.dt Open Letter to President McKinley by Colored People of Massachusetts,\
by Colored National League-A Project Gutenberg eBook
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OPEN LETTER||TO||PRESIDENT McKINLEY||BY||\
Colored People of Massachusetts.
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“Not as Suppliants do we Present Our Claims,
but as American Citizens.”
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OPEN LETTER||TO||PRESIDENT McKINLEY||BY||\
Colored People of Massachusetts.
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“Not as Suppliants do we Present Our Claims,
but as American Citizens.”
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The Colored People of Boston and vicinity,
through the Colored National League, at a mass
meeting held in the Charles Street Church, Tuesday
evening, October 3d, 1899, addressed an Open Letter
to President McKinley.
The reading of the letter by Mr. Archibald H.
Grimké, Chairman of the Committee, was listened to
with marked attention and interest, and at the conclusion
of its reading the letter was adopted by the
meeting with significant unanimity.
The letter was forwarded to President McKinley,
signed by the officers of the meeting and others.
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Boston, Mass., October 3, 1899.
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Hon. William McKinley,
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President of the United States,
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Sir:—
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We, colored people of Massachusetts in mass meeting
assembled to consider our oppressions and the state of the
country relative to the same, have resolved to address
ourselves to you in an open letter, notwithstanding
your extraordinary, your incomprehensible silence on the
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subject of our wrongs in your annual and other messages
to Congress, as in your public utterances to the country
at large. We address ourselves to you, sir, not as
suppliants, but as of right, as American citizens, whose
servant you are, and to whom you are bound to listen, and
for whom you are equally bound to speak, and upon
occasion to act, as for any other body of your fellow-countrymen
in like circumstances. We ask nothing for
ourselves at your hands, as chief magistrate of the
republic, to which all American citizens are not entitled.
We ask for the enjoyment of life, liberty, and the pursuit
of happiness equally with other men. We ask for the
free and full exercise of all the rights of American
freemen, guaranteed to us by the Constitution and laws of
the Union, which you were solemnly sworn to obey and
execute. We ask you for what belongs to us by the high
sanction of Constitution and law, and the Democratic
genius of our institutions and civilization. These rights
are everywhere throughout the South denied to us,
violently wrested from us by mobs, by lawless legislatures,
and nullifying conventions, combinations, and conspiracies,
openly, defiantly, under your eyes, in your
constructive and actual presence. And we demand,
which is a part of our rights, protection, security in our
life, our liberty, and in the pursuit of our individual and
social happiness under a government, which we are bound
to defend in war, and which is equally bound to furnish us
in peace protection, at home and abroad.
We have suffered, sir,—God knows how much we
have suffered!—since your accession to office, at the hands
of a country professing to be Christian, but which is not
Christian, from the hate and violence of a people claiming
to be civilized, but who are not civilized, and you have
seen our sufferings, witnessed from your high place our
awful wrongs and miseries, and yet you have at no time
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and on no occasion opened your lips in our behalf. Why?
we ask. Is it because we are black and weak and despised?
Are you silent because without any fault of our own we
were enslaved and held for more than two centuries in
cruel bondage by your forefathers? Is it because we bear
the marks of those sad generations of Anglo-Saxon brutality
and wickedness, that you do not speak? Is it our
fault that our involuntary servitude produced in us widespread
ignorance, poverty and degradation? Are we to
be damned and destroyed by the whites because we have
only grown the seeds which they planted? Are we to
be damned by bitter laws and destroyed by the mad
violence of mobs because we are what white men made
us? And is there no help in the federal arm for us, or
even one word of audible pity, protest and remonstrance
in your own breast, Mr. President, or in that of a single
member of your Cabinet? Black indeed we are, sir, but
we are also men and American citizens.
From the year 1619 the Anglo-Saxon race in America
began to sow in the mind of the negro race in America
seeds of ignorance, poverty and social degradation, and
continued to do so until the year 1863, when chattel
slavery was abolished to save the union of these states.
