Salt Lake City suggests to you at once the Mormon Church. This church
was organized in 1830 in the state of New York. The Mormons located
later in Kirkland, Ohio, and there erected a temple which is said to
be standing today. The church was persecuted, and Joseph Smith was
martyred. It was moved from place to place, and finally Brigham Young,
its President, had a vision. He saw a land in the far west, and was
directed to go to this remote country, far away from persecutions,
where the colony might worship in their own way. They started out for
this far country, and were many months making the trip. The party was
composed of 143 men, three women and two children, and three colored
servants. The names of all are on the fine monument at the head of the
principal street of the city.
When they had reached the place the President said, “This is the place
I saw in the vision.” The men were advised to go to work at once on
small farms. The first year they grew a good crop by irrigation, but
about the time the crops matured the cricket’s came and almost ate the
crops. The sea gulls from the lake eighteen miles away came and ate up
the crickets. This saved the pioneers. They have in the sacred square
a monument to the sea gulls. It is known as the Temple Square. The
temple is the most unique building in the world. It was forty years in
construction, and it cost a million dollars. It is built of native gray
granite which was hauled by teams for more than twenty miles away.
The Tabernacle standing in the same square is also a unique
construction. It will seat ten thousand people and has in it one of the
best organs made. The building is a “long, oval shape, dome top. The
hearing qualities are perfect. One may drop a pin in a hat or on the
floor, and two hundred feet away, at the other end of the auditorium,
hear it fall.” No nails are used in its construction. Pillows support
the arches, while wooden pegs tied with raw hide support the individual
pieces.
The gray stone Assembly Hall, where relics and art collections are
kept, is also in the same square.
One should visit the state capital. It is located on one of the
nearby mountains. This mountain is at the head of several streets and
had an electric line running around it and to the top. The building
itself is one of the finest in the country. It has large granite
supports measuring three or four feet in diameter, twenty or more feet
in length, of Georgia marble, polished to a finish, each weighing
twenty-five thousand pounds. These great pillows were brought from
Georgia on forty-six cars.
One could spend weeks in this fine building studying the art of it and
the great display of relics of the early pioneer life. Several Mormon
sisters have charge of the collections, and they are very interesting
as well as very entertaining.
We leave Salt Lake City, and forty miles east we come to Provo. We are
more than four thousand feet in elevation. It is called the “Garden
City.” It is near the Wasatch Mountains. We pass through the Provo
Canyons. This is unlike anything else we have seen. We climb the
mountains overlooking a most beautiful valley off to the left with
a very fine stream said to contain trout. There are fine homes and
orchards and many flocks of sheep and cattle. There is some mining a
few miles across the valley on the opposite mountain side.
A railroad stretches across the valley to connect with this mine from
the main line. A few apple orchards. Some fine red barns. The meadows
evidently afford a great deal of hay. Hundreds of stacks of hay, as
green as if just cut, dotted the valley. We are in several feet of snow
and being drawn by several massive steam engines. Up, up, up we go till
we reach Soldiers’ Summit, seven thousand and four hundred feet high.
Your heart begins to beat a little faster, some one has the headache,
another has bleeding of the nose. If you have slept all the way through
the valley and up the mountains you will begin to wake up when you
reach this high elevation. Unless your heart is seriously affected you
do not need to worry, for you are in this elevation only a few minutes,
when you begin to drop to normal altitude for these parts. The snow is
about six feet deep and sparkling. The air is fine and pure, and your
mouth grows dry for some of the crystal liquid you have just passed.
It comes from crags and crevices for more than a half mile above you,
scarcely missing the sides of your train as it passes its narrow
channel.
A crowd of a dozen or more school girls get on the train. They are
all the world like our own girls, only they were white, every one of
them. They sang songs, made speeches, moved from place to place on the
train, recited their lessons, talked kindly of their teachers and their
fellows, of the loved ones they have left behind for a few months—they
were just school girls, that was all. The tourists, including my lonely
self, were glad to have this merry bunch—this innovation to break the
monotony. They leave us at Green River, and we settle down again to our
usual repose when we are soon disturbed by the news butcher saying,
“The mountain ahead is one-half mile high, the canyon ten feet wide,
just wide enough for the train to pass.” “It is Castle Gate.” The walls
of the red stone stand up like the walls of a sixty-story sky-scraper.
