Ignorance, intellectual and moral, is our main weakness, a curse for which our forefathers were not responsible, but for which we, of the rising generation, are compelled to atone under the manacles of political proscription and religious and social ostracism.
It could hardly be expected that the slaveholders of the South would in their straitened circumstances undertake the education of those whom they had looked upon as their property taken violently from them. So the North, as it has abolished slavery, must also abolish ignorance.
The first need of the colored man is Christian training. The old preachers, fettered by slave habits and filled with superstition and sectarianism, will hardly be able to make their flocks much better than themselves. The colored people need spiritual advisers whose lips and lives express the holy gospel they profess. There are in the South thousands of colored preachers, controlling large congregations, too, who are unable to read correctly a single text from the book which they undertake to expound to their followers. The colored people are naturally religious and nominally Christian. They are ready to be led by the Christian teacher or the scheming Romanist, by the true patriot or the plotting demagogue. As clay in the hand of the potter, they can be made vessels fit for the Master’s kingdom, or they can be left to grow more vicious and more corrupt, and thus be lost to Christianity.
The colored man needs the facilities for becoming educated. He has the inclination, but not the means, to make a good and useful citizen. The A. M. A. has done much, and will, I hope, do more to arouse this whole nation to see the threatening danger that lurks in the ignorant masses of the South, and to feel the necessity of removing the danger by educating this element. The black man is not to blame for his hard lot, nor is he of his own accord an American; but 250 years of toil and hardship have wedded him to this soil, and here he means to stay. Docile and tractable, his industry has made the Southern wilderness productive and beautiful. He has produced the cotton, tobacco and cane of this country. Any attempt to supply his place as a laborer in the South will prove utterly futile. He is there a laborer, citizen and voter, part and parcel of the American nation, and I trust the American nation will recognize him as such. The full, complete recognition of the right and privilege of the colored man to be and do whatever any other citizen is and does, is what the republic must settle down to. The question whether the colored man shall live in this republic, on terms of perfect equality, protected in the enjoyment of every privilege and immunity accorded to any other American, is a question which has postponed the progress of the South, and will continue to until the nation shall have solved this problem. Sooner or later the republic must see its solution. Like Banquo’s ghost, down at your beck or wane it will not. It will present itself at your churches, your theatres, your legislative councils and your court rooms. It is the one question that will not and cannot be settled until it is settled rightly. It is a question embracing the development of an irrepressible race, one that cannot be starved out, driven out or killed out. When the people of the South, together with the people of the North, shall approach this subject, under the guidance of intelligent reason and an enlightened conscience, they will see that the true way to solve this vexing question is to educate the colored man and treat him as a citizen. But, aided or unaided, helped or hindered, the negro will have an influence in the government of this country, and there is now no power in the arm of the American people to keep him down. He will rise to help make this republic the grandest and noblest that has ever dotted the face of this globe, or he will sleep on a common burying-ground with his white oppressors, amid the ruins and ashes of this republic. Inseparably united with the fate and fortune of America, the words of the Hebrew maiden to Naomi express his adhesion to the white man. “Whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge; thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God; where thou diest I will die, and there will I be buried.”—Richard Wright, Esq.
Africa and the Africans.—Mr. President: Africa and the Africans is the subject assigned me. But before entering upon it directly, it is fitting, perhaps, that I should say that for the last six and a half years I have been in Great Britain as the Secretary of the Freedmen’s Missions Aid Society, of which the Earl of Shaftesbury is President and Lord Kinnaird is Treasurer. The British people have been largely interested in aiding the American Missionary Association in preparing and sending out to Africa colored teachers, missionaries and general helpers for that great work so wonderfully opened up in that dark land. And it is well known that the Jubilee Singers, who went through Great Britain under the patronage of the Freedmen’s Aid Society, or we may say its President, the noble Earl of Shaftesbury, received very generous aid for Fisk University from our British friends. They have also aided liberally in the support of colored missionaries at the Mendi Mission on the West Coast of Africa. But latterly they have become greatly interested in the Arthington Mission, projected for the Upper Nile valley, toward which field two white missionaries have gone forth, Rev. H. M. Ladd, and Dr. Snow, of Western New York. For this mission, Robert Arthington, Esq., of Leeds, England, has given $15,000; others in Great Britain have given $15,000 more; so we have $30,000 of the $50,000 needed for the mission from our British friends. One London gentleman, after hearing a statement of the case in Scotland, sent for the speaker and gave him $5,000, as he said, instead of a legacy. Note that. A young man, who is a butler in a gentleman’s family, sent at another time $50. When asked if that was not too much for him he said, “I gave £10 a little ago, to help a friend out of a difficulty, and I can give £10 for the good of a vast continent.” A good woman, who had been a governess for some years, also handed to the Secretary £10 for herself, and her sister gave £10 more; and they agreed to give together £15 ($75) a year right on for colored missionaries for Africa. These were deeds of self-sacrifice. Are there not generous young men, and older men, and noble women in America, who will do as well for that dark continent, which our ancestors so cruelly plundered? We need, we must have $20,000 more, very soon, for that Arthington Mission. We want a steamer on the Upper Nile waters also. We must besides have a steamer, the John Brown memorial steamer, for the Mendi Mission on the West Coast at once. In that country there are no roads, there are no beasts of burden. Human beings have to be the carriers of all burdens for hundreds of miles. And our dear missionaries have fallen, many of them, in early death, in those perilous journeys through swamp and jungle, on their errands of love to the poor suffering millions of Africa. We cannot believe that their friends and our friends will hesitate and delay their giving for this steamer for the increase of good and the saving of precious lives.
