As a member of the negro race, I myself have suffered as a child whose
parents were born in slavery, deprived of all influences of the
ennobling life, made obedient to the will of the white man by the lash
and chain, and sold to the highest bidder when there was no more use
for them.
The first negro fact for white thought is--that my clients, the
colored people here in America, are not responsible for being here any
more than they are responsible for their conditions of ignorance and
poverty. They suddenly emerge from their prison house poor, without a
home, without food or clothing, and ignorant. Now the enemies of God
and of the progress of civilization in our country are to-day
introducing a system of slavery with which they hope to again enslave
the colored people. To carry out their evil designs they retain able
politicians, lawyers and newspapers to represent them, such as Senator
Tillman, the Hon. John Temple Graves of Georgia and the Baltimore Sun,
and they are trying the negro on four counts which allege that the
race is ignorant, cannot be taught, is lazy and immoral.
Now, are the negroes, as a whole, guilty of these charges? In the
first place, the negro race of America is not ignorant. In the year
1833 John C. Calhoun, senator from South Carolina, is reported to have
said that if he could find a single negro who understood the Greek
syntax, he would believe the negro was human and would treat him as
such. At that time it was a very safe test. God accepted the challenge
in behalf of the negro race, and inspired his white sons and daughters
both in the North and South to teach their brothers in black; and a
few years afterward black men were examined and the world pronounced
them scholars, while later still the schools were using a Greek
grammar written by a black man, W. S. Scarborough of Wilberforce, O.
In his class were Frederick Douglas, Henry Highland Garnett, Robert
Elliot, the Rev. J. C. Price and John M. Langstone, as defenders of
the race. Bishop Allen Payne, Bishop Hood and John B. Reaver will ever
be remembered for their godly piety and Christian example, as we shall
also remember Bishop, Sumner and Bubois for their great literary
productions, William Washington Brown as the greatest organizer and
financier of the century, Prof. Booker Washington as the greatest
industrial educator of the world, and last, but not least, Thomas
Condon, the greatest crank for the spiritual training and higher
education of the negro race.
Under the leadership of such men, assisted by our white friends and
backed up by our colored race journals--the Christian Banner of
Philadelphia, the Christian Recorder, the Star of Zion and the
Afro-American Ledger of Baltimore, Ind., the National Baptist Union
of Pennsylvania, the Age of New York, the Christian Organizer of
Virginia and the Guardian of Boston--our onward march to civilization
is phenomenal and by these means we have reduced illiteracy 50 per
cent.
In the South we have over $12,000,000 worth of school property, 3,000
teachers, 50 high schools, 17 academies, 125 colleges, 10 law and
medical schools, 25 theological seminaries, all doing a mighty work
for God and humanity.
Now as to laziness. We have now in practice 14,000 lawyers and
doctors, and have accumulated over $150,000,000 worth of church
property. In the South we have over 150,000 farms and houses, valued
at $900,000,000, and personal property at $170,000,000. We have raised
over $11,000,000 for educational purposes. The property per capita for
every colored man, woman and child in the United States is estimated
at $75, and we are operating successfully several banks and factories;
we have 7,500,000 acres of land, and the business activity of the
colored people was never as thoroughly aroused as it is to-day.
When I come to deal with the charge of immorality I bow my head and
blush for shame, first because if the charge be true, I see they are
getting like the white man every day. I know that at the close of the
American civil war the 4,000,000 negroes had more than 25 per cent. of
white blood coursing through their veins.
What about this new educated negro? Just ask the Pullman Car Company,
which employs hundreds of negroes, into whose care thousands of women
and children of our best American families are entrusted every day.
Now, you cannot do without the negro, because if you send him away,
you will run after him. He is here to stay. The only way to deal
successfully with the colored race is God's way. First, recognize that
he is your guest; second, recognize that you have robbed him of his
birthplace, home, family and savings. It is these facts that are
causing so much unrest on the part of the whites in this country. The
negro loves his country, which he has proved beyond a doubt in every
American battle, in every act of loyalty to his country, and in his
long and patient suffering. Pay him what you owe him by educating him.
