Roscoe Conkling

“ Your personal influence will be felt in school room and in pulpit. Your directing intelligence will count in law, and medicine, and business; as able and devoted men and women, you by your examples will steady the nerves of a staggering people and make the word Negro more than a reproach. Delicate indecision, hesitant virtue, carping discontent, bric-a-brac culture—these ill become stalwart men and robust women. ”

“ By all the honorable traditions of the noble family into which you are now adopted, you are pledged not to pick your way daintily in the soft places of the earth; you are pledged to make your lives real, useful, constructive. ”

“ A school unresponsive to the needs of actual life is a school preparing for Utopia. The universities and the public schools of the Western States illustrate what I mean: for example, the University of California has recently introduced a course in irrigation. And here in the East, Cornell teaches poultry raising. For an unscrubbed population the school should emphasize cleanliness; for a propertyless population, foresight and thrift. Let me speak even more definitely. In this city of Washington, as in other urban communities, the death rate of the Negro population is exceedingly high. ”

“ Moreover the genuine teacher knows that his duty is not bounded by the four walls of the class-room. He is dealing with boys and girls to be sure, but he is dealing with more—with social conditions. The life and work of the community he must study quite as much as he must study the child. Indeed, child and man are largely products of social conditions. The educated teacher, by friendly visits to homes and by cheerful work in churches and societies, will seek to elevate community opinion and the standard of life and work. ”

“ Though no member of this graduating class should become a preacher or a preacher’s wife, every member may wisely ally himself with the church and use his personal influence to enlarge and strengthen church work, to make it definite and human and nobly practical.
So much for the work in which personal influence is the determining factor. Medicine and business are types of the work in which what I have rudely called directing intelligence determines. ”

“ More, importantly, you possess in varying degrees a group of valuable [4] industrial qualities,—that ambition without which work is drudgery and enlargement of life unsought and unattainable; that habit of earnest endeavor which, established by continuous attention to Greek or Latin, mathematics or history, may be utilized in the school room, or on the farm, or in the court room; that habit of self-control which enables men to sacrifice vagrant impulse to sober duty; that resourcefulness which discovers better methods of getting work done ”

“ Let us consider, first of all, how you may be of direct service by work in which the chief factor is personal influence and by work in which the chief factor is directing intelligence.
Teaching is an art inseparable from the personality of the teacher,—an art in which a mature person seeks by personal influence to help immature persons build their characters soundly. ”

“ There is no lack of preachers but there is much lack of good preachers. The preacher has the entree to the firesides of the people. The educated preacher, like the educated teacher, realizes the profound effect that the housing of the working classes exerts upon the morals and the efficiency and the happiness of the working classes, the profound effect that surroundings exert upon life and character. ”

“ After a while, let us hope, the schools here will offer from one end to the other, such teaching of the industrial arts as will prepare students worthily to maintain themselves under severe economic stress. Do you realize that, despite the enlargement of educational opportunities in Washington and the growth of the Negro population, there are probably here to-day fewer Negro artisans than there were in 1870? Here is a profound need, and for the schools a rare opportunity. Moreover, the school life of most children is short, not over five or six years. ”

“ Now, it is the fundamental business of the schools to enlarge the range of the students’ interests and wants, to stir up a divine discontent. The saddest thing about the Negro peasant in his windowless cabin in Georgia, the saddest thing about the Negroes in the filthy shanties of Mobile, New York, and Washington, is not so much poverty, as slovenly unconcern. What all such people need—be they white or black, red or yellow—is the development of wants—wants for better things. ”

“ A man of moderately developed wants will exert himself to get a steady job under healthful conditions, to get a comfortable house to live in—three or four sunny, pleasantly furnished rooms and, if possible a garden for vegetables and flowers—yes, he will exert himself to win a wife to make that house a home. ”

“ Now, for you and me no such careers are probable and yet every educated Negro who is worth his salt, is in similar fashion a copy for imitation and serves to secure respect for his race. The Negro contractor and builder; the Negro who owns a well managed truck farm; the Negro school teacher, who has saved money enough to buy municipal bonds or shares in a railway,—that person becomes in a money getting time a definite and concrete argument to white men and to black men that black men can be more than hewers of wood and drawers of water, than cooks and coachmen. ”

“ Fundamentally, you and I by our thoughtfulness, our practical interest in the happiness of others, our [17] elevation above petty prejudice, our simplicity, our decisive prudence, our enduring energy, our devotion, may indirectly count for good in a thousand ways in the life and work of our communities. ”

“ By offering good houses at reasonable rents to the Negro working [15] class, the Negro business man will find a paying investment and a means of much service. In the second place, hotels, restaurants, and theatres even in the capital of the nation are open to black men and women only on degrading terms, or not open at all. The closing of such accommodations is really the opening for black business men of the doors of opportunity.
In discussing ways of direct service I have then mentioned teaching and preaching as types of the work in which the decisive factor is personal influence. ”

“ In addition to the knowledge and the qualities I have mentioned, most of you have a settled disposition toward some form of self-support appropriate to an exceptional training; while you know that some men must black other men’s boots, you also know that a boot-black with a high school diploma at home means waste—waste of time, waste of money, waste of education. ”

“ In the profession of medicine, I admit, personal influence and directing intelligence subtly interlace. The Negro doctor’s social position makes him specially accessible to Negroes in cases of need. As a friend of the family or of the family’s friends, the doctor is not dreaded as a feelingless [13] stranger with a terrible knife. Moreover, the Negro doctor does not feel himself a man of alien blood come to tend an inferior. Social position and understanding sympathy, then, render the Negro doctor readily accessible and very useful. ”

