0013: Australia in 1884: Ngarra Burra Ferra

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PREVIOUSLY on 1884 

Barmah Lake, Victoria, Australia

Sunday 3 August 1884

Rowing up the Murray river, separating Victoria from New South Wales, in a native canoe, Thomas Shadrach James passes several paddle boats carrying wool and other agricultural produce from the outback which will be unloaded at Echuca wharf and transported by land to Melbourne. The 24-years-old Tamil Mauritian started teaching Aborigines children at Maloga Mission three years ago, but this is the first time he traveled up the river. 

After arriving at the shore of the Barmah Lake, his companion William Cooper – a 23-years-old half-European half-Aborigines of the Yorta Yorta Nation – suggested that they make a simple ‘mia-mia’ – a temporary shelter. They then goes out to shoot some rabbits before the short mid-winter day ends.

While Thomas skins the preys, William makes fire to cook them under the winter night sky. The whole colony seems far away – the chaotic life at the mission which has become a small village, the busy town of Echuca, and furthest away Melbourne, Victoria’s capital.

As they finally sit down to eat, William looks across to the other shore of the lake and slowly tears come to his eyes. Thomas waits for him to tell why they came out so far in the bush, when he was only expecting a verbal reply to his question. 

It’s certainly not the question of William’s English. Among all the Australian natives that Thomas has met, he speaks in the best English. Daniel Matthews, who founded the mission, told him that from knowing nothing of the language 13-year-old William mastered the English alphabets in three days and became fluent in no time.

Aboriginal Australian women and children, Maloga.

William was born by the banks of the Murray River in 1860. His mother, Kitty, was a traditional Wollithiga woman who made first contact with white settlers and lives in the Moira Forest. Their Moitheriban group, are known as the “reed people” by neighboring tribes. Kitty and her children speak a dialect of Yorta Yorta. William’s father, with whom he has no contact, was a white man called James Cooper. 

Finally, William utters, “My mother told me about this place some years ago. She was just a girl when white men first came to Yorta Yorta land. You must have heard of Edward Curr?”

Thomas: Yes, the Father of Separation who split Victoria from New South Wales, right? His son, E.M. Curr, also published a book Recollections of Squatting in Victoria last year.

William: I wonder if he mentioned anything about the crime which he committed here 41 years ago. 

Thomas: I don’t recall reading that. What happened?

William wipes his tears and continues: In 1843, some Yorta Yorta men stole sheep from their farm out of hunger. the younger Curr, then reported to Henry Dana, the chief of the Native Police that large numbers of Aborigines had assembled on the south bank of the Murray River and claimed that they were "daily threatening the lives of his men and attempting to take the sheep". 

So they hatched a plan. Curr with a bullock dray and sheep acted as a decoy and enticed many of our people from their reed-bed shelter. The white officers then charged from their hiding place and seized Chief Warry whom Curr pointed out. They rounded up the rest like sheep, started firing and shot some of them in the river. At least 20 men, one woman, five children were shot and killed. My mother was among the few who survived. 

Thomas: … How atrocious.

William Oswald Hodgkinson's painting 'Bulla, Queensland, 1861' shows armed fighting.
(Credit: National Library of Australia)

William: There were many more of us before they came and took our lands, desecrate our sacred places and destroyed our livelihood. Some of us adapt by becoming slaves and servants in their farms, others hide away from them in the bush trying to survive by the old ways. 

Thomas: They said this whole continent is Terra Nullius – no man’s Land – because they don’t see natives as humans.

William: But taking our land is not all they want. What they really want is to eliminate us. They call us subhuman and vermin. After Sunday service, some would go out on “black hunts” or “black shoots” and shoot as many men, women and children as possible. They took pleasure in killing us for fun as though we were kangaroos. 

Thomas: I am very sorry for these horrific acts by fellow Christians who laid their hands on native people.

William: You are not responsible for what white people do. You are not white. I believe that your people have also suffered at the hands of white people. Even Daniel isn’t responsible. Even though he’s white, he’s different. He built the Mission to protect us from them. I remember the first day I met him ten years ago. He came to pick up my family, after taking a great risk to rescue my sister Lizzie and her baby from the white men who chained her and other native women as sex slaves. I don’t even know how to repay him.

Thomas: You don’t have to. As he always says, he does it to pay for his father’s sins. You know the story how his father used to be a slave trader? 

William: Yes, I know that his father was a sea captain who shipped enslaved people from Africa to the West Indies.

