ive million grand-daughters
in 1910. Can all these women be vile and the hunted race continue to
grow in wealth and character? Impossible. Yet to save from the past the
shreds and vestiges of self-respect has been a terrible task. I most
sincerely doubt if any other race of women could have brought its
fineness up through so devilish a fire.

Alexander Crummell once said of his sister in the blood: "In her
girlhood all the delicate tenderness of her sex has been rudely
outraged. In the field, in the rude cabin, in the press-room, in the
factory she was thrown into the companionship of coarse and ignorant
men. No chance was given her for delicate reserve or tender modesty.
From her childhood she was the doomed victim of the grossest passion.
All the virtues of her sex were utterly ignored. If the instinct of
chastity asserted itself, then she had to fight like a tiger for the
ownership and possession of her own person and ofttimes had to suffer
pain and lacerations for her virtuous self-assertion. When she reached
maturity, all the tender instincts of her womanhood were ruthlessly
violated. At the age of marriage,--always prematurely anticipated under
slavery--she was mated as the stock of the plantation were mated, not to
be the companion of a loved and chosen husband, but to be the breeder of
human cattle for the field or the auction block."

Down in such mire has the black motherhood of this race
struggled,--starving its own wailing offspring to nurse to the world
their swaggering masters; welding for its children chains which
affronted even the moral sense of an unmoral world. Many a man and woman
in the South have lived in wedlock as holy as Adam and Eve and brought
forth their brown and golden children, but because the darker woman was
helpless, her chivalrous and whiter mate could cast her off at his
pleasure and publicly sneer at the body he had privately blasphemed.

I shall forgive the white South much in its final judgment day: I shall
forgive its slavery, for slavery is a world-old habit; I shall forgive
its fighting for a well-lost cause, and for remembering that struggle
with tender tears; I shall forgive its so-called "pride of race," the
passion of its hot blood, and even its dear, old, laughable strutting
and posing; but one thing I shall never forgive, neither in this world
nor the world to come: its wanton and continued and persistent insulting
of the black womanhood which it sought and seeks to pros