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….