Memories of Childhood's Slavery Days by Annie L. Burton
page 40 of 67 (59%)
page 40 of 67 (59%)
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American battle, in every act of loyalty to his country, and in his
long and patient suffering. Pay him what you owe him by educating him. Give him an opportunity to live. Allow him to live in decent parts of your city. Pay wages sufficient to support his children. Do this and God will remove the objectionable negro from the land. * * * * * The Negro stands to-day upon an eminence that overlooks more than two decades spent in efforts to ameliorate the condition of seven million immortal souls by opening before their hitherto dark and cheerless lives possibilities of development into a perfect and symmetrical manhood and womanhood. The retrospect presents to us a picture of a people's moral degradation and mental gloom caused by slavery. A people absolutely sunk in the lowest depth of a poverty which reduced them to objects of charity and surrounded them with difficulties which have ever stood as impregnable barriers in their way to speedy advancement in all those qualities that make the useful citizen. Every influence of state and society life seems to be against their progress and like some evil genius, these Negro hating ghosts are forever hunting them with the idea that their future must be one of subserviency to the white race. Hated and oppressed by the combined wisdom, wealth and statesmanship of a mighty confederacy who watched and criticised their mistakes which were strongly magnified by those who fain would write destruction upon the Emancipation; they are expected to rise from this condition. |
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