The Blessings of Liberty and Education: An Address Delivered in Manassas, Virginia, on September 3, 1894
THE BLESSINGS OF LIBERTY AND EDUCATION: AN
ADDRESS DELIVERED IN MANASSAS, VIRGINIA,
ON 3 SEPTEMBER 1894
Unidentified newspaper clipping, Speech File, reel 17, frames 247-53, FD Papers, DLC.
Other texts in Speech File, reel 17, frames 254-65, reel 32, frames 403-26, FD Papers,
DLC.
Industrial education was a subject which had long attracted Douglass’s in-
terest. Consequently, it was with some enthusiasm that he delivered the major
address upon the 3 September 1894 dedication of the Colored Industrial
School at Manassas, Virginia, before a large crowd that included many
Visitors from other southern states and from Washington, D.C. , 4 September 1894.
LADIES , GENTLEMEN AND FRIENDS: As I am a stranger among you
and a sojourner, you will, I hope, allow me a word about myself by way of
introduction. I want to say something about the day upon which we met.
Coincidents are more or less interesting and here is one such of a somewhat
striking character. This day has for me a special interest. It happens to be
the anniversary of my escape from bondage. Fifty-six years ago today, it
was my good fortune to cease to be a slave a chattel personal and to become
a man. It was upon the third day of September, 1838 , that I started upon my
little life work in the world. It was a great day for me. With slavery behind
me and all the great untried world before me, my heart throbbed with many
anxious thoughts as to what the future might have in store for me. I will not
attempt here any description of what were my emotions in this crisis. I
leave you to imagine the difference between what they were then, and what
they are on this happy occasion. I then found myself in a strange land,
unknown, friendless, and pursued as if I were a fugitive from justice. A
stranger to every one I met in the streets of the great city of New York. For
that city was the first place in which I felt at liberty to halt in my flight
farther North. New York at that day was by no means a city of refuge. On
the contrary, it was a city in which slave hunters and slave catchers de-
lighted to congregate. It was one of the best fields for slave-hunting sport
this side of Africa. The game once started was easily taken. If they had
caught me I should have been elsewhere than here to assist in founding an
Industrial School for colored youth in Virginia. This is all I have to say.
My second thought germane to this occasion, and which must have
some interest for us all, very naturally relates to the noted place where we
now happen to be assembled. Since the great and terrible battle with which
its name is associated and which has now passed into history as the birth of
many battles,1Popularly known in the North as the First and Second Battles of Bull Run, major engagements between Confederate and Union armies occurred in the vicinity of Manassas, Virginia, on 21 July 1861 and 29-30 August 1862. Long, , 98-100, 257-58. no event has occured here, so important in its character and
influence, and so every way significant, as the event which we have this
day met to inaugurate and celebrate. To found an educational institution for
any people is worthy of notice, but to found a school, in which to instruct,
improve and develop all that is noblest and best in the souls of a deeply
wronged and long neglected people, is especially noteworthy. This spot
once the scene of fratricidal war, and the witness of its innumberable and
indescribable horrors, is, we hope, hereafter to be the scene of brotherly
kindness, charity and peace. We are to witness here, a display of the best
elements of advanced civilization and good citizenship. It is to be a place
where the children of a once enslaved people may realize the blessings of
liberty and education, and learn how to make for themselves and for all
others, the best of both worlds.
No spot on the soil of Virginia could have been more fitly chosen for
planting this school, than on this historic battlefield. It has not only the high
advantage of forming an instructive contrast and illustrating the compensa-
tion possible to mankind, by patiently awaiting the quiet operation of time
and events, but suggests the battle to be waged against ignorance and vice.
Thirty years ago when Federal and Confederate armies met here in deadly
conflict over the question of the perpetual enslavement of the Negro, who
would or could have dreamed that in a single generation, such changes
would be wrought in the minds of men that a school would be founded here
for the mental, moral and industrial education of the children of this same
people whose enslavement was sought even with the sword? Who would
have imagined that Virginia, after the agony of war, in a time so short,
would become so enlightened and so liberal as to be willing and even
pleased to welcome here, upon her sacred soil, a school for the children of
her former slaves? Thirty years ago neither poet, priest nor prophet could
have foretold the vast and wonderful changes which have taken place in the
opinions and sentiments of the American people on this subject since the
war. The North has changed and the South has changed, and we have all
changed, and all changed for the better. Otherwise, we should not be here
today engaged in the business of establishing this Institution.
