Mechanicsville, Sumter County, South Carolina. His parents
were slaves and his father, a Baptist minister, is still
alive. Mr. Gilbert began his early school life during the
reconstruction period, at Mechanicsville, and continued it
at Mannville, in an adjoining township, until 1879, when he
entered Benedict College (then Benedict Institute) at
Columbia, South Carolina. He remained in Benedict till the
spring of 1883, when he graduated from a classical course
specially designed to fit him for a Northern college. In the
fall of 1883, after a searching examination, he entered the
freshman class of Colgate University and remained in that
institution four years, until his graduation in 1887 with
the degree of A. B. During his college course Mr. Gilbert
particularly distinguished himself in the languages and
oratory. During his sophomore year he won in an oratorical
contest the First Kingsford Prize. Although the only colored
man in his class, yet he was so highly esteemed by his
classmates that he enjoyed the unique distinction of being
elected every three months for four years as Class Secretary
and Treasurer. In addition to this he was elected Class
Historian in his senior year. His alma mater conferred on
him the degree of A. M. in 1890. Immediately after his
graduation Mr. Gilbert was called to the pastorate of the
First Colored Baptist Church at Nashville, Tenn. He remained
in this position three years and a half and then he accepted
the call of the Bethel Baptist Church of Jacksonville, Fla.
He was not permitted by his denomination to remain long in
this pastorate; for after one year in it, on the nomination
of the American Baptist Home Mission Society of New York, he
was elected to lead in the educational work among the
colored Baptists of Florida. He presided one year over the
Florida Institute at Live Oak, and he led in 1892 in the
founding of the Florida Baptist Academy (now college) at
Jacksonville, Fla. The cares and anxiety involved in this
work threatened his health and in 1894 he resigned this
position to accept the pastorate of a young church
organization in Savannah, Ga., having in the meantime
declined an election to the presidency of State University
at Louisville, Ky. In 1894 he was elected Vice-President and
Professor of History, Political Science, and Modern
Languages, in the Colored State College at Orangeburg, S. C.
He served in this capacity two years and after re-election
for a third year he resigned to re-enter upon his life-work
in the gospel ministry. He served a few months after this in
the office of General Missionary and Corresponding Secretary
of the Baptist State Convention of South Carolina, but this
work militating against his health he gave up to enter upon
the pastorate of the Central Baptist Church at Charleston,
S. C., where he now is. Mr. Gilbert received three years ago
the degree of D. D. from Guadalupe College of Seguin, Tex.
In 1883 Dr. Gilbert was married in Columbia, S. C., to Miss
Agnes Boozer. Seven children have been born to them, five of
whom are still living. Dr. Gilbert is much in demand as a
public speaker on great occasions and his services are
frequently sought by some of the best churches of his
denomination.
The necessity for asserting and maintaining the affirmative of the
above question is due to the deep-seated prejudice against the Negro,
which prejudice is the unfortunate fruit of the Negro's past
enslavement. It is not surprising that those who for centuries held
the Negro as a chattel should regard him as a being essentially
inferior to themselves, and time is required, in the changed condition
of affairs, to completely eradicate this idea. Even now, despite the
remarkable development of the Negro since his emancipation,
occasionally some Rip Van Winkle, awaking from a long sleep, essays to
deny the complete humanity of the Negro race. A true believer in the
Scriptures must be equally a believer in the fatherhood of God and the
brotherhood of all men. For the divine record declares that God "hath
made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of
the earth." Language, physiology and psychology confirm the
truthfulness of Scripture on this issue. The mission of Christianity
to preach the gospel over the inhabited world is based upon this great
idea. Science and Holy Writ assert the intellectual equality of all
men of whatever race or color, so far as real capacity and
possibilities are concerned.
The position and relative importance of a race or nation in the
world's history are determined more by its antecedents and
environments than by the original endowments of each individual that
constitutes it. Two different races, having the same antecedents and
subject to the same environments, will produce the same results. In
answering the question as to whether the Negro has demonstrated his
intellectual equality with the white man during the century just
closed, our inquiry must necessarily be confined to the closing third
of that century; for prior to the emancipation of the race the colored
people were generally in an enslaved condition. Opportunities for
education, citizenship, and the development of manhood, were few, and
at best could apply to but few of the race. Although our inquiry is
limited to only one-third of the century just closed, nevertheless we
can safely assert that in that short period the Negro has demonstrated
by actual results his intellectual equality with the white man.
