Daniel Wallace Culp

THE NEGRO'S ADVERSITIES HELP HIM.

BY PROF. JOSEPH D. BIBB, A. M.

PROF. JOSEPH D. BIBB, A. M.

Prof. Joseph D. Bibb comes from the city of Montgomery, Ala., of excellent parents. His early life was spent among pleasant surroundings and he received his primary education at the Swain Public School of that city. While quite young he entered Fisk University, where he was prominent because of his splendid scholarship and original ideas. Being impressed with the idea that Negroes were the natural and best teachers for the Negro youth, he left that institution and entered Livingstone College at Salisbury, N. C., at the head of which was the justly celebrated Dr. J. C. Price. Here he received the degree of A. B. in 1886.

He was not contented with his academic attainment, but completed the courses of law and theology, and has constantly applied himself to the fulfillment of his high ideal.

After graduating he spent his first year as instructor in the State Normal at Montgomery, ten years as principal of the public school, in which he received his training, and two years as professor of Hebrew and Bible history at Morris Brown College, Atlanta, Ga. Neither of these nor the minor fields of usefulness satisfied his ideal, and it was not until he entered the active ministry that he felt that satisfaction that comes with fitness. He is now laboring acceptably as a minister in the A. M. E. Church and is recognized as one of its most scholarly divines.

The world needs men who will use all of their cultivated powers to bless and to lift up their fellowmen, who will dedicate themselves to their fullest energies and their energies to their people. Such a man is the subject of our sketch.

In this hour when the sun is just beginning to climb the horizon of a new day in the life of the Negro race, there is an imperative need for close observation and serious, earnest thought. We cannot content ourselves with appearances. We cannot trust the decision reached mainly through our emotional nature. We must bring the whole personal conscious man into our meditation in order that we may see and comprehend that hand of God laid in love upon the Negro of this country.

All problems in a nation's life must be unraveled and solved by that nation. It may take advantage of foreign influences and examples, incorporate and utilize them, but the real work must be done by the nation itself. The same principle obtains in problems affecting individual life or the life of a race. To adjust the Negro in harmonious relationship to American civilization is a question that depends for solution not so much upon the nation as upon the thought and life of the race itself. The Negro seen through the refractory medium of fear and prejudice is regarded as an unhealthy member, yet it is evident that he is a vital member and cannot be removed by the surgeon's scalpel. It is necessary, therefore, that this unhealthy member should be toned up to harmony with the great organism of which he is a part.

"No cross, no crown," is a trite saying, yet it has lost nothing of the beauty of strength of originality, but, rather, it has grown to be the sustaining, inspiring motto of all men as they plod up the hill of life. Great souls do not whine and fret in adversity. The men and women who lay the foundation of great institutions that bless mankind, that fling rainbows on the black bosom of the tempest, do not tremble and falter because of the clouds and mountain peaks, but onward and upward they go until the victory is won. The church came up by the way of the cross. If you would know the path of civilization, look for the great battlefields in the world's history. The greatest battles of reform in church and state have been fought, and the right has conquered. The Negro to-day reaches his hand out and plucks the best fruitage of the highest and grandest age known to man. Even liberty, a plant that grows luxuriantly only when watered with human blood, and rooted in the hearts and affections of a free people, is within the very grasp of the American Negro.

The history of the free American Negro is one continuous and unbroken chain of success. I shall lay the proof of the statement before you as we advance. Did you ever consider the agencies at work for the amelioration of the condition of the Negro in this country? Here and there counter-forces may appear to hinder the too rapid advance of the Negro, but such is the inevitable law of growth. Life is conditioned upon its ability to absorb and assimilate the good and reject and expel the bad. What are these counter-forces, these hostile external relations? Do they tend to destroy the equilibrium of the race, or, rather, do they conduce to its stability and strength? The answer is obvious. The Negro is being sharpened and fashioned here under Providence into a better and nobler manhood. He is suffering no more than all infant races suffered. Slavery and oppression is the school in which races are trained for the enjoyment of the fullest life. God has a purpose in thus dealing with the Negro. The power of his individuality, his highly developed religious nature, his disposition to linger in peace in whatever condition he finds himself; his preserving a truly magnanimous spirit in the very face of an unwarranted and violent opposition, foretell his future history. He is contributing his part toward the industrial development of the South and the religious elevation of the nation. Many of his redeeming qualities are often regarded as evidences of puerility and barbarism.

Character cannot be built in a day, neither in an individual nor in a race, but the Negro is old enough now to be an American citizen. He has reached the years of maturity; his character is formed, and what is good for the most advanced citizen is good for him. He demands equal and exact justice; he will content himself with nothing less. There are divine purposes in each life, in each race and nation. How well these purposes are subserved is left with the individual, the race or the nation.

