 Section 17, First Paper of 20th Century Negro Literature. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Phyllis Vincelli. 20th Century Negro Literature. Topic 17, First Paper by M. W. Gilbert D.D. Did the American Negro prove in the 19th Century that he is intellectually equal to the white man? The subject of this sketch was born July 25, 1862 at Mechanicsville, Sumter County, South Carolina. His parents were slaves, and his father, a Baptist minister, is still alive. Mr. Gilbert began his early school life during the Reconstruction period at Mechanicsville and continued it at Manville in an adjoining township until 1879 when he entered Benedict College, then Benedict Institute, at Columbia, South Carolina. He remained in Benedict until the spring of 1883 when he graduated from a classical course specially designed to fit him for a northern college. In the fall of 1883, after a searching examination, he entered the freshman class of Colgate University and remained in that institution for years until his graduation in 1887 with the degree of A.B. During his college course, Mr. Gilbert particularly distinguished himself in the languages and oratory. During his sophomore year, he won in an oratorical contest the first Kingsford Prize. Although the only colored man in his class, yet he was so highly esteemed by his classmates that he enjoyed the unique distinction of being elected every three months for four years as class secretary and treasurer. In addition to this, he was elected class historian in his senior year. His alma mater conferred on him the degree of A.M. in 1890. Immediately after his graduation, Mr. Gilbert was called to the pastorate of the first colored Baptist Church at Nashville, Tennessee. He remained in this position three years and a half, and then he accepted the call of the Bethel Baptist Church of Jacksonville, Florida. He was not permitted by his denomination to remain long in this pastorate. For after one year in it, on the nomination of the American Baptist Home Mission Society of New York, he was elected to lead in the educational work among the colored Baptists of Florida. He presided one year over the Florida Institute at Live Oak, and he led in 1892 in the founding of the Florida Baptist Academy, now college, at Jacksonville, Florida. The cares and anxiety involved in this work threatened his health, and in 1894 he resigned this position to accept the pastorate of a young church organization in Savannah, Georgia, having in the meantime declined an election to the presidency of State University at Louisville, Kentucky. In 1894 he was elected Vice President and Professor of History, Political Science, and Modern Languages in the colored State College at Orangeburg, South Carolina. He served in this capacity two years, and after reelection for a third year he resigned to re-enter upon his life work in the Gospel ministry. He served a few months after this in the Office of General Missionary and Corresponding Secretary of the Baptist State Convention of South Carolina. But this work, militating against his health, he gave up to enter upon the pastorate of the Central Baptist Church at Charleston, South Carolina, where he now is. Mr. Gilbert received three years ago the degree of D.D. from Guadalupe College of Seguin, Texas. In 1883 Dr. Gilbert was married in Columbia, South Carolina to Miss Agnes Boozer. Seven children have been born to them, five of whom are still living. Dr. Gilbert is much in demand as a public speaker on great occasions and his services are frequently sought by some of the best churches of his denomination. The necessity for asserting and maintaining the affirmative of the above question is due to the deep-seated prejudice against the Negro, which prejudice is the unfortunate fruit of the Negro's past enslavement. It is not surprising that those who for centuries held the Negro as a chattel should regard him as being essentially inferior to themselves and time is required in the changed condition of affairs to completely eradicate this idea. Even now, despite the remarkable development of the Negro since his emancipation, occasionally some rip fan-winkle awakening from a long sleep essays to deny the complete humanity of the Negro race. A true believer in the scriptures must be equally a believer in the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of all men. For the divine record declares that God hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth. Language, physiology, and psychology confirm the truthfulness of scripture on this issue. The mission of Christianity to preach the gospel over the inhabited world is based upon this great idea. Science and holy writ assert the intellectual equality of all men of whatever race or color so far as real capacity and possibilities are concerned. The position and relative importance of a race or nation in the world's history are determined more by its antecedents and environments than by the original endowments of each individual that constitutes it. Two different races, having the same antecedents and subject to the same environments will produce the same results. In answering the question as to whether the Negro has demonstrated his intellectual equality with the white man during the century just closed, our inquiry must necessarily be confined to the closing third of that century. For prior to the emancipation of the race the colored people were generally in an enslaved condition. Opportunities for education, citizenship, and the development of manhood were few and at best could apply to but few of the race. Although our inquiry is limited to only one third of the century just closed nevertheless we can safely assert that in that short period the Negro has demonstrated by actual results his intellectual equality with the white man. One, the Negro has demonstrated in thirty-five years a capacity for education equal to that of the white man. This remark does not apply alone to his primary education but also to the highest. He has entered already every intellectual field that is open to him and he is achieving success in every one that he has entered within a third of a century one hundred and fifty-six institutions for the higher education of the Negroes have been founded and from these and northern colleges there have been more than seventeen thousand graduates. These colleges are located chiefly in the south and their courses of studies are as high as their neighboring white colleges. In some instances they are higher. Some of these graduates have evinced great ability and brilliancy and mastering the most difficult studies included in the curriculum. The existence of Negro colleges and the successful graduation of Negroes therefrom has a strong argument for his intellectual equality. Nor has the Negro simply demonstrated his ability to master the literary courses of the college but also his capacity to acquire the knowledge and training to fit him for life in the various professions. Within a third of a century the race has produced thirty thousand teachers, five hundred physicians, two hundred and fifty lawyers and a large number of others who have entered the ministry, politics and editorial life. If there is doubt on the demonstration of the Negro's ability to acquire education in his own colleges we need only to mention the fact that his ambition has led him to some of the leading northern universities where he studied at the side of white men and even there he has demonstrated his essential intellectual equality with the white man by winning in several well-known instances some of their highest honors for scholarship, proficiency and oratory. Two, the Negro has demonstrated his capacity for imparting an education to others after he has himself received it. He is an essential and established factor in the public school system of the South. It is he that is entrusted with the primary education of his people and it is due largely to him that his people in thirty-five years have reduced their illiteracy forty-five percent. During those thirty-five years he has become professor of law, medicine, theology, mathematics, the sciences and languages. In the colleges devoted to the education of the colored men there are colored professors who have become eminent in their departments and who would fill with credit similar chairs in white institutions of learning. All of the colored state colleges of the South are under the management of Negroes as presidents and professors. Three, the Negro has also demonstrated his productivity in the field of authorship. In this particular he has shown a white man's capacity. In calling attention to the Negro's achievement in this particular it may be well to note the fact that the Negro's white neighbor, although he lives in a climb similar to that which produced in Greece philosophers like Plato and Aristotle and poets like Homer, Euripides and Sophocles and in Italy poets like Virgil and Horace has not produced a philosopher or a first class poet with all the leisure he enjoyed while the Negro has been engaged in enforced labor for him. In the highest field of thought as in philosophy and the works of imagination the South presents a barren field. In the sphere of authorship usually entered by white men the Negro has already worked his way. He has already produced meritorious books on mathematics, sociology, theology, history, poetry, travels, sermons, languages and biographies. There have been three hundred books written by Negroes. Four. Nor has the Negro's mind followed slavishly in the beaten path of imitation. He has demonstrated that he possesses also a high order of intellect by his inventive genius. The lubricator now being used on nearly all the railroad engines in the United States was invented by a colored man, Mr. E. McCoy of Detroit, Michigan. Eugene Birkins, a Negro, was inventor of the Birkins automatic machine gun concerning which Admiral Dewey said it was by far the best machine gun ever made. Many other useful inventions in the country are credited by the patent office to the Negro. Five. The Negro has also demonstrated in thirty-five years his capacity for organizing, controlling and directing great and diversified interests. Capacity to organize, maintain and direct presupposes a high order of mind. Executive ability requires accompanying intellectual ability and not mere brilliancy. Unaided and alone, the Negro has set on foot great ecclesiastical organizations which he is maintaining and developing with much credit to himself. In all these organizations, leadership to the few has been cheerfully conceded by the masses. As a church builder with little means at his command, the Negro stands without a peer. Within the last thirty-five years of the nineteenth century, the Negro has founded high schools, academies and colleges, and he is successfully supporting and managing them. If it is fair to estimate the ability and worth of men by real achievements, then it must be conceded that the foremost man for real ability throughout the entire South is a Negro. And we refer to the eminent founder and developer of the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. It is unquestionable in our mind that the greatest enterprise conceived and executed by any one mind in the entire South during the past forty years was that conceived in the brains of a single Negro, the child of a slave mother that resulted in the world-renowned Tuskegee Institute. The results of Tuskegee will demonstrate that the highest order of mind in the South, as well as the most famous, is in the keeping of the Negro. The leading Presbyterian institution of learning in the South for the education of colored men is now managed successfully by Negro scholars. We refer here to Biddle University. 