WHEREAS no provisions have, as yet, been made by the World's Columbian Exposition Commission for securing exhibits from the colore...d women of this country, or the giving of representation to them in such Fair, and WHEREAS under the present arrangement and classification of exhibits, it would be impossible for visitors to the Exposition to know and distinguish the exhibits and handiwork of the colored women from those of the Anglo- Saxons, and because of this the honor, fame and credit for all meritorious exhibits, though made by our race, would not duly be given us ... RESOLVED that for the purpose of demonstrating the progress of the colored women since emancipation and of showing to those who are yet doubters, and there are many, that the colored women ... are making rapid strides in art, science and manufacturing, and of furnishing to all information as to ... what the race has done, is doing and might do, in every department of life, that we, the colored women of Chicago request the Columbian Commission to establish an office for a colored woman whose duty it shall be to collect exhibits from the colored women of America ... [ellipses in source]LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The colored woman feels that woman's cause is one and universal; and that not till the image of God, whether in parian or ebony, i...s sacred and inviolable; not till race, color, sex and condition are seen as the accidents and not the substance of life ... [ellipsis in source] not till then is woman's lesson taught and woman's cause won--not the white woman's, nor the red woman's, but the cause of every man and every woman who has writhed silently under a mighty wrong. Woman's wrongs are thus indissolubly linked with all undefended woe, and the acquirement of her "rights" will mean the final triumph of all right over might, the supremacy of the moral force of reason, and justice, and love in the government of the nations of the earth.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
... the majority of colored men do not yet think it worth while that women aspire to higher education.... The three R's, a little ...music and a good deal of dancing, a first rate dress-maker and a bottle of magnolia balm, are quite enough generally to render charming any woman possessed of tact and the capacity for worshipping masculinity.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If a liberal policy towards the late Rebels is adopted, the ultra Republicans are opposed to it; if the colored people are honored..., the extremists of the other wing cry out against it. I suspect I am right in both cases.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
But I am not tragically colored. There is no great sorrow dammed up in my soul, nor lurking behind my eyes. I do not mind at all. ...I do not belong to the sobbing school of negrohood who hold that nature somehow has given them a lowdown dirty deal.... No, I do not weep at the world--I am too busy sharpening my oyster knife.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I am colored but I offer nothing in the way of extenuating circumstances except the fact that I am the only Negro in the United St...ates whose grandfather on the mother's side was not an Indian chief.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Seeing their children touched and seared and wounded by race prejudice is one of the heaviest crosses which colored women have to ...bear.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
... no young colored person in the United States today can truthfully offer as an excuse for lack of ambition or aspiration that m...embers of his race have accomplished so little, he is discouraged from attempting anything himself. For there is scarcely a field of human endeavor which colored people have been allowed to enter in which there is not at least one worthy representative.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
As a colored woman I might enter Washington any night, a stranger in a strange land, and walk miles without finding a place to lay... my head.... The colored man alone is thrust out of the hotels of the national capital like a leper.... Surely nowhere in the world do oppression and persecution based solely on the color of the skin appear more hateful and hideous than in the capital of the United States, because the chasm between the principles upon which this Government was founded, in which it still professes to believe, and those which are daily practiced under the protection of the flag, yawn so wide and deep.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
This is beautiful indeed; the colored people have given this to the head of the government, and that government once sanctioned la...ws that would not permit its people to learn enough to enable them to read this book.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »