The Portable Nineteenth-Century African American Women Writers

by Various

  And, as in all imitations that means mere copying, the ridiculous mannerisms and ugly defects of the model are appropriated more successfully than the life and inner spirit which alone gave beauty or meaning to the original. Emancipation from the model is what is needed. Servile copying foredooms mediocrity: it cuts the nerve of soul expression. The American Negro cannot produce an original utterance until he realizes the sanctity of his homely inheritance. It is the simple, common, everyday things of man that God has cleansed. And it is the untaught, spontaneous lispings of the child heart that are fullest of poetry and mystery.

  Correggio once wandered from his little provincial home and found his way to Rome where all the wonder of the great art world for the first time stood revealed before him. He drank deep and long of the rich inspiration and felt the quickening of his own self consciousness as he gazed on the marvelous canvasses of the masters.

  “I too am a painter,” he cried and the world has vindicated the assertion. Now it is just such a quickening as this that must come to the black man in America, to stimulate his original activities. The creative instinct must be aroused by a wholesome respect for the thoughts that lie nearest. And this to my mind is the vital importance for him of the study of his own folk-lore. His songs, superstitions, customs, tales are the legacy left from the imagery of the past. These must catch and hold and work up into the pictures he paints. The poems of Homer are valued today chiefly because they are the simple unstudied view of the far away life of the Greeks—its homely custom and superstitions as well as its more heroic achievements and activities. The Canterbury Tales do the same thing for the England of the 14th century.

  The Negro too is a painter. And he who can turn his camera on the fast receding views of this people and catch their simple truth and their sympathetic meaning before it is all too late will no less deserve the credit of having revealed a characteristic page in history and of having made an interesting study.

  42

  MARY CHURCH TERRELL

  (1863–1954)

  Mary Church Terrell was born Mary Eliza Church in Memphis, Tennessee, the daughter of two former slaves. After graduating from Oberlin College, she earned a master’s degree in teaching and married Robert Herberton Terrell, who went on to become the first black municipal judge in Washington, D.C. Mary Church Terrell was politically active throughout her life, fighting for women’s suffrage and civil rights. She was the first president of the National Association of Colored Women, and she was chosen by W. E. B. DuBois as a charter member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

  In the following two pieces, Terrell strikes two distinct tones. “The Progress of Colored Women” is an optimistic essay on the accomplishments of colored women in the United States since the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation. Like other such essays in this anthology, Terrell’s notes black women’s devotion to church, charity, and chastity. She also accounts for the financial and educational resources under black women’s control, claiming that 80 percent of black teachers are women, and that black women donated over $500,000 in support of the cause of education. In “Peonage in the United States,” Terrell investigates a corrupt prison system that replicates slavery. Under the convict lease system, unlike on plantations, there is no financial interest in keeping workers healthy.

  “The Progress of Colored Women” (1898)

  SOURCE: Mary Church Terrell, “The Progress of Colored Women,” delivered before the National American Women’s Suffrage Association, Cong. Rooms, 1898.

  When one considers the obstacles encountered by colored women in their effort to educate and cultivate themselves, since they became free, the work they have accomplished and the progress they have made will bear favorable comparison, at least with that of their more fortunate sisters, from whom the opportunity of acquiring knowledge and the means of self-culture have never been entirely withheld. Not only are colored women with ambition and aspiration handicapped on account of their sex, but they are almost everywhere baffled and mocked because of their race. Not only because they are women, but because they are colored women, are discouragement and disappointment meeting them at every turn. But in spite of the obstacles encountered, the progress made by colored women along many lines appears like a veritable miracle of modern times. Forty years ago for the great masses of colored women, there was no such thing as home. Today in each and every section of the country there are hundreds of homes among colored people, the mental and moral tone of which is as high and as pure as can be found among the best people of any land.

  To the women of the race may be attributed in large measure the refinement and purity of the colored home. The immorality of colored women is a theme upon which those who know little about them or those who maliciously misrepresent them love to descant. Foul aspersions upon the character of colored women are assiduously circulated by the press of certain sections and especially by the direct descendants of those who in years past were responsible for the moral degradation of their female slaves. And yet, in spite of the fateful heritage of slavery, even though the safeguards usually thrown around maidenly youth and innocence are in some sections entirely withheld from colored girls, statistics compiled by men not inclined to falsify in favor of my race show that immorality among the colored women of the United States is not so great as among women with similar environment and temptations in Italy, Germany, Sweden and France.

  Scandals in the best colored society are exceedingly rare, while the progressive game of divorce and remarriage is practically unknown.

