Zion's Watch Tower and Herald of Christ's Presence, “The Volunteer Work”
“There are probably as many as a hundred colored brethren on the Watch Tower lists, some of them very clear in the truth, and very earnest in its service, financially and otherwise. We have received letters from several of these, who had intended engaging in the volunteer work, expressing surprise that in the call for volunteers in the March 1st issue we restricted the inquiry to white Protestant churches. They rightly realized that we have not the slightest of race prejudice … The reason is that so far as we are able to judge, colored people have less education than whites—many of them quite insufficient to permit them to profit by such reading as we have to give forth.”
The article answers black readers who had written to ask why the free-literature campaign was directed only at white Protestant congregations. It goes on to advise that Watch Tower literature be given to black readers "not by promiscuous circulation, but only to those who give evidence of some ear for the truth", and separately excludes Roman Catholic churches because "the vast majority of their attendants are either too ignorant or too bigoted to read and think for themselves". Two Reprints pages further on the same article states: "The volunteer service is open to all of the Lord’s dear people, brethren and sisters, white and colored." The restriction was therefore on the churches the literature was taken to, not on who could take it.
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Provenance and verification note for Zion's Watch Tower and Herald of Christ's Presence, The Volunteer Work
Confidence note. Read in the 1900 Reprints volume on the Internet Archive on 19 September 2026 and re-checked leaf by leaf from the item’s djvu.xml. The whole quoted passage stands on one Reprints page, the leaf whose own running head reads “(121-122) ZION’S WATCH TOWER Allegheny, Pa.” and which closes with the marker [ 2618 ]; the marker falls inside the passage in the OCR only because the page is set in two columns. The next leaf reads “April 15, 1900 ZION’S WATCH TOWER (122-123)” and carries the rest of the article, including the exclusion of Roman Catholic congregations. This confirms the commonly cited page 122. Obvious OCR errors (“li«ts”, “w’hite”) have been repaired against the surrounding text; the page images were not separately inspected.
Scan provenance. Internet Archive item “Magazines: Zion’s watch tower and herald of Christ’s presence, 1900”, the Watch Tower Reprints volume for 1900.
Corroborated by. src-race-zwt-1900-0301-volunteer-call
Notes. Widely quoted from the phrase "colored people have less education than whites" onward. The full passage also contains the magazine’s claim to have "not the slightest of race prejudice", which critics often omit and defenders often quote alone, and the article later states that the volunteer service itself was open to "brethren and sisters, white and colored".
Accessed. 19 September 2026 · Source ID. src-race-zwt-1900-0415-colored-brethren