|
HERESY
"BAD
BISHOP BROWN'S"
QUARTERLY
LECTURES
NO
I
The American Race Problem RT. REV. WILLIAM MONTGOMERY BROWN, D.D. "Episcopus
in parilbus Bolsbevikiium et Infidelism"
"BAD BISHOP BROWN" BIOGRAPHICAL
SKETCH
Reprinted
from Time, Feb.25, 1924
SKINNING BISHOP BROWN
Dear Lord, Thy church on devious ways
What can we do? The rich and great
And then there's Bishop Lawrence, too'
"What! Lawrence called a heretic?
-Sylvanus-1924.
BAD
BISHOP BROWN
As
men marched impatiently across the last years of the 19th Century, while
Titantic voices prophesied the glory of a bigger, brighter, better age
to come, an Episcopal clergyman,
vital, imaginative, brilliant, went forth to serve God in Arkansas. Vision
and power were his. He felt the kingdom of Heaven was not impossible of
fulfillment in America. He became Bishop. Let men love one another and
praise God!
The
20th Century came and eternal harmonies continued to vibrate in the mind
of the Bishop. He could not fully utter them. His talk became a little
wild. Men did not love one another utterly. His talk became wilder, and
began to grate upon vestrymen and other bishops with bank accounts. At
a general meeting, in Boston, he was nearly mobbed. Finally his health
broke, and in 1912 he went to live in Galion, Ohio, the Rt. Rev. William
Montgomery Brown, Bishop of Arkansas, resigned.
Then suddenly, across a dangerous ocean and a continent of war, his aging eyes beheld a great nation being born from the womb of a great theory-Russia, the first-born of Communism. Like old Sirneon he cried: "A
light to lighten the Gentiles," but with more vitality than the Biblical
patriarch he proceeded to write a book. He called it "Communism and Christianism."
Of
course it was heretical. He was charged with heresy before the House of
Bishops. They decided not to' try him, but to endeavor to get him to subside
peacefully.. But the old man proved as difficult as a porcupine. The matter
dragged.
Last
week it became known that Bishops Hal of Vermont, Francis of Indianapolis
and Gravatt of West Virginia, had formally charged him with heresy and
he would be brought to trial. The reason for this action was simply that
the Protestant Episcopal Church cannot allow an old man to go about uttering
communistic and other wild doctrines in the name of an Episcopalian prelate.
The action has nothing whatever to do with the modernist controversy. Bishop Brown's trouble is more pathological than theological. He is a nuisance which the Bishops feel they must efficiently and speedily dispose of. Some of the passages from Bishop Brown's bad book: Gods in the skies (Jesus, Jehovah, Allah and Buddha) are all right as subjective symbols of human potentialities and attributes, and of natural laws, even as the Stars and Stripes on a pole, Uncle Sam in the capitol and Santa Claus in a sleigh are all right as such symbols; but such gods are all wrong... I place the Brother Jesus of the Christian religion and the Uncle Sam of the American politics on the same footing with each other and with others of their kind as subjective realities . The
birth, death, descension, resurrection and ascension of all the saviour-gods,
not excepting Jesus, are versions of the sun myth ....
As
an objectivity there is no such divinity (meaning the Triune God, Father,
Son and Spirit) He is a subjectivity existing in the imagination of orthodox
Christians ....
Bishop
Brown, in Galion, Ohio, shows signs of fight. The church is full of heretics,
says he, and he will not get out until the other heretics get out. Then
he makes the crack which is intended to smart in high places: "Is it my
theology or my economics that is being attacked?" It is, of course, his
economics, which even the Modernist handles with care.
One
of the great plays now "on Broadway" is G. B. Shaw's "Saint Joan." A central
scene is a conversation between the Bishop of Beauvais and the Earl of
War-wick. The Bishop objects to Joan of Arc because in her passion for
God, she overlooks the respect which is a Bishop's due. The Earl objects
to her because, in her passion for France, she overlooks the respect due
to a Feudal Earl. Bishop and Earl join hands to burn her.
And
thus, for differing reasons, every normal American objects to the aged
and mentally warped Brown of Galion, Ohio.
"BAD BISHOP BROWN'S" RELIGIOUS
AND POLITICAL CATECHISM
MARXISM is correct in its opposition to religion if it be regarded as a belief in a supernaturalistic God, Bible, church, heaven or hell. But none of these beliefs have anything to do with religion' and politics. What is religion? Religion is the desire and determination to make the most of life by having it as useful, long and happy as possible. What is politics? Politics is the effort to find out the way to the most abundant life and to walk therein. What is the way? The way is truth. What is truth? Truth is a fact so interpreted by experience, observation, investigation and reason that if it be regarded in conduct it will tend to make life more and more what it should be, What is a fact? The doings of nature are so many facts and there are no others. Of what must a real gospel consist? The only real gospel that the world can have must be constituted of facts rightly interpreted, solely with reference to making the most of human life here and now, not elsewhere and else when. What is the greatest of all known facts? The fact that man is only a part of nature (evolved in the image and likeness of a beast, not made in the image and likeness of the God, Jehovah) and, therefore, he is on exactly the same footing as to his origin, history and destiny as a mountain, mushroom and mouse, with no more prospect of a future existence in heaven or hell Why are the Soviet Russians advancing more rapidly in the way towards the ideal civilization than other peoples? Because they are trying to banish the gods from the skies and capitalists from the earth. Can people, then, be both Marxian-Leninian, or Bolshevik-Communists and Jesuine Christians? Yes. For they alike seek to secure to the world a more abundant life through a knowledge of the truth or science. Did Jesus say anything to this effect? Jesus did not say things any more than Santa Claus does, but those who wrote the Christian version of the ageless and matchless drama of human redemption, creating and staging him as its central figure, put these two wonderful sayings into his mouth: I am come that the world might have life and have it more abundantly. And ye shall know the truth
and the truth shall make you free.