6. In business and politics, the Negro, despite the odds arrayed against him, is succeeding reasonably well. He is constantly undertaking new business enterprises, and wherever the government or state has entrusted him with official position, the intelligent Negro has discharged his public functions with credit to the government and glory for himself. Whenever failure is recorded against the Negro, it is not due to his lacking the mental endowments equal to that of the white man, but because he was denied the white man's favorable past, and because a white man's opportunity is denied him. Equality of opportunities and equality before the laws should be cheerfully granted him. Criticism against him is savage and un-Christian if these doors are closed against him. End of Topic 17, First Paper Topic 18, First Paper of 20th Century Negro Literature This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Phyllis Vinceli. 20th Century Negro Literature Topic 18, First Paper by John Wesley Cromwell What progress did the American white man make in the 19th century along the line of conceding to the Negro his religious, political, and civil rights? John Wesley Cromwell, the 12th child and seventh son of Willis H. and Elizabeth Carney Cromwell, was born at Portsmouth, Virginia, September 5th, 1846. In 1851 the family moved to Philadelphia, where he entered the public schools and subsequently the Institute for Colored Youth, graduating in 1864. He taught at Columbia, Pennsylvania, after which he established a private school in his native town. Under the auspices of northern charitable associations he taught at Spanish Neck and Little Gunpowder in Maryland, Providence Church, Scott Farm, Charlotte County, and Weithville, Virginia. On the inauguration of the public school system he became principal of the Dills Bakery School in Richmond, Virginia, and in the following summer taught near the scene of the Nat Turner Insurrection in Southampton County in the same state. Mr. Cromwell took an active part in the reconstruction of Virginia, was delegate to the First State Republican Convention, did jury service in the United States Court for the term at which the case of Jefferson Davis was calendared, and was a clerk in the Reconstruction Constitutional Convention. A shot, fired with deadly intent, grazed his clothing while at Spanish Neck, Maryland, where the church in which the school was taught was burned to the ground, and he was twice forced to face the muzzles of revolvers in Virginia because of his work as an educator. In 1871 he entered the law department of Howard University, graduating there from in 1874. In 1872, after a competitive examination, having distanced 240 applicants, he received a $1,200 appointment in the Treasury Department in which he was twice promoted by the same method within 20 months. In 1885, in the early days of the Cleveland administration, he was removed as an offensive partisan, having established and conducted since 1876 the People's Advocate, a weekly journal of more than local influence. He then began the practice of law in connection with his journalistic work. In 1889 he was tendered and he accepted a Principalship of one of the grammar schools of Washington, D.C., the position he still holds. In 1875 he was chosen at Richmond the President of the Virginia Educational and Historical Association and was four times re-elected. He has served two terms as the President of the Bethel Literary, with which he has been officially connected for 20 years. He was one of the original members of the American Negro Academy, founded by Reverend Alexander Crummel and is its corresponding secretary. In 1873 he was married to Miss Lucy A. McGuinn of Richmond, Virginia. Six children survived of that marriage, the eldest being Miss Othelia Cromwell, the first colored graduate, 1900, of Smith College, Massachusetts. In 1892 he married Miss Annie E. Kahn of Mechanicksburg, Pennsylvania. In 1887 he became a member of the Metropolitan AME Church under the pastorate of Reverend now Chaplain T. G. Steward. Among his addresses and papers are the Negro in Business, the Colored Church in America, Nat Turner, a Historical Sketch, Benjamin Banneker, the Negro as a Journalist, and other historical and statistical studies. The first named, published for a syndicate of Metropolitan newspapers in 1886, found its way in one form or another in nearly all the representative papers of the land. The status of the Negro at the close of the 18th and the opening of the 19th centuries was substantially the same north and south. These well-defined geographical sections on both sides of Mason and Dixon's line were not as extensive then as now. Ohio, Kentucky, and Tennessee were the only states west of the Alleghenies. Florida was a foreign possession, Alabama and the region beyond were to be numbered with the United States at a subsequent period. The colored population in 1800 was one million one thousand four hundred and thirty six free and slave or eighteen point eight eight percent of the entire population. Eight hundred ninety three thousand forty one were slaves of whom there were in round numbers thirty thousand in the states of New Hampshire, Rhode Island, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, New York, and Delaware. Twenty thousand were in New York alone. In nineteen hundred the total population is seventy six million three hundred and three thousand three hundred and eighty seven with eight million eight hundred and forty thousand seven hundred and eighty nine persons of Negro descent or eleven point five of the aggregate population. The year eighteen hundred marks the beginning of an epic of increasing hardship for the Negro both in church and state. It was also characterized by fierce aggressiveness by the slave power stimulated by the invention of the cotton gin by Eli Whitney and the impetus which it gave to the growth and importation of cotton. The acquisition of the Louisiana purchase from France added to the possible domain of slave territory and affected the current of political action for more than half a century. During this period the Negro was a most important figure both in church and state the occasion if not the cause of perplexing problems. In the field of religion and politics especially has his status attracted worldwide attention. At a very early day the Methodist and Baptist churches had the largest number of colored followers in both town and city but these as yet were not assembled in distinctive organizations. The right of the Negro not only to govern but to direct his religious instruction was bitterly contested sometimes by force at other times by law. The high-handed manner in which the ordinary rights of worship were denied the Negro led to the withdrawal of the majority of colored Methodists in Pennsylvania, New York, Maryland and South Carolina and ultimately to the formation of the two denominations the African Methodist Episcopal and the African Methodist Episcopal Zion churches that became independent before the end of the first quarter of the last century. As to the recognition of the right of colored Baptists to church fellowship the white Baptists were more liberal for we find an association of white churches recognizing the existence of a colored Baptist church at Williamsburg in 1790. The first colored Episcopal society was received into membership on the express condition that no delegate was to be admitted in any of the diocesan conventions. As early as 1801 Reverend John Chavis a Negro of North Carolina was licensed by the Hanover Presbytery of Virginia as a missionary to his own people. The incompatibility of an ordained minister of the same denomination being a slave was recognized in the manumission of Reverend John Gloucester the slave of Reverend Gideon Blackburn of Tennessee on the organization of the first colored Presbyterian church of the country at Philadelphia in 1807 and the subsequent settlement of Reverend Gloucester as its pastor. That the white Baptists really manifested greater liberality in this period is obvious because we also find Jacob Bishop a Negro the pastor of the first Baptist church of Portsmouth Virginia for a few years. The church was a large and influential one and the predecessor of Bishop Reverend Thomas Armistead had served with distinction as a commissioned officer in the Revolutionary War. Today at all the general conferences of the ME and ME South both white and of the AME, AME Zion and CME denominations all colored fraternal delegations are exchanged with all the courtesies bestowed by the two former on the two ladder that should prevail among brethren. A further concession is seen in the fact of the elections of colored ministers of recognized scholarship and fitness to important secretarieships and an editorship by the powerful ME church. Another illustration is the organization about 30 years ago by the ME church south of its colored membership into the CME denomination and the liberal provision made by the former connection for secondary education in the Paine Institute at Augusta, Georgia. The Protestant Episcopal Church that forbade St. Thomas Philadelphia and St. Phillips, New York to aspire to membership in diocesan conventions repealed this resolution after the breakout of the Civil War and delegates from these and other colored parishes throughout the north and west at least find free admission. Sixty years ago the application of so promising and talented a young man as Alexander Crummel to be