Give him an opportunity to live. Allow him to live in decent parts of
your city. Pay wages sufficient to support his children. Do this and
God will remove the objectionable negro from the land.
* * * * *
The Negro stands to-day upon an eminence that overlooks more than two
decades spent in efforts to ameliorate the condition of seven million
immortal souls by opening before their hitherto dark and cheerless
lives possibilities of development into a perfect and symmetrical
manhood and womanhood.
The retrospect presents to us a picture of a people's moral
degradation and mental gloom caused by slavery. A people absolutely
sunk in the lowest depth of a poverty which reduced them to objects of
charity and surrounded them with difficulties which have ever stood as
impregnable barriers in their way to speedy advancement in all those
qualities that make the useful citizen. Every influence of state and
society life seems to be against their progress and like some evil
genius, these Negro hating ghosts are forever hunting them with the
idea that their future must be one of subserviency to the white race.
Hated and oppressed by the combined wisdom, wealth and statesmanship
of a mighty confederacy who watched and criticised their mistakes
which were strongly magnified by those who fain would write
destruction upon the Emancipation; they are expected to rise from this
condition.
The idea of giving to the newly enfranchised a sound, practical
education was considered at the dawn of freedom, an easy solution of
what as an unsolved problem threatened the perpetuity of republican
institutions. Within a year from the firing on Sumter, benevolent and
farsighted Northern friends had established schools from Washington to
the Gulf of Mexico, which became centers of light penetrating the
darkness and scattering the blessings of an enlightened manhood far
and wide.
The history of the world cannot produce a more affecting spectacle
than the growth of this mighty Christian philanthropy which, in
beginning amid the din of battle, has steadily marched on through
every opposing influence, and lifted a race from weakness to strength,
from poverty to wealth, from moral and intellectual nonentity to place
and power among the nations of the earth.
We have ten millions of colored people in the United States whose
condition is much better to-day than it was fifty years ago. Then he
had nothing, not even a name. To-day he has 160,000 farms under good
cultivation and valued at $4,000,000 and has personal property valued
at $200,000,000. In the Southland the negroes own 160 first-class drug
stores, nine banks, 13 building associations, and 100 insurance and
benefit companies, two street railways and an electric at
Jacksonville, Fla., which they started some few years ago when the
white people passed the Jim Crow law for that state.
Now it is reckoned that the negroes in the United States are paying
about $700,000,000 property taxes and this is only one-fifth of all
they have accumulated, for the negro is getting more like the white
people every day and has learned from him that it is not a sign of
loyalty and patriotism to publish his property at its full taxable
value.
In education and morals the progress is still greater. As you all
know, at the close of the war the whole race was practically
illiterate. It was a rare thing, indeed, to find a man of the race who
even knew his letters. In 1880 the illiteracy had fallen to 70 per
cent. and rapid strides along that line have been made ever since.
To-day there are 37,000 negro teachers in America, of which number
23,000 are regular graduates of high and normal schools and colleges,
23 are college presidents, 169 are principals of seminaries and many
are principals of higher institutions. At present there are 369 negro
men and women taking courses in the universities of Europe. The negro
ministry, together with these teachers have been prepared for their
work by our schools and are the greatest factors the North has
produced for the uplift of the colored man.
To-day there are those who wish to impede the negro's progress and
lessen his educational advantages by industrializing such colleges as
Howard University of Washington by placing on their Boards of Trustees
and Managers the pronounced leaders of industrialism, giving as a
reason that the better he is educated the worse he is; in other words,
they say crime has increased among educated negroes. While stern facts
show the opposite, the exact figures from the last census show that
the greater proportion of the negro criminals are from the illiterate
class. To-day the marriage vow, which by the teaching of the whites
the negro held to be of so little importance before the war, is
guarded more sacredly. The one room cabin, with its attendant evils,
is passing away, and the negro woman, the mightiest moral factor in
the life of her people, is beginning to be more careful in her
deportment and is no longer the easy victim of the unlicensed passion
of certain white men. This is a great gain and is a sign of real
progress, for no race can rise higher than its women.