Thomas: One day when Captain John Matthews was on a voyage, he saw an apparition of a man pointing on the map in the chart house of the ship. With curiosity, he altered the course to that specific coordinates and found a man he saw in the chart-house adrift at sea in a raft. After being rescued, the man said he had prayed to God all night for an intervention. The captain marveled at the story and after soul-searching became converted. He threw the rum overboard, gave up slave trading and moved to Australia. 

William: When I learned about the plight of the Africans who are enslaved and dispossessed of everything just like us, I cried. While working as coachman for Sir O’ Shanassy in Melbourne, I also heard him speak about Pacific Islanders blalckbirded away from their islands into slavery in Queensland’s sugar plantations. It broke my heart. Why do white men do this? They claim the whole Earth as their own. Around the time Sir O’ Shanassy passed away last year, I heard politicians’ uproar over European and American invasions of “their” backyard. What an irony. The British Empire has taken Australia, Tasmania, New Zealand, Fiji and what not.

Thomas: Yes, they panicked that Germany was going to occupy the Eastern part of New Guinea, France going to take Vanuatu, and they were angry that the Colonial Office in London was doing nothing to stop it. So Queensland unilaterally claimed annexation of the part of New Guinea unoccupied by the Netherlands themselves, but it was later rejected, to their dismay, by London.

William: And precisely because of that, the Australasian colonies will unite and become a union. More bad news for natives like us. 

After a massacre, those Aboriginal people who were not killed were often enslaved, 
similar to these men photographed near Wyndham, WA.(Credit: State Library of Victoria)

Thomas: Never give up. I’m sure God is on your side. You are all an inspiration. When I hear the twenty-five of you singing in Melbourne three and a half years ago, it was like God spoke to me. That’s why I volunteered to help Daniel at the mission without thinking of money or anything. 

William: We are all grateful for that. Although I was not at Maloga at that time, we could not have written the petition to Lord Loftus without your help. 

Thomas: It was not me or Daniel. It all came out from the hearts of Moira and Ulupna peoples. I can still remember parts of it now... That all the land within our tribal boundaries has been taken possession of by the government and white settlers; our hunting grounds are used for sheep pasturage and the game reduced and, in many places, exterminated, rendering our means of subsistence extremely precarious, and often reducing us and our wives and children to beggary….

William continues: We, the men of our several tribes, are desirous of honestly maintaining our young and infirm, who are in many cases the subject of extreme want and semi-starvation, and we believe we could, in a few years support ourselves by our own industry, were a sufficient area of land granted to us to cultivate and raise stock. We have been under training for some years and feel that our old mode of life is not in keeping with the instructions we have received, and we are earnestly desirous of settling down to more orderly habits of industry, that we may form homes for our families…

Thomas sighs: Unfortunately, the request was not granted. But at least the government began to take their responsibility and formed the Aborigines Protection Board as well as setting aside reserves at Cummera. Things are looking up. 

William: But it’s far from justice. Some of the petitioners still believe that it was a gift to them from Queen Victoria! We will have to do something again to make our points across.  In three years, it will be the queen’s Golden Jubilee and soon after that, the centenary of the New South Wales settlement. 

Thomas: There’s also a biblical teaching that in every 50th or jubilee year, property is returned to its original owners even if it had been sold in the meantime.

William: All the better. It will be a time to remind them how the last one hundred years has been apocalypse for us. All the Killing Times that happened must not be forgotten. We must have a fitting memorial.

William Cooper in later years

Thomas: What would you ask for?

William: That those among us who want it should be granted sections of land in fee simple or at a small nominal rental annual, with the option of purchase at reasonable prices for us under the circumstances. It should always be born in mind that we were the former occupiers of the land. This would enable us to earn our own livelihood, and thus partially relieve the State from the burden of our maintenance.

Thomas: That’s not much at all to ask for. Even poor rural whites would want the same thing, especially the Irish. If there were justice in treatment and distribution of land, there would not have been the Eureka Rebellion, and there would not be a Ned Kelly for them to hunt down and killed four years ago.

William: He was treated badly for stealing animals. But at least, they didn’t wipe out all his people.

Thomas: In many ways, the Ireland has also been occupied by the English like Australia. If the Irish were black, the English might have wiped them out too. Not that starving them in the Great Famine was much better.

