As to our higher schools, some of our best colleges have died since 1865; others are dying now. Such a death is a loss, not to the South only, but to the whole country. Yours have grown rich. I do not envy you; I rejoice in your strong and well-furnished institutions. But you should be patient toward us, and, I am not ashamed to say, you should help us as God gives you opportunity. Men and brethren, it is time to have done with 1860–65. Said a Brooklyn man to me last year who, unsolicited, had helped two Southern schools: “I think my friends here approve what I have done; but if any should ask, ‘Why did you not give this money to your own people?’ my answer is: ‘They also are my people—we are one people.’” On that platform we can become a Christian nation strong enough to bless the world.
Northern money has done much to “develop the South” during the last decade in pushing railroads and other great industrial enterprises. It is all welcome, and ten times as much. But I do not question that each $100 invested in Christian education in the South since the war has done more to develop it in every best sense than each $1,000 placed in railroads and factories. But enough on these lines of thought.
I must say a word or two as to the relations of your work to Africa. The first atlas I ever saw made a desert of sand cover all the wonderful lands that Livingstone, Stanley, and others have discovered, and they printed across the map of Africa 28,000,000, with an interrogation point to indicate a guess as to the population. Now we are studying the maps of interior Africa, and they tell us of great nations and a population that may reach 200,000,000! Can any man who believes in the Bible, or in God, doubt for one moment that Providence is in the history of the negroes in the United States? Can we doubt that these millions of negroes, now committed to us as the wards of the Christian church, must, some day, attempt and accomplish the evangelization of Africa?
I rejoice that your Association has its eye and heart upon Africa. I saw two photographs in the chapel of Fisk University last May that stirred my soul; they were the faces of two missionaries who had gone from that great Christian school to Africa. One Sunday evening I preached in the chapel. A youth from your Mendi Mission, a native of Africa, getting ready to be a missionary, sang for us in his home language a familiar Sunday-school song, “I Have a Father in the Promised Land.” Some day they will be singing Christian songs in every village of the Dark Continent. How the thought of the Divine fatherhood and of the brotherhood of the eternal Son has changed Europe and made America. Some day these thoughts will change Africa. What we call civilization can’t do it; the gospel of Jesus Christ can. The Christian negroes are getting ready for their work, and you and others working in the same fields, are helping them to get ready. The missionary fire is beginning to burn in their hearts. When they go forth, bearing the sacred symbol of our Lord’s love to men, every Christian man and woman in our land should help them. That movement—and it is coming—will, at no distant day give your colonization and missionary societies all they can do. Was there ever a greater need or a more hopeful field, a greater duty or a brighter promise of success? Mr. President, you may be sure that from thousands of Christian hearts all over the South the prayer goes up, “God bless the work of the American Missionary Association, with all others who are preaching the gospel to the poor.”
FROM ADDRESS OF GENERAL CLINTON B. FISK.
The American Missionary Association is one of those societies that has long been near my heart, having a large place in it. From its very beginning I watched its growth, but had no idea in the years before that I should ever have such intimate relations with it. Being in the South at the close of the war with the care of two or three millions of colored people thrown on my hands, I naturally looked about to see what was being done for schools and what for Christian culture. I found the American Missionary Association on the skirmish line. They were gathering up the broken fetters of the slaves, selling them for old iron and putting the money into spelling-books and Bibles, building school-houses and sending self-sacrificing, earnest Christian men and women to the South to teach these people; and I naturally fell very much in love with them.
I got a letter a day or two since. It was written by the Mayor of one of the chief cities of the South to myself. I picked this out of a large bundle of correspondence of the same sort. He addresses me and says: “You will doubtless be surprised at receiving a letter from me. In 1865 I was Mayor of this city, which position I now occupy. In that memorable year 1865, through your instrumentality and by order of Major-General George H. Thomas, I was suspended from office. But that is a matter of the past, and for one I favor letting ‘bygones be bygones.’ The charge against me was using my official position for the oppression of the colored people and opposing their education. However true that might have been at the time, certainly such a charge cannot be made against me now. Immediately after the close of the war and upon the restoration of civil law, I was chosen one of the School Commissioners of this district, and gave active aid, amidst much opposition, in the establishment of Public Schools. I have labored earnestly in the cause ever since, and I am proud to inform you that my efforts have in a measure been crowned with success. We have now a splendid school system and a magnificent school building for the whites. We wish now to do as much for the colored people. There is much opposition in every locality in the city to the establishment of a colored school in their midst. Yet, notwithstanding this opposition, I have proffered to sell a lot of my own for the purpose on very reasonable terms.”
Now, that is a great change to come about in seventeen years. So I simply sat down and wrote him a letter which he could use as “substance of doctrine.” I said: “My dear Mr. Mayor, go on to perfection. Do the same thing for the colored people you do for the white people, and blot ‘colored’ and ‘white’ out of your memory. Make a school for the children. It is not easy to send them to the same school; I know all about that.” The colored boy is perhaps more opposed to associating with the white boy in the school than the white boy is to associating with the colored boy. It takes a long time to overcome those strong prejudices on the part of the colored people.
Just after the establishment of Fisk school, which commenced in such a halo of glory under the auspices of this Association, there came into my headquarters in Nashville an old Irish woman, bringing her two little boys with her, and she said, “Misther Gineral Fisk, ’ave you heny hobjection to my sinding these little chaps to your nigger school?” I said, “Not at all, if the ‘niggers’ haven’t any objection.” But it will take a long time before they will drift into one school. I am glad that all of ours are open. How singular it would look to write over the portals of all our schools in the South, “White children admitted here!” Let us do all we can for the education of both races. That particular class to which my friend Haygood made such admirable reference, those poor white people of the South, appeals to us as scarcely any other interest in the South does to-day. Let us remember them. I am glad, sir [addressing Dr. Haygood], that you are going to be in a position to help a great many colored young men and women to become teachers.