Part 7
The Genius of Colored Americans in Literature; The Arts and Sciences Inherited From the Ancient Ethiopians Read, Study, and Educate up to Opportunities—A High Racial Type Appears in Modern Times—A Cause for Pride and an Incentive to Action, Energy and Efficiency.
Men of learning, wisdom, and honest, without prejudice, take the standard of a race of men from his primitive type.
That type is sought for in the most excellent productions of the race, their achievements and their position among civilized nations that were the founders of our present civilization.
He who grovels in the worst human elements of any race, knows nothing about that race, and opens the door to the degeneracy of all the nations and races on earth, by advocating them as the evidences of degeneracy.
Since the world began there have been good and bad elements among the peoples that inhabited it, but the good elements alone have survived, the bad or the evil has gone down into ruin. Nations that sought to waylay and throttle progress for their own selfish ends, and immoral purposes have been forced out into the world’s Gehenna, and in the garbage heap there are still rummaging many of the split races of the earth, and many individuals bury themselves in its reek refusing to emerge into the clear sunlight.
It is, as it always has been, the great, the high hope and aim of men of intellect, and higher aspirations than the luxuries of life which kill the soul, to lift the evil in mankind out of the category of civilization, and develop mind and intellect as the only adjunct toward universal unity and peace.
To cure all the evil which afflict men of every race and people, is an impossibility so long as the earth exists for the use and benefit of mankind. Force has been tried, but even the death penalty does not stay crime and disorder. The Crucified One gave up his life and took upon himself all the sins of men, and pointed out the way for them to follow if they would be saved. But even this Majestic, this Divine Sacrifice has not stayed the evils afflicting man when left to his own devices, to his own ill-regulated freedom. We know the way, indeed, and whoso refuses to follow it, must be classed with the evils we suffer. Every man must lift himself out of the slough.
There is food for thought in the past, which hinges much upon the present and the future, and if it is taken in the proper spirit, it can not fail to develop the mind, the soul, and put men on the high road toward the accomplishment of the designs of God.
THE QUEEN OF SHEBA AND SOLOMON
It was related in another article, that the Queen of Sheba visited Solomon, but we shall give a further account of this great queen because it will lead to the reason why Ethiopia reached a high state of development.
Open the Bible at 1st Kings, 10, verses 6 to 10 and read:
“6. And she said to the king, it was a true report that I heard in mine own land of thy acts and thy wisdom.
“7. Howbeit I believed not the words, until I came, and mine eyes had seen it: and, behold, the half has not been told me: thy wisdom and prosperity exceedeth the fame which I heard.
“8. Happy are the men, happy are these thy servants, which stand continually before thee, and that hear thy wisdom.
“9. Blessed be the Lord thy God, which delighted in thee, to set thee on the throne of Israel: because the Lord loved Israel forever, therefore made he the king, to do judgment and justice.”
Here was an Ethiopian Queen who was clearly desirous of benefiting her great empire and uplifting her people, traveling in pursuit of the best way to do it, just as our modern men are now doing.
This, it should be remembered, occurred more than a thousand years before the birth of Christ, or to bring the years down to date, it was two thousand nine hundred and twenty-eight years ago—nearly thirty centuries.
THE ETHIOPIANS CONQUERED EGYPT
To diverge a few lines: Napoleon Bonaparte was a deep student, and when attempting the conquest of Egypt, he pointed his soldiers to the great Pyramids saying: “Soldiers of France, forty centuries are looking down upon you,” he uttered a truth of history, and established an Ethiopian empire a thousand years before Solomon. The reason is this: The Ethiopians conquered Egypt, or erected it into a province, and built the great Pyramids that still exist.
But to return to the Queen of Sheba.
She found a knowledge of God in her visit and carried it back to her people, because we find His worship beginning to make its appearance upon the monuments and inscriptions.
Now a singular circumstance is presented by the claim of Ethiopian kings and princes after the visit of the Queen of Sheba to Solomon.
It was claimed by the princes of Axoum, in Ethiopia, which was evangelized by the Empress Helena, consort of the Roman Emperor Constantine, in the year 324 of the Christian era, that the Queen of Sheba bore a son to King Solomon, and that he was the founder of a dynasty, the annals of the kingdom giving a long list of the kings descended from him, and relating that they governed for centuries without interruption. Pieces of their money still in existence and the inscriptions on recently unearthed monuments furnishing evidence of this fact.
In a history of Alexander the Great, translated from the Ethiopian, it is related of another Queen of Sheba, who, in the year 332 before the Christian era, resisted that mighty conqueror with so much vigor, that he capitulated to her charms, as she was a most beautiful woman, and left her kingdom in peace. She laughingly reproached him for his weakness, so the story goes: “You, the mighty conqueror who have never been defeated by man, have been captured and defeated by a woman.”
