[This is not a survey of present conditions, but of the work of negro education and evangelization in the South, as conducted by the Christian Church from the beginning to the present time.]

      In the physical world plain surveying is a simple mathematical problem, but if mountains and great rivers and canyons are to be explored, or ocean depths to be mapped, genius together with careful training and equipment of the finest instruments is required. To survey an intricate political or social problem requires not only genius and training, but the wisdom which cometh from above. No more difficult field for survey than the South in reconstruction is found in the history of the world. Many wise and brave men have fallen in its passes, or been swept away by its mighty currents, or lost in its dismal swamps. No greater task has been given human wisdom than that of bringing order out of the mighty chaos left after a devastating civil war and the liberation of four million and a half of slaves who were to occupy, side by side, the same territory as their former masters.

      I shall not attempt to bring anything new on the negro problem of our South, but simply a survey of the small clearing we have tried to make in this wilderness. In blazing our way in we discovered a few facts and principles which have guided our course and lain at the foundation of all our work. We soon saw that any attempt to train the negro which did not consider the rights of the white man would be vain, for these two were to live and reach a higher state of civilization in the same territory. It helped one to see clearly how both have suffered. The real heroism of the white man of the South was taxed far more in reconstruction than, during the war. He need not be shamed of his record.

      To the negro was given the problem [60] of educating himself. It was ignorance instructing ignorance, the blind leading the blind. Those of his own race who had education were afar off and not in sympathy with his struggles. The influence and guidance of the white man, which had been his in so large a degree in the past, were suddenly removed. Those who came from the North as his instructors usually neither understood him nor his needs. Unwise legislation only increased his difficulties. Any education which put into his heart hatred toward the white man, or caused him to despise manual toil, would only be a curse. It was not, and is not, our task to fit him for some ideal condition, but for the one he is forced by circumstances to fill. The full rights of a people who had been enslaved could not come at once. Fitness for liberty is even better than liberty. The quickest way to get people their rights is to make them right. The road at best from abject servitude to manly self-reliance is not an easy one. Intelligence is an indispensable element in civilization. You must educate, and one part of this problem is to educate the negro, and yet not put him out of touch with the work which he must do, and which it is best for him to do. Therefore he must be taught to work, and that with skill and intelligence. Skill in toil brings to the toiler self-respect and true dignity, and the development of any race has its foundation in the skill of its toilers. God's own are those who work intelligently.

      Therefore, great emphasis has been laid, and wisely, on industrial education for the negro. Yet the chief emphasis should be placed on another--a more essential requisite of the highest civilization. A state of slavery gives to the enslaved, as a class, no morality, but much immorality or unmorality. It gave to the negro no true spirituality or religion, but much emotional or false religion, which must be unlearned or replaced by the sane and true. He who lives without a knowledge of the true God, no matter what his culture or his skill, can never attain to the highest plane of life; so the teaching of the Man of Galilee must guide the cultivated mind and the trained hand, or no true civilization ran result.

      The great handicap to the negro of this country in his upward progress has been the ignorance or the selfishness of his leaders. The real work, then, seems to be to train guides for this race. The few have ever led the many out of bondage. If the mass has gone astray, a true guide will lead them back: the sheep strayed far, but the good Shepherd brought them home again. The history of the world is contained in the biography of a few leaders. The greatest gift Divine Wisdom could give the world was an infallible Guide. So the greatest gift we can make to the negro is leaders of their own race, filled with the wisdom and love of the Carpenter

C. C. SMITH.

of Nazareth. We could not reach the millions, but have sought to train leaders who would know how to guide the masses of ignorant, superstitious, shiftless freedmen.

      What, then, should be some of the characteristics of this leader? He should have education, but yet patience with ignorance; he should be pure, yet understand the temptations of the impure; he should have true refinement, yet have sympathy for squalor and wretchedness; he should have skill, and yet know how to lead the unskilled; he should have charity or love for the degraded of his own, and at the same time respect for the most cultivated of the white race; he should draw his ideals and inspiration from the highest sources of wisdom, and yet be able to turn its power into the lowliest tasks for the lowliest of his race; he should be truly "lifted up," yet not out of reach of those low down; he should have lofty purposes, together with the humility which will gain the confidence of his own and of the white people as well. Our leader, then, should have the wisdom of Solomon, the meekness of Moses, the patience of Job, and the love of Jesus Christ which includes all. We probably shall not often reach the full measure of this ideal, yet toward [61] it we strive. From our training-schools, working for this conception, have gone missionaries all over the South, and to Jamaica and one to Africa. Some have gone as preachers, some as teachers, some as farmers, some as mechanics--yet all as Christians, to live for the good of others.