Let me plead with the friends of the negro. Please continue to give
him higher ideals of a better life and stand by him in the struggle.
He has done well with the opportunities given him and is doing
something along all the walks of life to help himself, which is
gratitude of the best sort. What he needs to-day is moral sympathy,
which in his condition years ago he could hardly appreciate. The
sympathy must be moral, not necessarily social. It must be the
sympathy of a soul set on fire for righteousness and fair play in a
republic like ours. A sympathy which will see to it that every man
shall have a man's chance in all the affairs of this great nation
which boasts of being the land of the free and the home of the brave
for which the black man has suffered and done so much in every sense
of the word.
Let this great Christian nation of eighty millions of people do
justice to the Black Battalion, and seeing President Roosevelt
acknowledges that he overstepped the bounds of his power in
discharging and renouncing them before they had a fair trial, and now
that they are vindicated before the world, to take back what he called
them, Cutthroats, Brutal Murderers, Black Midnight Assassins, and
Cowards. This and this alone will to some extent atone for the wrong
he has done and help him to regain the respect and confidence of the
world.
Now in order to change the condition of things, I would suggest:
First, that an international, industrial association be formed to help
Afro-Americans to engage in manufacturing and commercial pursuits,
assist them to buy farms, erect factories, open shops in which their
young men and women can enter and produce what the world requires
every day for its inhabitants.
If they were able to-day to produce the articles in common use as
boots, shoes, hats, cotton and woolen goods, made-up clothing and
enterprises such as farming, mining, forging, carpentering, etc.,
negroes would find a ready sale in preference to all others, because
of its being a race enterprise, doing what no other corporation does,
giving employment to members of the race as tradesmen, and teaching
others to become skilled workers. These enterprises should be started
in the southern, northern and western states, where the negro
population will warrant such an undertaking.
I would suggest "A School History of the Negro Race" to be placed in
our public schools as a text book. The general tone of all the
histories taught in our public schools points to the inferiority of
the negro and the superiority of the white. It must be indeed a
stimulus to any people to be able to refer to their ancestry as
distinguished in deeds of valor, and particularly so to the colored
people. With what eyes can the white child look upon the colored child
and the colored child look upon himself, when they have completed the
assigned course of United States history, and in it found not one word
of credit, not one word of favorable comment for even one among the
millions of his fore-parents who have lived through nearly three
centuries of his country's history. In them he is credited with no
heritage of valor, he is mentioned only as a slave, while true
historical records prove him to have been among the bravest of
soldiers and a faithful producer of the nation's wealth. Though then a
slave to the government, the negro's was the first blood shed in its
defence in those days when a foreign foe threatened its destruction.
In each and all of the American wars the negro was faithful, yes,
faithful in battle while members of his race were being lynched to
death; faithful to a land not his own in points of rights and
freedom, all and that after he had enriched with his own life's blood,
shouldered his musket to defend, when all this was done, regarded him
with renewed terms, Black, Negro.
Last but not least the negro needs a daily newspaper in every large
city, managed and edited by members of the race.
Such papers are needed to deal with questions of state and reflect the
thoughts of the social world, to enter the province of ethics and
tread the domain of morals and to give their opinion on the varying
phases of religious truths and pass judgment on matters of a political
nature.
There are hidden wrongs perpetrated by the whites against the negro
race that will never be brought to light until the race owns and
controls its own daily newspapers which alone have the power to
discover and enthrone truth, thus becoming a safe guide to all honest
seekers of facts respecting the race whether from a moral,
educational, political or religious field. To carry out the plans
suggested, whether viewed from an intellectual, industrial,
commercial, or editorial standpoint, the world must acknowledge that
to-day the negro race has the men and women, who are true to their
race and all that stands for negro progress.