A COLORED TEACHER TO HIS COLORED PUPILS.
Do not waste time complaining against the existing order of society. Enter a manly protest against all forms of wrong and injustice, but do not pass your days in wailful lachrymations against the regulations of a civilization whose grandeur you have done nothing to make, and whose severities you are doing nothing to mollify. Leave that to the ignorant demagogue. Bring your knowledge of history and of human nature to bear upon the situation. I have already pointed out to you that the adjustment of man's relation to man constitutes one of the primary problems of life. Where this adjustment is complicated by diverse physical peculiarities and by different inherited or acquired characteristics, the problem becomes one of the greatest intricacy that has ever taxed human wisdom and patience for solution.
Race prejudice is as much a fact as the law of gravitation, and it would be as suicidal to ignore the operation of the one as that of the other. Mournful complaint is as impotent as an infant crying against the fury of the wild wind. History has taught you that the path of moral progress has never taken a straight line, but has ever been a zig-zag course amid the conflicting forces of right and wrong, truth and error, justice and injustice, cruelty and mercy. Do not be discouraged, then, that all the wrongs of the universe are not righted at your bidding. The great humanitarian movement which has been sweeping over the civilized world from the middle of the eighteenth century to the present time, manifesting itself in political revolutions, in social and moral reforms, and in works of love and mercy, affords the amplest assurance that all worthy elements of the population will ultimately be admitted to share in the privileges and blessings of civilization according to the measure of their merit. The man whose education has resulted in practical intelligence, will find the largest field for the exercise of his powers. I urge you to bring your education to bear upon your practical tasks. You need not fear that your knowledge will carry you beyond the needs of the situation. In dealing with a people who exhaust their strength in working with blunt iron without sufficient knowledge to wet the edge your wisdom will ever be profitable to direct.
Prof. Kelly Miller.