The liberality on the part of the people of Virginia, a typical State of the
South, which has encouraged and justified the founding of this Industrial
School, not only within her borders, but here on the very first great bat-
tlefield between the two great sections of our Union, is as much a cause of
amazement, satisfaction and joy, as is the readiness with which the good
people of the North have responded to the call for pecuniary aid and thus
made this enterprise successful. Both circumstances are to day causes of
joy and congratulation. They show that the colored man need not despair
that he has friends in both sections of the Republic. In view of this school
and of the changes in public sentiment which it indicates, we may well
exclaim with Milton, “Peace hath her victories, no less renowned than
War!”2A paraphrase of a line from John Milton’s poem “To the Lord General Cromwell" (1652). , 1: 166-67.
When first invited to speak a few words in celebration of the founding
of this Industrial School, I was disposed to decline the honor, in favor of
some one of my younger and better educated brothers. But I am glad now
that I did not decline the honor. The duty devolved upon me, but which I
then hesitated to assume involves in every respect, an agreeable duty. I am
glad that, at my time of life, the opportunity is afforded me to connect my
name with a school so meritorious and which I can reasonably hope will be
of so great and permanent service to a people so greatly needing it. It is in
line with my relations to the negro, for I have pleaded the cause of the
oppressed against all comers, during more than fifty years of conflict. Were
a period put to day to my career, I could hardly wish for a time or place or an
occasion better suited for a desired ending, than here and now. The found-
ing of this and similar schools on the soil of Virginia,—a State formerly the
breeder, buyer, and seller of slaves; a State so averse, in the past, to the
education of colored people as to make it a crime to teach a negro to
read,3Douglass probably summarizes the statutes of Virginia and other southern states against the education of blacks as they appear in George M. Stroud, , 1st ed. (Philadelphia, 1827), 88-89.—is one of the best fruits of the agitation of a half a century, and a
firm foundation of hope for the future.
The idea at the bottom of this Institution is rapidly gaining ground
everywhere. Industrial education is with me, however, no new idea. Near-
ly forty years ago I was its advocate; and at that time I held it to be the chief
want of the free colored people of the North. I was then editor of the “North
Star” a newspaper printed in Rochester, N. Y.4Douglass editorialized upon the topic of industrial education at numerous times during his journalistic career in Rochester from 1847 to 1863. The topic was addressed most fully in 1854 and 1855 when black leaders debated plans for establishing an industrial college. , 7 April 1854, 18, 25 May 1855. I saw then, that the free
negro of the North, with everything great expected of him, but with no
means at hand to meet such expectations, could not hope to rise while he
was excluded from all profitable employments. He was free by law, but
denied the chief advantages of freedom: he was indeed but nominally free;
he was not compelled to call any man his master, and no one could call him,
but he was still in fact a slave, a slave to society and could only be a hewer
of wood and a drawer of water.5Deut. 29: 11, Josh. 9: 21, 23. It was at that day easier to get a black boy
into a lawyer’s office to study law, or into a doctor’s office to study medi-
cine, than it was to get him into a carpenter’s shop to push a plane, or into a
blacksmith’s shop to hammer iron.
