“I have a friend who is presiding elder in the A.M.E.  Church and his wife, I think, is capable of being a social and intellectual accession in any neighborhood in which they might live.  He rented a house in the city of L. and being of a fair complexion I suppose the lessee rented to him without having a suspicion of his race connection.  When it was ascertained that he and his family were colored, he was ordered to leave, and this man, holding among the ministers of that city the position of ambassador for Christ, was ordered out of the house on account of the complexion of his family.  Was there not a screw loose in the religious sentiment of that city which made such an act possible?  A friend of mine who does mission work in your city, some time since, found a young woman in the slums and applied at the door of a midnight mission for fallen women, and asked if colored girls could be received, and was curtly answered, ‘no.’  For her in that mission there was no room.  The love of Christ constrained no hand to strive to rescue her from the depths of degradation.  The poor thing went from bad to worse till at last, wrecked and blighted, she went down to an early grave the victim of strong drink.  That same lady found on her mission a white girl; seeing a human soul adrift, regardless of color, she went, in company with some others, to that same mission with the poor castaway; to her the door was opened without delay and ready admittance granted.  But I might go on reciting such instances until you would be weary of hearing and I of relating them; but I appeal to you as a patriot and Christian, is it not fearfully unwise to keep alive in freedom the old animosities of slavery?  To-day the Negro shares citizenship with you.  He is not arraying himself against your social order; his hands are not dripping with dynamite, nor is he waving in your face the crimson banners of anarchy, but he is increasing in numbers and growing in intelligence, and is it not madness and folly to subject him to social and public inequalities, which are calculated to form and keep alive a hatred of race as a reaction against pride of caste?”

“Mr. Thomas, you have given me a new view of the matter.  To tell you the truth, we have so long looked upon the colored man as a pliable and submissive being that we have never learned to look at any hatred on his part as an element of danger, and yet I should be sorry to know that by our Southern supineness we were thoughtlessly helping create a black Ireland in our Gulf States, that in case the fires of anarchy should ever sweep through our land, that a discontented and disaffected people in our midst might be as so much fuel to fire.”

“But really I have been forgetting my errand.  Have you any opening in your store for my young friend?”

“I have only one vacancy, and that is the place of a utility man.”

“What are the duties of that position?”

“Almost anything that comes to hand; tying up bundles, looking after the mails, scattering advertisements.  A factotum whose work lies here, there and everywhere.”