1928

This Federal Council meeting is an interesting study in the geography of morals. The race commission presented a report today in which it tried to place the council on record as favoring the enforcement of the fifteenth amendment as well as the eighteenth. It was obviously an effort to exploit the strong prohibition sentiment of the churches for the sake of committing them to the espousal of the interests of the disfranchised Negroes in the south. That is not a bad political strategy. But it did not quite work.

A good brother from the southern Presbyterian church warned that to interfere with this “political issue” would “soil the garments of the bride of Christ.” To him the eighteenth amendment represented a “moral” issue but the fifteenth was a “political” one. I have a sneaking suspicion that the fifteenth amendment expresses more of the genius of the gospel than the eighteenth, but that is neither here nor there. What was interesting was the way in which various church leaders tried to rescue us from the embarrassment into which the council was brought by this proposal.

A good brother who was raised in the south and now lives in the north tried to act as mediator. He introduced his remarks with the usual nice story about how much he loved his negro mammy. Some day he ought to have a lesson in ethics and learn how much easier it is to love those who acknowledge their inferiority than those who challenge our superiority. It is indeed a virtuous woman who can love her social competitor as sincerely as she loves her faithful maid.

Another mediator was a southern bishop who has many northern connections. He made much of the fact that the south disregards only the spirit and not the letter of the enfranchising amendments to the constitution. The bishop is really a man of some courage who has spoken out bravely on the industrial conditions in the south. But he was evidently afraid in this instance either to accept or to reject a Christian view of race relations. So he stuck to casuistry about the letter of the law. He has probably preached many a sermon on the text about the letter killing and the spirit making alive. At any rate everyone who spoke revealed how geographic and historical circumstance had qualified Christian conviction.

That was as true of those of us who took an uncompromising position as the southern equivocators and the semi-southern mediators. To the southerners we are not Christian idealists but merely “Yankee” meddlers. And perhaps we are. At any rate it was easy to see from the debate that the north cannot help the south much in solving its race problem. If it is solved the solution must come out of the conscience and heart of the south.

After all, the problem, as every moral problem, is not merely conditioned by geography but by mathematics. Contact between races when the one race is almost as numerous as the other is quite a different story from a relationship in which the subject race is numerically very much weaker than the dominant group. Therefore let us not judge, lest we be judged. It is so easy to repent of other people’s sins.

Nevertheless it does not make one feel very comfortable to have a great church body seek some politic solution for a problem in which the ideal of Christian brotherhood leaves little room for equivocation.