July 12th, 2011 by Ajuan Mance
http://blackoncampus.com/2011/07/12/a-beautiful-black-mind-alexander-crummell/
Alexander Crummell (1819-1898)
[I]f there has been anything for which the colored people of this
country have been and now are noted, it is for disseverance, the
segregation of their forces, the lack of the co-operative
spirit. . . . The people, as a body, seem delivered over to the same
humble, servile occupations of life in which their fathers trod,
because, from a lack of co-operation they are unable to step into the
higher callings of business; and hence penury, poverty, inferiority,
dependence, and even servility is their one general characteristic
throughout the country, along with a dreadful state of mortality.
And the cause of this inferiority of purpose and of action is two-
fold, and both the fault, to some extent, of unwise and unphilosophic
leaders. For, since, especially emancipation, special heresies have
influenced and governed the minds of colored men in this nation: (1)
The one is the dogma which I have heard frequently from the lips of
leaders, personal and dear, but mistaken, friends, that the colored
people of this country should forget, as soon as possible, that they
are colored people: a fact, in the first place, which is an
impossibility. Forget it, forsooth, when you enter a saloon and are
repulsed on account of your color! Forget it when you enter a car,
South or West, and are denied a decent seat! Forget it when you enter
the Church of God, and are driven to a hole in the gallery! Forget it
when every child of yours would be driven ignominiously from four-
fifths of the common schools of the country! Forget it, when thousands
of mechanics in the large cities would make a strike rather than work
at the same bench, in the same yard, with a black carpenter or brick-
maker! Forget it, when the boyhood of our race is almost universally
deprived of the opportunity of learning trades, through prejudice!
Forget it, when, in one single State, twenty thousand men dare not go
to the polls on election-day, through the tyranny of caste! […] Forget
that you are colored, in these United States! Turn madman, and go into
a lunatic asylum, and then, perchance, you may forget it! But, if you
have any sense or sensibility, how is it possible for you, or me, or
any other colored man, to live oblivious of a fact of so much
significance in a land like this! The only place I know of in this
land where you can .forget you are colored. is the grave!…
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