explanation often vouchsafed by the white landlord—that the Negro is
indolent, improvident and vicious. Taking them man for man and dollar
for dollar, I think you will find the Negro, in ninety-nine cases out of
a hundred, not a whit behind the Anglo-Saxon of equal chances. It is a
fact which every candid man who rides through the rural districts in the
South will admit, that in progressive aspirations and industry the Negro
is ahead of the white man of his chances. Indeed it would not be hard to
show that the white man _of his chances_ does not exist. The “Crackers”
and “poor-whites” were never slaves, were never oppressed or
discriminated against. Their time, their earnings, their activities have
always been at their own disposal; and pauperism in their case can be
attributed to nothing but stagnation,—moral, mental, and physical
immobility: while in the case of the Negro, poverty can at least be
partially accounted for by the hard conditions of life and labor,—the
past oppression and continued repression which form the vital air in
which the Negro lives and moves and has his being.
One often hears in the North an earnest plea from some lecturer for “our
working girls” (of course this means white working girls). And recently
I listened to one who went into pious agonies at the thought of the
future mothers of Americans having to stand all day at shop counters;
and then advertised with applause a philanthropic firm who were giving
their girls a trip to Europe for rest and recreation! I am always glad
to hear of the establishment of reading rooms and social entertainments
to brighten the lot of any women who are toiling for bread—whether they
are white women or black women. But how many have ever given a thought
to the pinched and down-trodden colored women bending over wash-tubs and
ironing boards—with children to feed and house rent to pay, wood to buy,
soap and starch to furnish—lugging home weekly great baskets of clothes
for families who pay them for a month’s laundrying barely enough to
purchase a substantial pair of shoes!
Will you call it narrowness and selfishness, then, that I find it
impossible to catch the fire of sympathy and enthusiasm for most of
these labor movements at the North?
I hear these foreigners, who would boycott an employer if he hired a
colored workman, complain of wrong and oppression, of low wages and long
hours, clamoring for eight-hour systems and insisting on their right to
have sixteen of the twenty-four hours for rest and self-culture, for
recreation and social intercourse with families and friends—ah, come
with me, I feel like saying, I can show you workingmen’s wrong and
workingmen’s toil which, could it speak, would send up a wail that might
be heard from the Potomac to the Rio Grande; and _should it unite and
act_, would shake this country from Carolina to California.
But no man careth for their souls. The labor interests of the colored
man in this country are as yet dumb and limp. The unorganized mass has
found neither tongue nor nerve. In the free and liberal North, thanks to
the amalgamated associations and labor unions of immigrant laborers, who
cannot even speak English,—the colored man is relegated to the
occupations of waiter and barber, unless he has a taste for school
teaching or politics. A body of men who still need an interpreter to
communicate with their employer, will threaten to cut the nerve and
paralyze the progress of an industry that gives work to an American-born
citizen, or one which takes measures to instruct any apprentice not
supported by the labor monopoly. A skilled mechanic, a friend of mine,
secured a job in one of our cities and was seen by union men at work on
his house. He was immediately ordered in murderous English to take down
his scaffolding and leave the town. Refusing to do so, before night he
was attacked by a force that overwhelmed him and he was obliged to
leave. Such crushing opposition is not alone against colored persons.
These amalgamated and other unions hold and are determined to continue
holding an impenetrable monopoly on the labor market, assuming supreme
censorship as regards the knowledge and practice of their trade.
In the South, on the other hand, where the colored man virtually holds
the labor market, he is too uncertain and unorganized to demand anything
like a fair share of the products of his toil. And yet the man who
thinks, must see that our labor interests lie at the foundation of our
material prosperity. The growth of the colored man in this country must
for a long time yet be estimated on his value and productiveness as a
laborer. In adding up the account the aggregate of the great toiling
mass largely overbalances the few who have acquired means and leisure.
The nation judges us as workingmen, and poor indeed is that man or race
of men who are compelled to toil all the weary years ministering to no
higher want than that of bread. To feed is not the chief function of
this material that has fallen to our care to be developed and perfected.