William: We natives have had our whole world taken from us, yet we are not even demanding to be given back everything. All of us can learn to share this immense land with respect for each other’s way of life. And there would be less trouble for everyone. But now we, the original owners of the land, are entirely dispossessed of it by those who call themselves Christians.

Thomas Shadrach James in later years

Thomas: Frankly I am surprised that natives turn to Christianity at all. That’s why I asked you today how you decided to convert. But now I think I know the answer.  

William: I am the last among my family to convert. With all the things I learned during the time I traveled the country with Sir O’ Shanassy about Christian cruelties on natives, I couldn’t have brought myself to it. 

Thomas: What changed?

William: Six months ago, I woke up one night with music in my head. It came to me in my dream. I heard music that brought people with the same skin color from very far away. And they sang of a people who had been had been enslaved and taken from their homes. Then next morning at the service, when Daniel read from Exodus about Jews who were also dispossessed and enslaved by the pharaoh, I suddenly had an epiphany that this was where I was supposed to be. 

Thomas: I remember that. Exodus 15:4. “Pharaoh’s chariots and his army, he has hurled into the sea.

The best of Pharaoh’s officers are drowned in the Red Sea..” 

The University of Newcastle-led project has now mapped
more than 300 massacre sites around Australia.

William: White men have broken our faith. They have desecrated our holy places, our anchors in the world, and we have nothing left to hold on to. But with God, I feel connected with the world again. Never mind those men do not deserve to call themselves Christians. I have found Christ and his message of love and hope. I will follow Jesus and appeal to them as fellow human being. So after the service, I went to Daniel and said, “I must give my heart to the Lord”

Thomas: I can relate to that too. I don’t know where I belong or who my people are, really. My distant father is from Madras. My late mother was from Ceylon. I was born in Mauritius, and now I am in Australia.

William: You now belong with us. This is your land too. I welcome you as my brother. God has brought you to us.

William holds out his hand which Thomas holds firmly, feeling to finally belong somewhere.

Thomas: And God brought you all to me as singing angels. Praise the Lord.

William: Praise the Lord.

The two men – bonded as brothers – cross their heart, looking up to the Southern Cross high in the sky.

The Southern Cross

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Thomas Shadrach James found his home among the Yorta Yorta people, and soon married William’s sister, Ada. He and his son Shadrach James would continue to teach and influence generations of Aboriginal Australian activists. 

A few years later, the Frisk Jubilee Singers – an African American a cappella choir from Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee – came to sing at the Maloga Mission.  

One song in particular deeply captured the hearts of the Aborigines at the mission so much that they would write, “"I shall never forget the effect of our singing there. The Aborigines were at first very shy of us, but when they heard us sing, they went into a state I can only describe as one of almost ecstatic delight… The music of the plantation stirred their souls as no other music could have done… They seem to recognize us as brethren from a far distant tribe. They followed our carriages for miles along the road, and waved adieus from fences, trees, and rising grounds in a way which showed that were we ever able to return there we would be welcomed with a welcome white men seldom receive."

It was “Turn back Pharaoh’s Army” – the story of Moses leading Jews out of Egypt. This song of deliverance and hope would be notated by Thomas James, translated into Yorta Yorta language and passed down the generations, now known as Ngarra Berra Ferra. 

Years later, William Cooper would found the Australian Aboriginal League, and on 6 December 1938 – weeks after Hitler’s Kristallnacht operation – lead a delegation of to the German Consulate in Melbourne to deliver a petition which condemned the "cruel persecution of the Jewish people by the Nazi government of Germany. 

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Womeriga Moses nyinin wala 

When Moses struck water 

Wala yapunei yeiputj 

Water came together 

Nowra bura fera yumina yala 

Turn back Pharaoh’s army Alleluia 

 

Nowra bura fera yumina yala 

Turn back Pharaoh’s army Alleluia 

Nowra bura fera yumina yala 

Turn back Pharaoh’s army Alleluia 

Nowra bura fera yumina 

Turn back Pharaoh’s army  

bura fera yumina 

Pharaoh’s army 

bura fera yumina yala yala 

Pharaoh’s army Alleluia 

 

Yunduk bekuk Jesu 

We’re going to sing to Jesus 

Browal bokuna yumina 

to bring some valiant soldiers’ 

Nowra bura fera yumina yala 

Turn back Pharaoh’s army Alleluia 

 

Nowra bura fera yumna yala 

Turn back Pharaoh’s army Alleluia 

Nowra bura fera yumna yala 

Turn back Pharaoh’s army Alleluia 

Nowra bura fera yumna 

Turn back Pharaoh’s army  

bura fera yumna 

Pharaoh’s army 

bura fera yumna yala yala 

Pharaoh’s army Alleluia 

 

Nowra bura fera yumna yala 

Turn back Pharaoh’s army Alleluia 

Nowra bura fera yumna yala 

Turn back Pharaoh’s army Alleluia 

Nowra bura fera yumna 

Turn back Pharaoh’s army  

bura fera yumna 

Pharaoh’s army 

bura fera yumna yala yala 

Pharaoh’s army Alleluia

Next Installment will be online on August 30 or slightly later.

