Service by the Educated Negro Address of Roscoe Conkling Bruce of Tuskegee Institute at the Commencement Exercises of the M Street High School Metropolitan A. M. E. Church Washington, D.C., June 16, 1903

Tuskegee Institute Steam Print.

SERVICE BY THE EDUCATED NEGRO.

When George William Curtis had received from Harvard her greatest degree, he arose at the Alumni Dinner and said, “In the old Italian story the nobleman turns out of the hot street crowded with eager faces into the coolness and silence of his palace. As he looks at the pictures of the long line of ancestors he hears a voice,--or is it his own heart beating?--which says to him noblesse oblige. The youngest scion of the oldest house is pledged by all the virtues and honor of his ancestry to a life not unworthy his lineage.... When I came here I was not a nobleman, but to-day I have been ennobled. The youngest doctor of the oldest school, I too, say with the Italian, noblesse oblige. I am pledged by all the honorable traditions of the noble family into which I am this day adopted.”... You, my friends, are ennobled by the diploma of a school, rich in traditions of high endeavor and actual service. Shall those traditions fail to enter your hearts, and to quicken your energies, and to chasten your ambitions? This question you are not now competent to answer, and you will not be competent until you have lived your lives.

Your equipment for the business of life is not contemptible. 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. More, importantly, you possess in varying degrees a group of valuable 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; that directing intelligence by which one man can effectively organize for a given purpose, many materials and many workers. 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. 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. Such is your equipment as citizens. 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? That is our problem.

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 be to uplift each himself. My present purpose, however, is to consider mainly how such individual success may contribute to the welfare of the many.

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. 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. Such personality and power cannot be manufactured to order, but are slowly developed by much reading and thinking and doing and no little contact with wholesome people. In Charles Francis Adams’ pungent address, at Cambridge in 1883, he said, “In these days of repeating rifles, my alma mater sent me and my classmates out into the strife equipped with shields and swords and javelins. We were to grapple with living questions through the medium of the dead languages.” While thus sharply criticizing the content of the curriculum, Mr. Adams would have been the first to maintain that to breathe the atmosphere of a university is an assured way of getting broadened culture, and that this atmosphere is made largely by the teachers. Frederick Douglass had no university degree, but he was certainly a man of culture; his teachers were among the choicest spirits of an aroused generation--Sumner and Garrison and Wendell Phillips--and they gave him breadth and balance and clear-sightedness. Charles Francis Adams was set upon the highway of modern culture despite the curriculum; Douglass received that grace which is of the spirit of literature without the curriculum. Both men were deeply indebted to noble teachers. The thing that makes one man really different from another is not so much knowledge as character; and the thing that makes one school different from another is not so much curriculum and apparatus, as teaching body. Algebra and trigonometry, Greek and Latin, history and political economy, the student will forget; but he will not forget a teacher gentle but earnest, of disinterested scholarship and life-long devotion. The specific teaching may be quite erased from the memory, but in the heart will be left a deepening respect for the teacher.

Many of you are to become class-room teachers. 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 point; whether you have won the confidence of your class--that is the main issue; and that conquest is not made by the sword of discipline but by the spirit of vigorous goodness.

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. A crowded unclean home in an undrained street, is almost as much an object of concern to the educated teacher as is a hopeless little dunce who can’t spell “rabbit!” Let us ground child-study in community study.

This knowledge of the life and work of the community will react upon the program of study. The educated teacher, I have said, aims at raising somewhat the level of life in the community. The program of study is an instrument for that end. 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. This excessive death rate is due to a variety of causes; relatively low economic position is a powerful cause. Thus, one of the largest industrial insurance companies in the United States finds, I learn, that the death rate of Negroes is practically the same as that of whites, in approximately the same industrial occupations; and there is much more evidence to the same effect. In addition to the teaching of hygiene, the school may aim to remedy the conditions expressed in the high death rate, in two ways,--first, through imparting productive capacity by the training of hands; and second, through developing wants by the touching of hearts and arousing of minds.

Already you have a manual training high school and through the grades certain work in carpentry and sewing and cooking. The increasing efficiency of all such work should be welcomed and actively aided by every educated teacher. 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. 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. We 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. 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. Such wants (and they are, you will note, not impossibly spiritual) every school ought to tend to develop.