While I have no sympathy with those who affect to despise labor, even
the humblest forms of it, and hold that whatever is needed to be done, it is
honorable to do; it is nevertheless plain that no people, white or black can,
in any country, continue long respected, who are confined to mere menial
service for which but little intelligence or skill are required, and for which
but the smallest wages are paid or received, especially if the laborer does
not make an effort to rise above that condition. While the employment, as
waiters at hotels and on steamboats and railroads is perfectly proper and
entirely honorable, in the circumstances which now surround the colored
people, no one variety of the American people can afford to be known only
as waiters and domestic servants. While I say this, I fully believe in the
dignity of all needful labor. All honest effort to better human conditions is
entitled to respect. I have met at Poland Springs in the State of Maine6The waters of Poland Spring in Androscoggin County, Maine, acquired a reputation in the 1850s for their healing powers. The Poland Spring House and other resort hotels in the town of South Poland annually welcomed thousands of visitors in the late nineteenth century. A bottling plant was established in 1877 to market the spring water nationally. Georgia Drew Merrill, ed., (Boston, 1891), 735-36. and
at the White Mountains in New Hampshire,7A portion of the Appalachian system, the White Mountain range lies primarily in Coos and Grafton counties in northern New Hampshire. , 2: 2403. and other places, as well as at
the late World’s Columbian Exposition at Chicago, many young white
ladies and gentlemen who were truly such, students and teachers in High
Schools and Seminaries, gladly serving as waiters during their vacation,
and doing so with no sense of being in any degree degraded or embarassed
by such service. But this would not have been the case with them if society
by any law or custom, had decided that this service should be for such
persons, their vocation in life. Daniel Webster used to say that New
Hampshire was a good state to emigrate from. So I say of menial service. It
is a good condition to separate from just as soon as one can find any other
calling which is more remunerative and more elevating in its tendency. It is
not the labor that degrades, but the want of spirit to rise above it.
Exclusive service or exclusive mastery is not good for the moral or
mental health of any class. Pride and insolence will certainly be developed
in the one class and weakness and servility in the other. The colored people
to be respected must furnish their due proportion to each class. They must
not be all masters or all servants. They must command as well as he
commanded. However much I may regret that it was my lot to have been a
slave, I shall never regret that I was once a common laborer; a servant, if
you please so to term it. But I felt myself as much a man then as I feel
myself a man now; for I had an ambition above my calling and I was
determined then, as I have been ever since, to use every means in my power
to rise to a higher plane of service just as soon and as fast as that could be
possible.
My philosophy of work is, that a man is worked upon by that upon
which he works. Some work requires more muscle than it does mind. That
work which requires the most thought, skill and ingenuity will receive the
highest commendation and will otherwise do most for the worker. Things
which can be done simply with the exertion of muscle and with little or no
exertion of the intellect will develop the muscle, but dwarf the mind.
Long ago it was asked, “How can he get wisdom who holdeth the plow
and whose talk is of oxen.”
The school which we are about to establish here is, if I understand its
object, intended to teach the colored youth who shall avail themselves of it,
the use of both mind and body. It is to educate the hand as well as the brain;
to teach men to work as well as to think, and to think as well as to work. It is
to teach them to join thought with work, and thus to get the very best results
of both thought and work. In my opinion there is no useful thing that a man
can do that can not be better done by an educated man than by an unedu-
cated man.
In the old slave times colored people were expected to work without
thinking. They were commanded to do as they were told. They were to be
hands; only hands, not head. Thought was the prerogative only of the
master. Obedience was the duty of the slave. I in my innocence once told
my old master that I thought a certain way of doing some work I had in hand
the best way to do it. He promptly demanded, “Who gave you a right to
think?” I might have answered in the language of Robert Bums,
“Were I designed your lordling’s slave,
By Nature’s law designed,
Why was an independent thought
E’er placed in my mind?”8Douglass adapts a line from the ninth stanza of Robert Burns’s poem “Man Was Made to Mourn.” Smith, , 66.
But I had not then read Robert Burns. Burns had high ideas of the dignity of
simple manhood. In respect of the dignity of man we may well exclaim
with the great Shakespeare concerning him: “What a piece of work is man!
How noble in reason! How infinite in faculties! In form and moving, how
express and admirable! In action, how like an angel! In apprehension, how
like a god! The beauty of the world; the paragon of animals! ”9Douglass slightly misquotes , act 2, sc. 2, lines 323-23. Yet, if man
be benighted, this glowing description of his power and dignity is merely a
“glittering generality”10Usually attributed to Massachusetts Whig politician Rufus Choate's letter of 9 August 1856 to the Maine Whig State Committee. Samuel Gilman Brown, ed., , 2 vols. (Boston, 1862), 1: 212-16. an empty tumult of words without any support of
facts.