THE AMERICAN RACE PROBLEM
FROM THE 1929 NATIONAL PLATFORM OF THE COMMUNIST
PARTY OF THE UNITED STATES
The Communist Party considers
it as its historic duty to unite all workers regardless of their color
against the common enemy, against the master class. The Negro race must
understand that capitalism means racial oppression and Communism means
social and racial equality.
DEMANDS OF THE PARTY
1. Abolition of the whole system of race discrimination. Full racial,
political, and social equality for the Negro race.
2. Abolition of all laws which result in segregation of Negroes. Abolition
of all Jim Crow laws. The law shall forbid all discrimination against Negroes
in selling or renting houses.
3. Abolition of all laws which disfranchise the Negroes.
4. Abolition of laws forbidding intermarriage of persons of different
races.
5. Abolition of all laws and public administration measures which prohibit,
or in practice, prevent Negro children or youth from attending general
public schools or universities.
6. Full and equal admittance of Negroes to all railway station waiting
rooms, restaurants, hotels, and theatres.
7. Federal law against lynching and the protection of the Negro masses in their right of self-defense. 8. Abolition of discriminatory practices in Courts against Negroes. No discrimination in jury service. 9. Abolition of the convict lease system and of the chain gang.
10. Abolition of all Jim Crow distinctions in the army, navy, and civil
service.
11. Immediate removal of all restrictions in all trade unions against the membership of Negro workers. 12. Equal opportunity for employment, wages, hours, and working conditions
for Negro and white workers. Equal pay for equal work for Negro and white
workers.
THE AMERICAN
RACE PROBLEM
Behold
the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world.-John Baptist.
I have lived into my third generation.
If I could live to its end, twenty-five years more, I would see a new world-a
world without an exploitation problem; a world without a race problem;
a world without a class problem; a world without a poverty problem, and
a world without a war problem.
Most certainly the dawn of this new
world is breaking and in less than fifty years, before the end of the twentieth
century, its glorious sun will be well above the horizon for all mankind.
Even now it is appearing for the inhabitants of the greater parts of the
continents of Europe and Asia, causing them to rejoice as no people have
ever rejoiced.
Within the two generations through
which I have passed, the Negro race problem has grown into one of the greatest
among all social problems. In the first of these generations it was the
great American problem and wholly concerned with the Afro-American slaves.
During the second it still remained unsolved. The Civil War was supposed
to solve it but; at last, sad experiences have forced rapidly multiplying
thousands to see that the only problem solved by wars is how to make the
world safe for millionaires.
Anyhow, the Civil War did not solve
for America its black race problem and the World War extended this problem
to Africa and also made it as great for England and France as it ever has
been for the United States; and, worse, it added to the black race problem
of America and Africa the colored or dark race problems of China, Japan,
India and South America, making the problem of the dark races as a whole
enormously great.
The problem of the colored or dark races is now among the greatest problems which confront the white race, yet unless it is solved no part of the human race can stand. Not only will the black, yellow, brown and other dark races go down but the white race with them. Though most unfortunately the World
War did much to increase the greatness of the problem of the colored races,
it as fortunately gave birth to the greatest among all schools, the school
of communism, in which white, black, yellow, brown and dark mathematicians
who are now alike, without any reference to color lines, working together
upon it in all parts of the world. We know that the mathematicians of this
school can solve the colored race problem because they have already succeeded
in one great country and to some degree in many others.
These racial mathematicians are the bolsheviks, the social engineers, in whom I center all my hope for the figuring out of a better? world. They will, within the first two or three generations of the new era which opened on the most momentous day in human history, November 7th, 1917, solve not only this tremendous dark race problem: but, also, the more terrible problems of exploitation, poverty and slavery and with these four they will solve the fifth, the most terrific among all problems, the problem of war. In a lecture on the Communist and Capitalist
Solutions of the Chinese Problem, published in Part III of the booklet,
Communism and Christianism, I have dealt with the yellow part of the colored
race problem.* That lecture is almost as applicable
to India, Africa, South America and, indeed to all colonial countries as
to China; but the great black race problem which we have within the United
States was hardly touched. I grapple it in this lecture.
I.
CHRISTIAN SOLUTION OF RACE PROBLEMS
I was born near' the middle of the
nineteenth century, when in Christian countries people tried to solve social
problems in the orthodox way; that is, by reference to the revelations
of the Christian God in a great book called the Bible.
Most among you were born near the beginning
of the twentieth century, when in every country people more and more try
to solve social problems in the heretical way. that is, by reference to
the discoveries of man in a far greater book called nature.
I have tried to solve the race problem
both ways. I could not get anywhere with my orthodox nineteenth century
Bible figuring, so of late years I have been figuring the scientific, the
nature way.
When I did my figuring on the race
problem in the old orthodox way, I proceeded on the basis of theological
prejudices. Now that I am figuring in the new heretical way, I proceed
upon scientific facts. The difference in the two ways is, then, a question
of procedure. whether with reference to ancient, revealed prejudices or
modern, discovered facts. I no longer believe in super natural revelations
from the skies by gods. I accept nothing as revealed until it has been
naturally discovered on earth by man.
