inion than by ties of consanguinity since
their manumission and enfranchisement. It is not because they are poor and
ignorant and oppressed, as a mass, that there is no such sympathy of
thought and unity of effort among them as among Irishmen and Jews the
world over, but because the vitiation of blood, beyond the honorable
restrictions of law, has destroyed, in large measure, that pride of
ancestry upon which pride of race must be builded. In no other logical
way can we account for the failure of the Afro-American people to stand
together, as other oppressed races do, and have done, for the righting of
wrongs against them authorized by the laws of the several states, if not
by the Federal Constitution, and sanctioned or tolerated by public
opinion. In nothing has this radical defect been more noticeable since the
War of the Rebellion than in the uniform failure of the people to sustain
such civic organizations as exist and have existed, to test in the courts
of law and in the forum of public opinion the validity of organic laws of
States intended to deprive them of the civil and political rights
guaranteed to them by the Federal Constitution. The two such organizations
of this character which have appealed to them are the National
Afro-American League, organized in Chicago, in 1890, and the National
Afro-American Council, organized in Rochester, New York, out of the
League, in 1898. The latter organization still exists, the strongest of
its kind, but it has never commanded the sympathy and support of the
masses of the people, nor is there, or has there been, substantial
agreement and concert of effort among the thoughtful men of the race along
these lines. They have been restrained by selfish, personal and petty
motives, while the constitutional rights which vitalize their citizenship
have been "denied or abridged" by legislation of certain of the States and
by public opinion, even as Nero fiddled while Rome burned. If they had
been actuated by a strong pride of ancestry and of race, if they had felt
that injury to one was injury to all, if they had hung together instead of
hanging separately, their place in the civil and political life of the
Republic to-day would not be that, largely, of pariahs, with none so poor
as to do them honor, but that of equality of right under the law enjoyed
by all other alien ethnic forces in our citizenship. They who will not
help themselves are usually not helped by others. They who make a