We give you merely the edge of the field to be filled by you or some one you know and hope to see attain it. It is a thickly sown field, and if you cultivate it, you will be rewarded with an astonishing harvest.
INVENTORS
The evidence is accumulating every day that the Colored citizen, under favorable environments, has performed his whole duty in the work of benefiting mankind, whether in arduous labor or advancing the world by his thought.
The records of the United States Patent office show more than four hundred inventors and inventions among the Colored people. Many of these inventions are of the highest value and utility. These inventions are for devices of every conceivable use, from a rapid fire gun, invented by Eugene Burkins, a young colored man of Chicago, down to a pencil sharpener in common use today. In the line of humanity, life saving guards for locomotives and street cars have been invented. All of this goes to show the trend of the Colored man’s mind, and what he can do by thinking and the proper use of his brain.
As an inventor Mr. James Marshall, of Macon, Georgia, has attracted national notice through his novel flying machine which he has had patented. Mr. Marshall has introduced what is called a “Circumplanoscope,” which renders the flying machine non-capsizable, and which will enable it to stand still in the air.
R. W. Overton, a sixteen-year-old student of the Stuyvesant High School, within the past year won the long distance record for model aeroplanes against more than twenty competitors from all the high schools of Greater New York and vicinity.
It was said that the pioneer leaders of our Colored Americans struggled up and carried their people up with them. The questions presented them, the problems they were called upon to solve were new and the lights given them to solve them was somewhat dim. They worked for betterment by this dim light, but the light grew stronger as they advanced, and when they came to lay down the lamp of leadership, it was taken up by their successors burning brightly, and with added wisdom to carry on the great work.
Who can tell then, the names of the leaders to succeed them? They were in process of training, however, just as there are other leaders being trained or growing up to follow in the footsteps of the present leaders. They appeared and have expended and are expending their labors in elevating their fellow citizens, but they will eventually be obliged to lay down their mantle of leadership for others to take up. This means that in the present Colored Americans there are those destined, or who will make themselves fit to become great leaders in every department of uplift.
Conditions have improved during the past generation, and the new generation looks upon an enlarged field, with more varied prospects, greater development, and opportunities that did not exist before, and which have naturally sprung from the gradual progress of the race.