AN APPEAL TO THE KING

;

THE ADDRESS DELIVERED

NEGRO DAY

IX THE

ATLANTA EXPOSITION

OCTOBER 21, 1895

BY THE

KEV. J. W. E. BOWEN, Ph. D., D. D.

Professor of Historical Theology,

immmon * logical * Seminary

ATLANTA, GA.

AN APPEAL TO THE KING

.)//■ President, Ladies and Gentlemen: As a representative of the American Negro, I venture to address a

modest statement and an appeal to the king. We realize that, although the king is invisible, his personality is tangible. He occupies a front seat in the halls of legislation; he dictates the political policy of the nation; his nod of approval is more significant than the mythological rod of Jupiter, while his disapproving nod spreads fear and consterna- tion far and wide amid the ranks of his subjects. He determines what statutes shall be enacted, and should his subjects in a mad freak enact any statute contrary to his wishes he annuls them immediately and relegates the reckless and vituline political Titans to the limbo of political forgetfulness. He sits in a high chair in the police, the crimi- nal, the equity, the appellate and supreme courts of the states and of the nation and interprets the law. He then prescribes to the police, the sheriff, the constable, the mayor, the governor and president how these interpretations shall be earned out. The great body of his laws is unwritten, but they are executed with scrupulous exactness in the minutest detail. He sets the pace in the drawingroom; the swing of his baton describes the movement of the foot, the hum of the music and the color, quality and style of the dress.

RECENT SOCIAL CHANGES

The whirligig of time is merciless and providential—merciless to the indolent and reckless, but providential to the faithful and honorable. The poetic truth that “There is a divinity that shapes our lives, rough hew them as we may,” may be rewritten in the prosaic facts of today as found in the experience of individuals as well as in that of peoples and of nations. The changes are so rapid and radical in human society, flitting before our gaze like the fast-unfolding views of a huge pano- rama, or like dissolving and charming lines in the kaleidoscope, that we can scarcely get more than an outline or rightly esteem their far- reaching effects. The eye grows weary and the brain is overpowered in contemplating these monotonous and astounding changes. And yet we have but come to the outskirts of a mighty and harmless cataclysm in society when the present inequalities and misadjustments will be remedied and human society become so based that there shall be equality of opportunity for every human being. In actual illustration the Greeks are at our doors. We are too near the recent civil and frac- ticidal strife to appreciate this fact, whereby a new people was born in a day; a people that to all practical appearance, as well as by anteced- ents, were no people at all. And even more marvelous is that other incomparable fact standing alone in its gracious magnanimity and in the silence of its untarnished splendor is the revolution in the moral and social sentiment toward the Negro on the part of his former master. This fact alone is a sufficient and an unwitting confirmation of the

1

existence of an undertow of righteousness in human society; and moreover it is a reasonable guarantee that ultimately all the world will brothers become.

Our eyes have seen strange sights and our ears have heard strange sounds. When Booker T. Washington delivered his unmatched speech from this platform, a distinguished citizen of Georgia, the successor to one of her proudest sons, said : “That man’s speech is the beginning of a moral revolution in America.” That utterance is proof in itself that the revolution has already come, and it only remains for time to crys- tallize its various phases and essentials into the component elements of civilization.

The erection and equipment of the Negro building; the Negro’s place of usefulness and honor, in this most notable of southern exposi- tions and the general satisfaction expressed with his accomplishments are all additional marks of unpreceived but positive changes in society. And once again the Negro wishes to put himself on record in the most positive, hearty and unequivocal terms, without the least tinge of Jesuitical sophistry that he loves the land of his nativity and is ready, as of yore, to pour out his heart’s best blood for the institutions of that land. The sad and sweet memory of his historic sorrows saturate this atmosphere and every foot of ground in southern soil is made holy be- caus it embalms the sacred dust of his faithful sires. The memory of our deeds is still a fragrant and faithful theme. I appeal to the bronzed lips of your orator on Marietta street, who stands supremely alone in painting the devotion of my sable and ignorant sires. Hear him in his speech before the Merchants’Association of Boston in their annual ban- quet, December, 1889 : “T see a slave scuffling through the smoke,winding his black arms around the fallen form, reckless of the hurtling death, < bending his trusty face to catch the words that tremble on his stricken lips, so wrestling meantime with agony that he would lay down his life for his master’s stead. 1 see him by the weary bedside ministering with uncomplaining patience, praying with all of his humble heart that God would lift his master up until death comes in mercy and in honor to still the soldier’s life. I see him by the open grave, mute, motion- less, uncovered suffering for the death of him who in life fought against his freedom. I see him when the mound is heaped and the great drama of his life is closed, turn away with downcast eyes and uncertain step starts out in the new and uncertain fields, faltering, struggling, but moving on until his shambling figure is lost in the light of this better and brighter day. And from the grave comes a voice say- ing : “Follow him! Put your arms about him in his need, even as he puts his arm about me. Be his friends as he was mine.”