matriculated as a student in any of the Episcopal Divinity schools created a great shock in church circles and his rejection is set forth at length in Bishop Wilbur forces history of American Episcopalianism. Yet both at the New York and Philadelphia theological seminaries numerous colored clergymen Episcopalian and others now graduate with honor and distinction. Today in the House of Bishops there are two colored prelates of African descent. Right Reverend S. D. Ferguson, the Bishop of Africa, and the right Reverend James Theodore Holly, the Bishop of Haiti, the former a native of South Carolina, the latter of the District of Columbia. There welcome to the pulpits of many of the most exclusive Episcopal churches and to the homes of their parishioners is in marked contrast to the greeting of the Negro by the same communion only two generations previously. In the general assemblies of the Presbyterian Church today the presence of colored commissioners is no novelty and the faculty of Biddle University composed of colored professors by the will of the Presbyterian Board of Education shows what this conservative body has done in the recognition of Negro scholarship. The conventions and associations of the Baptist Church in the south where the bulk of the black race dwell are still on the color line yet there is progress towards true fraternal feeling here. Some years since the religious herald of Richmond, Virginia the leading journal of that denomination in the south announced among its paid contributors the name of a prominent colored divine. It must be said nevertheless that during the first half of the nineteenth century the record of the white church on the Negro shows not only a temporizing but a cowardly spirit. This was true in some respects of the congregational church. Instead of leading the church followed the state. The anti-slavery sentiment which was unmistaken in the later years of the eighteenth century became with the growth of commercialism and national expansion quiescent and subservient to the slave power. The right to vote which in colonial days was generally exercised by colored freeholders was subsequently either restricted or wholly denied. North Carolina, Maryland and Tennessee in the south and Pennsylvania in the north disfranchised their colored suffragists. The wave of disfranchisement then as on the threshold of the twentieth century dashed from one state to another. In the north repeated efforts were made to concede to the Negro his complete political and civil rights. Though the sentiment in his behalf became stronger at every trial of strength yet with a single exception Wisconsin each result was decisive against the concession of the franchise to the Negro. It was only after a bloody civil war in which thousands of lives were sacrificed and billions of treasure were expended that the nation conceded to the Negro first his freedom, next his civil rights, finally his political franchise. One hundred years ago there were but few colored schools even in the free states and these only in the larger towns and cities. Philadelphia was in the lead with New York a second and Boston a third. Connecticut in the third decade of the nineteenth century would not permit Prudence Crandall to maintain a school of colored girls. The means employed to break it up stands a blot on the name of the Commonwealth. A resolution of the National Convention of Colored Men held at Philadelphia to establish a college for the education of colored youths at New Haven occasioned both fierce excitement and bitter hostility. Negroes could ride only on the top of the stagecoach when traveling and Jim Crow cars prevailed on the introduction of railroads. Angry mobs were frequent. Churches and schools were the common target of attack. In the opening of the West to settlement public sentiment there against the Negroes found emphatic expression and black laws forbidding with heavy penalties their permanent abode in that section. These laws have only been removed in the memory of men still living. In many communities however these laws were a dead letter just as today there are isolated localities in Indiana and Illinois as in Georgia and Texas where no Negro is permitted to permanently abide. Through the anti-slavery and abolition agitation carried on by such reformers as William Lloyd Garrison, Wendell Phillips, Frederick Douglass, and Horace Greeley the organizations of the colored people themselves and their appreciation of the meager educational advantages afforded them prior to apematics. The sentiment of the country yielded one by one the rights and privileges of citizens until colored members of state legislatures in more than half a dozen northern states, delegates to city councils, a judgeship each in Massachusetts and Michigan, and state elective officers in Kansas in none of which communities was the colored voting population of itself sufficiently numerous to elect evidences the remarkable revolution and public opinion towards the Negro throughout the north. In the south since 1867 there have been more than a score of congressmen including two senators, state legislators by the hundreds, councilmen, police officers, city and county officials without number, but nearly all of these were obtained by the numerical preponderance of the Negro rather than any liberalizing of dominant white sentiment. End of Topic 18, First Paper Topic 18, Second Paper of 20th Century Negro Literature This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org Recording by Phyllis Vincelli 20th Century Negro Literature Topic 18, Second Paper by the Reverend J. M. Cox D.D. What progress did the American white man make in the 19th century along the line of conceding to the Negro his religious, political and civil rights? James Monroe Cox was born in Chambers County, Alabama, February 26, 1860. While he was yet a boy his parents moved to Atlanta, Georgia and in the public schools of that city he received his first educational training. Having a desire to go to college and receive the best training possible for life's work he entered Clark University. He took high rank in his studies completing the classical course in 1884 and graduated from Gammon Theological Seminary in 1886 being the first student to receive the degree of B.D. from that institution. The year following his graduation from Gammon he was appointed teacher of ancient languages in Flanders Smith College, Little Rock, Arkansas. In the fall of 1887 he was married to Miss Hattie W. Robinson, a young woman of culture and refinement. Who after graduating from Clark University in 1885 taught two years in the public schools of Macon, Georgia. They have five interesting children and their married life has been singularly happy and helpful. After a professorship of eleven years in Flanders Smith College he was appointed president of the institution. As president he has served for five years and under his administration the school has had a strong healthy growth until now it numbers almost 500 students. A much needed addition to the main building has been completed at a cost of $14,000. The faculty has been increased and through the efforts of the students he has raised some money which forms the nucleus of a fund for a trades school. He is a member of the Little Rock Conference of the M.E. Church and has twice represented his brethren as delegate to the General Conference at Omaha, Nebraska in 1892 and at Cleveland, Ohio in 1896. His influence over the young people committed to his care is great and he is striving to send out strong, well-rounded Christian characters and thus erect monuments more enduring than granite or marble. Last year Gammon honored him with a degree of D.D. The very language of our subject assumes that the Negro is entitled to religious, political and civil rights and limits our task to showing the extent these rights have been conceded to him by the American white man. In considering this, as well as other subjects that concern the race, it is well to bear in mind the fact that men make conditions and conditions also make men. The truth of this statement is strikingly demonstrated in the reactionary influence which slavery had upon the American white man. The chains that bound the Negro and made him a chattel also fettered the mind and soul of the white man and caused him to become narrow and selfish. Lincoln's proclamation gave freedom alike to slave and master and now the progress made by each along all lines of human development will depend upon the extent he leaves behind slavery conditions and thinks on pure and higher things. Living in the past, meditating upon the time when he was owner of men and women, the white man must still be a slaveholder. If he cannot hold in subjugation human beings, he will arrogate unto himself the rights of others and use them to further his own selfish ends. The Negro also must get away from slavery conditions if he hopes ever to be a man in the truest sense of the word and have accorded him the rights of a man. Time and growth are determining factors in what is known as the Negro problem. The white man must grow out of and above his prejudice, learn to measure men by their manly and Christian virtues rather than by the color of their skin and the texture of their hair. The Negro must devote himself to character making, wealth getting, and to the faithful performance of all duties that belong to him as a man and a citizen. For he may only hope to receive his rights to the extent that he impresses the white man that he is worthy and deserving of them. We repeat, it will take time to accomplish these things, but when they are accomplished, rights which now the white man withholds and which it seems he will never concede will, like Virgil's golden branch, follow of their own accord. Viewing the subject in the light of the above-stated facts, we believe that much progress was made by the American white man in the nineteenth century along the line of conceding to the Negro his religious, political, and civil rights. In fact, the progress made in this direction stands without a parallel in the annals of history. It surpasses the most sanguine expectation of the Negro's friends and even of the Negro himself. Although the white man is not entirely rid of his prejudice in religion and the color line is written over the entrance to many of his temples of worship, yet he recognizes the Negro as a man and a brother and accords to him religious rights and privileges. The Negro worships God according to the dictates of his own conscience, and the laws of the land protect him in this worship. He is a potent factor in all