TO WEAR WELL OUR CROWN.
Our racial organization must bear in mind that we are struggling for untrammeled freedom in the greatest government that human intellect has ever evolved. Without proper culture we cannot meet the requirements of worthy citizenship. We must pay especial attention to our public schools, and see to it that knowledge shall not be lacking. The value that education will be to the citizen is admirably outlined by Thomas Jefferson, in the following words used in setting forth the purposes of education.
Education is intended:
1. "To give every citizen the information he needs for the transaction of his own business.
2. "To enable him to calculate for himself, and to express and preserve his ideas, his contracts and accounts in writing.
3. "To improve, by reading, his morals and faculties.
4. "To understand his duties to his neighbors and country, and to discharge with competence the functions confided to him by either.
5. "To know his rights; to exercise with order and justice those he retains; to choose with discretion the fiduciary of those he delegates; and to notice their conduct with diligence, with candor and judgment. And in general to observe with intelligence and faithfulness all the social relations under which he shall be placed."
In order to insure the education of the masses, the following steps must be taken:
1. The Negroes must be stimulated to acquire taxable values to such an extent that the Southern States shall not administer the school funds for the Negroes with the feeling that they are making a charitable donation to the race.
2. Night schools must be fostered for adults.
3. Money must be provided for the lengthening of the school term.
4. Salaries for teaching must be raised that a high order of talent may be the more easily enlisted.
5. Books must be supplied to the children too poor to buy.
6. Means must be instituted to prevent the too common habit of withdrawing the Negro child from school at so early an age to help support the family. These and such other measures as close scrutiny may from time to time suggest must be employed to make the public school system among the Negroes what it ought to be.
