For Frederick Douglass' Paper.

FROM OUR NEW YORK CORRESPONDENT.

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MR. EDITOR:—The great hindrance to the advancement of the free colored people, is the want of unity in action. If we were to unite in the pursuit of any one object, I can imagine no possibility beyond our power to compass.

But we are not united as a people, and the main reason why we are not united, is, that we are not equally oppressed. This is the grand secret of our lack of union. You cannot pick out five hundred free colored men in the free States, who equally labor under the same species of oppression. In each one of the free States, and often in different parts of the same State, the laws, or public opinion, mete out to the colored man a different measure of oppression; in Maine and Massachusetts, no political rights are denied him; the polls in election time, the churches and school houses (except in Boston, which hardly belongs to Massachusetts) are open to him and his; hence, by a natural course of events, Massachusetts abolished the old law which interdicted marriages between whites and blacks. In Pennsylvania, on the contrary, the colored man has everything to contend for, in matters, political, religious and social. A colored gentleman of Boston, who was in Philadelphia last week, procured a ticket for Julien's concert; he was refused admission at the door, and, on rating the door-keeper in good set terms for the refusal, he was deprecatingly told "that the colored people in Philadelphia never thought of seeking admission to such entertainments!" Midway between these extremes, we have New York, Ohio, Michigan and the northern part of Illinois, in which, either statute law, or public opinion accords some rights to, and withholds other rights from, the man of color.

And in addition to these local oppressions, the free colored men, in the free States, has other grades or gradations of oppression laid upon him. He is oppressed in the ratio of his complexion. The weight is laid heaviest on the purely black man, and is lightened as he approaches the caste of the purely white man. A thousand instances may be adduced to support this statement; it is a rule which has found its way into a decision of the Supreme Court of Ohio, and into the statute laws of Illinois and Virginia. In our own ranks, the same rule has found expression in the contrariety of motive which sends DelanyDelany, Martin Robison

Born to a free mother and a slave father in Charlestown, in western Virginia, Martin Robison Delany (1812-85) was an editor, physician, and leading advocate of black emigration. In 1822 Delany's mother moved to Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, where his father later joined them, and the young Delany attended a local school. In 1831 he moved to Pittsburgh where he worked as a barber, attended a school run by a black Methodist minister, and studied medicine, upgrading his occupation from “cupper and leecher“ to physician. Between 1843 and 1847, Delany was editor of the Mystery, a black Pittsburgh newspaper. For the next two years he served as co-editor of Doug1ass’s North Star and lectured and traveled extensively to gain new subscriptions for that paper. In 1850-51 Delany attended Harvard Medical College but, owing to protests from white students, was denied admission to the final term needed to complete his medical degree. The following year he wrote The Condition, Elevation, Emigration, and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States, Politically Considered (Philadelphia, 1852), in which he argued that emigration was the only remedy for the oppressed state of black Americans. When many black abolitionists, including Douglass, rejected Delany's position, he organized a series of National Emigration Conventions that met in 1854, 1856, and 1858. These assemblies created a permanent National Board of Commissioners, of which Delany was president and chief propagandist. In 1856 Delany moved to Chatham, Canada West, and three years later explored the Niger river valley in Africa looking for possible emigration sites. His novel Blake was serialized in the Weekly Anglo-African from November 1861 through May 1862. During the Civil War, Delany served the North first as a recruiter and examining surgeon and eventually as a major of the 104th U.S. Colored Troops. From 1865 to 1868 Delany was a Freedmen's Bureau officer in South Carolina and later was active in that state's politics, running unsuccessfully for lieutenant governor on the Independent Republican ticket in 1874. Ullman, Martin R. Delany, 52-103, 115-21, 140-71, 211-46; Dorothy Sterling, The Making of an Afro-American: Martin Robison Delany, 1812—1885 (Garden City, N.Y., 1971); Thomas Holt, Black Over White: Negro Political Leadership in South Carolina during Reconstruction (Urbana, Ill., 1977), 74-75, 176-77; Miller, Search for a Black Nationality, 115-33, 171-83; Martin R. Delany, Blake; or, The Huts of America, ed. Floyd J. Miller (Boston, 1970), ix; DAB, 5: 219-20. and WhitfieldWhitfield, James Monroe

