only a review of statistics to answer the above question, for where
once was the rude cabin, and one-room hut, we now see the beautiful
homes with well kept stock and farm, hygienic stables as well as
artistic lawns. The first experiment the general masses of negroes had
in the saving of money was under that institution known as "The
Freedman's Saving and Trust Company." The institution started out
under the most favorable auspices. The depositors numbered among its
rank and file, day laborers, farmers, mechanics, house-servants,
barbers and washerwomen; thus showing to the entire country that the
emancipated Negro was not only working but by industry and economy was
saving his earnings. We know too well of the misplaced confidence in
that bank and how after a short time the bank failed and thousands of
colored men and women lost their earnings. During the brief period of
its existence $57,000,000 were deposited. Although the Freedman's Bank
caused many a colored person to shrink from any banking institution,
yet some were hopeful and again began to save money. Throughout the
entire South we find scores of colored men who have excellent farms,
elegant homes and small fortunes.
"In Baltimore a company of colored men own a ship-dock and transact a
large business. Some of the largest orange plantations in Florida are
owned by colored men. On most of the plantations, and in many of the
large towns and cities colored mechanics are quite numerous."
The total amount of property owned by the colored people in all the
states is rated at over $400,000,000.
In the North, East and West we see many colored men with handsome
estates run high into the hundred thousands. Almost every large city
and town will show among her population a Negro here and there whose
wealth is rated between five and ten thousand dollars or more.
Rev. A. G. Davis of Raleigh, N. C., in an address at the North
Carolina Agricultural Fair, said, "Scan, if you will, the long line of
eight million Negroes as they march slowly but surely up the road of
progress, and you will find in her ranks such men as Granville T.
Woods, of Ohio, the electrician, mechanical engineer, manufacturer of
telephones, telegraph and electrical instruments; William Still, of
Philadelphia, the coal dealer; Henry Tanner, the artist; John W.
Terry, foreman of the iron and fitting department of the Chicago West
Division Street Car Company; J. D. Baltimore, engineer, machinist, and
inventor, of Washington, D. C.; Wiley Jones, of Pine Bluff, Arkansas,
the owner of a street car railroad, race track and park; Richard
Hancock, foreman of the pattern shops of the Eagle Works and
Manufacturing Company, and draughtsman; John Beack, the inventor,
whose inventions are worth tens of thousands of dollars; W. C. Atwood,
the lumber merchant and capitalist."
And now in review let me add that the social conditions of the
American Negro are such that he has shown to the world his aptitude
for study and general improvement.
Before character, education and wealth, all barriers will melt, and
these are necessary to develop the growth of the race.
From abject serfdom and pauperism he has risen to a plane far above
the masses of any race of people.
By his industry and frugality he has made himself master of any
situation into which he has been placed, and none will deny that his
achievements along all lines have been commensurate with his
opportunities.
SECOND PAPER.
DID THE AMERICAN NEGRO MAKE, IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY, ACHIEVEMENTS
ALONG THE LINES OF WEALTH, MORALITY, EDUCATION, ETC., COMMENSURATE
WITH HIS OPPORTUNITIES? IF SO, WHAT ACHIEVEMENTS DID HE MAKE?
BY JOSEPHINE SILONE YATES.
[Illustration: Mrs. Josephine Silone Yates]
MRS. JOSEPHINE SILONE YATES.
Mrs. Josephine Yates, youngest daughter of Alexander and
Parthenia Reeve-Silone, was born in Mattiluck, Suffolk
County, N. Y., where her parents, grandparents and
great-grandparents were long and favorably known as
individuals of sterling worth, morally, intellectually and
physically speaking. On the maternal side Mrs. Yates is a
niece of the Rev. J. B. Reeve, D. D., of Philadelphia.
Mrs. Silone, a woman of education and great refinement of
character, began the work of educating this daughter in her
quiet, Christian home, and both parents hoping that she
might develop into a useful woman spared no pains in
endeavoring to secure for her the education the child very
early showed a desire to obtain; and with this end in view
she was sent to Newport, R. I., in her fourteenth year,
having already spent one year at the Institute for Colored
Youth in Philadelphia, and Mrs. Coppin, then Miss Fannie
Jackson, with her vigorous intellect, aided the inspiration
the mother had begun. In 1877 Miss Silone graduated as
valedictorian of a large class from Rogers High School of
Newport; and although the only Colored member of her class,
and the first graduate of color, invariably she was treated
with the utmost courtesy by teachers, scholars and such
members of the School Board as Thomas Wentworth Higginson,
T. Coggeshall, and others.
Two years later she graduated from the Rhode Island State
Normal School in Providence, and soon began her life work as
a teacher. During the eight years spent in Lincoln
Institute, Jefferson City, Mo., she had charge of the
Department of Natural Science, and was the first woman to be
elected to a professorship in that institution.