Our ears have become familiar with the so-called race problem, which has been popularly interpreted to mean the Negro race problem. A truer and larger conception of the subject would speak of the human race problem, instead of the narrower Negro race problem. This great problem assumes different name in different parts of the world. We have nihilism in Russia, socialism in Germany, communism in France, socialism and the submerged tenth in England, while in the United States it is as multiform in its elements as the nation is composite in its blood and physiognomy. In California it is the problem of the Chinese, in the great middle west it is the Scandinavian and other for- eign struggles; in the north, central and eastern states it is the Irish and Italian problem, while overreaching all of these is the problem of the battle for bread, and in the south it is the Negro problem. It is, therefore, no sign of breadth of vision to declare that there is only one great problem in the United States and that one is the Negro problem. These problems will require centuries of persistent effort that they may be solved upon the ethical and equitable basis of the New Testament teachings. In dealing with all of these the principles of equality and of brotherhood should obtain.

o

THRICE FEET MAKE A YARD

It is a basal and sociological truth that, other things being equal, like treatment and like opportunities produce like results, the breadth and quality of which will depend upon native power and inherent ability. What is the condition for the development of the noblest type among men ? There can be but one answer to this question, namely, equality of opportunity. The largest struggle of human society is to attain this concrete reality of civil justice. Under it, each will produce according to his ability for the good of mankind, and that good will not be a passive uniformity cast into the stereotyped mold of racial capacity, but will be complex in its essentials and divinely human in its cast.

The Negro has learned that three feet make a yard in mathematics, and he believes that they make a yard in politics, economics and ethics; in Europe, Asia and Africa; among whites and among blacks. It is noteworthy that inside of one generation the Negro should learn such valuable lessors. And in consequence of which he has begun the study of himself and is seeking to locate himself as a factor among men. The Negro has a definite sphere to fill in history, and although his day is a day of small beginnings, the present results are prophetic of large vic- tories in the future. His educational life has just begun and his teach- ers, without bias, say that he will some day fill the world with his name. This belief to the contrary notwithstanding, the old question still lives and with vital pertinacity challenges the soberest thought of states- men, ecclesiastic and political, namely: Has the Negro any place in American life. If so what is that place to be? But the most encour- aging feature about this question is the fact that the Negro himself has addressed his best thought to its answer. A certain school of polit- ical economists assume to lay down as a maximum to govern the forma- tion and development of a nation this theory : Without amalgamation of blood there can be no national life to those not amalgamated. This is as crude a notion as the ancient theory of the flatness of the earth. The present progress of mankind in every clime is its best refutation. Nevertheless in spite of the fact that the noble Sinbad is almost ridden to death by this Old Man of the Sea, it must be observed that America is the only country that is at work upon this problem. England and Europe have not had the courage nor disposition, if they had the wis- dom, so much as to read the problem through once. But the American people have the disposition and the audacity not only to read it through, but to begin its wise solution upon the broad basis of humanity, and please God, the Negro will have sense enough to stay and contribute to its correct solution until this nation shall become in truth homogeneous in sentiment though heterogeneous in blood.

The United States is the sphere of nationality and not of raceality; blood makes a race, but sentiment a nation; and the chief corner stone of the nation is the first statement in the original charter of the proud republic: “We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” The question of the equality of the races as familiarly understood and as commonly interpreted is a threadbare and musty saying and is groundless in reason and in the concrete facts of today.

There is no such thing as perfect equality of individuals or races. This is a figment clung to by minds that are woefully deficient in rudimentary training or are still wrapped in the swaddling bands of medieval infancy. The true or native equality of men as stated by the great Jefferson in the fundamental charter of the republic and as rationality and biblically interpreted in biology, philosophy, reason, scripture and common sense is, that all men are natively and equally endowed with the essentials of humanity and of divinity. And because

3

of this, each and all should be permitted to develop his endowment for the good of society wnthin the limits of unprejudiced legislation. Such an interpretation and process of development must lead to the largest good for the largest number.

