Part 6

Think of the scores of young colored women all over our Northern states teaching the "young idea how to shoot," and not a black face in the class. We find colored women with large classes of white pupils in St. Paul, Minn.; Chicago, Ill.; Detroit, Mich.; Cleveland, Ohio; Buffalo, N. Y.; and other Northern cities. "From the state of semi-civilization," says Williams, "in which he cared only for the comforts of the present, his desires and wants have swept outward and upward into the years to come and toward the Mysterious Future."

Several hundred weekly newspapers, a dozen monthly magazines, conducted by Negroes, are feeding the mind of the race, binding communities together by the cords of common interest and racial sympathy. The conditions around which the Negro was surrounded years ago have disappeared and the Negro is as proud of his own society as the whites are of theirs. Sociological study and laws have given to our present generation the will power and tenacity to establish and maintain a social standing equal with any of the races of the world. Without a question of doubt he has shown moral qualities far in advance of those which dominated in slave history and under which he was constantly subjected.

Has the Negro made any achievements along the lines of wealth? needs only a review of statistics to answer the above question, for where once was the rude cabin, and one-room hut, we now see the beautiful homes with well kept stock and farm, hygienic stables as well as artistic lawns. The first experiment the general masses of negroes had in the saving of money was under that institution known as "The Freedman's Saving and Trust Company." The institution started out under the most favorable auspices. The depositors numbered among its rank and file, day laborers, farmers, mechanics, house-servants, barbers and washerwomen; thus showing to the entire country that the emancipated Negro was not only working but by industry and economy was saving his earnings. We know too well of the misplaced confidence in that bank and how after a short time the bank failed and thousands of colored men and women lost their earnings. During the brief period of its existence $57,000,000 were deposited. Although the Freedman's Bank caused many a colored person to shrink from any banking institution, yet some were hopeful and again began to save money. Throughout the entire South we find scores of colored men who have excellent farms, elegant homes and small fortunes.

"In Baltimore a company of colored men own a ship-dock and transact a large business. Some of the largest orange plantations in Florida are owned by colored men. On most of the plantations, and in many of the large towns and cities colored mechanics are quite numerous."

The total amount of property owned by the colored people in all the states is rated at over $400,000,000.

In the North, East and West we see many colored men with handsome estates run high into the hundred thousands. Almost every large city and town will show among her population a Negro here and there whose wealth is rated between five and ten thousand dollars or more.

Rev. A. G. Davis of Raleigh, N. C., in an address at the North Carolina Agricultural Fair, said, "Scan, if you will, the long line of eight million Negroes as they march slowly but surely up the road of progress, and you will find in her ranks such men as Granville T. Woods, of Ohio, the electrician, mechanical engineer, manufacturer of telephones, telegraph and electrical instruments; William Still, of Philadelphia, the coal dealer; Henry Tanner, the artist; John W. Terry, foreman of the iron and fitting department of the Chicago West Division Street Car Company; J. D. Baltimore, engineer, machinist, and inventor, of Washington, D. C.; Wiley Jones, of Pine Bluff, Arkansas, the owner of a street car railroad, race track and park; Richard Hancock, foreman of the pattern shops of the Eagle Works and Manufacturing Company, and draughtsman; John Beack, the inventor, whose inventions are worth tens of thousands of dollars; W. C. Atwood, the lumber merchant and capitalist."

And now in review let me add that the social conditions of the American Negro are such that he has shown to the world his aptitude for study and general improvement.

Before character, education and wealth, all barriers will melt, and these are necessary to develop the growth of the race.

From abject serfdom and pauperism he has risen to a plane far above the masses of any race of people.

By his industry and frugality he has made himself master of any situation into which he has been placed, and none will deny that his achievements along all lines have been commensurate with his opportunities.

SECOND PAPER.

DID THE AMERICAN NEGRO MAKE, IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY, ACHIEVEMENTS ALONG THE LINES OF WEALTH, MORALITY, EDUCATION, ETC., COMMENSURATE WITH HIS OPPORTUNITIES? IF SO, WHAT ACHIEVEMENTS DID HE MAKE?

BY JOSEPHINE SILONE YATES.

MRS. JOSEPHINE SILONE YATES.

Mrs. Josephine Yates, youngest daughter of Alexander and Parthenia Reeve-Silone, was born in Mattiluck, Suffolk County, N. Y., where her parents, grandparents and great-grandparents were long and favorably known as individuals of sterling worth, morally, intellectually and physically speaking. On the maternal side Mrs. Yates is a niece of the Rev. J. B. Reeve, D. D., of Philadelphia.

