Part 5

I met the president of a railroad within a month, who has recently constructed a long road in the South against time. I asked him, “With what help did you construct this road?” He said, “With colored men entirely.” “Were they satisfactory?” “Entirely so.” “Would they do as much work per man as the railroad laborers of the North?” “Not quite as much per man, but there was no danger of a strike. They were cheerful, hearty and willing, and I was entirely satisfied with them. I completed my road many days before the time given me, with every man in the South prophesying it was impossible to accomplish that result.”

I said to a policeman not long since in the city of Savannah, “Have you any colored men on your force?” “Not one; and if a colored man were placed here, every one of us would resign.” I then asked him about the colored people in the South and in that city. He said, “They are orderly and well-behaved; we have no fault to find with them.” “How are they getting on in the schools?” “They are beating our white children in the public schools.” “How is that?” “Well, our people do not altogether patronize the public schools, and the colored mothers take much more pains to have their children prompt and constant in attendance than the white mothers; and when the children of this generation come to stand up face to face ten years hence, we are going to be put to shame by the intelligence of many a black boy that to-day walks our streets barefooted and ragged.” That is the statement of a man who said he would resign if a colored man was put upon the police force of which he was a member.

There are many things about the colored people we must be patient with. They are ignorant, and ignorant beyond what we realize. It is an ignorance which we must not be surprised at; it is an ignorance which we must be patient with. It is our duty to give them education—and not merely the duty of us who are here to-night, not merely of this generation, but of generations to come. It is a duty that is patriotic beyond what we are apt to consider. At the close of the war we gave to the colored population the ballot; but it has been the proud claim of New England always that back of the ballot must be intelligence, and that it is not safe in a republic that he who casts the vote that decides the fate of the nation shall cast a vote that he cannot read. Yet to-day there is that enormous vote of the South, a vote which the man casting it cannot read. We sometimes wonder that, in a state like South Carolina, where the colored population is almost double the white, it is possible that they should be deprived of the franchise; but you can judge how timid a man is as to his rights when he cannot read his ballot nor count it after it is cast. Therefore, as I say, that question must be a slow one as it works itself out; but it is as citizens of this nation, as patriots, that we must see to it that intelligence is furnished to that people at the earliest possible day, to enable them to both read and count the ballots which they cast.

_—Henry D. Hyde, Esq._

[THE COLORED MAN.—Fifteen years ago Gen. O. O. Howard asked a colored school, “What message will you send to the friends North?” Richard Wright, at that time a lad of thirteen, responded, “_Tell ’em we’s risin’ sir_.” Mr. Wright has since graduated from Atlanta University, and for several years has been engaged in teaching and editing a local paper in Georgia. Those who heard his admirable address had abundant evidence that his statement has been verified in his own case, at least. We regret that we can give our readers so small a part of it.]

You cannot imagine how much it rejoices me to stand before those who helped to shape the events whose tremendous logic forced the great patriot and philanthropist, Abraham Lincoln, to sign that necessary war measure which resulted in striking the shackles from the four million unfortunate human beings whom I have the honor to represent at this meeting.

I come to tell you that your labors have not been in vain. The colored man, whose cause you have espoused, is worthy of your efforts. Numerically, the colored people form about one-seventh of this great nation. Their natural increase is greater, probably, than that of any other branch of the American family. In the South they constitute nearly one-half of the population, and in the cotton states even more. Nine-tenths of the manual or menial labor of the South is done by colored men. Freedom has not made them lazy, as has been stated by their enemies. Besides making ten million more bales of cotton than during any fifteen years of slavery, they have, during the last fifteen years of freedom, acquired in the South over one hundred million dollars worth of property. That eagerness for an education which characterized them when your first missionaries were put in the field has not left them. In 1878, Gen. Eaton reported as being in the public schools of the South 675,150 colored children, and about 100 schools devoted to secondary, normal, collegiate and professional training among the six and a-half million colored citizens. Such, in brief, is the strength of a people who are to help shape the destiny of this republic.

Ignorance, intellectual and moral, is our main weakness, a curse for which our forefathers were not responsible, but for which we, of the rising generation, are compelled to atone under the manacles of political proscription and religious and social ostracism.

It could hardly be expected that the slaveholders of the South would in their straitened circumstances undertake the education of those whom they had looked upon as their property taken violently from them. So the North, as it has abolished slavery, must also abolish ignorance.

