Go to our churches on the Sabbath, and see the silk, the satin, the velvet, and the costly feathers, and talk with the uneducated wearers, and you will see at once the main hindrance to self-elevation.
To elevate ourselves and our children, we must cultivate self-denial. Repress our appetites for luxuries and be content with clothing ourselves in garments becoming our means and our incomes. The adaptation and the deep inculcation of the principles of total abstinence from all intoxicants. The latter is a pre-requisite for success in all the relations of life.
Emerging from the influence of oppression, taught from early experience to have no confidence in the whites, we have little or none in our own race, or even in ourselves.
We need more self-reliance, more confidence in the ability of our own people; more manly independence, a higher standard of moral, social, and literary culture. Indeed, we need a union of effort to remove the dark shadow of ignorance that now covers the land. While the barriers of prejudice keep us morally and socially from educated white society, we must make a strong effort to raise ourselves from the common level where emancipation and the new order of things found us.
We possess the elements of successful development; but we need live men and women to make this development. The last great struggle for our rights; the battle for our own civilization, is entirely with ourselves, and the problem is to be solved by us.
We must use our spare time, day and night, to educate ourselves. Let us have night schools for the adults, and not be ashamed to attend them. Encourage our own literary men and women; subscribe for, and be sure and pay for papers published by colored men. Don’t stop to inquire if the paper will live; but encourage it, and make it live.
With the exception of a few benevolent societies, we are separated as far from each other as the east is from the west.
CHAPTER XXVII.
Union is strength, has long since passed into a proverb. The colored people of the South should at once form associations, combine and make them strong, and live up to them by all hazards. All civilized races have risen by means of combination and co-operation. The Irishman, the German, the Frenchman, all come to this country poor, and they stay here but a short time before you see them succeeding in some branch of business. This success is not the result of individual effort—it is the result of combination and co-operation. Whatever an Irishman has to spend he puts in the till of one of his own countrymen, and that accounts for Irish success.