SERVICE BY THE EDUCATED NEGRO

  ADDRESS OF ROSCOE CONKLING BRUCE
  OF TUSKEGEE INSTITUTE AT THE COMMENCEMENT
  EXERCISES OF THE M STREET
  HIGH SCHOOL METROPOLITAN A. M. E.
  CHURCH WASHINGTON, D. C., JUNE 16, 1903




  Copyright 1903
  C. W. B. Bruce

  Tuskegee Institute Steam Print.




SERVICE BY THE EDUCATED NEGRO.


When George William Curtis had received from Harvard her greatest
degree, he arose at the Alumni Dinner and said, “In the old Italian
story the nobleman turns out of the hot street crowded with eager
faces into the coolness and silence of his palace. As he looks at the
pictures of the long line of ancestors he hears a voice,--or is it
his own heart beating?--which says to him _noblesse oblige_. The
youngest scion of the oldest house is pledged by all the virtues and
honor of his ancestry to a life not unworthy his lineage.... When I
came here I was not a nobleman, but to-day I have been ennobled. The
youngest doctor of the oldest school, I too, say with the Italian,
_noblesse oblige_. I am pledged by all the honorable traditions of
the noble family into which I am this day adopted.”... You, my friends,
are ennobled by the diploma of a school, rich in traditions of high
endeavor and actual service. Shall those traditions fail to enter your
hearts, and to quicken your energies, and to chasten your ambitions?
This question you are not now competent to answer, and you will not be
competent until you have lived your lives.

Your equipment for the business of life is not contemptible. As
workers you have some acquaintance with the natural resources of
our country, and the ways in which they have been utilized in the
production and distribution of commodities through the perfecting of
industrial organization and the applying of science to work. More,
importantly, you possess in varying degrees a group of valuable
industrial qualities,--that ambition without which work is drudgery
and enlargement of life unsought and unattainable; that habit of
earnest endeavor which, established by continuous attention to Greek
or Latin, mathematics or history, may be utilized in the school room,
or on the farm, or in the court room; that habit of self-control
which enables men to sacrifice vagrant impulse to sober duty; that
resourcefulness which discovers better methods of getting work done;
that directing intelligence by which one man can effectively organize
for a given purpose, many materials and many workers. In addition to
the knowledge and the qualities I have mentioned, most of you have a
settled disposition toward some form of self-support appropriate to an
exceptional training; while you know that some men must black other
men’s boots, you also know that a boot-black with a high school diploma
at home means waste--waste of time, waste of money, waste of education.
Moreover, you appreciate the duties and value the privileges of
citizenship in a democracy, and most of you have on the whole a serious
intent to do what you reasonably can to promote the general welfare.
Such is your equipment as citizens. Finally, as human beings, you are
able to participate in the intellectual, æsthetic, and moral interests
of cultivated people. How may you with such equipment be really useful
under the conditions of American life? That is our problem.

And right here let me say that nobody wishes you to make a profession
of uplifting your race. In the first place, that’s a pretty big job;
and in the second place, your race is uplifted whenever one of you
manages well a truck farm, a grocery store, a school room, or a bank.
Charity begins at home; your chief business should be to uplift each
himself. My present purpose, however, is to consider mainly how such
individual success may contribute to the welfare of the many.

Let us consider, first of all, how you may be of direct service by work
in which the chief factor is personal influence and by work in which
the chief factor is directing intelligence.