The first need of the colored man is Christian training. The old preachers, fettered by slave habits and filled with superstition and sectarianism, will hardly be able to make their flocks much better than themselves. The colored people need spiritual advisers whose lips and lives express the holy gospel they profess. There are in the South thousands of colored preachers, controlling large congregations, too, who are unable to read correctly a single text from the book which they undertake to expound to their followers. The colored people are naturally religious and nominally Christian. They are ready to be led by the Christian teacher or the scheming Romanist, by the true patriot or the plotting demagogue. As clay in the hand of the potter, they can be made vessels fit for the Master’s kingdom, or they can be left to grow more vicious and more corrupt, and thus be lost to Christianity.

The colored man needs the facilities for becoming educated. He has the inclination, but not the means, to make a good and useful citizen. The A. M. A. has done much, and will, I hope, do more to arouse this whole nation to see the threatening danger that lurks in the ignorant masses of the South, and to feel the necessity of removing the danger by educating this element. The black man is not to blame for his hard lot, nor is he of his own accord an American; but 250 years of toil and hardship have wedded him to this soil, and here he means to stay. Docile and tractable, his industry has made the Southern wilderness productive and beautiful. He has produced the cotton, tobacco and cane of this country. Any attempt to supply his place as a laborer in the South will prove utterly futile. He is there a laborer, citizen and voter, part and parcel of the American nation, and I trust the American nation will recognize him as such. The full, complete recognition of the right and privilege of the colored man to be and do whatever any other citizen is and does, is what the republic must settle down to. The question whether the colored man shall live in this republic, on terms of perfect equality, protected in the enjoyment of every privilege and immunity accorded to any other American, is a question which has postponed the progress of the South, and will continue to until the nation shall have solved this problem. Sooner or later the republic must see its solution. Like Banquo’s ghost, down at your beck or wane it will not. It will present itself at your churches, your theatres, your legislative councils and your court rooms. It is the one question that will not and cannot be settled until it is settled rightly. It is a question embracing the development of an irrepressible race, one that cannot be starved out, driven out or killed out. When the people of the South, together with the people of the North, shall approach this subject, under the guidance of intelligent reason and an enlightened conscience, they will see that the true way to solve this vexing question is to educate the colored man and treat him as a citizen. But, aided or unaided, helped or hindered, the negro will have an influence in the government of this country, and there is now no power in the arm of the American people to keep him down. He will rise to help make this republic the grandest and noblest that has ever dotted the face of this globe, or he will sleep on a common burying-ground with his white oppressors, amid the ruins and ashes of this republic. Inseparably united with the fate and fortune of America, the words of the Hebrew maiden to Naomi express his adhesion to the white man. “Whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge; thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God; where thou diest I will die, and there will I be buried.”—_Richard Wright, Esq._

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AFRICA AND THE AFRICANS.—Mr. President: Africa and the Africans is the subject assigned me. But before entering upon it directly, it is fitting, perhaps, that I should say that for the last six and a half years I have been in Great Britain as the Secretary of the Freedmen’s Missions Aid Society, of which the Earl of Shaftesbury is President and Lord Kinnaird is Treasurer. The British people have been largely interested in aiding the American Missionary Association in preparing and sending out to Africa colored teachers, missionaries and general helpers for that great work so wonderfully opened up in that dark land. And it is well known that the Jubilee Singers, who went through Great Britain under the patronage of the Freedmen’s Aid Society, or we may say its President, the noble Earl of Shaftesbury, received very generous aid for Fisk University from our British friends. They have also aided liberally in the support of colored missionaries at the Mendi Mission on the West Coast of Africa. But latterly they have become greatly interested in the Arthington Mission, projected for the Upper Nile valley, toward which field two white missionaries have gone forth, Rev. H. M. Ladd, and Dr. Snow, of Western New York. For this mission, Robert Arthington, Esq., of Leeds, England, has given $15,000; others in Great Britain have given $15,000 more; so we have $30,000 of the $50,000 needed for the mission from our British friends. One London gentleman, after hearing a statement of the case in Scotland, sent for the speaker and gave him $5,000, as he said, instead of a legacy. Note that. A young man, who is a butler in a gentleman’s family, sent at another time $50. When asked if that was not too much for him he said, “I gave £10 a little ago, to help a friend out of a difficulty, and I can give £10 for the good of a vast continent.” A good woman, who had been a governess for some years, also handed to the Secretary £10 for herself, and her sister gave £10 more; and they agreed to give together £15 ($75) a year right on for colored missionaries for Africa. These were deeds of self-sacrifice. Are there not generous young men, and older men, and noble women in America, who will do as well for that dark continent, which our ancestors so cruelly plundered? We need, _we must have_ $20,000 more, very soon, for that Arthington Mission. We want a steamer on the Upper Nile waters also. We must besides have a steamer, the John Brown memorial steamer, for the Mendi Mission on the West Coast at once. In that country there are no roads, there are no beasts of burden. Human beings have to be the carriers of all burdens for hundreds of miles. And our dear missionaries have fallen, many of them, in early death, in those perilous journeys through swamp and jungle, on their errands of love to the poor suffering millions of Africa. We cannot believe that their friends and our friends will hesitate and delay their giving for this steamer for the increase of good and the saving of precious lives.