      I shall not emphasize at all the material advance which has been made in eighteen years of endeavor, nor the difficulties we have overcome; but wish to speak now for a few minutes of types of character produced by working toward our ideals.

      First, the preacher type! We have given our best for the training of our preachers. Of all sad caricatures on a holy calling, the ignorant negro preacher of the South is the saddest. The stage has tried in vain to reproduce him. The organized church depends largely on the preacher for its character and influence. Great care has been taken to carefully train our messengers of Christ. To this our Bible school and the care and time given to the teaching of the word of God in all our schools will testify. Our preacher has been taught the Book and how to tell the story of redeeming love. As he goes to his task he must often very largely support himself. This discourages him not, as skilled labor brings contempt on no calling. Our preacher is trained to toil that he may have self-reliance and manly independence and sympathy with his toiling brethren. Is there a house of worship to build, he is chief workman. He understands the needs of his people, and by his counsel encourages a higher type of civilization among them. In his pastoral visits he pleads for better conditions in the home, so that all shall be removed from the baneful influence of squalor. He teaches that cleanliness of body and neatness in the home are essential to purity of life. He advises his members against foolish and childish outlay of money, so they may have the means to give each child a good education. His standard of morals is high. He teaches that good deeds rather than good feelings are an index of standing with God. He preaches a gospel of life, not emotion. He depends upon the pure word of God, not stories, for the conversion of his hearers. He is the good shepherd of his flock, seeking to lead them to green pastures and beside still waters. Pure in his own life, he becomes an ensample. He seeks not alone to interest his people in their own salvation, but in the salvation of the whole world. By his own unselfish devotion he seeks to make them true followers of Jesus. We have scattered all over the South to-day such preachers, and the real work of the church is being performed by them. Wherever they go we find a higher type of civilization.

      The teacher type! A woman teacher in a rural district where negroes are many and whites few and conditions most primitive, where ignorance, superstition, filth and sin abound. In the midst of this she keeps herself neat and clean, and her schoolroom is a model of neatness and order. Her language is pure; she insists that her scholars shall have clean bodies, and, as far as her influence has power, clean lives as well. She teaches the common branches accurately. She enters into sympathy with the most lowly of her people. She visits the homes of her pupils and seeks to correct the conditions of the typical cabin life. Her own standards of life are high, almost puritanical. She will not brook the least deviation from truth, and her virtue to her is a sacred thing. It is a wall so high that no black man's passion nor white man's gold can scale it. Would God the women of the North could know the price the black woman of the South pays for her virtue and the number and might of the temptations which assail her. This teacher's salary is small, her sphere narrow, but all who go from the influence of her life have had a new vision. When will we learn the value of the personal relation of teacher to scholar? The chiefest thing is not what is taught, but who teaches, for the teacher's character abounds in the child's future.

      The farmer type! He owns his farm; it is the product of his toil. He has built his three or four room cabin largely with his own hands. He gathers his family around a table of his own construction. His wife--let us say one of the girls we have trained--keeps a well-ordered house and cooks well the [62] food. His children are neatly clothed, and attend school regularly. His mule is fatter than his neighbor's mule. His cow gives more milk. His fields are cleaner and yield more produce to the acre than is usual. He worships in a "meeting-house" largely constructed by his own labor. He communes at the Lord's table which his wife has neatly spread. He humbly, yet clearly and forcefully, offers prayer in the presence of his people. The prayer of him who raises a bale of cotton to the acre prevails with God and man in the South. Both he and his wife intelligently teach in the little Sunday-school. His money provides preaching at home and helps to send the gospel afar. He is a great man in his community, yet thinks not of this. He has caught the vision of service through honest and skilled toil, and is doing more for the true redemption of his race than all the college men who contend for ideals alone, for he is working out his own salvation, and by example and service the salvation of others, in the midst of real, not ideal, conditions. God alone can measure the value of such a one to all.