In 1889 Miss Silone was married to Prof. W. W. Yates,
principal of Phillips School, Kansas City, Mo., and removed
to that city, where since she has been engaged in either
public or private school work.
From the age of nine years she has been writing for the
press, and her articles have appeared in many leading
periodicals--for a long time under the signature "R. K.
Potter." Mrs. Yates has long been a zealous club worker and
is well known as a lecturer East and West. She was one of
the organizers and the first President of the Kansas City
Woman's League; and in the summer of 1901 was elected
President of the National Association of Colored Women,
which organization she had already served as Treasurer for a
period of four years.
Mrs. Yates is the mother of two children, whose education
she carefully superintends, and is ever ready to comfort the
sick or to stop her round of duties to give counsel or
render help along any line possible to the many young people
and others who seek her door.
The measure of the success of a race is the depths from which it has
come, and the condition under which it has developed. To know what the
Negro actually accomplished in the nineteenth century, one must know
something of his life and habitat previous to the year 1619, when
against his will or wish, he was brought to the Virginian coast; must
also know his life as a slave, and his opportunities since
emancipation.
History shows that the Negroes brought from Africa to this country to
be sold into slavery were at the time in a more or less primitive
stage of uncivilized life; while the methods used to capture and
transport them to this "land of the free and home of the brave,"
recently revived through the vivid pen pictures and other
illustrations running in serial form in Scribner's, Pearson's and
other reliable periodicals (accounts which bear the impress of truth,
and are hardly liable to the charge of having been written within too
close range of time and space, or vice versa, to be strictly
truthful), indicate the demoralizing and debasing effects of the
"system" from its initial period, this followed up by the blighting
influences of slave life, even under the most favorable conditions,
for nearly two hundred and fifty years, left upon Negro life and
character just the traits it would have left upon any other people
subjected to similar conditions for the same length of time.
It may be said, and with truth, that slavery gave to the Negro some of
the arts of civilized life; but it must be added, that, denying him
the inalienable rights of manhood, denying him the right to the
product of his labor, it left him no noble incentive to labor at these
arts, and thus tended to render him improvident, careless, shiftless,
in short, to demoralize his entire nature.
It is further stated that the system gave him Christianity. Did it
give him piety? Could it give him morality in the highest sense of
these terms?
Constantine could march the refractory Saxons to the banks of a stream
and give them their option between Christianity and the sword, but the
haughty monarch soon found that a religion forced in this peremptory
and wholesale fashion did not change the moral nature of the soldier;
and we submit that Christianity, language, and the arts of civilized
life, absorbed amidst the debasing influences of a cruel and infamous
bondage could not be productive of a harmonious development of body,
mind and soul; of strong moral and intellectual fiber; or of ideas of
the dignity of labor; of habits of thrift, economy, the careful
expenditure of time and money; or knowledge of the intimate
relationship of these two great factors in the process of
civilization. These are results attained only where the rights of
manhood and womanhood are acknowledged and respected. The lack of
these results or basic impulses to advancement represent defects in
the Negro character, preventing a more rapid development in the
nineteenth century and directly traceable to his enslaved state; and
the origin or cause, the growth and subsequent development of these,
and other defects, must be taken into consideration before the Negro
is stamped as the greatest criminal on earth, wholly irredeemable;
before he is condemned in wholesale manner for not having made more
rapid strides toward advanced civilization in little more than one
generation of freedom. Indeed, it speaks well for the intrinsic merit
of the race, that although public opinion freely admits that the
natural outcome of bondage is a cowardly, thieving, brutal, or abject
specimen of humanity, even in the darkest hours of slavery, there were
many, many, high-born souls who, if necessary, at the price of life
itself, maintained their integrity, rose superior to their
surroundings, taught these same lofty sentiments to others.
Emancipation and certain constitutional amendments brought freedom to
the material body of the erstwhile slave, but the soul, the higher
self, could not be so easily freed from the evils that slavery had
fastened upon it through centuries of debasement; and because of this
soul degradation the Negro, no less than the South, needed to be
physically, mentally and morally reconstructed.
Reconstruction, the eradication of former characteristics, the growth
and development of new and more favorable ones, is with any race the
work of time. Generations must pass, and still it need not be expected
that the process will be full and complete; meanwhile, what measure of
success is the Negro achieving? Were his achievements in the
nineteenth century, educationally, morally, financially and otherwise
at all commensurate with his opportunities?
