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Full resolution (TIFF) - On this page / på denna sida - IX. Leadership and Concerted Action - 35. The Negro Protest - 1. The Slave Revolts - 2. The Negro Abolitionists and Reconstruction Politicians
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Chapter 35. The Negro Protest 737
Negroes are innately docile as a race and were content with slavery. In a sense, Vesey
represents the spirit of independence for which the founding fathers of America arc
praised—an insurrection is merely an unsuccessful revolution. But Denmark Vesey
is a symbol of a spirit too violent to be acceptable to the white community. There are
no Negro schools named for him, and it would be extremely poor taste and bad
judgment for the Negroes to take any pride in his courage and philosophy. There is,
indeed, little chance for Negro youth to know about him at all.^
2. The Negro Abolitionists and Reconstruction Politicians
The Negro fighters in the Abolitionist movement in the North—^Wil-
liam G. Allen, Dr. James McCune Smith, Martin Delany, William Wells-
Brown, Sojourner Truth, Robert Purvis, Samuel E. Cornish, Charles
Lenox Remond, Henry Highland Garnet, David Ruggles, William Still,
Harriet Tubman, Charles Bennet Ray, John M. Langston, Frederick
Douglass, and many others—represented a second early crop of Negro
protest leaders. Unlike the slave insurgents, these leaders set the future
pattern on which Negroes based their protest. The new pattern consisted
of nonviolent legal activities in accord with the democratic principles of
the American Creed and the Christian religion. Frederick Douglass, the
outstanding Negro leader of this period, in 1852, in his 4th of July oration
at Rochester, voiced the Negro protest thus:
What to the American slave is your 4th of July.? I answer: a day that reveals to
him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he
is the constant victim. To him your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an
unholy licence; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are
empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants, brass-fronted impudence; your
shouts,of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons
and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are, to him, more
bombast, fraud, deception, impiety and hypocrisy—a thin veil to cover up crimes
which would disgrace a nation of savages. . . .
You boast of your love of liberty, your superior civilization, and your pure
Christianity, while the whole political power of the nation (as embodied in the two
great political parties) is solemnly pledged to support and perpetuate the enslavement
of three millions of your countrymen. You hurl your anathemas at the crown-headed
tyrants of Russia and Austria and pride yourselves on your democratic institutions,
while you yourselves consent to be the mere tools and bodyguards of the tyrants of
Virginia and Carolina. You invite to your shores fugitives of oppression from abroad,
honor them with banquets, greet them with ovations, cheer them, toast them, salute
them, protect them, and pour out your money to them like water; but the fugitives
from your own land you advertise, hunt, arrest, shoot, and kill. You glory in your
refinement and your universal education; yet you maintain a system as barbarous and
dreadful as ever stained the character of a nation—
z
system begun in avarice, supported
in pride, and perpetuated in cruelty. You shed tears over fallen Hungary, and make
the sad story of her wrongs the theme of your poets, statesmen and orators, till your
gallant sons are ready to fiy to arms to vindicate her cause against the oppressor ;
but. in
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