William Henry Ferris

“ General Armstrong once triumphantly told a class of colored students at Hampton, “Hampton will give you enough education to cope with any colored men you may meet.” But Dr. Alexander Crummell saw deeper. He saw that the Negro needed also an education that would enable him to cope on equal intellectual terms with any white men that he might meet. For that reason the Negro needed to dip into literature, history, philosophy, psychology, sociology, sciences, anthropology and ethnology; needed in a word to be kept in touch with the trend of modern science and the tendencies of modern thought. ”

“ If there was ever a time in the Negro’s history when he needed trained and well-equipped leadership, it is now when tens of thousands of black Africans and black Americans have demonstrated on scores of bloodstained battlefields in France that heroism can wear a sable hue and be clothed in ebony ”

“ Crummell was a man that you could never forget, once you met him or heard him preach. He frequently said that what the race needed was an educated gentry, and he was himself one of the finest specimens of that rugged strength, tempered with Christian culture and a refined benevolence, which was his ideal, that the race has yet produced. Sprung from the fierce Timene Tribes, who on the west coast of Africa cut to pieces a British regiment near Sierre Leone several years ago, he possessed the tireless energy, the untamed spirit and the fearless daring that made his warrior ancestors dreaded. ”

“ William Graham Summer of Yale said that it was because they did not regard the Negro as a man.
And the whole slavery debate hinged on the question of the humanity of the Negro, hinged upon the question as to whether he possessed the intellectual, ethical, aesthetical and religious potentialities and possibilities which white men possessed, hinged upon the question as to whether the Negro did or did not possess a soul. The South said that the Negro was a beast and not a man, and was not capable of intellectual or moral improvement. ”

“ We need a Scipio Africanus, who saw with an eagle eye that Rome must carry the war into Africa and forthwith proceeded to take the initiative, made himself the compeller of circumstances, himself determined the course that events would take, and made himself the master of Rome’s fate and the architect of her destiny. ”

“ Quicken in the Negro youth of the land a belief in the mighty hopes that make us men and we will write deeds upon the pages of history, as our black brothers wrote theirs in letters of blood upon the sunlit plains of fair France, that will command the attention and compel the recognition of a hostile world. ”

“ I believe that this Universal Mind works in the hearts and consciences of men and that He is the ground and source and fount of their noble impulses and higher aspirations. And I believe that “Eternal Power, not ourselves, that makes for righteousness,” will continue to stir in the hearts and minds of men until they see the sin of damning a man because of the color of his skin. ”

“ In my chapter upon “The American Negro’s Contribution to literature,” I tell how beautifully DuBois in his “Souls of Black Folk” has drawn the figure of a man, whom I regard in some respects the grandest character of the Negro race. Read the chapter and read Crummell’s book upon “Africa and America,” and then you will recognize the greatness of Crummell. Some people say that great Negroes are jealous of each other. But read Crummell’s chapter upon Henry Highland Garnet and DuBois’s chapter upon Crummell, and you will see how kindred spirits appreciate each other’s worth and value. ”

“ At a time, when the humanitarian plums will be handed out at the Peace Table at Versailles, at a time when the small and weak nations of Europe will have their day in court, at a time when the oppressed and suppressed peoples of Europe, Palestine and Armenia will have their innings, now is the time for the Negro to make his appeal, present his plea and submit his case. ”

“ In 1776, the high sounding and world resounding Declaration of Independence was signed, which said that all men were created free and equal and had an inalienable right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. ”

“ In the past we have been dependent upon what our Anglo-Saxon friends have thought of us and have blindly worshipped the hand-picked leaders our Anglo-Saxon godfathers have set up for us, to bow down to. The time has now arrived for us to mold the opinion of our Anglo-Saxon friends by what we think of ourselves, and to select and follow our own leaders. ”

“ But I believe that the intricacy of the structure of the atoms, the law and order that is enthroned in the heavens above from farthest star across the milky way to farthest star are silent but patent witnesses to the fact that a Universal Mind is back of and behind and manifests Himself in the universe. ”