Then northern white men began, in order to form a more
perfect union, to sow this self-same mind of the negro with
quite different seeds,—seeds of knowledge and freedom;
seeds garnered in the Declaration of Independence for the
feeding of the nations of the earth, such as the natural
equality of all men before the law, their inalienable right
to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, and the
derivation of the powers of all just governments from the
consent of the governed. These seeds of your own planting
took root in the mind and heart of the negro, and the
crop of quickening intelligence, desire for wealth, to rise
in the social scale, to be as other men, to be equal with
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them in opportunities and the free play of his powers in
the rivalry of life, was the direct and legitimate result.
The struggle of the negro to rise out of his ignorance,
his poverty and his social degradation, in consequence
of the growth of these new forces and ideas within him, to
the full stature of his American citizenship, has been met
everywhere in the South by the active ill-will and determined
race-hatred and opposition of the white people of
that section. Turn where he will, he encounters this
cruel and implacable spirit. He dare not speak openly
the thoughts which rise in his breast. He has wrongs
such as have never in modern times been inflicted on a
people, and yet he must be dumb in the midst of a nation
which prates loudly of democracy and humanity, boasts
itself the champion of oppressed peoples abroad, while it
looks on indifferent, apathetic, at appalling enormities and
iniquities at home, where the victims are black and the
criminals white. The suppression, the terror wrought at
the South is so complete, so ever-present, so awful, that
no negro’s life or property is safe for a day who ventures
to raise his voice to heaven in indignant protest and appeal
against the deep damnation and despotism of such a social
state. Even teachers and leaders of this poor, oppressed
and patient people may not speak, lest their institutions of
learning and industry, and their own lives pay for their
temerity at the swift hands of savage mobs. But if the
peace of Warsaw, the silence of death reign over our
people and their leaders at the South, we of Massachusetts
are free, and must and shall raise our voice to you and
through you to the country, in solemn protest and warning
against the fearful sin and peril of such explosive social
conditions. We, sir, at this crisis and extremity in the
life of our race in the South, and in this crisis and extremity
of the republic as well, in the presence of the civilized
world, cry to you to pause, if but for an hour, in pursuit
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of your national policy of “criminal aggression” abroad
to consider the “criminal aggression” at home against
humanity and American citizenship, which is in the full
tide of successful conquest at the South, and the tremendous
consequences to our civilization, and the durability
of the Union itself, of this universal subversion of the
supreme law of the land, of democratic institutions, and
of the precious principle of the religion of Jesus in the
social and civil life of the Southern people.
With one accord, with an anxiety that wrenched our
hearts with cruel hopes and fears, the colored people of
the United States turned to you when Wilmington, N.C.,
was held for two dreadful days and nights in the clutch of
a bloody revolution; when negroes, guilty of no crime
except the color of their skin and a desire to exercise the
rights of their American citizenship, were butchered like
dogs in the streets of that ill-fated town; and when government
of the people by the people and for the people
perished in your very presence by the hands of violent
men during those bitter November days, for want of
federal aid, which you would not and did not furnish, on
the plea that you could not give what was not asked for
by a coward and recreant governor. And we well
understood at the time, sir, notwithstanding your plea of
constitutional inability to cope with the rebellion in
Wilmington, that where there is a will with constitutional
lawyers and rulers there is always a way, and where
there is no will there is no way. We well knew that you
lacked the will, and, therefore, the way to meet that
emergency.
It was the same thing with that terrible ebullition of the
mob spirit at Phœnix, S.C., when black men were
hunted and murdered, and white men shot and driven out
of that place by a set of white savages, who cared not for
the Constitution and the laws of the United States any
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more than they do for the constitution and the laws of an
empire dead and buried a thousand years. We looked in
vain for some word or some act from you. Neither word
nor act of sympathy for the victims was forthcoming, or of
detestation of an outrage so mad and barbarous as to
evoke even from such an extreme Southern organ as is
the News and Courier, of Charleston, S.C., hot and
stern condemnation. Hoping against hope, we waited for
your annual message to Congress in December last, knowing
that the Constitution imposed upon you a duty to give,
from time to time, to that body information of the state of
the Union. That, at least, we said, the President will
surely do; he will communicate officially the facts relative
to the tragic, the appalling events, which had just occurred
in the Carolinas to the Congress of the United States.