If we recall the abuse and the needs of Africa, we can but see and feel our duty and privilege in this connection. Africa has been for five hundred years the hunting-ground for the bondmen of the whole world, and to this day the slave trade covers an area nearly equal to all Europe, in Northern, Central and Southern Africa. This accursed trade is to the East, and mainly to the Mohammedan countries; and it is said that from some of the Eastern ports a traveler may wend his way, without a guide, into the very heart of Africa, by following the line of human bones and the skin-covered skeletons of the poor slave victims who have fallen in that terrible march to the sea. And that this crime should have been permitted by the Christian nations down to the closing part of this 19th century is an astounding fact! And it ought not to need an argument to show any man that a people who still demand slaves, and buy human beings therefor, ought to be hounded out of the very pale of the civilized nations; for it is generally known that for every slave delivered in any country, four and often six human beings have fallen in death in the attempts to capture them, or in the cruel journey to their doom. And this trade will never be stopped till the better nations learn to treat the demand for slaves as a huge crime, as well as the act of supply. To meet and combat this crime boldly and persistently in both demand and supply is the call of God to the Christian nations out on the morning and the midnight air.
Now we may do both. Africa is open to us, and travelers are penetrating her vast territories; the steamer’s screw and paddle-wheels of reform are stirring her waters and also the thought of her people; commerce is tapping her mines of wealth; geographers are correcting her maps; scientists are studying her various climates and testing her remedial agents. Christianity, of which it was said in a meeting of the International Society for Africa, made up of distinguished travelers, learned and scientific men, “History shows that Christianity has special virtue for rescuing savage races from barbarism, causing them rapidly to over-step the first barriers in the way of civilization”—Christianity, we say, is now challenging Paganism, the Moslem curse, and the accursed slave trade, on that long plundered continent of Africa. And now we have a potent factor for the work not available a little ago. We have more than six millions of Africa’s sable children, from which people we may select educated Christian young men and women for the great work given us to do. And these are the people for Africa. They can live in hot climates; they are by blood relations and common sufferings in sympathy with the people to be reached and saved; they can touch the heart, stir the thought and lift up their own race as no other people can ever do it.
For this they are developing a peculiar type of piety on a grander scale than we have yet seen among the Anglo-Saxon race. The Pauline we have had—the intellect and conscience carried by an intense conviction of duty, so that the man would go to the stake for his principles. But the loving, trustful type of piety belongs to these sable children of the sunnier and more genial climes. Shall we, then, know our day and dare to take our opportunity with these ex-slaves for the redemption of Africa from ignorance, superstition, slavery, war and woe? We want the John Brown mission steamer. We want, we must have, in addition to all the generous and noble gifts for our Southern work, the sum of $20,000, already pledged by the committee of the A. M. A., for the Arthington Mission in the Upper Nile valley, frightfully ravaged by the villainous slave trade to this very day!
Who, then, of all God’s dear people, will rally to this standard, and come at the call of the Divine King to this momentous work, with hand and heart and money, to take possession of that vast continent of Africa, with its 200,000,000 of people, for Christ, and for the good of all nations?—Rev. O. H. White, D.D., Sec. F. M. A. Soc., London, Eng.