On both sides these walls tower up till your neck tires looking up at
them.
Here the engineers have defied nature. You follow the river and the
canyon, sometimes on this side, sometimes on that side, rising and
falling in elevation till you reach Mack, near the state line of
Colorado at an elevation of four thousand and five feet. You pass
through a valley widening out from a ten-foot gorge to forty or fifty
miles, and absolutely fenced all around by these massive walls for
fifty or more miles as effectively as if done by the master hand of
some giant. We follow Hog Back Canyon and a tributary of the Colorado
River. We arrive at Glenwood Hot Springs at 10:30 at night, four
hundred miles from Salt Lake City in an elevation of five thousand and
seven hundred feet. We stop here for the night and take the 6 a. m.
train the next morning for Denver.
We are on the Denver and Rio Grande Railroad. We pass up the Colorado
River Canyon. The road is tortuous, the stream abounds like the waters
of “Galore,” the mountain crags are high and precipitous, every foot
has tested the skill of the engineer. It is wonderful. We go through
Tennessee Pass, sight Mount Jackson toward the west. Mount Elbert
to the left more than fourteen thousand feet high is seen. We leave
Readville to the left and pass through the richest mining region in
the world. Georgetown, Red Cliff, Fair Play, Platt Ranch, Buena Vista,
Cripple Creek, Anaconda Goldfield. All these are centers of mining
interests. They abound in gold, silver, lead, copper, zinc, etc. We
come south from Glenwood Springs to Salida nearly a hundred miles and
into the Arkansas River Valley and follow this river to Florence and
Pueblo.
It will be remembered that in the summer of 1921 there was a cloudburst
in that section of the country, and Pueblo was in the midst of the
washout. Hundreds of lives and millions of dollars worth of property
were lost. The valley still shows great evidence of that destruction
everywhere you look. This was particularly true of the city itself. I
stood under the pier of their fine station, and the high water mark
was two feet above my head. We are seven hundred miles from Salt Lake
City and still seventy-five miles from Denver. We are at Colorado
Springs. Denver is our destination for the night. As we leave Cannon
City and Florence we sight to our north perhaps a hundred miles Pike’s
Peak. This is early in the afternoon, and we do not lose sight of that
majestic wonder of the world until we have passed Denver for almost
another hundred miles.
We spend four days in Denver very pleasantly and profitably. It is the
“Mile High City.” We have left all the mountains behind. The community,
including Colorado Hot Springs and Denver and Pike’s Peak need no
description from me. They are too well known. It is the healthiest
place in all the world. I saw no graveyards, and I presume they are few
and very far between. The elevation is more than five thousand feet. We
are now seven hundred and fifty miles east of Salt Lake City. Denver is
a fine place in which to live. I am not so sure about the conditions of
earning a living.
We leave Denver at 10 in the morning and stop for the night at
Phillipsburg in Kansas. The country is practically all prairie land
suited for cattle, horses and sheep, corn, wheat, and the grasses. It
is an open country with few trees excepting the low sections and river
bottoms.
We pass Lincoln City in Nebraska and later the city of Omaha. We have
already crossed the La Platte River and now at Omaha we cross the
Missouri River. Passing Council Bluffs in Iowa we speed along to Des
Moines, Iowa, where we plan to spend the next night. We arrived late in
the evening and left early the next morning for Chicago. The country
was largely given to farming and stock raising.
We were in Chicago about two weeks, and were then off for Washington
City, where we spent another week, then we came home, arriving here at
Bricks the 22nd of March. A most cordial reception awaited me here.
I was met at the station by teachers, students and friends of the
community, all led by the school band.
Not many colored people on the Pacific Coast as compared with our
eastern country. They are scattered here and there throughout the
middle west. Most of those I saw looked as if they had good jobs and
were busy. I saw a great many very nice homes of our colored people. I
visited a great many places of business entirely colored. The colored
ministers were all educated men. The colored churches were up to date.