It is an enormous waste of values to harness the whole man in the narrow
furrow, plowing for bread. There are other hungerings in man besides the
eternal all-subduing hungering of his despotic stomach. There is the
hunger of the eye for beauty, the hunger of the ear for concords, the
hungering of the mind for development and growth, of the soul for
communion and love, for a higher, richer, fuller living—a more abundant
life! And every man owes it to himself to _let nothing in him starve_
for lack of the proper food. “What is man,” says Shakespeare, “if his
chief good and market of his time be but to sleep and feed!” Yet such
slavery as that is the settled lot of four-fifths the laboring men of
the Southland. This, I contend, is an enormous, a profligate waste of
the richest possibilities and the divinest aptitudes. And we owe it to
humanity, we owe it pre-eminently to those of our own household, to
enlarge and enrich, so far as in us lies, the opportunity and grasp of
every soul we can emancipate. Surely there is no greater boon we can
bestow on our fellow-man in this life, none that could more truly
command his deepest gratitude and love, than to disclose to his soul its
possibilities and mend its opportunities,—to place its rootlets in the
generous loam, turn its leaves towards the gracious dews and warm
sunlight of heaven and let it grow, let it mature in foliage, flower and
fruit for GOD AND THE RACE! Philanthropy will devise means—an object is
not far to seek.
Closely akin to the value that may be said to have been wasted through
the inclemency and barrenness of circumstance, through the sickness, sin
and death that wait on poverty and squalor, a large item of worth has
undoubtedly been destroyed by mistaken and unscientific
manufacture—foolhardy educators rashly attempting to put in some
theoretically desirable _crack_—the classical crack, or the professional
crack, or the artistic-æsthetic-accomplishments crack—into material
better fitted for household pottery and common every-day stone and iron
ware. I want nothing I may say to be construed into an attack on
classical training or on art development and culture. I believe in
allowing every longing of the human soul to attain its utmost reach and
grasp. But the effort must be a fizzle which seeks to hammer souls into
preconstructed molds and grooves which they have never longed for and
cannot be made to take comfort in. The power of appreciation is the
measure of an individual’s aptitudes; and if a boy hates Greek and Latin
and spends all his time whittling out steamboats, it is rather foolish
to try to force him into the classics. There may be a locomotive in him,
but there is certainly no foreshadowing evidence of either the teacher
or preacher. It is a waste of forces to strain his incompetence, and
smother his proficiencies. If his hand is far more cunning and clever
than his brain, see what he can best do, and give him a chance according
to his fitness; try him at a trade.
Industrial training has been hitherto neglected or despised among us,
due, I think, as I have said elsewhere, to two causes: first, a mistaken
estimate of labor arising from its association with slavery and from its
having been despised by the only class in the South thought worthy of
imitation; and secondly, the fact that the Negro’s ability to work had
never been called in question, while his ability to learn Latin and
construe Greek syntax needed to be proved to sneering critics. “Scale
the heights!” was the cry. “Go to college, study Latin, preach, teach,
orate, wear spectacles and a beaver!”
Stung by such imputations as that of Calhoun that if a Negro could prove
his ability to master the Greek subjunctive he might vindicate his title
to manhood, the newly liberated race first shot forward along this line
with an energy and success which astonished its most sanguine friends.
This may not have been most wise. It certainly was quite natural; and
the result is we find ourselves in almost as ludicrous a plight as the
African in the story, who, after a sermon from his missionary pleading
for the habiliments of civilization, complacently donned a Gladstone hat
leaving the rest of his body in its primitive simplicity of attire. Like
him we began at the wrong end. Wealth must pave the way for learning.
Intellect, whether of races or individuals, cannot soar to the
consummation of those sublime products which immortalize genius, while
the general mind is assaulted and burdened with “what shall we eat, what
shall we drink, and wherewithal shall we be clothed.” Work must first
create wealth, and wealth leisure, before the untrammeled intellect of
the Negro, or any other race, can truly vindicate its capabilities.
