Sparkling Gems of Race Knowledge Worth Reading Part 1

Sparkling Gems of Race Knowledge Worth Reading.

by Various.

ANNOUNCEMENT.

If, as Lord Bacon says, "reading makes a full man," then it behooves every one who has any aspirations to read.

The negro is just pa.s.sing, as it were, through the gateway that enters upon life's great work, and the publishers of this little volume are anxious to see our "brother in black" develop, both from an intellectual and a moral standpoint, and are ready to do what they can to stimulate the race on to still greater achievements than they have ever before accomplished. In launching "Sparkling Gems" we are simply putting forth to the world what we hope may, in some measure, instruct and encourage the colored people. We have compressed a vast amount of valuable race information into a small compa.s.s. The style of the work is good, and its moral tone is excellent. It can scarcely fail to profit every member of the race who will read it, hence it should be in every family, in every office, and in every library.

It has been the earnest aim of the compiler to embody in these pages the latest conclusions of some of the most prominent Afro-American scholars on several of the mooted subjects pertaining to the race.

We owe a debt of lasting grat.i.tude to many of our friends who have so generously furnished us valuable a.s.sistance in the collection of _data_ for this volume, among whom we may mention W. B. Rust and T. B.

Mears as among the most enthusiastic.

Believing that there is a genuine need for such a work as we have produced, we offer it to our colored friends and their white friends, praying G.o.d's blessing upon it. THE PUBLISHERS.

[Ill.u.s.tration: AS IT NOW IS--HOME OF A FREEMAN.

Residence of R. R. Church, Memphis, Tenn., the wealthiest colored man in the state; estimated at $250,000.]

SPARKLING GEMS.

THE NEED OF NEW IDEAS AND NEW AIMS FOR A NEW ERA.

BY ALEX CRUMMELL, WASHINGTON, D. C.

This subject divides itself into two heads: (1) The "Need" suggested; and (2) The "Aims for a New Era," which shall meet the need.

It seems to me that there is an irresistible tendency in the Negro mind in this land to dwell morbidly and absorbingly upon the servile past. The urgent needs of the present, the fast-crowding and momentous interests of the future appear to be forgotten. Duty for to-day, hope for to-morrow, are ideas which seem oblivious to even leading minds among us. Enter our schools, and the theme which too generally occupies the youthful mind is some painful memory of servitude. Listen to the voices of the pulpit, and how large a portion of its utterances are pitched in the same doleful strain! Send a Negro to Congress, and observe how seldom possible it is for him to speak upon any other topic than slavery. We are fashioning our life too much after the conduct of the children of Israel. Long after the exodus from bondage, long after the destruction of Pharaoh and his host, they kept turning back, in memory and longings, after Egypt, when they should have kept both eye and aspiration bent toward the land of promise and of freedom.

Now I know, my brethren, that all this is natural to man. G.o.d gave us judgment, fancy, and memory, and we cannot free ourselves from the inheritance of these or of any other faculty of our being; but we were made to live in the future as well as in the past.

Nothing can be more hurtful for any people than to dwell upon repulsive things. To hang upon that which is dark, direful, and saddening tends to degeneracy. There are few things which tend so much to dwarf a people as the constant dwelling upon personal sorrows and interests, whether they be real or imaginary.

The Southern people of this nation have given as evident signs of genius and talent as the people of the North; but for nigh three generations they gave themselves up to morbid and fanatical anxieties upon the subject of slavery. To that one single subject they gave the whole bent and sharpness of their intellect, and history records the result.

For more than two hundred years the misfortune of the black race was the confinement of its mind in the pent-up prison of human bondage.

The morbid, absorbing, and abiding recollection of that condition is but the continuance of that same condition in memory and dark imagination. But some intelligent reader of our race will ask, Would you have us as a people forget that we have been an oppressed race?

No. G.o.d gave us memory, and it is impossible to forget the slavery of our race. The memory of this fact may ofttimes serve as a stimulant to high endeavor. What I would have you guard against is not the memory of slavery, but the constant recollection of it, as the commanding thought of a new people, who should be marching on to the broadest freedom of thought in a new and glorious present, and a still more magnificent future. You will notice here that there is a broad distinction between memory and recollection. Memory is a pa.s.sive act of the mind, while recollection is the actual seeking of the facts, the endeavor of the mind to bring them back again to consciousness.

The fact of slavery is that which cannot be faulted. What I object to is the unnecessary recollection of it. The pernicious habit I protest against as most injurious and degrading. As slavery was a degrading thing, the constant recalling of it to the mind serves by the law of a.s.sociation to degradation. My desire is that we shall, as far as possible, avoid the thought of slavery. As a people, we have had an exodus from it. We have been permitted by a gracious Providence to enter the new and exalted pathways of freedom. We have new conditions of life and new relations in society. These changed circ.u.mstances bring to us thoughts, new ideas, new projects, new purposes, and new ambitions, of which our fathers never thought. We have need, therefore, of new adjustments in life. The law of fitness comes up before us at this point, and we are called upon, as a people, to change the currents of life and to shift them into new and broader channels. I do not ignore the intellectual evils which have fallen upon us. Neither am I indifferent to the political disasters we are still suffering. But when I take a general survey of our race in the United States I can see that there are evils which lie deeper than intellectual neglect or political injury.