“ Teaching ability, to adapt the words of Cardinal Newman, “is not a mere extrinsic or accidental advantage which is ours to-day and another’s to-morrow, which may be got up from a book and easily forgotten again, which we can command or communicate at our pleasure, which we can borrow for the occasion, carry about in our hands and take into the market; it is an acquired illumination, it is a habit, a personal possession and an inward endowment.” The best way to become a good teacher is, therefore, to become a good man or a good woman, and to grow in power to interest and influence young people. ”

“ Remember that teaching ability is an inward endowment; remember that a morally stunted man or a ribbon-loving woman cannot be an effective teacher. The most searching critic of character I ever knew was a barefoot boy whose laughing eyes danced over the pages of the fourth reader; an intuitive philosopher he! School boy opinion has, I doubt not, many vagaries but on the whole its essential decisions as to teachers are amazingly correct. Whether you teach geography by the Oswego Method, is not greatly to the [7] point; whether you have won the confidence of your class—that is the main issue ”

“ We [9] must send the whole boy to school and not merely his head!
Not for a moment do I decry that important function of the schools, which I have called the development of wants. Human wants are social forces. Corn and cotton are grown to supply certain bodily wants; the fine arts are cultivated in response to certain æsthetic wants; philosophy and pure science are elaborated at the quiet insistence of certain intellectual wants; religion is preached to assuage certain spiritual wants. Every voluntary act is the hand-maid of some want. ”

“ If the school possessed adequate facilities for giving industrial capacity, more parents would be willing and able to let their children remain in school seven and eight and nine years. The schools and the cultivated portion of this community cannot afford to give those who ask for bread a stone. ”

“ Finally, as human beings, you are able to participate in the intellectual, æsthetic, and moral interests of cultivated people. How may you with such equipment be really useful under the conditions of American life? ”

“ Now, the practical usefulness of the preacher lies largely in the fact that he supplies the sanctions for right doing,—the thunderings and the lightnings and the noise of the trumpet, the mountain smoking, and in all but above all Jehovah. To show the man in the street or in the cotton field that for him lying and stealing are bad because, if everybody were a liar and a thief, society would fall to pieces,—that would be very well, but it would hardly make the man honest in word and deed. ”

“ As workers you have some acquaintance with the natural resources of our country, and the ways in which they have been utilized in the production and distribution of commodities through the perfecting of industrial organization and the applying of science to work. ”

“ The preacher must himself be righteous, resourceful, sympathetic, with the gift of nearness to men. Such qualities education is peculiarly fit to bestow or to develop, and hence an educated ministry is sorely needed by our people from Boston to New Orleans.
An educated ministry would realize that social settlements, gymnasiums, kindergartens, day nurseries, friendly visiting, homes for defectives and orphans and the aged may fitly and usefully be organized and maintained by the church. By such means the church may tend to establish a kingdom of heaven on earth. ”

“ And right here let me say that nobody wishes you to make a profession of uplifting your race. In the first place, that’s a pretty big job; and in the second place, your race is uplifted whenever one of you manages well a truck farm, a grocery store, a school room, or a bank. Charity begins at home; your chief business should [5] be to uplift each himself. ”

“ The example of this man is being imitated in a hundred educational and industrial communities in the Southern States. And all men feel more respect for the Negro race because out of its loins has come Booker T. Washington. ”

“ Moreover, you appreciate the duties and value the privileges of citizenship in a democracy, and most of you have on the whole a serious intent to do what you reasonably can to promote the general welfare. ”

“ Dayton, Ohio,—not one of these important cities has a total population as large as the Negro population of the District of Columbia. As buyers of goods, eighty-seven [14] thousand people are important; but as sellers of goods, the eighty-seven thousand Negroes in Washington are by no means important. For example, of the total profits on the dry goods bought in a year by the Negro population of Washington,—profits amounting to thousands and thousands of dollars, for the ratio of expenditure to income is exceptionally large,—what per cent. goes to Negro merchants? ”

“ A constructive statesman like Washington, educators like Lewis Moore and Lucy Moten and your own Anna Cooper, theologians like Bowen and Grimke, scholars like Blyden and Scarborough and DuBois and Kelly Miller, inventors like Woods and McCoy, a novelist like Chesnutt, a poet like Dunbar, a musician like Coleridge-Taylor, a painter like Tanner—yes, and, of those who are gone, Banneker who searched the heavens ”

“ It was in this debate that Conkling, adroitly choosing the right time and the proper subject, impressed the country with his power as an orator and his ability as a brilliant, resourceful debater, although, perhaps, a destructive rather than constructive legislator. Nature had lavished upon him superb gifts of mind and person. ”

“ Her arms dropped by her sides, as if suddenly paralyzed, and I noticed a remarkable variety in the shade of her broad Irish physiognomy.
"There is no great harm done, Biddy," said my hostess, immediately, in a peculiarly quiet, gentle voice, "just step down to John for another bowlful. While poor Biddy is collecting her scattered senses on the stairs, my son, will you kindly assist Willie in picking up the most noticeable lumps?—put them in this saucer, my dear. She is just learning, you know and—she would not cross that Rubicon as bravely as the classic hero you were reading of last night." ”

“ When Conkling felt himself at ease, in congenial society, he displayed his mastery of irony and banter, neither hesitating to air his opinion of persons nor shrinking from admissions which were candid to the verge of cynicism. ”