The Negro Laborer: A Word to Him

by W. H. Councill

"The workmen employed on the Baker & Helm block on the corner of Washington and Clinton Sts., are workmen right, and deserve a word of kind praise for the 'big licks' they have accomplished in the erection of this building.

"We are told that every brick layer on the work is a colored man, and we do not hesitate to say that they have shown up wonderfully well, and performed good, honest labor quickly done. The rafters for the roof are now being placed in position, and once the roof is on, the finishing strokes will be given with refreshing precision. All honor to the colored mechanics, they are entitled to much praise, and we shall see that they get all they deserve, and which they are justly entitled to."

Also, M. Quad, the correspondent of the Detroit Free Press, writing from Eufaula, Alabama, says of the colored people there:

"Come down here and I will show you hundreds of acres of the best lands which are owned by the black men. I can show you from ten to twelve colored men who have more acres, better buildings, and more cash than any like number of white farmers in some of our Michigan counties. The colored school is fully equal to the white one, and the people speak of this fact with pride. There was a time when the streets of Eufaula were crowded with vagrant blacks, none of whom had the ambition to earn a shilling more than would give him food and clothes. The vagrant laws were enforced, and the change was astonishing. There is not an idler in the place. There is not a black man in or around the town who isn't given the fairest kind of a show to go ahead. While the white man will always enforce respect, he will bear and assist and condone. Alabama is to-day doing more for the flesh and blood it once cracked the slave whip over than Michigan is doing for its unlettered and vicious white population. The black man of the south is improving every year, and no one will concede this quicker nor feel prouder over the fact than the southern whites. There need be no sympathy wasted on the black man of Alabama. He is doing for himself in education and finance, far better than some of the white population of the north."

Possess merit and that will tell whether you get into the papers or not.

The means of obtaining the kinds of notices we wish published in the white papers, are quite meagre. The court records are the only information accessible to them. Very few of us have any business or association with the white press. We never think of letting them know of our transactions, hence how can they receive notice? This complaint is without justification and should cease Stand up for the colored press, and it will prove ample for us in all things.

XIII. A Plain Question for Southern Consideration.

One of the great questions which must command the consideration of southern people, in the immediate future, is better care of the servants, and more attention to their moral and industrial training. I am dealing with the servant class of our people, which at present is more than ninety-nine per cent. of the race. The employer can not help having a deep interest in this class, if he would protect his own family. Ninety-five per cent. of the nurses and chamber-maids of the South are colored. These servants are thrown in hourly contact with the children of the families they serve. The nurses do much to shape the lives of the children they carry in their arms. Earliest impressions are most enduring. Somebody has said: "Give me the first seven years of a child's life and you may have the man." The influences of the nurse will be felt throughout the life of the child. If those influences are virtuous, exercised by an intelligent, honest christian nurse, great good will result. But if the nurse have the opposite qualities—if she be indolent, sloven, ignorant, vicious and deceptive—the child will surely imbibe some of these disorders which will show themselves some where in the life of the child, or his offspring. Moral contagions are more deadly and easily communicated than any diseases of the body. What fond mother would commit her infant to the arms of a leper? And yet it were better to do that, than expose it to influences which corrupt the mind and taint the whole constitution. It is a fact that southern white women have been accustomed, for many generations, to surrender the care and training of their children to "black mamas," who inspired manhood and gave the first great lessons of God and truth to hundreds of the present hoary haired statesmen of the Sunny South. This custom is still a delight in the South, and white mothers trust their children to the care of Negro nurses with the same implicit faith that Thetis committed her young Achilles to the charge of Phoenix and Chiron. I wish that these nurses sufficiently appreciated this confidence and would feel a deep pride in their work and responsibility. It must be borne in mind that the relations of thirty years ago do not exist, and the results of the ante-bellum nursery government and the system of to-day, cannot be the same.

Here is a work for Southern women of the white race. Leave out of the question the love for mankind, which should prompt them to elevate the whole race of man, they must meet this matter of the elevation of domestics on selfish grounds if no other. They must in self protection strive to make the house servant class intelligent and virtuous. Honesty must become a part of the mentality, and not a form or a cloak worn while under the surveillance of the law, or the eye of virtue. Who says that the colored servant is not as honest as any other servant? I do not. I am not making comparisons at all. I am speaking of things as I want them to be. If they are so already, then I "rejoice with exceeding great joy." The importation of white family servants and nurses will not solve the problem. It is a question which cannot be handled except in the light of christian education. The importation of white servants means the introduction of disorder in domestic government, and it will produce a revolution in the social system of the South. It will bring communism in the kitchen, socialism in the dining-room, nihilism in the chamber, and the hand of anarchy to rock the cradles of the South. Let the South nurse the Negro with right and kindness, while the Negro nurses the infants of the South, and we shall have domestic labor of the most desirable class.

There should be attached to every well ordered southern home rooms for the servants. These rooms should be comfortable in all their appointments. In the villages and small towns as well as in the cities this is needful. Women of all grades must be modest. Modesty is her shield. When she loses that, she is exposed to the licentious missiles of vulgar men. It disarms a girl of her womanly reservedness to be thrown early in morning and late at night, alone, into the streets going to and from her work. She finally gets a boldness which is out of place in any home.