The age-herald., 1901-03-31
The Negro in the New Constitution.
BY JOHN wlTHERsPooN DueosE.
PROOF POSITIVE


 distinction of race. nor will it yoke sil- ly sentimentalism with the laws of sound practice Not many will be the delegates who will not know that the taxes of one race in a free country are sufficient to defray the public expenses of that race, and that the best security for negro ad- vancement Is in the advancement of the social ambition, the industrial prosperity and the political supremacy of the whites. School textbooks are indispensable to the race who are inventors of the alphabet. The race borrowers of the invented al- phabet have a superior field of their own and a practical monopoly of that field. It Is a very wide and exalted field. I walk ed over the tornado district in the city the other day Where I happened to ob- l saw several negro laborers engaged in 1t to one white laborer. The low arch- tectural building or the grand building in it's process of construction has no re- spect for race except that more negroes than whites are at work on all What Is negro education? Let us have negro ed- ucation. Let us define 1t and defend it.
 Let us learn of the negro in our midst. For one, l would not leave Alabama, where we have two-fifths negro popula- ton. to find good government in Kansas. or Wisconsin or Massachusetts. More than that, being a Democrat above sus- picion, I would not abandon Dallas coun- ty as a home, where there are four-ffths negro population, for Cullman. where there are no negroes.
 Our statesmen have dallied with the negro question for a long time. The ne- gro is unmoved because he is fixed by nature In the Southern conditions. Our statesmen walk half way up to the prob- lem of negro presence and walk back again.
 A hundred years ago Mir. Jefferson preached deportation of the negro and a hundred years ago he proposed to annex Cuba where he knew negro slavery was established for long season of endur- ing. A hundred years ago he bought Louisiana and signed a treaty of pur- chase stipuating for protection of slave masters who then lived there. Mir Jef ferson did not deport his own slaves, of which he owned many.
 Later came Mir. Clay with the agitation of his scheme for deporting the whole negro population to Liberia In the midst of this period of excitement a lawyer James G. Birney, of Huntsville. spoke at Tuskaloosa in favor of the Clay Idea. 'Pegleg" Williams recently has had an experience in Georgia which. if read by
 
 generation the after circumstances that attach to the tradition of lawyer Birney's s speech at Tuskaloosa. MT Clay owned negroes, but there is no tradition alive that he deported any away from his "Ashland" farm. He asked the abolition- ists to nominate him for President in 1S40 but they would not accept him: he asked them to elect him President in 1S44 but they abandoned him to the abstract prin- nttS of trt. ss.,;sr l.,r responsibility
 Finally John Brown took practical view of the negro question. Tn the fall of 1859 Brown, who had been all his life peripatetic preacher of the gospel be- came possessed of the fancy that the world needs a new Christ" The negro question was rampant in politics at that time. and in it Brown saw his chance for giving to the world "a new Christ" He deliberately prepared himself to act the role. (See the autobiography of Mrs Howe. one of his followers). He acted well his part. MT. Lincoln took up Browns part where it had been dropped and under more suspicious conditions succeeded where Brown had failed.
 MT. Lincoln freed the negro! How so? If MT. Lincoln freed the race from the ills it bore here in 1S60-65 he must have restored it to the rights the race enjoyed in some anterior time, under other condi- tions and elsewhere. The freed negro did not return to any ruins of Nineveh and Babylon, lost to him by Alabama laws that affected him in bondage. We have good negroes now forty years after Mir. Lincoln took effect. We had good negroes all along before Mir. Lincolns advent, Ehe negro who figured in the Canoe fisAA" in mid-sream on the Ala bama, is epsry whit character worthy of history as Miles Standsh The black negro who preached to congregations of white slave owners at Montgomery week after week, about 1886. Is not ignebie in the class of Alabama orators.
 l give the substance of many interviews have had with Congo negro of recent months, questions end answers. He is a perfect type of his race as we have Sn Alabama;
 rDoes your tribe live iH heusesq'
 'No, live in the open. Sometimes when we stay lopg at one place we cut caves