“ Twenty years ago we did not fully realize that the treatment and consideration that an individual, a race or a nation received, is determined by the estimate in which the world holds the individual or race, and that this estimate is largely determined by the estimate in which the individual or race holds itself. ”

“ Alexander Crummell gathered his colored friends around him and formed the Academy. The same reason that led the American mind to discountenance the Negro’s higher aspirations and strivings and longings caused Dr. Crummell to encourage them. He realized that living in the same country with the American white man, facing the same problems and conditions, the Negro needed the same kind of education and training that the white man needed, or he would lag hopelessly behind in the race of life. ”

“ But, no, this grand old man of the Negro race, nearly eighty years of age, endeavored to realize a dream that he had conceived when a student in Cambridge University, England. He proposed to found and establish [Pg 9] the American Negro Academy, an organization composed of Negro scholars, whose membership should be limited to forty and whose purpose should be to foster scholarship and culture in the Negro race and encourage budding Negro genius. He communicated with colored scholars in America, England, Hayti and Africa. ”

“ It was a rude awakening that they experienced in the summer of 1917, when the edict went forth that all American citizens, [Pg 13] black as well as white men, were subject to the selective draft. It was a rude awakening that they experienced, when they discovered that their sons must cross the ocean and give their lives to bring a freedom to war-ridden Europe, which was denied their race in this country. ”

“ And the soul of man, the ego, the center of self-consciousness, recognitive memory and reflective thought, which has maintained its identity amid the changes of the physical organism, will survive the destruction of that organism and live on and on in the spirit world, embodied in whatever form and clothed with whatever garments its Maker so decreed. ”

“ They tell us that when you utter an audible sound, you start in motion sound waves which travel on for miles and miles. So it is with the influence of a human personality. It does not end at the grave. It lives in the lives that have been inspired, in the example set and the thoughts thrown out. ”

“ In Georgia and other states, they took particular pains to see that the Negro had no chance or opportunity for mental improvement. In Georgia they would fine and imprison a white man and whip and imprison a colored man who was caught teaching a slave to read and write. ”

“ We have had too many leaders who have pursued the Fabian policy of watchful waiting, who have been the creatures of circumstance, who have been the sport of chance, who have been determined by their environment, and who have been dependent upon the turn or course that events would take. ”

“ And then I can see that famous Yale philosopher, George Trumbull Ladd, a descendant of Elder Brewster and Governor Bradford, who came over in the Mayflower, and who himself was a splendid representative of modern puritanism. These and a score of other professors in my college days were what ex-President Timothy Dwight of Yale would call men of high character, and they made the students feel that merely to achieve character was something worth the effort and striving. ”

“ And at this golden moment and rare opportunity, we need far-sighted pilots, wise guides, who can seize and utilize the civic, political, economic and industrial opportunities, which may present themselves. ”

“ Tall, slender, symmetrical, erect in bearing, with a graceful and elastic walk, with a refined and aristocratic face that was lighted up by keen penetrating but kindly eyes, and surrounded by the gray hair and beard which gave him a venerable appearance, with a rich, ringing, resonant baritone voice, which had not lost its power even in old age, with an air of unmistakable good breeding and a conversation that flavored of books and literature and art, Dr. ”

“ Metaphysicians tell us that through his five senses, man is in touch with and in relation to his physical environment and a physical world, and that through his reason, imagination, conscience, aesthetic and religious intuitions, man is in touch with and in relation to his spiritual environment and a spiritual world. ”

“ They also tell us that at death, the soul and body merely part company and go their respective ways. The oxygen, carbon, hydrogen and other chemical elements in the body mingle with the material elements from which they came. ”

“ The result was that in March, 1897, when McKinley was inaugurated, the most celebrated scholars and writers in the Negro race for the first time assembled together in the Lincoln Memorial Church and formally organized into a brotherhood of scholars. ”