James Monroe Whitfield (1822-71), barber and poet, was born in New Hampshire. During the winter of 1838-39, the Young Men's Union Society of Cleveland appointed Whitfield to deliver an address on the subject of emigration. Thus, as a youth of sixteen, Whitfield urged that blacks establish separate settlements in the United States or on its borders. By the mid-1850s he had become a major spokesman for black emigration. After he moved to Buffalo, New York, in 1841, Whitfield worked as a barber and wrote poetry. Several of his poems had already been published in the North Star when Douglass visited Whitfield in Buffalo in late June 1850. Recounting their visit, Douglass lamented, “That talents so commanding, gifts so rare, poetic powers so distinguished, should be tied to the handle of a razor and buried in the precincts of a barber‘s shop, and that he who possesses them should be consigned, by the malignant arrangements of society, to occupy a position so menial, is painfully disheartening." A delegate to the black convention meeting in Rochester in 1853, Whitfield also endorsed and attended the 1854 emigration convention in Cleveland and was commissioned to investigate Central America as a site for prospective black settlements. Convinced that “full and fair equality can be looked for, only through the existence of national organizations of the different races," Whitfield hoped that the emigration of black Americans would contribute to the emergence of a powerful and independent black nation in the American hemisphere. Before leaving Buffalo around 1859, Whitfield published a volume of poetry, America and Other Poems (Buffalo, 1853), which he dedicated to Martin R. Delany. Later poems appeared in the Liberator the San Francisco Pacific Appeal and the San Francisco Elevator. After the Civil War, Whitfield's principal residence seems to have been in San Francisco, though he also lived in Portland, Oregon, and in Idaho. Between 1864 and 1869 he was Masonic Grand Master of California. Joan R. Sherman, “James Monroe Whitfield, Poet and Emigrationist: A Voice of Protest and Despair," JNH 57: 169-76 (April 1972); Miller, Search for a Black Nationality 137-40; Delany, Condition of the Colored People 132; J. M. Whitfield to Editor, 15 November 1853, in FDP 25 November 1853; ASB 24 August 1850 to seek to found a State in which, as the latter says there shall be no distasteful amalgamation, but "black be the ruling element," while, on the other hand, Langston and Day claim their rights inside the Senate House in Ohio.

Here, then, we have before us, the fact, that there are various grades of oppression inflicted on our people; reduced to numerical exactness, I may safely assert that there may be counted two thousand distinct forms of oppression scattered among the hundred and seventy-six thousand free colored people in the free States.

The result is, that each man feels his peculiar wrong, but no hundred men together feel precisely the same oppression; and, while each would do fair work to remove his own, he feels differently in regard to his neighbor's oppression. For example, our yellow friends, Day and Langston, may vote at the next, as I believe they did vote at the last, general election in Ohio, under the quadroon decision of the Supreme Court of that State, while our black friend Delany curses that decision as "infamous," and berates his yellow brothers aforesaid as "willing contributors to their own degradation," in voting under it. Day and Langston vote because they believe it their duty as men to avail themselves of all privileges within their reach; Delany denounces their act, because he is excluded by the very decision which grants them the privilege. Now, put the main question, can these three colored men in good and hearty faith, earnestly unite in a common resistance to their diverse oppressions? does not that Ohio decision pluck them asunder in the very springs and secret sources of action? And is it not the depth and bitterness of our oppression, when earnest men are thus rent apart by impulses they cannot control? And are we not forced to probe this difficulty to the very bottom and find the remedy, before we can be in position "to do something for the common elevation["]?

Similarly cruel differences in oppression, in every variety of shade, ramify through the entire free colored population, and with similar results. Hence that want of unity in thought, action and resistance, which has distinguished us; for there must be common oppression to produce common resistance.

Hence, also, we have too long blamed ourselves with the want of union without sufficiently enquiring into the cause thereof. We have attributed to innate fault of character, what really belongs to the circumstances which surround us—And now that we have traced our want of Union to this its real source—I mean unequal oppression—how shall we discover the remedy for our disunion? In reply to this question, it is idle to speculate about ought to; we must go down to the practical level of can; how can we become united? The underlying question, whether we ought to unite, as colored people, I will discuss hereafter; at present I assume that we ought
so to combine.

