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MEN OF MARK

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INTRODUCTION CONTINUED – 4

(CONTINUED FROM 7/15/24)

At the meeting of the Colored Press convention in St. Louis, Missouri, July 13, 1883, he was nominated for its president, but was beaten by Hon. W. A. Pledger of Georgia by one vote. When said convention met in Richmond, Virgina, July 8, 1885, he was made chairman of the executive committee and at the next meeting, August 3, 1886, Atlantic City, New Jersey, he was elected president by a majority of four over Mr. T. T. Fortune, editor of The Freeman.

Dr. Simmons is very much interested in the education of the hand. He has written a pamphlet on “Industrial Education” which has had a wide circulation. A sample of it will be seen below.

If the industrial craze be not watched, our literary institutions will be turned into workshops and our scholars into servants and journeymen. Keep the literary and industrial apart. Let the former be stamped deeply so it will not be mistaken. We need scholars. All men are not workers in the trades, and never will be. If we cripple the schools established, by diverting them largely from their original plan, we shall have no lawyers, doctors, professors, authors, etc. And again, the money in the schools will be divided and neither end will be reached; we will be like clowns trying to ride two horses, and as they get wider apart, we drop in a ditch, and our horses run away from us and break their own necks. Keep these schools apart, and attempt not the task of grinding scholars out of industrial, nor finished workmen from literary schools. Each has a legitimate sphere and let each stick to it. In the colleges, universities and higher schools of the South, not less than a thousand white men are teaching our youth; it is not intended that they will do so forever. I would, therefore, prepare the professors to take their places in the same manner that they were prepared – in literary institutions. In plainer words, let the student be free from industrial trade work when he has made certain grades in his classes. We want good workmen and good scholars, not deluded smatterers in either department. Gingerbread work, fiddling with tools, frittering away time, is not seriously making a mechanic. Industrial work as a sentiment must be crystallized into a profitable reality.

Hence, this feeble effort in Southern schools will only be the means of deceiving many into the notion that they are “workmen,” when they are only botches, and will furnish another poor class of mechanics to supplement a class of which we now complain. It would be wiser to spend ten thousand dollars on a single school per year, and make a first class industrial department, than two thousand dollars on each of five schools. Many will learn to do things for which they can give no reason.

The people, the masses, the boys, the girls, the rank and file, must be taken through a thorough course and made master of a trade. I said this school was needed as a corrective; that is, to teach the dignity of labor. They must learn the gospel of manual labor; not simply as a means of bread and butter, but an honorable calling and duty. Let the buzz of the saw, the ring of the hammer, the whisle of the engine, the spinning of the wheel, the low of the ox, the bleating of the lamb, the crow of the rooster, all be music and inspiration to the rising race. Labor is honorable, but it is fast becoming unfashionable for the colored boy or girl to seek manual labor, and rather than work, many become loafers, dissipates and wrecks. Let us start a current large enough to meet the mental tide and mingling, find the happy medium. Parents must give their children trades. Teachers and preachers must see to this matter.

This school should have a large farm attached, where agriculture in every form should be taught, and by means of which living could be made cheap to poor students. To sum up the words of another, here in this school, the farmer should be educated in science, elementary engineering, mechanics and agriculture; the miner, mineralogy, geology, chemistry, and his own work; the merchant in geography, history, foreign language, political economy and laws; the machinist must master all the known powers of material nature – heat and cold, weight and impulse; matter in all conditions – liquid, solid and gaseous, standing or running, condensed or rare, adamantine or plastic – all must be seen through and comprehended by the master of modern mechanics. Architects, engineers, teachers and all classes of workers require a technical education.

I mean to take the female along too. They must be taught domestic economy, household ethics, home architecture, cookery, telegraphy, photography, printing, editorial work, dressmaking, tailoring, knitting, fancy work, nursing, dairying, horticulture, apiaculture, sericulture, poultry raising, stenography, type-writing, practical designs, painting, repousse work, etc., etc., for if men must make money, the women must know best how to save it, or what is better, help to get it. A saving wife is worth her weight in gold and earns her own board and is entitled to have her washing done from home.

Before I leave this subject, let me say that it may prove the best thing after all that our youth cannot get into the workshops and factories as readily as white youths. The latter class have the blessings of good homes and the amenities of a social life beyond that of a colored child. Every library, lecture hall and art gallery is open, and the finest music, sculpture, books, magazines and journals fall as thick around them as autumn leaves. But our youths need to have the moral training which comes from the school – room as well as the skill that comes from the workshop. They need practical drill in habits of industry, care in business, punctuality in dealing with the world, and, in fact, they need the moral bracing up that makes good citizens and square business men and women. Perhaps Providence has so hedged us that out of trials and darkness may come pleasure and light. So now we are driven to do perhaps the best thing for our race by putting our children where head, hand, eye, ear, and in fact the whole man, must be trained.

TO BE CONTINUED….

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INTRODUCTION CONTINUED – 3

CONTINUED FROM 7/13/24

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.