0004 US race relations in 1884: Waging perpetual war

PREVIOUSLY on 1884 

Memphis, Tennessee. Mid-August 1884.

Ida B. Wells’ heart races upon seeing on the envelope a familiar handwriting. It’s a letter from the great Frederick Douglass with whom she has been corresponding regarding an unpleasant incident she experienced on a Chesapeake & Ohio train. On May 4, after she refused to give up her seat in the first-class lady’s car, the train conductor and two men dragged her to the crowded smoking car which also served as segregated car for colored people. 

Ida B. Wells circa 1893

Ida is surprised that the esteemed orator and abolitionist leader finds the time to respond to all her inquiries, despite his arduous travelling schedule on lecture tours. Since escaping from slavery in 1838 when he was twenty, he’s become the most well-known abolitionist in America and abroad. However, he has lately come under attack for continuing to back the Republican Party despite their increasingly pro-rich position throughout the Great Railroad Strike and the dirty Compromise of 1877 which, among other things, pulled federal troops out of the South. 

But given the Democrat Party’s white-supremacist policies and practices, his support for the Republican Party is welcomed by seven millions of blacks in Southern states where Jim Crow laws renewed their status as oppressed second-class citizens terrorized into fearful silence from lynching, murders, arson and threats by white supremacists even after the Klu Klux Klan was suppressed in 1871. Ultimately, the dirty politics of the day hurt both blacks and poor whites. The same federal troops that had protected blacks from violence were pulled out and sent to suppress the Great Strike of 1877 a few months later. 

With slightly trembling hands, Ida opens the envelope and finds a letter and a booklet. The letter reads …

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Battle Creek, Michigan. 

Aug 1, 1884

Dear Miss Wells,

Thank you for your latest letter of July 5th which I received with gratitude. It was very kind of you to remind me with appreciation of my speech What to the Slave is the Fourth of July? from many years ago. While recounting it, I was struck by how much and how little things have changed during the two decades after the Emancipation Proclamation and the Civil War.

Later today, I will humbly be giving another speech here in Battle Creek to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the Emancipation in the British West Indies. As you are aware, the abolition movement in America, like many other institutions of this country, was largely derived from England. Even the doctrine of immediate emancipation as against gradualism, is of English, not American origin. It was expounded and enforced by Elizabeth Heyrick and adopted by all the earnest abolitionists in England.

I happily remember my first lecture tour in the British Isles in 1845-7, occasioned by the threats made against my life after the publication of Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass. During the tour, I had the opportunity to visit Ireland at the outbreak of the Great Famine which ultimately killed a million and sent another million starving Irish men, women and children to our shore. 

Great Irish Famine 1845-9

Exchanges with Irish leader "The Liberator" Daniel O'Connell opened my eyes to see that poverty and inequality are not natural states, but conditions inflicted by one group of man on another. Such was clearly shown by how the Corn Law and aristocratic landlord turned a natural blight into a catastrophic famine. It is no surprise that they are now reaping the consequences with the Land War, which may erupt into a civil war someday.

For wherever men oppress their fellows, wherever they enslave them, they will endeavor to find the needed apology for such enslavement and oppression in the character of the people oppressed and enslaved. When we wanted, a few years ago, a slice of Mexico, it was hinted that the Mexicans were an inferior race, that the old Castilian blood had become so weak that it would scarcely run down hill, and that Mexico needed the long, strong and beneficent arm of the Anglo-Saxon care extended over it. We said that it was necessary to its salvation, and a part of the "manifest destiny" of this Republic, to extend our arm over that dilapidated government. So, too, when Russia wanted to take possession of a part of the Ottoman Empire, the Turks were an "inferior race." So, too, when England wants to set the heel of her power more firmly in the quivering heart of old Ireland, the Celts are an "inferior race." So, too, the Negro, when he is to be robbed of any right which is justly his, is an "inferior man."

