Black Teachers for Black Pupils: a Speech Delivered in Baltimore, Maryland, on 4 December 1879
BLACK TEACHERS FOR BLACK PUPILS: A SPEECH
DELIVERED IN BALTIMORE, MARYLAND,
ON 4 DECEMBER 1879
Baltimore American, 5 December 1879. Other texts in Baltimore Sun, 5 December 1879;
Washington People's Advocate, 13 December 1879; Philadelphia Christian Recorder, 1
January 1880.
The purpose of the meeting in the Bethel A. M. E. Church on Saratoga Street
in Baltimore on the evening of 4 December 1879 was to demonstrate support
for a demand that the city school board hire black teachers for black schools.
A choir of the church’s Sunday school students opened the meeting with
singing. The Reverend James H. A. Johnson presided, and William E. Mat-
thews, black lawyer and financier, spoke prior to Douglass. The audience in
the packed church hall greeted Douglass with “tumultuous applause.” After
concluding remarks from Johnson, the gathering approved resolutions in
favor of black teachers for black schools and then adjourned.
[Douglass] said he did not come here to make, but rather to hear, a speech.
He heard an admirable speech,1William E. Matthews (1845-94) delivered the address to which Douglass refers. Born in Baltimore, Matthews was a free black. Before attaining a law degree from Howard University in 1873, Matthews was a principal speaker for the Gailbraith Lyceum, a realtor, and the first black to be appointed to a clerkship in the U.S. Post Office (1870). In 1881 he opened a real estate and broker‘s office in Washington, D.C. Matthews managed Douglass’s finances before the latter went to Europe in 1886. In several letters to Matthews, Douglass alludes to tensions and differences between them, but always considers the bond of their common cause decisive. Their political collaboration was longstanding—both men had been members of the delegation of ten blacks who interviewed President Andrew Johnson on 7 February 1866. In his speech at Bethel Church, Matthews argued that white teachers had no communion with the parents of black children and in general seemed to feel compromised by teaching black students. The salaries paid to white teachers should go into the pockets of competent blacks, because “money represents civilization and will enable the colored people to buy books, pictures, music and secure other civilizing influences.” Matthews also pointed out that Baltimore was in defiance of the law: “the ordinance that established schools for blacks required that no racial distinctions be made in the selection of teachers.” William J. Simmons, ed., Men of Mark: Eminent, Progressive, and Rising (1887; New York, 1968), 246-51; Douglass to William E. Matthews, 20 September 1882, 1 July 1889, General Correspondence File, reel 3, frames 635-36, reel 5, frames 415-16, FD Papers, DLC. remarkable because it had not dealt in
glittering generalities.2In a letter to a Whig convention in Maine in 1856, Rufus Choate spoke with opprobrium of “the glittering and sounding generalities" put forth by “the new geographical party, calling itself Republican." Brown, Works of Rufus Choate, 1: 212, 215.
He said: I have had my share of speech making, as I have been at it for
over forty years, and only came here to let you see my gray head, and let
you know that I am still on the side of freedom and equality; on the side of
justice and fair play. Justice is the perpetual disposition to render to every
man his due; and we are here in the same old cause of liberty, justice and
equality. (Applause.) We are only following the line marked out for us by
Bethel Church more than fifty years ago—the principle of the assertion and
dignity of manhood, and Bethel Church can be in no better service than it
exercises this evening. The question here discussed is a self-evident propo-
sition; yet it is a fact that we have to argue this self-evident proposition. It is
self-evident that every man has the right to occupy that position for which
his ability qualifies him. A house has the right to just as much space as its
walls occupy, and a ship has the right to draw as much water as its size
allows. It is self-evident that a man has a right to do that for which he is
fitted, whatever his race or color, whether he be a Caucasian or Mongolian,
an Ethiopian or an Indian. (Applause)
I am very glad of the cautious yet bold assertion of the purpose of the
meeting by the speakers. No tirade against white teachers because of their
race or color is to be permitted. This matter of colored men and women
being admitted to colored schools supported by taxes contributed by white
and colored alike is not a question of color, but of prejudice. There is a
disposition among the best of our white friends and the worst of our white
enemies to make the colored man “keep his place.” (Laughter.) They love
us, but at a long distance. (Laughter.) Generally love wants its object to be
very near, in the same city, under the same roof, or in the same room.
(Laughter.) But the love which some of our white friends bear towards us is
to have us at a gentlemanly distance and in humble places. It is a fact that
the time was when, in the words of Chief Justice Taney, “Black men had no
rights which white men were bound to respect.”3Douglass paraphrases the decision of Chief Justice Roger B. Taney in the case of Dred Scott v. John F. A. Sanford, 19 Howard (1857), 407. The leaven is still here,
but the spirit rather subdued.4Douglass probably alludes to Matt. 13: 33, Luke 13: 21, 1 Cor. 5: 6, Gal. 5: 9.
I remember the time when, fifty years ago, I saw our brethren chained
together and driven down Pratt street to City Block, where they took the
vessel for the New Orleans market, there to be sold like sheep and swine.
But the preachings of the pulpit, the utterances of the press and a growing
civilization demanded that this hell black crime should not be displayed in
public, and coaches were obtained in which the slaves were taken to the
wharf, and the rattle of the old chain and the clank of the old fetters were
concealed from the public ear. Finally, the whipping post at the County
wharf was permitted to rot away. Then Sunday schools were opened to the
colored people. But we negroes are an irrepressible people, and there is no
keeping us back; and as we stopped the cargoes of human merchandise to
New Orleans, so also we shall get into these schools. (Applause) I won’t
despair of anything.
