ADDRESS OF REV. WM. BURNET WRIGHT, D.D.
When that Egyptian King, of whom we all know, was carving those memorials of his greatness which, even as brought to us by the magazines of late, have interested us all so much, and when Egypt was the most superb power in the world, slave women, of whom the mother of Moses was one, were lamenting by the Nile. But the people then to be pitied were not the Hebrews, but the Egyptians.
As I think of the future of my country, my anxiety is not for the black race.
The two nations which seem destined to exert in the near future the most intense and wide influence are Russia and the United States. Before each of them God has set essentially the same task and appears to have conditioned largely their prosperity upon the way in which they do it. That task is to develop into full-orbed free men a vast number of citizens who have been dwarfed and twisted by slavery. How to do this most thoroughly and speedily is the superlatively important question for each nation to decide. In Russia, there is no more acute observer than Count Tolstoi: and Count Tolstoi has said to his countrymen, "What we in Russia need supremely is three things; they are schools and schools and schools." The American Missionary Association, in view of all that has been said here these two days, seems to me to be repeating, with the emphasis of an adequate experience, those same words; and I think Mr. Hand has shown a judgment equal to his generosity in so wording the conditions of his gift that it repeats the same thing. The Association, whether intentionally or unintentionally, is telling us that what we need in the South supremely is "schools and schools and schools."
By schools I certainly do not mean institutions which train only the mind or the body, or both. I am perfectly familiar with the picture which Mr. Maturin Ballou has drawn of the Alaska Indian using the knowledge gained in missionary schools to raise a check. I know that education which does not rightly train the will may be giving tools to a burglar or weapons to a mad man. The anarchism in Chicago, but for the education it controls, would have been like Bunyan's giants—able only to gnaw its nails in malice and have fits in sunshiny weather. But the American Missionary Association understands this thoroughly. In that copy of the year's review which Dr. Strieby sent me, the report of the school work was marked with a red pencil, that of the church work with a blue one; but the two marks overlapped, the red and the blue, so completely that all attempts to separate them were hopeless. Dr. Strieby himself could not distinguish between the church work and the school work of the Association. No man can. They are indistinguishable because they have been inseparable. This is as it should be. This is essential to their real success. This is New Testament preaching—discipling; and that is what the Master told us to do. The danger of Count Tolstoi's leadership in Russia is great, and it is solely this: that he does not know that fact. The safety of your guidance, gentlemen, who conduct the policy of this Association, is that you do. The education given by the State and by the Federal Government has been and must necessarily be, almost wholly secular. But the education given by this Association is distinctly, not technically, religious. It is rooted and grounded in the Bible. And if what I am saying appears to you trite, I am glad of it, because it shows that on the substantial facts we are at one and need no argument.
There are, however, two facts which sharply distinguish between the work we have to do among our emancipated slaves and that set before Russia among her emancipated serfs, and which make it more conspicuously obvious than it can be in Russia that we need schools. We have, first of all, to contend with the prejudice of color. We have been told how great that is. I need spend no time in repeating this while the debates at Worcester and in the Episcopal Convention at New York ring in our ears; while Harvard seniors can not elect for class orator the ablest and fittest man they have if he happens to be colored, without eliciting from New York newspapers two-column editorials of amazement; and while writers as wise, as informed, and as calm as George Cable, are unable to write without showing their quivering apprehension of a race war. The wickedness of this class feeling is conceded by all good men, and I need not dwell upon it.
