INTRODUCTION CONTINUED – 3

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As an educator, he has likely no superiors. Discarding specialism in education, he claims that ideal manhood and womanhood cannot be narrowed down to any one sphere of action, but that the whole being – every faculty with which we are endowed – must receive proper development. No boy or girl comes under his influence without feeling a desire to become useful and great. He infuses inspiration into the least ambitious. He has a knack of “drawing out” all there is within. No flower within his reach “wastes its sweetness on the desert air.” If there are elements of usefulness in those around him, he trains and utilizes them. As a president, his executive ability is excellent. Students admire, respect and stand in awe of him; his teachers are proud of him, trust his judgement and abide by his decisions. For poor students he has the tenderest sympathy, especially for those who most desire an education and struggle hardest for it. He rewards those who are faithful in discharge of duty, and for those who accomplish something he has words of cheer, but for idlers nothing.

September 29, 1882, he was elected editor of the American Baptist, and at this time is President of the American Baptist Company. As an editor, Dr. Simmons brings before the public every live issue of the day. His editorials are racy, versatile and logical. He contends for rights and cries down wrongs. He is extensively copied, and has the personal respect of every editor and prominent man in the country. A man of forcible character and deep convictions must reveal himself in his writings, and the subject of this article is such a man. His pen pictures are characterized by a rugged strength which takes hold of the reader and fixes the thought in memory more than by elaboration and flourishes which soothe and please, but pass from the mind as water through the seive. In regard to the duty of colored citizens to existing parties he believes “that committed as both parties are to the pernicious doctrine of State Rights, colored people should pay less attention to national politics than to State affairs.” He says:

”The days are slipping by and our children are growing into manhood and womanhood – we are fast passing away. Shall we live deluded with the hope that the general government will bring to us a panacea for all our ills? No; we must court the favors of the people of the State. We must be for progress wherever found. We must act wisely. Indeed the Republican party could not, if it would, help us. They are debarred by statutes, and sentiments, stronger than statutes. Let us study State interests, its schools and its development in every direction. Let us cast our votes for liberal men who will help us. We cannot expect those against whom we vote to do so. Take Kentucky; who has secured all the school advantages for the colored race? Why, the colored people themselves. The Republican party did not do it – not a bit of it. The white men of the party and their children were all right. When did they offer to make a special fight for us? Never. When, then, did we secure a change of the forty-eight per capita tax to an equalization of the tax for all children alike? By petition of our own and by favor of Democrats, even when put to a popular vote, and by the act of a Democratic legislature. Is it not queer, too, that we never thought to demand of our party that they made the fight for us? The answer is, the colored man is such a slave to party that his blind obedience has befogged his reason so that he has fought the white man’s battles, secured office for him, and fought for his own rights unaided in “Negro Conventions.” White men would have made a broad open fight and demanded the Negro votes. After the convention was over the Negroes would petition the very legislature members whom they had fought and voted against in every county. Negroes attempt to do in convention what they ought to do with their votes, and are driven to it by the policy of the Republican party in the South. We should change this thing.”

Dr. Simmons activities are prominently identified with the most important affairs of the race. Several years he has been chairman of the executive committee of the “State Convention of Colored Men of Kentucky.” At the meeting in Lexington, November 26, 1875, he was re-elected. The call of the said meeting, a document enumerating in a few words, the long catalogue of injustices practiced upon the colored citizens of the State, shows a high degree of statesmanship. It begins thus:

FELLOW-CITIZENS: – When a free people, living in a body politic, feel that the laws are unjustly administered to them; that discriminations are openly made; that various subterfuges and legal technicalities are constantly used to deprive them of the enjoyment of those rights and immunities belonging to the humblest citizen; when the courts become no refuge for the outraged, and when a sentiment is not found sufficient to do them justice, it becomes their bounden duty to protest against such a state of affairs. To do less than vigorously and earnestly enter our protest is to cringe like hounds before masters, and to show that we are not fit for freedom. We are robbed by some of the railroad companies who take our first-class fares and then we are driven into smoking cars, and, if we demur, are cursed and roughly handled. Our women have been beaten by brutal brakemen, and in many cases left to ride on the platforms at the risk of life and limb.

We are tried in courts controlled entirely by white men, and no colored man sits on a Kentucky jury. This seems no mere accident, but a determined effort to exclude us from fair trials and put us at the mercy of our enemies, from the judge down to the vilest suborned witness.

When charged with grave offenses, the jail is mobbed, and the accused taken out and hanged; and out of the hundreds of such cases since the war, not a single high-handed murderer has ever been brought before a court to answer. Colored men have been deliberately murdered, and few if any murderers have been punished by the law. Indecent haste to free the criminal in such cases has made the trial a farce too ridiculous to be called more than a puppet show.

The penitentiary is full of our race, who are sent there by wicked and malicious persecutors, and unjust sentences dealt out by judges, who deem a colored criminal fit only for the severest and longest sentences for trivial offenses.

In all departments of the State we are systematically deprived of recognition, except in menial positions. In our metropolitan city, and even cities of lesser note, we are not considered in the appointments in fire companies, police force, notary public, etc. In fact, we are the ruled class and have no share in the government.

Dr. Simmons was chairman of the committee appointed by the convention to lay before the Legislature the grievances of the 271,481 colored citizens. His speech on this occasion was a masterpiece. Says the Soldiers‘ Reunion, a paper published at Lexington:

The speech of Rev. W. J. Simmons, D. D., before the Kentucky Legislature, was one of the ablest efforts ever made in the interests of the colored people. They (the Legislature) have ordered two thousand copies printed.

Said he:

Only the history of the two races in our beautiful country could give birth to such a scene as this. That we, born Americans, finding distinctions in law, should be driven to appeal to a portion of the same body politic for rights and equalities; and though American sovereigns ourselves, because too weak, bend the suppliant knee, craving that we might be given that which appears rightly ours without contest. We feel some pride, and are consequently jealous of the good name of the State and of the United States. We also feel humiliated that a foreigner who has never felled a tree, built a cabin, or laid a line of railway, seems more welcome to this shore, and is accorded every facility for himself and children to make the most of themselves, even BEFORE NATURALIZATION; while we, seeing them happy in a new-found asylum, and knowing you from our youth up – our mothers washed your linen and nursed you, our fathers made the soil feed you, and kept the fire burning in your grate – are compelled to beg, in the zenith hour of 1886, your favors. Two generations are before you; the one born in the cradle of slavery, the other born in the cradle of liberty; the one saw the light mid the discussions of your fathers; the other mingled their infant’s voice with the retreating sound of the cannon. We belong to the South – the “New South.” Your own progress in the questions of human liberty and our own thirst for draughts from higher fountains, and, indeed, in obedience to the demands of our constituents, we venture to lay before you in a manly, honorable way, the complaints of 271,481 as true hearted Kentuckians as ever came from the loin of the bravest, truest and most honored of women, sired by the most distinguished fathers. As Kentuckians we meet you with the feelings and aspirations, common and peculiar to those born and surrounded by the greatness of your history, the fertility of your soil, the nobility of your men and the beauty of your women. We come, plain of speech, in order to prove that we are men of judgement, meeting men who are really desirous of knowing our wants.

NOTES: It is clear to me that the written word in the 1800’s was somewhat different than the way we utilize words, periods, semicolons, etc. the English language. To honor the Men of Mark, who wrote these pages, I’m not changing anything they wrote. The way you are reading this AWESOME WORK – Is the way it was written.

TO BE CONTINUED.