THE NEGRO’S PLACE IN HISTORY

With regard to the Negro’s place in American life, it was formerly stated that he was only fit for servitude; that the best part of him was his faithful muscle; that even today and forevermore he must remain a serf or a hewer of wood and a drawer of water to the vast revolving machinery of civilization; he must be the ignorant workman and the unassimilated pariah of Americam society. It is to his credit that in his early days he had brawn; that it drove the ax that rang through the forest of the Old Dominion and the plow that upturned the sod of Louisiana and Mississippi for the cane and cotton, while his voice endowed their leaves with a tongue never before heard. With his powerful right he scattered the silver grain in the Carolinas, and {he golden grain in Maryland and Georgia and disemboweled the moun- tains of Tennessee of their ancient black treasury, and from his earliest days in this country unto a very recent day, his sweat was almost the only oil for the machinery of southern industry and his arm the driving wheel of its trade. And when we shall be removed from the struggles of recent times in the social and political world to the centuries beyond in which the prejudices engendered in the participants of the strife shall be knowm only through the cold type of history, then under the unblui'red eye and the cold and unsympathetic logic of the patient historian the period of the servitude of the Negro will shine forth with a luster unapproachable in American history.

When it is asserted that he must be a worker, all sensible Negroes answer yea and amen? A worker in clay wrenching from nature her hidden stores; a worker in wood, iron, brass, steel and glass turning the world into an habitation fit for the Gods; a worker in the subtile ele- ments of nature in obedience to the original command to subdue and conquer it; a worker in the realm of mind contributing to the thought products of mankind, thereby vindicating for himself a birthright to the citizenship of the republic of thought; a statesman in church and instate; a publicist and a political economist; in short, he must be a man among men, not so much a Black man but a MAN though black. And for the attainment of all the possibilities of his rich, unex- plored African nature of docility and tractability; of enthusiasm and perseverance with his burning African fervor, there must be measured to him as well as to the white man three feet to make a yard. Such an equality of opportunity not only establishes an equality of responsi- bility, but must be reached before human society shall prosper under the normal laws of true development. The Negro does not shrink nor ask to be exempted from the working of the latter half of this statement, namely, equality of responsibility; but simply prays to the American sentiment, who is the King, for equality of oppor- tunity in all matters that effect the welfare of the state. In all matters relating to the security of the homes of the people and the institutions / of the republic, we say to the king that the story of our past fealty is the best answer we can make touching our future devotion and interest. It is on record for us, written by one of the greatest of democratic presidents, Andrew Jackson, that we may be actuated by lofty purposes as seen in the noble defense made by Negro soldiers of the city of New Orleans in the second British war. It is on record for us that in all of the social upheavals between capital and labor the Negro has never been found with Are brand in hand. We point with pride to our loving and lucid history that we are humane as well as human.

4

A IM.EA KOR THE HIGHER EDUCATION OF THE NEGRO

Before asking now what is the Negro’s place in American civiliza- tion, a larger question comes into notice that effects all men, namely, what is the place of any branch or family of the human race in the sum total of humanity? The man who attempts to answer this question will risk his wit. The Negro’s place will be what he makes for him- self, just as the place of every people is what that people makes for itself, and he will he no exception to the rule. The method whereby he shall make that place is under consideration. One class contends that he must make it by staying in the-three “R’s” and they are specially at pains in ridiculing the higher education of the Negro’s, even for leaders in church or state. Yea, he must learn the three “R’s;” he must master the king’s of English and then he must plume his pinions of thought for a flight with Copernicus, Keppler and Herschel; he must sharpen his logic for a walk with Plato, Emanuel Kant and Herbert Spencer; he must clarify his vision for investigations with Virchow, Huxley'and Gray; he must be able to deal in the abtruse questions of law as do Gladstone, Judge Story and Judge Speer; he must fortify himself to divide rightly the Word as do Cannon Farrar, Bishop Fos- ter, Bishop Haygood, Dr. John Hall and Dr. H. L. Wayland. In short, the education of the Negro must be on par with the education of the white man. It must begin in the kindergarten as that of the white child and end in the university as that of the white man. Anything short of this thorough preparation for all of the stages of life for the Negro would be unfair to a large part of humanity. We ask that noth- ing be done that would spoil his nature or masculate his personality, but let everything be done that would fit him to All every situation in life that man may fill from the blacksmith and hod carrier to the statesman and philosopher. And if such preparation require a knowledge of the old blue black spelling book or of Aristotle’s logic; a knowledge of the plow or the trip hammer or of the spade or of the driving wheel; or of simple addition or integral calculus; or the first reader or Kant’s “Critique,” simple justice and common sense require that he be ac- quainted with whatever shall fit him to fill his station in life. Does this mean that the Negro be turned into a white man? Is he to be so educated that he will cease to be what God meant that he should be? Nay! verily, for any education that makes a people dissatisfied with their racial personality is a farce and a reproach.

