Sparkling Gems of Race Knowledge Worth Reading | Page 7

feed
"old mistress" committed to his charge. He would hide the cattle and
food and valuables in the hollows and in the thickets, and then pilot the
Northern army by these hidden goods safely through the mountains out
of danger. Has ever human nature been so taxed before? No other
citizens in this great country have better right to rejoice at her
prosperity than the Negro.
The South owes her industrial significance largely to the Negro. King
Cotton sits on a throne of gold held aloft by the strong black arms of
the Negro and shakes his snowy locks over the commercial world. And
our beloved South may yet call upon ebony sinews to beat back the
enemies of her peace, prosperity, and happiness, and again stand
between starvation, danger, and death, and her defenseless wives and
little ones; and the Negro will again manfully, cheerfully, faithfully
answer the call.
From this spot must radiate higher hopes, 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