Something has been done intellectually we all know. That one black man
has written a Greek grammar is enough to answer Calhoun’s sneer; but it
is leisure, the natural outgrowth of work and wealth, which must furnish
room, opportunity, possibility for the highest endeavor and most
brilliant achievement. Labor must be the solid foundation stone—the
_sine qua non_ of our material value; and the only effective preparation
for success in this, as it seems to me, lies in the establishment of
industrial and technical schools for teaching our colored youth trades.
This necessity is obvious for several reasons. First, a colored child,
in most cases, can secure a trade in no other way. We had master
mechanics while the Negro was a chattel, and the ingenuity of brain and
hand served to enrich the coffers of his owner. But to-day skilled labor
is steadily drifting into the hands of white workmen—mostly foreigners.
Here it is cornered. The white engineer holds a tight monopoly both of
the labor market and of the science of his craft. Nothing would induce
him to take a colored apprentice or even to work beside a colored
workman. Unless then trades are to fall among the lost arts for us as a
people, they must be engrafted on those benevolent institutions for
Negro training established throughout the land. The youth must be taught
to use his trigonometry in surveying his own and his neighbor’s farm; to
employ his geology and chemistry in finding out the nature of the soil,
the constituents drafted from it by each year’s crop and the best way to
meet the demand by the use of suitable renewers; to apply his mechanics
and physics to the construction and handling of machinery—to the
intelligent management of iron works and water works and steam works and
electric works. One mind in a family or in a town may show a penchant
for art, for literature, for the learned professions, or more bookish
lore. You will know it when it is there. No need to probe for it. It is
a light that cannot be hid under a bushel—and I would try to enable that
mind to go the full length of its desires. Let it follow its bent and
develop its talent as far as possible: and the whole community might
well be glad to contribute its labor and money for the sustenance and
cultivation of this brain. Just as earth gives its raw material, its
carbons, hydrogen, and oxygen, for the tree which is to elaborate them
into foliage, flower and fruit, so the baser elements, bread and money
furnished the true brain worker come back to us with compound interest
in the rich thought, the invention, the poem, the painting, the statue.
Only let us recognize our assignment and not squander our portion in
over fond experiments. James Russell Lowell says, “As we cannot make a
silk purse out of a sow’s ear, no more can we perform the opposite
experiment without having a fine lot of spoiled silk on our hands.”
With most of us, however, the material, such as it is, has been already
delivered. The working of it up is also well under way. The gold, the
silver, the wood, the hay, the stubble, whatever there was at hand has
all gone in. Now can the world use it? Is there a demand for it, does it
perform the functions for which it was made, and is its usefulness
greater than the cost of its production? Does it pay expenses and have
anything over.
The world in putting these crucial questions to men and women, or to
races and nations, classifies them under two heads—as consumers or
producers. The man who consumes as much as he produces is simply _nil_.
It is no matter to the world economically speaking whether he is in it
or out of it. He is merely one more to count in taking the census. The
man who consumes more than he produces is a destroyer of the world’s
wealth and should be estimated precisely as the housekeeper estimates
moths and mice. These are the world’s parasites, the shirks, the lazy
lubbers who hang around rum shops and enter into mutual relationships
with lamp posts to bear each the other’s burdens, moralizing all the
while (wondrous moralists and orators they often are!) and insisting
that the world owes them a living! To be sure the world owes them
nothing of the kind. The world would consider it a happy riddance from
bad rubbish if they would pay up their debt and move over to Mars. Every
day they live their unproductive bodies sink and destroy a regular
portion of the world’s values. At the very lowest estimate, a boy who
has reached the age of twenty, has already burned up between three and
four thousand dollars of the world’s possessions. This is on the very
closest and most economical count; I charge him nothing for fuel or
lights, allowing him to have warmed by fires that would have burned for
others and estimating the cost simply of what he has eaten and worn, _i.
e._ the amount which he has actually sunk of the world’s wealth. I put
his board at the moderate sum of ten dollars per month, and charge him
the phenomenally small amount of thirty dollars a year for clothing and
incidentals. This in twenty years gives him a debt of three thousand
dollars, which no honest man should be willing to leave the world
without settling. The world does not owe them a living then—the world
only waits for them to square up and change their residence. It is only
they who produce more than they consume, that the world owes, or even
acknowledges as having any practical value.