PROTECT EVERY WOMAN

Gentlemen of the south, and of the north, may I speak for myself. If so, ‘Hear me for my cause and be silent that ye may hear.’ You are the representatives of the noblest civilization that ever leaped from the brain of man. In the earliest days of Puritan discipline in this coun- try, and even in England, your fathers were giants in the land, and in. many parts their sons are worthy successors. Your indomitable cour- age and resistless power have won for you victories upon battlefields that reduce the victories of Xerxes and Alexander to the achieve- ments of novices. Your triumph in the world of mind, in science, philosophy, history and ethics are unparalleled in history. Your ethical and political conceptions have honeycombed the world, and although your record is stained with spots unworthy your training and privileges, still like the sun, though spotted, it is glorious. Your conception of the sacredness of the family relation and the value of personal chastity and of the paramount necessity for the protection of womanly virtues is the crown and glory of your splendid history. We cannot but bow to you for these magnificent achievements. As a representative of the thinking people of my race 1 take off my hat to the white man of this country, north and south, when he swears by all

5

that liveth that the sanctity of his home and the purity of his family shall be maintained inviolate at every hazard. Our noblest nature affirms this. We too have come to learn that the purity of woman means the purity of the family and the purity of the family the purity of the race and nation, and whosoever insults that purity is an enemy to society and in league with hell. And when it is said that we have no conception of the value of purity or the sacredness of the marriage relation we simply ask that the sins of the vicious be not charged to the whole race. We confess with shamed face that our notions of these relations, on the whole, are not what they should be. With this confession it ought to be stated that our training on the whole has not been what it should have been. But the race is making a heroic effort to expel from its system all the virus of degrading sin and thus far we have made progress. We pray thee to deal gently with thy servants in this respect, seeing that we are struggling to make our race a race of purity, sobriety and Christian power. We do not ask that the criminal escape, but we plead that the court shall ferret out his crime by due process of law and that he receive the full measure of punishment according to law. We ask that justice, sure, unbiased and remorseless be meted out to all criminals, black and white, who violate the purity of any woman, white or black, south or north, and we here would join hands with you around our common altar and swear allegiance to those principles to aid you in finding and punishing the criminals wherever found. Thus the education that the negro needs is the education that the white man needs to make him honorable, virtuous, industrious and to fit him to fill his place whatever it may be.

A TRIBUTE TO NORTHERN PHILANTHROPISTS We have come today to present to you and to the country a few

products of our brain and skill wrought out under adverse and trying circumstances. We present them humbly and modestly, not as com- pleted products, but as the earnest of our undeveloped power and the prophecy of our possible future. We record with grateful recognition the magnanimity of our southern friends in this opportunity given us to come before the country in a new light. This act in itself is a clear indication of future developments. By observation it will be seen that the exhibits from the schools among the American Negro are by far in excess of that of a promiscuous character, and this is as is should be, for the largest life of the Negro since emancipation has been a school life. These results are due to our philanthropic friends. The Negro would be unworthy of the confidence of his southern white friends and prove himself a sordid ingrate did he not hold in grateful memory the unstinted deeds of his philanthropic northern friends. When the smoking throat of the angry gun ceased to belch forth death and des- truction and when the shotted cannon ceased in its carnage of death and the thunders were ‘hushed on the moor,’ suddenly there leaped upon the stage of action a people crude, rude, ignorant, superstitious, with only a few marks of divinity left, but enough to be identified as human. Then it was that the messengers of love came into our bleeding and sorely distressed south and with a patience and cheerful generos- ity that would make the angels hush their heavenly harps to watch and admire, they begun their tedious, discouraging and seemingly fruitless, but self-imposed task to teach the Negro the elements of civilized life in a state of freedom. The philanthropists in the north of every church and of no church poured out their millions for the work. Their monuments and those of the workers are in every southern state in brick and mortar, the lighthouses of civilization, the fortresses of American patriotism and the institutes of religion. Their names are legion, but among them stand out prominently John F. Slater, Daniel Hand, Alexander Meharray, Clinton B. Fisk, Mr. Fayerweather, Elijah H. Gammon, William F. Stewart and others. And moreover the sacred

