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26. Whose Problem Is This?
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26 Whose Problem Is This? In this 1894 essay for the AME Church Review, Fortune outlines the racial situation of the day. He does not see the problem as being substantially different from those that faced the country before the Civil War. These issues, argues Fortune, are “as much a menace to national liberty and the preservation of the union of the states as was the problem of slavery.” He discusses five problems—disfranchisement , mob and lynch law, miscegenation laws, separate coach legislation, and the convict lease program. These issues, according to Fortune, are affecting the “honor and credit” of the nation, and the country should address them. In the end, however, although Fortune sees the problem as an issue the government and the country as a whole need to address, he also deems it necessary for the race to organize and support its organizations that are employed in the act of educating the nation. Such a comment is a reference to Fortune’s Afro-American League, which had collapsed the previous year on the national level. Whose Problem Is This? —AME Church Review 11, no. 2 (1894): 253–61 Revolutions, like time, it has been said, never go backwards. However, this may be, if the revolution begun by Benjamin Lundy1 and William Lloyd Garrison,2 and culminating at Appomattox Court House, has not gone backward since 1876, in all respects, it is undeniable that it has done so as to some of its phases. There is nothing truer than that in all those matters affecting the life, liberty and citizen rights of Afro-Americans with which they were clothed by the three war amendments to the Federal Constitution, we have steadily lost ground in the past two decades in the Southern States where the large mass of the race reside, and must continue to reside for a number of years to come, and perhaps for all time. If we shall continue to lose ground in those States during the next two decades as we have done in the past two, in the vital matters of civil and political rights, our condition will be more hopeless and desperate than it was in 1856, when Chief Justice Taney3 declared “that it has been held to be good law and precedent that a black man has no rights which a white man is bound to respect.” It is not necessary to be an alarmist, to take refuge in an ultra-pessimism, to reach such a conclusion, because all existing facts, based upon existing conditions, plainly and logically point to such an unforbidding ultimation. Regarded from this point of view, it is vital to the discussion to ascertain whose problem is this, ours or the Nation’s, as upon the answer depends the solution of the issues involved for or against us. Mr. Frederick Doug lass4 remarked some time ago that there is no “Negro problem” but that the problem to which he is related is the Nation’s problem. Technically, this definition is sound, although at the time it was enunciated I did not so regard it. True it is that all of our effort since the war, has been based upon the presumption that there is a “Negro problem” and that such relation as the Nation at large bore to it, was incidental rather than fundamental; and, contending upon this line, we have encountered defeat and mortification at every step of the way. The Nation has not heeded when we protested, when we cried out against injustice and outrage, because, taking our cue from the enemy, we have labored with all our resources to convince the Nation at large that its interest in the matter was purely sentimental. We are a busy people; and we seldom trouble ourselves about the misfortunes of others. We become interested only, and often reluctantly, when it is clearly demonstrated that the misfortunes of others affect us in some way. It was because of this that Mr. James G. Blaine5 anathematized the suffrage villainies of the Southern States, because those suffrage villainies had led to his defeat for the Presidency in 1884. He did not open his mouth upon those suffrage villainies until they had been successfully employed (as they had been employed in other days against Henry Clay,6 Daniel Webster7 and Stephen A. Douglas8) to destroy forever the most cherished political dream of his life. It was a selfish lamentation, but selfishness, in the main, is the mainspring of human aspiration and conduct among...