What is the result? The words "Lynched," "Jim Crow," "Disfranchised," are the signs of degraded ideas. Moreover, "Negro" is very apt to creep into each one of the three mind pictures and conversely one of the three into the "Negro" mind picture.
Do you understand? Now why is that? That is what Ethiopic culture teaches, through the "Ancient Order of Ethiopian Princes."
If we believe that we come from nowhere and have no history but that of a slave, our substance will be the charity of our oppressors, and our future handicapped by doubts and fears.
Ancient history knows no "Negro," but ancient history does know Ethiopia and Ethiopians. Change a family's name and in a generation you cannot tell whether its foreparents were rogues or saints. It is the same with a race. You cannot trace your ancestors through the name "Negro."
Take away our birthright, our ancient honorable name, "Ethiopian" and you have stopped the very fountain of our inspiration. If we are "Negroes" we are by the same dictionary also, "Niggers." The moment we realize, however, that we are "Ethiopians," we can see the beams from the lamps of Ethiopian culture lighting a pathway down the shadowy ages, and the fires of ambition are rekindled in our hearts, because we know that we came from the builders of temples and founders of civilization.
Study this.
Contrasts of North and South.—An investigator's report on home conditions of retarded children said:
The mother is eager to learn, and constantly talks of wanting to attend night school if the opportunity ever offers itself. She is eager for her girl to complete her education and wants her to take a business course so she will be independent. "A white man can take everything from the colored man but his learning," Mrs. —— said repeatedly.
In coming to Chicago she wasn't sure what she would find, but she had heard that colored people had a show here. She brought her child here to give her one. Chicago seems like heaven to her now when she thinks of what she had been through in the South.
When the investigator asked her about the church to which she belonged she said: "Olivet. I goes every Sunday and Wednesday nights to prayer meeting just to thank God that he let me live to go to a place of worship like that, a place where my people worship and ain't pestered by the white men."