The cause of it has been largely overlooked, and therefore the remedies so often advocated have proved futile. Until the cause is distinctly recognized and acknowledged and remedied, the prejudice will remain. The cause is this: All freeborn people in every age and clime have had a contempt for slaves. That is very near the feeling—mark my words—they ought to have. It was stronger in Athens than it has ever been in Charleston. It is partly, and has always been largely, caused by the wicked pride of mastership, but it has also been largely inspired by the perception of those vices and inferiorities which his condition breeds in the slave. Ignorance, deceit, cowardice, are contemptible; and therefore men who know better fall into the way of despising those who are ignorant and cowardly instead of trying to help them become the reverse of all these things. In nearly every other nation—there are two exceptions that will readily occur to you—save our own, as soon as the slave's chains have been broken and the slave's vices eradicated, the emancipated man has been absorbed among the class of freemen. There was nothing left to suggest that he had ever been a slave. The people forgot it. But the black man bears an ineffaceable mark that he belongs to a race which has been enslaved; and it is, therefore, in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred unconsciously but instinctively assumed that his is still the servile character. There is no natural antipathy between the white and the black races; if there were there could be no mulattoes. The sole reason of the persistence of this caste feeling is that the black man bears the mark saying to every one that sees him, "I belong to a race that has been enslaved:" and unconsciously men assume, "Therefore your character is still a servile character." The prejudice is deep; it is almost universal; and so long as there is a God in heaven who led forth the Hebrews and overthrew the Pharaohs, there will be no safety for this Nation of ours until the prejudice is obliterated, as completely as that which once existed and was more intense between the Anglo-Saxon and the Norman. If, as has been the case in many another land, there should arise an emergency threatening the existence of our Nation, and there were one man, and only one, capable of steering us through the storm into safety—some Lincoln or Washington—and if every voter in our country knew that this man were the only one who could do it, that man, if he were black, could not be elected President. Were such an emergency to arise to-morrow, we should perish. We should perish by suicide, and richly deserve all that we got. There is no safety for our land until this prejudice of caste is gone. It never came by argument; it can never be argued away. It can not be smothered under legislation nor uprooted by resolutions nor effaced by tears. While good men feel it they will fight it, but the majority will yield to it and it can be decided in only one way. That way was well outlined by a colored student in Hampton Institute in the debating club of that institution. The subject for discussion was, "How Shall We Black Men Secure Our Rights?" The last speaker was black as ebony, and had been bred in his early years a slave. When he arose I expected to hear him repeat the familiar complaints and suggest the familiar remedies. He did neither. He simply said: "My friends, I do not agree with all that you have said. I think, as you do, that the way white people treat us in the street cars and hotels"—and he might have added, in churches, but he did not—"is wrong, unchristian, and cruel." And when he said that, there was a pathos in his voice which made me ashamed to be a white man. "But," he added, "while I think as you do that it is cruel, I do not think that the white people will ever stop treating us as inferiors so long as we are inferiors, and I think that they will despise us as long as they can. But when we get enough character in our hearts, enough brains in our head, and enough money in our pockets, they will stop calling us niggers!"
He was right—a thousand times right. We must face the facts and steer by them, and not attempt to be guided by sentiment and emotions. So long as the sight of a black face instinctively suggests to us rags and ignorance, and servility and menial employments, just so long this prejudice of caste will endure, and no amount of individual genius, culture, or character will be able to brush the mildew of caste from any individual black man's brow. That lady may be a Florence Nightingale, but if I whisper, and whisper truly, that she came from the slums, that her sisters are in the penitentiary, and her brothers are thieves, society will never forgive her for not being in the penitentiary herself. Society will pity her in ostentatious magniloquence, which is far worse than contempt or neglect; perhaps it will clothe her with silk and diamonds; but it will never treat her as it would not dare not to treat any lady whom it felt its equal. As has been well said, what is needed is not patronage nor pity, but fact—the recognition of fact. When the sight of a black face shall no longer remind men that it belongs to a race of which the immense majority close at hand are still showing what we have driven into them by the lash and bound in them by chains; when the black face shall have clothed itself in associations as full of comfort and culture and Christian worth as a white man wears, "Negro" will be as honorable as "Caucasian." And for this, through its churches which are schools, and its schools which are churches, the American Missionary Association is laboring and praying with splendid success.
I would like to remind you of the second point, which is emphasized by the statement in the report that a graduate, of Fisk University, with his wife, another graduate, has gone to Africa under commission of the American Board, and has there shown eminent abilities. Africa is the only continent on the planet that has never had a history. For millenniums it has been a locked closet. But in the providence of God the gaze of Christendom is now concentrated upon it. All the passions, good and bad, which push men are impelling the most adventurous and energetic of our race to look or to go thither. Love of money, love of adventure, love of power, love of man and love of God, are leading men to look into the 200,000,000 dusky faces there from which the veil has at last been thrown back. Meanwhile 8,000,000 of that race whose Christianizing means the regeneration of a continent vaster than Europe and the inauguration of a history perhaps to be more splendid than that which Europe has wrought out in two millenniums, are here for you and me to educate. Do you believe these facts are accidents? Do you believe that He who maketh the wrath of man to praise Him and restraineth the remainder of wrath has not ordained them according to the counsels of his own will? There never can be a Christian education which does not plant and foster the missionary spirit. Is it a dream? If so, let me die before I wake. Is it a dream that among 8,000,000 of our fellow citizens each of whom, as Dr. Strieby told us at New York, is qualified to live, perhaps to thrive, in the climate which has proved a grave to Anglo-Saxons, each of whom is qualified to visit Africa with a fair hope of making himself received as a child returning unto his own household? Is it too much to hope that, under the Christian education we may give them if we will, enough will desire to preach Christ to the dark continent to gem it with life and light as the sky is gemmed with stars?
I am too old to do it, but so complete is my conviction that the future of the race in the coming century shall move toward Africa as in the ages following Paul it moved toward the North and West of Europe, that were I a young man, loyal and devoted to my Master, and trying as he told his followers by Gennesaret to read in the morning and evening red the signs of the times, I should not go to Africa, perhaps; I would go to Tougaloo University, I think, and there devote all my energies and powers to instructing black men in the meaning and scope and inspiration and promise of the Master's words, "Go ye."