      Again, the type of these sent to organize and lead industrial education for their own. He will usually go to the blackest part of the "Black Belt," where conditions are most primitive, where the roads are paths and the fences are not at all, where the cabins and huts and poverty and ignorance abound, where the rental system is crushing the very life and soul out of the shiftless, ignorant negro. His task is not easy. He must win the confidence of his own, and nothing is so suspicious as helpless ignorance. He must have prudence in his dealings with the white landlord who rules supreme. He must show by actual example what prosperity is. This people has never seen it. He must with those unskilled toilers build buildings and fence land and raise good crops. He must show them how to get on in life. Then he must teach them the word of God as applied to their own lives and own conditions. He must build New Testament civilization in the midst of this wilderness and out of this raw material. His hand must point the way of life and turn the leaves of Holy Writ and drive the plane and saw and hold the plow. In doing all he must be an exemplar of purity of life and speech, holding aloft a rectitude before unknown, under the most adverse conditions and manifold temptations. Oh the wisdom, patience, skill, tact and devotion required for such a task! Yet under the lead of our trained ones I have seen with my own eyes the transformation wrought. I have seen the wilderness blossom as the rose, and peace and prosperity and happiness take the place of conflict, poverty and misery. If he had been trained in the North, or in a school which did not understand his task, he would be worthless here; but, trained in the midst of and to meet these difficulties, he overcame.

      As I have before said, in all our schools the most pronounced place has been given to the word of God and its teaching and spirit, because we have ever deemed this the essential without which all else were vain in the uplifting of this people. The Bible has been of a truth the great text-book. The most familiar story to our scholars has been the story of redemption. The cross of Christ as the emblem of sacrifice has ever been held before their eyes. Where this is done some one may catch a vision of love akin to the love of the Saviour. Those of a child race may see the vision most clearly. This vision of love and sacrifice and service has come in greater or less measure to almost all of these in our schools; but the vision came in fullest measure, perhaps, to a full-blooded African, Jacob Kenoly. At the National Convention two years ago I spoke of his conception of service and duty to his own, and of the beginnings of his work among the semi-civilized descendants of his race who were colonized in Liberia many years ago from the United States. Jacob Kenoly has now been in Africa for a little over four years. The first year he taught the wild people back in the jungle, but, driven to the coast in order to save his life, he has labored for the above-named people for three years. He now lives in a very small two-story house made with his own hands--the first sided and shingled house in that part of Liberia, for there are no sawmills [63] there. His two-story schoolhouse, sixty by thirty-five feet, is now completed. The zinc for the roof of this building was sent from England, and his boys carried it the fifteen miles from the coast. For this building he has raised about four hundred dollars on the field. He raises the vegetables for the school table on the two hundred acres of land, a gift to him from the Liberian Government. He obtains his meat from the jungle with the gun sent to him from the United States. The girls of his school make garments, and some of these for the wild people he first taught in the jungle that they may come to school. They sew on a sewing-machine sent by a sister in Iowa. The singing-books for his large singing class and Testaments were sent him by a publishing-house in this country. Many small gifts have been given him by his friends and former schoolmates for his health and comfort. The C. W. B. M. pays him seventy-five dollars each quarter as his salary, but he puts most of it into his work, saying, "These big black hands can take care of Jacob." His church of ten members, at last report, now communes in his own house. One of his advanced students, one of those belonging to the jungle people, is now on his way to the United States to attend the Southern Christian Institute, that he may be equipped to return again as a missionary to his people in Africa. The money for his passage here was furnished by a Sunday-school class in Indiana, led by one of our devoted sisters.

      I do not present this outline of Jacob Kenoly's work to date to make an appeal for means to carry on his work. Already enough has been given by Iowa to pay for the school building and its furnishing and equipment. My only wish now for Jacob Kenoly, on the material side, is that some large-hearted brother would furnish the means to send him a helper or two. Nor do I present this record chiefly to show the value of our Christian industrial training to the negro. It does show this, and we have a right to emphasize it, but it points to the far more important truth that if the whole church got Jacob's conception of obligation and payment, "the knowledge of the Lord would soon cover the whole earth as the waters cover the great deep"--namely, I owe all I am and hope to be to Jesus Christ my Lord, and I can only pay that debt by serving my fellow-man. He as truly saw the man of Africa calling him as did Paul the man of Macedonia. We need in the church to-day, not more "higher criticism" nor more "orthodoxy," but a greater vision of human need and our personal obligation to relieve it. Jacob's life, then, as an inspiration is worth all the Southern Christian Institute has cost, for whether we measure his work by his breadth of vision, or unselfishness in his plans, or uncomplaining heroism in execution and suffering, or steadfastness of purpose amid difficulties, or depth of love in going to the lowliest of earth, or his tact in winning confidence, or his supreme humility, for he gives all the praise to others, or his sublime faith in God by which he held to his hand in the darkest hours--Jacob Kenoly leads us all. He is our true missionary type and points all to a closer following of the example and teachings of the Master.