BLACK QUEENS WHEN CHRIST WAS BORN
The reign of the Sheban dynasty was followed by that of the queens of Candace, who were ruling Ethiopia at the date of the birth of Christ, indeed, one of them is mentioned in the New Testament, Matthew 12:42, and her story is related in another chapter of this book.
Among the many evidences of high civilization in Ethiopia, are its literary productions. There are several hundred books in the various public libraries of Europe which show a remarkable condition of development.
In the way of history, there are the annals of ancient chronology by Georges Ibn-al Amid, which follows the genealogy of David from Adam, and a list of the kings of Israel and Judea, together with the principal events of their reigns. To this is added a chronology of the reigns of the Roman Emperors, and the Consuls.
In the chronological book, there is an entire chapter giving the history of the kings of Ethiopia, from Ibn-al Hakim, son of Solomon by the Queen of Sheba, down to recent times.
There are also volumes of poems of great beauty and perfect meter, stories of wars, genealogical lists, biographies, commentaries, moral maxims, philosophy, anecdotes, astrologies, homilies, hymns, etc. All of these are contemporaneous.
In proof of this remarkable condition, reference is made to the “Catalogue des manuscripts Ethiopiens (Gheez et Amharique) de la Bibliotheque nationale de France, a Paris,” a copy of which may be found in any of our great public libraries.
ETHIOPIAN WOMEN HELD IN HIGH ESTEEM
In refinement, the Ethiopians held women in a superior position in the social scale, which says Dr. Reich, the historian, “Shows a higher point of delicacy and refinement than either their Eastern or Western successors. Colossal in art, profound in philosophy and religion, and in possession of the knowledge of the arts and sciences, =the Ethiopian race exhibits the astounding phenomenon of an elevated civilization at a period when the other nations of the world were almost unknown=.”
Referring to this question of psychology in civilization exhibited by the Ethiopians, the same Dr. Reich, in his “History of Civilization,” says:
“People, as a rule cherish the idea that nations are like individuals, and that accordingly nations have their childhood, their youth, and their old age, and their death just as we are used to see in individuals. This entire idea is utterly false. There is no such parallel development. =A nation is a mental thing only.=”
Dr. Scholes, in his “Glimpses of the Ages,” citing Heeren’s “Manual of Ancient History,” relative to the Ethiopians, says:
“It may be gathered from the monuments and records that Upper Egypt (Ethiopia) was the first seat of civilization, which originating in the South, spread by the settlement of colonies toward the North (Egypt).
“These migrations are proved by the representations, both in sculpture and painting found in the yet remaining monuments throughout Egypt.” “Glimpses of Ages,” p. 191. Heeren, p. 57.
There were tribes among the Ethiopians which were of a low grade of civilization, just as in the most civilized countries of the present times, there are peoples of a very low grade, not only in civilization but in intelligence. But, there existed a highly cultured and civilized Ethiopian people, who dwelt in cities, erected temples and other edifices, and who had good government and humane laws. Moreover, their fame and progress in knowledge and their social arts spread in the earliest ages over a considerable part of the earth.
Upon the authority of Heeren, already referred to, and upon their own investigations, Dr. Glidden and Dr. Morton, who are quoted in Scholes’ “Glimpses of the Ages,” made an examination of the Egyptian skulls, and gave it as their opinion that the Egyptians and the Ethiopians never came from Asia, but were indigenous or aboriginal inhabitants of the African Nile country, and were all of the “Negroid type.”
ANCIENT EGYPTIANS WERE NEGROES
Featherstone in his “Social History of the Races of Mankind,” goes still further, and confidently asserts that the ancient Egyptians were of the Negro race.
“This,” he adds, substantially, “is borne out on all the Egyptian paintings, sculptures, and mummies; the hair found, as well as that possessed by their descendants, the Copts, is the curly, or woolly variety, and the lips and nose the same.
“The fact that the ancient Egyptians were Negroes three thousand six hundred years before the Christian era is substantiated, and that their population in Egypt at that period amounted to seven millions.”
Admitting all these things to be true, it may be asked: “Well, what of it? What good will that do the Colored Americans?”
It has to do with Colored Americans as much as an ancient highly civilized ancestry has to do with the modern Jews. They know that their race is not extinct; that they are an integral part of the great movement of all mankind toward a unification of mind and intelligence. This fact burned into their minds must operate as an incentive of the greatest propelling force to urge them onward toward the high destiny that awaits all mankind.
That they are working out the plans of the Almighty by so doing, puts them in the vanguard of civilization, with opportunities at hand to avail themselves of all the advantages attached to such a high purpose. There is something to work for—something worth working for, and when the Colored American takes this high view of his destiny, it will be too small a thing to notice, even should he be denied the privilege of sitting beside a white man.