Teaching is an art inseparable from the personality of the teacher,--an
art in which a mature person seeks by personal influence to help
immature persons build their characters soundly. Teaching ability,
to adapt the words of Cardinal Newman, “is not a mere extrinsic or
accidental advantage which is ours to-day and another’s to-morrow,
which may be got up from a book and easily forgotten again, which we
can command or communicate at our pleasure, which we can borrow for
the occasion, carry about in our hands and take into the market; it is
an acquired illumination, it is a habit, a personal possession and an
inward endowment.” The best way to become a good teacher is, therefore,
to become a good man or a good woman, and to grow in power to interest
and influence young people. Such personality and power cannot be
manufactured to order, but are slowly developed by much reading and
thinking and doing and no little contact with wholesome people. In
Charles Francis Adams’ pungent address, at Cambridge in 1883, he said,
“In these days of repeating rifles, my alma mater sent me and my
classmates out into the strife equipped with shields and swords and
javelins. We were to grapple with living questions through the medium
of the dead languages.” While thus sharply criticizing the content
of the curriculum, Mr. Adams would have been the first to maintain
that to breathe the atmosphere of a university is an assured way of
getting broadened culture, and that this atmosphere is made largely
by the teachers. Frederick Douglass had no university degree, but he
was certainly a man of culture; his teachers were among the choicest
spirits of an aroused generation--Sumner and Garrison and Wendell
Phillips--and they gave him breadth and balance and clear-sightedness.
Charles Francis Adams was set upon the highway of modern culture
despite the curriculum; Douglass received that grace which is of the
spirit of literature without the curriculum. Both men were deeply
indebted to noble teachers. The thing that makes one man really
different from another is not so much knowledge as character; and the
thing that makes one school different from another is not so much
curriculum and apparatus, as teaching body. Algebra and trigonometry,
Greek and Latin, history and political economy, the student will
forget; but he will not forget a teacher gentle but earnest, of
disinterested scholarship and life-long devotion. The specific teaching
may be quite erased from the memory, but in the heart will be left a
deepening respect for the teacher.

Many of you are to become class-room teachers. Remember that teaching
ability is an inward endowment; remember that a morally stunted man
or a ribbon-loving woman cannot be an effective teacher. The most
searching critic of character I ever knew was a barefoot boy whose
laughing eyes danced over the pages of the fourth reader; an intuitive
philosopher he! School boy opinion has, I doubt not, many vagaries
but on the whole its essential decisions as to teachers are amazingly
correct. Whether you teach geography by the Oswego Method, is not
greatly to the point; whether you have won the confidence of your
class--that is the main issue; and that conquest is not made by the
sword of discipline but by the spirit of vigorous goodness.

Moreover the genuine teacher knows that his duty is not bounded by the
four walls of the class-room. He is dealing with boys and girls to be
sure, but he is dealing with more--with social conditions. The life and
work of the community he must study quite as much as he must study the
child. Indeed, child and man are largely products of social conditions.
The educated teacher, by friendly visits to homes and by cheerful work
in churches and societies, will seek to elevate community opinion and
the standard of life and work. A crowded unclean home in an undrained
street, is almost as much an object of concern to the educated teacher
as is a hopeless little dunce who can’t spell “rabbit!” Let us ground
child-study in community study.

This knowledge of the life and work of the community will react upon
the program of study. The educated teacher, I have said, aims at
raising somewhat the level of life in the community. The program of
study is an instrument for that end. A school unresponsive to the needs
of actual life is a school preparing for Utopia. The universities and
the public schools of the Western States illustrate what I mean: for
example, the University of California has recently introduced a course
in irrigation. And here in the East, Cornell teaches poultry raising.
For an unscrubbed population the school should emphasize cleanliness;
for a propertyless population, foresight and thrift. Let me speak
even more definitely. In this city of Washington, as in other urban
communities, the death rate of the Negro population is exceedingly
high. This excessive death rate is due to a variety of causes;
relatively low economic position is a powerful cause. Thus, one of the
largest industrial insurance companies in the United States finds, I
learn, that the death rate of Negroes is practically the same as that
of whites, in approximately the same industrial occupations; and there
is much more evidence to the same effect. In addition to the teaching
of hygiene, the school may aim to remedy the conditions expressed in
the high death rate, in two ways,--first, through imparting productive
capacity by the training of hands; and second, through developing wants
by the touching of hearts and arousing of minds.