In his natural condition, however, man is only potentially great. As a
mere physical being he does not take high rank, even among the beasts of
the field. He is not so fleet as a horse or a hound or so strong as an ox or a
mule. His true dignity is not to be sought in his arms or in his legs, but in his
head. Here is the seat and source of all that is of especially great or practical
importance in him. There is no fire in the flint and steel, but it is friction
that causes it to flash, flame and burn and give light where all else may be
darkness. There is music in the violin, but the touch of the master is needed
to fill the air and the soul with the concord of sweet sounds. There is power
in the human mind, but education is needed for its development. As man is
the highest on earth it follows that the vocation of the scholar is among the
highest known to man. It is to teach and induce man’s potential and latent
greatness. It is to discover and develop the noblest, highest and best that is
in him. In view of this fact no man whose business it is to teach should ever
allow himself to feel that his mission is mean, inferior or circumscribed. In
my estimation neither politics nor religion present to us a calling higher
than this primary business of unfolding and strengthening the powers of the
human soul. It is a permanent vocation. Some men know the value of
education by having it. I know its value by not having it. It is a want that
begins with the beginning of human existence, and continues through all
the journey of human life. Of all the creatures that live and move and have
their being on this green earth, man at his birth is the most helpless and the
most in need of instruction. He does not even know how to seek his food.
His little life is menaced on every hand. The very elements conspire against
him. The cattle upon a thousand hills; the wolves and bears of the forest; all
come into the world better equipped for life than does man. From first to
last his existence depends upon instruction.
Yet this little helpless weakling, whose life can be put out as we put out
the flame of a candle, with a breath, is the lord of creation, though in his
beginning he is only potentially this lord, with education he is the com-
mander of armies; the builder of cities; the tamer of wild beasts; the
navigator of unknown seas, the discoverer of unknown islands, capes and
continents, and the founder of great empires and capable of limitless civi-
lization.
But if man is without education although with all his latent possibility
attaching to him he is, as l have said, but a pitiable object; a giant in body
but a pigmy in intellect, and at best but half a man. Without education he
lives within the narrow, dark and grimy walls of ignorance. He is a poor
prisoner without hope. The little light that he gets comes to him as through
dark corridors and grated windows. The sights and sounds that reach him,
so significant and full of meaning to the well trained mind, are to him of
dim and shadowy importance. He sees, but does not perceive. He hears,
but does not understand. The silent and majestic heavens fretted with stars,
so inspiring and uplifting, so sublime and glorious to the souls of other
men, bear no message to him. They suggest to him no idea of the wonderful
world in which we live, or of the harmony of this great universe, and
hence, impart to him no happiness.
Education, on the other hand, means emancipation. It means light and
liberty. It means the uplifting of the soul of man into the glorious light of
truth, the light by which men can only be made free. To deny education to
any people is one of the greatest crimes against human nature. It is easy to
deny them the means of freedom and the rightful pursuit of happiness and
to defeat the very end of their being. They can neither honor themselves nor
their Creator. Than this, no greater wrong can be inflicted; and, on the
other hand, no greater benefit can be bestowed upon a long benighted
people, than giving to them, as we are here earnestly this day endeavoring
to do, the means of an education. It is aimed to make them skilled work-
men, useful mechanics, workers in wood, leather, tin and iron.
It is sometimes said that we have done enough for the Negro; that we
have given him his liberty and we should now let him do for himself. This
sounds well but that is all. I do not undervalue freedom from chattel
slavery. It was a great and glorious triumph of justice and humanity; it was
the fruit of long years of labor, agitation and sacrifice. But let us look at his
emancipation and see where it left the Negro, and we shall see how far it
falls short of the plainest demands of justice and of what we owe the Negro.
To find an adequate measure of compensation for any wrong, we must
first ascertain the nature and extent of the wrong itself. The mere act of
enslaving the Negro was not the only wrong done him, nor were the labors
and stripes imposed upon him, though heavy and, grievous to bear, the sum
of his wrongs. These were indeed terrible enough; but deeper down, and
more terrible still, were the mental and moral wrongs which enter into his
claim for a slight measure of compensation. For two hundred and forty
years the light of letters was denied him, and the gates of knowledge were
closed against him.
