do SO from mutual preference. They are
friends or desirable acquaintances, and are
held together by mutual attraction or by con-
siderations of profit or loss one way or an
other. But in the public school, in the
church, in the rail car, in the hotel, no man
has any right to say to another you have got
man here that do not recognize as nv
equal, and you are bound to put him out.
Such a man might well enough be told to
settle that question in his own dining-room
and parlor at home. There it is the precious
liberty of every American citizen to lay down
the law of equality after his own fashion.
There man may be judged by the company
he keeps. But enough.
Mr.. Greeley lays down rule of non-re-
sistance to prescription strangely at variance
with his whole history as reforrner. His
g. loc Lao lox