This is the reason why I oppose our wars of expansions such as the Mexican War, through which those deluded in America’s manifest destiny wish to enlarge slavery territory like the imperialist William Walker who would have us annex Cuba and much of Central America. 

Neither do I support, as President Lincoln did, sending freed blacks “back” to Africa – a continent they have never seen. Lincoln fought to save the Union at all costs, not – at least not at first – to emancipate enslaved people. Laying blame for the secession on enslaved people, he would have removed all black presence from American soil to prevent further conflict.  To him, I insisted that black people should rightfully remain in this land where we and our ancestors have toiled with blood, even if white people are unwilling to accept our equality or doubt our ability to ever achieve it. 

Having said that, although Lincoln shared the prejudices of his white fellow countrymen against blacks, it is hardly necessary to say that in his heart of hearts he loathed and hated slavery which he said was ‘the greatest wrong inflicted on any people.’

Another thing that I came to realize while in Ireland was the intersections of the Irish struggle against British rule with our own. Because of the global reach of British and French power, I can’t help wondering whether Lincoln was finally pushed to issue the Emancipation Proclamation – after the chastisements from abolitionists including myself proved ineffective –  in order to prevent Britain and France from recognizing, or, worse, arming the Confederacy? Whatever the reason, his Emancipation Proclamation as well as his agreement to enlist black soldiers to fight shoulder to shoulder with their white comrades did much to regain my respect for him. 

Going back even further, it was also in England that it was suggested to me that our Revolutionary War was in fact a counter-revolution against abolition. According to this particular English gentleman, Lord Mansfield’s decision of 1772 frightened the Southern colonies so much that they joined the North in taking up arms in order to shield the institution of slavery from the impending emancipation. It is not unlike when later Napoleon sent troops to suppress rebelling Haitians from enjoying the same Rights of Man as Frenchmen. However, I didn’t believe it then as I still don’t believe it now. 

Haitian Revolution

After all, I have faith that our Declaration of Independence and our Constitution contain Enlightenment ideals that extend equality and rights to black Americans. Regrettably that was how I came to a long disagreement with my former mentor Mr. Garrison who burned the constitution which he believed to be absolutely pro-slavery. 

But after the Supreme Court decision last year declared the Civil Rights Act of 1875 unconstitutional, I wonder if he was right. How is it justice when it’s decided that the Fourteenth Amendment protect blacks only from discrimination by states but not by individuals and corporations? At this rate, these corporations will one day have more rights than people of color like us, as, according to the newspapers, railroad barons are now arguing in court that their companies are protected by the amendment ‘persons’!

The strength and activities of the malign elements of the country against equal rights and equality before the law seem to increase in proportion to the increasing distance between that time and the time of the war. When the black man's arm was needed to defend the country; when the North and the South were in arms against each other and the country was in danger of dismemberment, his rights were well considered. 

That the reverse is now true, is a proof of the fading and defacing effect of time and the transient character of Republican gratitude. From the hour that the loyal North began to fraternize with the disloyal and slaveholding South; from the hour that they began to "shake hands over the bloody chasm", from that hour the cause of justice to the black man began to decline and lose its hold upon the public mind, and it has lost ground ever since. 

The future historian will turn to the year 1883 to find the most flagrant example of this national deterioration. Here he will find the Supreme Court of the nation reversing the action of the Government, defeating the manifest purpose of the Constitution, nullifying the Fourteenth Amendment, and placing itself on the side of prejudice, proscription, and persecution. 

Whatever this Supreme Court may have been in the past, or may by the Constitution have been intended to be, it has, since the days of the Dred Scott decision, been wholly under the influence of the slave power, and its decisions have been dictated by that power rather than by what seemed to be sound and established rules of legal interpretation. 

Although we had, in other days, seen this court bend and twist the law to the will and interest of the slave power, it was supposed that by the late war and the great fact that slavery was abolished, and the further fact that the members of the bench were now appointed by a Republican administration, the spirit as well as the body had been exorcised. Hence the decision in question came to the black man as a painful and bewildering surprise. It was a blow from an unsuspected quarter. 

For the moment the colored citizen felt as if the earth was opened beneath him. He was wounded in the house of his friends. He felt that this decision drove him from the doors of the great temple of American justice. The nation that he had served against its enemies had thus turned him over naked to those enemies. His trouble was without any immediate remedy. The decision must stand until the gates of death could prevail against it. 

