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"12 Things White People Must Stop Doing To The Negro" by Nannie H. Burroughs
- STOP penalizing Negroes for not being white. Color is not character. It is only a badge of distinction.
- STOP making social excursions into the Negro race, depositing white offspring and then crying out against social equality.
-STOP fighting integration in public education in the daytime, and practicing social equality anytime they want to.
- STOP teaching basic untruths about race.
- STOP trying to disprove the biblical and scientific fact that “God hath made of one blood all races of men to dwell on the face of the earth”.
The New Testament re‐affirms this fact when Jesus declared, “One is your Master, even Christ; and all ye are brethren”. All scientists are agreed that biologically, sociologically, physiologically, ethnologically, all races are the same. Why this difference of color? This superficial difference was made by time, climate, soil, food, and environment. Men scattered and lived in different parts of the earth, and the five factors listed above accomplished incidental, pigmentary, difference on races.
- STOP misinterpreting Genesis 9:19‐27. The Bible does not say that God cursed Ham. It says that “Noah cursed his son, Ham”. God did not even appear on the scene while Noah was drunk. Noah did the same kind of “running off at the mouth” that drunks usually do. Noah’s cursing and assigning his son to everlasting servitude was about as effective as would be the cursing and assignment to servitude, of any son by any father, today. God has never cursed any race. Man must STOP cursing and destroying any race under the pretext that he is only helping God carry out His plan and purpose.
On this point God speaks in Galatians 6:7 without equivocation – “Be not deceived … whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he reap”. Races and nations always reap, in various ways, the ungodly things that they sow.
-STOP making unjust discriminatory laws, molding social sentiment against respect for human personality, building up customs, continuing outmoded attitudes in an effort to prove that the Negro is inferior. In any race, only those are inferior who do inferior things.
- STOP putting all kinds of barriers in the way of the progress of the Negro race, and then declaring that America’s high purpose is to build “one nation indivisible, with LIBERTY and JUSTICE for ALL”.
- STOP making laws to protect the legal and civil rights of all citizens and when the rights of the Negro are involved, allow white citizens to put themselves above the law and not only deny Negroes their legal rights but persecute and lynch them. Such acts express vicious race prejudice. Out of such acts and attitudes America can never build a Christian democracy.
- STOP using Negroes as political mud sills and stepping stones, to get whites in power, politically, and then deny Negroes full citizenship rights and equal opportunities, through education and employment, to secure their own rightful place in the labor world and enjoy full citizenship rights, responsibilities, rewards and privileges.
-STOP teaching race prejudice to children in order to perpetuate contempt for people who are not white and thus make segregation a permanent institution in a democracy.
- STOP calling this land “Christian” and the government thereof a democracy. The fact is brotherhood and fellowship are not the practice in many American churches. In the majority of them, Negroes are only welcome or tolerated on specially arranged occasions, and this arrangement is not for long nor frequent. Most white Christian churches and organizations export their religion through missionaries. They do keep a spurious brand for home consumption. Americanism and the attitudes of most whites are intended to “keep the Negro in his place” – give him an inferior complex and do injury to his mind, spirit and soul, and thus make him a second class citizen.
The only hope and the redeeming factor in race relations in America is that there is and always has been an appreciable number of whites – and thank God, the number is increasing, in the North and in the South, who have been just, kind and generous. Many white people are embarrassed, hurt and often articulate in expressing themselves and are active against injustice. But compared with the total population that is active and articulate against justice to the Negro, this fair minded number is small.
America could practice the teachings of Jesus Christ in human relations and rotherhood; justice and goodwill could be applied in education, labor, civil rights and religion without making the white race any blacker or the black race any whiter.
It is not at all necessary to further MIX UP and MESS UP the two races in order to clean up the results of the kind of ungodly social mixing and grave injustice that have been going on for over three hundred years.
America should decide, once and for all, to give the Negro his full citizenship rights. Those whites, who make social excursions into the Negro race, should stop it and “shinny on their own side” forever.
Booker T. Washington, the wisest man of his generation would put it this way, “the races can be one as the hand, and as separate as the fingers thereon”. Write this one fact on the fly leaf of your Bible, ‐‐ this private mixing and then a public protest against mixing, is a stench in the nostrils of a just God.
With a political and social justice, as the eternal basis, two races working together, could cooperate in building the greatest Christian Democracy the world has ever seen.
By Miss Nannie H. Burroughs Lincoln Heights Washington 19, D.C.
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