He was driven from time to eternity in the darkest ignorance, herded
with the beasts of the field; without marriage, without family, without
school, and without any moral training, other than that which came by the
slave drivers lash. People who live now, and talk of doing too much for the
Negro, think nothing of these things, and those who know them, seem to
desire to forget them, especially when they are made the basis of a claim for
a larger measure of justice to the Negro. They forget that for these terrible
wrongs there is, in truth, no redress and no adequate compensation. The
enslaved and battered millions have come, suffered, died and gone with all
their moral and physical wounds into Eternity. To them no recompense can
be made. If the American people could put a school house in every valley; a
church on every hill top in the South and supply them with a teacher and
preacher respectively and welcome the descendents of the former slaves to
all the moral and intellectual benefits of the one and the other, without
money and without price, such a sacrifice would not compensate their
children for the terrible wrong done to their fathers and mothers, by their
enslavement and enforced degradation.
I have another complaint. It is said that the people of the South have
made but little progress since their emancipation. This complaint is not
only groundless , but adds insult to injury.11Phaedrus, , Book v, fable 3. Under the whole Heavens there
never was a people liberated from bondage under conditions less favorable
to the successful beginning of a new and free mode of life, than were the
Freedmen of the South. Criminals, guilty of heinous crimes against the
State and society, are let go free on more generous conditions than our
slaves were.
The despotic Government of Russia was more liberal and humane to its
emancipated slaves than our Republic was to ours. Each head of a family of
slaves in Russia was given three acres of land and necessary farming
implements with which to begin life. But our slaves were turned loose
without anything—naked to the elements.
As one of the number of enslaved, I am none the less disposed to
observe and note with pleasure and gratitude every effort our white friends
and brothers are making to remedy the evils wrought by the long years of
slavery and its concomitants. And in such wise I rejoice in the effort made
here today.
I have a word now upon another subject, and what I have to say may be
more useful than palatable. That subject is the talk now so generally
prevailing, about races and race lines. I have no hesitation in telling you
that I think the colored people and their friends make a great mistake in
saying so much of race and color. I know no such basis for the claims of
justice. I know no such a motive for efforts at self-improvement. In this
race-way they put the emphasis in the wrong place. I do now and always
have attached more importance to manhood than to mere kinship or identity
with any variety of the human family. Race, in the popular sense, is narrow.
Humanity is broad. The one is special the other is universal; the one is
transient, the other permanent. In the essential dignity of man as man, I
find all necessary incentives and aspirations to a useful and noble life.
Manhood is broad enough, and high enough as a platform for you and me
and all of us. The colored people of this country should advance to the high
position of the Constitution of the country. It makes no distinction on
account of race or color, and they should make none.
Since emancipation we hear much said of our modern colored leaders
in commendation of race pride, race love, race effort, race superiority, race
men and the like. One man is praised for being a race man and another is
condemned for not being a race man. In all this talk of race , the motive may
be good, but the method is bad. It is an effort to cast out Satan by
Beelaebub.12Matt. 12: 24, 26; Mark 3: 22-23; and Luke 11: 18, 19. The evils which are now crushing the Negro to earth have
their root and sap, their force and mainspring, in this narrow spirit of race
and color and the Negro has no more right to excuse or to foster it than men
of any other race. I recognize and adopt no such narrow basis for my
thoughts, feelings, or motives of action. I would place myself and I would
place you, my young friends, upon grounds vastly higher and broader than
any founded upon race or color. Neither law, learning, nor religion is
addressed to any man’s color or race. Science, education, the word of God,
and all the virtues known among men, are recommended to us not as races
but as men. We are not recommended to love or hate any particular variety
of the human family more than any other. Not as Ethiopians, not as Cauca-
sians , not as Mongolians , not as Afro-Americans, or Anglo-Americans are
we addressed but as men. God and nature speak to our manhood and
manhood alone. Here all ideas of duty and moral obligation are predicated.
We are accountable only as men. In the language of the Scripture, we are
called upon to quit ourselves like men. To those who are everlastingly
prating about race men, I have to say: Gentlemen, you reflect upon your
best friends. It was not the race or the color of the Negro that won for him
the battle of liberty. That great battle was won, not because the victim of
slavery was a Negro, mulatto, or an Afro-American, but because the victim
of slavery was a man, and a brother to all other men, a child of God, and
could claim with all mankind a common Father, and therefore should be
recognized as an accountable being, a subject of Government and entitled
to justice, liberty and equality before the law and everywhere else. Man
saw that he had a right to liberty, education, and to an equal education, and
to an equal chance with all other men in the common race of life and in the
pursuit of happiness.
