The morning journal-courier., 1908-03-07


 business interests of the whites to such an extent that nothing short of a general catastrophe and collapse Of great commercial interests would fol- low their exodus if such aathing were conceivable or practicable. Let us cut out all the politics and personali- ties that have grown up around Book CT Washingtons astute actions, and adopt the thought of the couplet quoted by Mir Browne in advocacy of an exodus and the reassembling of the race in Africa:
 One has to teach that Labor is divine Another Freedom; and another Mind. and the Washington policy and that of | the Niagara Movement, as 1t is call ed, headed by Professor Dubois of | the Atlanta University, can be dis cussed without heat. In those two leaders the American race is coming to recognize that it has two strings to its bow, and that it will not be profit able for it to lay aside either.
 The most enlightened treatment of | the question of late is the new work by William H. Ferris, scholarly young negro who a dozen years ago received the degree of A. M. from both Harvard, and Yale and has since pursued the career of peripatetic phil l osopher, teaching, preaching, lectur- ing, writing for the newspapers and studying the great American race problem. He has visited with an open mind, an intelligent eye and an unfailingly amiable disposition twen- 1 ty different States and sojourned in over two hundred towns, cities, vil- lages and rural communities of the North, South and West since his graduation, all the while feeling the pulse of the public feeling and taking notes as he went. He regards the rise of Booker Washington to be, as he puts it next to President Roosevelt, 'the best known American in the world" as the 'erowning miracle of human history" But that after this l phenomenon the Niagara Move ment" should rise to promulgate ideas antipodal to those of Dr Washington l Negro history. To illustrate the nat ral course of evolution, compared to which the divisions between the blacks and whites in this country and among the blacks themselves are but as the f1otsam of the surface of the family history far enough to say that a hundred years ago everyone of his ancestors except two were free peo- pie, having secured their freedom soon after the War of 1872, and to- day his relations own S50,000 worth of taxable property in Delaware. "and there are hundreds of colored families whose record is exactly similar"
 But this long, natural and steady sort of rising of the Negro, MT. Ferris declares was checked by pr. Washing tons famous Atlanta speech. followed by others in which he ridiculed the higher aspirations and. spiritual striv- ings of his own people, and asked his own people to cease contending fol their manhood rights. The spectacle of the Moses of his people saying the things the Georgia white man desired him to say his minimizing of the in tellectual achievements of the Negro
 imported into the North the South's estimate of the Negro and cut tho foundation from under his civic priv ileges and political rights" For thu North soon began to think and fee under his instructions that 1t had fore
 ed the higher education and civil ant
 political rights upon the black mar before he was ready for 1t and silently
 acquiesced in the South's practical!
 undoing the work of Sumner and Gar
 rison. Mir. Ferris attributes the fail
 ure of the Niagara Movement to fur
 nsh effective oppssEion to Booke
 Washington's program to the lack O
 any equal personality In its leadership
 He believes that both Dubois worl and Washington's propaganda are i'm
 portant and necessary. He believes
 that the Negro as member of thu human family belongs to the Genu Vir as well as to the Genus Homo
 Without industrial education and al | economic DdSlS ne Wouiu De lpSt. uu
 without the higher education and thu
 ballot, which confers dignity and self respect upon an individual, that form the bulwark and prop of pride of an cestry and feminine virtue, he woult be equally lost. Ferris has faith tha the Anglo Saxon, in the very fibre of his moral nature, stands for justic : and that that justice which has slum bered for while will finally assert 1t self and welcome the black man int
 the brotherhood of the human fam [ fly into the circle of his politics..
 The history of the American contin ent is as yet but page compared witt the chapters of European history ant 1t may well be that with all tn - changes and revolutions to come, : our history is to he analogous of En ropes, this aspiration of the optimis tic young Negro scholar may be real 5 ized
 of tho ~ M Clnr