University of Virginia Library

Spirit of Division

5. There is in nature a divisive spirit. It is this spirit in nature which leads to her uniform tendency toward variability. But some races have far more divisive tendencies than others. At present the Negroes are characterized by a divisive spirit. The white people of the United States have 261 members for each church, and the colored people have 122 for each church. Prof. Henry Fairfield Osborn says: "The Anglo Saxon branch. of the Nordic race is again showing itself to be that upon which the nation must chiefly depend for leadership, for courage, for loyalty, for unity and harmony of action, for leadership, for self-sacrifice and devotion to an ideal."

The Baptist denomination occupies about the same relative position among the white and the colored people of the South. The minds of nine thousand colored people of Greenville, Mississippi, call for some twenty-two or twenty-three Baptist Churches in which to express

themselves. The minds of six thousand white people call for one Baptist Church. In Texarkana, Texas and Arkansas, there are fourteen Negro Baptist Churches and five white Baptist churches, with the Negro population of the two cities about one-fourth. of that of the white people. In Hot Springs, Arkansas, there are five white Baptist churches for the twenty-one thousand white population, and five Negro Baptist churches for a Negro population of four thousand. Throughout the South there is one Methodist denomination among the white people and three strong Methodist denominations among the colored people.

Is there anything in the climate of Africa which imparts the impulse to divide? The African ant is destructive, eating the wood of tree. Mr. Wm. T. Hornaday, in the book, The Minds and Manners of Wild Animals, says: "Our present ( 1921 ) male African elephant, Kartoum, is not so hostile toward people, but his insatiable desire is to break and to smash all of his environment that can be bent or broken. His ingenuity in finding ways to damage doors and gates, and to bend or to break steel beams, is amazing. His greatest feat consisted in breaking squarely in two, by pushing with his head, a 90 pound steel railroad iron used as the top bar of his fence. He knows the mechanism of the latch of the ponderous steel door between his two box stalls, and nothing but a small pin that only human fingers can manipulate suffices to thwart his efforts to control the latch. Kartoum has gone over every inch of surface of his two apartments, his doors, gates and fences, to find something that he can break or damage. The steel linings of his apartment walls, originally five feet high, we have been compelled to extend upward to a height

of nine feet, to save the brick walls from being battered and disfigured. He has searched his steel fences throughout, in order to find their weakest points, and concentrate his attacks upon them. If the sharp pointed iron spikes three inches long that are set all over his doors are perfectly solid, he respects them, but if one is the least bit loose in its socket, he works at it until he finally breaks it off."

Regardless as to whether Africa does or does not impart the impulse of division we have ample evidence that-this is an attitude which the colored people of the United States should watch with the utmost care.