When I speak of ancient prejudices
I know what I am talking about. I have had them. I suffered from them just
as much as any doddering old fundamentalist whom you can name in the House
of Bishops. I feel sorry today for people who are still suffering from
the prejudices which so blinded me through the whole generation of my active
ministry in the Episcopal Church.
But I do not feel despondent. I had
as bad a case of prejudice as any, and if I could be cured, there is no
reason to suppose that the other bishops can not.
That I was cured is now well established
by history. It is for this I was excluded from the House of Bishops. So
long as I kept all my prejudices intact, I was thoroughly welcome in it.
I used to have a prejudice as to the
color of God.! thought that he was white. I thought the Almighty belonged
to the Caucasian rACE; and, of course, that Adam. made in his image and
likeness, was white. I even wrote a book about it all. I entitled it, The
Crucial Race Question, and I proceeded on the assumption that the Christian
God had all the prejudices against the Negro that I had, and that the church
must solve the problem in the way that any lily white God who had lived
in the south long enough to acquire southern ideals would be likely to
solve it.
Understand, I did not hate the Negro.
I wanted to help him, or I thought I did. I wanted to uplift him. But I
wanted him to keep his place. In other words, I was a living insult to
him, assuming that his place was by divine decree secondary to. mine. His
place was to be an humble servant of the white man and his reward for his
unquestioning and unending servility was to be a condescending pat on the
back now and then.
I even granted that Negroes would live
in heaven when they were dead, if they were sufficiently respectful and
obedient to us superior white folks while they lived on earth. In fact,
I must have figured that we would need them there. God had some reason,
I knew, for creating them. He let them live on earth; obviously, so that
they could shine our shoes; and he would, doubt-less, let them live in
heaven so that they could keep our halos shined.
So I argued in my book that instead
of having blacks and whites in the same churches, where the Negroe might
get the absurd notion that they were equal before God with us Caucasians,
that we should give them a separate and special Jim Crow church in which
they could practice for the lowly parts that God would let them play in
a Jim Crow heaven.
Now, all this was perfectly logical,
if you once grant the ancient premise from which my logic flowed, but it
was hardly twentieth century logic. The premise was not modern. It was
an ancient theological prejudice and had nothing to do whatever with modern
scientific facts.
Did the bishops put me out for entertaining
such theological prejudices? They did not. It was only when I got to dealing
with scientific facts that they excluded me. A bishop just naturally loves
a theological prejudice and hates a scientific fact; but the twentieth
century reckons with such facts. And that is why the bishops and their
churches have been losing out until they have ceased to count for much.
Let me tell you more about the peculiar
kind of race prejudice which I displayed. I was in Arkansas, but I was
not originally from Arkansas, and my prejudices, therefore, were a little
different from those of the Arkansas native. In fact, you will be surprised
when I tell you how different they were and why.
I was from the north. I was from a
section of Ohio where there were few Negroes. I did not even see one until
I was ten years old, and I never was used to associating with them and
always felt strange when I met with and talked to one. Southern people,
Qn the other hand, were used to having them around, which created a very
different psychology.
From time immemorial, ignorant tribesmen
have always shrunk from contact with alien tribes. A large part of human
history is taken up with the wars which alien tribes waged against each
other for no other apparent reason often than that they were alien.
People from the outside, whether they
had different skins or not, had different ways, arid being different from
the home folks meant that they were inferior. The home folks were suspicious
of them, feared them and therefore hated them. If the aliens had a differently
colored skin, they shrank from every contact with them and wanted to kill
them.
But after they had carried on a tribal
war long enough, these alien tribes often made peace and became one tribe.
Fighting is one way of getting acquainted. It is a very poor way today,
for with modern weapons, nations can almost exterminate each other before
they have a chance to. say, how do you do. But in the early days, tribes
which had fought each other for one or two hundred years got so well acquainted
that they did not seem queer any longer, and so they ceased fighting and
amalgamated.
That is the way we happen to have that
interesting tribe which now calls itself Anglo-Saxon. To be an Angle at
one time, meant that you were angling to catch and kill a queer Saxon,
and to be a Saxon was to be out to catch and kill a queer Angle. But now
their descendants proudly talk of their Anglo-Saxon blood as though it
were one pure 8train and not the hyphenated hybrid which it is.
When it comes to racial stock,
we are all hyphenated and we are all hybrids. Even the Jews, who in many
countries are still queer to the Gentiles, are not one race.
They are like the Gentiles, a lot of races. In the Old Testament, Jehovah
is frequently represented as becoming peeved because his chosen people
were consorting too freely with the Canaanites and other heathen tribes.
But it is not claimed that he did anything much about it. After the different
bloods were mixed, the Jewish God, Jehovah. could not or would not unmix
them, and the Christian God, Jesus, can not or will not unmix the white
and colored races in America today.
But, assuming that Jehovah and Jesus
really exist, and that, being Gods, they could and would do anything that
ought to be done by them, their failure to unmix hybrid bloods leads to
the conclusion that they are not worried about them, and that good Jews
and Christians should not be.
You may call yourselves colored, and
people who call themselves white may insist on calling you colored. But
it is generally recognized that many colored people have a lot of white
ancestors, and if the facts could be known, it would doubtless be discovered
that the whites have a lot of colored ancestors.