Mrs. Silone, a woman of education and great refinement of character, began the work of educating this daughter in her quiet, Christian home, and both parents hoping that she might develop into a useful woman spared no pains in endeavoring to secure for her the education the child very early showed a desire to obtain; and with this end in view she was sent to Newport, R. I., in her fourteenth year, having already spent one year at the Institute for Colored Youth in Philadelphia, and Mrs. Coppin, then Miss Fannie Jackson, with her vigorous intellect, aided the inspiration the mother had begun. In 1877 Miss Silone graduated as valedictorian of a large class from Rogers High School of Newport; and although the only Colored member of her class, and the first graduate of color, invariably she was treated with the utmost courtesy by teachers, scholars and such members of the School Board as Thomas Wentworth Higginson, T. Coggeshall, and others.

Two years later she graduated from the Rhode Island State Normal School in Providence, and soon began her life work as a teacher. During the eight years spent in Lincoln Institute, Jefferson City, Mo., she had charge of the Department of Natural Science, and was the first woman to be elected to a professorship in that institution.

In 1889 Miss Silone was married to Prof. W. W. Yates, principal of Phillips School, Kansas City, Mo., and removed to that city, where since she has been engaged in either public or private school work.

From the age of nine years she has been writing for the press, and her articles have appeared in many leading periodicals--for a long time under the signature "R. K. Potter." Mrs. Yates has long been a zealous club worker and is well known as a lecturer East and West. She was one of the organizers and the first President of the Kansas City Woman's League; and in the summer of 1901 was elected President of the National Association of Colored Women, which organization she had already served as Treasurer for a period of four years.

Mrs. Yates is the mother of two children, whose education she carefully superintends, and is ever ready to comfort the sick or to stop her round of duties to give counsel or render help along any line possible to the many young people and others who seek her door.

The measure of the success of a race is the depths from which it has come, and the condition under which it has developed. To know what the Negro actually accomplished in the nineteenth century, one must know something of his life and habitat previous to the year 1619, when against his will or wish, he was brought to the Virginian coast; must also know his life as a slave, and his opportunities since emancipation.

History shows that the Negroes brought from Africa to this country to be sold into slavery were at the time in a more or less primitive stage of uncivilized life; while the methods used to capture and transport them to this "land of the free and home of the brave," recently revived through the vivid pen pictures and other illustrations running in serial form in Scribner's, Pearson's and other reliable periodicals (accounts which bear the impress of truth, and are hardly liable to the charge of having been written within too close range of time and space, or vice versa, to be strictly truthful), indicate the demoralizing and debasing effects of the "system" from its initial period, this followed up by the blighting influences of slave life, even under the most favorable conditions, for nearly two hundred and fifty years, left upon Negro life and character just the traits it would have left upon any other people subjected to similar conditions for the same length of time.

It may be said, and with truth, that slavery gave to the Negro some of the arts of civilized life; but it must be added, that, denying him the inalienable rights of manhood, denying him the right to the product of his labor, it left him no noble incentive to labor at these arts, and thus tended to render him improvident, careless, shiftless, in short, to demoralize his entire nature.

It is further stated that the system gave him Christianity. Did it give him piety? Could it give him morality in the highest sense of these terms?

Constantine could march the refractory Saxons to the banks of a stream and give them their option between Christianity and the sword, but the haughty monarch soon found that a religion forced in this peremptory and wholesale fashion did not change the moral nature of the soldier; and we submit that Christianity, language, and the arts of civilized life, absorbed amidst the debasing influences of a cruel and infamous bondage could not be productive of a harmonious development of body, mind and soul; of strong moral and intellectual fiber; or of ideas of the dignity of labor; of habits of thrift, economy, the careful expenditure of time and money; or knowledge of the intimate relationship of these two great factors in the process of civilization. These are results attained only where the rights of manhood and womanhood are acknowledged and respected. The lack of these results or basic impulses to advancement represent defects in the Negro character, preventing a more rapid development in the nineteenth century and directly traceable to his enslaved state; and the origin or cause, the growth and subsequent development of these, and other defects, must be taken into consideration before the Negro is stamped as the greatest criminal on earth, wholly irredeemable; before he is condemned in wholesale manner for not having made more rapid strides toward advanced civilization in little more than one generation of freedom. Indeed, it speaks well for the intrinsic merit of the race, that although public opinion freely admits that the natural outcome of bondage is a cowardly, thieving, brutal, or abject specimen of humanity, even in the darkest hours of slavery, there were many, many, high-born souls who, if necessary, at the price of life itself, maintained their integrity, rose superior to their surroundings, taught these same lofty sentiments to others.

Emancipation and certain constitutional amendments brought freedom to the material body of the erstwhile slave, but the soul, the higher self, could not be so easily freed from the evils that slavery had fastened upon it through centuries of debasement; and because of this soul degradation the Negro, no less than the South, needed to be physically, mentally and morally reconstructed.

Reconstruction, the eradication of former characteristics, the growth and development of new and more favorable ones, is with any race the work of time. Generations must pass, and still it need not be expected that the process will be full and complete; meanwhile, what measure of success is the Negro achieving? Were his achievements in the nineteenth century, educationally, morally, financially and otherwise at all commensurate with his opportunities?