Sparkling Gems of Race Knowledge Worth Reading | Page 4

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. Multitudes 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
class, 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 mass, 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 assume 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 emancipation 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 vassalage, 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 noble duties, to these humble but
sacred conditions, what is