The man who is calling you a Negro,
and is discriminating against you because he calls you a Negro, can not
prove before any scientific tribunal that he is not partly Negro himself.
It is a wise child who knows his father, to say nothing of his grandfather
and his great grandfather. That is one of the things which you never can
tell.
You doubtless have heard the story
of the colored preacher who was expounding to his congregation the exact
difference between faith and knowledge.
"Now, there is Brother and Sister Jones,"
he said, 'with their twelve children, right there in the front seat. They
is all your children, isn't they, Sister Jones?
"Yes, Sister Jones, she has knowledge
that they is all her children. And Brother Jones, he has faith that they
is all his."
Well, we Anglo-Saxons have faith that
there is no colored blood in our veins, But we have no knowledge of it.
We can not establish it as a fact. And if we can not establish it as a
fact, it has no part in a genuine, twentieth century discussion of the
American race problem.
Suppose that science should discover
a method by which anyone's male ancestors could be accurately determined.
What of it? Suppose it should be discovered that I had some Negro blood-what
of that? I would be just the same person that I was before the discovery.
I would be no more worthy and no more unworthy. My body would be just as
good and no better than it was before, and so would my brain and my disposition
and capacity to be of use to my fellow men. None of these things would
be changed in the least by the discovery that I was part Negro. **
That is a fact; but being a fact, Americans
who discuss their vexed race question do not want to have anything to do
with it.
I myself would have been much disturbed
if such a fact had been called to my attention when I was writing my book,
The Crucial Race Question, and trying to establish a Jim Crow church to
prepare colored people for my Jim Crow heaven. For my absurd theological
prejudices would cause one to feel that such a discovery made all the difference
in the world, in fact all the difference in two worlds, in this world and
the next, heaven or hell.
Pardon me if I seem to ridicule the
theological mind. I ridicule it because I had one, and no one has better
reason than I to know just how utterly ridiculous the theological mind
is. According to the theological mind, everything always depends on something
which can not possibly be determined.
When we are dead is there for us another
life in another world? Nobody knows and it is impossible that anybody can
know. And so, says the ridiculous theologian, it is absolutely necessary
for us all to makeup our minds definitely on the subject of a future life
and to hold to the belief that there is to be one for most in a hell of
woe below the earth and for some in a heaven of bliss above the earth.
A chief reason for my exclusion from the House of Bishops was disbelief
in a future life in one of these utterly impossible places.
Yet the theologians are liberal in
their way. They permit us to be densely ignorant of all the knowledge which
it would be humanly possible for us to get. We may think that two plus
two equals nine, that water runs up hill, that we will not burn our fingers
if we take hold of a red hot pipe, and that God will f6rgive us for our
ignorance. But unless we know by faith certain things which nobody knows
by experience and nobody can possibly find out, God will damn and burn
us for all eternity.
Now, that is not the twentieth century
mind. People are asking what is the matter with the bishops and the churches?
The answer is, they have lost out as to the twentieth century mind. The
twentieth century mind says: thou shalt not catch hold of a red hot pipe,
for in the moment that thou catcheth hold of a red hot pipe thou shalt
catch hell. Not a fictitious, theological hell below the earth (there is
no below or above from the earth) but a real scientific hell: on earth.
That is the kind of a hell which you
can understand. the kind which is based upon fact, the kind which you can
avoid by knowledge. But you can not avoid the theological hell or gain
the theological heaven because the avoidance of that hell or the gaining
of that heaven involves belief in a whole lot of ancient absurdities which
no true son or daughter of the twentieth century can believe. In fact none
among the bishops believes it.
Does any bishop believe in the Bible
hell and heaven? No, not one. But the doctrine of redemption from this
hell to this heaven is the essence of the faith said to be once for all
delivered by Cod to the Christian saints. Ask the bishops whether they
really believe in the Bible kind of heaven and hell, and in the doctrines
of the fall of Adam and the redemption of the world by the blood of Jesus
which goes with the orthodox belief in heaven and hell. I asked them and
offered to go out without a trial if they said they did. They could not
say this. So they tried me and put me out of their synagogue.
The bishops did this because they have
not the twentieth century mind, and knew not what they were doing. In my
"bad" books (five of them) entitled, The Bankruptcy of Christian Supernaturalism.
and in my "bad" lectures (four each year) of this magazine, Heresy, I am
trying to get the twentieth century mind across to my dear brethren. It
is hard sledding! But I shall keep on working at it until. for me, the
night cometh in which no man can work.
When I was giving my august pronouncements
on the Crucial Race Question of our country, I did not have a scientific
mind. I had a theological mind, full of theological prejudices. and an
episcopal mind, full of episcopalian prejudices, and an Ohio mind, full
of Ohio prejudices. and an Arkansas mind, full of lately acquired Arkansas
prejudices. Since a mind full of absurd prejudices is the chief qualification
for the episcopate. the church certainly made no mistake in selecting me
as the head of a Southern Diocese.
Prejudices are like racial stocks.
They get mixed up very easily, and the fellow in whose brain they are mixed
up the most is likely to think that he is the sole possessor of the only
Simon-pure, unadulterated prejudice on earth. An Arkansas mind is bad enough,
but when you mix it up with an Ohio mind you get a sorry concoction of
prejudices.