religious and reformatory movements, and works side by side with his brother and white for the overthrow of vice and sin, and for the hastening of the time when man and nations shall live and act in harmony with the principles of the Christian religion. He sits in the councils of the leading denominations of the country and assists in making their laws and determining their polity. He is accorded a place on the programs of the different young people's gatherings and is listened to with the same attention which other speakers receive. He bears fraternal greetings from his to white denominations and is courteously received and royally entertained. In international assemblies and ecumenical conferences he enjoys every right and receives the same attention that others enjoy and receive. But this progress is further evidenced by the profound interest manifested by the white man in the Negro's religious and moral development, and by the strong pleas on the part of the nation's best and ablest men for the complete obliteration of the color line in religion and for dealing with the Negro as with any other man. Millions of dollars have been given for the building of churches and schools and hundreds of noblemen and women have toiled and suffered that the Negro might be elevated. The bishops of the Methodist Episcopal Church, representing two and a half million members, said in their address to the General Conference at Omaha in 1892, quote, We have always affirmed them, the Negro's, to be our brothers of the same blood and stock of all the races which compose one common humanity. As such, we have claimed for them the same rights and privileges which belong to all other branches of the common family, end quote. His political rights. He who but yesterday was a slave is now a citizen clothed with the elective franchise. This is marvelous and all the more so because the ballot is a wonderful force. It is the ground element of our American civilization. In its exercise, the poor man counts as much as the rich, the ignorant as much as the learned, and the black as much as the white. Indeed, the free and untrammeled use of the ballot makes its possessor a veritable sovereign and gives him power over men and their possessions. Opinion is divided as to the wisdom of giving the Negro citizenship at the time it was given him. We think no mistake was made. It came at the time the Negro needed it most. It was the weapon with which he defended himself when he had but few friends. The Negro has not been a failure in politics. The very leaders who urge our young men to let alone politics will, on the other hand, point out Bruce, Douglas, Pinchback, and others as the most worthy and conspicuous characters of the race. That a reaction has set in and the Negro is being deprived of the ballot should occasion no alarm and little surprise. The grandfather clause in the different state constitutions will serve as a check to the white man's progress along educational lines but a spur to urge a psalm. These seeming setbacks in the concession of political rights I count as progress and place it to the white man's credit. The decision of the Supreme Court at Washington against the constitutionality of the Civil Rights Act of 1875 has had its effect, and today we find the Negro more discriminated against in his civil than in any other class of rights. Then too the social bugbear has had much to do with this discrimination. However progress has been made. It has been slow of course because of the channel, public opinion, through which it has been compelled to come. In many sections of the country the Negro enjoys the most of his civil rights. He is admitted to the hotels, theaters, and other public places, and on public conveyances he has furnished fair accommodations. We believe in the ultimate triumph of right. Let us be patient. There is a disposition on the part of the better class of white people to do the fair and just thing by the Negro. This class will continue to increase, and someday the Negro will enjoy all of his rights, and our fair country will indeed be the land of the free as well as the home of the brave. End of Topic 18, Second Paper Topic 19, First Paper of 20th Century Negro Literature This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org Recording by Phyllis Vincelli 20th Century Negro Literature Topic 19, First Paper of the Negro as a Laborer by Professor N. W. Harley The subject of this sketch was born a slave in Robeson County near Lumberton, North Carolina, July 15, 1852. His father was a Methodist preacher who exhorted the plantation slaves and was noted as a natural mathematician. His mother was deeply religious. Mr. Harley is a self-made man, for he taught himself to read and write after being taught to spell about a third through Webster's blueback spelling book. And with this small beginning he laid the foundation for a collegiate education and for the active work of life. In 1881 he was elected Register of Deeds in Richmond County, North Carolina, where he had taught school for a number of years. And in 1882 was appointed United States Postal Clerk on the Carolina Central Railway and transferred to Charlotte, Columbia and Augusta Railway, which position he held till 1885. In 1879 he was graduated at the Biddle University, Charlotte, North Carolina, with honors. In 1885 he went to Texas and engaged in the profession of teaching and served for a number of years as principal of the Grammar School No. 2 of Dallas, Texas. Afterward he was promoted to the Principalship of the Colored High School of the Dallas City Public Schools, which position he now holds. Professor Harley has taken an active part in the educational work of his state and has served as President and Secretary of the Teachers State Association of the State of Texas. He has also held the position of Superintendent of the Colored Department of the Texas State Fair for eight years and still holds that position. He is a practical staff reporter on the Dallas Morning News, Dallas, Texas. Mr. Harley was married to Ms. Florence Bell Coleman of Dallas, Texas, 1891, and has three children, Lucretia, Chauncey Depew, and Norman W. Jr. He is the author of Harley's Tree of History, a new and graphic method of teaching history. Also, Harley's Simplified Long Division, a new graphic method of teaching long division. Also, Harley's Diagram System of Geography. He has for a number of years advocated the establishment of a state university for the youth of Texas and is also working with the Reverend W. Lomas and D. Rowens to establish an industrial school for his people at Dallas. He is also Chairman of the YMCA Board of Education of Dallas, and along with Mr. Zrice, Darrell, Polk, Weems, and Anderson is conducting a successful YMCA night school for all ages and sexes. For 250 years the American Negro has been a drawer of water and a hewer of wood. He felled the trees and turned the forest into fields of cotton and corn. He drained the swamps and turned them into fields of rice. He graded the highways and made them possible for railroad transit and traffic. In summer he was to the white man, his owner and umbrella. In winter to the same owner he was his winter wood, and always a ready servant with hand and brawn as bread and meat and shelter. The question of labor is one of bread and meat. To the bread winner it means much. To the unemployed it often lends a charm for crime. For after all the unemployed needs food, clothing, medicine, a shelter and employment alike for body and mind. But the subject of labor is not a new one, and indeed it has been made a question of many complex phases introduced by prejudice from white trade unions. Also climate makes an important factor, hence the different sections of our country employ to a large extent different kinds of labor suited to the prevailing industries, thrift and enterprises. We may consider at once the two general classes of labor, the crude and the skilled. For generations the black man, as a crude laborer, raised King Cotton in the cotton fields of the south. He has had no competition as a crude laborer. He still holds a trust on the fleecy staple. His right there is none to dispute. But today a new and brighter era opens before us. We are to manufacture cotton as well as raise it. We are to advance and keep pace with the mental training of our children and provide employment for them in every avenue. As the Turk weaves his carpet and darns his shawl, and as the Chinese prepares his silk, so the black youth must be trained to change cotton into cloth. Trained hands and trained minds are inseparable companions. If we educate our boys and girls we create in them a desire. We thrust upon them a stimulus which pushes them out into the active world, and if only with polished brain and soft hands they wander from place to place seeking the shady side of active stern reality. Since we, by educating our boys and girls, create new appetites, new desires, new activities, we set in motion new forces. Then we ought the more to create new enterprises, open new avenues, establish new business or improve the old so as to meet the new relations, the awakened appetites, the growing activities and the employment of the new forces in the culture of cotton and the establishment of cotton mills. We commit a crime by creating appetites and then failing to appease them. The education of our children should no longer be a mere theory but a matter of real practical nature, such as will benefit the breadwinner, the home seeker, the higher citizenship, the welfare of the greatest number. While I favor the higher education of the youth of the nation, I also think the youth ought to learn trades, to wear the overalls at the forge, at the workbench, to adjust the machinery in the workshop and the factory. I would have the youth able to design and build a house as well as to live in one, to raise potatoes as well as to eat them, to produce as well as consume. For many years the great majority of the youth must be common laborers, whatever their education, whatever their social condition or station. Then it follows, as the day follows the night, that they should be educated with the trend of the mind and in connection with environment. In the days of slavery, many of our young men and women were trained along certain lines. The young men such as skilled carpenters, blacksmiths, stone masons, bricklayers and the like, and the young women were trained in dressmaking and the like. And these boys and girls grew up having a kind of monopoly in their respective lines, although controlled by their owners. But for a quarter of a century very little