an people have grave cause for
apprehension. The Anglo-African element of our population is classed
off by popular sentiment, and kept so. It is for the thoughtful, the
honest, the calm but resolute men of the race to mould the sentiment
of the masses, lift them up into the broad sunlight of freedom.
Ignorance, superstition, prejudice, and intolerance are elements in
our nature born of the malign institution of servitude. No fiat of
government can eradicate these. As they were the slow growth, the
gradual development of long years of inhuman conditions, so they must
be eliminated by the slow growth of years of favorable conditions. Let
us recognize these facts as facts, and labor honestly to supplant them
with more wholesome, more cheering realities. The Independent colored
man, like the Independent white man, is an American citizen who does
his own thinking. When some one else thinks for him he ceases to be an
intelligent citizen and becomes a dangerous dupe--dangerous to
himself, dangerous to the State.

It is not to be expected now that the colored voters will continue to
maintain that unanimity of idea and action characteristic of them when
the legislative halls of States resounded with the clamor of
law-makers of their creation, and when their breath flooded or
depleted State treasuries. The conditions are different now. They find
themselves citizens without a voice in the shapement of legislation;
tax-payers without representation; men without leadership masterful
enough to force respect from inferior numbers in some States, or to
hold the balance of power in others. They find themselves at the mercy
of a relentless public opinion which tolerates but does not respect
their existence as a voting force; but which, on the contrary, while
recognizing their right to the free exercise of the suffrage, forbids
such exercise at the point of the shotgun of the assassin, whom it not
only nerves but shields in the perpetration of his lawless and
infamous crimes. And why is this? Why is it that the one hundred and
twenty thousand black voters of South Carolina allow the eighty
thousand white voters of that State to grind the life out of them by
laws more odious, more infamous, more tyrannical and subversive of
manhood than any which depopulate the governments of the old world? Is
it because the white man is the created viceregent of government? The
Scriptures affirm that all are sprung from one parental stem. Is it
because h