We have three special points of weakness in our race: 1. The Status of the Family. 2. The Conditions of Labor. 3. The Element of Morals.

It is my firm conviction that it is our duty to address ourselves more earnestly to the duties involved in these considerations than to any and all other considerations. Let us notice first

THE STATUS OF THE FAMILY.

I shall not pause to detail the calamities which slavery has entailed upon our race in the domain of the family. Every one knows how it has pulled down every pillar and shattered every priceless fabric. But now that we have begun the life of freedom we should attempt the repair of this, the n.o.blest of all the structures of human life. The basis of all human progress and of all civilization is the family. Despoil the idea of family, a.s.sail rudely its elements, its framework, and its essential principles, and nothing but degradation and barbarism can come to any people. If you will think but for a moment of all that is included in this word "family," you will see at once that it is the root idea of all civility, of all the humanities, of all organized society. In the family are included all the loves, the cares, the sympathies, the solicitudes of parents and wives and husbands; all the active industries, the prudent economies, and the painful self-sacrifices of households; all the sweet memories, the gentle refinements, the pure speech, and the G.o.dly anxieties of womanhood; all the endurance, the courage, and the hardy toil of men; all these have their roots in the family.

Alas! how widely have these traits and qualities been lost to our race in this land! How numerous are the households where they have never been known or recognized! The beginning of all organized society is in the family. The school, the college, the professions, suffrage, civil office, are all valuable things; but what are they compared to the family? Here, then, where we have suffered the greatest, is a world-wide field for our intellectual anxieties and our most intelligent effort.

Secondly we will consider

THE CONDITIONS OF LABOR.

I refer to the industrial conditions of our race. No topic is exciting more interest and anxiety than the labor question. Almost an angry contest is going on upon the relations of capital to labor. Into this topic all the other kindred questions of wages, hours of labor, co-operation, distribution of wealth--all are canva.s.sed in behalf of the labor element of the country, but all, I may say exclusively, for the white labor of this great nation. The white labor is organized labor; it is intelligent labor; it is skilled labor; it is protected labor. It is labor nourished, guarded, shielded, rooted in national inst.i.tutions, propped up by the suffrage of the laboring population, and needs no extraordinary succors. But, my friends, just look at the black labor of this country, and consider its sad conditions, its disorganized and rude characteristics, its almost servile status.

What gives labor, in any land, dignity and healthiness? It is the qualities of skill and enlightenment. It is only by these qualities that men can work in the best manner, with the least waste, and for the largest remuneration. Where the laborer is uninformed and merely mechanical in his work, there he knows labor somewhat as an animal does; and he is led almost blindly to the same dull, animal-like endurance of toil, which is the characteristic of the beast of the field. His work, moreover, is not self-directed, for it has no inward spring. It is not the outcome of the knowing mind and the trained and cunning hand. It is labor directed by overseeing and commanding skill and knowledge. Mult.i.tudes in every land under the sun know labor precisely in the same way that domestic animals do. They know the mere physical toil. They know the severest tasks. They know the iron routine of service. They know the soulless submission of drudgery. But alas! they have never come to know the dignity of labor; they have never been permitted to share its golden values and its lofty requitals.

Now, if I do not make the very greatest of mistakes, this is the marked peculiarity of the black labor of this country. I am not unmindful of the fact that the Negro is a laborer. I repel the imputation that our race, as a cla.s.s, is lazy and slothful. I know, too, that, to a partial extent, the black man, in the Southern States, is a craftsman, especially in the cities. I am speaking now of aggregates. I am looking at the race in the ma.s.s, and I affirm that the sad peculiarity of our labor in this country is that it is rude, untutored, and debased.

Here, then, is a great problem which is to be settled before the Negro race can make the advance of a single step. Without the solution of this enormous question, neither individual nor family life can secure its proper conditions in this country. Who are the men who shall undertake to settle this momentous question? How are they to bring about the settlement of it? I answer, first of all, that the rising intelligence of this race, the educated, thinking, scholarly men, who come out of our schools trained and equipped by reading culture; they are the men who are to handle this great subject. Who else can be expected to attempt it? Do you think that men of other races will encourage our cultivated men to parade themselves as mere carpet knights of politics, and they themselves a.s.sume the added duty of the moral and material restoration of our race? Never! They expect every people to bear somewhat the burdens of their own restoration and upbuilding; and rightly so. And next, as to the other question, How is this problem of labor to be settled? I reply, in all candor, that I am unable to answer so intricate a question. But this I do say: (1) That you have got to bring to the settlement of it all the brain power, all the penetration, all the historical reading, and all the generous devotedness of heart that you can command; and (2) that in the endeavor to settle this question that you are not to make the mistake that it is external forces which are chiefly to be brought to bear upon this enormity. No race of people can be lifted up by others to grand civility. The elevation of a people, their thorough civilization, comes chiefly from internal qualities. If there is no receptive and living quality in them which can be evoked for their elevation, then they must die! The emanc.i.p.ation of the black race in this land from the injustice and grinding tyranny of their labor servitude is to be effected mainly by the development of such personal qualities, such thrift, energy, and manliness as shall, in the first place, raise them above the dependence and the penury of their present va.s.salage, and next shall bring forth such manliness and dignity in the race as may command the respect of their oppressors.

