And if in just fury you accuse their vagabonds of
violating women, they also in fury quite as just may reply:
The rape which your gentlemen have done against helpless
black women in defiance of your own laws is written on the
foreheads of two millions of mulattoes, and written in inef-
faceable blood. And finally, when you fasten crime upon this
race as its peculiar trait, they answer that slavery was the
arch-crime, and lynching and lawlessness its twin abortions;
that color and race are not crimes, and yet it is they which in
this land receive most unceasing condemnation, North, East,
South, and West.
I will not say such arguments are wholly justified,--I will
not insist that there is no other side to the shield; but I do say
that of the nine millions of Negroes in this nation, there is
scarcely one out of the cradle to whom these arguments do
not daily present themselves in the guise of terrible truth. I
insist that the question of the future is how best to keep these
millions from brooding over the wrongs of the past and the
difficulties of the present, so that all their energies may be
bent toward a cheerful striving and cooperation with their
white neighbors toward a larger, juster, and fuller future.
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