If we recall the abuse and the needs of Africa, we can but see and feel our duty and privilege in this connection. Africa has been for five hundred years the hunting-ground for the bondmen of the whole world, and to this day the slave trade covers an area nearly equal to all Europe, in Northern, Central and Southern Africa. This accursed trade is to the East, and mainly to the Mohammedan countries; and it is said that from some of the Eastern ports a traveler may wend his way, without a guide, into the very heart of Africa, by following the line of human bones and the skin-covered skeletons of the poor slave victims who have fallen in that terrible march to the sea. And that this crime should have been permitted by the Christian nations down to the closing part of this 19th century is an astounding fact! And it ought not to need an argument to show any man that a people who still demand slaves, and buy human beings therefor, ought to be hounded out of the very pale of the civilized nations; for it is generally known that for every slave delivered in any country, four and often six human beings have fallen in death in the attempts to capture them, or in the cruel journey to their doom. And this trade will never be stopped till the better nations learn to treat the demand for slaves as a huge crime, as well as the act of supply. To meet and combat this crime boldly and persistently in both demand and supply is the call of God to the Christian nations out on the morning and the midnight air.

Now we may do both. Africa is open to us, and travelers are penetrating her vast territories; the steamer’s screw and paddle-wheels of reform are stirring her waters and also the thought of her people; commerce is tapping her mines of wealth; geographers are correcting her maps; scientists are studying her various climates and testing her remedial agents. Christianity, of which it was said in a meeting of the International Society for Africa, made up of distinguished travelers, learned and scientific men, “History shows that Christianity has special virtue for rescuing savage races from barbarism, causing them rapidly to over-step the first barriers in the way of civilization”—Christianity, we say, is now challenging Paganism, the Moslem curse, and the accursed slave trade, on that long plundered continent of Africa. And now we have a potent factor for the work not available a little ago. We have more than six millions of Africa’s sable children, from which people we may select educated Christian young men and women for the great work given us to do. And these are the people for Africa. They can live in hot climates; they are by blood relations and common sufferings in sympathy with the people to be reached and saved; they can touch the heart, stir the thought and lift up their own race as no other people can ever do it.

For this they are developing a peculiar type of piety on a grander scale than we have yet seen among the Anglo-Saxon race. The Pauline we have had—the intellect and conscience carried by an intense conviction of duty, so that the man would go to the stake for his principles. But the loving, trustful type of piety belongs to these sable children of the sunnier and more genial climes. Shall we, then, know our day and dare to take our opportunity with these ex-slaves for the redemption of Africa from ignorance, superstition, slavery, war and woe? We want the John Brown mission steamer. We want, we must have, in addition to all the generous and noble gifts for our Southern work, the sum of $20,000, already pledged by the committee of the A. M. A., for the Arthington Mission in the Upper Nile valley, frightfully ravaged by the villainous slave trade to this very day!

Who, then, of all God’s dear people, _will rally to this standard, and come at the call of the Divine King to this momentous work, with hand and heart and money, to take possession of that vast continent of Africa, with its 200,000,000 of people, for Christ, and for the good of all nations_?—_Rev. O. H. White, D.D., Sec. F. M. A. Soc., London, Eng._

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THE FREEDMEN.

REV. JOSEPH E. ROY, D.D., FIELD SUPERINTENDENT, ATLANTA, GA.

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REPORT OF COMMITTEE ON EDUCATIONAL WORK.

Your Committee upon the educational work of this Association would congratulate its friends upon the great prosperity which has marked the past year, and which gives such rich promise for the years to come.

We find as causes for thankfulness:

1st. The permanent improvements to our various educational institutions in new and better buildings and increased endowments.

2d. The growing appreciation by the colored people of these educational privileges.

3d. The increasing confidence and sympathy of the Southern whites in the education of the Freedmen, and in the schools founded for them by the North, as shown by the words and deeds of prominent individuals and the articles in leading journals.