While slavery lasted you know we could seldom get ourselves recog-
nized in any form of law or language as men. Our old masters were
remarkably shy of recognizing our manhood even in words written or
spoken. They called a man with a head as white as mine, a boy. The old
advertisements for runaways were carefully worded: “Runaway, my boy
Tom, Jim or Harry,” never, my man.
Hence, at the risk of being deemed deficient in the quality of love and
loyalty to race and color, I confess that in my advocacy of the colored man’s
cause, whether in the name of education or freedom, I have had more to say
of manhood and of what is comprehended in manhood and in womanhood,
than of the mere accident of race and color; and if this is disloyalty to race
and color, I am guilty. I insist upon it that the lesson which colored people,
not less than white people ought now to learn is, that there is no moral or
intellectual quality in the color of a man’s cuticle; that color in itself is
neither good nor bad; that to be black or white, is neither a proper source of
pride nor shame. I go further and declare that no man’s devotion to the
cause of justice, liberty, and humanity is to be weighed, measured and
determined by his color or race. We should never forget that the ablest and
most eloquent voices ever raised in behalf of the black man’s cause, were
the voices of white men. Not for the race, not for color, but for man and
manhood alone they labored, fought and died. Neither Phillips, nor
Sumner, nor Garrison,13Wendell Phillips, Charles Sumner, and William Lloyd Garrison. nor John Brown, nor Gerrit Smith was a black
man. They were white men, and yet no black men were ever truer to the
black man’s cause than these and other men like them. They saw in the
slave, manhood, brotherhood, and womanhood outraged neglected and
degraded and their own noble manhood, not their racehood, revolted at the
offense. They placed the emphasis where it belonged. Not on the mint
annis and cummin14Matt. 23: 23. of color and race, but upon manhood, the weightier
matters of the law.
Thus compassed about by so great a cloud of witnesses, I can easily
afford to be reproached and denounced for standing in defense of this
principle against all comers. My position is, that it is better to regard
ourselves as a part of the whole than as the whole of a part. It is better to be a
member of the great human family, than a member of any particular variety
of the human family. In regard to men as in regard to things, the whole is
more than a part. Away then with the nonsense that a man must be black to
be true to the rights of black men. I put my foot upon the effort to draw lines
between white and black or between blacks and so-called Afro-Americans.
or race line in the domain of liberty. Whoever is for equal rights, for equal
education, for equal opportunities, for all men of whatever race or color, I
hail him as a “countryman, clansman, kinsman and brother beloved.”
I must not further occupy your time except to answer briefly the inqui-
ry, “What of the night?”15Isa. 21: 11. You young people have a right to ask me what
the future has in store for you and the people with whom you are classed. I
have been a watchman on your walls more than fifty years, so long that you
think I ought to know what the future will bring to pass and to discern for
you the signs of the times. You want to know whether the hour is one of
hope or despair. I have no time to answer this solemn inquiry at length or as
it deserves, and will content myself with giving you the assurance of my
belief. I think the situation is serious but it is not hopeless. On the contrary,
there are many encouraging signs in the moral skies. l have seen many dark
hours and have yet never despaired of the colored man’s future. There is no
time in our history that I would prefer to the present. Go back to the
annexation of Texas—the fugitive slave law times and the border war in
Kansas. The existence of this Industrial School of Manassas, is a tri-
umphant rebuke to the cry of despair now heard in some quarters. Nor does
it stand alone. It is a type of such institutions in nearly all of the Southern
States. Schools and colleges for colored youth are multiplying all over the
land. Hampton, Tuskegee, Cappahosic, are brilliant examples.16In 1868 the American Missionary Association founded the Hampton Institute in Hampton, Virginia, as a normal school for blacks with a curriculum emphasizing industrial education. The Alabama general assembly chartered Tuskegee Institute in 1881 as an industrial and agricultural training school for blacks, and the institute gained national prominence under the leadership of Booker T. Washington, a Hampton graduate. An industrial high school for blacks, supported mainly by northern contributions, operated at Cappahosic, Gloucester County, Virginia, until the early twentieth century. Douglass made addresses at all three of these institutions. , 6: 1 (June 1894); Mary Wiatt Gray, (Virginia) (Richmond, 1936), 181-82; , 571, 1256-57. The light
of education is shedding its beams more brightly and more effectively upon
the colored people of the South, than it ever did in the case of any other
emancipated people in the world. These efforts cannot fail in the end to
bear fruit.
