Note 15 — Chapter Nine

In the light of the important rôle my brother was subsequently to play in the destinies of both the American Negro and the American Indian, it is not surprising that, all through his childhood, the boy had a most inordinate sympathy for the black man. In our small town, we had a colored population of about three hundred. Dave was known only to a few of them, and those the ones who occasionally worked about the place. I have seen him listen with a sort of pained quiescence to my Father’s flash-in-the-pan outbursts of temper toward some one on the farm. But let it break against a black man, and for some reason, as if he could not endure further humiliation for the race, off he would rush to some self-inflicted chore, such as water-drawing or wood-chopping. Anything to shut out the sound and scene. Once, it must be recorded, when he was only five, he fairly flew at my father and banged him in the stomach for screaming his rage at a negro farm-hand who had overturned a five-gallon bucket of soft soap.

The two Chinese laundrymen in town used to interest him too. He was forever standing against their plate-glass windows, watching them sprinkle clothes by holding mouthfuls of water and spraying it out.

I think one of the finest passages in H.T. Wayne’s preface to his three-volume work entitled The Thirty-five Terrific Years After Roosevelt is the one Winslow loved, and which I am sure I can write down by heart.

“It was as if the Negro race, once it found its legs, thanks to the divine intervention of a Lincoln, found those legs, figuratively speaking, to be as spavined, as rickety, and as bowed as the children of squalid negroes could be.

“It was left for David Schuyler to lead the American Negro out of the more or less dazed eighty years following his emancipation.

“The Schuyler Housing Bill, as applied to the Southern States alone, stamps its author as one of the great social liberators of his time, to say nothing of the subsequent intellectual awakening of that race under the benign influence of his three administrations. The American Indian owes him territorial, civic, state and property rights that were to clutch him back from a precipice that overlooked the abyss of annihilation.

“‘The Yellow Problem,’ as handled in those three terms, will not bear elucidation here. The fourth and as yet unwritten volume of this group will treat of it exclusively.”