The broad ax. [volume] (Salt Lake City, Utah) 1895-19??, 1905-07-15
Eatesed u the Post Office a chleAeA
q n. a. Secoad-elaa Matter.
No pride in Oppression and servility

No pride in Oppression and serVility.
Booker T. Washington says: Il am
proud of the quaint, melancholy and
beautiful slave songs in which the scr
row and the hopes Of my people found
expression"
I am not proud when l hear them
sing these songs. / am sad. They are
the death throes of the soul; they are
wailings and not songs they are the
music of agony and despair; they tell
of the horrors of the middle pass
age" Of the scourge and the lash, OF
branding irons, of the violent tearing
asunder of the tenderest ties of ma
ture; through the vein of their melan-
choly runs the cry of debased man
hood and ruined womanhood produced
by the brutality of slavery. These
songs are slave songs, the dead
marches" for human hope and ambi-
ton. Let us wipe them out, forget
them, like we should the horrors Of
times which produced them"
Washington seems to be proud of
so many things that the Negro did
which prove his servility and abjec-
ton rather than his manhood. Again,
he says:
81 am proud that these same slaves
proved faithful, in their hour of trial,
to the southern people; that when
their masters were called from their
fresides to war, they dared trust their
wives and children to these faithful
servants, and that in all that period
of disorder not once was trust be-
trayed."
But what called these masters from
their iresides to war? Their desire
to perpetuate their power to enslave
and pollute the wives and children Of
the very men whom they left at home
to protect the masters wives and chill
dren. These Negroes were wise
rather than faithful They were be-
tween the camps of the great confed.
crate army that General Grant took
more than four years to conquer, and,
any uprising on their part would have
turned the guns of that army upon
them, and humiliation would have
been the result Anyway, unlike their
masters, they were too manly to Of
fend defenseless women and children.
They may have been faithful servants
all right, but they were not contented
servants, for they anxiously watched
for the coming of deliverance l am
more proud Of the Negro who escaped.
Joined the army and fought the battles
of his freedom than the Negro who
remained. l am more proud Of the
Negro who met his master at Fort
Wagner and Port Hudson than of that
abject and craven "cuss" who willingly
picked cotton while his master was
forging the chains for the perpetual
enslavement of his race
From such talk as Booker T. Wash
ington is now putting forth it is to
be inferred that he will be a large
contributor to the monument which is
to be erected at Richmond to the
faithful slave. He seems TO be the
apostle Of servility and submission.
The faithful slave is no example for
men. We pity Uncle Tom," we Meth.
er emulate nor admire him. White
men are proud Of Washington, Hamp-
den, Lafayette, William Tell, and true
Negroes are proud Of Toulssant
L'Ouverture, not of some semi-idiot
who believes that, in order to be
Christian, he must be servile. The
manly Negro rejects, with Lord
Brougham, THE wild and guilty phan
tasy" and feels the finger Of God writ
ing liberty upon his own heart--The
Advance, st. Louis, no.