Sparkling Gems of Race Knowledge Worth Reading | Page 5

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 sanctity of
marriage, the facility of divorce, the chastity 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 emancipation. 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,
nobler, 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 ignoble 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 constitution 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
constitution. 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,