attention has been paid to trade learning in many sections of the South. This condition confronts us today, however it is claimed that it is no fault of the children that they do not learn trades, and it is further urged by many parents that the blame does not lie at their hands. But that it is the fault of the times, of conditions and circumstances, and still others claim that the trade unions are the main cause. Many claim that if their children are trained along certain lines they will be debarred by the opposition of the trade unions. But these excuses seem too trivial. The opposition of the labor organizations should urge greater activity in superior trade learning in every pursuit, so that when the white striker walks out of the shops, the black man, skilled, trusted and tried, should walk in and demonstrate his ability to do better and more work than the outgoing striker. We are to take no steps backward in industrial and intellectual progress in the opening days in the dawn of the new century. A thinking people is a prosperous people. We are to be measured by what we can accomplish, not by the color of the skin, the texture of the hair, the color of the eye, or the contour of the head. But we are to be measured as skilled farmers, mechanics, printers, artists and scholars. This age demands substantial progress in every department of industry, in the home, at the fireside, in the shop and on the farm. To labor with skill, to facilitate and hasten its benign results with trained hands and cultivated brain must ever be the fiery incentive of our people, in order that they may keep abreast of the times in all practical operations as skilled laborers and, as such, vindicate their usefulness as citizens. As laborers and citizens, the black face must stand for integrity in the community, the emblem of sterling worth, the black diamond intrinsic in value. The time has come when one person ceases to employ another because he is of color, but he employs the one who can give more than value received. The race needs to bring the hand and the head nearer together. The boy who has completed a college education should, in the course of time, raise more corn to the acre, if he be a farmer, than his uneducated father, for his knowledge of geology should better fit him to know the condition and nature of the soil. If a mechanic, his knowledge of geometry and of physics should enable him to be an adept. The question of labor during the last few years has become, in many respects, intensely sectional. North of the Mason and Dixon's line, the color of the skin has to do with the employment of the colored man along certain lines of skilled labor. While this is true in the South, the prejudice is not so rank as in the North, except where the colored laborer comes in contact with the Yankee or the foreigner. End of Topic 19, First Paper Topic 19, Second Paper of 20th Century Negro Literature This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Phyllis Vincelli. 20th Century Negro Literature Topic 19, Second Paper by Professor R. G. Robinson B. L. The Negro as a Laborer Professor R. G. Robinson B. L., the subject of our sketch, was born in Hamilton, Bermuda Islands, B. W. I., February 16th, 1873. In pursuit of education, he came to the United States at the early age of eleven, going directly to New Hampshire. In the fall of 1885, he entered Dow Academy in Franconia, New Hampshire. By economy and thrift, he maintained himself in this institution for eight years, graduating in 1893, second in his class. During this course, he was several times elected president of the Autonomation Literary Society. His conduct in standing was very tersely stated by one of his professors when he said that he was courteous and obliging, under all circumstances, clear and logical in his deductions and conscientious as a Christian. He immediately entered Dartmouth College in the class of 97. During his college course, he was prominent in athletics, at the same time holding a good position in his class. Despite the fact he was one of the two colored men in a class of 128, yet at the close of freshman year, he was unanimously elected class auditor for the ensuing year. He was a charter member of the Ruskin Society, a society for the cultivation of the histrionic art in Dartmouth College. In 1897, Dartmouth gave him the degree of Bachelor of Letters. Says President Tucker of Dartmouth, he is a man of clear and earnest purpose, possessing tact and good executive ability. After graduation, he was elected to the chair of English Language and Literature in the Tuskegee Institute, but resigned at the close of the year and was elected principal of one of the city schools of Montgomery, Alabama, which position he held until elected by the Freedman's Aid and Southern Educational Society as principal of the LaGrange Academy, LaGrange, Georgia. In 1899, he was married to Lily Bell, the daughter of William Hill, the wealthy truck gardener of Montgomery. Mrs. Robinson is a graduate of the A&M College at Normal, Alabama. They have a son, Mason Francis. Professor Robinson has a brother who is a member of the Boston Bar. He graduated from Dow Academy and Franconia, New Hampshire in 1893, attended Oberlin College and received the degree of L. L. B. from Boston University. In 1898, he was a member of the Boston Common Council. So artful is nature that she does not permit man to break one of her laws for his pleasure without a sacrifice on his part, that for every action there is a corresponding reaction, and so the laws of compensation hold good in the dealings of man with man, races with races, and nations with nations. Slavery, as ignominious as it was, had a dual effect. The master race, forming what might be termed a landed aristocracy, looked upon manual labor as degrading, while it of necessity became the natural sphere of the weaker. Thus the spirit of work became engrafted into the very being of the Negro. This is the path all races have trod. The basis of the South's industrial system was Negro labor, and although the Emancipation Proclamation changed the whole structure from a base of slave labor to that of free labor, nevertheless the Negro remained virtually in the same position, but with enlarged opportunities. This was a legacy greater than the ballot, for it is vastly more important to a man to be able to earn an honest living than to be privileged to cast a ballot, and doubly so if the element of doubt as to its being counted enters into the privilege. It was a cruel change from that of an irresponsible creature to that of a man clothed with the responsibility of self support and of American citizenship, a change that would have staggered any race, but the Negro has acted nobly his part. To say that the Negro is a valuable citizen, and a necessity in the development of the South, is to put it mildly. It can best be appreciated when we remember that since the war the Negro has earned 75 billions of dollars, and out of this vast amount he has saved the pitiful sum of 500 millions, thus contributing to the wealth of the South 74 billions and a half of dollars. It is estimated that four-fifths of the labor done in the South is done by the Negro. The theory advanced by those who claim themselves to be immune from that dreaded disease of Negrophobia is that the industrial education of the Negro will inevitably inspire a similar movement for the industrial training of the poor whites, and the resultant competition means a further complication of the race problem, which will only be solved by the ultimate separation of the races. This theory is as unique as it is original, and bids fair to revolutionize the laws of economics, but to the contrary the laws of trade and labor are as imperious as all the enactments of necessity. The South is fast regaining her lost treasures, and bids fair to become not only an agricultural section, but with her wonderful oil and mineral resources to be the rival of the North. Coupled with her wonderful resources is the free Negro labor, which is the cheapest in the world outside of Asia, and will not only be in demand, but will ultimately enter into all industries, driving all before it. It is a certainty that capital will inevitably seek and secure the cheapest labor. Besides cheapness, other qualifications have made, and will continue to make, him indispensable to the South's development and make him far superior to the foreign element for which a few seem to clamor. Coming out of slavery ignorant, irresponsible, no name, no home, no mule, there is no better way to measure the influence of Christian education than by the increased ability to earn, to save, and to wisely invest money. The spirit of home-getting and the eagerness for education are very hopeful signs. We proudly quote from a lengthy editorial in a recent issue of the Atlanta Constitution. Quote, The building up of wealth follows a sharpening of intellect. If the untutored colored man of the past quarter of a century could amass nearly a half a billion of dollars, why may not the educated Negro during the next quarter of a century quadruple the amount? End quote. As a skilled laborer, it will take time for the race to make a mark, because here he will meet with sharper competition. This is the opportunity of the industrial school, the lack of sufficient numbers of skilled colored mechanics, and because of the existence of prejudice, the employer shows timidity in attempting to supplant white labor with Negro labor. This fear will decrease as the supply increases. We endorse industrial training for the masses, but as efficient as it is, it is not sufficient. The tendencies of these schools is to make the training of the hand of primary importance and that of the brain secondary. This might suffice for a while, but in this age of progress, of invention, when the genius of the age seems to have directed all its power to the invention of labor-saving machines, the demand for brainy mechanics is increasing so rapidly that the industrial school of today will wake up tomorrow only to find itself behind the times. The northern section of our country, with its large manufacturing interests and the constant demand for skilled labor, has encouraged the combining of labor into trade unions as a means of protection against the encroachments of capital. Because of the social side of these organizations, the Negro has been debarred, with some exceptions. The unions will operate against him just as long as the interests of the unions are not in jeopardy and the supply of skilled colored mechanics is insufficient. But in the south, where Negro labor is plenty and agriculture is the chief occupation, the Negro will always have a practical monopoly and as opportunities and all the trades in the north, as well as in the south, will increase in proportion. I see becomes an educated, thrifty, law-abiding landowner. The time has come when the Negro can no longer afford to play upon the sympathies of his friends, but as a man among men he must be preeminently fitted for his place, fitted in intellect, in the knowledge of his craft, and in sobriety. As a common laborer the Negro in his ignorance has had to battle against great odds. Too often his employer, who built the courts, run them and owns them. But who made the Negro shoulder the expense, feeling that he has the right of way, and in his eagerness to get something for nothing has forced the Negro through necessity to do the very thing for which he condemns him. Despite these great odds, industry and uprightness in any man, be he white or black, makes him a valuable member of any community. End of Topic 19, Second Paper. Topic 19, Third Paper of 20th Century Negro Literature. