These assaults and attempts at ridicule served to bring me into general
notice. I soon found that, by reason of them, and without merit or
effort of my own, I had become known throughout the whole country as
"the Colored Professor." I had a status. The lady being the daughter of
a highly respectable minister, she also had a status. To permit
therefore the union of these parties would be to bring the principle of
amalgamation into respectability. So reasoned those who attempted to
reason on behalf, or rather in excuse, of the mob. "We are sorry," they
went on condescendingly to say, "for Professor Allen, for though a man
of color, he is nevertheless a gentleman, a Christian and a scholar. But
this union must not be; the 'proprieties of society,' must not be
violated!" Here then was the secret of this extraordinary outbreak. Had
we moved in what these good people would have been pleased to term a
lower strata of society, they would have let us alone with infinite
contempt.
The most lamentable feature of this Fulton mob was the fact, that we
could not, if we had sought it, have secured any redress. No court of
law in the State would have undertaken to bring to justice the
perpetrators of this outrage. But on the contrary, such court would have
been inclined to take sides with the mobocrats, and to justify them in
the means which they employed wherewith to chastise a colored man who
had presumed so grossly to violate the "proprieties of society.
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