If it be true that the main reason of our
disunion lies in the fact that we are not
equally oppressed, then we must seek to
create within ourselves, such a hearty hat
red of all oppression, that any wrong to
one shall be a wrong to all; or, we must
seek to find, without ourselves some, gene
ral form of oppression continuous in charac
ter, against which we may all, as one man,
combine and continuously struggle until we
are free and equal.

The first alternative is manifestly impos
sible at present, although it is the most de
sirable, and will be the necessary result of a

combination found under the second alternative. And, in view of the second alternative, PUBLIC OPINION is the general form of oppression, continuous in character, against which we may rally and form persistent union. But we must be content to attack public opinion in detail: and each specific victory will strengthen our hands and perfect our organization for the next.

Public opinion is the King of to day; and ules our land: yet we can conquer public opinion, because we have conquered it. Public opinion said we must go to Liberia: yet here we are, and it is granted by public opinion that here we will stay: so omnipotent is our combined will against the public wish. And yet, our opposition to the colonization scheme, was, rather, nstinctive (I use the word for want of a better) impulse than afore thought combination: it was part of that innate love of soil which our forbears brought from Africa, and which renders indigenous negro-land the most impenetratable in God's earth. The Scotch thistle, celebrated in a Latin motto, was troddon down by Romans, and cut away from its native heath to make room for Roman bridges yet extant: but no hostile foot has maintained its foothold upon, no hostile cohorts have cut military roads th[r]ough, negro-land! Yet the British maintain Empire in the (to European Constitution) equally pestilential India.

Colonization, an oppression bearing equally upon us all, was resisted by us all: it compelled our union and thereby ensured its own defeat. Having, in this common resistance, learned the secret of our power, it is our duty to use it for our elevation and affranchisement.

If we look around us, we will find public opinion our oppressor in a thousand other matters: it broods over us from free Maine to slave Texas, nay—and let this be hindered well by our emigration brethren—it goes in advance of us to the uttermost parts of the earth and defends its tyranny over us on the grounds of our imbecility: it says we are "kicked" by it, because "we've got no friends, and ain't able to help ourselves." That is, we lack executive power.

We have borne enough, and well enough, already; it is time that we should "up boys and at them," that is do something. We must do something to take away this reproach of imbecility; it does not matter so much, what we do, whether we over-run Sonora, or create an Industrial School. But as brother Day says, this talk must be (CONTINUED IN OUR NEXT.)

Brother Day calls on me by my own and two other names, to "do battle" with him, touching the Industrial School. Now, Mr. Editor, if I knew a nice little brook with five smooth stones, and could get Philo to make me a sling, I would mix in with the he-biddy of Dear Aliened, if there be such an one; but it should be an express'd condition, that hens and shawls should be kept from the battle ground. It is a pretty rural sight and sound to witness Brother Day gallanting Maria*, and Becky†, and Nancy‡, and Fanny^, over his barn-yard, astonishing them with his bantam strut and squeaky crowing, while he boastfully cries "hens you are hens and I know it,"—now, Mr. Editor, could I have the heart to disturb that harmony? If tearful Fanny Homewood, sat and listened to wailing Lucy Stone until she thought her to be brother Day, who could be so hard-hearted as to ruffle a feather of brother Day's wings? It might be the death of her (Fanny, to wit:)

Our excellent pastor of St. Philip's, actually preaches against the Nebraska Bill; and it is said that a distinguished vestry-man is "down on him" ever since that sermon. I have seen a letter from Providence, which states that Philo actually fainted, on reading Charlotte K—'s last letter in your pape[r]; as Philo is about to give the world renewed proofs of his sterling manhood, I hope Charlotte will write no more at him; he can't be spared.

Yours, affectionately,

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. .

NEW YORK, May 4th, 1854.

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*A Shanghai (with spurs?) hen
†A speckled hen.
‡A : rahmpootra hen.
^A Guinea hen ; crows also, in the Spring, and
wears gaffs.