Already you have a manual training high school and through the grades
certain work in carpentry and sewing and cooking. The increasing
efficiency of all such work should be welcomed and actively aided by
every educated teacher. After a while, let us hope, the schools here
will offer from one end to the other, such teaching of the industrial
arts as will prepare students worthily to maintain themselves under
severe economic stress. Do you realize that, despite the enlargement
of educational opportunities in Washington and the growth of the Negro
population, there are probably here to-day fewer Negro artisans than
there were in 1870? Here is a profound need, and for the schools a rare
opportunity. Moreover, the school life of most children is short, not
over five or six years. If the school possessed adequate facilities for
giving industrial capacity, more parents would be willing and able to
let their children remain in school seven and eight and nine years. The
schools and the cultivated portion of this community cannot afford to
give those who ask for bread a stone. We must send the whole boy to
school and not merely his head!

Not for a moment do I decry that important function of the schools,
which I have called the development of wants. Human wants are social
forces. Corn and cotton are grown to supply certain bodily wants;
the fine arts are cultivated in response to certain æsthetic wants;
philosophy and pure science are elaborated at the quiet insistence of
certain intellectual wants; religion is preached to assuage certain
spiritual wants. Every voluntary act is the hand-maid of some want.
Now, it is the fundamental business of the schools to enlarge the range
of the students’ interests and wants, to stir up a divine discontent.
The saddest thing about the Negro peasant in his windowless cabin in
Georgia, the saddest thing about the Negroes in the filthy shanties of
Mobile, New York, and Washington, is not so much poverty, as slovenly
unconcern. What all such people need--be they white or black, red or
yellow--is the development of wants--wants for better things. A man of
moderately developed wants will exert himself to get a steady job under
healthful conditions, to get a comfortable house to live in--three or
four sunny, pleasantly furnished rooms and, if possible a garden for
vegetables and flowers--yes, he will exert himself to win a wife to
make that house a home. Such wants (and they are, you will note, not
impossibly spiritual) every school ought to tend to develop.

In short, the development of the wants of sober men and the giving of
the skill to buy the means of satisfying those wants--these two things
are vital to the work of the school. Let me be clearly understood; the
school should of course develop the more spiritual wants, wants for the
things that give literature and art and religion their values. These
spiritual things are the headwaters of the fullest and deepest and
highest enjoyments of life. But these matters have long been emphasized
in the traditions of school-men; moreover, when the flesh is weak, the
spirit is not very strong. My wish just now is to emphasize the things
that lie at the basis of race maintenance and progress.

The considerations brought forward exhibit the opportunities of the
teacher and the high significance of the teacher’s work.

Teaching and preaching are very much alike. Phillips Brooks said very
truly that preaching is the bringing of truth through personality. Some
of you will prepare yourselves to preach; all of you will have to do
with preachers. There is no lack of preachers but there is much lack
of good preachers. The preacher has the entree to the firesides of the
people. The educated preacher, like the educated teacher, realizes the
profound effect that the housing of the working classes exerts upon the
morals and the efficiency and the happiness of the working classes,
the profound effect that surroundings exert upon life and character.
The preacher will use some of the influence that issues from his
superrational functions to make the homes of the people hygienically
as well as morally clean, to make those homes more attractive than the
resorts of vice.

Religion and the Church have, from a certain point of view, two main
functions,--first to make peace between human society and assumed
spiritual beings; and, second, to antagonize anti-social acts and
tendencies. The first function, religion performs for a horde of
man-eating savages as well as for the congregation of St. Paul’s; the
second function religion performs, characteristically in a civilized
society, by allying itself with morality. The surprisingly low death
rate of Jews wherever found is unquestionably due in large part to this
alliance of religion and morality. In our English Bible we find:--

“And God spake all these words, saying,

“Honour thy father and thy mother....

“Thou shalt not kill.

“Thou shalt not commit adultery.

“Thou shalt not steal.

“Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour.

“Though shalt not covet thy neighbour’s house, thou shalt not covet thy
neighbour’s wife, ... nor anything that is thy neighbour’s.

“And all the people saw the thunderings, and the lightnings, and the
noise of the trumpet, and the mountain smoking.”...

