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An Oath of Afro-American Youth
by Kelly Miller

I will never bring disgrace upon my race by any unworthy deed or dishonorable act: I will live a clean, decent, manly life; and ever respect and defend the virtue and honor of womanhood.  I will uphold and obey the just laws of my country and of the community in which I live, and will encourage others to do likewise.  I will not allow prejudice, injustice, insult or outrage to cower my spirit or humiliate my soul, but will ever preserve the inner freedom of heart and  conscience.  I will not allow myself to be overcome of evil, but will strive to overcome evil with good.  I will endeavor to develop and exert the best powers within me for my own personal improvement, and will strive unceasingly to quicken the sense of racial duty and responsibility.  I will in all these ways aim to uplift my race so that, to everyone bound to it by ties of blood, it shall become a bond of ennoblement, and not a by-word of reproach.

WHAT TO READ 

In "The Upas Tree" Mr. Robert McMurdy makes a strong plea for the abolition - that is, the legal abolition - of capital punishment, for with two executions out of 141 convicted murderers in New York State it may safely be said that the lex talionis has become a thing of the past even in a State that is one of the most exacting in the enforcement of criminal penalties.

Mr. McMurdy's argument is based on the very well-written story of the conviction and sentence to death of a man whose innocence of murder is established only after the death cap has been placed over his head by a determined, whiskey-nerved executioner.  The characters, one of whom is an humble Negro of admirable qualities, are well drawn, the plot skilfully [[skillfully]] executed and, to a layman, the story throws much light on the tricks of the lawyer's trade.

Whether or not the abolition of the death penalty would result in a marked change one way or other in the number of murders is not conclusively proved, but the strong point of Mr. McMurdy's story is that with all the skill and ability of distinguished counsel at the command of the accused, and with every precaution for an impartial trial, it is still possible for an innocent man to be convicted of crime on doubtful circumstantial evidence and for the guilty to escape by the aid of perjury and jury bribing.  How much greater, then, is the risk of such miscarriage of justice when the accused is poor, friendless, without the pale of the very law which is supposed to protect him.  The paramount need of American justice with regard to homicide as well as lesser crime is a reform which shall bring about the conviction and punishment of the guilty without regard to pecuniary condition or other circumstances not contemplated in the scheme of justice.  It is the practical certainty of acquittal, and the freedom even from prosecution, which makes the taking of human life so frequent in this country, particularly in the Southern States.  Where death is the penalty for homicide, it ought to be enforced.  When it is, perhaps we  shall be able to replace it with life imprisonment, incarceration for five years, or whatever punishment may be demanded in the light of growing civilization. 

F. J. Schulte & Co., Chicago, Ill.


One of the greatest difficulties of the color problem in America is the lack of information, on both sides of the line, concerning the elementary facts of the presence of the Negro in this country.  Professor Brawley, of Atlanta Baptist College, has made a most important and valuable contribution to the filling of this void in his Short History of the American Negro, which endeavors simply to set forth the main facts about the subject that one might


WHAT TO READ       93

wish to know and supply in some measure the historical background for much that one reads to-day in newspapers and magazines." In this latter respect, perhaps, the work falls short of it its purpose, for Mr. Brawley gives little attention to what one most frequently reads in the press concerning Negroes. The special merit of the work is that it cannot fail to stimulate the interest and must give to the general public at least an intelligently respectful attitude towards what does appear in the newspapers. It is a summary of the history that has been set down in books. The reader must study for himself the history that has yet to be written. 

Mr. Brawley possesses in a high degree the essential quality of the true historian as an impartial recorder of facts. So free is he from the personal bias so naturally and so frequently present in those who speak of and for their own that one is inclined to think that he does not always present his case with the emphasis and accuracy which it deserves. No history of the Negro in America, designed primarily for newspaper readers, can be complete without reconciling the statement "the word Negro is the Spanish and Portuguese form"-- it is not, as Mr. Brawley says, the Italian also--"of the Latin adjective niger, meaning black," with the fact of the color of Mr. Chesnutt, whom Mr. Brawley rightly describes as a Negro novelist, and who is most certainly white. In justice to black men and for the fuller information of other American newspaper readers, it would have been well to explain the cause of this change in color from the "neager" and "nigre" and "neeger" and "nigger" in the uncertain spelling of the slave trader to the Negro whose history is written by himself. But Mr.. Brawley does not define Negro. He merely says that the word from which it comes means black, and that such ancestors of American Negroes as were brought to this country as slaves were nearly all black. He leaves us to infer that Negro means progress, light, courage, virtue, in its fullest sense of real manhood, patience, increasing solidarity of effort to ten millions of Americans people to whose night-bound vision

"Yon gray lines
That fret the clouds are messengers of day."

The Macmillan Co., New York, $1.25.

An admirable little volume of poetry is Henry G. Kost's "Sunlight and Starlight." The stanza quoted below begins the stirring appeal, "To the Nation's Conscience," which is one of Mr. Kost's many expressions of justice to the black man:

"When you struck the shackles from him,
And you called your chattel man--
Who, through gloomy centuries, suffered
'Neath his color's darkened ban;
When you gave the rights of freemen
To the race your sires enslaved,
how your hearts, with pride ennobled
Cheered the saviors and the saved!". 

The Gorham press, Boston, or the Book Department of THE CRISIS. $1.58.

"Dawn in Darkest Africa" is the title of a book by John. H. Harris, with an introduction by Lord Cromer, which appears to have been suppressed by the British Government. It is reviewed at great length in the African Times and Orient Review by Dr. MacGregor Reid, who says:

"Africa is a dark continent to all but its inhabitants. In the heart of the darkness is much light, and the ruins that lie upon its surface speak of an enlightened past, a time of order and of good government even while Europe lay steeped in ignorance. 

The hope of Africa still lives within the soul of its people, and Mr. Harris belongs to that small yet ever-growing body of thinkers who see light ahead. To those who know Africa best 'Dawn in Darkest Africa' will be welcomed as a ray of sunshine within the domicile of morbidity, where the gloomy thought is ever beating at the hope of the heart, and progress is undermined by the suspicions, jealousies and indiscretions of the dark view."

"The Black Bishop, Samuel Adjai Crowther," by Jesse Page, F.R.G.S. Fleming H. Revell, $2. A splendid biography of the first ablest Negro elevated to the Anglican Episcopate.

"Education for Manhood," by Kelly Miller, occupies the first number of the Monographic Magazine, which has been started by the dean of Howard University. Lord Macaulay, J. W. Cromwell, Grimke and Du Bois are the names of some of the authors of succeeding issues.