Page:Daniel Minort Baxter - Bishop Richard Allen and His Spirit (1923).pdf/29

fore powerless; all sorts of persons imbued with prejudice, like St. George trustees, are spread broadcast in our land. The Ku Klux Klan, the I. W. W. Klan are endeavoring to mold sentiment into dangerous socialistic ideas, anarchy and class hatred. Let us keep Allen’s spirit; despite his enemies he never hated any one, he won his battles by love. His little band trusted in God, and despite some of the richest persons and best brains in the Methodist Church and Philadelphia, they won out and gave the race the greatest hope toward manhood and citizenship it has perhaps gotten—not excepting the great emancipation by Abraham Lincoln. For if Fred Douglass, B. K. Bruce, Robert Brown Elliott, John Langston, Thomas Miller, George White, W. R. Revels and George Murray have made the halls of congress ring with forensic eloquence; if Henry O. Tanner painted the world into a fantastic fresco and took a place by the side of Michael Angelo; if Flora Batson, Selika and Sisiretta Jones sang the world into a lullaby; if Paul Lawerence Dunbar and Phillys Wheatley touched the lyrics of the Muses of the gods and sang like Annius, it was Richard Allen’s spirit that quickened their