Sparkling Gems of Race Knowledge Worth Reading | Page 7

broader ideas, nobler aims to teach, inspire, and exalt Negro muscle, Negro brain, Negro heart--to soften asperities, to generate greater tolerance, and to make the South a "new earth" until the "Fatherhood of God" and the "brotherhood of man" shall bring the "new heaven."
[Illustration: NEGRO BUILDING, TENNESSEE CENTENNIAL.]
No people can rise in the world and maintain creditable standing alone with the saw, the hammer, and the plane; as cooks, washerwomen, and nurses; as farmers, bootblacks, hotel boys, and barbers. These are necessary, but there must be strong intellectual giants in the pulpit, at the bar, in the schoolroom, in medicine--as scientists, linguists, artists, inventors--in order that any people may be accorded a creditable standing in the society of races.
Whatever any other people need the Negro needs. We want the Negro to have higher industrial education. He must be taught to smelt iron ore, build locomotives, ships, telescopes, microscopes, steam engines of every class, all kinds of mechanical engineering, farming machinery and appliances, and do all work in glass, brass, gold, and silver. This kind of higher industrial education is the only kind that he needs now and is essential to his salvation. This kind of industrial education is the only kind that can give a people permanent strength.
Teach the Negro boy the sacredness of human life. Teach him that man must be as precious in the sight of man as he is in the sight of God. Teach obedience to law, obedience to legally constituted authority, which alone can give protection to life and property and security to society. Teach him that the human mind can form no loftier ideal than that of the triumph of right through the supremacy of law--that no one who violates the humblest law of the land can be an ideal man. Teach him that the transmission of a disregard for law is the transmission of the spirit of the mob, the spirit of riot, the spirit of hate, the spirit of internecine murder, the overthrow of the state, the birth of chaos and pandemonium. Teach him that men and races grew from within; that man grows by expansion from within; that congressional enactments cannot make us a race. The race must make itself. Teach him that he belongs to a glorious race, which stands before its God with its hands unstained in human blood. Teach him to honor and revere this record, and hand it untarnished down to the remotest posterity. Teach him that it is better to be persecuted than to persecute. Teach that neither race nor color will rule future man, who will be the evolution of the wisdom of all the past ages; but that man, that race, which will furnish the most brains, the most virtue, the most honor, the most truth, the most industry, will stand highest and longest before God and the judgment bar of the future righteous intelligence of the world.
Teach him to love, not to hate. Teach him that the man who hates him on account of his color is far beneath him, but the man who hates his condition and strives to lift him up may be his superior. Teach him that any coward may insult him, may wrong him, may send a bullet crashing through a man's brain, may warm his dagger in a brother's lifeblood, but it takes a strong man to take the weak and unfortunate by the hand and say: "Stand on your feet, my brother, and be a man." Teach him that that man, that race, is superior which does superior things to lift mankind to superior conditions. Teach him that that is the superior man, the superior race, which does most for its country, fights noblest for man, and lives closest to God.

THE TENNESSEE CENTENNIAL.
Its Benefits to the Negro.
The people of Tennessee will celebrate the one hundredth anniversary of the admission of their State into the Union by holding, at Nashville, the capital, in 1897, for a period of six months from the 1st day of May, a great Centennial and International Exposition.
A structure to be known as the
NEGRO BUILDING
will be one of the most attractive in the exposition, and will occupy a delightful and commanding position on the east bank of Lake Watauga.
The cut on page 28 will give the reader some idea of its magnitude. It is amply sufficient to accommodate the vast variety of exhibits which the Afro-American will have to display to the world. The purpose of this department is to show the progress of our race in the United States from the old plantation days to the present.
[Illustration: RICHARD HILL, CHIEF.]
This building was erected at a cost of over $12,000, and is the work of the management, without any solicitation or money from the Negro himself, which demonstrates an earnest anxiety for our participation