But not one word did your message contain on this subject,
although it discussed all sorts and conditions of subjects,
from the so-called war for humanity against Spain to the
celebration of the one hundredth anniversary of the founding
of the national capital in 1900. Nothing escaped
your eye, at home or abroad, nothing except the subversion
of the Constitution and laws of the Union in the
Southern States, and the flagrant and monstrous crimes
perpetrated upon a weak and submissive race in defiance
of your authority, or in virtual connivance therewith.
Yes, sir, we repeat, or in virtual connivance therewith.
And, when you made your Southern tour a little later,
and we saw how cunningly you catered to Southern race
prejudice and proscription; how you, the one single public
man and magistrate of the country, who, by virtue of
your exalted office, ought under no circumstances to
recognize caste distinctions and discriminations among
your fellow-citizens, received white men at the Capitol
in Montgomery, Ala., and black men afterward in a
negro church; how you preached patience, industry
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moderation to your long-suffering black fellow-citizens,
and patriotism, jingoism and imperialism to your white
ones; when we saw all these things, scales of illusion in
respect to your object fell from our eyes. We felt that
the President of the United States, in order to win the
support of the South to his policy of “criminal aggression”
in the far East, was ready and willing to shut his
eyes, ears and lips to the “criminal aggression” of that
section against the Constitution and the laws of the land,
wherein they guarantee civil rights and citizenship to the
negro, whose ultimate reduction to a condition of fixed
and abject serfdom is the plain purpose of the Southern
people and their laws.
When, several months subsequently, you returned to
Georgia, the mob spirit, as if to evince its supreme contempt
for your presence and the federal executive authority
which you represent, boldly broke into a prison shed,
where were confined helpless negro prisoners on a charge
of incendiarism, and brutally murdered five of them.
These men were American citizens, entitled to the rights
of American citizens, protection and trial by due process
of law. They were, in the eye of the law, innocent until
convicted by a jury of their peers. Had they been in
legal custody in Russia or Spain or Turkey they had not
been slaughtered by a mob under like circumstances; for
the Russian military power, or the Spanish or the Turkish,
would have guarded those men in their helpless and
defenseless condition from the fury of the populace who
were seeking their blood. Sir, they were men; they
were your brothers; they were God’s children, for whom
Jesus lived and died. They ought to have been sacred
charges in the hands of any civilized or semi-civilized
State and people. But almost in your hearing, before
your eyes (and you the chief magistrate of a country
loudly boastful of its freedom, Christianity and civilization),
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they were atrociously murdered. Did you speak?
did you open your lips to express horror of the awful
crime and stern condemnation of the incredible villainy
and complicity of the constituted authorities of Georgia in
the commission of this monstrous outrage, which out-barbarized
barbarism and stained through and through
with indelible infamy before the world your country’s
justice, honor and humanity?
Still later, considering the age, the circumstances and
the nation in which the deed was done, Georgia committed
a crime unmatched for moral depravity and sheer atrocity
during the century. A negro, charged with murder and
criminal assault, the first charge he is reported by the
newspapers to have admitted, and the second to have
denied, was taken one quiet Sunday morning from his
captors, and burned to death with indescribable and
hellish cruelty in the presence of cheering thousands of
the so-called best people of Georgia, men, women and
children, who had gone forth on the Christian Sabbath to
the burning of a human being as to a country festival
and holiday of innocent enjoyment and amusement. The
downright ferocity and frightful savagery of that American
mob at Newnan outdoes the holiday humor and thirst
for blood of the tiger-like populace of Pagan Rome,
gathered to witness Christian martyrs thrown to lions in
their roaring arenas. The death of Hose was quickly
followed by that of the negro preacher, Strickland, guiltless
of crime, under circumstances and with a brutality of
wickedness almost matching in horror and enormity the
torture and murder of the first; and this last was
succeeded by a third victim, who was literally lashed to
death by the wild, beast-like spirit of a Georgia mob, for
daring merely to utter his abhorrence of the Palmetto
iniquity and slaughter of helpless prisoners.