As of now, I’m increasingly negative about taking up further government positions, but at the same time I’m greatly encouraged that you are pursuing a lawsuit against the train company. This case is very important for all black people, and it must be doubly so for you as a lady. The Supreme Court decision took away protection against discrimination from not only blacks but also women. I am confident that suffragists like Elizabeth Stanton, my long-time friends since the 1848 Seneca Falls Women’s Rights Convention and Susan B. Anthony will agree with my opinion regarding the decision. (Although we may have parted our ways over the Fifteenth Amendment, I wish her all the best in her renewed struggle for women’s suffrage since appearing before the House Judiciary Committee a few months ago.)

I hereby enclose a copy of the Proceedings of the Human Rights Mass Meeting of October 22, 1883 – one week after the decision – which also contains my full speech on the Supreme Court decision. I hope you will find useful the arguments therein. I look forward to hearing from you on the lawsuit.

With kind regards,

Frederick Douglass

Frederick Douglass after 1884 with his second wife Helen Pitts Douglass (sitting).
The woman standing is her sister Eva Pitts.

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The "This decision has humbled the nation" speech of October 22, 1883 speech reads: 

Friends and fellow citizens. I have only a few words to say to you this evening.... 

We have been, as a class, grievously wounded, wounded in the house of our friends, and this wound is too deep and too painful for ordinary and measured speech…

The cause which has brought us here tonight is neither common nor trivial. Few events in our national history have surpassed it in magnitude, importance and significance. It has swept over the land like a cyclone, leaving moral desolation in its track. This decision belongs with a class of judicial and legislative wrongs by which we have been oppressed. 

We feel it as we felt years ago the furious attempt to force the accursed system of slavery upon the soil of Kansas; as we felt the enactment of the Fugitive Slave Bill, the repeal of the Missouri Compromise, and the Dred Scott decision. I look upon it as one more shocking development of that moral weakness in high places which has attended the conflict between the spirit of liberty and the spirit of slavery, and I venture to predict that it will be so regarded by aftercoming generations. Far down the ages, when men shall wish to inform themselves as to the real state of liberty, law, religion, and civilization in the United States at this juncture of our history, they will overhaul the proceedings of the Supreme Court, and read this strange decision declaring the Civil Rights Bill unconstitutional and void… 

We cannot, however, overlook the fact that though not so intended, this decision has inflicted a heavy calamity upon seven millions of the people of this country, and left them naked and defenseless against the action of a malignant, vulgar and pitiless prejudice from which the Constitution plainly intended to shield them. 

It presents the United States before the world as nation utterly destitute of power to protect the constitutional rights of its own citizens upon its own soil. It can claim service and allegiance, loyalty and life from them, but it cannot protect them against the most palpable violation of the rights of human nature; rights to secure which governments are established. It can tax their bread and tax their blood, but it has no protecting power for their persons. Its national power extends only to the District of Columbia and the Territories—to where the people have no votes, and to where the land has no people. All else is subject to the States. In the name of common sense, I ask what right have we to call ourselves a nation, in view of this decision and of this utter destitution of power? 

In humiliating the colored people of this country, this decision has humbled the nation. It gives to the railroad conductor in South Carolina or Mississippi more power than it gives to the National Government. He may order the wife of the Chief Justice of the United States into a smoking-car full of hirsute men and compel her to go and to listen to the coarse jests and inhale the foul smoke of a vulgar crowd. It gives to hotel keepers who may, from a prejudice born of the Rebellion, wish to turn her out at midnight into the storm and darkness, power to compel her to go. 

In such a case, according to this decision of the Supreme Court, the National Government has no right to interfere. She must take her claim for protection and redress, not to the nation, but to the State; and when the State, as I understand it, declares that there is upon its statute-book no law for her protection, and that the State has made no law against her, the function and power of the National Government are exhausted and she is utterly without any redress. 

Bad, therefore, as our case is, under this decision, the evil principle affirmed by the court is not wholly confined to or spent upon persons of color. The wife of Chief-Justice Waite—I speak it respectfully—is protected to-day, not by the law, but solely by the accident of her color. So far as the law of the land is concerned, she is in the same condition as that of the humblest colored woman in the Republic. The difference between colored and white here is that the one, by reason of color, does not need protection. It is nevertheless true that manhood is insulted in both cases. 

"No man can put a chain about the ankle of his fellow-man, without at last finding the other end of it about his own neck." 

