lot is ours; her
storms are ours; her calms are ours. If she breaks upon any rock, we
break with her. If we, born in America, can not live upon the same soil
upon terms of equality with the descendants of Scotchmen, Englishmen,
Irishmen, Frenchmen, Germans, Hungarians, Greeks, and Poles, then the
fundamental theory of America fails and falls to the ground."[1] While
everybody was practically agreed upon this fundamental matter of the
relation of the race to the Federal Government, more and more there
developed two lines of thought, equally honest, as to the means by which
the race itself was to attain unto the highest things that American
civilization had to offer. The leader of one school of thought was
Richard Allen, founder of the African Methodist Episcopal Church. When
this man and his friends found that in white churches they were not
treated with courtesy, they said, We shall have our own church; we shall
have our own bishop; we shall build up our own enterprises in any line
whatsoever; and even to-day the church that Allen founded remains as
the greatest single effort of the race in organization. The foremost
representative of the opposing line of thought was undoubtedly Frederick
Douglass, who in a speech in Rochester in 1848 said: "I am well aware of
the anti-Christian prejudices which have excluded many colored persons
from white churches, and the consequent necessity for erecting their own
places of worship. This evil I would charge upon its originators, and
not the colored people. But such a necessity does not now exist to the
extent of former years. There are societies where color is not regarded
as a test of membership, and such places I deem more appropriate for
colored persons than exclusive or isolated organizations." There is much
more difference between these two positions than can be accounted for by
the mere lapse of forty years between the height of the work of Allen
and that of Douglass. Allen certainly did not sanction segregation under
the law, and no man worked harder than he to relieve his people from
proscription. Douglass moreover, who did not formally approve of
organizations that represented any such distinction as that of race,
again and again presided over gatherings of Negro men. In the last
analysis, however, it was Allen who was foremost in laying the basis
of distinctively Negro enterprise, and Douglass who felt that the real
solution of any difficulty was for the race to lose itself