Atlanta Daily World

Close Range
Versus
Long
Range
Interest

By The Rev.
J. RAYMOND HENDERSON

One of the peculiar traits of mankind is its capacity to become terribly worked up over that which is far away while remaining apathetic toward that which is at hand. A white lady actually broke down and wept when she heard a returned missionary tell of children in Labrador who needed clothes but her hackmen who sat drenched in a downpour of rain elicited not even passing attention from her. I know a church in Virginia which has seven missionaries on the Continent of Africa to save the poor "heathen," who are really better off than the members of the church, but which does not care an iota about the Negroes of the town in which the church is located. We mortals seem to be so constituted that we just relish what is far away. If it is in China, Africa, the isles of the sea it gets us. If it is in New York, Chicago, Atlanta, we remain indifferent to it. The interest of the American Negro in the Ethiopian-Italian brawl is a good illustration of this long range interest.

In New York a smart Negro has registered 30,000 young Negro bucks for proposed service in the Ethiopian army against Italy at 25 cents a head. I'll wager not 500 of this deluded crowd belong to the NAACP which is engaged on every front in America in a combat as important to the American Negro as the impending struggle 7000 miles away. It is indeed stranger than fiction to find men who want to lay down their lives but are unwilling to lay down a dollar.

Here in Atlanta Negroes are disturbed over the fate of Ethiopia. They are scanning which nation will win. This they should do. But the fate of the Negro right here in America should more seriously challenge his interest than anybody else's fate anywhere else on the globe. Atlanta Negroes need to draw their interest in and learn to concentrate upon themselves. There is little question who will win here. The white man already has the N in close quarters and is daily seeking to wrest from him the vast vestige of rights due a free people.

Although I am preparing to leave Atlanta for a brief period I am intensely interested in the plight of the Negro right here. I want Ethiopia to lick Italy. I am not going to join those who pray for this war not to come. The white man's inflated ego needs puncturing, and Ethiopia is in as good position to do it as any colored nation in the world. She has done it before. If I pray at all it will be that Ethiopia will administer such a thrashing to Italy that the entire white world will take a tumble and see what some day the colored people of the world will do for the white peoples of the world if world-wide oppression does not cease.

Things close at hand interest me.
Things like equal pay for teachers in Negro schools, adequate school facilities for Negro children, the ballot, and every right and privilege under the Constitution. After we get through with all these little wars and they are not little, then let us turn our attention to other lands afar.

Last Wednesday we attempted to have a NAACP meeting.
So few came it was postponed.
It will be held at Wheat Street church on Wednesday night at 8 o'clock. I do hope that all of our business and professional men will come, all of our ministers, all of our college graduates who should be thinking seriously of the race's plight, but who are apparently indifferent, all of the school teachers, all of the great body of workers who need assistance and who would gladly follow if those of us who call ourselves or are called by them "leaders" only lead.

A bond issue will soon be voted upon in this city. If Negroes do not bestir themselves they will wake up to discover that the white man, who cannot be trusted, will use almost all the money for white schools while our overcrowded condition and double sessions continue. The NAACP accepts every proposal from me that it now or very nearly so pleads in regard to its needs. Wheat Street church should be packed Wednesday night with Duke Ellington men may come and Louie Armstrong also, but the "Negro cannot fight his way into his rights. He MUST FIGHT."

leave Atlanta for a brief period