The lesson of all the ages upon this point is, that a wrong done to one man is a wrong done to all men. It may not be felt at the moment, and the evil may be long delayed, but so sure as there is a moral government of the universe, so sure as there is a God of the universe, so sure will the harvest of evil come. Color prejudice is not the only prejudice against which a Republic like ours should guard. The spirit of caste is malignant and dangerous everywhere. There is the prejudice of the rich against the poor, the pride and prejudice of the idle dandy against the hard-handed workingman. There is, worst of all, religious prejudice, a prejudice which has stained whole continents with blood. It is, in fact, a spirit infernal, against which every enlightened man should wage perpetual war. 

Perhaps no class of our fellow-citizens has carried this prejudice against color to a point more extreme and dangerous than have our Catholic Irish fellow citizens, and yet no people on the face of the earth have been more relentlessly persecuted and oppressed on account of race and religion than have this same Irish people. But in Ireland persecution has at last reached a point where it reacts terribly upon her persecutors. England is to-day reaping the bitter consequences of her own injustice and oppression. Ask any man of intelligence, "What is the chief source of England's weakness? What has reduced her to the rank of a second-class power?" and if truly answered, the answer will be "Ireland!" But poor, ragged, hungry, starving, and oppressed as Ireland is, she is strong enough to be a standing menace to the power and glory of England. 

Fellow citizens! We want no black Ireland in America. We want no aggrieved class in America. Strong as we are without the negro, we are stronger with him than without him. The power and friendship of seven millions of people, however humble and scattered all over the country, are not to be despised. 

Today our Republic sits as a queen among the nations of the earth. Peace is within her walls and plenteousness within her palaces, but he is bolder and a far more hopeful man than I am who will affirm that this peace and prosperity will always last. History repeats itself. What has happened once may happen again. 

Crispus Attucks, the first American martyr to die for the American Revolutionary War

The negro, in the Revolution, fought for us and with us. In the war of 1812 General Jackson, at New Orleans, found it necessary to call upon the colored people to assist in its defense against England. Abraham Lincoln found it necessary to call upon the negro to defend the Union against rebellion. In all cases the negro responded gallantly. Our legislators, our Presidents, and our judges should have a care, lest, by forcing these people outside of law, they destroy that love of country which in the day of trouble is needful to the nation's defense. 

Fellow citizens! While slavery was the base line of American society, while it ruled the church and state; while it was the interpreter of our law and the exponent of our religion, it admitted no quibbling, no narrow rules of legal or scriptural interpretations of the Bible or of the Constitution. It sternly demanded its pound of flesh, no matter how the scale turned or how much blood was shed in the taking of it. It was enough for it to be able to show the intention to get all it asked in the courts or out of the courts. But now slavery is abolished. Its reign was long, dark and bloody. Liberty is now the base line of the Republic. Liberty has supplanted slavery, but I fear it has not supplanted the spirit or power of slavery. Where slavery was strong, liberty is now weak. 

Oh, for a Supreme Court of the United States which shall be as true to the claims of humanity as the Supreme Court formerly was to the demands of slavery! When that day comes, as come it will, a Civil Rights Bill will not be declared unconstitutional and void, in utter and flagrant disregard of the objects and intentions of the national legislature by which it was enacted and of the rights plainly secured by the Constitution. This decision of the Supreme Court admits that the Fourteenth Amendment is a prohibition on the States. It admits that a State shall not abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States, but commits the seeming absurdity of allowing the people of a State to do what it prohibits the State itself from doing. 

It used to be thought that the whole was more than a part; that the greater included the less, and that what was unconstitutional for a State to do was equally unconstitutional for an individual member of a State to do. What is a State, in the absence of the people who compose it? Land, air and water. That is all. Land and water do not discriminate. All are equal before them. This law was made for people. As individuals, the people of the State of South Carolina may stamp out the rights of the negro wherever they please, so long as they do not do so as a State, and this absurd conclusion is to be called a law. All the parts can violate the Constitution, but the whole cannot. It is not the act itself, according to this decision, that is unconstitutional. The unconstitutionality of the case depends wholly upon the party committing the act. If the State commits it, the act is wrong; if the citizen of the State commits it, the act is right. 

By the end of the Civil War, roughly 179,000 black men (10% of the Union Army) served as soldiers in the U.S. Army and another 19,000 served in the Navy. Nearly 40,000 black soldiers died over the course of the war.