But it is said that we are now being greatly persecuted. I know it. I
admit it. I deplore it. I denounce it. Attempts are being made to set aside the
amendments of the Constitution: to wrest from us the elective franchise; to
exclude us from respectable railroad cars; to draw the color line against us
in religious organizations; to exclude us from hotels and make us a pro-
scribed class. I know it all, and yet I see in it all a convincing evidence of
our progress and the promise of a brighter future. The resistence we now
meet is the proof of our progress. We are not the only people who have been
persecuted.
The resistance is not to the colored man as a slave, a servant, or a
menial, or a person. It is aimed at the Negro as a gentleman, a successful
man, as a scholar. The Negro in ignorance and in rags meets no resistance.
He is rather liked than otherwise. He is thought to be in his place. It is only
when he acquires education, property, popularity and influence, only when
he attempts to rise above his ancient level, when he was numbered with the
beast of the field, and aspires to be a man and a MAN AMONG MEN, that he
invites repression. Even in the laws of the South, excluding him from the
railroad cars and other places, care is taken to allow him to ride as a
servant, a valet, or a porter. He may make a bed, but must not sleep in it. He
may handle bread, but must not eat it. It [is] not the Negro, but the quality
of the Negro that disturbs popular prejudice. It is his character not his
personality which makes him an offense or otherwise. In one quality he is
smiled upon as a serviceable animal. In the other he is scorned as an upstart
entirely out of his place and is made to “take a back seat. I am not much
disturbed by this for the same resistance in kind, though not in degree, has
to be met by white men and white women who rise from lowly conditions.
The successful and opulent esteem them as upstarts. A lady as elegant and
opulent as Mrs. Potter Palmer,17Famed Chicago businesswoman and reformer and socialite, Bertha Honoré Palmer (1849-1918), held the position of chair of the board of lady managers of the World’s Columbian Exposition. Palmer was the daughter of Henry H. Honoré who in 1855 relocated his family from Louisville, Kentucky, to Chicago where he became wealthy through real estate investments. She was educated at female seminaries and by private tutors and married Chicago merchant Potter Palmer, twenty-three years her senior, in 1870. Her husband’s wealth and her sister’s marriage to a son of President Grant enabled Palmer to establish herself as the leader of Chicago’s high society. She also befriended Jane Addams and supported such reforms as temperance, coeducation, and women’s suffrage. Palmer traveled extensively to persuade forty-seven foreign governments to send displays to the Women’s Building at the Columbian Exposition. Her management of these exhibits won her great praise as did her graceful handling of an intentional snubbing by a touring Spanish princess who called her an “innkeeper’s wife" on account of her husband’s ownership of the Palmer House hotel. Following her husband‘s death in 1902, Palmer resided in Europe for eight years and then settled in western Florida where she profited greatly by investing in the region’s economic development. , 1: 6 (February 1891); Ishbel Ross, (New York, 1960); James, , 4: 8-10; , 7: 210; , 12: 541-43; , 14: 176-77, 190-91. of Chicago, had to submit to this test. She
was compelled to hear herself talked about as a “shoddy” upstart, the
“wife of a tavern keeper,” and the like, during the Colombian Exposition.
But the upstart of to-day, is the elite of to-morrow.
A ship at anchor, with halliards broken, sails mildewed, hull empty,
her bottom covered with sea-weed and barnacles, meets no resistance. She
lies perfectly still. But when she spreads her canvas to the breeze and sets
out on her voyage, turns prow to the open sea, the higher shall be her speed,
the greater shall be her resistance. And so it is with the colored man. He
meets with resistance now because more than ever he is fitting himself for a
higher life. He is shedding the old rags of slavery and putting on the apparel
of freedom.
In conclusion, my dear young friends, be not discouraged. Accept the
inspiration of hope. Imitate the example of the brave mariner who, amid
clouds and darkness, amid hail, rain and storm bolts, battles his way
against all that the sea opposes to his progress, and you will reach the goal
of your noble ambition in safety.