4th. And lastly, we are devoutly thankful that the Holy Spirit has been so manifestly present in the labors of the year, and that revivals of religion have given evidence of God’s favor on the work, and promise of men and women for the great missionary work lying before the American Freedmen.

Your Committee feel constrained to urge the importance of the following measure:

1st. This Association should concentrate its efforts upon its work in the States, among the negro, the Indian and the Chinese, as offering its distinctive missionary field.

2d. The friends of the Association should redouble their efforts to put its schools upon a permanent endowed basis, and thoroughly equip them for giving a high Christian education to the Freedmen.

3d. In view of the vast educational structure to be built from the very foundations, the pressing importance of immediate education for millions of illiterate children, the poverty of the South, and the insufficiency of benevolent contributions from the North, the National Government should be urged to immediately inaugurate some additional and more adequate system of national aid.

C. T. COLLINS, _Chairman_.

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ADDRESS OF REV. C. T. COLLINS.

On the staircase of the Berlin Museum, the great artist Kaulbach has represented the intensity of the battle of the Huns by picturing the spirits of the dead warriors rising up in a cloud above that battle-field and prolonging the contest in a spiritual war. It seems to me a type of all great moral strifes. After the roar of the cannon has died away, and the dead have been laid in their graves, the spirits and the principles involved in the battle grapple with one another for victory.

For four long years North and South met in the crash of material strife, and now, for sixteen years, Northern principles and Southern principles have been meeting in a death grapple, and the victory will not be won until Northern principles conquer. For four years North and South met in the crash of battle, setting four million slaves free from chattel bondage, and for sixteen years North and South have met in the silent strife of spiritual warfare, to set what are now over six millions free from the grosser bondage of ignorance. When, in 1865, four and a half million Freedmen knocked at the school-house of the South for admittance, you are most of you aware of the prejudice and opposition that met them; but are you aware what the school-house was at which they knocked? The South never had provided an education for the masses. Its theory was to educate the higher classes and leave the masses alone, even those of the whites. It never had an adequate school system before the war. North Carolina was the only state in the Confederacy that kept up anything like public schools during the war, and at its close her permanent school fund of nearly $3,000,000 was lost.

After sixteen years’ replenishment, the entire school property of the eight Southern States, reported by the Commissioner of Education in his last report in 1879—the value of the sites, buildings and all other school property—does not amount to much over seven millions, or, leaving Kentucky out, much over five millions. Alabama, Arkansas, Mississippi, Texas and Georgia, which do not report, are poor in school property. Leaving Kentucky and West Virginia out, with their four millions, in all the States south of them there are probably not to-day $7,000,000 of school property. New York, with her $30,000,000, has four times as much as all this South. Your Massachusetts, although it does not fully report, has doubtless the same multiple; and eight states of the North have each more school property to-day than all the school property of this South.

Moreover, these poorly equipped states, indifferent to the education of the poor whites, and prejudiced against the education of the poor blacks, were awfully, bitterly poor. In 1870, after recovering from the worst shock of the war, there was nearly $1,500 in Massachusetts for every man, but there was in Alabama, Georgia and North Carolina only a little over $200 for every man. Do you realize that $2,000,000,000 had been put into Confederate bonds to support that war, and that it was all gone? What would have been the state of the North if our public debt had been repudiated? And besides that, everything was in ruin, industries prostrated, society convulsed, and this poor stricken country had to lift up the debt of the Union as well as the North itself. We said bitterly, “They do not educate.” We said angrily, “They _won’t_ educate;” and, brethren, we ought to have said charitably, “Alas, O God, they _can’t_ educate!” Such, briefly, was the condition sixteen years ago. Now what has been done? Northern aid leaped to the rescue, as you well know. Millions have been given. That black form, lying blinded by ignorance at our feet, was bent over by patient, tender Christian sympathy, and the cataract lifted from his eyes with a golden, jeweled knife. Why, I look at the car of educational progress in the South, and under it I see 50,000 glittering wheels, on which it is rolling on, and those wheels are each one of them a ten dollar gold piece given last year by the North. There was, in the last report of the Commissioner of Education, 129 schools of higher education for colored youth and over 14,000 scholars in them; and almost without exception each of these schools has against it a name indicative that it sprung up out of Northern Christian benevolence. This is only a part of what the North has done.

But, friends, we hear a great deal about this and we hear very little of what the South has done. Twenty years ago it was the law of the land that the negro should not be educated; and now in every state in the South it is the constitutional law that he shall be educated; and furthermore, the commissioners of these states say they will devote every energy within them to carry out this law.