I spoke in a number of them, and the audience looked well groomed and
happy. I quizzed the professional men, and they advised me that the
outlook for the colored people generally was good. All advised that
colored men going west ought to have some money to start a business.
If colored men would go west and enter farming their opportunities
would be unlimited. They ought to have money enough to carry them till
their crops come to maturity. If they grow fruit it takes the young
trees five years to come into bearing, and they must have something
to depend upon during that time. At the same time there is no time of
the year in California when a farmer cannot grow vegetables. There are
fruit growers’ associations that take care of everything the farmer
grows. He can become a member of any of them irrespective of his color.
He must have some money and some farming sense. There are forty-five
thousand colored people in Los Angeles. Only a few are farming. There
are not enough farmers to attract any attention. I am always sorry
to see so many of our folks flock to the cities when the farms are
offering so many opportunities for independence and a better living.
There is nothing needed in the west so much as water and people—_water
and people_. If they get the people the irrigation projects will soon
give the water. They need not only people who are not dependent upon
others for every move they make, but people who are industrious and who
have the brain.
We hear in the East a great deal about the Japanese. I hear more about
them here than I heard on the coast. Out there they have the reputation
of being industrious, smart and great organizers. I do not think those
are bad qualities. They are qualities that we have been taught to
prize. There is no reason why we should prize them in one race and
despise them in another. They are universally courteous. Some Northern
people think they will get all the land. I saw millions and millions of
acres of land in California alone that somebody needs to get and put to
use. Then I saw other millions stretched four thousand miles and more
across the American continent that will feed all the world when brought
under cultivation and development.
They tell us out West that all the mountains in that country are full
of minerals. If that is true we have not touched the world’s supply.
From the unoccupied land I saw there must be enough to feed a hundred
times our present population. In some of these states one can travel
almost a hundred miles and not see a sign of human life except the
little station settlements. New York, Cleveland, Detroit, Chicago, and
a few other cities are too congested for healthy environment, and some
propaganda ought to be started by some organization or somebody to
popularize the country and the farms.
The spirit of competition in our large cities in any occupation is
virulent. It is not worth the struggle. Manhood and womanhood is
stagnant. It is truly the survival of the fittest. I never saw a Negro
farmer in the South begging bread. Vast areas of our best farming land
ought to be bought by this congested crowd filling our large cities.
Our people go to the city because of the lack of compatibility of
people in the community where they want to live. They may not like the
other races out West, but there was great silence and a unanimity of
opinion relative to an open expression of their hatred. Poor execution
of the laws, open expressions of hatred, fear of personal molestation.
These were the expressions I met in Cleveland, Detroit and Chicago.
Norman Angell expresses it in his book, “The Fruits of Victory,” when
he gives the cause of the world’s restlessness and war. He says they
have resulted from our wrong thinking. We have got to be big enough
to forget some things and start off right. Correct our thinking. I
attended a Christian Science Church in St. Paul, Minnesota, and one of
the tenets of their church is that if you have a pain just forget about
it and it goes. It seems to work, for that church is doing a great
business all over the country. That is what we have got to do in the
political world and in the world where our relations interlock. We do
not get anywhere by hatred and fighting.
Every city and every town I visited from Spokane to Seattle to San
Bernardino, seventeen hundred miles south is on a boom and every one
you meet is a boomer. That is the way to build up a community or a city
or a town, or anything else. I was not supposed to give any addresses
while on this trip, unless there was some fine opportunity to make
friends for the American Missionary Association and for Brick School.
I could not afford to let such opportunities pass even though I was
out seeking recreation and rest and change. This opportunity came to
me at least twenty-eight times. I was invited to speak twice in Dr.
H. H. Proctor’s Church in Brooklyn, N. Y. Dr. Proctor was a classmate
of the writer at Fisk University. He had one of the largest churches
in all the South, the First Congregational Church in Atlanta. When
the migration of colored people began to be a problem in the Northern
centers, Dr. Proctor was called to Brooklyn to meet the impending
onrush. He has projected one of the largest church enterprise in
Greater New York, and his bringing the enterprise to a successful
fruition will mean great things for New York and for the colored people
generally.