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MEN OF MARK

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INTRODUCTION CONTINUED – 2

(CONTINUED FROM 7/10/24)

His army life was not uneventful; he took part in battles around Petersburg, Hatches Run, Appomattox Court House, and was present at the surrender of Lee, the crises out of which our own happier cycle of years has been evolved. He was discharged September 13, 1865, and in 1866 and 1867 worked as journeyman at his trade for Dr. William H. Longfellow, a colored dentist of Philadelphia, after which he returned to Dr. DeLange.

He was converted in 1867 and joined the white Baptist church in Bordentown, pastored by Rev. J. W. Custis, a brilliant man, under whose influence about one hundred and fifty had joined the church that spring.

Although the only colored man in the church, he was treated with much kindness; and when his call to the Gospel ministry was made known, they rallied to his support, defraying his school expenses three years. The New Jersey State Educational Society aided him to attend Madison University of New York, from which he graduated in 1868, taking the academic course. Both students and teachers were his warm friends and are today. The dark skinned youth, though alone, never felt the sting of injustice at their hands. September, 1868, found him matriculated at Rochester University, having been led to make the change by an offer of additional aid by laboring in a small Baptist church in Rochester, and because there he found colored people among whom he could associate and do missionary work. At this early date we see cropping out the love for the race which in after years became one of the ruling passions of his life.

One pleasant year slipped by, and the freshman year completed, when his eyes became seriously affected. The trouble was brought on by continuous night study of Greek during his academic year. This prevented school attendance until the year 1871 when he entered Howard University, Washington, District of Columbia, and graduated as an A. B. in 1873. His graduating oration treating of the Darwinian theory, a subject then very popular in literary circles, attracted much attention and newspaper comments. Extracts were printed in a paper in England devoted to science and literature.

At many periods, his school life was a sequel to the days of deprivation of childhood. Time and again he would be forced to stay indoors while having his only shirt laundried. Poor shoes and patched clothes were the rule, not the exception. During his entire course he did not have a whole suit until reaching the senior year. Once he ate cheese and crackers three weeks. During the senior year, September, 1872, to June, 1873, he walked seven miles a day, and taught school; came home and drilled the cadet company from four to five; recited at night, and graduated with the salutatory of the class. That was a happy day; by frugality he had saved three hundred dollars. Commencement day for him ended many deprivations and sacrifices in one sense. Both have come since, but of a different character and easier to bear. In the world one can find means of replenishing his purse, and many opportunities of changing his circumstances; but with a student it is different. He must in a degree be stationary, and cannot move around for the purpose of getting benefits.

During these years his mother lavished on him the devotion and pride of a loving heart. She washed, ironed and labored in other ways to help him. In this she was greatly assisted by one Bunting Hankins and his devoted wife of Bordentown, New Jersey, in whose family she labored. General O. O. Howard, president of Howard University, and General E. Whittlesey, dean of the college department, showed him many kindnesses during and after college days. While a student, he showed such aptness to teach in conducting a school at a place called Bunker’s Hill, rebuilding it almost from nothing, that the school-board promoted him to the principalship of a much larger building, with several hundred scholars. This was the Hillsdale Public school, District of Columbia. Here he boarded in the house of Hon. Solomon G. Brown, one of the ablest scientists in this country.

Immediately after graduating, he took Horace Greeley’s advice, and went west, to Arkansas, with the idea of making it his home; was examined and secured a State certificate from the Honorable Superintendent of Education, J. C. Corbin, but soon returned to Washington and taught at Hillsdale until June, 1874.

After marrying Josephine A., the daughter of John and Caroline Silence, in Washington, District of Columbia, August 25, 1874, he went south. By this union they have had the following children: Josephine Lavinia, William Johnson, Maud Marie, Amanda Moss, Mary Beatrice, John Thomas and Gussie Lewis. Desiring to better his financial condition he went to Florida, September, 1874, and invested in lands and oranges, but the investment did not prove a paying one. While in Ocala (in 1879) he was ordained a deacon, and was licensed to preach without asking for it. Pastored at a small station a year before ordination, after which time, he was ordained the night before leaving the State.

He was principal of Howard Academy, deputy county clerk and county commissioner. Here, too, his political tendencies received an impetus. He was chairman of the county campaign committee, and a member of the district congressional committee. Stumped the county for Hayes and Wheeler, and when it is remembered that the state went only 147 majority for Hayes, it is quite a material thing that the county in which he lived raised its quota from 525 Republican majority to 986. After this he returned to Washington and taught public school until 1879, when he left to accept the pastorate of the First Baptist church, Lexington, Kentucky. To do great work, God raises up great men.

September, 1880, he was called to the presidency of the Normal and Theological institution (as it was then called), a school conducted under the auspices of the General Association of Colored Baptists of Kentucky. At that time the school had but thirteen pupils, two teachers and an empty treasury. Says the Bowling Green Watchmen, a State paper edited by Rev. Eugene Evans:

Few men of Professor Simmons’ ability and standing would have been willing to risk their future in an enterprise like the Normal and Theological Institution; an enterprise without capital and but a few friends. But it can be truly said of Professor Simmons, that he has proven himself master of the situation. The school had been talked of for nearly twenty years’ but no one ever dreamed of its being a possibility. When he was elected president, every cloud vanished, and the sunshine of success could be seen on every side. Some of his students already rank among the foremost preachers, teachers and orators of the State.

To Be Continued.