Now to which class do we belong? The question must in the first place be
an individual one for every man of whatever race: Am I giving to the
world an equivalent of what it has given and is giving me? Have I a
margin on the outside of consumption for surplus production? We owe it
to the world to give out at least as much as we have taken in, but if we
aim to be accounted a positive value we must leave it a little richer
than we found it. The boy who dies at twenty leaving three thousand
dollars in bank to help another, has just paid expenses. If he lives
longer it increases his debit and should be balanced by a corresponding
increase on the credit side. The life that serves to develop another,
the mother who toils to educate her boy, the father who invests his
stored-up capital in education, giving to the world the energies and
usefulness of his children trained into a well disciplined manhood and
womanhood has paid his debt in the very richest coin,—a coin which is
always legal tender, a priceless gift, the most precious payment we can
make for what we have received. And we may be sure, if we can give no
more than a symmetric life, an inspiring thought, a spark caught from a
noble endeavor, its value will not be lost.
Previous to 1793 America was able to produce unlimited quantities of
cotton, but unable to free the fibre from the seeds. Eli Whitney came to
the rescue of the strangled industry and perfected a machine which did
the work needed. The deliverance which he wrought was complete. The
following year America’s exports of cotton to England were increased
from not one pound in previous years to 1,600,000 pounds. He gave
dollars.
Just before the battle of Quebec Wolf repeated and enjoyed Gray’s Elegy
saying he valued that gem more highly than the capture of the city
before which he was encamped. The next day the city was taken and Wolf
was laid to rest. But the world is in debt to both the poet and the
soldier—a boundless debt, to the one for an eternal thought-gem, to the
other for immortal heroism and devoted patriotism.
Once there lived among men One whom sorrowing millions for centuries
since have joyed to call friend—One whose “come unto me ye that are
heavy laden” has given solace and comfort to myriads of the human race.
_He gave a life._
We must as individuals compare our cost with what we are able to give.
The worth of a race or a nation can be but the aggregate worth of its
men and women. While we need not indulge in offensive boasting, it may
not be out of place in a land where there is some adverse criticism and
not a little unreasonable prejudice, quietly to take account of stock
and see if we really represent a value in this great American
commonwealth. The average American is never too prejudiced, I think, to
have a keen appreciation for the utilities; and he is certainly not
behind the rest of the world in his clear perception of the purchasing
power of a dollar. Beginning here, then, I find that, exclusive of the
billions of wealth _given_ by them to enrich another race prior to the
passage of the Thirteenth Amendment, the colored people of America
to-day hold in their own right $264,000,000 of taxable property; and
this is over and above the $50,000,000 which collapsed in the Freedman’s
Savings Bank when that gigantic iniquity paralyzed the hope and shocked
the faith of an inexperienced and unfinancial people.
One would like to be able to give reliable statistics of the
agricultural and mechanical products of the colored laborer, but so far
I have not been able to obtain them. It is a modest estimate, I am sure,
to ascribe fully two-thirds of the 6,940,000 bales of cotton produced in
1888 to Negro cultivation. The reports give estimates only in bulk as to
the products of a state or county. Our efficient and capable census
enumerators never draw the color line on labor products. You have no
trouble in turning to the page that shows exactly what percentage of
colored people are illiterate, or just how many have been condemned by
the courts; no use taking the trouble to specify whether it was for the
larceny of a ginger cake, or for robbing a bank of a cool half million
and skipping off to Canada: it’s all crime of course, and crime
statistics and illiteracy statistics must be accurately detailed—and
colored.