  The intellectual progress of colored women has been marvelous. So great has been their thirst for knowledge and so Herculean their efforts to acquire it that there are few colleges, universities, high and normal schools in the North, East and West from which colored girls have not graduated with honor. In Wellesley, Vassar, Ann Arbor, Cornell and in Oberlin, my dear alma mater, whose name will always be loved and whose praise will always be sung as the first college in the country broad, just and generous enough to extend a cordial welcome to the Negro and to open its doors to women on an equal footing with the men, colored girls by their splendid records have forever settled the question of their capacity and worth. The instructors in these and other institutions cheerfully bear testimony to their intelligence, their diligence and their success.

  As the brains of colored women expanded, their hearts began to grow. No sooner had the heads of a favored few been filled with knowledge than their hearts yearned to dispense blessings to the less fortunate of their race. With tireless energy and eager zeal, colored women have worked in every conceivable way to elevate their race. Of the colored teachers engaged in instructing our youth it is probably no exaggeration to say that fully eighty percent are women. In the backwoods, remote from the civilization and comforts of the city and town, colored women may be found courageously battling with those evils which such conditions always entail. Many a heroine of whom the world will never hear has thus sacrificed her life to her race amid surroundings and in the face of privations which only martyrs can bear.

  Through the medium of their societies in the church, beneficial organizations out of it and clubs of various kinds, colored women are doing a vast amount of good. It is almost impossible to ascertain exactly what the Negro is doing in any field, for the records are so poorly kept. This is particularly true in the case of the women of the race. During the past forty years there is no doubt that colored women in their poverty have contributed large sums of money to charitable and educational institutions as well as to the foreign and home missionary work. Within the twenty-five years in which the educational work of the African Methodist Episcopal Church has been systematized, the women of that organization have contributed at least five hundred thousand dollars to the cause of education. Dotted all over the country are charitable institutions for the aged, orphaned and poor which have been established by colored women. Just how many it is difficult to state,
owing to the lack of statistics bearing on the progress, possessions and prowess of colored women.

  Up to date, politics have been religiously eschewed by colored women, although questions affecting our legal status as a race are sometimes agitated by the most progressive class. In Louisiana and Tennessee colored women have several times petitioned the legislatures of their respective states to repel the obnoxious Jim-Crow laws. Against the convict-lease system, whose atrocities have been so frequently exposed of late, colored women here and there in the South are waging a ceaseless war. So long as hundreds of their brothers and sisters, many of whom have committed no crime or misdemeanor whatever, are thrown into cells whose cubic contents are less than those of a good size grave, to be overworked, underfed and only partially covered with vermin infested rags, and so long as children are born to the women in these camps who breathe the polluted atmosphere of these dens of horror and vice from the time they utter their first cry in the world till they are released from their suffering by death, colored women who are working for the emancipation and elevation of their race know where their duty lies. By constant agitation of this painful and hideous subject, they hope to touch the conscience of the country, so that this stain upon its escutcheon shall be forever wiped away.

  Alarmed at the rapidity with which the Negro is losing ground in the world of trade, some of the farsighted women are trying to solve the labor question, so far as it concerns the women at least, by urging the establishment of schools of domestic science wherever means therefore can be secured. Those who are interested in this particular work hope and believe that if colored women and girls are thoroughly trained in domestic service, the boycott which has undoubtedly been placed upon them in many sections of the country will be removed. With so few vocations open to the Negro and with the labor organizations increasingly hostile to him, the future of the boys and girls of the race appears to some of our women very foreboding and dark.

  The cause of temperance has been eloquently espoused by two women, each of whom has been appointed national superintendent of work among colored people by the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union. In business, colored women have had signal success. There is in Alabama a large milling and cotton business belonging to and controlled by a colored woman, who has sometimes as many as seventy-five men in her employ. Until a few years ago the principal ice plant of Nova Scotia was owned and managed by a colored woman, who sold it for a large amount. In the professions there are dentists and doctors whose practice is lucrative and large. Ever since a book was published in 1773 entitled “Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral by Phillis Wheatley, Negro Servant of Mr. John Wheatley,” of Boston, colored women have given abundant evidence of literary ability. In sculpture we were represented by a woman upon whose chisel Italy has set her seal of approval; in painting by one of Bouguereau’s pupils and in music by young women holding diplomas from the best conservatories in the land. In short, to use a thought of the illustrious Frederick Douglass, if judged by the depths from which they have come, rather than by the heights to which those blessed with centuries of opportunities have attained, colored women need not hang their heads in shame. They are slowly but surely making their way up to the heights, wherever they can be scaled. In spite of handicaps and discouragements they are not losing heart. In a variety of ways they are rendering valiant service to their race. Lifting as they climb, onward and upward they go struggling and striving and hoping that the buds and blossoms of their desires may burst into glorious fruition ere long. Seeking no favors because of their color nor charity because of their needs they knock at the door of Justice and ask for an equal chance.

