FROM OUR BROOKLYN CORRESPONDENT.

MY DEAR DOUGLASS:—

Languid letter-writers, punsters, and poets, here-abouts, have been for the last dozen days, nearly, trying to chaunt their peans to autumn, and to say all manner of nice things about him; but it was no go; the whole thing was a positive failure. August, with the burthen of the season upon him, and in his age wearied and dwindled; September, in the warmth and vigor of youth, took up the last days of summer, and so exhibited them, that so far from our realization of anything sad, or even of the Poet's beautiful state of feeling expressed thus:

"The melancholy days have come
The sadest [sic] of the year,"

we were compelled, amid our quick breathing, and panting, and fanning, to exclaim—

The scorching days have come,
The hotest [sic] of the year.

But autumn has come at last. I felt his cool breath, and heard his first sigh the other night as I lonely wended one of my quiet but devious way [sic]; and saw evidences of his finger prints the next morning upon the brown-edged leaves that, but six hours before, was [sic] as green as summer could make them. But such are the changes of the seasons; and thus they beautifully illustrate our lives. We all have our spring, summer, autumn, winter. The last wish of the master of Idlewild is for a penknife‚"Rorger's best." Would it not be strange if this wish should prove really the last of this scholar and Poet—this gentleman of literary renown—this man of the world—the wide, wide world? The last one we have on record is for the article,—"Rorgers best," but not to cut however the thread which of late has been becoming more and more slender, but that still binds him to this present state, but to cut a goose-quill. Such a knife he tells us (the race of which by reason of steel pens are now extinct) has many a time formed the bridge between his brain and the next thought. The bridge between my brain and the next thought is not a penknife, "one of Rorger's best," but a little girl scanning her lessons for tomorrow's school exercise, and this leads me to my next idea. It is this: that thousands of children hereabouts have commenced their Autumn School Term, and not a few colored ones among the number. But the Institution, our branch of it as a whole, how different from the white one! Instead of a vigorous Institution, in which are being fitted our sons and daughters for the real duties of life, we find it a languishing, sickly thing; while those whose business it is to make it what it ought to be, are found whining and fawning round the doors of the white branch, and hankering after the crumbs that fall there—such as even their beggars refuse to snap up. Instead of being like a forest in which are being grown fine thrifty oaks, which are to compose some day, (not far distant,) a part of our country's ships, our branch of the Institution, as a whole, resembles more a neglected patch, in which the seeds had been good and the husbandmen faithful, but the nutriment lacking. Parents, Guardians, and Sponsors, you are that nutriment so much needed. In your longings for this change, from the black flock to the white flock, you say in extenuation more can be gained there; better pasture for your little lambs. Ah! is it so? Let me tell you something. You may neglect your own schools, and cringingly crowd or clandestinely slide your little ones into white schools,

and slink away from the white presence with a satisfaction wonderfully astonishing; but if you have ever heard of or know anything of the condition of a toad under a barrow, then in the comparison you may draw but a very faint online of their condition. I speak of the schools as they presently exist here; and the feelings and sentiments reigning within them. If known to be what they really are, (colored,) your children are the continual subjects of contempts and ridicule; if in by deception or stealth, they are ever trembling and shaking for fear of exposure. Such a position will dry up all the healthful springs of the mind of the best youth among us; and change whatever sources there may be left in a direction leading, to where death itself is far preferable. Therein I have stated I think the chief cause immediate or remote, of the languishing condition of colored schools. Let me re-state: want of confidence in them simply they are colored. Let me add another cause is because of a want of interest in them, by those who nominally support them. This, however, grows out of the other and first cause, and is but secondary. I took my station in one of these colored schools, a short time since, for the day; and I hesitate not to say that a better disciplined, better appointed school, and seemingly more faithful teachers evinced in all the fruits so profusely strewn around me, does not exist hereabouts. Of the reading of the classes, one especially, I will wager a brace of volumes of Whittier's or Bryant's Poems, or if you prefer of Miss Watkins or Whitefield, that it can not be excelled by any class, private or public, white or otherwise, in Gotham, or out of it. The books thus won to be given to the best pupil in the excelling class. Let us cease, then, to longer hanker after the Flesh Pots of Egypt, and make these schools, all of them what they ought to be. This done, followed up by corresponding efforts with our children to their maturity, we need neither slip nor slide them, not yet entertain fears for their after position. Position worth having, is the result of a bold and straightforward course. And let me also attach here another thought, since it dovetails well into the ones I have just expressed. Some writer through the columns of the National Era, (copied in F. Douglass' Paper,) attempts to answer the question, "what becomes of the free colored people?" by saying that they glide into the whites. Though by discreditable, dishonorable, disreputable means, still they do it. Do it by preference—do it by studied determination. Now, while I have no objections, whatever, to this gliding or sliding process that so takes the fancy of the colored people, if the statement of the writer be true, still I have most serious objections as to the means voluntarily used on our part, excepting they be honorable ones, growing out of a consciousness of equality. What such resorts, and voluntary too on our part, as are here set forth? Shame whispering forbids me to answer. And are we guilty? are the events true? The bare thought is enough to make every colored man and woman's face burn with the white heat of intensest shame. Stand up in the jury box, every one of you, and as the charges are read to you, answer, are they true? But I forbear to read them. This process or exodus of the colored people out of themselves, of which this writer speaks, so far as it contains any truth, consigns more of us to the bonds of physical and