The first argument in favor of emancipation was in a book written by
Rev. Mr. Godwin, of Jamaica, who, in a volume of two hundred pages,
proved that “it was not a sin in the sight of God to baptize a negro.”5Douglass refers to Godwyn’s Negro's and Indian's Advocate.
(Laughter) This was not so easy to prove. Baptism implies possession of a
will; it implies the possession of mental power; but the negro had no will.
The question then arose, “If you baptize a negro you must admit him into
the Church of Christ, and he becomes your brother in Christ, and then you
must treat him as a brother. By baptism he ceases to become a heathen, and
by the common law of Christianity he rises to the dignity of a freeman.”
(Applause) But now we can be baptized as often as we please, and still you
are not satisfied.
You always want something, and I hope you will so continue as long as
one of your privileges is curtailed. Some among us have the spirit of Isaiah;
they cry aloud and spare not.6Isa. 58: 1. There is a meaner thing than a slave, and that
is a contented slave. I may be a slave, but a contented slave—never. Our
color is a mere pretext in the discriminations against us. It is only a
contemptible disposition to keep the race down. But we won’t stay down.
When the war broke out we offered our services to that great and good
man, Father Abraham7Abraham Lincoln. (applause), but they told us “your presence in the
army would be distasteful to the white soldiers,” and so they undertook to
fight the rebels only with one hand—the white hand—and were flogged
every time. Beaten at Chancellorsville,8In the battle of Chancellorsville on 1-4 May 1863, Confederate General Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia, consisting of approximately sixty thousand men, defeated Union General Joseph Hooker's Army of the Potomac, more than twice its size. Long, Civil War Day by Day, 344-49. Bull Run and Big Bethel, they
found it necessary to call for the black man; but they did not give him a blue
uniform, but a red shirt, and instead of putting arms into his hands he was
put to digging trenches. But they discovered that it would not do, as the
irrepressible negro was determined to have the blue coat and a gun on his
shoulder, and so they put him into arsenals, forts and yellow fever districts,
to hold them for the white soldiers, and instead of fighting the rebels, he
had to fight yellow fever. (Laughter) But before the war ended the govern-
ment found the earth crumbling beneath them, the Star Spangled Banner
heavy with blood, and the recruiting sergeants footsore and weary calling
for more men. Then they called upon the negro, and said he was just as
good to stop a bullet as anybody else.
Then came emancipation, and soon afterwards we wanted the ballot.
We agitated the question, and at length we got it. To be sure, the right is
crippled by violence in some of the Southern states, and even here it is not
protected. Yet this opposition and violence contains within itself the seeds
of destruction, and we shall soon exercise unmolested our elective fran-
chise. (Applause)
In regard to the appointment of teachers, all the arguments of the
opposition have been ably met. The school commissioners of the city ought
to be here, and if they had at heart the interests of the colored race, they
would have been here to hear what is said on our side of the case. They
should have come here with the words, “Let us have light,”9Douglass paraphrases Gen. 1: 3. listen to our
complaints, and if the complaints are just to redress them. It is little, it is
contemptible, to keep a man away from taking charge of a class merely
because of his color. Baltimore is too big to be so little, I want you reporters
to tell the absentees of the School Board that I think it’s a very small
business for the Commissioners of Public Schools of Baltimore to continue
to exclude from such positions talented and competent men, in every way
qualified to fill them, simply because they are colored. They may wriggle
and twist as much as they please about their incompetency, but the whole
world knows that there are hundreds and thousands of competent colored
people to teach the public schools. We are not only lawyers and doctors,
but also inventors, and I myself have invented something to keep specta-
cles on a man’s nose when he perspires. (Laughter.)
This prejudice against color exists only in this country. I have been
where the people are whiter than the people of the United States (and we,
too, are getting white as fast as we can) and wherever I went, whether into
the House of Lords or the House of Commons, in the British Museum10The British national library and museum is housed in Bloomsbury, London, and collectively called the British Museum. It was founded in 1753 by an act of Parliament to maintain important rare books and historical records then in government possession. The original building was replaced by a new one, designed by Robert Smirke and constructed from 1823 to 1852, during which time the old building was gradually demolished. When Douglass was in London in 1846 and 1847, the holdings included Egyptian antiquities captured in 1801 from the French and the Elgin marbles. S[ydney] F[rank] Markham, comp., Directory of Museums and Art Galleries in the British Isles (London, 1948), 191-94. or
in the palaces, highways, parks and churches, at private tables and on the
street, I found myself received as a man, and have never heard a word or
seen a gesture or a disposition to insult me on account of my color.
We will not be kept down, but we must struggle for and demand our
rights. There is something valuable under the sky but a struggle must be
made for it. There are rights in reserve for us, but we must contend for
them. No nation that enjoys liberty can wear it so sublimely as one that has
wrenched it from the reluctant hand of some tyrant. We put the colored
schools on the defence before the Christianity and humanity of the commu-
nity and ask the colored teachers to plead before the tribunal of the people.
Our cause is just, and must triumph; but you must continue to agitate it until
you secure your rights. (Applause)