  “The Convict Lease System and the Chain Gangs” (1907)

  SOURCE: Mary Church Terrell, “Peonage in the United States: The Convict Lease System and the Chain Gangs,” The Nineteenth Century and After: A Monthly Review 57 (July–December 1907).

  IN the chain gangs and convict lease camps of the South to-day are thousands of colored people, men, women, and children, who are enduring a bondage, in some respects more cruel and more crushing than that from which their parents were emancipated forty years ago. Under this modern régime of slavery thousands of colored people, frequently upon trumped-up charges or for offences which in a civilized community would hardly land them in gaol, are thrown into dark, damp, disease-breeding cells, whose cubic contents are less than those of a good-sized grave, are overworked, underfed, and only partially covered with vermin-infested rags. As the chain gangs and the convict lease system are operated in the South to-day they violate the law against peonage, the constitutionality of which was affirmed by the Supreme Court two years ago. In the famous case of Clyatt versus the United States, Attorney-General Moody, recently placed upon the bench of the Supreme Court, represented the Government, while Senator Bacon and others appeared for Clyatt, a resident of Georgia, who had been convicted in the Federal Courts of that State and sentenced to four years’ hard labor on the charge of having held two colored men in peonage on account of debt, in violation of the law. In his brief, Attorney Moody declared that the executive arm of the law, so far as the enforcement of the statute against peonage was concerned, has been practically paralyzed.

  “Notwithstanding the fact that several United States Courts have held this law to be constitutional” [said Judge Moody], “the Government is powerless to compel its enforcement or observance, even in the most typical and flagrant cases. We think we may truthfully say” [continues Judge Moody], “that upon the decision of this case (Clyatt v. the United States) hangs the liberty of thousands of persons, mostly colored, it is true, who are now being held in a condition of involuntary servitude, in many cases worse than slavery itself, by the unlawful acts of individuals, not only in violation of the thirteenth amendment to the constitution, but in violation of the law which we have under consideration.”

  With one or two exceptions, perhaps, no case decided by the Supreme Court within recent years involved graver considerations than were presented by the questions raised in the Clyatt case, for the constitutionality of the law against peonage was thereby affirmed.

  If anybody is inclined to attach little importance to Judge Moody’s description of the conditions under which thousands of peons are living in the South to-day, on the ground that they may be simply the exaggerated statement of a Northerner who, at best, has received his information second hand, let him listen to the words of a man, born and reared in the South, who was commissioned a few years ago to investigate the convict camps of his own State. After Colonel Byrd, of Rome, Ga., had inspected every county camp in the State which it was possible for him to discover, he addressed himself to Governor Atkinson, who for years had been trying to improve existing conditions, as follows:

  “Your Excellency never did a more noble deed nor one that has been more far reaching in good or beneficent results to a helpless and friendless class of unfortunates than when you sent Special Inspector Wright into the misdemeanor camps of Georgia two years ago. His one visit did valiant service for human beings that were serving a bondage worse than slavery. True they were lawbreakers and deserved punishment at the hands of the State, but surely the State has no right to make helpless by law and then to forsake the helpless to the mercies of men who have no mercy. Surely there can be no genuine civilization when man’s inhumanity to man is so possible, so plainly in evidence.”

  Immediately after the constitutionality of the law against peonage was affirmed by the Supreme Court in March 1904, Judge Emory Speer, of Savannah, Georgia, one of the most eminent jurists in the country, began to attack the chain gangs of the South on the ground that they violate both the thirteenth amendment and the law against peonage. Since the thirteenth amendment declares that “involuntary servitude except as punishment for crime, whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall not exist in the United States,” Judge Speer attacked the chain gangs, because men, women, and children by the hundreds are forced into involu
ntary servitude by being sentenced to work upon them, who are not even charged with crime, but are accused of some petty offence, such as walking on the grass, expectorating upon the side walk, going to sleep in a depot, loitering on the streets, or other similar misdemeanors which could not by any stretch of the imagination be called a crime. Judge Speer also declared it to be his opinion that even those who sentence these helpless and friendless people to the chain gangs, and thus force them into involuntary servitude, are guilty of violating the law and are liable to punishment therefore; since it was explicitly stated in the decision rendered by the Supreme Court that even though “there might be in the language of the court either a municipal ordinance or State law sanctioning the holding of persons in involuntary servitude, Congress has power to punish those who thus violate the thirteenth amendment” and the law against peonage at one and the same time.

  In spite, however, of the overwhelming weight of evidence showing that atrocities are daily being perpetrated upon American citizens in almost every State of the South, with the connivance of those who administer the law, which are as shocking and unprintable as those endured by the Russian Jew, in spite of the power which the Supreme Court asserts is possessed by Congress, but feeble efforts are being put forth to suppress the chain gangs and the convict lease camps of the South. It is surprising how few there are among even intelligent people in this country who seem to have anything but a hazy idea of what the convict lease system means.