UNITY IN ACTION

"The great hindrance to the advancement of the free colored people is the want of unity.... "[T]he 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 of the free states, and often in different parts of the same state, the laws, or public opinion, mete out the colored man a different measure of oppression... "[F]or there must be a common oppression to produce a common resistance. "Hence, also we have too long blamed ourselves with the want of union without sufficiently inquiring into the cause thereof. We have attributed to innate fault of character which really belongs to the circumstances which surround us--And now that we have traced our want of union to this its real course--I mean unequal oppression--how shall we discover the remedy for our disunion?... "If it be true that the main reason for our disunion lies in the fact that we are not equally oppressed, then we must seek to create within ourselves such a hearty hatred of oppression that any wrong to one shall be a wrong to all; or we must seek to find without ourselves some general form of oppression continuous in character , against which we may all, as one man, combine and continuously struggle until we are free and equal." P.98, 100, "Unity in Action," THE WORKS OF JAMES MCCUNE SMITH: BLACK INTELLECTUAL AND ABOLITIONIST edited by John Stauffer (2006)