Dr. Proctor is a large man, mentally and physically, and he has a large
vision. His vision is not larger than the times are demanding. Our
church people are demanding a larger programme. Some of our churches,
perhaps all of them, have been too reticent and conservative, holding
on to the dead past and lost prestige with the masses. Dr. Proctor is
planning a progressive and constructive programme. I could not lose
the opportunity which his kind invitation gave me to tell our Northern
friends what our Southern brethren are doing along many lines. I also
had the invitation to address a large Baptist Church in Brooklyn where
more than a third of its membership of more than three hundred members
were from Gloucester County in Virginia. A former Brick School boy was
the shepherd of this flock.
Out on Long Island we had the pleasure of addressing a small
Congregational Church under the leadership of Rev. G. W. Hinton. We
found here a goodly number of our North Carolina friends, and they were
glad to hear from their friends here in North Carolina.
Later the Fisk University singers from Nashville, Tenn., met with the
Greater New York Fisk Club at the Y. W. C. A. in a Harlem Cafeteria,
and a fine programme was given. I was invited to speak at the Baptist
Ministers’ meeting in New York in one of the largest churches in
the city. If the size of the church, the furnishings, etc., and the
appearance of the men meant anything it certainly looked as if our
friends in New York City were very prosperous. The young lady who
directs all the work of the Y. W. C. A. on 137th Street is a Brick
School girl who later graduated from Pratt, and we have every evidence
that she is making good in that great city.
At Springfield in Massachusetts we had the pleasure of speaking three
times for Rev. William N. DeBerry. Dr. DeBerry is a product of Fisk
University and Oberlin Theological School. He has the finest work of
any of our men. His church organization is unique; he is progressive
and constructive, at the same time scholarly and conservative. He is
the most aristocratic Negro preacher we have today. His spirit is
contagious, and he has the finest coöperation of his members from the
oldest to the youngest.
At Rochester we had the invitation to address a very fine gathering
of friends who had met at a reception to the teacher of their
Sunday-school class and to the minister of their church.
At Buffalo we also gave an address at another Baptist Church. In all of
these places we met scores of people from North Carolina.
In Cleveland, Ohio, I had the invitation to speak several times at the
Mount Zion Congregational Church. Rev. Harold Kingsley is the present
pastor. Rev. Kingsley is a product of Talladega College, Ala. His wife
was a former teacher here at Bricks. We had a most cordial reception at
his church and at his home.
It was in this church where I read my first essay nearly forty years
ago. Its pastor at that time was Rev. Dr. S. N. Brown, who is now Dean
of Theology at Howard University. The church has had a great history.
The former pastor was Rev. George V. Clark, of Charlotte, N. C. Dr.
Clark was a Liberty County (Georgia) boy and a product of Atlanta
University. The church is now in the most congested Negro section of
Cleveland and has before it a great destiny and future. The present
minister is a young man of great enthusiasm and well prepared to meet
its growth. The city of Cleveland has a congested Negro population: I
saw a statement in the Cleveland papers from the head of the Cleveland
“Community Chest” that of all racial groups in the city the colored
people had more than done their part with the least expenditure of
effort.
I visited several of the larger churches—Baptist and Methodist
churches. All the Cleveland churches seem to be in the most progressive
state. Their church buildings are among the very best in the country.
Their membership and attendance are very large.
In Detroit we attended Rev. Dr. Bradby’s church, which is said to
have a membership of four thousand people. I also spoke at one of
the services. They had four services going at the same time. About a
third of these people held up their hands indicating that they were
from North Carolina. The day was very cold, but their spirits were
very warm. Dr. Bradby is a Canadian, but understands thoroughly the
Negro temperament, and gives them exactly what is best fitted to that
temperament. He speaks with authority.
At night I attended one of our churches ministered to by Rev. Brooks.
The church has some institutional feature and is doing excellent
service for the community. Mrs. E. E. Scott, of Montgomery, Ala., is
assistant in these civic service features.