The year 1863 saw four million Negroes come forth from a state of
cruel bondage with little of this world's goods that constitute
capital; with few of those incentives to labor that universally are
requisites to the full and free development of labor and capital. The
knowledge the Negro had of agriculture, of domestic life, and in some
cases, his high-grade mechanical skill, gave him something of a
vantage ground, but for nearly two hundred and fifty years he had been
so "worked" that it would be expecting too much to demand that he at
once comprehend the true dignity of labor. Nor was it to be expected
that to his untutored mind freedom and work were terms to be
intimately associated. Then there was a certain amount of
constitutional inertia to be overcome, a natural heritage of the
native of a tropical or semi-tropical climate, but quite incompatible
with the fierce competition of American civilization, or with the
material conditions of a people who owned in the entire country forty
years ago, only a few thousand dollars; and among whom education was
limited to the favored few whose previous estate either of freedom,
or by other propitious circumstance, had rendered its acquisition
possible. Organizations for business enterprise or any purpose of
reform and advancement, outside of the Northern cities, was
practically unknown.
Evidently one of the first things to be done by which the Negro could
be reconstructed and become an intelligent member of society was to
educate him; teach him to provide for himself; making him more
provident and painstaking; teaching him self-reliance and
self-control; teaching him the value of time, of money, and the
intimate relationship of the two. Certainly not a light task. These
lessons could only be learned in the practical school of experience,
then, not in a day. And what has been accomplished? Forty years ago
there was not in the entire Southland a single Negro school; before
the close of the nineteenth century there were twenty thousand Negro
school houses, thirty thousand Negro teachers, and three million Negro
school children happily wending their way to the "Pierian Spring."
Under the "system," generally speaking, it had been considered a crime
to teach the Negro to read or write; and the census of 1870 shows that
only two-tenths of all the Negroes of the United States, over ten
years of age, could write. Ten years later, the proportion had
increased to three-tenths of the whole number; while in 1890 only a
generation after emancipation, forty-three per cent of those ten years
and over were able to read and write; this proportion before the close
of the century reached forty-five per cent.
To wipe out forty-five per cent of illiteracy in less than forty
years; to find millions of children in the common schools; to find
twenty thousand Negroes learning trades under the soul inspiring
banner of free labor; to find other thousands successfully operating
many commercial enterprises; among these, several banks, one cotton
mill, and one silk mill; to find Negroes performing four-fifths of the
free labor of the South, thus becoming a strong industrial factor of
the section is to furnish proof of achievements in the nineteenth
century of which we need not be ashamed; and considering the
restrictions of labor unions, the fields or classes of labor from
which the Negro is practically barred regardless of section, quite
commensurate with the opportunities afforded him during the period in
question.
Within forty years the system of instruction in the American schools
has undergone some radical changes for the better; and if the system
in vogue at the beginning of this period, with the study of the
classics as the pivotal point, did not fit the practical needs of the
average Anglo-Saxon youth, with his heritage of centuries of culture,
it is not strange if some blunders were made in attempting to shape
this same classical education into a working basis for a people
emerging from a state of bondage in which to impart even the elements
of education, was considered a crime, generally speaking.
Industrial, manual, or technical training had not, forty years ago,
taken firm hold upon the educational system, and school courses for
Negroes were planned after classical models, perhaps better suited in
many instances for students of a more advanced mentality and
civilization; for humanity at large can scarcely hope to escape the
slow and inevitable stages and processes of evolution. Individual
genius, however, bound by no law, may leap and bound from stage to
stage; and we point with pride to Negroes whose classic education in
the early decades of freedom served not only to prove their own
individual ability, but the capacity of the race for, and
susceptibility to, a high degree of culture at a time when such
demonstration was a prime necessity.
We do not consider that any mistake was made in at once providing for
the classical or higher education of those who were mentally able to
receive it, and as brilliant achievements of the nineteenth century
from an educational standpoint, we refer with a keen sense of
gratification to the two thousand five hundred and twenty-five or more
college graduates who are helping to raise the standard of the race
from all points of view; to the real genius of the race that has given
us Douglass, Langston, Bruce, Washington, Tanner, Scarborough, Page,
Grisham, Miller, Dubois, Wright, Bowen, Crogman, Johnson, Dunbar,
Chestnutt and others too numerous to mention, whose names should be
enshrined in the hearts of present and future generations; to the
forty thousand Negro students pursuing courses in higher institutions
of learning; to the twelve thousand pursuing classical courses; to the
one hundred and twenty thousand taking scientific courses; to the one
hundred and fifty-six institutions for the higher education of
Negroes; to the two thousand practicing physicians; to the three
hundred newspapers and the five hundred books written and published by
Negroes; to a gradually increasing discrimination in all those matters
of taste and form which mark the social status of a people, and give
to the individual, or the mass, the, perhaps, indefinable, but at the
same time, distinctive, stamp of culture.