THE JEW AND THE COLORED MAN
A curious racial transformation is going on in the United States outside the two divisions of man, the Jew and the Colored man, which means much more to the ethnologist and lover of mankind than is apparent on the surface. The various nations, such as the English, French, German, Irish, Scotch, Spaniard, etc., are rapidly losing their identity of race or descent, and becoming American with new facial traits, as well as mental attributes. All these nations or tribes, will lose their identity and be merged into another and different stock distinctly American, perhaps revert to the parent Aryan stock. Thus we shall witness, the four primitive divisions of mankind, the Aryan, rehabilitated; the Jew or Semitic, with renewed wisdom; the Ethiopian, or Hamitic, still a distinct race, and the Turanian, or Chinese, working together to accomplish a unity of nations, one in thought and high purpose. Everything is apparently working in that direction, and there is no single nation, or union of nations of diverse civilization that will be able to stay the movement.
DEVELOPMENT OF THE RACE IN THE UNITED STATES The Result of a Great Civilized Ancestry—Some of our Colored Americans, Their Doings and Their Personality
The Colored Americans, as one of the great divisions of the human family, with as proud an ancestry and as high a civilization as the Jews, and co-eval with them in the point of cultured antiquity, are proving themselves as progressive and, with the additions of modern culture, civilization and progress, are building their race up to a high point of excellence.
They have bridged the ages, so to speak, and are showing themselves penetrated with the spirit of a civilizing evangelization, which began in the Far East, nearly four thousand years ago.
They are carrying down to date, without losing by an intermission, the great aims and purposes of the Ethiopian Candace and Sheba dynasties, under which were introduced the arts and sciences, sculpture and painting into Egypt and Europe, refinement, literature, and wise government.
They are demonstrating every day, that they are moving with the great divisions of the human race, toward that high goal of unity that is the evident purpose of God in creating man.
Under an enlightened political system, the few aggravations in the local laws of which will soon disappear beneath the mighty onward tread of the peoples of the earth, our Colored Americans are beginning to realize their destiny, and are seizing the opportunities that present themselves for their benefit, as for the benefit of a common destiny of all men.
They are beginning to understand, and they are acting upon the understanding that education is the chief factor in the solution and proper attainment of their destiny.
This “education” has always been the essential element in the rise and progress of every nation on the earth, the educated have forced their way upward toward the light, and become factors in the world’s progress toward enlightenment. Those who have ignored education have fallen and lie buried beneath the sands of the deserts of Europe and Asia, without descendants or successors, and known only to the excavator of ruins. Their very races have disappeared without a trace.
THE CASE OF THE JAPANESE
The marvelous rise of the Japanese is due to the seizure of the opportunity of education, and appropriating every detail that goes to make power and physical influence.
Not much more than three generations ago, the Japanese empire was a mere name, an isolated country of semi-barbarians, a mere tribe without power, influence or standing as a national unit. It is now clamoring at the door of every civilized nation for recognition as a world power, and threatens to enforce its demands with an army and navy that is too formidable to be ignored or slighted.
It has reached the acme of the physical and lays claim to that alone as its right to recognition. It has not yet learned that in the great movement of the peoples of the earth toward unification, the physical must go down before the psychological, and therefore, if the Japanese persist in their physical prowess, they will disappear as have other greater nations claiming the same force as the summit of earthly influence. They are mere fragments of a tribe detached from the Turanian division of the human family.
History repeats itself always in the cases of the great divisions of the human family, where some branch attempted to usurp the power, functions and authority of the whole.
The Assyrians, the Persians, the mighty mistress of the world, the Roman Empire, vanished like a breath when they presumed to stand in the way of the designs of the Almighty.
All were pawns upon the chessboard of time, so to speak, the very foundation of which is soul, that attempted to wrest the fiat from its meaning by the adoption of brute or national force.
They served the purpose of carrying man toward a certain goal on the way to his final pinnacle, then claimed the results of the uplift, and went down through vanity and presumption.
Japan with its physical impress persisted in, will go down like the rest. It must go down because it does not represent any factor in the Divine designs. But it is an illustration of what education will accomplish, and its fate will illustrate what human nature, obsessed by its own reliance upon force, will reach in the end.
Our Colored Americans have no such incentive as force or physical designs. The conquerors of the earth were compelled to yield to the educational programme to uplift the soul of man, not his material prospects, except so far as they advanced the psychological, and they may be said to be now in that psychological phase of the movement of the nations of the earth, which leads to the highest point of intensive civilization.
A GREAT DIVISION OF THE HUMAN FAMILY
It should be constantly borne in mind, that the Ethiopians and their descendants, the Colored Americans in the United States, represent a great division of the human family, which, with the others, are alone to be considered in the great design of unification.