It was so in my case and it is so in
the case of thousands of northerners wh9 take up their residence
in the south. They become much more southern than the southerners. For
they add their own shrinking from the Negro (a shrinking based wholly upon
unfamiliarity with him) to the southerner's attitude of cheap snobbery
and pretense.
An ignorant rustic in the north who
has never associated with Negroes is not likely to worry very much because
he sees one riding in the same car or even eating in the same public restaurant.
That, to him, is not intimate association. This ignoramus, however, just
naturally shrinks from close association with a being so strange and queer
as to have a colored skin. And he does not want a colored woman about the
house: he does not want her black fingers touching his food, and his wife
would not want her beds made or her children bathed by her.
Now, that is sheer race prejudice.
We may rail against it, but it is natural enough at a certain stage in
social evolution. It is the old tribal way of looking at things. The near
neighbors constitute human society for such a person, and any person who
is at all unfamiliar is in his eyes a little less than human.
But the race prejudices of the southerner
do not have the same origin. In fact, strictly speaking, they are not race
prejudices at all. Intimate contact with the Negro is not disagreeable
to the typical southern white. He has had intimate contact with Negroes
from his childhood. A colored nurse attended him when a baby. He generally
went to sleep with his head pillowed between her breasts and he may have
eaten from one of them while a colored baby ate from the other.
If, then, it were not for a definite
education given to him for a specific purpose, such a child would never
be likely to feel any difference whatever between colored people and white.
If it were not for this education, a white boy would be quite as likely
to fall in love with and marry a colored girl, and a white girl so brought
up to fall in love with and marry a colored man, as they would be to choose
one of their own race.
But the southern boy and girl are educated
from childhood to keep the Negro in a position of social inferiority. Not
to avoid intimate contacts, as might be the case if race prejudice were
at the root of the education, but to keep the Negro in his place as a servant
of the whites. This is not race prejudice. It is class prejudice. It is
economic interest.
This is almost exactly the same prejudice
which the children of the old feudal lords were taught to display toward
the serfs on their estates. although the serfs were of exactly the same
race as they. Gentlemen might be kind to their servants. They might make
it a point always to speak pleasantly to them, to laugh with them at their
celebrations and to cry with them at their funerals, but let any member
of the servant class deign to aspire to any privilege reserved by Cod for
the nobility and that servant had to be kept in his place.
But I was a theologian when I went
to Arkansas and I did not know all this. Being a theologian. I was just
like the other bishops. I did not know anything except a lot of things
that nobody could possibly know. Yet, like the minds of all bishops. my
mind was trained to absorb prejudices. where they did not directly conflict
with the prejudices which I had already absorbed, and I could sometimes
absorb them even when they did.
So I added my ignorant provincial Ohio
race prejudice to this preposterous feudal Arkansas class prejudice and
wrote my absurd book. The Crucial Race Question.
The Negroes in the south. I am sorry
to say, did not resent the book. They were as ignorant as I, and some among
them even thought that it was rather nice Of me to do what no other bishop
had done, suggest a way by which Negroes could become full-fledged bishops
in the United States with a sure enough apostolic succession, even if it
was in a Jim Crow episcopacy and a Jim Crow apostolic succession.
I thought it was rather nice of me
myself. I was sure that I did not hate the Negro and, with close and long
association with him, I was finding his presence not at all disagreeable.
He surely ought to go to heaven, if he kept his place in it; and since
the Protestant Episcopal Church was the only sure route to heaven, I was
more and more for giving him a nice little Protestant Episcopal Church.
II.
COMMUNIST
SOLUTION OF RACE PROBLEMS
Now let us pass out of the ancient
world. in which the many orthodox bishops were princes and the few heretical
scientists martyrs, into the modern world in which the many scientists
are everything and the few bishops nothing.
Did you ever hear of Negro communism?
No. You never did and you never will. You will hear of a lot of Negro communists,
but you will not hear of a Negro communism, nor of a Negro communist party,
not even a Negro local of the communist party.
Communism is an ideal into which the
idea of race distinction can not enter; and the communist party, although
it has many Negroes in it and will soon, I hope, have millions of them,
is a party which Negroes, as Negroes, can not join.
It is a party which Negroes, if they
are to join, must do so, not as Negroes, but as men and women. A communist
can not draw the color line, because it is impossible, in the first place.
for anybody to say who is white and who is colored, and because, in the
second place. the drawing of such a line is destructive of every-thing
which the communist wants.
People may sigh for the kingdom of
God on earth and still draw the color line, for what such people really
want is the kingdom of a Caucasian God. They would have nothing whatever
to do with the kingdom of a God who did not believe in white supremacy.
But no one can really want the communism
of man on earth and indulge in any such distinction. It is not merely impossible
for one who draws any color line to get into the communist party, but it
is psychologically impossible for the human mind to entertain the vision
of communism and still think of any race as inferior.
I changed my whole attitude toward
the Negro, not through studying the Negro problem but through getting the
vision of communism.
Communism is a system of society in
which there is no class exploitation and no cause for it, and in a world
where there is no class exploitation, there can not be a race problem.
At bottom, since the rise of the owning
class, the race problem has been a question of economic exploitation. But
for this crime of crimes (economic exploitation) there would be no class
or race problem, no poverty problem and no war problem.
Where there is economic exploitation,
however, people will exploit those whom it is easiest to exploit. In America
it is easiest to exploit the Negro, and so he is exploited most.
