Work and Self-Elevation: A Speech Delivered in Cincinnati, Ohio on April 14, 1854
WORK AND SELF-ELEVATION: AN ADDRESS DELIVERED IN CINCINNATI, OHIO, ON 14 APRIL 1854
Frederick Douglass' Paper, 5 May 1854.
On the evening following the close of the Cincinnati Anti-Slavery Convention, Douglass spoke before a crowd at the black Zion Baptist Church on Third Street. In his account of the meeting, Douglass noted that “although it was designed to be a select audience, many of our white friends came in, and remained with us until a late hour.” Several local black citizens, including the prosperous merchant John I. Gaines, spoke after Douglass completed his remarks. Douglass took this opportunity to meet many black Cincinnatians and later wrote that their successful efforts at self-improvement were “giving
the lie to the slander that the colored people are deteriorating in a state of freedom.” FDP, 28 April 1854; Dabney, Cincinnati’s Colored Citizens, 371, 374.
The chapel was crowded at an early hour with people of both races. Mr. D[ouglass] addressed his remarks entirely to the colored people. He ardently desired the elevation of their condition and a universal acknowledgment of the equality of races; but it was not sufficient that they were able to affirm their natural equality with the Anglo-Saxon race; they must show practical equality, or in other words, equal attainments. The difference between natural equality and practical equality is the difference between a field richly covered with a golden harvest of ripe grain, and another wholly uncultivated and covered with thorns and thistles, and all manner of noxious weeds.
We cannot expect, said he, an acknowledgment of natural equality with the white men while they construct railroads on which they can travel sixty miles an hour, while our legs are able to carry us only four; while they build steamboats on which we are only cooks and stewards, and while they have turned this round globe into a whispering gallery, by which they can communicate with each other instantaneously from opposite sides of the world, and we can make ourselves heard only a mile.
Two hundred years ago, Dr. Godwin took the ground, in England, that it was not a sin to baptize negroes.1Morgan Godwyn advocated this position in Negro's and Indian's Advocate. It had been considered sacrilege before that time. Well, my friends, we have made some progress since then.
He alluded to the call for a convention at Cleveland to take measures for the emigration of the African race to Canada or Africa where they might enjoy advantages that they could not hope for in this country;2The “Call For A National Emigration Convention of Colored Men" had been issued by Manin R. Delany, William Webb, John N. Still, and twenty-three others on 19 August 1853. Douglass printed the call but in an accompanying editorial branded the movement “unwise, unfortunate, and premature." There followed a year of controversy in which Douglass and his associate editor, William J. Watkins, frequently wrote and spoke against the emigration scheme. The convention met in Cleveland in August 1854, and created a National Board of Commissioners to explore possible sites for emigration. Although Delany's efforts kept the Board functioning until the Civil War, it failed to launch any of its proposed colonies. FDP, 26 August, 18 November 1853, 13 January, 15 September 1854; Miller, Search for a Black Nationality, 144-53; Victor Ullman, Martin R. Delany: The Beginnings of Black Nationalism (Boston, 1971), 160-66. but he believed there was no country in the world where the black man could more successfully elevate himself and his race than in the United States. Least of all did he desire their removal to a tropical climate. Take for instance, the
little busy bee to Africa, and though he will work for a few months like a little Turk, yet when he finds that winter never comes, he will become as lazy as a tumble bug. So the human race becomes indolent in a warm climate. The characteristics which give honor to a nation in this age are power and enterprise. A tropical climate is not suited to the development of these. The hardships we encounter here will serve in the end, to our elevation.
He alluded to the employments generally pursued by the colored men. While they were contented to carry a trunk, the white man respected them only to the extent of the services rendered, to wit:—a quarter’s worth, or to shave off his beard, only a dime’s worth; but now that growing the beard was getting fashionable, they were likely to lose even that little respect.
He had himself filled almost every menial avocation. He was a caulker by trade, and served his time in the ship yard of Geo[rge] Gardiner at Fell Point, in Baltimore;3Douglass describes his ship-caulking career at Gardiner's shipyard in Douglass, Narrative, 127-33; idem, Bondage and Freedom, 308-18; idem, Life and Times, 199-207. but he had been at different times a common laborer, a waiter, a coachman, a chimney sweep and a wood sawyer.
He then spoke of the faults of the colored race—of their clannishness—of their desire to live together in one street, and of their fondness for getting too many in one house, also of their improvidence; they desired to harvest their corn as soon as they had planted it, to receive a reward for their labor before it was done.
Mr. Douglass then related the plan (which had been published in his paper and in the Aliened American) of a school for the children of the colored race.4The plan printed in FDP, 24 March 1854, was signed by Douglass, John D. Peck, Amos G. Beman, John Jones, J. D. Bonner, and James McCune Smith, who composed the committee on the manual-labor school set up by the 1853 National Negro Convention. The Aliened American, published weekly in Cleveland, Ohio, was edited by William Howard Day during 1853. It was designed to combine manual labor with study, to impart a knowledge of trades as well as of books to teach an art with every science. He had been driven to seek some such plan from the difficulty of getting colored children into the mechanic shops of white men. He found it easier to get his son into a lawyer’s office to read Blackstone, than into a Blacksmith’s shop to hammer iron. The reason of this was that the lower the man was in the scale of intelligence, the more inveterate were his prejudices.
The school he proposed was not to be proscriptive; white folks might send their sons there. There was no prejudice among boys in regard to
color, they associated freely together in the games and sports of childhood—it was only when they became men that they discovered that certain of their fellowmen were black.
One thing he regarded as settled: The colored race were bound to remain in the United States; there was no getting them out; individuals might emigrate, but nations seldom or never; they had been two hundred years or more in this country, and it belonged to them. (Applause) They cultivated it with their toil and watered it with their tears; their labor had earned it, and having been here about as long as anybody else; they could sing as their Methodist brethren did:
“We have been, and still are with you."5Douglass quotes a variation of the hymn “Promise." lyrics ofwhich include: “Jesus has been with us / And He is still with us / And He's promised to be with us to the end.” Henry F. Chandler, a white farmer in Georgia, received credit for the composition of the hymn. George Pullen Jackson, White Spirituals in the Southern Uplands (Chapel Hill, N.C. 1933), 288; John G. McCurry, ed. The Social Harp: A Collection of Tunes, Odes, Anthems, and Set Pieces, Selected From Various Authors (1855; Athens. Ga., 1973), xi, 73.
And since they intended to remain here they would try and make themselves comfortable and, if possible, agreeable to their white brethren. (Applause) The air became very warm and close, and some one raised a window near the pulpit. “That’s right,” said Douglass, “raise it and let in the air—that’s another improvement we must make.” Our work should speak for us, and command respect for us. The architect who points to this and that building of his erecting, feels a manly pride for his work. His children can point to it and say our father built this.
The colored people must make for their race permanent monuments—so that it might be said of some noble structure, a “colored man built that.” How much better to do this than to spend a lifetime in putting the polish on a boot which the first drop of rain would destroy, or in shaving a beard which would grow out again the next morning, and leave no monument of the labor. What inferiority the black man must feel when shown noble structures—told that such a man had reared them, was then asked what he had done, and had to reply “Why I never know’d nothin.” For his part he would work his fingers to the bone, but his children should have trades.
The speaker apologized for the brevity of his remarks. He was exhausted by his labor at the convention, and did not come here to make a speech, but to meet and converse with his colored fellow citizens. He had tried simply to tell them useful and wholesome truths, that he might do
them good. “God knows I love my people, and I am determined to fall or flourish with them.”