Similar commendable handling meets the colored producer from the
managers of our Big American Show at Chicago which we are all so
nervously anxious shall put the best foot foremost in bowing to the
crowned heads and the gracious lords and ladies from over the waters. To
allow any invention or mechanism, art or farm product to be accredited a
black man would be drawing the color line! And our immaculate American
could never be guilty of anything so vile as drawing a color line!!!
I am unable to say accurately, then, just how many bales of cotton,
pounds of tobacco, barrels of molasses and bushels of corn and wheat are
given to the world through Negro industry. The same difficulty is met in
securing authentic information concerning their inventions and patents.
The records of the Patent Office at Washington do not show whether a
patentee is white or colored. And all inventions and original
suggestions made by a colored man before emancipation were necessarily
accredited to some white individual, a slave not being able to take the
oath administered to the applicant for a patent. Prof. Wright, however,
by simply collecting through personal inquiry the number of colored
patentees which could be remembered and identified by examiners and
attorneys practicing before the Patent Office authorities, published
upwards of fifty in the A. M. E. Review for April, 1886. Doubtless this
number was far within the truth, and many new patents have been taken
out since his count was made. Almost daily in my walk I pass an ordinary
looking black man, who, I am told, is considering an offer of $30,000
for his patent rights on a corn planter, which, by the way, has been
chosen as part of the Ohio exhibit for the Columbian Exposition. He has
secured as many as half a dozen patents within a few years and is
carrying around a “new machine” in his head every day.
Granville Wood, of Cincinnati, has given valuable returns to the world
as an electrician; and there is no estimating the money in the outright
gift of this people through unremunerated toil. The Negro does not
always show a margin over and above consumption; but this does not
necessarily in his case prove that he is not a producer. During the
agitations for adverse legislation against the Chinese, the charge was
alleged that they spent nothing in the country. They hoarded their
earnings, lived on nothing, and finally returned to China to live in
luxury and to circulate the wealth amassed in this country. A similar
complaint can never be lodged against the Negro. Poor fellow, he
generally lives pretty well up to his income. He labors for little and
spends it all. He has never yet gained the full consent of his mind to
“take his gruel a little thinner” till his little pile has grown a bit.
He does not like to seem short. And had he the wage of a thousand a year
his bigheartedness would immediately put him under the painful necessity
of having it do the entertainment of five thousand. He must eat, and is
miserable if he can’t dress; and seems on the whole internally fitted
every way to the style and pattern of a millionaire, rather than to the
plain, plodding, stingy old path of common sense and economy. This is a
flaw in the _material_ of the creature. The grain just naturally runs
that way. If our basal question of economics were put to him: “_What do
you give—are you adding something every year to the world’s stored up
capital?_” His ingenuous answer would be, as the ghost of a smile flits
across his mobile lips—“Yea, Lord; I give back _all_. I am even now
living on the prospects of next year’s income. I give my labor at
accommodation rates, and forthwith reconvert my wages into the general
circulation. Funds, somehow, don’t seem to stick to me. I have no
talents, or smaller coins either, hid in a napkin.” It will be well for
him to learn, however, that it is not what we make but what we save that
constitutes wealth. The hod-carrier who toils for $1.50 a day, spending
the dollar and laying up the half, is richer than the congressman with
an annual income of $5000 and annual duns of $8000. What he most
urgently needs to learn is systematic saving. He works hard enough
generally—but does not seem able to retrench expenses—to cut off the
luxuries which people of greater income and larger foresight, seeing to
be costly and unnecessary would deny themselves. He wants to set to work
vigorously to widen the margin outside the expenditures. He cannot be
too deeply impressed with the fact that tobacco and liquors—even leaving
out their moral aspects—are too costly to be indulged in by any who are
not living on the interest of capital ready in store. A man living on
his earnings should eschew luxuries, if he wishes to produce wealth. But
when those luxuries deteriorate manhood, they impoverish and destroy the
most precious commodity we can offer the world.