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292            THE CRISIS

the decent and indecent. Separation is impossible in a democracy. It means segregation, subordination and tyranny. 
Social equality? Of course we want social equality. Social equality is the right to demand the treatment of men from your fellow man. To ask less is to acknowledge your own lack of manhood.

RESOLUTION AT COOPER UNION ON LINCOLN'S BIRTHDAY

HE National Association for the Advancement of Colored People was first called into being on the one hundredth anniversary of the birth of Abraham Lincoln. It conceives its mission to be the completion of the work which the great emancipator began. It proposes to make a group of 10,000,000 Americans free from the lingering shackles of past slavery--physically free from peonage, mentally free from ignorance, politically free from studied insult. 
We have refused for a moment to contemplate a great democracy like this, with all its wealth and power and aspiration, turning back in the onward furrow when once it set its hand to the plow. 
Great as are the forces of reaction and race and class hatred at all times, and bitter as is the concerted and organized effort to increase color prejudice in this land and beat back the struggling sons of the freedmen, we are still confident that the inherent justice and sense of fair play in the American people both North and South is never going to permit the past crime of slavery to be increased by future caste regulations leading straight to oligarchy and spiritual death.
But we know that if this crime of crimes is not to be perpetuated this nation must immediately take its feet from the paths wherein they are now set. The horror of 2,600 prisoners murdered without trial in twenty-seven years, the tens of thousands of unaccused black folk who have in three years been done to death and worse than death, the widespread use of crime and alleged crime as a source of public revenue, the defenseless position of colored women now threatened again in six literatures, the total disfranchisement of three-fourths of black voters, the new and insidious attack on property rights, the widespread, persistent and growing discrimination in the simplest and clearest matters of public decency and accommodation--all these things indicate not simply the suffering of a mocked people, but greater than that, they show the impotence and failure of American democracy.
If it be not possible in the twentieth century  of the Prince of Peace, in the heyday of European culture and world revival of brotherhood for a cultured people, to extend justice, freedom and equality to men whom they have cruelly wronged, but who, despite that, have done their hard work, fought their battles, saved their Union, upheld their democratic ideals, and showed themselves capable of modern culture--if it be not possible for America to yield these men what they have justly earned and deserve, then America herself is impossible and the vast dreams of Washington, Jefferson and Lincoln are vain.
But it is not so.  We can be just, we can be law abiding, we can be decent. All we need to know and realize is the truth about this awful failure to live up to our ideals; and so on this anniversary of the great man who began the emancipation of the Negro race in America and the emancipation of America itself we, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, again appeal to the nation to accept the clear and simple settlement of the Negro problem, which consists in treating all men, black and white, as you would have them treat you.

THE MAN WHO WON-(A Story)
By HARRY H. PACE

I.
THE keeper of the livery stable at Golden, S. C., was seriously puzzled. He stood in front of the stable door, his brow contracted in thought, gazing at a top buggy fast receding in the distance. Ever and anon he emitted an interjection characteristic of the section and cast a curious look at the pieces of silver in his hand.
The midday express from Washington had left a solitary passenger, in itself an unusual occurrence. The stranger, fair of face, well dressed and of commanding appearance, had come to his place and requested a buggy to take him out into the country.
"Goin' to Edgefield's ain't you?" said the  Liveryman genially.
"No. I'm going to Andy Wyatt's," responded the young man, whose name was Russell Stanley.
"Goin' to come right back?" came the second question curiously.
"I'm going to stay," was the positive reply.
Consequently the keeper was puzzled. Wyatt was a Negro, one of the biggest cotton planters in the State, owned ten squares miles of land and had an army of tenants, croppers and workmen surrounding him. He was openly admired and respected by the blacks of the entire district, and secretly envied and feared by a large portion of the whites. But he kept a cool head, raised more cotton than anybody else, had the finest stock, paid his bills promptly, and his credit was gilt edged. His nearest neighbor and keenest rival was Col. James Edgefield, the Democratic boss of the State and Congressman from the fifteenth district.  Edgefield's hospitality was well known; so was the beauty of his daughter and only child, Elsie. It was a common thing for young men to drop off at Golden and run out to Edgefield's place for a day or two. One young man had stayed two whole weeks. But what any white man was doing driving off to Andy Wyatt's to stay was what puzzled the liveryman.
Nevertheless, the buggy and the driver, with its passenger, were soon out on the dusty road that led to Wyatt's farm. The liveryman had made a careful inspection of Stanley to see if he might not be mistaking, as he said, "a Nigger for a white man." But the features, the   pale skin and brown half curling hair, together with the general air of culture and refinement unknown to any Negro he had ever seen, confirmed him in his first opinion.
To the driver, on the way out, Russell made no effort to conceal the fact of his connection with the black race, despite his appearance. He was an entire stranger to the South, its people and its ways, though he was born on the very farm to which he was now driving. He knew in a general way of the prejudices and restrictions of this section. He had never been entirely free from them in New York. He remembered well how it came to him one day in the street not far from the glitter and glare of Broadway. One of his playmates called him a "Nigger" and said something about his "Nigger" mother. He whipped him mercilessly and then went home crying to her to find out what the boy meant. Little by little there came to him, with his advancing years, the meaning of it all, the situation of his race, and more particularly his own peculiar condition. He watched the line across his mother's brow grow deeper day  by day and sorrowed with her in the life once so full of hope that had been swallowed up in the shame of his birth. He almost hated his own existence that had brought to her such sorrow and distress. To him she was always good, pure and noble. His father he did not know; only one thing he knew-that his father was white.
Year after year, as soon as he was old enough, the lad had struggled along in the bustle of New York to support his mother and educate himself. And when he sat beside her bed and saw her life come peacefully to a close far away from home and kindred and friends, alone, forgotten and almost despised, his heart beat furiously and he lifted his eyes and prayed for revenge on the one who had caused it all.