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Mary Patterson. 20th Century Negro Literature. Topic 19, Third Paper. The Negro as a Laborer. By Ms. Lena Terrell Jackson. M.A. Lena Terrell Jackson was born December 25th, 1865 in Gallatin Sumner County, Tennessee. Her father died in her early childhood, hence the responsibility of her support and education fell upon her mother. This mother determined to give her daughter the advantage of a good education. Accordingly, at the age of seven years, the daughter was placed in a private school and remained there until the autumn of 1876 when, having finished the course of study in the private school, she was entered as a pupil in the Bellevue City School and remained there three consecutive years. She completed the course of study in the Nashville City Schools in June 1879. In September 1879, she entered the middle preparatory class of Fisk University and remained at Fisk six years, graduating from the collegiate department in 1885. During the six years spent at Fisk, she taught school during the summer months in the rural districts and with the money thus earned helped to support her mother and maintained herself in school. She also assisted her mother in her family work after school hours. After graduation in 1885, she was elected as a teacher in the Nashville Public Schools, having resigned two similar positions, the one at Birmingham, Alabama and the other at Chattanooga, Tennessee, to accept the Nashville appointment. In 1894, she was assigned to the junior grade in the Colored High School and two years later to the chair of Latin in the high school, which position she is still filling. Following out the principles of economy that are so thoroughly inculcated in the minds of Fisk students, her first thought after completing her course of study was turned towards the acquisition of real estate and the purchase of a home for her mother who through so many struggles and sacrifices had made it possible for her to obtain a college education. Her hopes in this direction have been realized to some extent and she had secured not only a home but considerable other real estate. The wide scope of this subject and the limited time given for research, together with the absence of statistics, make it impossible at this time to present more than a brief sketch. I propose to continue my research and investigation at some later date to present the subject in a very much enlarged form, giving the condition of the Negro as a laborer in all the leading cities of the United States. In the present sketch, the design will be made of only a few cities. The southern cities with their stately residences and business houses that were constructed in antebellum days bear emphatic testimony to the skill of the Negro in the mechanic arts. All of the labor of the South at the time was done almost exclusively by the Negro. Plantation owners train their own blacksmiths, wheelwrights, painters, and carpenters. The Negro was seen as a foreman on many southern plantations during antebellum days. Education has greatly improved his ability to labor and today in every vocation he is found as a laborer, competing successfully with other laborers. Notwithstanding the fact that prejudice and labor organizations are arrayed against him, the character of his work is such and his disposition as a laborer such that his services will always be in great demand. Negro laborers are given employment on large buildings alongside of white laborers and generally give entire satisfaction. In the city of Nashville, Tennessee, during the present year and the construction of the Polk Flats, two Negro laborers were employed with a number of white laborers. A strong pressure was brought to bear upon the foreman to displace the two Negro laborers and fill their places with white men. The request was promptly denied. This is conclusive proof that had the character of the Negro's work not been eminently satisfactory, the reverse would have been the result. The Negro is found in all occupations that are characteristic of a progressive people, namely barbers, blacksmiths, brick and stone masons, carpenters, coachmen, domestic servants, firemen, farm laborers, mail carriers, merchants, grocers, millers, shoemakers and repairers, waiters, nurses, seamstresses, housewives, washerwomen and milliners. Trades and industries. As stone and brick masons, the wages range from $2 to $3 per day. Huntsville, Alabama has a brickyard that is owned and controlled by Negroes. This firm secures the contract for a large number of houses in Huntsville and the adjoining towns. There is a town in the northern part of Virginia in which the entire brick making business is in the hands of a colored man, a freedman, who bought his own and his family's freedom, purchased his master's estate and eventually hired his master to work for him. He owns a thousand acres or more of land and considerable town property. In his brickyard, he hires about 15 hands, mostly boys, from 16 to 20 years of age and runs five or six months a year, making from $200,000 to $300,000 brick. Probably over one half the brick houses of the place are built of brick made in his establishment and he has repeatedly driven white competitors out of business. As firemen, the Negro has shown himself courageous and faithful to his trust. During a great fire in Nashville, Tennessee, a few years ago it was conceded by all that the progress of a disastrous fire was checked and much valuable property saved by the heroic efforts of the colored fire company. Unfortunately, however, the captain of the company and two of his comrades were sacrificed and all the large cities colored fire companies are to be found in every case and some sections of Texas and Mississippi Negro plantation owners are often found. Just after the close of the war, the highest ambition of the Negro was the ministry but there has been a remarkable change in that direction and Negroes are now found in all the professions. The Negro physician has made an enviable record. One of the leading surgeons in the west is a colored physician. He is the founder of a large hospital in a western town and is also surgeon and chief of one of the largest hospitals in the country. The Negro has also gained some distinction at the bar. A large number of Negroes are teachers and an increasing number of these are young women. Clerical work. Negroes are given employment as clerks in the government service at Washington D.C. There is a large number of railway male clerks with salaries ranging from $1,000 to $1,500 a year. Nashville, Tennessee has three male clerks who have held their respective routes for more than 10 years. Common laborers. This class includes porters, janitors, teamsters, laborers and foundries and factories. The usual wages paid for this class of work is $1 a day. The barboring and restaurant businesses toward which the Negro naturally turned just after emancipation for which their training as home servants seemed especially to fit them are not so largely followed now owing to the fact that the best talent of the race have entered the professions. Yet, however, in some places the Negro restaurant keeper does a thriving business. In Chicago, Illinois, there were two fine up-to-date restaurants which did a good business. One of these employed white help exclusively. The Negro blacksmiths and wheelwrights do a good business, sometimes taking in from $5 to $8 a day. As shoemakers and repairers and furniture repairers and silversmiths the Negro is successful and is kept busy. In painting, there is a color contractor in Nashville who does business on a large scale. He is proprietor of his own shop, employs a large number of men and secures the contract for a large number of fine dwellings. His patronage is confined mostly to white people. Nashville has a steam laundry owned and operated entirely by colored men and a large white patronage. In the rural districts, most of the Negroes devote themselves to farming, either working on the farms of others or are themselves proprietors of farms. Domestic service. In this field of labor both men and women are found. The average wages paid the men is $15 a month and bored. In addition to their wages they also receive lodging, cast off clothes and are trained in matters of household economy and taste. At present there is a considerable dissatisfaction and discussion over the state of domestic service. Many Negroes often look upon menial labor as degrading and only enter it from utter necessity and then as a temporary makeshift. The state of affairs is annoying to employers who find an increasing number of careless and impotent young people who neglect their work and in some cases show vicious tendencies. The low schedule for such work is due to two causes. One is that from custom many southern families hire help from which they cannot afford to pay much. Another reason is that they do not consider their work worth anymore. This may not be the open conscious thought of the better elements of such laborers but it is the unconscious tendency of the present situation which makes one species of honorable and necessary labor difficult to buy or sell without lost of self-respect on one side or the other. They work out regularly in families or take washing into their homes and like house servants are paid by the week or if they work by the day from 30 to 50 cents a day. This absence of mothers from home not only occasions a neglect of their household duties but also of their children especially the girls. Aside from house servants and washer women many of the women are seamstresses who are mostly fine employment and white families. Some do a remunerative business in their own homes. The Negro woman is especially successful as a trained nurse and a considerable number of the brightest and most intelligent among the young women are entering upon that calling. Conclusion, the closing years of the 19th century indicate remarkable advancement of the Negro in all industrial lines but the 20th century will doubtless furnish opportunities which will enable him to carry these beginnings to their legitimate fruition. End of topic 19 third paper. Topic 20 first paper of the 20th century Negro literature. