[SuchFriendsAreDangerous]

Youngstown, Ohio, October 2, I923 An Appeal To The Soul Of White America

Surely the soul of liberal, philanthropic, liberty-loving, white America is not dead. It is true that the glamour of materialism, has, to a great degree, destroyed the innocence and purity of the national conscience, but, still, beyond our politics, beyond our soulless industrialism, there is a deep feeling of human sympathy that touches the soul of white America upon which the unfortunate and sorrowful can always depend for sympathy, help, and action.
It is to that feeling that I appeal at this time for four hundred million Negroes of the world, and fifteen million of America in particular.
There is no real white man in America, who does not desire a solution of the Negro problem. Each thoughtful citizen has probably his own ideas of how the vexed question of races should be settled. To some the Negro could be gotten rid of by wholesale butchery, by lynching, economic starvation, by a return to slavery and legalized oppression; while others would have the problem solved by seeing the race all herded together and kept somewhere among themselves, but a few those in whom they have an interest should be allowed to live around as the wards of a mistaken philanthrophy; yet, none so generous as to desire to see the Negro elevated to a standard of real progress, and prosperity, welded into a homogeneous whole, creating of themselves a mighty nation with proper systems of government, civilization, and culture, to mark them admissable to the fraternities of nations and races without any disadvantage.
I do not desire to offend the finer feelings and sensibilities of those white friends of the race who really believe that they are kind and considerate to us as a people; but I feel it my duty to make a real appeal to conscience and not belief Conscience is solid, convicting and permanently demonstrative; belief, is only a matter of opinion, changeable by superior reasoning. Once the belief was that it was fit and proper to hold the Negro as a slave and in this the Bishop, Priest and layman agreed. Later on they changed their belief or opinion, but at all times the conscience of certain people dictated to them that it was wrong and inhuman to hold human beings as slaves. It is to such a conscience in white America that I am addressing myself.
Negroes are human beings -the peculiar and strange opinions of writers, ethnologists, philosophers, scientists and anthropologists notwithstanding-they have feelings, souls, passions, ambitions, desires, just as other men, hence they should be considered.
Has white America really considered the Negro in the light of permanent human progress? The answer is NO.
Men and women of the white race, do you know what is going to happen if you do not think and act now? One of two things. You are either going to deceive and keep the Negro in your midst until you have perfectly completed your wonderful American civilization with its progress of art, science, industry and politics, and then, jealous of your own success and achievements in those directions, and with the greater jealousy of seeing your race pure and unmixed, cast him off to die in the whirlpool of economic starvation, thus, getting rid of another race that was not intelligent enough to live, or, you simply mean by the largeness of your hearts to assimilate fifteen million Negroes into the social fraternity of an American race that will neither be white nor black. Don't be alarmed! We must prevent both consequences. No real race loving white man wants to destroy the purity of his race, and no real Negro conscious of himself wants to die, hence there is room for an understanding and an adjustment, and that is just "