missioners is no novelty, and the faculty of
Biddle University, composed of colored professors, by the will of the
Presbyterian Board of Education, shows what this conservative body has
done in the recognition of Negro scholarship.

The conventions and associations of the Baptist Church in the South,
where the bulk of the black race dwell, are still on the color line,
yet there is progress towards true fraternal feeling here. Some years
since "The Religious Herald," of Richmond, Virginia, the leading
journal of that denomination in the South, announced among its paid
contributors the name of a prominent colored divine.

It must be said, nevertheless, that during the first half of the
nineteenth century the record of the white church on the Negro shows
not only a temporizing, but a cowardly spirit. This was true in some
respects of the Congregational Church;[5] instead of leading, the
church followed the state. The anti-slavery sentiment which was
unmistaken in the later years of the eighteenth century became with
the growth of commercialism and national expansion, quiescent and
subservient to the slave power. The right to vote, which in colonial
days was generally exercised by colored freeholders, was subsequently
either restricted or wholly denied. North Carolina, Maryland and
Tennessee in the South, and Pennsylvania in the North, disfranchised
their colored suffragists. The wave of disfranchisement then, as on
the threshold of the twentieth century, dashed from one state to
another. In the North repeated efforts were made to concede to the
Negro his complete political and civil rights. Though the sentiment in
his behalf became stronger at every trial of strength, yet with a
single exception--Wisconsin--each result was decisive against the
concession of the franchise to the Negro. It was only after a bloody
civil war, in which thousands of lives were sacrificed and billions of
treasure were expended, that the nation conceded to the Negro, first,
his freedom, next his civil rights, finally his political franchise.

One hundred years ago there were but few colored schools, even in the
free states, and these only in the larger towns and cities.
Philadelphia was in the lead, with New York a second and Boston a
third.

Connecticut, in the third decade of the nineteenth century, would not
permit Prudence Crandall to maintain a school of colored girls. The
means employed to break it up stands a blot on the name of the
co