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Larry Wilson. 20th century Negro literature. Topic 20 first paper by William E. Partee. Reverend William E. Partee, D.D. was born at Concord, North Carolina of Christian parents in the year 1860 and at an early age placed in the common schools of his native town. He was born in 1910 but by determination and the help of friends he gained in education. When but 16 years of age he taught a country school. He was graduated from the college and theological departments of Biddle University and was licensed to preach in 1883 and ordained in 1884 by the Presbytery of Catawba and entered upon his life work by serving in North Carolina for more than three years among his early playmates and companions. In the year 1887 he took charge of a mission church in school in Gainesville, Florida serving acceptably in that work for more than four years and standing faithfully by the people during that memorable epidemic of yellow fever in 1888. In 1892 he was called through the pastorate of Laura Street Presbyterian Church a great position he occupied for nearly seven years. During two years of that time he was also principal of one of the city graded schools. In 1896 he was sent as a commissioner from the Presbytery of East Florida to the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church at Saratoga. In 1898 he resigned from his work in Jacksonville to take charge of the first presbyterian church in Richmond, Virginia. Thus he has been engaged for many years in his work of ministry always doing earnest and faithful work and held in high esteem by the people of every community in which he has labored. He was married in 1886 to Miss Edith I. Smith of Lynchburg, Virginia who proved a worthy inefficient helper in his work and uncomplainingly shared with him the trials and vicissitudes which fall to the preacher's lot in life for fourteen years. Then the master called her to rest from her labors. To form a correct estimate of the Negro as a Christian we must take into account the depths from which he came. Back of his forty years of freedom lie more than two hundred years of bondage in which he was forced to obey the will of another absolutely and kept in ignorance. All real manhood was repressed and every ambition curbed though under the control of the Christian church and people of the South and living on the farms and in the homes of families of their masters mingling in their lives in their society and subject to their molding influence. Yet as a rule the moral principles and qualities necessary to a religious life were not taught him neither was he encouraged to cultivate them. There was no lawful marriage, no true home but husband and wife were the property of a master who used or abused either as he chose. Their children grew up under the same conditions and were encouraged or forced into unchastity lying, stealing and betraying of one another under the teaching that there was no moral wrong to them since they were the property of another who was responsible for their acts. There could be no growth in morals and there can be no true religion without morals. To say the least they came out of bondage with a dwarfed moral nature and to this day suffer more or less from the effects of it. The carnality of slavery has not ceased to bear fruit as we all know. Ever and on it shows itself in those horrible acts which the newspapers report in full. It takes long and weary years to root out of a race or nation, evils that have become fixed in its nature. But while there is much to be deplored as to laxity and morals among the masses there has been constant and steady improvement in this regard. It is no doubt true that any race kept in bondage under similar conditions for the same length of time as the Negro was would come out of it in no better condition and would perhaps show no better record in 40 years than this race has shown and especially so if that bondage were preceded by heathenism. Dr. Higgood has said the hope of the African race in this country is largely in its pulpit. No people can rise above the religion. No people's religion can rise above the doctrines preached and lived by their ministry. The Negro began almost unaided and alone in this particular as to the religion they were very largely left to themselves during slavery. Their ministers were ignorant and unlettered. Many of them were pious but many were ungodly and unscrupulous. So theirs was a religion largely without the Bible. It consisted of bits of scripture here and there of glowing imaginations of dreams and of superstitions yet it was the best they knew. Then many years of freedom had passed by before fully equipped ministers could be provided them. During those years faithful servants of God unlettered did their best to be the true religious leaders of the people all honored to them but they necessarily came short in many respects and could not carry the people up to the higher plain of religious life. With these things before our minds we say that the race has shown a remarkable growth in the essentials of true Christian manhood. Their notions may in some things be crude. Their conceptions of truth may be realistic. They may be more emotional than ethical. They may show many imperfections in the religious development. Nevertheless is it true that their religion is their most striking formative characteristic? So susceptible are they that no other influence has had so much to do in shaping their better character and what they are to become in their future development will be largely determined by their religion. While in their church and social life there are some elements of evil and superstition some of which are the inheritance of past ages in the Fatherland while others have been developed in this country by the conditions of life during the years of slavery. Still any fair-minded person who takes the pains to correctly inform himself will acknowledge that these are being gradually but surely eradicated. As a Christian he commends himself in his faith and devotion. Though his religion may sometimes be defective in its practical application to the principles of right conduct in living God, heaven, hell, and the judgment day are realities to him. He believes the truths of the Bible to be real and thus he is sound in the faith so far as he understands it and that is more than can be said of many who are better informed than he. What a rare thing to find one an infidel. Where can you find a people more susceptible to religious teaching? The emotional nature is highly developed and they are quick to respond to whatever appeals to their sympathies and affections. Emotion has its place in religion and is not to be ignored but to be properly used and controlled and directed. To move anyone we must first reach the feelings. If these can be aroused they may develop into a conviction that the subject of them should adopt a given course of action and he accordingly does so. I am not sure after all that we should seek to repress such to any great extent. It may be appointed his favor for since he is easily and powerfully impressed by strong appeals he is the more readily brought under the influence of the wise teacher or leader. It is true in some cases that mere physical excitement is mistaken for being filled with the spirit and thus some swing to the extreme in this direction. It is noticeable however that this is being rapidly outgrown and more self-control is being practiced. After all it does seem that being easily moved and swayed may furnish the lever by which the wise and prudent may begin to lift them to the higher grounds of religious life. No doubt in most cases there is deep down beneath the easily overwrought feelings of true religious disposition with much spirituality and divine energy. Benevolence is rightly regarded as an important matter in Christian living. In proportion to his means the Negro excels in this. Hundreds of churches and many schools and colleges have been built out of their property to sum up and place on record their gifts for the extension of Christ's kingdom where perhaps show to the world an unequaled record of sacrifice and devotion to a cause. Show that a cause is a worthy one and they are ready to give according to their ability to help that cause. To give help to ministers of the gospel and other Christian workers is not only regarded as a duty but as an honor and a pleasure. On the whole they are kind at heart, generous to the distressed obliging and considerate. Love to friends and forgiveness of enemies are marked characteristics. The statement has been often made that loose notions as to morals are held. To some extent this may be true. Let us bear in mind that the large majority are poor and are common laborers and more than half of the race are illiterate. Compare them with this class of any race in this or any other country and I dare say they will suffer but little by the comparison. Some have made much of the fact that in many places whole families by necessity live in one or two room cabins. While this is unfortunate and to be regretted it is nevertheless true that you can find even in such conditions in the majority of instances that purity and virtue are as much respected as among those who live in roomy homes where every privacy is afforded. They are not any worse certainly and perhaps are better in this respect than the multitudes of other races who live in the cellars and attics of crowded tenements in our great cities. That has not make the mistake of including all in one general class and that the worse. But while acknowledging that there is great room for improvement let us recognize in the vast mass of multitudes who in education morals and religion are the equals of any people. The correspondence between the profession of the heart and the outward life is often not what it should be but is not that true also of many Christians of any race. There are Christians of highest