became social outlaws in the South.  The peculiar sensitiveness of the southern white men for women, never shed its protecting influence about them.  No friendly word from their own race cheered them in their work; no hospitable doors gave them the companionship like that from which they had come.  No chivalrous white man doffed his hat in honor or respect.  They were “Nigger teachers”—­unpardonable offenders in the social ethics of the South, and were insulted, persecuted and ostracised, not by Negroes, but by the white manhood which boasts of its chivalry toward women.

And yet these northern women worked on, year after year, unselfishly, with a heroism which amounted almost to martyrdom.  Threading their way through dense forests, working in schoolhouse, in the cabin and in the church, thrown at all times and in all places among the unfortunate and lowly Negroes, whom they had come to find and to serve, these northern women, thousands and thousands of them, have spent more than a quarter of a century in giving to the colored people their splendid lessons for home and heart and soul.  Without protection, save that which innocence gives to every good woman, they went about their work, fearing no assault and suffering none.  Their chivalrous protectors were hundreds of miles away in their northern homes, and yet they never feared any “great dark-faced mobs,” they dared night or day to “go beyond their own roof trees.”  They never complained of assaults, and no mob was ever called into existence to avenge crimes against them.  Before the world adjudges the Negro a moral monster, a vicious assailant of womanhood and a menace to the sacred precincts of home, the colored people ask the consideration of the silent record of gratitude, respect, protection and devotion of the millions of the race in the South, to the thousands of northern white women who have served as teachers and missionaries since the war.

The Negro may not have known what chivalry was, but he knew enough to preserve inviolate the womanhood of the South which was entrusted to his hands during the war.  The finer sensibilities of his soul may have been crushed out by years of slavery, but his heart was full of gratitude to the white women of the North, who blessed his home and inspired his soul in all these years of freedom.  Faithful to his trust in both of these instances, he should now have the impartial ear of the civilized world, when he dares to speak for himself as against the infamy wherewith he stands charged.

It is his regret, that, in his own defense, he must disclose to the world that degree of dehumanizing brutality which fixes upon America the blot of a national crime.  Whatever faults and failings other nations may have in their dealings with their own subjects or with other people, no other civilized nation stands condemned before the world with a series of crimes so peculiarly national.  It becomes a painful duty of the Negro to reproduce a record which shows that