In Kalamazoo, Mich., we attended a revival meeting in the Methodist
Church. The temperature outside did not disturb the emotional elements
the least when the several ministers put on the “arousements.” I had to
wonder whether I was in northern Michigan or in North Carolina.
I spoke in a Baptist Church in Chicago where they are said to have a
membership of ten thousand people. Several services were going on at
the same time. I also addressed a congregational audience in Chicago
presided over by Rev. Dr. C. W. Burton. Dr. Burton is a product of
Talladega College, and Yale Theological School. He is a fine type of
minister and is doing great good.
In Butte, Montana, I was told there are about five hundred colored
people and three colored churches. These churches had no regular
ministers at the time of my visit. The colored men work as porters and
miners. They have mixed schools. They have several social clubs and
secret orders, such as the Masons and Odd Fellows.
In almost all of the cities I visited mixed schools are the rule,
and many of them have a percentage of colored teachers. In Cleveland
especially I was told that the colored teachers are liked very much by
their students and parents of the opposite races. In many places it
would be most difficult to tell who are colored and who are white. Most
of the teachers I met are very efficient and alive to their job.
In Tacoma I spoke to the Sunday-school in the morning and in the
evening I spoke at the evening services of the First Congregational
Church, Rev. Dr. Edgar C. Wheeler, minister. Prof. Oliver H.
Richardson, of the University of Washington, followed me with an
address on the “Study of International Relations.” The subject of my
address might have been “Inter-Racial Relations.” At the close of this
address I visited the colored Methodist Church, and also spoke there.
The church was well filled, and the services were full of interest. The
minister was a well trained man, and had the best order and system in
the church.
In Portland I attended a meeting of a select group of ladies and
gentlemen of the Theosophical Society. I did not speak, but went
primarily to hear an old friend speak on the subject of “Racial
Unity.” His lectures covered a number of cities on the coast, and his
subjects, “The Unity of Religions,” “Seven Valleys,” “Inter-racial
Amity,” “Harmony Between Religion and Science,” “The Mashrak; Ulkar or
Universal Science,” “What is a Bahai?” “Four Stages in Man’s Growth.”
All of these different lectures are summed up in the one though, “The
Fundamental Unity of Races and Religion.” The object of the lectures
are the promotion of universal brotherhood, international coöperation,
universal education, the abandonment of prejudices. The lecturer was
a colored man, a product of Fisk University, and of the law school
of Howard University. He has traveled through Europe, Egypt, and
Palestine. His thought and language is clear and convincing. Our friend
Dr. Gregory proved himself a master with these subjects.
The subjects above are very suggestive. There is nothing else to be
said when the speaker has finished his address. What does it mean? In
New York, Buffalo, Cleveland, Detroit, Chicago, St. Paul, and all our
large centers there are the finest temples and edifices built to the
new cult, new thought, new religion. Many of our traditional churches
in these large centers have a hard fight to get a hearing. I attended
one of these new thought churches in St. Paul where the interest was at
white heat with an attendance of more than seven hundred people. The
temperature outside was fourteen degrees below zero. This was at night.
All these cults are based in one way or another on the Bible, but we
seem to have adapted for our own spiritual edification and practice
that which fits our own mind and temperament. We then argue that
everybody else is dead wrong. Some of the finest minds I know are lined
up with these new cults. Surely they must have some basis for their
mental attitude.
I was asked by the Secretary, Rev. Dr. George Hinman, of the American
Missionary Association office in San Francisco, to fill an appointment
for him in Berkley, Cal., February 26th. This was at the North
Congregational Church at Berkley. This church was right under the
shadow of the University of California, and I counted it a great
honor to be asked to speak there. The minister of the church was Rev.
Mr. Ralph Baxter Larkin. He was sick the day of my visit, and I was
introduced by Rev. Dr. Sargent. The printed programme announcing the
service for the day with my address had this on the first page, “A
Church of Reverent Worship, open mind, intellectual freedom, social
conscience, spiritual aspiration and human sympathy. It seeks to
discover and interpret the meaning of life in the life of the eternal.”
This expression gave me great poise for what I had to say. I was at
once at ease.