1. The Negro has demonstrated in thirty-five years a capacity for
education equal to that of the white man. This remark does not apply
alone to his primary education, but also to the highest. He has
entered already every intellectual field that is open to him, and he
is achieving success in every one that he has entered. Within a third
of a century one hundred and fifty-six institutions for the higher
education of the Negroes have been founded, and from these and
Northern colleges there have been more than seventeen thousand
graduates. These colleges are located chiefly in the South, and their
courses of studies are as high as their neighboring white colleges; in
some instances they are higher. Some of these graduates have evinced
great ability and brilliancy in mastering the most difficult studies
included in the curriculum. The existence of Negro colleges and the
successful graduation of Negroes therefrom is a strong argument for
his intellectual equality. Nor has the Negro simply demonstrated his
ability to master the literary courses of the college, but also his
capacity to acquire the knowledge and training to fit him for life in
the various professions. Within a third of a century the race has
produced thirty thousand teachers, five hundred physicians, two
hundred and fifty lawyers, and a large number of others who have
entered the ministry, politics, and editorial life. If there is doubt
on the demonstration of the Negro's ability to acquire education in
his own colleges, we need only to mention the fact that his ambition
has led him to some of the leading Northern universities where he
studied at the side of white men, and even there he has demonstrated
his essential intellectual equality with the white man by winning, in
several well-known instances, some of their highest honors for
scholarship, proficiency and oratory.
2. The Negro has demonstrated his capacity for imparting an education
to others after he has himself received it. He is an essential and
established factor in the public school system of the South. It is he
that is intrusted with the primary education of his people, and it is
due largely to him that his people in thirty-five years have reduced
their illiteracy 45 per cent. During those thirty-five years he has
become professor of law, medicine, theology, mathematics, the
sciences, and languages. In the colleges devoted to the education of
the colored men, there are colored professors who have become eminent
in their departments and who would fill with credit similar chairs in
white institutions of learning. All of the colored state colleges of
the South are under the management of Negroes as presidents and
professors.
3. The Negro has also demonstrated his productivity in the field of
_authorship_. In this particular he has shown a white man's capacity.
In calling attention to the Negro's achievement in this particular, it
may be well to note the fact that the Negro's white neighbor, although
he lives in a clime similar to that which produced in Greece,
philosophers like Plato and Aristotle and poets like Homer, Euripides,
and Sophocles, and in Italy poets like Virgil and Horace, has not
produced a philosopher or a first-class poet, with all the leisure he
enjoyed while the Negro has been engaged in enforced labor for him. In
the highest field of thought as in philosophy and the works of
imagination the South presents a barren field. In the sphere of
authorship usually entered by white men the Negro has already worked
his way. He has already produced meritorious books on mathematics,
sociology, theology, history, poetry, travels, sermons, languages, and
biographies. There have been three hundred books written by Negroes.
4. Nor has the Negro's mind followed slavishly in the beaten path of
imitation. He has demonstrated that he possesses also a high order of
intellect by his inventive genius. The "lubricator" now being used on
nearly all the railroad engines in the United States was invented by a
colored man, Mr. E. McCoy, of Detroit, Michigan. Eugene Burkins, a
Negro, was inventor of the Burkins' Automatic Machine Gun, concerning
which Admiral Dewey said it was "by far the best machine gun ever
made." Many other useful inventions in the country are credited by the
Patent Office to the Negro.