Afflictions are a wholesome discipline, and the people who would survive the wreck of nations must fight their way up under the inexorable law of God, through trials, through tribulations, through persecution and through blood. I do not wish in any way to condemn the agitation of the hour in the name of justice, and civil political liberty, but rather to urge it in a reasonable way. Agitation, says Wendell Phillips, is the method that puts the school by the side of the ballot box. Agitation prevents rebellion, keeps the peace and secures progress. Every step she gains is gained forever. Muskets are the weapons of animals. "Agitation is the atmosphere of brains." Sir Robert Peel defines it as the marshaling of the conscience of a nation to mold its law. Injustice cannot stand before exposure and argument and the force of public opinion. No sharper weapon of defense will be required against the wrongs which afflict the South." No race can rise higher than its ideal. To teach the Negro that the evils of his environments will crush him forever, that a servant is and must be servile in disposition and in general habit of mind; that hair and skin and the shape of the head stamp him an inferior, is a doctrine of creation without God in it.

No, let him know and feel that he is a man with the great ever-expanding capacity of a man, and that a step beyond him is Deity. Let him see himself mirrored in Hamlet's sublime outbursts of admiration: "What a piece of work is man, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculties, in reform, how express and admirable; in action how like an angel in apprehension how like a god." Let him know that he has and will yet realize in his racial life the loftiest ideal of civilization. The Negro has profited immeasurably by the lessons, stern and severe—taught him in this country.

Yet these adverse forces are but ministers of Heaven, awakening his sleeping energies and accelerating his motion towards racial unity and organization. They are stern, at times, inhuman teachers, but so long as the Negro considers himself inferior, so long as a barber discriminates against his father and brother, so long as a waiter feels himself disgraced if he waits upon one of his own race, and the washer-woman if she washes for her sisters, so long as we loathe to serve only our own kith and kin these rough and severe teachers are absolutely indispensable.

The power that permanently lifts a people is within that people, so also the forces that degrade them. You cannot change public opinion by drifting with its current. You cannot present yourself in a slavish attitude and then demand a free man's portion. In that attitude you are neither feared nor loved, but tolerated. You are regarded an excrescent growth on the body of civil society. But it cannot always be thus.

How can this race fail? In this day a million new homes, comfortable homes of cultured black men, are built above the ruins of the slave's log cabin of yesterday. Wilberforce and Morris Brown, Tuskegee, Biddle and Livingstone, each gallantly manned by black men, and thousands of schools dotting the South—all immortalizing Christian philanthropy—are sending forth annually torch-bearers of truth to light the paths the race must pursue in the great civilization of to-day. How well these advantages will subserve his progress, his interest—depend upon the confidence and faith which they will inspire in him toward himself. Responsibility alone educates. Skill comes by constant practice. Any reason alleged that the Negro is not yet prepared for the leadership of his people, whether in the church or institutions of learning or in politics, or whether in any of the various avenues of business or of life, weakens the character of the race, and augments and quickens the prejudice of the enemy both within and without the race.

Our rightful leaders may be comparatively inexperienced, but experience is not acquired by inactivity. It took the Civil War to make Grant. The Northern missionary at the time when it tried the souls of men following in the wake of battle came to break the long night of ignorance that had settled down upon the Negro; but they have done their duty and gone to their reward. God bless them. The Negro is now prepared to take care of himself. Let the child crawl, he will learn to walk. Lift up the men and women of your own race. Let some great, towering example of Negro manhood and thrift and virtue and wisdom point the youth to the pole star of redemption. Trust the Negro now, and the future will take care of itself.

I repeat, if this and coming generations are taught to believe the crushing and slanderous dictum of natural inferiority, what hope is there for the salvation of the race, for a man can rise no higher than his ideal? These great, honest, sincere souls in the race, who show their love as do fathers to their children, rebuke because they love. Moses, the great leader of and lawgiver to the Israelites—a people who gave to the world its noblest song, its widest proverbs, its sweetest music—throws down the Table of the Ten Commandments in righteous indignation when he found them worshiping idols, but the next day his heart, gushing forth love for his people, he found his way in prayer to God, seeking forgiveness for his idolatrous people. This was but an expression of his burning zeal for the safety and progress of his people. So do I regard the scathing criticism given within the race by its own men. All other criticisms are questionable. But grant that the negro likes the idea, worships the idea of white supremacy, with its institutions and customs, vitalized apparently with the energy of violent opposition to his moral and industrial development; I cannot believe that he will always be thus.

Necessity is not merely the mother of invention, but the soul of the law of progress—the genius of civilization. It is here in the closing period of the Nineteenth Century effulgent with the light of all the historic past and marvelous achievements that the Negro must stand or fall. Here in the wilderness where peaks of cultivated mountain-tops in the near distance invite him onward and upward; here under the full ordered sun of the brightest day the world has seen he must work out his salvation with fear and trembling.