6

dust of some of these heroes and heroines lie sleeping in southern soil. On yon hill, beneath the classic shade of Atlanta University, is laid in perpetual peace the remains of the late Dr. Ware, whose very life is a constant source of inspiration to all who knew him and there is an atmosphere of holy awe that surrounds that solitary grave. The monuments of these heroic laborers and generous givers is in more than brick and stone. It is in flesh and blood, in the multitudes of broadly educated and scholarly and cultured men and women who are working out a magnificent destiny in the South, in the leaders of the race, in the pulpit, at the bar, in the medical profession, in the school room, in the work shop, at the bench and in every trade and calling, to bless mandkind and advance civilization. Their work has begun to show what the possibilities of the Negro mind are. And ever true to our proverbial and African instinct and the warm blood that circulates in our veins, vve place upon the brow of these, our noble friends, the garland of our heart’s divinest gratitude.

THE NEW NEGRO

These simple results that may be seen in the Negro building are from a people just thirty years in freedom. They represent many spheres of labor and enterprise and show what may be accomplished under a more perfect system of life and labor. They show, moreover, that the Negro has been an apt and faithful student of his teachers in the mechanism of his skill as well as in the intellectual product of his brain. Thirty years of freedom is scarcely enough to take the first steps in the arts of peace. It required centuries for the Anglo-Saxons to reach his present commanding position. The Negro’s present days of infancy and of small-beginnings are no criterion to measure his future by. The depths from which he has come and the obstacles sur- rounding him must be remembered when expressing judgment of him; and when superficial writers on the other side of the water, as well as on this side, declare that the Negro can never assimilate a high civiliza- tion nor approach the present attainments of the Anglo-Saxons, they discover an immaturity of thought worthy of the schoolboy’s effort. This proves that the social problems of any country are to be learned only by long years of contact and of unprejudiced study. A railroad observation in sociology may make fascinating reading, but it lacks the elements of endurance and accuracy and cannot command the respect- ful notice of more than novelistic readers for one decade. To under- stand thr rapid strides that the Negro has taken one must know the pit from which he was digged, and the rock from which he was hewn. The cold facts of his present standing press out in bold relief with the distinctness of a mosaic and declare that there is a wealth unmeasured in that hidden mine. The first step has been taken and if the south and the north will measure to him an equality of opportunity there will come as the result splendid achievements for society. He longs to have a full chance; he longs to do nobly.

Finally, oh king! a new Negro has come upon the stage of action. As you enter the main entrance of the Negro building you will observe the statue of a Negro with broken manacles upon his wrists. This statue was born in the fruftful brain of a Negro, Mr. Hill of Washington. His frame is muscular and powerful; his eye is fixed upon his broken but hanging chain; his brow is knit in deep thought. This is the new Negro. What is he doing? He is thinking! And by the power of thought he will think off those chains and have both hands free to help you to build this country and make a grand destiny of himself. In generous affection for our native soil, in fealty to our institutions and in a universal love for all men, his spirit is that of his fathers made over. Being to the manor born, he cannot be alienated in sentiment and patriotic devotion to the institutions of the south and the whole

7

country. It must.be, remembered however, that this Negro has had born in him the consciousness of a racial personality under the blaze of a new civilization. With this new birth of the soul, he longs for an opportu- nity to grow into the proportions of a new and diviner manhood that shall take its place in the ranks of one common humanity. This Negro, when educated in all of the disciplines of civilization and thoroughly trained in the arts of civil and moral life, cannot fail to be an invalua- ble help to our American life. It is his deepest desire to rise and work manfully and he is willing to bide his time until the American white man shall have that element conquer in him which always conquers, namely, the love of fair play. Having been so generously treated by our southern friends in this exposition, we shall go forth to prove to them that, in the development of the south and in the protection of our institu- tions, we are at heart one with them. And in the classic words of Edmund Burke before his constituents in Bristol, England, we pray; “Ap- plaud us when we run; console us when we fall; cheer us when we recover; but let us pass on, for God’s sake, let us pass on.”