A colored skin in America is a badge
of slavery. In those countries in which the Negro has never been enslaved,
he does not suffer nearly so much from the discriminations which he encounters
here. In such countries, all a Negro has to do is to get enough money and
enough conventional culture and he will be allowed to stay at the best
hotels, unless too many rich American globe trotters enter complaints.
But that does not solve the Negro problem.
It simply solves the problem of a few Negroes who have been economically
lucky enough to get out of the working class into the owning class, the
exploiting dasses.
It does not solve the black problem
because it does not solve the white problem and the yellow problem and
the brown problem and the dark problem.
The greatest and most universal problem
of suffering humanity is the problem of exploitation, and neither the race
problem nor any among the other great problems will be solved until the
soluti6n of this problem of problems has been accomplished by the abolition
of the exploitation of the working class by the owning class which will
be the abolition of all economic slavery.
There have been four kinds of economic
slavery-patriarchal slavery, chattel slavery, feudal slavery and wage slavery.
These four slaveries, but the worst of them is wage slavery, and it will
never be abolished until the bishops with their absurd theologies, and
the capitalists with their cruel exploitations are banished from the earth.
But this is a long story for my telling of which I must refer you to my
"bad books," especially Communism and Christianism.
I would welcome it. of course, if capitalist
America should become as civilized as, say. capitalist France in the treatment
accorded to Negroes, but, even so. I would have to admit that such civilized
treatment could not take from the Negro in America the greatest burden
under which he staggers. It would simply take the burden from a few Negroes,
just as it has already taken it from certain privileged groups of whites,
leaving the masses, white and black, to struggle along under their burdens
of poverty, unemployment. slavery and despair.
This burden of every representative
of the working class (no matter what his color may be) must be borne until
the world has a new religion based on science, not theology, and a new
politics based service, not property. This world the workers must create
for themselves by a Marxian revolution in every nation. The bishops and
bankers will never do it by a Jesuine reformation.
The Negro in America staggers under
a double burden. He not only suffers from the exploitation which is the
lot of the white worker too, but he is not even accorded equality with
the white worker in many different ways.
But let him achieve such equality and
he will not achieve freedom. Even if he mixed his blood with the blood
of the white race until the whole nation had become mulatto, still the
vast majority of Negroes would remain slaves. They would be the slaves
of other Negroes. to be sure instead of slaves of white men, but that would
not solve their major problem.
Until the workers as a class, without
reference to race differences, do away with all exploitation of man by
man, the great majority of every race must still be victims of poverty
and slavery and war. Where people see that fact, the color line just naturally
disappears. Millions do see it, and fortunately for the good of the world
they are increasing everywhere, nowhere more rapidly than in the United
States.
There is a strange country in which
everybody sees it. In respect to the race problem, at least, it is the
most civilized country on earth. The Negro is not only accorded strict
equality but he is naturally given a little special attention. I do not
mean that he is given any special privileges. The only special privileges
in that strange country go to workers and their families. In time (just
as soon as their economic organization can be completed so that everybody
shall become a useful worker) there will be no special privileges for anyone.
But in the interim, they have in that strange country a workers' government
which thinks of the welfare of the workers first and allows all others
to get along as best they can-just as. in other countries, the government
always thinks of the welfare of the owners first and allows the workers
to get along as best they can.
You know, of course, that I am talking
about communist or Soviet Russia. Communist Russia has not solved its economic
problems yet, although it is solving them rapidly, much more rapidly and
satisfactorily for the workers than capitalist America. And with the solution
of the basic economic problems it also is solving the class problem and
the race problem and the color problem; and, indeed, it is solving all
the problems which go with the problem of exploitation, among them poverty,
slavery and war. There is a complete new way of looking at things over
there in that strange country, and the prospects of the workers are altogether
different from what they are here, infinitely better.
Communism is the goal, and communism
means the rise of the whole working class of the world, regardless of race,
to throw off all exploitation and unite in joyous, free, all-around service
to each other. The workers of the white race cannot rise into this communist
heaven out of their capitalist hell unless the workers of the black race
rise with them.
Who started anything like that? obviously,
not the czar; not the nobility; not bishops, not the bankers; not the lazy
old landowners, not the hustling new exploiters. It was the exploited ones
who started it all and who are now finishing up the job. It was the commonest
of the common people-those who were so utterly counted out of things under
the old regime that people, excepting when they had the most lowly work
to do, entirely overlooked their existence. It was all started in fact,
by the very type of people in old Russia who most closely correspond to
the Negroes in America.
The exploitation of workers by owners
has become the greatest of all sins; and, as to this sin. Americans are
the greatest among all the sinners of the whole world. The Negro is the
Lamb of God who will eave America from this body and soul destroying sin,
exploitation. This sin is the root of all sins and far more destructive
of human happiness than any other you can think of, not excepting even
the enormous gins of adultery and murder.
This is why I am insisting more and
more as I grow older (and I trust wiser) that a communist revolution must
save the world; that there is no other name given under heaven whereby
it can be saved, and that in every country the christ to whom we must look
for this sal vation by the overthrow of capitalism is the humblest strata
of workers. Certainly we can expect nothing from any strata of the owning
class, nor much, if anything, from the aristocracy of the working class.
So of late I have been saying with
increasing frequency and emphasis that in America the Negro is the future
bolshevik christ, the revolutionary christ, to whom we must look for salvation
from our besetting and ruinous national sin of exploitation.
