Page:The Afro-American Press.djvu/508

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THE AFRO-AMERICAN PRESS.

etc.: The view of The San Antonio (Tex.) Express, far in the sunny South, is the first whoso testimony sounds friendly. Says The Express: "All schemes for the removal of the Afro-American are schemes and nothing more. He has lived in America long enough to become part and parcel of it. He will not be taken to Africa, South America or Mexico, or anywhere else. If the promoters of these attempts to get rid of a very valuable and necessary class of citizens could revisit the earth 100 years from now and see the man and brother in his perfected state of development, they would return to their graves with a feeling of weariness over the fact that they could have been so foolish in life."

The Natchez (Miss.) Democrat is awakening to a sense of its duty, as the following clipping will show: "The negro is here to stay, and it is the part of wisdom and humanity to make his condition as prosperous and contented under just laws as circumstances will permit and the higher civilization of the dominant whites demands it should be."

To our mind this argument is good. Higher Christian civilization will not sutler itself to oppress the weak and ignorant; it rather seeks to lift them up.

The Chattanooga Times, another Southern contemporary, says: "That the negro has acquired twenty millions worth of taxable property in Texas and two hundred millions in the late slave states,—these things go for naught with the crusaders who would hustle them off the continent as aggregated nuisances. These attacks on the race by a section of the press have undoubtedly encouraged attacks on quiet negroes and a wanton abuse of them in many instances."

A most commendable and sensible view of the race question is also taken by The Raleigh (N. C.) News and Observer in the following language, which can not fail of appreciation and interest. Speaking of the race, the editor