To bring about these results we need intelligent men and women, so filled with philanthropy that they will go down to the humblest conditions of their race, and carry to their lowly huts and cabins all the resources of science, all the suggestions of domestic, social, and political economies, all the appliances of school and industries in order to raise and elevate the most abject and needy race on American soil. If the scholarly and enlightened colored men and women care not to devote themselves to these lowly but n.o.ble duties, to these humble but sacred conditions, what is the use of their schooling and enlightenment? Why, in the course of Providence, have they had their large advantages and their superior opportunities?

I bring to your notice one other requirement of the black race in this country, and that is the need of a

HIGHER PLANE OF MORALITY.

I make no excuse for introducing so delicate and, perchance, so offensive, a topic; a topic which necessarily implies a state of serious moral defectiveness. If the system of slavery did not do us harm in every segment and section of our being, why have we for generations complained of it? And if it did do us moral as well as intellectual harm, why, when attempting by education to rectify the injury to the mental nature, should we neglect the reparation of the moral condition of the race? We have suffered, my brethren, in the whole domain of morals. We are still suffering as a race in this regard. Take the sanct.i.ty of marriage, the facility of divorce, the chast.i.ty of woman, the shame, modesty, and bashfulness of girlhood, the abhorrence of illegitimacy, and there is no people in this land who, in these regards, have received such deadly thrusts as this race of ours. And these qualities are the grandest qualities of all superior people.

This moral elevation should be the highest ambition of our people.

They make the greatest mistakes who tell you that money is the master need of our race. They equally err who would fain fasten your attention upon the acknowledged political difficulties which confront us in the lawless sections of the land. I acknowledge both of these grievances. But the one grand result of all my historic readings has brought me to this single and distinct conviction that "by the soul only the nations shall be free."

If I am not greatly at error, a mighty revolution is demanded of our race in this country. The whole status of our condition is to be transformed and elevated. The change which is demanded is a deeper one than that of emanc.i.p.ation. That was a change of state or condition, valuable and important indeed, but affecting mainly the outer conditions of our people; and that is all that a civil status can do.

But outward condition does not necessarily touch the springs of life.

That requires other, n.o.bler, more spiritual agencies. What we need is a grand moral revolution, which shall touch and vivify the inner life of a people, which shall give them dissatisfaction with ign.o.ble motives and sensual desires, which shall bring to them a resurrection from inferior ideas and lowly ambitions; which shall shed illumination through all the chambers of their souls, which shall lift them up to lofty aspirations, which shall put them in the race for manly moral superiority. A revolution of this kind is not a gift which can be handed over by one people, and placed as a new deposit in the const.i.tution of another. Nor is it an acquisition to be gained by storm, by excitement, or frantic and convulsive agitation, political or religious. The revolution of which I speak must find its primal elements in qualities, latent though they be, which reside in the people who need this revolution, and which can be drawn out of them, and thus secure form and reality.

The basis of this revolution must be character. That is the rock on which our whole race in America is to be built up. Our leaders are to address themselves to this main and master endeavor--viz., to free them from false ideas and injurious habits, to persuade them to the adoption of correct principles, to lift them up to superior modes of living, and so bring forth, as permanent factors in their life, the qualities of thrift, order, virtue, and manliness.

But who are the agents to bring about this grand change in the Negro race? Remember, just here, that all effectual revolutions in a people must be racial in their characteristics. You can't take the essential qualities of one people and transfuse them into the blood of another people, and make them indigenous to them. The primal qualities of a family, a race, a nation are heritable qualities. They abide in their const.i.tution. They remain, notwithstanding the conditions and the changes of rudeness, slavery, civilizations, and enlightenment. It is a law of moral elevation that you must allow the constant abidance of the essential elements of a people's character; therefore when I put the query, Who shall be the agent to raise and elevate our race to a higher plane of being? the answer will at once flash upon your intelligence. It is to be effected by the scholars and philanthropists which come forth in these days from the schools. They are the people to transform, stimulate, and uplift, because it is a work of intelligence; it is a work which demands historic facts and their application to new circ.u.mstances.

But these reformers must not be mere scholars. The intellect is to be used, but mainly as the vehicle of mind and spiritual aims, and hence these men must needs be both scholars and philanthropists.

Allow me, in the conclusion of this article, to express the hope that He who holds the hearts of all men will give you the spirit to forget yourselves, and live for the good of man and the glory of G.o.d. Such a field and opportunity are graciously opened to you in the conditions and needs of our race in this country. May you and I be equal to them!