5. The Negro has also demonstrated in thirty-five years his capacity
for organizing, controlling, and directing great and diversified
interests. Capacity to organize, maintain, and direct presupposes a
high order of mind. Executive ability requires accompanying
intellectual ability and not mere brilliancy. Unaided and alone the
Negro has set on foot great ecclesiastical organizations which he is
maintaining and developing with much credit to himself. In all these
organizations, leadership to the few has been cheerfully conceded by
the masses. As a church builder, with little means at his command, the
Negro stands without a peer. Within the last thirty-five years of the
nineteenth century the Negro has founded high schools, academies and
colleges, and he is successfully supporting and managing them. If it
is fair to estimate the ability and worth of men by real achievements,
then it must be conceded that the foremost man for real ability
throughout the entire South is a Negro, and we refer to the eminent
founder and developer of the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. It is
unquestionable in our mind that the greatest enterprise conceived and
executed by any one mind, in the entire South, during the past forty
years, was that conceived in the brains of a single Negro, the child
of a slave mother, that resulted in the world-renowned Tuskegee
Institute. The results at Tuskegee will demonstrate that the highest
order of mind in the South, as well as the most famous, is in the
keeping of the Negro. The leading Presbyterian institution of learning
in the South for the education of colored men is now managed
successfully by Negro scholars. We refer here to Biddle University.
6. In business and politics the Negro, despite the odds arrayed
against him, is succeeding reasonably well. He is constantly
undertaking new business enterprises, and wherever the government or
state has intrusted him with official position the intelligent Negro
has discharged his public functions with credit to the government and
glory for himself. Whenever failure is recorded against the Negro it
is not due to his lacking the mental endowments equal to that of the
white man, but because he was denied the white man's favorable past,
and because a white man's opportunity is denied him. Equality of
opportunities and equality before the laws should be cheerfully
granted him. Criticism against him is savage and un-Christian, if
these doors are closed against him.
TOPIC XVIII.
WHAT PROGRESS DID THE AMERICAN WHITE MAN MAKE, IN THE NINETEENTH
CENTURY, ALONG THE LINE OF CONCEDING TO THE NEGRO HIS RELIGIOUS,
POLITICAL, AND CIVIL RIGHTS?
BY JOHN W. CROMWELL.
[Illustration: J. W. Cromwell]
JOHN WESLEY CROMWELL.
John Wesley Cromwell, the twelfth child and seventh son of
Willis H. and Elizabeth Carney Cromwell, was born at
Portsmouth, Va., September 5, 1846. In 1851 the family moved
to Philadelphia, where he entered the public schools and
subsequently the Institute for Colored Youth, graduating in
1864.
He taught at Columbia, Pa., after which he established a
private school in his native town. Under the auspices of
Northern charitable associations he taught at Spanish Neck
and Little Gunpowder in Maryland, Providence Church, Scott
Farm, Charlotte County and Wytheville, Va. On the
inauguration of the public school system he became principal
of the Dill's Bakery School in Richmond, Va., and in the
following summer taught near the scene of the Nat Turner
Insurrection in Southampton County in the same State.
Mr. Cromwell took an active part in the reconstruction of
Virginia, was delegate to the first State Republican
Convention, did jury service in the United States Court for
the term at which the case of Jefferson Davis was
calendared, and was a clerk in the reconstruction
Constitutional Convention. A shot, fired with deadly intent,
grazed his clothing while at Spanish Neck, Md., where the
church in which the school was taught was burned to the
ground, and he was twice forced to face the muzzles of
revolvers in Virginia, because of his work as an educator.
In 1871 he entered the law department of Howard University,
graduating therefrom in 1874. In 1872, after a competitive
examination, having distanced two hundred and forty
applicants, he received a $1,200 appointment in the Treasury
Department, in which he was twice promoted, by the same
method, within twenty months. In 1885, in the early days of
the Cleveland administration, he was removed as an offensive
partisan, having established and conducted since 1876 "The
People's Advocate," a weekly journal of more than local
influence. He then began the practice of law in connection
with his journalistic work. In 1889 he was tendered and he
accepted a principalship of one of the grammar schools of
Washington, D. C., the position he still holds.
In 1875 he was chosen at Richmond the president of the
Virginia Educational and Historical Association and was four
times re-elected. He has served two terms as the president
of the "Bethel Literary," with which he has been officially
connected for twenty years. He was one of the original
members of the American Negro Academy founded by Rev.
Alexander Crummell, and is its corresponding secretary.
