The Crucial Race Question

Excerpt from The Crucial Race Question: Or Where and How Shall, the Color Line Be Drawn

“On this great question I stand now, where Webster stood and Henry Clay; where Thomas stood, and Abraham Lincoln, and Henry Grady, and Councill and Turner and the rest – where in time all men will stand who see the light and dare to face it.

“Separation is the logical, the inevitable, the only way. No other proposed solution will stand the test of logic and experiment.

“For no statute will permanently solve this problem. No anodyne of law, no counter-irritant of legislation will quiet it longer than the hour of its application. The evil is in the blood of races, the disease is in the bones and the marrow and the skin of antagonistic people.

“Religion does not solve the problem, for the Christ Spirit will not be all-pervasive until the millenial dawn.

“Education complicates the problem. Every year of enlightenment increases the negro’s apprehension of his position, of his merit and attainment and of the inconsistency between his real and his constitutional status in the Republic. Education brings perception, and ambition follows, with the aggressive assertion against the iron walls of a prejudice that has never yielded and will never yield. The conflict is irrepressible and inevitable.

“Time complicates the problem by giving increasing numbers and additional provocation to the Negro, and increasing danger to the struggle which logic and destiny render certain.

“Politics complicates the problem by bringing times of fierce conflict when the passions and prejudices of faction may be moved to partisan alignment with the deep and lurking dangers of the Race Question.

“We have come in God’s providence to the parting of the ways. In the name of history and of humanity; in the interest of both races, and in the fear of God, I call for a division. We can make it peaceably now. We may be forced to accomplish it in blood hereafter. “John Temple Graves.”