Yes, the Russian revolution was started
by the most lowly among the exploited workers. These deeply wronged humble
workers knew what they wanted, and they saw things so clearly that, in
spite of their terrific handicaps, they outwitted the statesmanship and
defeated the invading armies of the whole capitalist world.
They did this eleven. years ago when
they were extremely weak. They are much stronger now, and are literally
growing more so every day in every way; and, therefore, I warn the capitalist
nations that if they try it again a much worse defeat is an inevitability.
None among these nations, not even
America, has fully recovered from the world capitalist war. All including
America would go down never to rise again in the workers' world war, if
the owners start it as they are hankering and preparing to do. The war
which will end war (because it will end exploiting capitalism) will be
on in the day that Soviet Russia is attacked.
The Russian workers saw things so clearly
because they knew what extreme exploitation was. When people told them
how lucky they were to have the czar to rule them, and to have such a lovely
lot of dukes and bishops to take care of, they were not fooled a bit.
They were not even fooled by Christian
socialists, religious reformers, nice people who said to them: We sympathize
deeply with your distress for we know it is hard to have other people riding
on your backs. But do not be impatient and we will put some cushions under
the saddles so you will not feel their weight quite so much. But of course
you understand that we can relieve you only a little until you wade across
Jordan with us and set us down in the promised land, when and where at
last we can allow you some rest, because we shall have wings there and
fly to most places instead of being carried.
No, these workers of old Russia were
not fooled. They knew that they could depend upon nobody but the exploited
workers themselves to do away with exploitation. And ever since they succeeded,
wherever they have looked across their own borders to extend greetings
to the comrades of other lands, they have known instinctively just who
their comrade: were: the exploited, of course, especially those who have
been exploited so ruthlessly that they know most of what exploitation is.
That is why the communists of Soviet
Russia greet the American Negro as they do. His skin is a badge of exploitation
and that, to the communist, is a badge of comradeship. Wherever a group
of workers want to get rid of exploitation, communists everywhere know
that they are comrades.
Those workers of Soviet Russia are
no nicer or more full of good intentions than. southern bishops. It is
just simply that they have a different point of view. That is all. They
have the twentieth century point of view. They are seeing things in terms
of scientific facts, not of theological prejudices as the bishops do.
They do not know anything at all about
the hell below the earth and heaven above, of which the bishops have so
much to say. They do not know anything about the God and devil of the bishops----whether,
if they exist, they are black or white or yellow or pink. They do not even
know or care when they see a man, whether he has colored blood in his veins
or not; but they do know that he is a man; and, if he is exploited and
tired of being exploited by his fellow man, they do know that he is a comrade.
That is why I expect millions of American
Negroes to become communists. That is why I expect the workers revolution
in America to be led by Negroes. Not because they are better or worse than
the white workers, not because they are superior or inferior, but because
they have been in a better position to know what exploitation is.
After all, there is no other way out.
There is and can be no solution of the race question which does not include
a solution of the class question. For if the race problem were not mixed
up with the opportunities for exploitation, it would have been settled
long ago.
Granted that some provincial white
folks just naturally shrink from contact with the Negro, that in itself
does not constitute a serious social problem today. For they easily get
over that; and, if they did not, their children would. All it requires
is a little experience in meeting those who seem alien to us and they no
longer seem alien.
But once let us see a chance to exploit
them, and the whole situation changes. Immediately, then, we will rationalize
this opportunity into a religious belief. We will think up reasons for
exploiting them. The bishops will even develop the notion that God put
them here for that very purpose. And if there is anything in the Bible
or in our accepted religious dogmas which seems to contradict such an absurd
idea the bishops will reinterpret the dogmas so that we may go on exploiting.
You see how useful the obliging bishops are to the bankers. No wonder they
have had such good salaries. But the bolsheviks will have no use for them.
This is why the bishops and bankers do not encourage bolshevism.
It is up to the exploited in America
to do the thinking and acting and it is up to the Negroes who have been
most exploited to do the most thinking and acting. That is why I hail the
Negroes as, not merely our equals, but our coming leaders.
I greatly fear I may have left the
impression that I do not believe with the other bishops in God. Jehovah,
sitting on the great white throne of the executive mansion in the capitol
of the whole earth the New Jerusalem, the great city of the celestial Paradise,
built wholly of precious stones and gold.
This would be a very wrong impression.
Of course I do not believe one word of it literally; and, of course. no
other bishop does. The bishops just try to think they do. The only difference
between them and me is that I have stopped trying. They will, too.
All the Gods are dear. I believe in
them wholeheartedly and I love them, especially Jesus, even as I believe
wholeheartedly in Santa Claus and love him; and yet like Santa Claus, the
gods are fictions, not realities. But the Christian Gods, Jehovah and Jesus
and Holy Spirit, have as fictions become for me glorious symbols of great
realities.
The true sons and daughters of this
age of science and freedom cannot any longer believe in the triune God
of the age of tradition and authority as a conscious, personal reality,
but they may always believe in him as an unconscious, impersonal reality
who symbolizes all reality, whether conscious or personal, or not.
It is with the Gods as with Santa Claus.
No adult believes in him as a reality, but all believe in him as the symbol
of two great realities~the love of parents for their children and the love
of the old for the young.
No educated person can believe in the
Christian Trinity as a reality, but all may believe in its three divine
persons as symbols; Jehovah symbolizes the universe. Jesus symbolizes humanity.
The Holy Spirit symbolizes civilization.