In 1873 he was married to Miss Lucy A. McGuinn, of Richmond,
Va. Six children survive of that marriage, the eldest being
Miss Otelia Cromwell, the first Colored graduate (1900) of
Smith College, Mass. In 1892 he married Miss Annie E. Conn,
of Mechanicsburg, Pa.
In 1887 he became a member of the Metropolitan A. M. E.
Church under the pastorate of Rev., now Chaplain, T. G.
Steward.
Among his addresses and papers are "The Negro in Business,"
"The Colored Church in America," "Nat Turner, a Historical
Sketch," "Benjamin Banneker," "The Negro as a Journalist,"
and other historical and statistical studies. The first
named, published for a syndicate of metropolitan newspapers
in 1886, found its way in one form or other in nearly all
the representative papers of the land.
The status of the Negro at the close of the eighteenth and the opening
of the nineteenth centuries was substantially the same, North and
South. These well-defined geographical sections on both sides of Mason
and Dixon's line were not as extensive then as now. Ohio, Kentucky and
Tennessee were the only states west of the Alleghanies; Florida was a
foreign possession, Alabama and the region beyond were to be numbered
with the United States at a subsequent period.
The colored population in 1800 was 1,001,436, free and slave, or 18.88
per cent of the entire population; 893,041 were slaves, of whom there
were in round numbers 30,000 in the states of New Hampshire, Rhode
Island, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, New York and Delaware; 20,000 were
in New York alone. In 1900 the total population is 76,303,387, with
8,840,789 persons of Negro descent, or 11.5 of the aggregate
population.
The year 1800 marks the beginning of an epoch of increasing hardship
for the Negro, both in church and state. It was also characterized by
fierce aggressiveness by the slave power, stimulated by the invention
of the cotton gin by Eli Whitney and the impetus which it gave to the
growth and importation of cotton. The acquisition of the Louisiana
Purchase from France added to the possible domain of slave territory
and affected the current of political action for more than half a
century.
During this period the Negro was a most important figure, both in
church and state, the occasion if not the cause of perplexing
problems. In the field of religion and politics, especially, has his
status attracted world-wide attention.
At a very early day the Methodist and Baptist churches had the largest
number of colored followers in both town and city; but these as yet
were not assembled in distinctive organizations. The right of the
Negro, not only to govern but to direct his religious instruction, was
bitterly contested, sometimes by force, at other times by law. The
high-handed manner in which the ordinary rights of worship were
denied the Negro led to the withdrawal of the majority of colored
Methodists in Pennsylvania, New York, Maryland and South Carolina, and
ultimately to the formation of the two denominations, the African
Methodist Episcopal and the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Churches,
that became independent before the end of the first quarter of the
last century.
As to the recognition of the right of colored Baptists to church
fellowship, the white Baptists were more liberal, for we find an
association of white churches recognizing the existence of a colored
Baptist church at Williamsburg, in 1790.
The first colored Episcopal society was received into membership on
the express condition that no delegate was to be admitted in any of
the diocesan conventions.[1] As early as 1801 Rev. John Chavis, a
Negro of North Carolina, was licensed by the Hanover Presbytery of
Virginia as a missionary to his own people.[2] The incompatibility of
an ordained minister of the same denomination being a slave was
recognized in the manumission of Rev. John Gloucester, the slave of
Rev. Gideon Blackburn, of Tennessee, on the organization of the first
colored Presbyterian church of the country, at Philadelphia, in 1807,
and the subsequent settlement of Rev. Gloucester as its pastor.[3]
That the white Baptists really manifested greater liberality in this
period is obvious, because we also find Jacob Bishop, a Negro, the
pastor of the First Baptist church of Portsmouth, Virginia, for a few
years.[4] The church was a large and influential one, and the
predecessor of Bishop, Rev. Thomas Armistead, had served with
distinction as a commissioned officer in the Revolutionary War.
To-day at all the general conferences of the M. E. and M. E.
South--both white--and of the A. M. E., A. M. E. Zion, and C. M. E.
denominations--all colored--fraternal delegations are exchanged with
all the courtesies bestowed by the two former on the two latter that
should prevail among brethren. A further concession is seen in the
fact of the elections of colored ministers of recognized scholarship
and fitness to important secretaryships and an editorship by the
powerful M. E. Church. Another illustration is the organization about
thirty years ago by the M. E. Church South of its colored membership
into the C. M. E. denomination and the liberal provision made by the
former connection for secondary education in the Payne Institute, at
Augusta, Georgia.