The Roman Empire represented no such portion of the human family. Assyria, Persia, Egypt, and the dominating historical peoples were all mixed, and when their uses had culminated, that is, when there was no more use for them, or when they ventured to assume superiority over the rest of the earth, they were submerged.
Of the mighty races that constituted the primitive divisions of man, there are now remaining, with each bearing a sharp line of distinction between them, the Aryan, Semitic, Turanian, and Ethiopian. Into these four divisions all the nations and peoples of the earth may be resolved.
It may be said that the Aryan consists of the white race; the Ethiopian, or Hamitic of the dark race; the Semitic, the Jews, and the Turanian, the yellow race, of which the Japanese are a mere branch of a subdivision.
Each of these great divisions of the human family has its own part to play in the great drama of the world’s progress, and the elimination of brute force or the physical as a negative element in progress, has brought these grand divisions face to face with the problem of psychology, mind or soul. It is immaterial what it is called, it cannot be disregarded.
The conditions or environments that have hedged in these great divisions have appeared to be similar in the world’s history. The Jews had their mighty empire. The Aryan developed into enormous power, but broke into fragments. The Ethiopian possessed the initial civilization of the world, and the Turanian, evidenced by the Chinese, have still a high position in the world.
Let us give a few details and then proceed to the progress of our Colored Americans toward the fulfillment of the great design:
The Jews lost their physical empire to become a psychological force. The Aryan became split into numerous branches which are now existing and moving steadily forward toward the psychological. The Turanians that controlled the Orient for ages by their physical prowess, have become a great republic based upon the power of mind. The great Ethiopian empire after leaving its impress upon the civilization of the world, was transformed into the psychological progress of the other members of the human family.
It will be perceived that all of them are drifting toward the same point, and that each of them is employing all the advantages and devices of modern life to continue on the march toward that point, at which all men shall be of one mind, one soul.
OPPORTUNITY AND ADVANTAGES OF COLORED AMERICANS
The Colored Americans in the United States, with their advantages are accepting the inevitable in the form of opportunities presented them, and are as irresistibly impelled toward the ultimate goal of unified mankind as the others.
Let us consider our Colored Americans at close range and see what they are doing in the way of seizing opportunities, and building themselves up to the accepted modern standards.
ECONOMIC PROGRESS
The one essential of modern life which the Colored American has not attained to perfection, is the proposition of economy. Not saving, but business qualifications. But he is an apt pupil and is rapidly acquiring experience.
The reports of 1912 give the value of property owned by the Colored people in the United States as =six hundred millions of dollars=. And upon this they pay taxes.
A year ago, The National Negro Business League held its eleventh annual session at Little Rock, Arkansas, with every State represented by delegates.
The wide range of Negro business activities discussed at that annual meeting, shows a vast stride toward improved commercial conditions, and an adaptability to the opportunities presented. Some of these activities were: Raising and shipping fruits and poultry; pickles and preserve manufactories; horticulture: grain, hay, and fuel; cotton raising; dealers in fresh and salt fish; farming and stock raising; town building; real estate; railroad building; coal and iron business; general and special merchandising; banking, and a multitude of other businesses. Sixty-two banks are operated by Colored Americans, and there is a National Negro Bankers’ Association, with W. R. Pettiford its President, the latter gentleman being President of the Alabama Penny Savings Bank, the second oldest Negro bank in the country. The Bankers’ Association has in process of formation, a large central Negro bank to act for Negro banks in the same capacity as the great banks of the East act as clearing houses for the other banks of the country.
It transpired in this connection, that the various Negro secret societies had on hand a large amount of money for the purposes of members’ funds and for widows. The Knights of Pythias alone, holding in all, cash and property $1,500,000.
INTELLECTUAL PROGRESS
When it comes to mental success and adaptability, the advance of Colored Americans is phenomenal, and shows as high an order of intelligence as any nationality in the world. Remember they are just regaining a lost heritage of renown.
The schools, colleges and universities number among their brightest and most brilliant pupils numerous Colored American youths, who are an honor to the cause of education and to their race. They have won scholarship prizes at Cornell University, at Amherst College, Simmons College, Columbia University, Wellesley College, Radcliffe College, Howard University, and in numerous public schools prizes have been awarded them against numbers of competitors.
Our Colored Americans are taking hold of the educational problem with a vim and courage, and they are succeeding along every department of study.
As an illustration of the thirst for knowledge, the case of Mrs. Martha Harmon, of New York, will be agreeable: This lady is seventy years of age, and attended night school for four years, taking an elementary course. She never missed an evening and was late only once. The New York Board of Education presented her with two gold medals, one for attendance, and the other for proficiency in her studies.
The intellectual progress of the Colored Americans may be emphasized by reference to that highly modern and civilized agent of education known as “The Press.”