Not only does Jesus symbolize humanity
as a whole but especially that part of it which is despised and rejected
everywhere and is suffering on the cross of gold for our sins, but will
rise again to become our redeemer. I can say then in all reverence and
sincerity of the colored races, behold the Lamb of God who is to take away
the sin of the world, the sin of the exploitation of the workers by the
owners. In America the Negro is preeminently this Lamb of God.
If I believed that the Lamb of God,
Jesus, was an historical personage, and if I believed the doctrine of reincarnation,
I would believe that Tolstoi was Jesus reincarnated.
And, if I believed in the existence
of a conscious, personal God and that Jesus was his divine son, incarnated
to the end that he might shed his blood for the redemption of fallen man
from an eternity of woe in a hell under the earth to everlasting bliss
in a heaven above the earth, I would believe that God, seeing the failure
of his first plan of salvation, concluded to try a second, that of having
his son born in a palace instead of in a stable and of having him save
the world by writing such great books as Tolstoi wrote instead of by shedding
such precious blood as Jesus shed
Yet I would believe that the two plans
for the salvation of man have this in common: the divine son in the cases
of both Jesus and Tolstoi is identified with the humblest and most exploited
part of the working class.
Conceding for a minute that there is
a god who sees things (a very great concession) it is evident from this
identification of Jesus and Tolstoy with the workers that God sees it to
be useless for him to try , even though he has divine power, to save the
world from the top down by princes and priests, and therefore if it is
saved at all it must be from below up by peasants and peons.
The world will be saved not be saved
by the mighty imperial countries, the United States, England, France and
Germany, but by the weak colonial countries, china, India. Africa and South
America.
After Jesus, God saw, what I wish our
militants could see, that the world can not be saved by blood. After Tolstoi,
God saw, what I wish that our pacifists could see, that the world can not
be saved by reformation.
So, conceding again, for the moment.
that there is a God, Jehovah, who figures out human problems, he figured
out a third plan of salvation which involved the reincarnation of his son
in a Marxian revolutionist, and Lenin, the bolshevik, became the successor
of Jesus and Tolstoi. This bolshevik fulfilled the will of his divine father
by setting on foot a world revolutionary movement and starting it off in
the right direction, towards scattering the proud in the imagination of
their hearts, putting down the mighty from their seats and exalting the
humble and meek, filling the hungry with good things and sending the rich
empty away.
Through this bolshevik, Lenin, God
is now making up for the time he lost in devising the other plans of saving
the world and in trying them out through the Christians, Jesus and Tolstoy,
both failures.
I am frequently asked whether I still
hold to the Jim Crowism which is advocated in my book, The Crucial Race
Question. I, here and now, once for all, give my answer to that vexed question,
and I hereby withdraw everything in that book which is contrary to anything
in this lecture. I would not be a communist if I did not utterly reject
the premise that the colored races are by God's will and decree inferior
to the white race and that, therefore, it has a divine right to rule and
exploit them, a premise upon which the Jim Crowism of the book is based.
When, in that book, I formulated and
recommended what was known as the Arkansas plan for the creation by the
Protestant Episcopal Church of an Afro-American episcopate and church,
I believed that the races of men owed their existence to the providence
of a conscious, personal God, not to the evolution of an unconscious, impersonal
nature. Consequently I held that interracial marriages were so many sins
against both God and man. Moreover I thought and taught that there were
degrees of this sin. It would be very sinful for
yellow and black men and women to marry,
but even more so for white people to marry either yellow or black.
My idea. on this subject were changed
by reading Darwin and Marx and thinking through their representations.
Darwinism has established the fact
that all humanity is one great family and that the differences between
its members as to color is due to geographical and climatic changes and
influences.
Marxism has established the fact that
the distinctions by which the human family is divided into two classes
(the owning class and the working slave class) are of an economic rather
than a racial character.
We shall never have a better world
until we have a classless, cooperative one, without racial and economic
distinctions, and this world (I am always saying) we shall never have until
we banish the orthodox gods from the skies and the exploiting capitalists
from the earth. America is demonstrating the fact that capitalism cannot
give us a classless, cooperative world, and Soviet Russia is demonstrating
the fact that communism can.
The American communist party is our
national Section of international communism. This Marxian communism is
the greatest movement which has ever been set on foot for the good of the
world as a whole, infinitely greater than Jesuine Christianism.
Capitalism exploits the workers of
the colored races even more than it does the workers of the white race.
Let every worker of every race stand by his class, the working class. The
communist party exists to promote the interests of the working class. The
republican and democratic parties exist to promote the interests of the
owning class.
The orthodox bishops are great people.
They know lots about a fictitious God and about a fictitious, unpardonable
sin against him, and about a fictitious, impossible hell below the earth
and heaven above the earth but they know nothing about the actual, unpardonable
sin and heaven and hell, else they would tell you that the worker who votes
either the republican or democratic ticket commits the unpardonable sin
of voting to keep his class in slavery and poverty; and, worse, he commits
the unpardonable sin of helping to keep ~he hell of capitalism with its
slavery, poverty and war on earth, and of doing nothing to bring the heaven
of communism with its freedom, plenty and peace upon it.
Negroes of America, unite with the
workers, not only of your race but of all races. The united workers of
America will have nothing to lose but their chains and a great country
to gain. You cannot unite by yourselves alone outside the Communist Party
of the United States.
**Science has established the fact that originally
the whole human family was colored; and, so, every representative of its
white branch has colored blood in him. I have. Every bishop has.-W. M.
B.
|