Atlanta Daily World

Political Walking

A FEW YEARS ago this country was startled and humiliated because Sen. "Cotton Ed" Smith of South Carolina walked out of a Democratic National convention when the Rev. Marshall Shepard, prominent minister of Philadelphia and member of the Pennsylvania assembly, was called upon to pray for God's guidance for the assembled convention.

This "walk out" has become one of the infamous episodes of this country's history. Recently Sen. "Cotton Ed" Smith was deposed by the intelligent voters of South Carolina and now he takes a long long walk into a retirement that will bring him the obscurity that his point of view so justly merits.

As Sen. Smith walks out, Rev. Shepard walks in, as recorder of deeds for the district of Columbia.

IRONICAL SITUATION

There is something ironical in this whole phenomenon of Smith walking out and Shepard walking in! A deposed Smith and an elevated Shepard! Who knows but that the divinity that "shapes our ends" so decreed it, even as St. Louis got an all-St. Louis world series the very year jim-crowism was banished in famous Sportsman's park.

The elevation of Rev. Shepard gives this writer a peculiar pleasure for four good reasons. In the first place he is a Negro and worthy and of essential political and moral stature. He has the ability and the social finesse that the office demands. He will fill the place with credit to himself and his opportunity-hungry fellow race-men. We have no fears or trepidations on the point of fitness for the place.

In the second place, he is a minister. Although the Negro ministry of this country has done a magnificent job in that it has helped to train the leadership of the Negro race, the very office and calling has deteriorated in prestige.

HOLD PREJUDICE

Negroes generally and especially in the upper circles invariably look for "something funny about their Christian ministry. The ministry among the professions is like the Negro among races, whatever good one does is individual and whatever wrong one does is ministerial. It has come about that although there is nothing to take its place, there is a strong current of prejudice against the Negro minister.

The shyster lawyer is not held against the legal profession. The voodoo doctor and conjurer are not held against the medical profession; but the jack-leg preacher is held stubbornly against the Negro ministry.

And by, "jack-leg" we do not necessarily mean the unlettered consecrated and constructive men who have laid the foundations of the race. We rather mean those men whether learned or unlearned who do not have the higher conception of their calling and responsibility in one of the highest callings. In other words the term "jack-leg" refers not so much to literary status as to an ignoble attitude towards a high calling.

Preaching has never been, is not now and will never be a thing of the head but of the heart and therefore in real preaching temperament and heart far outweigh more the intellectualization of the gospel.

MORAL HYPODERMIC

Rev. Shepard's elevation is a kind of moral hypodermic for the Negro ministry. In the third place, he is a Baptist minister. Too long the Negro Baptist ministry has been sold short on the curb of public opinion. One of the major reasons that Dr. Mordecai Johnson was opposed as president of Howard University was the fact that he was a Baptist preacher.

Had he been of any other denomination his elevation would not have occasioned such stiff opposition.

The impression prevails for too great extent that Baptist ministers are for the most part ignorant and of the swamp-angel type. Illustrious alumni of Whoop university. Three years ago enroute to Detroit, I was joined in Cincinnati by the erudite and scholarly George Singleton, my warm friend and the new Bishop Baber and two or three other AME celebrities. We teased about our denominations. They jokingly told me that the Methodist church was an "organization" while the Baptists were merely a "movement."

They thus jokingly put their fingers on one of the weaker points of the Baptist denomination. It lacks the organization of the Methodists and that is why the Negro Baptist ministry lacks the prestige that comes to the Methodist bishopric.

MOVEMENT MOVING

The elevation of Dr. Shepard shows that our "movement" is moving in a very definite way even as the great work of Dr. Johnson at Howard proves the same point. Booker T. Washington was a Baptist preacher! Finally I am proud of Dr. Shepard's elevation because it gives the rebuff to those who employed a kind of degenerate Monroe doctrine in their opposition to him.

Those who felt that the appointee should have hailed from the District of Columbia possibly forget how many citizens and natives of the District of Columbia are holding down fine positions elsewhere. Moreover the District of Columbia does not belong to those who live there, it belongs to the nation at large. Rev. Shepard was coming into his own when he acceded to the recordership of deeds. Political walking!