The negro will for pay perform any service under heaven, no matter how repulsive or full of hardship. He will sing his old plantation melodies and walk about the cotton fields in July and August, when the toughest white man seeks an awning. Heat is his element. He fears no malaria in the rice swamps, where a white man’s life is not worth sixpence.
Then, I say, leave the South and starve the whites into a realization of justice and common sense. Remember that tyrants never relinquish their grasp upon their victims until they are forced to.
Whether the blacks emigrate or not, I say to them, keep away from the cities and towns. Go into the country. Go to work on farms.
If you stop in the city, get a profession or a trade, but keep in mind that a good trade is better than a poor profession.
In Boston there are a large number of colored professionals, especially in the law, and a majority of whom are better fitted for farm service, mechanical branches, or for driving an ash cart.
Persons should not select professions for the name of being a “professional,” nor because they think they will lead an easy life. An honorable, lucrative and faithfully-earned professional reputation, is a career of honesty, patience, sobriety, toil and Christian zeal.
No drone can fill such a position. Select the profession or trade that your education, inclination, strength of mind and body will support, and then give your time to the work that you have undertaken, and work, work.
Once more I say to those who cannot get remunerative employment at the South, emigrate.
Some say, “stay and fight it out, contend for your rights, don’t let the old rebels drive you away, the country is as much yours as theirs.” That kind of talk will do very well for men who have comfortable homes out of the South, and law to protect them; but for the negro, with no home, no food, no work, the land-owner offering him conditions whereby he can do but little better than starve, such talk is nonsense. Fight out what? Hunger? Poverty? Cold? Starvation? Black men, emigrate.