So much for the work in which personal influence is the determining factor. Medicine and business are types of the work in which what I have rudely called directing intelligence determines.

In the profession of medicine, I admit, personal influence and directing intelligence subtly interlace. The Negro doctor’s social position makes him specially accessible to Negroes in cases of need. As a friend of the family or of the family’s friends, the doctor is not dreaded as a feelingless stranger with a terrible knife. Moreover, the Negro doctor does not feel himself a man of alien blood come to tend an inferior. Social position and understanding sympathy, then, render the Negro doctor readily accessible and very useful. Moreover, the Negro’s physical condition offers the doctor large opportunities for noble service. In a book upon “Ethnic Factors in the Population of Boston,” Doctor Bushee says, “In Boston the mortality of the Negro is much larger than that of any other ethnic factor”; again, “A high death rate, instead of a low birthrate is causing the Negroes to disappear”; and the statistics are not much more encouraging in many other urban communities North and South. That relatively low economic position is a powerful factor in producing this alarming death rate, I have already suggested; another capital factor is pitiable ignorance of the rudiments of personal hygiene and of sanitation. Negro doctors may without much trouble diffuse throughout a community these rudiments of knowledge and in so doing will prove themselves public servants. North and South the conspicuous financial success and substantial social service of hundreds of Negro doctors eloquently establish the correctness of this view; and of practising physicians, the Negro people to-day have unmistakably too few.

What of the Negro business man? In Washington public employment and the professions have captured most of the energetic and alert Negroes, to the injury of business development. Springfield, Massachusetts; Richmond, Virginia; Dayton, Ohio,—not one of these important cities has a total population as large as the Negro population of the District of Columbia. As buyers of goods, eighty-seven thousand people are important; but as sellers of goods, the eighty-seven thousand Negroes in Washington are by no means important. For example, of the total profits on the dry goods bought in a year by the Negro population of Washington,—profits amounting to thousands and thousands of dollars, for the ratio of expenditure to income is exceptionally large,—what per cent. goes to Negro merchants? Shall I say five per cent., one per cent., or one thousandth of one per cent.? Mathematical precision is, of course, not possible but you and I know that practically none of these profits go to Negro merchants. And you and I could name a dozen white merchants who have been enriched by those profits. And in consideration of this fact how many Negro clerks have the white merchants placed in their stores? how many Negro floor walkers? how many Negro buyers? And, my friends, how many thousands of years must elapse before the Washington Negro will add to his culture enough co-operative endeavor and competitive power to change all this? I myself have never yet been convinced that the Anglo-Saxon and the Jew really need the black man’s charity. Though I cannot point out, then, to the members of this graduating class openings in established business houses, I can point out that their success in business will provide opportunities for some later class, and will help to make the spending of Negroes enrich Negroes. Let me suggest two other ways in which the Negro business men may be of great service to the many. In the first place, the rents charged Negroes in cities, for example, Washington, are considerably higher for the same accommodations than the rents charged white people. By offering good houses at reasonable rents to the Negro working class, the Negro business man will find a paying investment and a means of much service. In the second place, hotels, restaurants, and theatres even in the capital of the nation are open to black men and women only on degrading terms, or not open at all. The closing of such accommodations is really the opening for black business men of the doors of opportunity.

In discussing ways of direct service I have then mentioned teaching and preaching as types of the work in which the decisive factor is personal influence. Medicine and business I have mentioned as types of the work in which the decisive factor is directing intelligence.

And now I wish to discuss two ways in which educated Negroes may be of indirect service,—first, by offering their fellows copies for imitation, and, second, by establishing the dignity of the race. In 1881, hardly a white man or a black man in the country dreamed that in twenty-two years a Negro would have achieved the building of a beautiful city in a Southern wilderness, would have organized efficiently the business of that industrial community of some 1700 people, would have won the abiding confidence of white men and black men North and South, would have brought the white North and the white South into intelligent co-operation in the uplifting of black men, would have worked out a solution for the central problem in American education, would have been acknowledged master of arts by the oldest university in the land, would have written one of the impressive books of the century, would have been asked by the British Government for help in the reconstruction of South Africa, would have been called by the sanest of British critics of affairs the most notable figure in the American Republic! And yet, this miracle you and I see to-day with our own eyes. The example of this man is being imitated in a hundred educational and industrial communities in the Southern States. And all men feel more respect for the Negro race because out of its loins has come Booker T. Washington.

A constructive statesman like Washington, educators like Lewis Moore and Lucy Moten and your own Anna Cooper, theologians like Bowen and Grimke, scholars like Blyden and Scarborough and DuBois and Kelly Miller, inventors like Woods and McCoy, a novelist like Chesnutt, a poet like Dunbar, a musician like Coleridge-Taylor, a painter like Tanner—yes, and, of those who are gone, Banneker who searched the heavens; Toussaint, soldier and statesman; Aldridge, the tragedian with his first medal in arts and sciences from the King of Prussia; Pushkin, the poet of the Russias; Dumas, father and son; the saintly Crummel; and Douglass the argument for freedom,—I say, the indirect service of such people is incalculable.

Now, for you and me no such careers are probable and yet every educated Negro who is worth his salt, is in similar fashion a copy for imitation and serves to secure respect for his race. The Negro contractor and builder; the Negro who owns a well managed truck farm; the Negro school teacher, who has saved money enough to buy municipal bonds or shares in a railway,—that person becomes in a money getting time a definite and concrete argument to white men and to black men that black men can be more than hewers of wood and drawers of water, than cooks and coachmen. Fundamentally, you and I by our thoughtfulness, our practical interest in the happiness of others, our elevation above petty prejudice, our simplicity, our decisive prudence, our enduring energy, our devotion, may indirectly count for good in a thousand ways in the life and work of our communities.

And, now, my friends, you enter the circle of educated men and women. Your personal influence will be felt in school room and in pulpit. Your directing intelligence will count in law, and medicine, and business; as able and devoted men and women, you by your examples will steady the nerves of a staggering people and make the word Negro more than a reproach. Delicate indecision, hesitant virtue, carping discontent, bric-a-brac culture—these ill become stalwart men and robust women. By all the honorable traditions of the noble family into which you are now adopted, you are pledged not to pick your way daintily in the soft places of the earth; you are pledged to make your lives real, useful, constructive. Remember—noblesse oblige!

TRANSCRIBER’S NOTE:

Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.