mental feebleness, and to the dominions of premature decay and death, than to the white ranks. My chief warrant for this last assertion is the result of my own eyes, long and constantly observant; still, I think, it is sufficiently backed up by admitted physological facts that it need fear no contradiction.

By the way, will some one hand me over one or two of those latter day papers—"Heads of the Colored People," by friend CommunipawSmith, James McCune

James McCune Smith (1813–65), a prominent black physician, abolitionist, and writer, was born in New York City to an enslaved father and a self-emancipated mother. He attended the New York African Free School, but was denied admission to Columbia University, Geneva Medical College, and the New York Academy of Medicine. He turned to the University of Glasgow in Scotland, where he received a B.A. (1835), M.A. (1836), and M.D. (1837). Upon returning to New York, he opened a pharmacy and medical practice that catered to both blacks and whites. He became involved in the abolitionist movement, serving as an associate editor of the Colored American in 1839, contributed regularly to the Anglo-African Magazine, and wrote correspondence for the North Star and Frederick Douglass’ Paper under the pseudonym “Communipaw.” Smith also wrote the introduction to Douglass’s second autobiography, My Bondage and My Freedom (1855). In 1861, Smith helped finance the revival of the Weekly Anglo-African to oppose black colonization and emigration, and he was a prominent member of the New York City Young Men’s Association, the American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, and the New York African Society for Mutual Relief. He was the sole attending physician of the Society for the Promotion of Education Among Colored Children, a member and vestryman of St. Philip’s Episcopal Church, and a trustee of the New York Society for the Promotion of Education Among Colored Children. In 1863 Wilberforce College appointed Smith professor of anthropology, but illness kept him from assuming his post. Lib., 1 June 1838; FDP, 18 May 1855; Douglass Papers, ser. 2:7–19; Miller, Search for a Black Nationality, 243; Pease and Pease, They Who Would Be Free, 90–92, 103, 110; Quarles, Black Abolitionists, 115, 134; Rhoda G. Freeman, “The Free Negro in New York City in the Era before the Civil War” (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1966), 40–42, 177, 186, 195, 200, 247, 276, 286, 325, 353, 393; DAB, 27:288–89. . I would like to have one of them, especially one for inspection just now. Tears of deep heartfelt sorrow for the long absence or final exit—I know not which—of good old friend Communipaw, are now streaming down my face. I find consolation only in the blest remembrance of him. So also of Observer and Veritas, Cosmpolite and Spectator; of home Maria, and Fanny Homewood, of the dear Aliened, and Occator, and all the lesser sattelites who once revolved so brightly there.

Alas! my dear Douglass, where are they? whither are they gone?

"When I remember all
These friends so linked together,
I've seen them round me fall
Like leaves in wintry weather, I feel like one
Who treads alone
Some banquet-hall deserted,
Whose lights are fled,
Whose garlands dead,
And all but he departed!

"Thus in the stilly night,
Ere slumber's chain has bound me,
Sad memory brings the light
Of other days around me."

ETHIOPWilson, William Joseph ("Ethiop")

William Joseph Wilson (1818–?), a free black man from New Jersey, operated a bootmaking shop in New York City as early as the 1830s. In the 1840s he became a secondary school teacher and later a principal of a black school in Brooklyn. He was an activist on behalf of black education, encouraging access and attendance, and even opened his own library. Wilson also campaigned to secure the franchise for New York African Americans. He served as a member of the Committee of Thirteen, organized by New York black leaders to stop enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Act. In the early 1850s Wilson’s letters appeared frequently in Frederick Douglass’ Paper, and Douglass referred to him as the newspaper’s “Brooklyn correspondent.” Wilson’s letters to the newspaper, published under the pseudonym “Ethiop,” were often part of an ongoing debate about the condition of blacks in New York and the United States. Wilson’s most frequent sparring partner in the war of letters was “Communipaw,” actually James McCune Smith, a prominent black physician in New York City. Carleton Mabee, Black Education in New York State: From Colonial to Modern Times (Syracuse, N.Y., 1979), 54, 63-67, 123, 129, 155, 158; Foner and Walker, Black State Conventions, 1:79-88; Quarles, Black Abolitionists, 87, 212, 229; Ripley, Black Abolitionist Papers, 4:144-45n. .

BROOKLYN HEIGHTS, Sept 16., 1854.