Now, the practical usefulness of the preacher lies largely in the fact
that he supplies the sanctions for right doing,--the thunderings and
the lightnings and the noise of the trumpet, the mountain smoking,
and in all but above all Jehovah. To show the man in the street or in
the cotton field that for him lying and stealing are bad because, if
everybody were a liar and a thief, society would fall to pieces,--that
would be very well, but it would hardly make the man honest in word
and deed. If, however, you marshal feelings of awe and reverence in
defence of honesty, if you get God on your side, your success is more
assured and you may develop a “sensibility to principle which feels a
stain like a wound.” The preacher fortifies the common moralities with
these religious sanctions and that is no easy business. The preacher
must himself be righteous, resourceful, sympathetic, with the gift of
nearness to men. Such qualities education is peculiarly fit to bestow
or to develop, and hence an educated ministry is sorely needed by our
people from Boston to New Orleans.

An educated ministry would realize that social settlements, gymnasiums,
kindergartens, day nurseries, friendly visiting, homes for defectives
and orphans and the aged may fitly and usefully be organized and
maintained by the church. By such means the church may tend to
establish a kingdom of heaven on earth.

Among cultivated Negroes there is apparent an unfortunate tendency to
look at preachers askance. This is due largely to reaction against bad
preachers, and to failure to understand and appreciate the temporal
opportunities of the Church. I argue for the usefulness of good
preachers and of the “institutional” church. Though no member of this
graduating class should become a preacher or a preacher’s wife, every
member may wisely ally himself with the church and use his personal
influence to enlarge and strengthen church work, to make it definite
and human and nobly practical.

So much for the work in which personal influence is the determining
factor. Medicine and business are types of the work in which what I
have rudely called directing intelligence determines.

In the profession of medicine, I admit, personal influence and
directing intelligence subtly interlace. The Negro doctor’s social
position makes him specially accessible to Negroes in cases of need. As
a friend of the family or of the family’s friends, the doctor is not
dreaded as a feelingless stranger with a terrible knife. Moreover,
the Negro doctor does not feel himself a man of alien blood come to
tend an inferior. Social position and understanding sympathy, then,
render the Negro doctor readily accessible and very useful. Moreover,
the Negro’s physical condition offers the doctor large opportunities
for noble service. In a book upon “Ethnic Factors in the Population
of Boston,” Doctor Bushee says, “In Boston the mortality of the Negro
is much larger than that of any other ethnic factor”; again, “A high
death rate, instead of a low birthrate is causing the Negroes to
disappear”; and the statistics are not much more encouraging in many
other urban communities North and South. That relatively low economic
position is a powerful factor in producing this alarming death rate, I
have already suggested; another capital factor is pitiable ignorance
of the rudiments of personal hygiene and of sanitation. Negro doctors
may without much trouble diffuse throughout a community these rudiments
of knowledge and in so doing will prove themselves public servants.
North and South the conspicuous financial success and substantial
social service of hundreds of Negro doctors eloquently establish the
correctness of this view; and of practising physicians, the Negro
people to-day have unmistakably too few.

What of the Negro business man? In Washington public employment and
the professions have captured most of the energetic and alert Negroes,
to the injury of business development. Springfield, Massachusetts;
Richmond, Virginia; Dayton, Ohio,--not one of these important cities
has a total population as large as the Negro population of the District
of Columbia. As buyers of goods, eighty-seven thousand people are
important; but as sellers of goods, the eighty-seven thousand Negroes
in Washington are by no means important. For example, of the total
profits on the dry goods bought in a year by the Negro population of
Washington,--profits amounting to thousands and thousands of dollars,
for the ratio of expenditure to income is exceptionally large,--what
per cent. goes to Negro merchants? Shall I say five per cent., one
per cent., or one thousandth of one per cent.? Mathematical precision
is, of course, not possible but you and I know that practically none
of these profits go to Negro merchants. And you and I could name a
dozen white merchants who have been enriched by those profits. And
in consideration of this fact how many Negro clerks have the white
merchants placed in their stores? how many Negro floor walkers? how
many Negro buyers? And, my friends, how many thousands of years must
elapse before the Washington Negro will add to his culture enough
co-operative endeavor and competitive power to change all this? I
myself have never yet been convinced that the Anglo-Saxon and the
Jew really need the black man’s charity. Though I cannot point out,
then, to the members of this graduating class openings in established
business houses, I can point out that their success in business will
provide opportunities for some later class, and will help to make the
spending of Negroes enrich Negroes. Let me suggest two other ways in
which the Negro business men may be of great service to the many. In
the first place, the rents charged Negroes in cities, for example,
Washington, are considerably higher for the same accommodations than
the rents charged white people. By offering good houses at reasonable
rents to the Negro working class, the Negro business man will find a
paying investment and a means of much service. In the second place,
hotels, restaurants, and theatres even in the capital of the nation are
open to black men and women only on degrading terms, or not open at
all. The closing of such accommodations is really the opening for black
business men of the doors of opportunity.

