THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED
TO THOSE COLORED GIRLS AND BOYS
UPON WHOSE NOBLE EFFORTS AND ACHIEVEMENTS
WILL REST THE FOUNDATIONS FOR
THE FUTURE SUCCESS OF
THE NEGRO RACE:
AND
TO ALL THOSE WHITE WOMEN AND MEN
WHOSE KIND ENCOURAGEMENT OF AND JUST
DEALINGS WITH ALL HUMANITY ARE BRINGING
ABOUT BETTER UNDERSTANDING AND GREATER
CO-OPERATIONS BETWEEN
WHITE AND COLORED PEOPLE.
COMPOSED—COMPILED—WRITTEN
ARRANGED—DESIGNED
AND
ORIGINAL DRAWINGS
MADE FROM ALONG
THE FAMOUS PICTURESQUE LEHIGH VALLEY
OF PENNSYLVANIA, U. S. A.
BY
WILLIAM HENRY HARRISON, Jr.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
AUTHOR’S PREFACE
Not to Boast but to Boost
Negroes should find great pride indeed
In Race progress herein they read;
But to such readers let me tell
This book means not our heads to swell;
For five of the greatest rich white men
Could buy the wealth of our Race: and then!
So this book is neither a brag nor boast
But just to inspire our younger host
To elevate their racial name
From poisoned stains of slavery shame,
By climbing to the highest heights
Thro aid of friends who are “real whites”.
TWENTY-FIVE years ago, when a lad fifteen years old attending the public schools of Pennsylvania, in which State I was born and reared, certain ideas and sentiments caused me to secretly resolve that some day, when I had gotten together the necessary data, I would write just such a book as is contained herein. At the time that resolution was formed, I was attending the Darlington School in Middletown District, Delaware County over which Prof. A. G. C. Smith was Superintendent. And I remember with much gratefulness my first and last public school teachers, Misses Carrie V. Hamilton and Rebecca R. Crumley and Prof. Smith for their kind and frequent words to me as encouragement to continue my education after graduating from the public schools.
My favorite study was the United States History, and even at the tender age of fifteen years, I was greatly surprised and Race pridely hurt not to find any history, except about slavery, in such books concerning the American Negro. I had such childish confidence in my school books and their authors that I felt sure if Negroes had fought and died in the several American wars; had become great poets, orators, artists, sculptors, etc., the histories I was studying would have mentioned such. I thought in doing that they would have been preserving United States valuable history more so than merely giving just credit to the Colored people who had made such history. I did not know that right then the attentions of many public school children in far away Europe were often called to the histories of such distinguished Colored Americans as Phyllis Wheatley, the poetess; Frederick Douglas, the orator; Henry O. Tanner, the artist; Edmonia Lewis, the sculptoress—all of them having won recognition and fame in Europe as well as in America.
My youthful ignorance, regarding the achievements of my race, is easily explained when it is taken into consideration that I was a farmer boy living far from libraries I had never seen and Negro histories I had never heard about. And the United States histories then used in the public schools had nothing in them to enlighten me on that subject. They misled and kept me, along with thousands of other Colored school children, in absolute ignorance relative to the progress and attainments of the American Colored people. So whenever our history classes went up to recite and my white classmates proudly went through the lessons about General George Washington, Noah Webster, Benjamin Franklin, Eli Whitney, Longfellow, etc., while I knew and could just as easily recite such history, nevertheless, my feelings of crushed race pride and mortification were beyond expression because not one thing could I proudly recite from my lessons about great things my people had accomplished in America.