education who enjoy abundant and varied opportunities of enlightenment and culture who fail to show in all their outward life what they profess in their heart to be. They do fall into the air of trying to separate between the religion of the heart and that of life but generally they are learning the better way. Where so large a percentage of the people cannot read and write how can you expect of them the highest degree of moral and religious life? Taking into account the disadvantages and limitations under which they labor you rather wonder that they have reached so high as they have in Christian living. We must consider the past history of the race its present disadvantages, environment and opportunity if we would justly estimate its Christianity. We must base our judgment upon the developed negro if we would be fair. Education helps us to be better Christians just as it helps others and as we get more knowledge of Bible truths such as education can give us we will be better Christians. Educated ministers are fast displacing the uneducated and those whose moral and Christian character fall below the standard are being crowded out and schools and colleges are sending out every year hundreds of educated Christian men and women who raise the standard of right living in every community where their lot is cast. The material prosperity of the negro may be placed in evidence as to his Christianity with all the odds against them and starting up from absolute poverty the race now owns farms homes schools churches bank accounts and personal property amounting to five hundred and fifty million dollars. It is remarkable that this has been acquired in forty years. God's word teaches that nations prosper in material things as they get close to God thus looking upon the brighter side we are led to commend in many things the Christianity of the negro race and to believe that as a people higher ground is aimed at though yet a long way off from perfection yet ever onward and upward are they tending. End of Topic 20 First Paper Topic 20 Second Paper of 20th Century Negro Literature This is a LibriVox recording all LibriVox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org Recording by Larry Wilson 20th Century Negro Literature Topic 20 Second Paper By Reverend L.B. Ellerson Reverend L.B. Ellerson A.M. was born at Chirraw South Carolina in 1869 Mr. Ellerson's father having died when the son was but an infant Mr. Ellerson was left to be reared under the fostering care of his mother alone he spent his youthful days in the public schools of his native town until he was 16 years old. At that time he was happily converted to Christ and received the impressions that he was called to the gospel ministry. At the same time he united with the Presbyterian Church in 1886 Mr. Ellerson entered Bible University at Charlotte North Carolina to pursue such a course as would prepare him for the ministry. He remained at Middle University until 1893 when he graduated from the Catholic Church with honor taking the philosophical oration. In 92 Mr. Ellerson was the successful contestant for the medal given by the alumni to the junior class. During his course at Biddle Mr. Ellerson spent his summer vacations teaching in the district schools of North and South Carolina. In June 1893 Mr. Ellerson was employed to do missionary work near Asheville North Carolina. He continued in this work until October 1893 at which time he entered the theological seminary of the Presbyterian Church at Princeton, New Jersey for the purpose of completing his course for the ministry. During the first two years of his course of theology at Princeton he continued to come south in summer and engage in teaching during vacations. He graduated from Princeton Theological Seminary in 1896. He and two others being the only colored students of 69 young men. Besides keeping up the studies of the last year Mr. Ellerson supplied the pulpit of Dwight's Chapel at Englewood, New Jersey. Here he remained until September 1896 when he came to South Carolina and was ordained to the full work of the gospel ministry by the Fairfield Presbytery the same presbytery having licensed him the preceding year. During Reverend Ellerson's course at Princeton he was at one time engaged to supply the pulpit of Salome Presbyterian Church at Elizabeth, New Jersey. At another time he was employed to assist the Reverend H. G. Miller pastor of the Mount Tabor Presbyterian Church in New York City during the illness of the pastor. Upon his ordination by Fairfield Presbytery in 1896 Reverend Ellerson was placed in charge of the church and schoolwork at Manning South Carolina. Here he worked very successfully preaching until November 1898 when he was called to the pastorate of Berean Presbyterian Church at Buford, South Carolina. At the same time he was made principal of Harberson Institute. Reverend Ellerson labored with a marked degree of success on the Buford field from November 1898 to April 191 when he was urged to accept a call from the Laurel Street Presbyterian Church at Jacksonville, Florida where he is at present prosecuting the work of his church with success. For a young man of his age Reverend Ellerson evidently stands high in the estimation of his fellow Presbyters. This is evinced by the fact that he has already filled some of the highest offices in the gift of his brethren. In 1898 he was unanimously chosen moderator of Fairfield Presbytery at Camden South Carolina. In 1899 he was made the choice of Atlantic Synod for moderator at Columbia South Carolina and in 1900 he was unanimously elected to represent the Presbytery of Atlantic in the General Assembly which met in St. Louis, Missouri. He has filled each of these offices with credit and ability. The degree of AM was conferred upon him by Biddle University, his alma mater in 1900. If it is true that man is naturally a religious being then it is preeminently true in the case of the Negro. If the Negro is anything at all he is religious. It matters not in what walk of life you find him or what may be his personal or individual character. It is a very rare case indeed when you find a Negro who indulges in doubt as to the existence of a supreme being or the existence of a future state of rewards and punishments. With him these are fixed points of belief. But as much as may be justly said regarding the Negro's natural piety it must be observed and admitted by all who know the Negro best that his religion is very much defective in his practical application to the principles of right conduct and living. And this we perceive is the main point at issue for when we discuss the Negro as a Christian we must of necessity feel called upon distinguished between his native piety and his applied Christianity. We wish it understood too that the general observations made here refer to the masses of Negroes rather than to the individual. We unhesitatingly affirm that individuals of our race have risen to as true and as high Christian status as has mankind anywhere. And although we know and confess that the masses of our race have not yet come up to the genuine standard of the New Testament Christianity even in apprehension yet it must be observed that their religion contains many features that are highly commendable. Chief among these features are first his simple childlike unwavering faith in God. Nor can this condition be wholly attributed to ignorance of thoughtlessness as some might hold. For indeed we have produced some men of as rare ability as move among the human throng. Yet it is almost as difficult to find an atheist, an agnostic or an infidel of any sort among us as it is to find a needle in a haystack. The Negro believes in the God of the Bible. Second, because the Negro is naturally emotional he is usually earnest and fervent in the exercise of his religious worship as far as that goes. He likes the strong passionate appeal which the time being at least tickles him into laughter or moves him to tears and sweeps him off his feet in its fight. The earnestness and fervency are alright but too often these run to the extreme and so constitute by far too large a portion of his Christianity. Third, again the Negro's religion is characterized by benevolence. I believe that history has no record of a people who out of their want and poverty have given so much to benevolent causes as have the Negro's in this country. Is it not wonderful to reckon the millions of dollars that have been given by us for erecting and maintaining church edifices, schools and other benevolent institutions? Since emancipation, it is perfectly safe to affirm that no people have exceeded us along this line. But with all of these good things that can be justly said to the credit of our religion, the Fair-minded must still admit that when we come to the daily application of the principles and practices of Bible Christianity we are lacking. If this be true, there is a cause. What is it? We believe that the cause was stated in part when we referred to the natural emotional element in our makeup. That element too often causes us to run off with the sentiment of being left the substance behind. Another cause and perhaps the main one is to be found doubtless in the same way in which we find the causes of defects in our race along other lines. That is, from defective leadership and instruction along this particular line. We would be understood the crying need of our race today is and has been a competent ministry to lead and instruct the masses in the application of the principles of right life and conduct from the standpoint of Bible Christianity. Today the church especially in our race is the center of both our social and Christian life. Like priests, like people all honored to the pioneers who did their best in their circumstances and who served well their day and generation. But this is another age. This is a brighter day. One that demands improvement along all lines and especially in the pulpit of my race. The pew is advancing, hence the pulpit had better push on. The key to the situation then is nothing more nor less than a more consecrated and intelligent Christian ministry for our race throughout the length and breadth of this land. And we are hopeful for the signs of the times portend the coming of better things. Already bright streaks of gray high up upon the eastern horizon herald the dawn of a new and brighter day. Every branch of the Christian church in our race is putting forth strenuous efforts to supply the pulpits of the race with competent ministers. Let this glorious day be hastened and soon Ethiopia will stretch out her hands to God. End of topic 20 Second Paper