The Protestant Episcopal Church that forbade St. Thomas, Philadelphia,
and St. Phillips, New York, to aspire to membership in diocesan
conventions repealed this resolution after the breaking out of the
Civil War and delegates from these and other colored parishes
throughout the North and West, at least, find free admission.
Sixty years ago the application of so promising and talented a young
man as Alexander Crummell to be matriculated as a student in any of
the Episcopal divinity schools created a great shock in church
circles, and his rejection is set forth at length in Bishop
Wilberforce's History of American Episcopalianism; yet both at the New
York and Philadelphia theological seminaries numerous colored
clergymen, Episcopalian and others, now graduate with honor and
distinction.
To-day in the House of Bishops there are two colored prelates of
African descent, Rt. Rev. S. D. Ferguson, the Bishop of Africa, and
the Rt. Rev. James Theodore Holly, the Bishop of Hayti; the former a
native of South Carolina, the latter of the District of Columbia.
Their welcome to the pulpits of many of the most exclusive Episcopal
Churches and to the homes of their parishioners is in marked contrast
to the greeting of the Negro by the same communion only two
generations previously.
In the general assemblies of the Presbyterian Church to-day the
presence of colored commissioners is no novelty, and the faculty of
Biddle University, composed of colored professors, by the will of the
Presbyterian Board of Education, shows what this conservative body has
done in the recognition of Negro scholarship.
The conventions and associations of the Baptist Church in the South,
where the bulk of the black race dwell, are still on the color line,
yet there is progress towards true fraternal feeling here. Some years
since "The Religious Herald," of Richmond, Virginia, the leading
journal of that denomination in the South, announced among its paid
contributors the name of a prominent colored divine.
It must be said, nevertheless, that during the first half of the
nineteenth century the record of the white church on the Negro shows
not only a temporizing, but a cowardly spirit. This was true in some
respects of the Congregational Church;[5] instead of leading, the
church followed the state. The anti-slavery sentiment which was
unmistaken in the later years of the eighteenth century became with
the growth of commercialism and national expansion, quiescent and
subservient to the slave power. The right to vote, which in colonial
days was generally exercised by colored freeholders, was subsequently
either restricted or wholly denied. North Carolina, Maryland and
Tennessee in the South, and Pennsylvania in the North, disfranchised
their colored suffragists. The wave of disfranchisement then, as on
the threshold of the twentieth century, dashed from one state to
another. In the North repeated efforts were made to concede to the
Negro his complete political and civil rights. Though the sentiment in
his behalf became stronger at every trial of strength, yet with a
single exception--Wisconsin--each result was decisive against the
concession of the franchise to the Negro. It was only after a bloody
civil war, in which thousands of lives were sacrificed and billions of
treasure were expended, that the nation conceded to the Negro, first,
his freedom, next his civil rights, finally his political franchise.
One hundred years ago there were but few colored schools, even in the
free states, and these only in the larger towns and cities.
Philadelphia was in the lead, with New York a second and Boston a
third.
Connecticut, in the third decade of the nineteenth century, would not
permit Prudence Crandall to maintain a school of colored girls. The
means employed to break it up stands a blot on the name of the
commonwealth. A resolution of the National Convention of Colored Men,
held at Philadelphia, to establish a college for the education of
colored youths, at New Haven occasioned both fierce excitement and
bitter hostility.
Negroes could ride only on the top of the stagecoach when traveling,
and Jim Crow cars prevailed on the introduction of railroads. Angry
mobs were frequent. Churches and schools were the common target of
attack. In the opening of the West to settlement public sentiment
there against the Negroes found emphatic expression in Black Laws
forbidding with heavy penalties their permanent abode in that section.
These laws have only been removed in the memory of men still living.
In many communities, however, these laws were a dead letter, just as
to-day there are isolated localities in Indiana and Illinois, as in
Georgia and Texas, where no Negro is permitted to permanently abide.