Southern States. And all men feel more respect for the Negro race because out of its loins has come Booker T. Washington.

[16]

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; Toussaint, soldier and statesman; Aldridge, the tragedian with his first medal in arts and sciences from the King of Prussia; Pushkin, the poet of the Russias; Dumas, father and son; the saintly Crummel; and Douglass the argument for freedom,—I say, the indirect service of such people is incalculable.

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.

[17]

And, now, my friends, you enter the circle of educated men and women. 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. Remember—noblesse oblige!

noblesse oblige

 Prev. P 10/11 next