      From our small survey in the Southland, and looking out from thence over the whole field, I see some things which indicate the dawning of a better day. The business men there are beginning to recognize the commercial value of the sober, industrious, thrifty negro. They see that it is not only right, but politic, to protect him and guard his rights. The hoodlum element can no longer trample the good negro under its feet with impunity. The commercial interests say this must not be, that these are a commercial asset. When the business men saw that they could not have the decent, sane negro and the saloon at the same time, they joined hands with those who fought the saloon, and the saloon had to go.

      Again, the best and wisest men see a great danger in the immoral relations existing between white men and black women. They are now beginning to look this evil fairly in the face. They know well that the mingling of the blood of the races comes not from intermarriage, but from concubinage. For a long time to come, no doubt, white men will continue to hold this [64] relation to black women, but the time is coming, and even now is, when no white man can keep his concubine and his respectability at the same time. It is a great victory to place any sin under the ban of public censure. Brave men and brave women in the South now dare to denounce this as a crime against God and man and league against it.

      Then, there is the large and increasing element of God-loving and Christ-serving men and women in the South, and there are no better in the world, who demand that the negro shall not only be protected, but that he shall be given a fair chance to develop the best that is in him, who welcome all proper advance for him and give to him their sympathy and help, for they know him altogether. And this they do, not for commercialism or selfishness, but for righteousness and because the Nazarene rules in their lives.

      Yet to the discerning these signs of hope but emphasize the need of reformation. They are but as stars shining through rifts in dark clouds which threaten the peace and purity and happiness of our land. I would not be true to the interest I represent, nor to you, if I did not here note conditions which may well cause alarm. I see in the South to-day this great miasmatic swamp which, if left undrained, not only threatens the nation's health, but in the end its very life. It is so vast and it spreads so rapidly, and its jungles are so dark, that, by comparison, the clearings made by all Christian philanthropy, where the soil is sweet and the air pure and the light penetrates, seem insignificant. We dare not, as a nation, then, overlook the fact that such a mass of ignorance is a menace to our free country. Freedom is a safe instrument only in the hands of the enlightened. A republic's strength is measured by the intelligence of its people. Where ignorance and squalor abound, sin and anarchy do much more abound. If it is a mark of true patriotism to die to make men free, it is a mark of higher patriotism to live to make men enlightened.

      Then, as one who loves his church and believes in "our plea," I bring a note of warning. The future will not judge us by our numbers, nor wealth, nor even doctrinal soundness, but by the Spirit of Him who went about doing good. At the judgment, where all values will be tested, the Judge will say, "You may have performed many wonderful works, but as you have not served the least of these for whom I died, depart." The church which hopes to win victory in the coming century can not stand alone on the soundness of its doctrine, but must catch the mind, the Spirit of the Master, and, having this Spirit, our church will not pass by these millions of degraded ones in our land. As at the eventide of our century I view the clearing we as a church have made in this wilderness in all the years of our history, there is one thing which gives me cause for deep regret--it is so small. Making all due allowances, yet it is with a feeling akin to chagrin that I compare its size with what the other religious peoples have cleared. When I view the field cultivated by the Methodist people, I think I can detect some mistakes made by them, yet I see the evidence of labor so vast and untiring and of Christian sacrifice which has poured out its millions to uplift this race, and behold such an army of toilers who have wrought at the dawn of day and until the sinking of the sun, that I take off my hat to them and view our field, by contrast, with great humility. And so with all the other religious bodies--all have tilled fields so vast in comparison with ours that I may not boast.

      Then, measured by our ability, I can not but deeply regret that it is so limited. We have come to Pittsburg to rejoice over the achievements of a century, to proclaim that we have grown in one hundred years from the handful who first met here to number a million and a quarter believing souls; that we have become a religious force in the world, and in this all do rejoice, yet I think you will excuse me if for my own field of labor I add no special note of exultation; that you will feel, with me, that here at least our work has not been commensurate with our ability. We must confess that we are unprofitable servants.

      But now we press forward with renewed hope and courage toward better [65] things, and in the very dawning a new century will not this great brotherhood, the churches, the brethren, aid us "in enlarging the place of our tent, and in stretching forth the curtains of our habitation, and in lengthening our cords, and in strengthening our stakes," as we make our farther clearing in this wilderness, that our next survey may of show a broader field.

[CCR 60-66]