Did you speak? Did you utter one word of reprobation,
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of righteous indignation, either as magistrate or as
man? Did you break the shameful silence of shameful
months with so much as a whisper of a whisper against
the deep damnation of such defiance of all law, human
and divine; such revulsion of men into beasts, and
relapses of communities into barbarism in the very center
of the republic, and amid the sanctuary of the temple of
American liberty itself? You did not, sir, but your
Attorney-General did, and he only to throw out to the
public, to your meek and long-suffering colored fellow citizens,
the cold and cautious legal opinion that the case of
Hose has no federal aspect! Mr. President, has it any
moral or human aspect, seeing that Hose was a member of
the negro race, whom your Supreme Court once declared
has no rights in America which white men are bound to
respect? Is this infamous dictum of that tribunal still the
supreme law of the land? We ask you, sir, since recent
events in Arkansas, Mississippi, Alabama, Virginia and
Louisiana, as well as in Georgia and the Carolinas, indeed
throughout the South, and your own persistent silence,
and the persistent silence of every member of your
Cabinet on the subject of the wrongs of that race in those
States, would appear together to imply as much.
Had, eighteen months ago, the Cuban revolution to
throw off the yoke of Spain, or the attempt of Spain to
subdue the Cuban rebellion, any federal aspect? We
believe that you and the Congress of the United States
thought that they had, and therefore used, finally, the
armed force of the nation to expel Spain from that island.
Why? Was it because “the people of the Island of Cuba
are, and of right ought to be free and independent?”
You and the Congress said as much, and may we fervently
pray, sir, in passing, that the freedom and independence of
that brave people shall not much longer be denied them by
our government? But to resume, there was another consideration
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which, in your judgment, gave to the Cuban
question a federal aspect, which provoked at last the
armed interposition of our government in the affairs of
that island, and this was “the chronic condition of disturbance
in Cuba so injurious and menacing to our interests
and tranquillity, as well as shocking to our sentiments of
humanity.” Wherefore you presently fulfilled “a duty to
humanity by ending a situation, the indefinite prolongation
of which had become insufferable.”
Mr. President, had that “chronic condition of disturbance
in Cuba so injurious and menacing to our interests
and tranquillity as well as shocking to our sentiments of
humanity,” which you wished to terminate and did terminate,
a federal aspect, while that not less “chronic condition
of disturbance” in the South, which is a thousand
times more “injurious and menacing to our interests and
tranquillity,” as well as far more “shocking to our sentiments
of humanity,” or ought to be, none whatever? Is
it better to be Cuban revolutionists fighting for Cuban
independence than American citizens striving to do their
simple duty at home? Or is it better only in case those
American citizens doing their simple duty at home happen
to be negroes residing in the Southern States?
Are crying national transgressions and injustices more
“injurious and menacing” to the Republic, as well as
“shocking to its sentiments of humanity,” when committed
by a foreign state, in foreign territory, against a foreign
people, than when they are committed by a portion of our
own people against a portion of our own people at home?
There were those of our citizens who did not think that
the Cuban question possessed any federal aspect, while
there were others who thought otherwise; and these,
having the will and the power, eventually found a way to
suppress a menacing danger to the country and a wrong
against humanity at the same time. Where there is a will
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among constitutional lawyers and rulers, Mr. President,
there is ever a way; but where there is no will, there is no
way. Shall it be said that the federal government, with
arms of Briareus, reaching to the utmost limits of the
habitable globe for the protection of its citizens, for the
liberation of alien islanders and the subjugation of others,
is powerless to guarantee to certain of its citizens at home
their inalienable right to life, liberty and the pursuit of
happiness, because those citizens happen to be negroes
residing in the Southern section of our country? Do the
colored people of the United States deserve equal consideration
with the Cuban people at the hands of your
administration, and shall they, though late, receive it?
If, sir, you have the disposition, as we know that you
have the power, we are confident that you will be able to
find a constitutional way to reach us in our extremity, and
our enemies also, who are likewise enemies to great public
interests and national tranquillity.
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I. D. BARNETT, President.
EDWARD E. BROWN, Vice-President.
EDWARD H. WEST, Secretary.
ARCHIBALD H. GRIMKÉ.
EDWIN G. WALKER.
JAMES H. WOLFF.
EMERY T. MORRIS.
WILLIAM O. ARMSTRONG.
THOMAS P. TAYLOR
AND OTHERS.
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.it The spelling of “defenseless” was corrected to “defenseless” on\
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