In discussing ways of direct service I have then mentioned teaching and
preaching as types of the work in which the decisive factor is personal
influence. Medicine and business I have mentioned as types of the work
in which the decisive factor is directing intelligence.

And now I wish to discuss two ways in which educated Negroes may be
of indirect service,--first, by offering their fellows copies for
imitation, and, second, by establishing the dignity of the race.
In 1881, hardly a white man or a black man in the country dreamed
that in twenty-two years a Negro would have achieved the building
of a beautiful city in a Southern wilderness, would have organized
efficiently the business of that industrial community of some 1700
people, would have won the abiding confidence of white men and black
men North and South, would have brought the white North and the white
South into intelligent co-operation in the uplifting of black men,
would have worked out a solution for the central problem in American
education, would have been acknowledged master of arts by the oldest
university in the land, would have written one of the impressive books
of the century, would have been asked by the British Government for
help in the reconstruction of South Africa, would have been called by
the sanest of British critics of affairs the most notable figure in
the American Republic! And yet, this miracle you and I see to-day with
our own eyes. The example of this man is being imitated in a hundred
educational and industrial communities in the Southern States. And all
men feel more respect for the Negro race because out of its loins has
come Booker T. Washington.

A constructive statesman like Washington, educators like Lewis Moore
and Lucy Moten and your own Anna Cooper, theologians like Bowen and
Grimke, scholars like Blyden and Scarborough and DuBois and Kelly
Miller, inventors like Woods and McCoy, a novelist like Chesnutt, a
poet like Dunbar, a musician like Coleridge-Taylor, a painter like
Tanner--yes, and, of those who are gone, Banneker who searched the
heavens; Toussaint, soldier and statesman; Aldridge, the tragedian with
his first medal in arts and sciences from the King of Prussia; Pushkin,
the poet of the Russias; Dumas, father and son; the saintly Crummel;
and Douglass the argument for freedom,--I say, the indirect service of
such people is incalculable.

Now, for you and me no such careers are probable and yet every educated
Negro who is worth his salt, is in similar fashion a copy for imitation
and serves to secure respect for his race. The Negro contractor and
builder; the Negro who owns a well managed truck farm; the Negro school
teacher, who has saved money enough to buy municipal bonds or shares in
a railway,--that person becomes in a money getting time a definite and
concrete argument to white men and to black men that black men can be
more than hewers of wood and drawers of water, than cooks and coachmen.
Fundamentally, you and I by our thoughtfulness, our practical interest
in the happiness of others, our elevation above petty prejudice, our
simplicity, our decisive prudence, our enduring energy, our devotion,
may indirectly count for good in a thousand ways in the life and work
of our communities.

And, now, my friends, you enter the circle of educated men and women.
Your personal influence will be felt in school room and in pulpit. Your
directing intelligence will count in law, and medicine, and business;
as able and devoted men and women, you by your examples will steady
the nerves of a staggering people and make the word Negro more than a
reproach. Delicate indecision, hesitant virtue, carping discontent,
bric-a-brac culture--these ill become stalwart men and robust women.
By all the honorable traditions of the noble family into which you are
now adopted, you are pledged not to pick your way daintily in the soft
places of the earth; you are pledged to make your lives real, useful,
constructive. Remember--_noblesse oblige_!




TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:


  Spaced out text is surrounded by underscores: _gesperrt_.

  Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.