These achievements, alone, within less than forty years of freedom,
serve to demonstrate our fitness for civilization, and also, that as
the years pass there is a still greater necessity for Negroes who
possess a broad, a liberal, a well balanced education; and at the same
time a similar need for Negroes possessing shrewd, business ability; a
high degree of mechanical skill; extensive knowledge of industrial
arts and sciences, and of profitably invested capital.
From the early years of freedom a few leaders, as at Hampton,
realized, that the great mass of Negroes needed first of all
experimental knowledge of the dignity of labor such as could never
result from labor performed under the conditions of slavery; that they
needed to know more of skilled labor in order to be able to meet and
enter the fierce competition of American industrial life, or even to
live upon the plane of American civilization; and in spite of adverse
criticism, these leaders proceeded to establish industrial and manual
training schools for the Negro, with such elementary training as from
their point of view seemed most beneficial. That the methods chosen
have been rich in results, it is only necessary to know something of
the deep and extensive influence of Hampton, Tuskegee, Normal, and
other industrial schools, in directly, or indirectly, improving the
environment and daily life of the masses.
The insidious and ultimate effect of slavery upon the normal and
spiritual nature of the enslaved is to blunt, to entirely efface the
finer instincts and sensibilities, to take away those germs of manhood
and womanhood that distinguish the lowest savage from the beasts of
the field. Continue this soul-debasement for centuries, deny the slave
the right to home, the right to family--ties which universally prove
the greatest stimulus to courage, patriotism, morality,
civilization--then declare the emancipated slave a brute, for whom
education does nothing, because in little more than a generation he
has not wiped out all of the degradation that the conditions of
generations instilled and intensified!
Criminologists, discussing the apparent increase of crime in this
country, assert that this apparent increase is largely due to the more
complete records kept of criminals within the last forty years than
formerly, and the better facilities for ferreting out crime and for
subjecting offenders to the penalty of the law; and it may be added,
in the Negro's case, as recently stated by a Kansas City judge, a
native of Georgia, noted for his unprejudiced views and fair dealing,
"It takes less evidence to convict a Negro than it does a white man;
and a longer term in the penitentiary will be given a Negro for the
same offense than will be given a white offender. That is why I have
been so frequently compelled to cut down the sentence of Negroes." The
entire history of the chain-gang system corroborates these
statements--a system that helps to increase the reported number of
criminals; and although race riots, lynchings and massacres may seem
to indicate the opposite to the uninitiated, the Negro is not a
lawless element of society. In the United States a natural
restlessness has possessed him since emancipation, and it requires
time to work out and adjust conditions under which he can develop
normally from the standpoint of morality as well as from other points
of view. Meanwhile, the prime necessity to raise the moral status is
the development and upbuilding of that which in its highest
embodiment, was denied him in the days of bondage--the home. We need
homes, homes, homes, where intelligence and morality rule. And what
was accomplished in this line in the nineteenth century? From owning
comparatively few homes forty years ago, the Negro advanced before the
close of the century to the position of occupying one million five
hundred thousand farms and homes; and of owning two hundred and
seventy-five thousand of these; many of them, as shown by views,
forming a part of the exhibit at the Paris Exposition and elsewhere,
compare favorably with the homes of any people.
As to the intelligence and morality that constitute the environment of
the great mass of these homes owned by Negroes, the statistics of
education and of crime show that Negro criminals do not, as a rule,
come from the refined and educated classes, but from the most
illiterate, the stupid, and the besotted element; from the class that
has not been reached by the moral side of education, if at all. Says
the compiler of the eleventh census: "Of juvenile criminals the
smallest ratio is found among Negroes." This speaks well for the
general atmosphere of the home life of our youth; while the bravery
displayed by the colored man in every war of American independence has
demonstrated his ability to risk life fearlessly "in defense of a
country in which too many states permit his exclusion from the rights
of citizenship." Such sacrifice presupposes a moral ideal of the
highest type.
The position of the women of the race, always an index to the real
progress of a people, in spite of slanderous attacks from unscrupulous
members of her own and other races, is gradually improving, and was
materially aided and abetted by the liberal ideas that especially
obtained in the latter half of the century with reference to the
development of women--irrespective of race or color--along the line of
education, the professions, the industrial arts, etc.
As to the advancement of the Negro from a financial standpoint, it is
possible that his achievements during the period in question might
have been greater; yet both from within and without there have been
many hindrances to overcome in the matter of accumulating wealth.
One of the greatest crimes of the slave system was that in practically
denying to the slave the right to the product of his labor or any part
thereof; it, to all intents and purposes destroyed his acquisitive
faculty; thus he had small incentive to labor when free; and as the
years went by, accumulated little in the shape of capital; showed
little interest in profitable investment of his savings, if he were so
fortunate as to have any. The great number of secret orders, and other
schemes for the unwary, the main object of which apparently was to
"bury the people" with great pomp and show, drained his pockets of
most of the surplus change.