O consistency, thou. art indeed a jewel! What does it matter to a colored citizen that a State may not insult and outrage him, if the citizen of the State may? The effect upon him is the same, and it was just this effect that the framers of the Fourteenth Amendment plainly intended by that article to prevent. 

It was the act, not the instrument; it was the murder, not the pistol or dagger, which was prohibited. It meant to protect the newly enfranchised citizen from injustice and wrong, not merely from a State, but from the individual members of a State. It meant to give the protection to which his citizenship, his loyalty, his allegiance, and his services entitled him; and this meaning and this purpose and this intention are now declared by the Supreme Court of the United States to be unconstitutional and void. 

I say again, fellow citizens, Oh, for a Supreme Court which shall be as true, as vigilant, as active and exacting in maintaining laws enacted for the protection of human rights, as in other days was that court for the destruction of human rights! 

It is said that this decision will make no difference in the treatment of colored people; that the Civil Rights Bill was a dead letter and could not be enforced. There may be some truth in all this, but it is not the whole truth. That bill, like all advance legislation, was a banner on the outer wall of American liberty; a noble moral standard uplifted for the education of the American people… 

This law, though dead, did speak. It expressed the sentiment of justice and fair play common to every honest heart. Its voice was against popular prejudice and meanness. It appealed to all the noble and patriotic instincts of the American people. It told the American people that they were all equal before the law; that they belonged to a common country and were equal citizens. 

The Supreme Court has hauled down this broad and glorious flag of liberty in open day and before all the people, and has thereby given joy to the heart of every man in the land who wishes to deny to others the rights he claims for himself. It is a concession to race pride, selfishness, and meanness, and will be received with joy by every upholder of caste in the land, and for this I deplore and denounce this decision…

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NEXT on 1884

0001 India in 1884: The Reach of the Brutish Empire

March 1, 1884.
Bombay

My dear friend Lord Randoph Churchill,

Today looking back at India gradually receding away, I was overwhelmed with feelings of hopes and fear. Although much has been accomplished, I felt the same vague sense of helplessness like exactly two years ago upon leaving Egypt. So I wanted to write to you now, even though I will only be able to post it when our ship arrives in Paris where Anne and I will stop for a few days..

From an aesthetic point of view nothing can be more seductive to a stranger from the West, or more surprising, than the spectacle of Hindu worship at one of these ancient shrines—the processions of women to some lonely grove by the water-side on holiday afternoons with their offerings of rice and flowers, the old-world music of pipe and tabour, the priests, the incense, the painted statues of the immortal gods, the lighted fire, the joyous sacrifices consumed with laughter by the worshippers. No one can see this without emotion, nor, again, witness the gatherings of tens of thousands clothed in white in the great temples of Southern India for the yearly festivals, and not acknowledge the wonderful continuity of thought which unites modern India with its European kindred of pre-Christian days. 

Meenakshi Temple, Madura

The worship of idols here is a reality such as untravelled Englishmen know only from their classics. The temples of Madura and Seringam are more wonderful and imposing in their structure than all the edifices of Europe put together, and the special interest is that they are not dead things. The buyers and the sellers still ply their trade in the porticoes, the birds have their nests beneath the eaves. There are sacred elephants and sacred apes. The priests chaunt still round lighted braziers. The brazen bulls are anointed each festival day with oil, the foreheads of the worshippers with ochre. There is a scent of flowers and incense, and the business of religion goes on continuous from old time, perhaps a little slacker, on account of the increasing poverty of the people, but not less methodically, or as a living part of men’s daily existence. 

When I had seen Madura I felt that I had at last seen a temple of Babylon in all its glory, and understood what the worship of Apis might have been in Egypt. This worship of the gods—not any theological or moral teaching—is the foundation of the Hindu religion, and what is still its distinguishing feature.

Because of us the English, the friendly bond between Egypt and India through the exchange of trade, religion and education over centuries have now been replaced by an ugly tie of Great Powers politics. With its shortcut to India — the lynch pin of the British Empire – by 4000 miles, the Suez Canal’s opening 15 years ago sealed the fate for Egypt. After Disraeli, with a massive loan from his friend Lionel de Rothschild, snapped up the bankrupt Khedive Isma'il’s shares for Britain in 1875, Gladstone made the final break from thirteen years of compromise with France and pretended respect for the Ottoman Sultan by sending troops under the pretext to suppress Urabi’s uprising and began the bombardment of Alexandria and occupation.